His statue looms above the avenue that bears his name, across from the Central Post Office in Helsinki, his stone gaze sweeping forever across a capital city that he conquered, ruled, yet was never really part of. That is how most people visualize him, by means of that outsized equestrian monument, and as strong-man-on-horseback statues go, it is not a bad specimen. The figure has dignity, the face wears an expression of gravity rather than bombast, and there is no phony saber for the pigeons to mock.
Carl Gustav Mannerheim towers above all other characters in the annals of the Winter War. Arguably the greatest Baltic statesman since Gustavus Adolphus, he was an elusive, complex, enigmatic, and powerful man who urgently deserves a good English-language biography. He is unlikely to get it, if only because of the linguistic difficulties of the kind of research that would be required to do justice to the subject.
Mannerheim was born in 1867, near the town of Aabo, into a prominent family of Swedish-Finnish aristocrats. His career path was a common one in those days: he chose the military, and became a member of the Finnish Corps of Cadets shortly after his fourteenth birthday. His entire subsequent career, however, can be traced directly from an incident that happened in 1886, when Mannerheim was nineteen. He went AWOL, got caught, and was expelled from the corps.
Boys will be boys, especially if their families are as well connected as the Baron’s. He simply crossed the border and obtained an appointment to the tsar’s Nikolaevski Cavalry School. Apparently he had already sown whatever small amount of wild oats were in his system, for his record at the cavalry school was superior, and he graduated with a lieutenant’s commission in 1889.
Two years later he won a coveted posting to the elite Chevalier Guards. Among his responsibilities was the job of overseeing the dress and bearing of the interior sentries at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. His view of the tsarist regime was therefore obtained from a splendid elevation, permitting him almost daily contact with the royal family.
During the last Romanov coronation, in 1896, Mannerheim enjoyed a place of honor at the heart of those lavish, Mussorgskian rites: he stood at the bottom of the steps leading to the throne itself. The four-and-a-half-hour ceremony, during every minute of which he was compelled to stand motionless in full dress uniform, emblazoned itself on his mind; even half a century later he spoke of it with deep emotion, recalling the ceremony as “indescribably magnificent.”1 To him, the essence of the tsarist heritage was its outward grandeur; it seemed to make little if any difference to him that its embodiment was a third-rate incompetent.
When war broke out between Russia and Japan, Mannerheim chose the sterner path of professionalism. He campaigned strenuously and earned a reputation for personal bravery the hard way: his horse was shot dead from under him during a reconnaissance patrol. He was promoted to colonel as a reward for his services in this ill-starred conflict and received a mention-in-dispatches from the tsar himself.
Two years later the tsar offered Mannerheim a choice assignment: a two-year trek through Central Asia, on horseback, from Turkestan to Peking, a distance of at least 5,000 miles. Ostensibly his mission was ceremonial and scholarly, but its real object was to collect information, both topographical and political, that might be of strategic interest at some future date. Specifically, he was ordered to collect information about the attitude of local rulers toward the tsar, and to find out all he could about regional rivalries that might be usefully exploited by Russian agents.
Mannerheim traveled with a small staff and an escort of handpicked cossacks; the expedition was gone for two full years and ended up traveling nearly 9,000 miles. One reason for the extra distance was a side trip to the holy city of Lhasa, a place where few foreigners had yet ventured. Much about Mannerheim’s abilities as a diplomat is revealed by the fact that he not only penetrated to the heart of Tibet but actually established a warm personal relationship with the Dalai Lama, the most sacred and least accessible ruler in Asia. In what must have been a scene straight out of a Rider Haggard novel, the reincarnation of Buddha requested, and thoroughly enjoyed receiving, lessons from the Finnish aristocrat in the art of pistol shooting. Mannerheim finished this odyssey in good health, with two massive volumes of detailed and rather pedantic observations in his saddlebags, and with a fondness for orientalia that lasted all his life.
When World War I began, Mannerheim found himself posted to the staff of the able but ill-fated General Brushilov. In 1915 he was named commander of the Twelfth Cavalry Division. In contrast to the situation in France, the eastern front had plenty of room for large, fluid engagements, and Mannerheim distinguished himself in several of them.2 Eventually, he rose to the level of corps commander, but by that time the rot had set in throughout the tsarist army as a whole.
