In Europe

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