by Peter Weiss
The decision of the union leadership to call off the strike led to the workers’ first major crisis of confidence in their organizations. Within three years the number of union members dropped from one hundred eighty-six thousand to eighty thousand. The condemnation of the strike actions coming from the Party and the reprisals meted out by the employers forced the emigration of many of the activists who could no longer expect to find employment. Toward the end of the previous century it was primarily the impoverished rural proletariat who had left Sweden; now, many of the best industrial workers were migrating, the people who would have been central to powering a revolutionary movement. This loss, along with a spiraling mood of demoralization, characterized the years leading up to the outbreak of war. In August of nineteen fourteen, the Social Democrats’ wartime truce with the newly established right-wing government of the royalist Hammarskjöld—which included a banker, Wallenberg, as minister of foreign affairs, the shipping entrepreneur Broström as naval minister, the industrial magnate Vennersten as finance minister, the estate owner Beck Friis as minister of agriculture, the head of the employers’ association, Sydow, as minister of the interior, and Westman, the propagandist for joining the war on Germany’s side, as minister of education—also meant the demise of the Second International in Sweden. Nevertheless, the left didn’t want a split to occur; they insisted on their right to fight for socialist principles within the Party, but, while they were attempting to build up the Party for an all-out assault against the bourgeoisie, the right-wing Social Democrats were seeking to use the Party to protect the country from unrest and economic crisis. The party was able to grow because it represented the interests of all groupings within the workers’ movement. The leaders of the left wing were still able to assert themselves without resistance; Ström, who in nineteen twelve had been involved in the formation of the left alliance, took on the post of Party secretary; and rightists in the leadership such as Palmstierna and Per Albin Hansson were now joined by new forces, such as Wigforss, Möller, Schlyter, and Undén, who, though they supported Branting, advanced progressive positions. With their wealth of ideas, the spokespeople of the left—which at the time also included Sandler—had it over the gang surrounding Branting. But while they were still searching for forms of action, the right were developing a tactic with which they would win over the masses. Holding the nation together, guaranteeing neutrality and simultaneously fighting for social reforms, Branting managed to make the workers’ party the largest party in the parliament in the fall of nineteen seventeen. It wasn’t until the following year, after a delegation from the left had taken part in the meeting in Zimmerwald, that the attacks against the opposing side were amped up in an effort to bring about a split. According to all estimations, said Ström, the majority of the workers stood behind the leader of the Party. In response to the increasingly radical antimilitarism in the Party and accusations from the left of having thrown in his lot with the reactionaries, Branting was now characterizing the war as a clash between the capitalist powers and heaping scorn on the senselessness of the arms race. He responded to the appeals of his critics with answers that made no commitments but that had an air of radicalism about them. He described the call for a Third International as a betrayal of the working class and began readying himself, in the event of a split in the Party, to shift the blame to the left, which had allowed itself to become seduced by Bolshevism. The Young Socialists and the Left Alliance were still struggling to maintain their legitimacy, but when they adopted the slogan of making the imperialist war into a war of the oppressed against their oppressors, the right began to publicly denounce them with venom. Hansson spoke of a monstrous erosion infecting the thought of the youth, and Branting dubbed the Zimmerwald line the revolutionary romanticism of rootless emigrants. The rants of rabid, small-minded bourgeois thought didn’t worry the workers; they were more convinced by Branting’s efforts to confront the looming chaos with resolve and reason than they were by revolutionary pamphlets. If the left did not wish to return to a healthy functioning of the Party and to prove their loyalty before the next attack was launched, they said, then they could expect to be kicked out. It was at this time that Ström was appointed to the First Chamber. Branting had promoted him with the consent of the Liberals, aiming to pacify him and to alienate his allies. Circles within the Right Party, who had just as much riding on a splintering of the Social Democratic opposition as he did, had accommodated the move. Ström, the representative of the Zimmerwald group, joined up with the other member of the left alliance in the upper house, Lindhagen, who like Palmstierna had come across from the Liberal Party. An extreme individualist and a leading force in the struggle for suffrage for men and women alike, he assumed the office of mayor of Stockholm. The filling of such positions with radical socialists, said Ström, indicated that the Party had already begun to take control of the state via parliamentary channels. The Left also saw the basis for social transformation in parliamentary rule. Unlike Branting’s group, which assumed an agreement would be reached with the bourgeoisie, they anticipated that the bourgeoisie would strike back, yet they failed to develop any strategy for such an eventuality, instead maintaining a fatalistic belief in a democratic transition to socialism. Their images of a socialist order also remained unclear and variegated. Even Höglund, who had a Marxist education and who, together with Nerman, the modernist poet, had pledged himself to Lenin’s International in Zimmerwald, combined half-anarchist tendencies with his concept of freedom, while Ström, the most pugnacious advocate of a new party, placed more emphasis on the significance of mental forces than material ones. The journalists Vennerström and Carleson held to generally humanist ideas, while Fabian Månsson followed a populist, spontaneitist, antibureaucratic line. A popular agitator like Månsson, Kata Dalström, the friend of Kollontai and Balabanoff, preached her doctrine of salvation, inflected by a primeval Christianity. She openly called herself a Communist but was already getting caught up in theosophical musings which a few years later would push her into mysticism. Though the goals of these leftist personalities might still have been primarily of an idealistic, utopian, philosophical, poetic, visionary nature, Branting was nevertheless determined to take the wind out of their sails, for the revolutionarily minded youth league—whose leaders included Kilbom and Linderot, both experienced in practical union work—was increasingly driving them to make the mass party a tool of a politics of confrontation. Branting, who wanted to form a government with the Liberals, now rejected all initiatives from the left to preserve the unity of the Party. It was no longer possible to realize his reformist vision while maintaining their critical platform. Warning against what was occurring in Germany, where the first Spartacus Letters had been published, Branting led a press campaign against the antagonists in the Party. Before presenting his ultimatum to the Party, he strengthened his promises to the workers until he believed he had convinced them that the youth association and left alliance were impeding the struggle for equal voting rights, for the eight-hour day, and for social welfare. After he had allowed the congress of the Young Socialists for Disarmament and World Peace to be broken up by the police and authorized the arrest of Höglund, the congress chairman, as a traitor and enemy of the people, in February of nineteen seventeen he provoked the break. Right up to the end, said Ström, we had attempted to facilitate an amicable division into various directions within the Party, but the resolution of the leadership, with the demand that all submit to the directives of the right, could only lead to our leaving the Party. With the heightening tensions on the international scene, he said, Branting was taking a risk that could have annihilated his party. He lost the entire youth league, the radical cadres, the best-known theorists; nevertheless, said Ström, he had no other option, for otherwise he’d have run the risk of allowing us to pull the Party to the left. Inspired by the February Revolution in Russia, said Ström, we appealed for the constitution of a popular socialist party. It was the mention of the names—of the right-wing Social De
mocrats who were still leading the Party today and assuming government positions, and of the leftists who with few exceptions had rejoined the Social Democrats—which made the political continuity evident to me, as well as the contradiction between the widespread will for renewal, which, half a year before the October Revolution, brought about an internationalist party seeking a transition to Communism, and the Party founders’ gradual renunciation of their work. But the investigation of their behavior had to be excavated from material that consisted of many layers. Tracing the symptoms and tendencies that seemed to point to the reasons for their deviation, we ran into contradictions that threatened to compromise our whole project. The conversation between Ström and Brecht also initially provided insights into the mechanisms of writing. In picking up on conflicting themes, in the abrupt shifts in perspectives, the following of contradictory impulses, the continual openness to new suggestions, I recognized something of Brecht’s working technique. He listed a mass of authors whose books he had used as material for