Toivo Alavirta

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Toivo Alavirta

Toivo Villiam Alavirta (27 June 1890 - 23 June 1940; original surname Ahlström; name as Soviet citizen Тойво Казимирович Алавирта) was a Finnish journalist and politician. He was a member of the Parliament of Finland from 1916 to 1918.

Alavirta was born in Tammela. In 1918, during the Finnish Civil War, he worked in the administration of the Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic. When the Red side lost the war, he fled to Soviet Russia. He joined both the Communist Party of Finland and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and worked as a journalist and a party functionary in the Karelian ASSR.^[1]

In 1935, Alavirta was accused of nationalism and excluded from the Communist Party. On 23 August 1937 he was arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to eight years in prison. He died on 23 June 1940 in a prison camp in Ust-Vym, in the Komi ASSR. He was posthumously rehabilitated by Soviet authorities in 1955.^[2]

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