Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim
Mannerheim served the Russian emperor for thirty years and then spent the next thirty keeping Finland out of Russian hands. He was a Finnish-Swedish aristocrat who joined the imperial Russian army because Finland was a Russian grand duchy, rose to lieutenant-general, rode across Asia to Peking on an intelligence mission disguised as an ethnographic expedition, and commanded a cavalry corps in the First World War. Finland declared independence in December 1917 as Russia collapsed. Mannerheim was given command of the government's forces in the civil war that followed within weeks, between the Reds of the industrial south and the Whites of the countryside. He won it in three months with German help, and the reprisals afterwards killed more Finns than the fighting had - some twelve thousand died in prison camps, a fact Finland took most of the century to discuss. He was regent in 1918 and 1919, lost the first presidential election, and left public life for two decades. He returned as chairman of the defence council and gave his name to the line of fortifications across the Karelian isthmus. He commanded in the Winter War of 1939, when Finland held off a Soviet invasion for three months and lost a tenth of its territory instead of all of it. Finland fought again from 1941 alongside Germany, and what Mannerheim declined to do in that war is the reason the country was treated as it was afterwards: he stopped the advance at the old frontier and refused to attack Leningrad from the north or to cut the railway carrying Allied supplies, over repeated German requests. He became president in 1944 at seventy-seven, appointed specifically to make peace because no one else could carry the army with him. He took Finland out of the war, accepted terms that cost Karelia and a large indemnity, and then had to expel his former German allies from Lapland by force. Finland was the only continental European combatant on the losing side that was neither occupied nor made a satellite.
- Lived: 1867 CE – 1951 CE
- Nationality: Finnish
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