the novel. After producing excerpts, he said, the writing followed almost automatically, in a kind of montage. With the same apparent condescension toward his own text, he said of the Engelbrekt piece that he was only continuing and transposing to the stage that which he had received from historians such as Grimberg, Schück, Lönnroth, Kumlien, Carlsson, or Nyström. He compared himself to a scientist in a laboratory who, always relying on the earlier work of others, produced new products through the chemical combination of elements. He glossed over how fundamentally the texts he produced differed from the material he used. Only with the care that he brought to each page of his manuscript did he indicate that he viewed this vastly improved, pasted over, neatly formatted object as something unique and autonomous. Otherwise he was more interested in experimentation than the effort to create a finished work. The concept of failure didn’t seem to exist for him. Every fragment, every partial result had its own value. He told Ström that in depicting Caesar’s Rome, with its market speculation and its corrupt senate, its party imbroglios and rigged elections, its terrorist upper class and its plebs, who were so easily won over for wars of conquest, he had sought too much of the present in the past, had gotten too deep into a historicism in which he had lost track of part of what was actually historical, from which he might have been able to learn more. As if history repeated itself, he had compared Caesar’s time with Nazified bourgeois society. The insurrectionary movement was annihilated, Catiline had been driven out and fell in battle, henchmen had caught his co-conspirators and strangled them in the dungeon late at night on the sixth of November in the year sixty-three before the common era. Caesar, supported by the owners of capital, had become a dictator and was now fanning the flames of the war that was to resolve all the contradictions in the state with a single blow. His army’s march toward Spain, as preparation for the subjugation of Gaul and Britain, could still be fit into a contemporary frame. But then the analogies were lost. The current war took up where the earlier imperialist war had left off, but whereas back then the revolution had erupted from the colossal destruction, today, from the outset, it was the counterrevolution which stood behind the clashes, with the intention of misleading the masses being hurled into battle so drastically that initiatives to revolt would be impossible. Ström returned to his role as Catiline. It would also have been possible to transport the Roman businesspeople and military, the corrupt government functionaries and demagogues, the hordes of slaves and burial societies into the impoverished Stockholm of nineteen seventeen. In the senate, Ström, Catiline, was now attacked fiercely by Cicero, Branting. It was no longer mere denunciations that the consul poured on the apostate but rather veiled accusations that the insurgent was plotting to kill him. With his meekness and conscientiousness, his philosophical bent and his republican candor, Lindhagen would have been able to play a Cato, while Nerman, as Cinna, could be placed in the milieu around the Neoteric poet Catullus. A Sulla could have been found in Kilbom as well; and thus, on the morning of the thirteenth of April nineteen seventeen, the four conspirators went to the Stockholm train station to pick up Lenin, who was traveling from Zurich. They escorted him and his entourage via Vasagatan to Drottninggatan, where Ström had rented rooms for the guests at Hotel Regina. Of the roughly twenty people, said the minister, he had recognized Krupskaya, Inessa Armand, Zinoviev, Sokolnikov, and Radek. Lenin was surprisingly short. He was wearing a shabby, almost floor-length coat and a tattered felt hat, carrying an umbrella, and wearing clunky hiking boots. Lenin was hurrying everyone along, wanted to continue on that night; the group didn’t arouse any attention, people were used to seeing flocks of ragged people on the streets, on their way somewhere, to get bread from the distribution stations, milk for the children, on a hunger march; it was only the porter who grew suspicious at the sight of the travelers with their bundles over their shoulders and their old-fashioned suitcases, and he demanded the money in advance. Lenin had none on him, Ström paid, alerted the local Party office, had them collect a few hundred kronor for the purchase of the tickets to the Finnish border, bought them breakfast, then sat in a dialogue with the leader of the Bolsheviks in a small room. At first Ström claimed not to remember what had been said, digressed, told them about their visit to the Bergström warehouse at Hötorget, as clothes were needed; he described Lenin’s threadbare trousers, the holes in his laced boots. Brecht pressured him, gradually got him to tell us something about the conversation. Brecht wanted to know Lenin’s opinion of the Swedish left, who were in the