Name Karl Wiik Died 1946 | Role Member of Parliament | |
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Karl Harald Wiik (1883, Helsinki - 1946) was a Swedish-speaking Finnish Social Democratic leader. He was a Member of the Finnish Parliament from 1911 to 1918, from 1922 to 1929, from 1933 to 1941 and from 1944 to his death. An influential member of the Party's left wing, he was imprisoned for a time after the Finnish Civil War for having participated in the Rebel administration. In 1940 he and five other Social Democratic MPs were expelled from the Social Democratic Party because of their leftist orientation. The six expelled MPs formed the short-lived Socialist Parliamentary Group, all of whose members spent the years 1941 - 1944 in prison because of their unrelenting opposition to the Continuation War. Upon their release from prison in September 1944 after the armistice with the Soviet Union, the members of the group decided to ally themselves with the newly legalized Finnish Communist Party. They, including Wiik, were among the founders of the Finnish People's Democratic League, an umbrella organization of the Finnish radical left dominated in practice by the Communist Party.