Finland's national hero began as a Russian imperial cavalry officer
Before he became the father of modern Finland, Gustaf Mannerheim spent three decades in the Russian imperial army, took part in the 1896 coronation of Tsar Nicholas II and rose to lieutenant general. He then led Finnish forces in three wars, served as regent and president, and in a 2004 poll was voted the greatest Finn ever.
Born in 1867 at Louhisaari Manor into a Swedish-speaking noble family, he went by his middle name Gustaf and disliked his third, Emil, signing simply C. G. Mannerheim. His father, a witty industrialist with radical views, left the heavily indebted family for a mistress in 1880, and his mother died the next year, leaving an uncle as guardian. As a schoolboy he was suspended for a year for throwing stones at windows. At the Hamina Cadet School he struggled, borrowed money, chafed at the rules, and was expelled in 1886, after which the prestigious Page Corps in Saint Petersburg turned him down, sending him into deep depression.
He nevertheless built a Russian military career, fighting in the Russo-Japanese War and on the Eastern Front of the First World War. After Finland declared independence on 6 December 1917, civil war erupted between the government's Whites and the socialist Reds. Appointed White commander in January 1918, Mannerheim won and staged a victory parade in Helsinki that May.
As regent from December 1918 to July 1919, he won recognition from several Entente powers and, though a monarchist, ratified Finland's republican constitution. He then lost the first presidential election to K. J. Ståhlberg and left politics, founding a child welfare league and leading the Finnish Red Cross. Named chairman of the Defence Council in 1931 to prepare for possible war with the Soviet Union, he became Finland's only field marshal in 1933.
When Soviet forces invaded in November 1939, he took command and became the unifying symbol of the Winter War. He later led Finland's invasion of the Soviet Union alongside Nazi Germany from 1941. In 1944 parliament unanimously made him president to negotiate peace. Ill, he resigned in 1946 and died in a Swiss sanatorium in 1951.
Source: Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim
