In Europe

by Geert Mak

  A conflict arose almost immediately between the smokers and the non-smokers. Lenin, who absolutely despised cigarette smoke, ruled that smoking was to be allowed only in the toilet. A line formed, and soon a second argument arose between the smokers and those who wished to use the toilet for its rightful purpose. Lenin solved the problem by drawing up toilet passes: smokers received a second-category pass, others a first-category pass.

  Meanwhile, Nadezhda sat looking out at the bare German landscape, and was surprised to note the absence of adult males. ‘Only women, teenagers and children could be seen at the wayside stations, on the fields, and in the streets of the towns,’ she wrote. During a stop at a station, Sokolnikov wondered why people were looking so interestedly into his carriage, until he realised that there was a piece of white Swiss bread lying on the windowsill. Lenin spent hours staring out of the window, his thumbs hooked in the armholes of his vest, long after it had grown dark and the occasional light flashing by was all there was to be seen.

  That evening brought a new crisis for the exasperated leader to solve. Karl Radek was in the compartment next to the Ulyanovs, along with Olga Ravich, Georgi Safarov and Lenin's great love, Inesa Armand. Radek was a jovial Polish Jew, a squat little pipe smoker with curly hair and thick glasses. He was an excellent organiser and a natural storyteller. Furthermore, he could do a perfect imitation of Lenin. The laughter cut straight through the thin carriage walls.

  The party atmosphere was heightened yet further when Charitonov and the exuberant Grigori Usivitch came to visit the compartment. Lenin had already poked his head in a few times to quieten things down – and received a boisterous welcome from Radek – but when Olga Ravitch's screeches of laughter once again penetrated all the walls and beyond the borders of propriety, he yanked open the door of the compartment, grabbed Olga by the hand without saying a word, led her down the corridor and pushed her into a compartment far away from his own. In the end, Lenin had to order lights out, ‘as a disciplinary party command’. But even that did not help.

  The next morning, at Stuttgart station, the German social democrat Wilhelm Janson tried to make contact with the revolutionary travellers. The Bolsheviks played deaf: any contact, after all, would have ruined the myth of the ‘sealed train’. In addition, the Russian and German socialists had had a parting of the ways. During the war, the unions and the social democrats had become respected negotiating partners for the German government. The Russians had known only exile and a covert existence. All their hopes were fixed on a revolution, in whatever form, not on evolution or compromise. ‘If Janson tries to enter our train, we'll throw him out on his ear,’ Lenin shouted in a rage. ‘Tell him to go to hell.’

  As the train approached Mannheim, the Russians in the third-class compartment began singing again. When French revolutionary songs also began echoing through the train, the German officers at the back went into action. They angrily approached the line of chalk: these French songs were an insult to the German nation. The Russian merrymakers finally desisted.

  In Frankfurt the evening rush hour had just begun, and the station was full of German troops. One of the men on the train, Fritz Platten, was Swiss. As a citizen of a neutral country, he was free to leave the train. In the station restaurant he ordered beer, sandwiches and newspapers for all his fellow passengers. While talking to some German soldiers, he must have let slip that there were Russian revolutionaries in the train who were determined to put an end to the war. Whatever the case, soldiers suddenly began leaving their lines and rushing up to the carriages. ‘Each man had a jug of beer in his hand,’ Radek wrote. ‘They ran up to us, asking whether peace was coming, and when.’ It was more than he could resist, of course: hanging out the window, he gave the call to revolution, until the soldiers were pulled away by their startled officers.

  The next day, when the train rolled through the suburbs of Berlin, Grigori Zinovyev said they were ‘silent as the grave’. At Potsdamer the train stopped for at least half a day. On Thursday, 12 April, the Russians finally reached the Baltic coast. Here they took the Swedish ferry to Trelleborg, and journeyed on from there to Stockholm.

  As far as I know, there is only one photograph of the travellers. It was taken in Stockholm, on Friday, 13 April, 1917. We see the group crossing a street, Lenin out in front, carrying an umbrella and wearing a hat like a businessman, gesturing extravagantly. Behind him, and wearing an enormous hat as well, is Nadezhda. In the middle we see the elegant outlines of Inessa Armand, in the background little Robert, hanging on Zinovyev's arm.

