You're reading: Moscow Times: The Finnish city where Lenin met Stalin still lives in Russia’s shadow

Moscow Times: The Finnish city where Lenin met Stalin still lives in Russia’s shadow

Published Nov. 7, 2017 at 8:28 pm

Russian Communist supporters walk along the Red square to lay flowers at Lenin's mausoleum in Moscow on November 5, 2017, to celebrate the forthcoming 100th anniversary of The Bolshevik Revolution.Russia is set to hold low-key events to mark a century since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution on November 7, with authorities uncertain how to assess the uprising that led to 70 years of Communist rule. / AFP PHOTO / Mladen ANTONOV

Photo by AFP

Tampere, Finland — On a cold December day in 1905, a group of local Finnish labor activists in the city of Tampere lent their hall to a group of Bolsheviks.

Tensions earlier that year had risen as part of a wave of labor activism across the Russian Empire and leading Bolsheviks needed a safe location to meet and regroup.