Baron Mannerheim Biography

We wrote a lot about Mannerheim after the collapse of the USSR: his biographies came out, he often attracted the attention of journalists. The life of the President of Finland, who did not know the Finnish language, near whose bed was a photograph of Nicholas II with the inscription in Russian “This is my sovereign”, turned out to be a fertile literary material and at the time of the perestroika breakdown of all kinds of cover, and when Russia rose from the knees.

They wrote that Mannerheim was obliged to Leningrad in the Great Patriotic War-he did not send Finnish troops to storm the city. This was a very great simplification, but Mannerheim was really not a convinced enemy of the USSR, in which he saw not earthly hell, but which became communist Russia. After a year, the Soviet leadership treated him loyally and even with respect, in any case in words.

An excellent rider, Bonvivan, a talented military leader, Mannerheim turned out to be an ideal character for fictionalized biographies. But there is one side with which, it seems, they have not yet tried to look at him: the baron became the brightest figure in a long series of faithful servants of the Russian emperor who went to the service of new national states.

The Russian Empire was highly characterized by Great Russian patriotism, but at the same time it was not the Russian state even during the Russian policy of Alexander III. The attaching Finland Alexander I said that this is not a province, but a state. The same state in the empire before the uprising of the year was Poland. The German nobility and for the most part, the Ostsee cities of Livonia and Estland, the Duchy of Kurland and Semigalsky, who were inhabited by German burghers, have retained their previous privileges after joining Russia.

And if the loyalty of the Polish officers of the Russian Empire often turned out to be quite conditional Thaddey Bulgarin, who began the cornet of the Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich, in the Napoleonic Ulan, the German officers and officials were its “gold reserve”. Their careers were irritated by the Great Russians. The replica of General Ermolov, abandoned by him to Alexander I, when he asked what award he wanted: "Sovereign, make me in the Germans." Ermolov was a brilliantly gifted person, but ethnic Germans in the Russian service were well educated, disciplined, responsible, punctual and reliable, and “production in the Germans” could not help here.

But in the new, independent Baltic states, the Germans did not linger in military service. When the Baltic provinces separated from the Russian Empire and received their statehood, a coup directed against the privileged German minority occurred in them. In Latvia, he was accompanied by an ethnic war and the intervention of German Freikors, volunteer detachments.

As a result, the Baltic Germans emigrated. Those who stayed in their homeland left after the joining of the Baltic republics to the USSR. But in their armies and state structures there were a lot of officer ranks in the Russian Empire of Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians. The generals of the Polish army during the Soviet-Polish war became forty former Russian officers.

Later they were not too quickly produced into new ranks, pushed into the shadow, but many, nevertheless, remained in service and showed themselves perfectly during the Second World War. In this series, Mannerheim is interesting in that he, with maximum completeness, fulfilled the secret requirement, which was presented to the immigrant from a privileged national minority service of a multilingual of the empire.

Baron abandoned his own nationality: he did not become Russian, but he was not either Shred, and even more so Finn. The Swedish nobleman and the Russian general, before the October Revolution, Mannerheim was hostile in relation to the Finnish liberation movement. He served in a privileged guards regiment, married a rich heiress, then moved to the court stable department.

The baron distinguished himself in the Russo-Japanese War, made an expedition to China, performing the intelligence task of the General Staff. Then he made a brilliant career, commanding the cavalry units in Poland, he became the commander of the guards brigade, and received the corps in the First World War. He was a typical man of the “old regime”, court and athlete - the baron was considered one of the best St.

Petersburg riders. In December, he returned to Finland, which proclaimed independence, because he lost everything in Russia. And it turned out to be necessary: ​​the right Senate was at enmity with the Red Council of the People’s Commissioners, in Finland there were also the thoroughly decomposed garrisons of the former imperial army, the people needed a military leader.

And Mannerheim was an intelligent military specialist and a good organizer: having received the mandate of the commander in chief, he defeated the Reds. This was crowned with wild ethnic massacre in Vyborg, when former Russian officers and peaceful inhabitants were killed along with the Red Guards. Mannerheim was furious, but could not do anything.For Shyutskorovites, Finnish militias, he had become a mythical figure by this time - the baron had nothing to do with this fantastic image.

In years, he was a regent of Finland. In m - her president. Before the winter war he was headed by the defense committee, during the war he became the commander in chief. He understood that it was necessary to prepare for the war, while looking for compromises, to fight during the war, and when the forces end, to agree. Thanks to him, Finland survived and preserved as a state. The same happened during the Second World War.

But at the same time, he was a citizen of the world and spent in a pleasant way, traveling all over the world, making secular relations and hunting exotic animals. In a sense, the baron made a dizzying career in the spirit of his Petersburg past and lived as the cavalry guard and an employee of the court stable part of Mannerheim would like. Imperial Petersburg and the court life gave him an understanding that politics is an art of possible, and he was endowed with sanity by nature.

The key to his success was the innate practicality and dexterity of the courtier, but at the same time he was a man of the outgoing world - not an autocrat, but an aristocrat, not a populist, but a gentleman to the tips of his fingers, with squeamishness related to politics in the squares. Hitler, with whom Mannerheim had to deal, caused him deep disgust. And to the new, communist Russia, he applied as a given that will always be next to Finland.

Her interests had to be taken into account, one way or another she had to get along with her. He was not ideologically indocrined, so it could be dealt with. Hence the stories that Stalin deleted him from the list of Finnish war criminals, where Mannerheim was the first.

Leonid Vlasov in the book “Mannerheim” writes about this differently: “As the president, Mannerheim enjoyed immunity, however, this did not matter much for Moscow. However, Stalin understood that to give the Old Marshal to the court means to throw the idea of ​​the independence of Finland on the bench, and this did not want to ... ... in the Red Cross hospital, where Mannerheim was lying, he was visited by Lieutenant General G.

Savonenkov, who informed Marshal that he would not be involved in the court as a military criminal and the Soviet leadership did not require his resignation, and even more so-his care, and even moreover- From the political life of the country. " Later he received the confidential message of Stalin, who wrote that Mannerheim "would not be attracted to court as a war criminal and he can freely go abroad." This also turned out to be the result of the life of the life of Karl Gustav Mannerheim: he understood that an honest opponent did not cause hatred and desire to take revenge.