  It was spring when the picture was taken, and the harbour was already free of ice floes. The city was all water and smoke, little steamboats were sailing everywhere, one could barely pick one's way through all the barrels and carts. The clear streets of the Söderholm neighbourhood, where the Swedish business classes now give their eye teeth to buy a house, in those days stank as badly as the alleys of London or the slums of Amsterdam.

  Eighty years later, looking out of the train in the half-light of early morning, I see only the big, wet shape of the capital in the process of waking up, roads filled with cars, a frozen river, flats. In the afternoon a different Stockholm appears, a glorious city in alternating shades of ochre and red, its water sparkling in the low sun. At first glance, the city's pace is pleasantly calm. For both mothers and fathers, Sweden provides a generous maternity leave. On a Monday morning in the Drottninggatan one sees twice as many men as women pushing prams. These house husbands have nothing hurried about them, they stroll along as peacefully as young mothers, with all the time in the world.

  Stockholm was and is a city of bureaucrats, calm regents who for centuries have managed an immense hinterland from behind their piles of paper. Here the smokestacks began to rise up only half a century after London and Berlin, but things went quickly after that. When Lenin was here, Sweden was already a spectacular case of the ‘winning disadvantage’: the poor, backward countryside turned out to contain staggering quantities of raw materials and fuels. In addition, for generations the isolation of their farms had forced Sweden's rural people to develop an amazing degree of versatility and inventiveness. In remote places they had to make and repair everything they needed, which turned them into an uncommonly energetic and versatile people. The Swedish farming class, in other words, formed the ideal army of labourers for a nascent industrial state.

  In the course of the nineteenth century, therefore, Sweden went through a quiet revolution. Countless farmers had freed themselves from their villages and started anew in the city, the people's relationship to nature had changed, and traditions were severed. By 1917, in fact, a reaction to that could already be seen: the latent nostalgia for the old-fashioned farming life still present among modern-day Swedes. Stockholm's town hall, still under construction at the time of Lenin's visit, perfectly reflects the mixed feelings of that day: the woodworked windows speak of Sweden's history, its shadowy archways are decorated with trolls and other mystic rural motifs, and some of its courtyards are reminiscent of Venice, the Renaissance, of the North's eternal longing for the lightness of Italy.

  I took a detour to Saltsjöbaden, a handful of red wooden houses and the huge Grand Hotel along the shores of a snowy lake, less than half an hour by train from Stockholm. Here, on a quiet December day in 1938, the famous Swedish ‘consensus model’ was born, a distant precursor of the Dutch polder model. Seated at the round dining table in the little room of the hotel tower, representatives of the government, employers and unions, under the motto ‘No rich individuals, but rich concerns’, laid the foundations for an impressive welfare state. The model meshed seamlessly with Swedish puritanical traditions, centralised government and ‘flat’ organisational structures.

  For almost eighty years, therefore, cool reason has governed here, and that can be seen all over Stockholm. The outlying neighbourhoods with their broad lanes and large, leafy courtyards remind one of the Amsterdam of H. P. Berlage and Cornelis van Eesteren. Homeless people, prostitutes a
nd drug addicts are skilfully kept under control and neatly filed away. Here the bicycle locks are flimsier than anywhere else in Europe. Everyone dresses almost alike, there is almost no sprucing up, but that is also characteristic of a rural society. A rare individual may stand out, but largely by reason of his or her bearing. These are the bosses; you sense it, but you scarcely notice.

  In front of the Riksdaghuset I run into Magnus Lundquist. He has been standing here all day, holding a huge banner. Painted on the left of the banner is a crown of thorns, and below that a head covered in red blotches. In the middle is a large cross. To the right I see a detail of a hip bearing a deep wound. Near the top of the banner is a shining, kingly figure on a white horse, with a Star of David on his forehead. Beside him is a dove. Above that an angelic figure in a pose of beatification. The edges of the banner are lined with bible verses.

