Urho Kekkonen
Urho Kekkonen was president of Finland for twenty-five years, won the office by two votes and kept it by making himself the only man Moscow would deal with, took the Paasikivi line and made it the Paasikivi-Kekkonen line, brought the thirty-five nations to Helsinki in 1975, and stayed until his memory went; the word Finlandisation was coined for what he did, by Germans who meant it as a warning, and the Finns took it as a description of survival. He was born in 1900 in the forests of Kainuu, the son of a lumber foreman, fought as a White in the civil war at seventeen and commanded an execution squad, which he did not talk about. He read law, was a national high-jump champion, and entered parliament for the Agrarians in 1936. He was minister of justice, of the interior, five times prime minister between 1950 and 1956, and in February 1956 was elected president by the electoral college with a hundred and fifty-one votes to a hundred and forty-nine. The method was the same for a quarter of a century. Moscow was consulted before anyone else, its displeasure was used to break Finnish coalitions he disliked, and its confidence was traded for the things Finland wanted, membership of the Nordic Council, association with EFTA in 1961 and a trade agreement with the Community in 1973, neutrality that everyone accepted, and a border that never moved. In the note crisis of 1961, when Khrushchev demanded military consultations under the 1948 treaty on the eve of a presidential election, he flew to Novosibirsk, talked the note away, and won the election his opponent had withdrawn from. Parliament extended his term without an election in 1973. He hosted the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in the summer of 1975, and the Helsinki Final Act was the peak of the policy. His health and mind failed after 1979 and he resigned in October 1981, having been re-elected in 1978 by a coalition of nearly every party; he died in August 1986. The presidency he left was cut down by the constitution of 2000, partly because of how he had used it.
- Lived: 1900 CE – 1986 CE
- Nationality: Finnish
- Roles: president, prime_minister, politician
