Edvard Gylling

Edvard Otto Vilhelm Gylling (30 November 1881 – 14 June 1938) was a Finnish politician, statistician and economist. A member of the Diet of Finland for the Social Democratic Party of Finland from 1908 to 1917 and vice chairman of the party, he served as Commissar of Finance for the revolutionary Red government during the Finnish Civil War. After the Red defeat he went into exile, eventually becoming the leader of Soviet Karelia as Chairman of the Council of its People's Commissars from 1923 to 1935, before falling victim to Stalin's purges.

Early life and career Gylling was born in Kuopio in 1881 into a middle-class family. He completed his doctorate at the Imperial Alexander University in Finland in 1909 with a thesis on the development of the crofter institution in Finland during the Swedish period, which established him as the Social Democratic Party's foremost expert on agrarian affairs. He played a significant role in shaping the Social Democrats' Russia policy during the First World War and was elected vice chairman of the party.

After the Red defeat, Gylling did not flee to Russia with most of the other People's Commissars. Instead he went underground in Vyborg and then escaped to Sweden, where he headed the Stockholm bureau of the Communist Party of Finland, which had been founded in Moscow. In this capacity he planned several military operations against the Finnish government, with the ultimate goal of establishing a Scandinavian Soviet Republic encompassing Finland and Eastern Karelia. In spring 1920 he travelled to Moscow at Lenin's invitation.

Soviet Karelia The Soviet government offered Gylling a central role in leading the socialist labour commune established in Eastern Karelia in 1920. In 1923 the commune was transformed into the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and Gylling served as Chairman of its Council of People's Commissars – in effect the republic's prime minister – until 1935.

Karelia was intended to serve as a base for a future revolution in Finland. With Lenin's authorisation, Gylling implemented a Finnicisation policy despite Finns being a clear minority in the region. He recruited Finnish emigrants from North America and committed communists from Finland, though many who emigrated to Soviet Karelia in good faith faced severe hardship; thousands were arrested and placed in labour and prison camps, without any intervention on Gylling's part. In June 1938 he was sentenced to death in a show trial typical of the Stalin era; the formal pretext was misuse of production and food resources at a forestry collective in 1930. He was executed on 14 June 1938 at the Kommunarka shooting ground in Moscow. Many of his Finnish colleagues in Eastern Karelia, including Kustaa Rovio, were accused of complicity and shared his fate.

Soviet sources long maintained that Gylling had died during a deportation in the 1940s, but this has since been established to be false. Gylling was posthumously rehabilitated by the Soviet authorities in 1955.