  Magnus’ big blue eyes look right through me. ‘What are you doing?’ I ask. ‘This is the real Jesus,’ he says. Tomorrow an exhibition will open here, on the theme of Jesus as homosexual.

  At dinner that evening I exchange national excesses with Lars-Olof Franzén, the thinking heart of Dagens Nyheter. I tell him about tons of cocaine being smuggled into the Netherlands with the express permission of the ministry of justice, about expense-account falsification in the public sector and large-scale fraud in the construction industry. In Sweden, people are outraged by the sums paid to directors in the form of golden handshakes, they find it preposterous; after all, we built up those companies together!

  A country can be known by its scandals. According to Franzén, issues like the ones we have mentioned are characteristic of a widening gap between common Europeans and the elite, here as well. ‘The Swedes are introverts, seemingly shy, but actually they are quite proud,’ Franzén says. ‘They use their own efforts as a benchmark. That is where their values lie.’

  While today's political leaders are concerned only with money and EU membership, old-fashioned equality and solidarity are still held dear by the common Swede. ‘Generally, people here feel that the politicians are busy selling out democracy. Nationalism doesn't play a particularly big role in that, more like a deep concern about the future of our society as such. The Swedes already miss the quality our health system once offered. And they think that today's leaders have fallen under the spell of greed.’

  He tells me that the first time he saw a beggar was in Paris in the 1960s. And he talks about how long ago he had heard people in New York talking only about money, about what everything cost, even down to a divorce. ‘It was unbelievable to me. I could never have imagined that would be normal in Stockholm too, thirty years later.’

  We talk about the influence Sweden had on the United States. During the famines in the nineteenth century, almost a quarter of all Swedes emigrated there. ‘Every family has uncles or distant cousins living in America.’ Roosevelt's New Deal was inspired by the example of the Swedish social democrats. ‘But I believe the influence now runs only in the other direction,’ Franzén says glumly.

  Watching TV that evening, I feel like a refugee. I don't understand a word these Swedes say, but I stare in astonishment at their uniform clothing, their deliberate movements, their pious body language. The woman reading the news looks as though she might burst into tears at any moment. The commercials are of an unparalleled corniness. Everything drips with nostalgia. At least one out of every three programmes is dominated by old farms, rural families and other bygone delights. The evening news is followed by an unintelligible sitcom about a supermarket, a shop manager and a blonde woman with preposterous breasts. Then follows an episode from a Heimat series about a village, all rural and green. Nowhere else in the world can five actors stand still for so long on camera without speaking a word. And I believe that, at that moment, they were in the throes of a knock-down-drag-out argument.

  How did Lenin and Stockholm get along in 1917? The mayor welcomed the foreign guest with due ceremony, the Swedish socialists threw a banquet in his honour, there were journalists present, photographers, and even a man with a film camera. For the first time in his life, Ulyanov was received as a prominent statesman. But his core ideas were not understood. The Swedes gave him money for the rest of his journey, and a little extra to buy a nice suit and a pair of decent shoes, even though, in his own words, he was ‘not going to Russia to open a haberdashery’. Then they put him on the next train to his fatherland. Swedish socialism was clearly on a different track. Less than three years later, they would renounce the world revolution and form the world's first democratic socialist government.

  One interesting character had travelled all the way from Germany to Stockholm just to see Lenin: the socialist multimillionaire Alexander Helphand, otherwise known as ‘Parvoes’. Parvoes had known Lenin back in his days as a young Marxist journalist. Later, by obscure means, he acquired a fortune in Istanbul. His former comrades lost faith in him, especially after it became clear that his business contacts extended all the way to the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin.

  Parvoes had, however – in his own way – remained committed to the revolution, and particularly to the money/revolution combination. In late 1914 he began drawing the attention of his German diplomat friends to the overlapping interests of German and Russian Marxists. Both, after all, were battling the same enemy: the czar and his regime. The Germans were all ears. At the ministry of foreign affairs, officials were all too conscious of the fact that Germany had become trapped in an endless, exhausting war on two fronts. Military means alone could never break the impasse. And so a new idea was launched within the ministry: the ‘revolutionisation’ of Russia. Serious domestic upheaval would, after all, force the czar to sue for peace, and allow Germany to concentrate all its war efforts on the Western Front. Parvoes’ plan was a godsend. Pumping money into it could clearly produce great results.

