Chilbum, Karl

The beginning of political activity

Chilbum was born into a family of a blacksmith of Walloon descent, who lived in the small town of Österbübruck near Uppsala . There, he began working at a steel mill at an early age. In 1900, the town was visited by a Social Democratic agitator, who met with steelworkers. Chilbum was one of seven workers who, after meeting with him, took part in the formation of a socialist circle in the city. One of the tasks of the circle was the creation of a union . However, the spies of the factory administration revealed the existence of the circle, and soon Chilbum was told that if he did not stop his political activities, he would lose his job and his family would be evicted from the house belonging to the factory. Then Chilbum was forced to temporarily move away from active political work.

In 1903 he moved to the city of Sandviken , where he joined a political circle. In Sandviken, he got on a ship called Thetis . On this ship he made trade flights from the city of Gavle to England and other countries of the world. In 1905, he leaves the Thetis. In 1905, in Gavle, being unemployed, he joined the local youth organization of the Social Democratic Party . The famous Swedish Social Democrat Fabian Monsson taught him the work of an agitator.

In 1907, Chilbum was sent to serve in the Swedish Royal Navy at the Sheppsholmen military base. During the service he distributed the Social Democratic newspapers and leaflets, which caused problems with the army leadership. After serving in the Navy, he came to Gothenburg and got a job at a safe factory, where he became a union leader. At that time, Chilbum became more actively involved in the activities of the Social Democratic Party and began to study Marxism.

In the communist movement

In 1910 he moved to Halmstad to work in the local cell of the Social Democrats. There Chilbum supported the leftist opposition of Cet Hoglund to the reformist leadership led by Hjalmar Branting . After the split of 1917, he joined the Left Social Democratic Party of Sweden , which supported the Bolsheviks. As early as 1915, Chilbum was in contact with the Russian Social Democrats. In particular, he worked closely with Bukharin , who lived in Sweden during the war.

In the spring of 1917, Chilbum was sent on behalf of the Swedish Left Social Democrats to Finland. His task was to convince the local Social Democrats to break with the old Social Democracy and turn left. He soon became convinced that the Finnish Social Democrats were more left-wing than they had thought in Sweden. The very next, 1918, the year in Finland there was a workers' revolution , however, defeated.

From Finland, Chilbum went to Russia already with the Swedish-Finnish Social Democrat Karl Wijk . Upon arrival in Petrograd, they met with Alexandra Kollontai and Vladimir Lenin . Upon his return to Stockholm, he began working for the Politiken newspaper as a member of the Swedish Left Social Democrats. The next time he came to Soviet Russia in December 1917, along with Cetus Heglund .

In 1919, in Stockholm, Chilbum met with American diplomat William Bullitt and journalist Lincoln Steffens . Their task was to establish contacts with the Soviet government. Both of them in Moscow at the beginning of the same year met with Lenin ^{[1] [2]} .

In 1921, Chilbum once again ended up in Moscow at the head of the Swedish delegation at the Congress of the Profintern . In the same year, the first democratic elections were held in Sweden, in which workers and women gained the right to vote. The Communist Party of Sweden participating in them ^[3] received 7 deputy mandates, one of which went to Chilbum.

After the exclusion in 1924 of Heglund from the Communist Party of Chile, Chilbum became one of the party leaders. The reason for the exclusion of Heglund was a disagreement with the leadership of the Comintern ^[4] . In 1925, Chilbum led a workers' delegation from Sweden, numbering about 300 workers, who had been in the Soviet Union for several weeks. The final part of their stay in the Soviet Union was a parade on Red Square, where Chilbum delivered a speech while on the rostrum of the mausoleum next to Bukharin and Rykov .

At the end of 1925, Chilbum was sent to Germany as a representative of the Comintern. However, the German embassy in Stockholm refused him a visa. With the help of a fake passport in the name of Karl Derry, Chilbum ended up in Germany. Chilbum's task was to monitor the activities of the Communist Parties of Germany and Austria . After spending more than three months in these countries, he was engaged in the elimination of the left from the KKE and KPA.

Independent Communist Party

In 1929, by decision of the Comintern, the majority of the Swedish Communist Party was expelled on charges of "right deviation." In particular, the leadership of the CPSU, led by Chilbum and Niels Flyug , opposed the Comintern tactics of the so-called. “The third period” and the slogan “Class against class” put forward in its framework ^[5] . Chilbum supporters continued to operate under the name of the Communist Party of Sweden. In the same year, 1929, the Chilbum KPS joined the International Communist Opposition , uniting supporters of the right ( Bukharin and Rykov ) in the CPSU (B.). Chilbum himself led the largest daily left-wing publication in Sweden, Folkets Dagblad Politiken, which remained after the split of the Communist Party for its supporters.

The beginning of the 1930s was marked by an economic crisis for Sweden. Industrial production declined sharply, mass strikes swept the country. In 1931, the military shot a working demonstration in the Odalen area ^[6] . In his article in the Folkets Dagblad Politiken, Chilbum called Karl Gustav Ekman's conservative government a bloody regime. In response, he was arrested and spent two months in Langholmen prison.

Again in the Social Democratic Party

In 1937, Chilbum was expelled from the Socialist Party (the name of the anti-Stalinist Communist Party after 1934) by one of its leaders, Niels Flyg. In the late 1930s, the Socialist Party made a sharp roll in the direction of Nazi ideology ^[5] .

In 1938, Chilbum returned to the Social Democratic Party of Sweden . He became a leader in the Folkets hus movement. This movement originated in Sweden at the end of the 19th century on the wave of a working upswing. “People’s houses” are proletarian community centers concentrated in almost all major cities in Sweden. The creation of the first “People’s House” began in Stockholm in 1897.

During World War II, Chilbum supported the coalition government of Peer Albin Hanson .