Lenina thought train9/10/2023 ![]() ![]() Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, joined by 29 other Russian exiles, a Pole and a Swiss, was on his way to Russia to try to seize power from the government and declare a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a phrase coined in the mid-19th century and adopted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of Marxism. Inside the waiting room I found what I’d been looking for, a bronze plaque mounted on a blue tile wall: “Here Lenin passed through Haparanda on April 15, 1917, on his way from exile in Switzerland to Petrograd in Russia.” In the crisp light near dusk I walked on to the railroad station, a monumental neo-Classical brick structure. Across the river in Finland the white dome of the 18th-century Alatornio Church rose over a forest of birches. I followed a side street to a grassy esplanade on the banks of the Torne. Scattered among the concrete apartment blocks were vestiges of the town’s rustic past: a wood-shingle trading house the Stadshotell, a century-old inn and the Handelsbank, a Victorian structure with cupolas and a curving gray-slate roof. The manager sketched out a walk that took me past the northernmost IKEA store in the world, and then under a four-lane highway and down the Storgatan, or main street. On a cold and cloudless October afternoon, I stepped off the bus after a two-hour ride from Lulea, the last stop on the passenger train from Stockholm, and approached a tourist booth inside the Haparanda bus station. It was once a thriving outpost for trade in minerals, fur and timber, and the main northern crossing point into Finland, across the Torne River. The town of Haparanda, 700 miles north of Stockholm, is a lonely smudge of civilization in the vast tundra of Swedish Lapland. ![]()
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