process of forming their own party. A few days earlier, the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany had been founded in Gotha, and the Spartacus Group had joined them. Lenin must have wanted to be informed about the formation of the Left Party, said Brecht. Lenin’s theory that the events in Russia were just a warm-up for the transformations in the countries of Western Europe seemed to have been confirmed, but he also recognized that the counterrevolution would confront the insurrections here even more strongly than in Russia. The German Independent Party already carried the antagonism within itself. Its raison d’être was not so much to distance itself from the Social Democratic Party as it was to neutralize leftist forces and keep them from converting to Bolshevism. The Spartacus League, which was attempting to push the Party’s evolution in a revolutionary direction, would sooner or later be expelled. If Lenin was in conversation with one of the leaders of the new party, said Brecht, then he would probably have addressed the question of how the dangers that were becoming evident in Germany could be avoided in Sweden. Lenin warned us, said Ström, that the actions of the workers could be headed off by the bourgeoisie. In Russia, Lenin had said, the right-wing forces in the worker’s movement, the Social Patriots, the Kadets, had placed themselves on the side of the landowners and the bourgeoisie to prevent a proletarian revolution. A convergence of workers, soldiers, and peasants had to be created. Ström asked whether the fragmentation of the populace might not bring about the fall of the revolution. The revolution will collapse, Lenin had replied, if we do not act and seize the leadership. Petit- bourgeois revolutions will become tools of capitalism, of imperialism. Our fellow party members on the right of the Social Democrats don’t seem to understand this; they are walking blindly through time and history. We deliberated, said Ström, on the character of the Party, whereupon the contradictions in our perspectives became apparent. Lenin demanded a strictly disciplined elite party, while for us a party could only be functional if it stood in close contact with all sections of the working people. Lenin also spoke of the Party as an instrument of the masses, of the seizure of power by a class-conscious proletariat, and yet, said Ström, at the mention of democratic centralism, I couldn’t help but hear something of the demand to fall in line, of the position that the working class could only be brought to class consciousness by the leadership. Lenin must have understood, said Brecht, that the Swedish left would end up in the same conflict with the Bolsheviks as the Spartacists, and Ström confirmed that in their discussion of the concept of
democracy, the conflict between Luxemburg and Lenin had been reactivated. He had, he said, rejected the notion that the Party constituted the vanguard of the revolution, had expressed his mistrust toward all leaders. I might have claimed, said Ström, that we were supporters of peace, of the individual freedom of movement, for I can still hear Lenin’s voice ringing in my ears as he retorted: you’re pacifists, even you lot, on the extreme left, are petit bourgeois pacifists. You love peace, but you are not willing to fight for peace. A Tsarist Russia remains a menace for the Scandinavian peoples as well. The army of the Tsar will not be defeated with prayers. The Russian Revolution will be armed. It is with arms that it will remove the continual threat of war and give Finland back its independence as well. Ström asked whether the revolution could turn into a military dictatorship. Yes, Lenin replied, if the soldiers and workers didn’t take over the army, if it continued to be led by the generals and trust bosses, then the bourgeois military dictatorship will prevail, in one country after the other. To Lenin’s question about our party’s program, said Ström, he had countered that there was still no such thing, that it had to be drawn up by the people themselves, in response to the conditions in the country. Lenin was indignant about our lack of decisiveness and insight, said Ström. Our job was to look forward, to capitalize on the lessons from the first stage of the Russian Revolution, to educate the masses and provide them with instruction. We were still massively outnumbered, Ström answered. In that case, said Lenin, what we needed to do was to identify what was keeping the Party in the minority and to draw in the workers through convincingly identifying the country’s problems and making suggestions for their improvement. We grew up with a democratic mindset, said Ström, and that he understands the democratic foundations of the Party to mean that the leadership can only reside at the bottom, with the members, and that decisions cannot be foisted upon them from above. Lenin agreed with him that, of all European countries, democracy was the most advanced in Sweden. But then he immediately asked how