Armas Äikiä

Armas Äikiä
Born	1904 Pyhäjärvi, Grand Duchy of Finland, Russian Empire
Died	1965 (aged 60–61)

Armas Äikiä (1904–1965) was a Finnish communist writer and journalist. He wrote the Anthem of Karelo-Finnish SSR. A citizen of two countries, who had several collection of poems published in the Soviet Union, Äikiä was one of the few Finnish exile writers and politicians who in the 1930s and 1940s avoided Stalin's terror and forced labour camps. Back in Finland, when the Communist Party was banned, he spent years in prison and wrote defiant poems.

Armas Äikiä was born in Pyhäjärvi, now Otradnoye on the Karelian Isthmus as the son of Matti Äikiä, a tailor, and Eeva (Koskinen) Äikiä. He was educated at an elementary school. At the age of 19 he moved to Helsinki, where he joined the Finnish Communist Party and worked as a chief editor at the Communist newspapers Liekki, Itä ja Länsi, and Tiedonantaja. Äikiä published his early poems in the anthology Vallankumousrunoja (1928). Between the years 1927–1928 and 1930–35 he was imprisoned at the Tammisaari prison camp because of political activities. During these years Äikiä wrote many of the poems, which were published in the 1940s in several collections.

From 1935 to 1947 Äikiä was a political refugee in the Soviet Union in the Russian Karelia, where he edited the magazine Punalippu. Äikiä also published poems in magazines, and his works were widely introduced to the public. In 1941 he wrote Laulu Kotkasta, which centered on the Communist leader Toivo Antikainen, and Kaksi Soturia drawing its subject from the Winter War of 1939–1940. Kalterilyyra (1945) presented Äikiä's vengeful prison poems, which originated in the Tammisaari penitentiary in 1927–28.

During these years, when Finland was fighting against Soviet aggression, Äikiä was a member of the Soviet-backed Terijoki government in Karelia. Its head was the emigrant communist Otto Wille Kuusinen. The puppet-government tried to appeal to every Finn to join in the struggle against Fascism. In a popular song, 'Jesli zavtra voina', Äikiä associated the Red Army with the emergence of light: "Oli tähdetön Pohjolan taivas, / oli synkeä Suomemme yö. / Valo tulkohon siis, / tuli leimahtakoon, / Puna-Armeija lahtarit lyö!" (from Taistelulauluja, ed. by S.K. Hel'man, 1941) Äikiä also served as a propaganda officer and he was a well-known radio voice. Much later Mauri Sariola portrayed him in a comic light in Armeija piikkilankojen takana (1970), which dealt with Finnish prisoners of war in Carelia. One of the prisoners says, hesitating after his agitation, that Äikiä is like a radish – but perhaps white and Finnish inside.

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