Juho Kusti Paasikivi
Juho Kusti Paasikivi was the conservative banker who had wanted a German king for Finland in 1918, who went to Moscow in 1939 to tell Stalin no and in 1940 to sign the peace that said yes, and who as president after 1946 worked out the rule his country lived by for forty-five years: that Finland's independence depended on Russia trusting it, and that everything else could be argued. He was born in 1870 in a village in Häme, orphaned, and rose by examinations. He took a doctorate in law, the head of the state treasury under the Russians at thirty-three, and from 1914 the director of the largest private bank, which he ran for twenty years. In the civil war of 1918 he was the Whites' prime minister and the leader of the party that offered the throne to a Hessian prince, and the German collapse that autumn ended both. He negotiated the Peace of Tartu with the Soviets in 1920, which he thought too generous to Finland, and spent the interwar years in the bank and as ambassador to Stockholm, saying that a small country next to Russia must never give it a reason. In the autumn of 1939 he was the envoy sent to hear Stalin's demands for bases and the Karelian border, advised concession, was overruled, and the Winter War followed. In March 1940 he was at the table in Moscow when the peace was signed, and then ambassador there until the Continuation War made the post impossible. The armistice of 1944 brought him back at seventy-four as prime minister under Mannerheim and in 1946 as president, and from then on he did the only thing the position allowed. The treaty of friendship and mutual assistance of 1948, negotiated so that it obliged Finland to defend itself and consult rather than to join anything came first. Reparations were paid in full and on time; the war-guilt trial of his predecessors held because Moscow required it; the communists kept in the government until 1948 and out of the police. He retired in 1956 at eighty-five and died that December. Kekkonen inherited the line and put his own name on it.
- Lived: 1870 CE – 1956 CE
- Nationality: Finnish
- Roles: president, prime_minister, banker
