He Was My Emperor! March 12, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
Field Marshal Gustav Mannerheim was the man who created (once) and then saved Finland (twice). First, he commanded the White insurrection against the Reds in Helsinki in 1918 leading the country to independence from Russia (which was becoming the USSR). Second, he commanded the Finnish army in the Winter War, and third, he commanded the same army in the Continuation War and, then, somehow, managed to maneuver the country out of that conflict once the going got bad. All three of these life-and-death struggles were fought against the same power: Russia. However, Mannerheim was himself part Russian, not by blood, but by vocation. He had grown up in Finland, a Russian province. Then from 1887 to 1917 he served in the Imperial Russian Army, his wife was Russian, and his many adventures included fighting and spying for Russia in the far east: he led, for example, an insurgent group against the Japanese, he travelled to Tibet on behalf of the Tsar… For the first twenty years, he lived in Finland, for the second twenty years he operated out of the heart of Russia, and in from 1917 to the end of the Second World War he was back in Finland again.
Mannerheim had enough character to carry his divided loyalties with him: it is one of his many attractive features. Over his desk (or according to some accounts on the wall of his sitting room), where he sat through three wars with Russia, there hung a portrait not of the Finnish President but of Tsar Nicholas II. When any bold visitor plucked up the courage to ask Mannerheim how it was possible that the hero of a nation that had been forged fighting Russia had a Russian Tsar in pride of place on his wall, Mannerheim would respond simply: ‘He was my Emperor.’ And so he had been… the photograph was autographed. In 1896 Mannerheim had served in ceremonials around Nicholas including at his coronation (‘the most exhausting ceremony I have known’). Mannerheim had, later in his life, spent an hour and a half with the Tsar describing his visit to the Dalai Lama, the longest but not the only interview with the Russian ruler and his family. ‘Nicholas II had not been a distant monarch to Mannerheim, but a man he had personally guarded for some years, a companion on shooting trips and a figure of some reverence.’
Beach would love to have a photograph of Mannerheim with his portrait of Nicholas, but simply cannot track any down. Perhaps none exist? drbeachcombing AT yahoo COM Do we even have a legend here, some Finnish cobblers?
