A Foreign Benefactor and a Domestic Liberator: the cults of Lenin and Mannerheim in Finland

Personality cult has usually been understood as a phenomenon of Caesarian or otherwise totalitarian or semi-totalitarian political cultures. However, there are many basically democratic regimes in which great statesmen, soldiers or artists (e.g. Parnell, Baden-Powell, Shakespeare, The Beatles etc.) have been eulogized or adored. Finland is no exception, where two controversial but interlinked political cult personalities, Lenin and Mannerheim, cropped up. This article examines their emergence, incompatible careers and conditions of politico-cultural use and misuse, ending up with an account of the recent situation in which imagined Lenin has disappeared from the scene and super-Mannerheim is about to rise. Also the ideational content and political messages of the two cults are disentangled in order to contribute to the contemporary history of Finnish ideas.