  For the Germans, therefore, the February Revolution of 1917 came as a long-awaited blessing. Top priority was granted to transporting Lenin and his group to Russia: at Halle, the private train of Crown Prince Wilhelm was even shunted for two hours onto a side rail to allow the Russians to pass. Major operations on the Eastern Front were postponed so as not to stimulate Russian patriotism unduly. The German treasury immediately gave five million marks to Parvoes ‘for political objectives within Russia’.

  Lenin and Parvoes had last met in May 1915. Their long tête-à-tête at that time was later dismissed by both as a chat about how the revolution was going. Yet the conversation no doubt covered a great deal more than that. In Stockholm, however, Lenin categorically refused to see Parvoes. It seemed to him far too great a political risk. Parvoes met with Karl Radek instead. Radek almost certainly spoke on Lenin's behalf. Then Parvoes went straight back to Berlin, for a personal meeting with the deputy minister of foreign affairs, Arthur Zimmermann.

  Probably – but one can only conjecture here, for nothing of what was discussed was ever committed to paper – both of these meetings dealt with the details of the German funding that ultimately helped the Russian Bolsheviks to seize power. That would allow a direct connection to be established between the Germans, Parvoes and a certain Jacob Hanecki (aka Fürstenburg), Lenin's representative in Stockholm and a man with whom the Bolshevik leader maintained almost daily contact.

  On the evening of Monday, 2 April, 1917 — 20 March, by the old Russian calendar – the German emissary to Denmark, who was also one of Parvoes’ close associates, sent the following telegram to his superiors in Berlin: ‘We must now do everything in our power to create the greatest possible chaos in Russia. We must do all we can to exploit the differences between the moderates and the extremists, because it is in our supreme interest that the latter gain the upper hand.’ Nothing in the archives, by the way, indicates any German interest in the actual substance of Lenin's revolutionary plans. Chaos in Russia and then a quick truce, that was all the Germans cared about.

  Late that Friday, on 31 March by the Russian calendar, the group – with the exception of Ra
dek, who was officially an Austrian national – left for Finland. On the platform, a Swedish socialist gave a farewell speech: ‘Cherished leader, be careful that terrible things are not done in Petrograd.’ After settling into his sleeping compartment, Lenin quickly crawled up onto the top berth. He took off his vest – despite Nadezhda's protests that he would catch a cold – and began reading the Russian papers he had rounded up in Stockholm. For the rest of the evening, his travelling companions heard only an occasional, disjointed cry: ‘Oh, the swine! … Bastards! … Traitors!’

  Chapter THIRTEEN

  Helsinki

  SWEDEN AND FINLAND ARE TWO SEPARATE WORLDS. IN THE OLD DAYS, the only way to travel between the two countries in winter was by sled, a long trek across the frozen Gulf of Bothnia.

  Lenin's train skirted the gulf. I travel aboard the Silja Serenade, a twelve-storey Titanic with five restaurants, a theatre, a casino, a promenade deck as big as a medium-sized shopping centre, and 2,000 passengers who take it all in their stride. At 6.00 in the evening we shove off from the quay at Stockholm and watch the last apartment buildings gliding by. In the distant houses, dinner is on the table, the television is on, children are preparing for bed and we are sailing off into the night. Other palaces drift beside ours, on their way to Estonia, Latvia or one of the Swedish islands.

  The ship shakes and cracks all night. At first light I go outside. On the upper deck I discover that an icy cold storm is blowing, but the ship glides forth like God's own steam iron. We plough our way through an endless whiteness, the ice floes smack against the hull with dull thuds, and on the snow-covered deck I have to steady myself against the howling wind. Meanwhile, down in the ‘Maxim’ and ‘Le bon vivant’ lounges, people are breakfasting quietly. The perfume shop is doing brisk business. Further down in the ship one hears a gentle thundering, but when the lift door opens on the lowest deck of all, one level below where the truck drivers sleep, the noise rolls in waves, pounding and roaring.