things were with Höglund, wasn’t he in prison, just like Liebknecht in Germany, and MacDonald in England. So where was the democracy in that, the freedom of the word, personal security. Do all workers in Sweden have the right to vote, he asked, is there protection from exploitation in Sweden. No. You have broken with Branting, but you have not yet realized that true freedom and democracy can only be reached via revolution. What guarantee was there, Ström had asked. The guarantee lies in the working class seizing control of the means of production, Lenin replied. For us, said Ström, the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat could have no validity, we had no reason to ascribe the revolutionary mission exclusively to the proletariat, from the very beginning, the democratic movement had been backed by people of diverse backgrounds. The dictatorship of the proletariat, said Lenin, means that the fundamental producing class is afforded all authority during a brief transition period to protect the revolution. The dictatorship of the proletariat produces an extreme centralization of forces. It was precisely because of his centralism, his undemocratic actions, said Ström, that we turned away from Branting. Branting is smarter than you are, retorted Lenin. But his politics are wrong. He is a Menshevik, he is banking on the Entente Powers instead of the working class. You think you possess the spirit of the revolution. Spirit, great. The only thing you need now is method. Perhaps history will teach you the right method. Even back then, said Ström, it was clear to me how far away we were from Lenin’s revolutionary goals, how irreconcilable the conception of the Bolsheviks was with the guidelines we needed to draw up for our party. In our country, in which the foundations for democratic institutions had been laid, and in which there was a hundred-year tradition of peace, different steps had to be taken than in backward, isolated Russia, in which only now the bourgeois revolution against feudalism and absolutism was taking place. We knew that, with an industrial proletariat that had been educated in democracy and trade unionism, with an expansive, still largely unpoliticized class of peasants, a broad, partially progressive middle class, and many intellectuals of radical yet humanist convictions, we would not be able to go on the attack as a conspiratorial vanguard of professional revolutionaries, but that we needed a party of the masses in which numerous groupings, all united by the fight against all forms of oppression, would be pieced together into a bloc. If we have learned something from history, said Ström, then it was this, that we must never allow ourselves to be diverted from our independence, from the specific constitution of our class situation. In my conversation with Lenin, and in the ensuing, documented discussion in a larger group, said Ström, we touched upon the problems which, just as they provoked disagreement in Lenin back then, would later force us to clash with the theses of the Soviet Party and the Comintern. We envisioned a party that reflected the concerns of the workers in our country, we didn’t yet want to commit to particulars, we had our own way of addressing the populace, we didn’t reject the proclivities of the numerous Good Templars and utilitarians, we didn’t deny the influence of Dalström, of Fabian Månsson, who combined the Sermon on the Mount with the Communist Manifesto, we were familiar with the people’s aversion to authoritarian ambitions, we ourselves preferred romantic declarations of fraternity to forming a rigidly disciplined party. We would have found our path, our own path, the need for a new party was profound, a strike movement was in the making. In addition to demands for equal suffrage, the eight-hour day, there was agitation for increased food rations for the workers, for reductions in the price of bread and milk, for rent gouging to be outlawed and amnesty to be granted to political prisoners. Here, our party would be able to take the lead and show the voters that addressing immediate problems was no longer the sole remit of the right-wing Social Democratic propagandists. In April of seventeen, said Ström, we were full of hope; then, perhaps due to the power exuded by Lenin’s personality, due to our admiration for the young Soviet state, we allowed ourselves to be made to renounce our right to self-determination, a decision that drove the Party from one phase of failure to the next. Radek, who had stayed behind in Stockholm to attend the founding congress of the Social Democratic Left Party on the twelfth of May with Münzenberg, produced a caricature of the meeting in Lenin’s honor, some ten years later, which suggested that the Bolsheviks’ trust in Ström and his comrades must have been minimal. With a feel for nuances, for all signs of doubt and hesitation, the satirist, who had now been eliminated by his own people just like Zinoviev and Sokolnikov, depicted where Lenin’s hosts would end