Konni Zilliacus was a British politician, diplomat and writer who was the Member of Parliament for Gateshead from 1945 until 1950, and for Manchester Gorton from 1955 until his death.
23 Facts About Konni Zilliacus
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Konni Zilliacus was widely considered to have had communist sympathies.
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Konni Zilliacus was a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and opposed the Vietnam War.
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Konni Zilliacus's father was Konrad Viktor Zilliacus, a Finnish independence activist.
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Zilliacus was born in Kobe, Japan, the son of exiled Finnish nationalist and journalist Konrad Viktor Zilliacus and American-born Lilian McLaurin Grafe.
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Konni Zilliacus travelled the world with his parents until 1909, when they settled in England.
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Konni Zilliacus then attended Bedales School in Hampshire, where he became friends with the sons of Josiah Clement Wedgwood.
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Konni Zilliacus attended Yale University in the US, graduating first in his class in 1915.
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Soon invalided out of the medical corps with diphtheria, Konni Zilliacus returned to Britain and joined the Union of Democratic Control and worked for the Liberal Party MPs Noel Buxton and Norman Angell.
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In 1919, newly married to Eugenia Nowicka and with a recently-born daughter, Stella Konni Zilliacus, he joined the British Labour Party.
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Konni Zilliacus wrote many articles and letters on international affairs on a pro bono basis, usually under pen names such as Vigilantes.
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Konni Zilliacus was a firm believer in the power of multinational organizations to prevent war, but he could not lead British foreign policy to work through the League.
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Konni Zilliacus worked diligently for the League of Nations until the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, when he resigned from the Secretariat of the League of Nations.
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In World War II, Konni Zilliacus worked for the Ministry of Information and joined the 1941 Committee.
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Konni Zilliacus was elected as Member of Parliament for Gateshead in 1945 and became known as a left-wing critic of government foreign policy.
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Konni Zilliacus was frequently accused of being a communist because he was sympathetic to Soviet policies and frequently contributed articles to liberal British publications, but he was not affiliated with the Communist Party of Great Britain.
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Konni Zilliacus sought re-election in the 1950 general election, but he lost his seat to Labour Party candidate Arthur Moody.
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Konni Zilliacus held the seat until his death, on 6 July 1967.
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Konni Zilliacus became a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and in 1961 was suspended from the party for several months for writing an article for a Czech magazine.
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Konni Zilliacus was a prominent pacifist, pushing for less spending on arms and nuclear testing during the 1950s and opposing the Vietnam War during the 1960s.
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Konni Zilliacus married, in 1919, Eugenia Nowicka, a 19-year-old Polish woman revolutionary whom he had met while in Siberia.
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Konni Zilliacus never married his arguably more important or better-known "wife", Jan Trimble, daughter of Laurence Trimble, an American film director of the silent screen era, though she took the name Konni Zilliacus and had a daughter by him in 1945.
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The Konni Zilliacus family lived from the 1940s onward in the St John's Wood and nearby Maida Vale areas of London, where she was a London Zoo volunteer and, until her death in 1999, a stalwart of the local Constituency Labour Party.