Author: Gleb Bryanski
Publication: Yahoo News
Date: October 31, 2004
URL: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=572&ncid=572&e=1&u=/nm/20041031/lf_nm/sweden_gulag_dc_1
Alice Eriksson calls herself a "Russian
grandmother" and seems an unlikely threat to Sweden's Left Party, a vital
partner for the country's ruling Social Democrats.
But the 79-year-old's story of emigration
to Stalin's Russia and life in the gulags has brought to its knees a party
on which Sweden's minority government -- facing a strong challenge from
the center-right in 2006 elections -- depends in parliament.
In 1933, Eriksson's father Ernst,
a miner, fled poverty and unemployment in northern Sweden to help build
a Soviet workers' paradise, along with about 1,500 other Swedes, with the
blessing of the Swedish Communist Party to which he belonged.
The dream went sour for him, his
wife and two daughters.
Arrested in 1938 by Stalin's secret
police, he was accused of spying and executed. As a daughter of an "enemy
of the people," Alice Eriksson was arrested in 1942 and sentenced to 10
years in the labor camps, where she remained until 1953.
On their return to Sweden gulag
survivors were denounced as traitors and liars by the forerunners of today's
Left Party. Many had to flee Kiruna to other parts of Sweden.
Their "crime" was to tell the truth
about the "communist paradise." In their hometown of Kiruna, a party stronghold,
many communists would not speak to Eriksson's sister Astrid who managed
to return in 1956.
Eriksson herself was not harassed.
She returned to Sweden in 1992 after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
The story of the Kiruna Swedes was
silenced until a television documentary shown this month revealed that
Left Party leader Lars Ohly censored an apology to them about their persecution.
"WE WERE WRONG"
A letter they were sent in 2000,
edited by Ohly, promised only a detailed historical study of their case.
Seeing support for the party slump
in the polls, Ohly told Reuters in an interview: "I feel deeply that we
were wrong. The decision we made worsened the trauma these people suffered."
The party has been thrown into internal
turmoil over parts of the documentary that showed Ohly describing himself
as a communist and praising Fidel Castro (news - web sites)'s Cuba.
"Communist ideology is like a religion,"
said Alice Eriksson, speaking in Swedish and Russian at her neat two-room
apartment in Kiruna. "I think it is ridiculous that here in Sweden someone
can still call himself a communist."
Social Democrat dissidents founded
the local Communist Party in 1917, the year of Russia's Bolshevik revolution.
"Communist" was dropped from the
name in 1990 and it was renamed the Left Party.
But the last portraits of Lenin
were not taken down from all party offices until 1999 and there is now
a debate about whether it should allow communists to join.
"When I call myself a communist
I mean there is a tradition within the working class movement that is worth
defending," Ohly told Reuters, outlining a party program calling for the
abolition of class differences in society and opposition to European Union
(news - web sites) membership.
A priest's son and former train
conductor, Ohly became head of the party in 2003 after fiery feminist Gudrun
Schuman quit over allegations of tax fraud.
Asa Lindeborg, an historian at Uppsala
University, said Ohly came from a generation that had been "taught not
to criticize the Soviet Union in the same way liberals were taught not
to criticize the United States."
WITCH HUNT
Ohly compared the current fuss to
Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch- hunt of communists in the United States
in the 1950s. There have been calls on the party to break with its past
and get rid of its controversial leader.
Prime Minister Goran Persson said
the Social Democrats would scale down their cooperation with the Left Party
after the 2006 elections -- assuming he wins a third consecutive term --
if Ohly insists on calling himself a communist.
Ohly dismissed this, predicting
Persson would come "cap in hand, begging for the Left's support."
Columnist Johannes Aman at Dagens
Nyheter newspaper said the Left was unlikely to lose its appeal as "an
anti-party for voters wanting to take a critical stance on society. The
storm will die down."
Just in case, up north in Kiruna
the leader of the local Left Party branch took Alice Eriksson a bunch of
flowers and proposed erecting a memorial for Kiruna's gulag victims.
"I do not need their apology," said
Eriksson bitterly. "I got one from the KGB."
