As a child I was told about the Soviet union as a dangerous place. A powerful state that held their citizens in submission, and worse still, one which harbored aggressive ambitions. The Soviet citizens were imprisoned in isolation, and no doubt viewed the rest of the world with great suspicion, brain-washed as they no doubt were. The only Soviet people you encountered in the news where the leaders such as Khrustjev, Gromyko, Mikoyan and sports stars, which appeared inhuman in their invincibility. The mistrustfulness one felt against the giant neighbor to the east was augmented by the study of Swedish history, in which the Russians played the role of irredeemable foes (although if one should be consistent, the main foe of Sweden for five hundred years was not Russia but Denmark). The overwhelming emotion was the one of fear aggravated by the Cold War which dominated my childhood and youth. I recall how I once to a visit to Budapest in the summer of 1983 encountered a Soviet Tour bus. While still at the time people living on the other side of the iron curtain were thought of exotic, those who came from the Soviet union, were felt to be far more estranged, almost as if they were visitors from another planet. Clearly the gap that separated us from the inhabitants of Eastern Europe was nothing compared to that which separated them in their turn from the Soviets. No wonder that I was an anti-communist, not because so much of political reasons, as I identified that creed with Russian oppressiveness.

The idea of the Soviet union as an oppressive power was not just a case of Cold War propaganda, it had some definite basis in fact, although only a fraction of that basis was allowed to leak through the borders. The Russian revolution was a dramatic event, eminently romantic. There was Lenin and Trotsky, figures larger then life, embodying all the revolutionary phantasies accumulated since the French Revolution. The revolution, although taking the crumbling Tsarist administration with surprise, was not uncontested. Having been born it had to go through a baptism of fire and a Civil War ensued, with the white opposition lukewarmly and dutifully supported by foreign powers. Then followed a period of consolidation and compromise. The 20’s was a vibrant period of experimentation, both social and artistic. Economically it benefitted from the NEP1 an unobtrusive if ubiquitous capitalist presence. And then there was Stalin. Stalin was not a front figure of the Revolution, completely overshadowed by far more charismatic figures such as Lenin and Trotsky, whose rhetorical brilliance, he was powerless even to emulate. But Stalin had his own kind of talent, in the end to prove to be far more enduring than the flashiness of the quintessential revolutionary. He was a hard worker, a listener, a pragmatist, and expert at playing one faction against another. In the end he prevailed, while leftists such as Trotsky was expelled from the party, exiled and eventually murdered, while Zinoviev and Kamenev were ousted and eventually executed as a result