MANNERHEIM

President, Soldier, Spy

Date: 2009-11-15

“Mannerheim spent much of his life, as he put it, ‘racing the storm’, watching the political horizon… He was cursed, as he might have observed himself, ‘to live in interesting times’”

Gustaf Mannerheim was one of the key figures of the twentieth century, and is still a national symbol in his home country of Finland, where a 2004 television survey voted him the ‘Greatest Finn of All Time.’ Born in 1867, he served in the Russian army during his youth, witnessing the coronation of the last Tsar in 1896 and fighting in the Russo-Japanese war, then spent two years undercover in Asia, posing as a Swedish anthropologist as he took part in the ‘Great Game’ of espionage. He crossed China on horseback, stopping en route to teach the 13th Dalai Lama how to shoot with a pistol, and spying on the Japanese navy on his way home. When the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, he narrowly escaped St Petersburg, then led anti-Bolshevik forces during the civil war in Finland. However, his finest hour arguably came at the age of 73, when he led Finland in the 1940 ‘Winter War’ against the Russians, his former masters.

Jonathan Clements’ biography is the first life of Mannerheim to be published for over a decade, and includes a significant amount of new historical material on Mannerheim’s time in China. Avoiding both the reverent attitude of older Swedish and Finnish accounts, and the sensational, myth-busting tendency of more modern writing, Clements portrays Mannerheim as human enough to grumble, when a long-coveted promotion brought with it a stamp duty charge of 4000 Finnish marks, ‘It’s a good thing they haven’t made me a more important man’, but also as the legendary leader who stated  ‘The rights of nations are not defended by means of declarations… There must be the desire to defend one’s country by deeds and sacrifices.’ This encapsulated his country’s attitude; on hearing of the declaration of war between Finland and Russia in 1940, in which the Finns would be outnumbered at least five to one, one of his countrymen remarked: ‘We are so few, and they are so many. Where will we find the room to bury them all?’

 Jonathan Clements lives and works in Finland and London. He has written biographies of Mao, Marco Polo and most recently of Wellington Koo and Prince Saionji in the Makers of the Modern World series.

Jonathan will be speaking at the Finnish Institute at 6pm on Wednesday 18^th November 2009 as part of the launch of this biography. If you would like more information about this event or the book itself, please contact Haus Publishing (telephone: 020 7838 9055) or email sustainability@hauspublishing.com

 Jonathan discusses his biography of Mannerheim with Lauri Karhuvaara on Finnish TV, http://www.katsomo.fi/?progId=25272, on Finland's Swedish-language TV channel,  http://svenska.yle.fi/nyheter/artikel.php?id=172031 and on YLE Broadcasting in Finland, 10th November 2009: http://areena.yle.fi/video/542830