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Konrad Viktor "Konni" Zilliacus (18 December 1855, in Helsinki – 19 June 1924, in Helsinki) was a Finnish independence activist involved in the Grafton Affair in 1905.
Early life
Zilliacus was born in Finland, then part of the Russian Empire. His parents were senator and the mayor of Helsinki Henrik Wilhelm Johan Zilliacus and Ida Charlotta Söderhjelm, daughter of the tax collector Johan Ulrik Söderhjelm. He studied law and entered the civil service in the office of the Governor-General.
In 1878 Zilliacus married the widow Lovisa Ehrnrooth, eleven years his senior, and the couple lived in considerable style at the Mariefors estate in Tusby, with a particular passion for horses and lavish entertaining. In May 1889, however, Zilliacus abandoned his wife, children and mounting debts and fled to America, ruining his wealthy father — senator Wilhelm Zilliacus — in the process. He became a newspaper reporter, in which capacity he travelled the world, living for a period in Costa Rica, then in Chicago. He lived from 1894 to 1896 in Japan — when his son Konni Zilliacus was born in Kobe — followed by Egypt and Paris. He returned to Finland in 1898, and submitted a petition to Tsar Nicholas II in 1899 demanding a constitution. He subsequently relocated to Stockholm in Sweden in 1900, where he began to publish a newspaper Fria Ord ("Free Speech") which supported independence for Finland.
Revolutionary activities
As one of the early leaders of the Finnish independence movement, he cultivated relations with the Russian revolutionary movement, and smuggled his newspaper and other revolutionary literature from Sweden to Finland on his yacht, as well as weapons. So feared was he by the Russian authorities that in 1903 Governor-General Nikolai Bobrikov issued a personal arrest warrant for Zilliacus alone, unlike other exiled opposition leaders.