A stroke of luck removed the Baron from the front during the period immediately before and after the revolution of November 7. He had fallen from his horse, suffered a sprained ankle, and was recuperating in Odessa; otherwise, loyalist that he was, he would likely have suffered the fate of so many other aristocratic officers.
His journey back to Petrograd was distinguished by both good luck and boldness. A timid man would have traveled incognito; Mannerheim engaged a private pullman car and made the entire journey clad in the full dress uniform of an Imperial corps commander. In one of the few flashes of subjective insight to light up the otherwise arid flatness of his autobiography, the Baron described his arrival in the Petrograd railway station: “It disgusted me to see generals carrying their own kit. However, I found two soldiers who quite willingly took charge of mine.”3 He crossed the Finnish border just after Finland declared independence.
His return to Finland did not generate parades in the streets; after all, outside of his own class hardly anyone knew him very well. He was coming “home,” but it was to a land to which he had paid little attention during the thirty-five years he had served in the Imperial army. Still, he was the most experienced warrior the Whites had, and under the circumstances, his fierce anti-Bolshevism counted for much more than his past infatuation with the tsar. Some idea of the bloody-mindedness of the campaign, and of Mannerheim’s willingness to prosecute the White cause ruthlessly, can be mined from a reading of his Order of the Day for March 14, 1918: “The hour has come, the hour for which the whole nation is waiting. Your starving and martyred brothers and sisters in southern Finland fix their last hope on you. The mutilated bodies of the murdered citizens and the ruins of the burntdown villages call to Heaven: vengeance upon the traitors! Break down all obstacles! Advance, White army of White Finland!”4
By the time it was all over, there would be mutilated bodies and burntdown villages enough to go around on both sides. During the period when the Reds controlled Helsinki, Tampere, and much of southern Finland, the “Red Terror” duplicated, on a smaller scale, its namesake in Russia. At least 1,500 people were murdered in the winter of 1917–18. Battle deaths in the campaigns that followed eventually totaled 6,794. But worse would come.
Mannerheim earned the nickname “The Bloody Baron,” not for his role as a battlefield commander, but for his perceived role in the ghastly events that happened after the guns fell silent. At least 80,000 Red sympathizers—women and children not excepted—were herded into makeshift concentration camps. Almost 10,000 died in them during the next six months. The “White Terror” that swept Finland paid the Reds back with heavy interest; hangings and firing-squad executions totaled more than 8,000.
This episode was the most shameful in Finnish history, and even at this date, the extensive research on the period has not been able to assign a precise portion of blame to Mannerheim. Conditions throughout rural Finland were hideous during the winter of 1918: hunger was rampant (from some remote districts, there were rumors of cannibalism), and an influenza epidemic raged in the camps unchecked by any efforts on the part of the Whites who ran them.
Mannerheim-haters held the Baron responsible for every death; Mannerheim’s hagiographers claimed that he did not know the extent of the butchery and that, even if he had known, communications were so poor that he had little control over what was happening in the interior of the country. It is true that communications between Helsinki and much of rural Finland were poor to nonexistent, but a commander of Mannerheim’s authority can usually get his orders through if he is really determined. Whether, in the heat of revenge, those orders would have been obeyed, is questionable.
Mannerheim’s avowed policy for dealing with the rebellion was pragmatic and simple: shoot the leaders and put the workers back to work as quickly as possible. Nothing in the record of his life suggests a personal streak of cruelty. His only hatred was of Bolshevism, an abstraction; wholesale vindictive retribution was a tactic that fit neither his character nor his plans for Finland.
It is hard, however, to imagine that Mannerheim was not aware of what was going on in his own backyard—indeed, only a short boat ride from his office—in the confines of the old tsarist fortress of Suomenlinna, in Helsinki harbor. The largest White concentration camp was there, and modern Finnish historians estimate that at least 3,000 Red prisoners were summarily killed within its walls: shot, hanged, bayoneted, and in some cases simply beaten to death. If Mannerheim did not order these killings, he surely did little to stop them, and his silence would have been taken, by the murderers, as tacit approval of their atrocities.