up. Not Lenin nor one of his Russian companions, not even the memorable Armand—Who, Brecht mused, would one day write the book about her, about whom so little is known—were present at the food-laden table. For, as Radek was trying to say, the radical leftist intellectuals were not seeking an alliance with them; they were already looking for other participants for their circle. They didn’t drink to the revolution but to Lindman, Trygger, and Hederstierna, the leaders of the bourgeois Right Party. This drawing, said Ström, as he held up the sheet to us, expressed the Bolsheviks’ lack of understanding of the political situation in Western Europe. Radek wanted to show that the founders of the Swedish Party would never have been able to become Communists. When we left the Party, he said, as far as Radek was concerned, this could only be traced back to long-standing reactionary motivations. This made it possible to justify the measures taken against us. It was not us who had walked out; the Comintern-backed sect had forced us out of the Party with their continual scheming. We had been made into the guilty parties because we had wanted to create a party in accordance with what was possible for us instead of clinging to the heroic epoch of the workers’ state and bowing to the demand for unconditional and irrational observance of Soviet directives. I am, said Ström, stroking his white moustache, an enemy of fanaticism and totalitarianism. The only things that had proved tenable in the disappointing, disillusioning, embittering, destructive struggle for a new party, he said, were humanistic values. Brecht looked at him with derision. He knew that the poli
tician would turn around and go straight back to attacking the Soviet Union in articles and speeches. It was true that Ström had been willing to stand by political refugees; together with Höglund and the younger Branting he had opposed the restrictions on the right to asylum, but he was wary of falling under suspicion as a protector of antifascists who were working illegally. He looked past Brecht’s Communism; for him, Brecht was somebody who stood above the Party. And Brecht happily let him believe that, for Brecht needed him. Ström, Höglund, and Branting could assist him in renewing his residency permit and, should it become necessary, in procuring papers to travel farther afield. Ström had handed Lenin the tickets. Finnish comrades would receive him in Haparanda and accompany him to Petrograd. But while Lenin and his companions were traveling north, feverish activities were taking place among the leadership of the Social Democratic Party. On the fourteenth of April, Branting had returned from Petrograd, where he had informed Kerensky of Lenin’s impending arrival. They were cut off from all news about the international situation there and believed that a bourgeois revolution was also imminent in Germany. A peace accord could not yet be anticipated, Branting had said, urging Kerensky to keep Russia in the war to lessen the strain on the Entente Powers. He had also been successful, he reported, in mediating between the provisional government and the workers’ councils to this end. And what had become of his actual mission, asked Palmstierna, who had sent him to exert all of his influence upon Kerensky to convince him to seize the opportunity to have Lenin killed on his way to the Russian capital. The problem was that Kerensky didn’t seem to have ascribed any particular significance to the arrival of the revolutionary leader. Rather he wanted to show—and Branting supported him in this—that democracy reigned in Russia. If somebody feared Lenin’s arrival, he maintained, then it was the people, who had just attained their freedom. The workers’ councils, which only represented a tiny portion of the populace, he pointed out, were only interested in maintaining their organizations, they were not interested in taking over the government. And these groups, which were suited to toppling but incapable of building up something new would also have allowed the bourgeoisie to take control without objections. Still buzzing from the memory of his evening in the Tsar’s box at the opera, where he had been cheered by the audience as he congratulated them on their victorious revolution, Branting recommended following the Russian example of confronting the actions of the left with the weapon of democratization. Just as the wandering rabble in Russia would not be able to achieve anything, the Party of the Swedish insurrectionists would also remain powerless. For two more days, Palmstierna sent flash telegrams to Kerensky. Kerensky, consider what is approaching you. Kerensky, do not underestimate the danger. Kerensky, respond to our urgent request. Years later, as an envoy in London, Palmstierna spoke about that fateful failure. Everything would have turned out differently, he exclaimed, had they followed his suggestion back then. But on the morning of April seventeenth, in the Tauride Palace, Lenin read out his ten theses.