In The Russian Revolution
As Anton Nilson was released from jail, the Bolshevik Revolution had just started in Russia. Without hesitation, and nowhere else to go, Nilson went to visit Russia in company with the Swedish communist leader Ture Nerman.
Anton Nilson decided to join the Red Army, fighting as a pilot in the civil war. Nilson helped organize the air defense of Moscow, later taking command of the air force on the Baltic Front. For his services his comrades elected him to receive an award from Leon Trotsky.
At the rise of Stalinism, Anton Nilson decided to return to Sweden in 1926. He would always consider Stalin as a traitor to the revolution, saying: "Stalin took the state police, which had been formed against the counter-revolution, and turned it against socialists...." and an adherent to the fascist model of a police state. His departure from the Soviet Union may as well have saved him from the Great Purges during the 1930s.
When Nikita Khrushchev took over the leadership of the Soviet Union after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, Anton Nilson considered it a positive development.
For the rest of his life, Nilson toured Sweden agitating for Swedish Communist rule. He also became revered as one of the Swedish Labour Movement's heroes and his portrait is to be found at the headquarters of Landsorganisationen. His 100th birthday, during which Anton Nilson himself held a speech lasting for several hours, was celebrated by several Social Democratic members of the Swedish Cabinet.
Anton Nilson lived to be 101 years old.
Read more about this topic: Anton Nilson
Famous quotes containing the words russian and/or revolution:
“Who are we? And for what are we going to fight? Are we the titled slaves of George the Third? The military conscripts of Napoleon the Great? Or the frozen peasants of the Russian Czar? No—we are the free born sons of America; the citizens of the only republic now existing in the world; and the only people on earth who possess rights, liberties, and property which they dare call their own.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“In bourgeois society, the French and the industrial revolution transformed the authorization of political space. The political revolution put an end to the formalized hierarchy of the ancien regimé.... Concurrently, the industrial revolution subverted the social hierarchy upon which the old political space was based. It transformed the experience of society from one of vertical hierarchy to one of horizontal class stratification.”
—Donald M. Lowe, U.S. historian, educator. History of Bourgeois Perception, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1982)