Whatever the Baron’s degree of culpability in the White Terror, there was no denying that he had won a smashing, and permanent, victory over the Bolsheviks. At the conclusion of his campaign, Kaiser Wilhelm awarded Mannerheim the Iron Cross—thus making him the only military commander who had fought against Germany to receive that coveted decoration.
Mannerheim personally favored a monarchy for Finland, but the reality was that Finland had chosen to become a parliamentary democracy. Mannerheim was not comfortable with the idea of democracies, or with their squabbling and undignified political parties. He challenged the system in the first-ever presidential elections, in July 1919, and was trounced by Professor Stahlberg. Although he lobbied for the job, Stahlberg refused to appoint Mannerheim commander of the Civic Guard, fearful of giving him access to even that limited instrument of power.
The new era in European politics was decidedly not to the Baron’s taste. As Marvin Rintala, one of his best biographers, states the matter:
No longer sustained by the stagnant but outwardly serene domination of the hereditary aristocracy, the Continent was buzzing with the tumultuous contentions of inexperienced parvenu bourgeois (or ostensibly proletarian) politicians. Baron Mannerheim’s orderly world—where a self-perpetuating elite governed and the commoners knew their place—had suddenly disappeared. An agitated and boisterous new regime replaced it. He never became fully reconciled to Democracy; when the new Constitution was being formulated, he urged empowering as head of state “a strong hand that will not be moved by party strife or forced to fritter away the power of government by compromise,” not appreciating the fact that compromise is the essence of democratic rule.5
After losing the election to Stahlberg, Mannerheim in effect was frozen out of domestic politics. He didn’t fit in with any political party, and no political party knew quite what to do with him. In fact Mannerheim despised political parties as a species, regarding them as undisciplined, selfish, and obstructionist. His concept of political service was almost Roman, wholly oriented toward the half-mystical idea of the individual man of honor who steps forward to serve the state. In his speeches he often referred to “the will to take risks and the readiness to bear responsibility.”6
Thus, by the end of 1919, Gustav Mannerheim was no more than an unemployed soldier. He dabbled in domestic affairs in two major areas: right-wing politics and charitable public works. If the combination seems paradoxical, that is because a late-twentieth-century citizen no doubt has trouble penetrating the mind-set of a nineteenth-century monarchist. He founded the Mannerheim Child Welfare Association in 1920, and two years later became chairman of the Finnish Red Cross. In both organizations he succeeded in establishing strong, effective administrations and in tying them to international networks.
Even a sympathetic biographer, however, has trouble with Mannerheim’s attachment to the Lapuans. Street brawlers were never his style; the idea of Mannerheim embracing Kurt Wallenius and his bully squads seems about as likely as the image of Field Marshal Hindenburg whooping it up with the Brown Shirts in a Munich beer hall. But Mannerheim saw the Lapuans as he wanted to see them, not as they really were. He voiced the opinion that the movement was an “expression of the Finnish people’s reaction to the abuse of freedom and democracy” and justified the Lapuans’ violent tactics by proclaiming that “balance reasserts itself sooner or later and the moment comes when the broad masses feel instinctively that order is preferable to unbridled liberty.”7 The Baron had enough sense to avoid backing a loser, however, and when the public turned on the Lapuans, he subsided into rumblings and grumblings to which few people listened seriously.
During the years between wars, Mannerheim seems to have been a solitary and rather lonely figure. He lived by himself with a small retinue of servants, in a big house in the Kaivopuisto neighborhood of Helsinki. Accounts by several people who visited him there agree that the house was furnished in an austere and overwhelmingly masculine style—hunting trophies, banners, plaques, weapons, framed certificates of honor, etc. “Even while he lived there, the house was taking on the air of the museum it was to become after his death,” wrote Rosita Forbes, a journalist who interviewed him just before the outbreak of hostilities.8 Prominently displayed on the Baron’s living room wall was an autographed portrait of Nicolas II. If any visitor were to remark on the appropriateness, or lack thereof, of this exhibit, Mannerheim would answer in a flat, declarative voice: “He was my emperor.”
When P. E. Svinhufvud was elected president in 1931, Gustav Mannerheim was recalled to public service and given the post of chairman of the Defense Council. He worked hard to build Finland’s defenses, and he was forced to fight for every markka in his share of the budget, often with the notoriously tight-fisted Paasikivi. Worn out from these unsavory bureaucratic struggles, he resigned again in 1937, only to be reinstated by President-elect Kallio.
