Vihtori Iisakki Kosola

Vihtori Iisakki Kosola (born 1884—died December 1936) nationalist political leader, the founder and commander of modern Finland’s Fascist Lapua Movement, which threatened the republic’s democratic institutions in the 1930s.

Kosola, of peasant background, first achieved recognition as a patriot when he was imprisoned by the tsarist authorities as a political offender during the last days of Finland’s affiliation with the Russian Empire. In 1929–30 he organized the anti-Communist, anti-Russian, and implicitly antidemocratic nationalist movement named for the town of Lapua. During the worldwide depression the movement quickly grew to nationwide proportions and won the support of distinguished governmental, military, and parliamentary figures. Kosola claimed that its illegal acts—including harassment and kidnapping of Communist and Socialist leaders—were necessary to save Finland from Russian domination; but his harangues against the views and activities of liberals such as Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg, the first president of the republic and an outspoken foe of the Lapua, showed his antidemocratic motives. At the urging of Kosola and the Lapua Movement, the government outlawed the Communist Party in 1931. An unsuccessful attempt at a coup d’etat in February 1932, however, resulted in the decline of the movement and in the imprisonment of Kosola for three years.