Pohjanmaan patriootti : Artturi Leinonen eteläpohjalaisena vaikuttajana ennen talvisotaa

Abstract

The focus of this study is the activity of Artturi Leinonen (1888-1963), an Ostrobothnian editor-in-chief, author and representative of the Agrarian Party, in the formation of public opinion during the 1930's. The research deals with phases of Leinonen's life from the 1910's until the outbreak of the World War II. A thorough study of the available source material makes it possible to throw light on the life-work of a so-called second class manipulator of public opinion whose importance Finnish historical research has almost totally neglected. Important records are, however, still unavailable. Leinonen's career is reconstructed and understood as part of the sociopolitical activity of his time. The corpus of Leinonen's writings, seen as a whole, and the above-mentioned goals form the matter of the research. Leinonen's greatest achievement was his significant role in stopping the rightist Lapua movement in Ostrobothnia where the movement began at the end of 1929. It was paradoxal, however, that Leinonen at first promoted the movement because of his clearly anticommunist goals but soon he became a very important opponent of the movement in his home province. Leinonen was one of the so-called activists who had been found quilty of treason against the Russian regime in 1916, and was sentenced to imprisonment in Siberia. Because of this hard experiences he strongly stuck to legal actions only in his older age. On the contrary, the Lapua movement accepted even illegal actions against communism and for the defence of the achievements of the Civil War in 1918. Leinonen' s achievement is not only in his activity as a lonely fighter in Ostrobothnia but also in his vital role in the process in which the Agrarian Party formed its attitude to the movement. Leinonen supported Prime Minister Kyosti Kallio, who roundly condemned the movement when its representatives vandalized the machinery of the printing house of the communist newspaper "Työn Ääni" in Vaasa in 1930. Leinonen's activity is a good example of how even a provincial opinion leader in a given historical situation may influence a process which deeply affects the destiny of an entire nation, and in this particular case even from within the region where the political process started.