When Stalin’s territorial demands became known to him in October 1939, Mannerheim consistently urged a policy of conciliation. He soon got a reputation for being the ghost at the banquet, and Prime Minister Cajander finally let it be known that he was ready to accept the Marshal’s resignation. Members of the then-powerful National Coalition party openly criticized Mannerheim for being too old, too afraid of the Russians, and—the most infamous criticism of all—for being a man who could not be trusted. Kallio finally agreed that the old man would have to go, only days before hostilities broke out, but the first Russian bombs fell on Helsinki just before the Baron’s resignation was formally accepted. Instead of being sacked, he was instantly appointed commander in chief. Even the old knight’s worst political enemies knew he was the only possible choice to lead the nation’s armed forces.
By the time Mannerheim actually became president of Finland in 1944, it was a bitter and ironic triumph, a role of almost Shakespearean despair. He was seventy-seven years old, worn out from years of wartime stress, and in fragile health; his nation was ravaged, exhausted, bankrupt, and savagely truncated. During his nineteen months in office he was often too sick to conduct daily business. Eventually, and very gently, his resignation was again requested, and the Baron stepped down, choosing, characteristically enough, to retire in Switzerland rather than in Finland.
He had done much more than simply lead his nation through two wars; he had led it out of war with Russia, yet managed to keep it free, identity intact. Whatever one may think of this or that element of his character and career, the independence of Finland is itself his monument; that achievement alone makes him loom as a genuine hero.
All that remained to him were five sunset years of tranquil retirement, mostly spent writing his curiously dispassionate memoirs—so matter-of-fact when dealing with the apocalyptic battles against the Red Army, yet so achingly nostalgic in their brief allusions to the world of Imperial Russia, now as remote to us, and by then, probably to him as well, as the world of lost Atlantis.
Mannerheim died on January 28, 1951; the Finnish civil war had begun on January 28, 1918. The synchronicity was a final touch of irony in a life that had been filled with ironic drama. He had been a majestic actor on the stage of Baltic history. Against his few but large-scale successes must be balanced many failures, and against those failures and successes alike must be balanced the legend that shrouds him now. It is a powerful legend, but it is based on facts. Historian Marvin Rintala, author of the best English-language study of Mannerheim and a writer who could be scathingly critical of him, was finally forced to this assessment of him: “He was a noble man, as well as a nobleman.”9 “Mannerheim did not grow up among the masses, but in a castle. … he was a cosmopolite in the age of nationalism; an aristocrat in the age of democracy; a conservative in the age of revolutions.”10
There is no question that Mannerheim’s politics were a dizzying anomaly, so much so that perhaps they should not be judged on ideological grounds. For all his anti-Bolshevism, for all his flirtation with the grubby machinations of the Lapuans, the man was not an ideologue. All that he did, all that he said, probably every single thing that he thought derived from the fact of his aristocratic birth and from the worldview he inherited from that birth in a prerevolutionary, predemocratic milieu. He was “The Baron” to his fingertips. Everyone who worked with or against him, whether they liked or hated him, agreed with or detested his politics, was struck by the man’s sheer physical bearing. When Hitler met Mannerheim for the first time, in June 1942, it was the führer who bowed, while the Baron remained stiffly at attention.
He was patriotic; he cared about Finland, but nationalistic zeal was not a strong part of his makeup. On the other hand, it was this very same lack of nationalistic passion that enabled him to walk his nation across an incredibly narrow tightrope in 1944, with its integrity, honor, and identity surviving on the other side. A more fire-breathing Finnish leader, Väinö Tanner, for example, might have succumbed to fantasies of last-ditch stands in the forest. History has proven this, in fact, to be Mannerheim’s greatest single accomplishment. Finns today find the idea of another war with Russia all but inconceivable (although the border defenses, to be sure, remain strong). There are few Finns still alive who can remember the barbarities of 1918, while nearly every Finn living today treasures the state of peaceful relations that exists between Finland and its giant neighbor. And one of the chief architects of that situation, Mannerheim, is still respected by the majority of Finns, even if the element of reverence has long since evaporated.
