In Europe

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 likea 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 naturehad 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