Ture Nerman - The Birth of Swedish Communism

The Birth of Swedish Communism

At the beginning of 1917, the struggle between the left and the right within the Social Democratic Party resulted in a split. Zeth Höglund and Ture Nerman, now considering themselves Communists, were expelled from the Party together with other prominent radicals such as Kata Dalström, Fredrik Ström and Stockholm's mayor Carl Lindhagen.

Höglund, who was the leader of the Party's youth organisation, managed to get the whole young socialists on his side in the foundation of the Swedish Social Democratic Left Party. The new party was formed in May 1917 and had around 20,000 members. It would soon change name and become the first Communist Party of Sweden. They launched a newspaper, Politiken, in which they wrote and published texts by other international communist leaders.

In April 1917, when Lenin passed through Stockholm on his journey from exile in Switzerland home to Petrograd, Ture Nerman was one of those who greeted Lenin and took care of him while there. For instance, the Swedish Communists took Lenin to the PUB department store, where they bought him a brand-new suit so he would look good and clean coming back home to Russia.

Upon Lenin's return in Russia and the October Revolution that followed, Ture Nerman and the Left Social Democrats fully supported the Bolsheviks and agitated for a similar Communist revolution in Sweden.

As an international representative of the Swedish Communist Party, Nerman had several communist contacts from all over the world: His friend Karl Liebknecht; Karl Radek, the Polish Bolshevik who had lived in Stockholm for a while; The Ukrainian-Italian socialist leader Angelica Balabanoff, who lived and worked in Stockholm; and Yrjö Sirola and Otto Kuusinen, two prominent Finnish communist leaders visited Ture Nerman in Stockholm several times.

Nerman also corresponded with the American socialist leaders Eugene V. Debs, John Reed (who helped him write a book on the first World War (Folkhatet)) and the American communist leader Max Eastman, who provided Nerman with a subscription to The Liberator.