FINLAND: My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose

“Only in the Soviet Socialist state,” said a learned Moscow professor recently, “is marriage for love possible. Bourgeois marriages are mere business matches wherein love gets dirty and trampled.”

In Moscow, back in 1924, lean, leggy Hertta Kuusinen was a nubile 20-year-old much exposed to the twin influences of love and the Soviet state. Her father, Finnish-born Otto Kuusinen (now Vice President of the U.S.S.R.’s Supreme Soviet), was an agile ideologist whose fancy footwork had kept him Secretary of the Comintern during the chairmanships of Zinoviev and Bukharin. Hertta’s heart interest was stocky, heavy-jowled Tuure Lehen, an ardent young Communist who had won fame as the author of texts on mob fighting and strike tactics. In stolen moments together at Moscow’s Lux Hotel, Tuure’s whispered tales of the beauties of mob violence made Hertta’s head spin. In 1926 the pair were wed. Eight years later Hertta was sent to her native Finland to practice Tuure’s preaching and was promptly clapped in jail.

She emerged in 1939 heart-whole and fancy free. In Moscow Tuure’s political star had faded, but in Finland a scholarly young saboteur named Yrjö Leino soon caught Hertta’s attention. In 1945, after years of close friendship, Hertta married Yrjö. “I wasn’t able to before,” she explained, “because of our being in jail.” Leino went on to become Finland’s Communist Minister of the Interior.

Yrjö soon took to making sheep’s eyes at a banker’s beautiful daughter, and various serving girls. When they heard about the banker’s daughter, the local party chieftains growled “Bourgeois behavior.” Hertta was more worried about the servant girls. According to Helsinki gossip, it irked Hertta that so many working-class women should learn about the poor quality of Leino’s lovemaking; that kind of talk could be bad for the party. Leino began to go into an eclipse anyway; he lost his job as Interior Minister, while Hertta kept getting more important —next to Ana Pauker she was probably the leading woman Communist in Europe. By last week, after Leino had openly criticized Russia and suggested that the Communists use less violent tactics, Hertta had had enough. She picked up bag & baggage and moved out of his apartment to go and live with her mother. She still had friends: who had turned up in Finland but first husband Tuure, once again in high Kremlin favor and wearing the insignia of a Red army general. Last week he was in Helsinki, busily plotting a wave of new strikes to blanket Finland.