Finnish Communist Arvo Tuominen expressed the opinion that the war was not Kuusinen's idea. According to him, Kuusinen would have known that the underground Finnish Communist Party was in shambles due to police terror and could not incite a mass revolt in Finland or mutiny in the ranks of the army. The number of soldiers who joined Kuusinen's Finnish People's Army was small, estimated to be in the thousands. According to Tuominen the main architect of the war was Andrei Zhdanov. Kuusinen was a natural choice as the head of the Finnish People's Government.