In Europe

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 greatestpossible 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 Radek, 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.
    The sidewalks of Helsinki are covered in slippery brown sludge. Almost twenty inches of snow fell here last week, but now the thaw has set in. Huge chunks of ice regularly come sliding off the roofs. The Finns seemnot to notice. They waddle like ducks down the slick streets. A kindergarten class comes by. In their thick woollen caps, their colourful snow trousers and body warmers, the children look like little Martians. Along the shore of the Gulf of Finland, a few people are swimming in the icy water. They have chopped a hole in the ice and splash around in it, a terrible thing to behold, but the spectators are enthusiastic: ‘The water here is always four degrees above zero, and even at twenty below it's an amazing feeling. All your rheumatism and head colds just vanish into the sea.’
    A little further along is Café Ursula, a circular pavilion with a view of the frozen water and the snowy islands. In the misty distance, two fishermen are sitting beside a hole in the ice. I have an appointment with the writer Claes Andersson, until recently Finland's minister of culture and an old acquaintance of Lars-Olof Franzén. ‘We are eternally beholden to Lenin, because he was the first Russian leader to recognise our independence,’ Andersson says. ‘But we have never been interested in his Bolshevism.’
    He talks about the Finns’ own civil war, the bloody conflict of 1918 between the Red farmers and workers and the White conservatives. The