The eccentric nature of Mannerheim’s patriotism is perhaps nowhere so clearly illustrated as in the matter of language. Born to Swedish-speaking nobility, and quite fluent in Russian and French (which he spoke in the elegant, high-flown manner of the Romanov Court), he could also converse passably in English, Polish, and German. Yet he did not bother to learn Finnish until his fiftieth year, regarding it as a barbarous and provincial tongue, a fact that will appear strange only to readers who have never attempted to grapple with that convoluted and unwieldy language. During the civil war he required the constant services of an interpreter just so he could pass orders to the Finnish-speaking troops under his command. One modern historian, after listening to recordings of Mannerheim’s wartime speeches, stated that “to put it bluntly, Mannerheim’s Finnish pronunciation is beyond belief, ranking with Winston Churchill’s French. Churchill, at least, did not have to govern the French.”11
With very few exceptions, his closest personal friends were not Finns but other European aristocrats. He generally disliked Germans and avoided them whenever possible. The story is told of a luncheon Mannerheim was forced, by the demands of protocol, to attend in the company of a pompous and overbearing German liaison officer. While the meal was still in progress, “this German officer produced a cigar before Mannerheim had finished eating and asked if it would bother the Marshal if he smoked it. Mannerheim fixed the Wehrmacht officer with a gaze that would penetrate armor plate and cut him dead by replying evenly: ‘I don’t know. No one has ever tried it.’”12
By his deep, ingrained hauteur, one is irresistibly reminded of Charles de Gaulle. Even in wartime there was something curiously “withheld” about Mannerheim, a remote quality which made it hard for subordinates to approach him with new ideas. He delegated authority grudgingly. He also seems to have been aware of this defect in his leadership style, for at most of his headquarters conferences he permitted his subordinates to speak first before he delivered his own views. His corps commanders found him a hard master. Östermann judged him cold, imperious, and unreasonable and after the war had harsh things to say about his generalship. Öhquist, who had a much higher regard for Mannerheim’s tactical grasp, also states that he was a harsh man to work for, an impossible man to please. Yet many other accounts display the Marshal as being courteous, even fatherly, with subordinates of low and middle rank; noblesse oblige, surely.
Though he was an autocrat to his bones, he had nothing in common with the dictators of his time, the Hitlers and Francos and Mussolinis, and seems to have regarded them as little men. For Stalin he may actually have felt a certain grudging respect, for at least the proportions of Stalin’s excesses were not without precedent in Russian history. But for the bureaucratic apparatus that kept Stalin in power—the purges, the gulags, the proliferation of party hacks throughout every level of Soviet society—he could only have felt contempt.
If Mannerheim’s politics seem inscrutably peculiar, it is probably because they are outside of all contemporary frames of reference. Totalitarianism itself, a postdemocratic form of reactionary spasm, was almost as alien to him as democracy. His ideals came from a lost world, a world where gentlemen in glittering uniforms conducted their business over sherry in gilded drawing rooms, and then adjourned, tiara-clad ladies at their sides, for an evening at the Imperial Ballet. Gustav Mannerheim would not have been out of place in the pages of a Tolstoy novel; but in the gray and airless chambers of modern parliamentary establishments, he was as anachronistic as an envoy from the court of Versailles.
1Mannerheim, Gustav, Memoirs of Marshal Mannerheim (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1945), 47.
2And in the process, he nearly brought about the death of the man who first encouraged the writing of this book, back in 1962. When he was a young subaltern in the tsarist army, Prince A. I. Lobanov-Rostovsky served in Brushilov’s campaign. One morning, his division was flanked and nearly trapped because the cavalry unit supposed to be screening its right wing had instead ridden off in a Custer-like plunge for glory. The commander of that cavalry division was Carl Gustav Mannerheim.
3Mannerheim, 112.
4Rintala, Marvin, Four Finns—Political Profiles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 30.
5Forbes, Rosita, These Men I Knew (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1940), 240.
6Rintala, 40.
7Forbes, 243.
8Ibid., 273.
9Rintala, 26.
10Ibid., 22, 36.
11Ibid., 21.
12Goodrich, Austin, Study in Sisu (New York: Ballantine Books, 1960), 22.