page_title: Risto Ryti
section_title: Member of parliament and finance minister
hierarchical_section_title: Risto Ryti / Politician and banker / Member of parliament and finance minister
caption_attribution_description: English: The building where Risto Ryti lived 1918 to 1935 in Helsinki. Block of flats painted pink with white details and decorations. The number 2 is visible on the entry door to the right, and the plaque giving the dates is just to the left of the door.
context_page_description: Risto Heikki Ryti was the fifth president of Finland, from 1940 to 1944. Ryti started his career as a politician in the field of economics and as a political background figure during the interwar period. He made a wide range of international contacts in the world of banking and within the framework of the League of Nations. Ryti served as prime minister during the Winter War and the Interim Peace. Later he served as president during the Continuation War. After the war, Ryti was the main defendant in the Finnish War-responsibility trials.
context_section_description: During the Finnish Civil War Ryti played no active part, remaining in hiding with his family in Red-dominated Helsinki. Afterwards, however, he would become deeply involved in politics, being elected a National Progressive member of Parliament in 1919, at the age of thirty the second youngest member. In the same year, the party candidate, an admirer of Ryti, Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg, was elected the first president of Finland. Ryti served as a member of Parliament from 1919 to 1924 and from 1927 to 1929. During his first few years in Parliament, Ryti served as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and later the Finance Committee. He also served as a member of Helsinki City Council from 1924 to 1927.
  According to the Finnish historian Martti Turtola, Ryti succeeded in politics in the first few years after the Finnish Civil War because his liberal, democratic, and republican ideals were popular then. Moreover, Ryti's personal political success continued even after his liberal-oriented National Progressive Party shrank to a fringe party, because he was considered an expert especially in economic policy and, very importantly, an impartial servant of the fatherland who refused to play partisan politics (see Martti Turtola, "Risto Ryti:  A Life for the Fatherland").
  In 1921, the thirty-two-year-old Ryti was appointed finance minister in the government of Juho Vennola. He served in that position twice until 1924. In 1923 President Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg appointed him governor of the Bank of Finland, a post he remained in until he became prime minister in 1939. Ryti only began to exercise his duties as chairman of the Bank of Finland after he resigned as finance minister in January 1924. During his early years in parliament, Ryti succeed in bringing order to the government budget. Although he was a Ståhlbergian, Ryti did not approve of pardoning Red prisoners. In his opinion, the Reds were criminals. Ryti refused to see the social background of the Finnish Civil War.
caption: Ryti's home in Helsinki 1918-35
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