A government of lost turtles: Lenin in Denmark

Russian revolutionary Lenin didn’t make much of an impression on Copenhageners, but the seed for many of his agricultural programmes was planted here. The life of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was filled with international assemblies and addresses. From the day he gave up studying law to become a Marxist at age of 17 to the day he took power in Russia more than two decades later, Lenin travelled and lectured all across Europe. His reasons were simple enough. Known in his native Russia as a revolutionary of long standing, the Czar’s secret police were always searching for Lenin. Thus he and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, kept constantly on the move; they travelled from country to country using pseudonyms and taking little more than the clothes on their backs.

At the same time Lenin was constantly in touch with his newly founded Bolshevik Party in Russia. Driven underground in St Petersburg, Lenin’s followers relied on their leader’s letters, communiqués and treaties to keep them organised and inspired. Because of this, Lenin’s letters include no fewer than 28 addresses written in 13 separate countries.

For the card-carrying Communist romantic, Europe at the beginning of the 19th century was the place to be. London, Paris, Berlin, Helsinki, Copenhagen – in almost every major city socialist groups and gatherings flourished. Often outlawed but rarely suppressed, these meetings brought together various socialist factions, allowing them to exchange their ideologies concerning the new century – a century they believed would belong to Socialism. In meeting halls such as the Old Fellow Palæet in Copenhagen, political catch-phrases flew as party members debated the historical inevitability of the fall of capitalism and the growth of a proletarian state. It was just such a congress which brought Lenin to Copenhagen on two separate occasions.


Lenin’s first visit to Copenhagen was in 1907 to attend the meeting of the Russian Socialist Economist Worker’s Party, which had been banned in their home country. However, wishing to maintain good diplomatic relations with Czarist Russia, the Danish government deemed the congress illegal, and so the meeting was broken up almost before it started. The Justice Ministry gave Lenin 12 hours to get out of the country.

Lenin’s second visit to Denmark was longer, although it is questionable how much more successful it was. In September 1910, the Eighth International Socialist Congress was held in Copenhagen at Old Fellow Palæet, and this time the state did not object, though it seems that Lenin did.


Lenin had few good things to say about Denmark’s version of socialism. In fact, he wrote that Thorvald Stauning – then head of the Tobacco Labourers’ Union and future Danish Socialist Party leader – was a ‘quasi-socialist’as well as ‘one of the most stingy and mean-spirited class snobs’ he had ever met.


It is not known whether Lenin openly declared this at the Congress or not, for there he remained a shadowy figure. His limited knowledge of foreign languages prevented him from giving any speeches or participating in many debates. And his more extreme ideas isolated him from many of his Western peers, who he later deemed ‘pseudo-socialists’.

What Lenin did do in Copenhagen was go to the Royal Library. Rain or shine, Lenin would march over to the library each morning and voraciously read Danish agricultural statistics. Though he had nothing but scepticism and disgust for the socialist party, he did admire the impressive productivity of local farms. It seems likely that many of the agricultural programs he implanted in the early Soviet Union were inspired by what he found in the records of the Royal Library.


Finally, it was Lenin’s landlady who remembered the oddest detail about his stay here. ‘I never even knew who he was,’ Mrs Vognmand Petersen confessed years later. ‘He was quiet and kept to himself. But one day, I remember him falling down in hysterical laughter about a dish I was cooking.’


Apparently, Mrs Petersen was fond of preparing mock turtle soup. She asked Lenin if he would like to try some of den danske ret forloren sklidpadde which the founder of the Soviet Union misheard and so misunderstood as den danske ret tabt skildpadde: the Danish government of lost turtles.

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