Arvo Tuominen

Who was Arvo Tuominen?

Arvo "Poika" Tuominen was a Finnish communist revolutionary and later a social democratic journalist, politician and author. Tuominen was given his nickname Poika in 1920 because of his boyish looks—poika means "boy" in Finnish.

Tuominen was born in 1894 in Kuotila to the family of a rural carpenter. In 1912 he moved to Tampere to become a carpenter's apprentice and soon joined the Social Democratic Party of Finland. During the Finnish Civil War in early 1918, Tuominen sided with the Finnish Red Guards and edited Kansan lehti, a radical social democratic newspaper in Tampere. He was shortly arrested when the White Guards took the city in April, but he was soon released. After the Red Guards were defeated in May 1918 several Finnish radical social democratic leaders fled to Russia, where they split from the mainstream of Finnish Social Democratic Party and founded the Communist Party of Finland in Petrograd in August–September 1918.

Tuominen became a supporter of Otto Wille Kuusinen's faction within the party. In 1921 he traveled to Petrograd, where Kuusinen's adherents, supported by the Comintern leadership, successfully challenged Kullervo Manner's supporters at the next party congress. Tuominen was elected to the party's Central Committee and was put in charge of its Finnish bureau. He returned to Finland, where he was arrested on January 26, 1922 and subsequently imprisoned for publishing a proclamation urging Finnish workers to fight on the Soviet side during the Soviet-Finnish conflict over Karelia. He was released in the spring of 1926 and was elected secretary of the Finnish Federation of Trade Unions. He was again arrested in April 1928 for maintaining contacts with the Soviet Union and the banned Communist Party.