Carl Lindhagen

Carl Albert Lindhagen (1860 – 1946) was a Swedish lawyer, socialist politician, and pacifist.

Carl Lindhagen was the Chief Magistrate ("Borgmästare") of Stockholm 1903 – 1930. His office was more senior than mayor, as it was an unelected gubernatorial and judicial office under the Swedish government, and not the Municipality of Stockholm.

As a lawyer, Lindhagen participated as adviser for the executives of the testament of Alfred Nobel. He was the secretary of the Nobel Committee in 1899. And at times he was suggested as a nominee to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, for his anti-militarism commitments.

Lindhagen fought for democracy, women's rights and better conditions for the working class and working farmers. He was also an advocate for better conditions for the indigenous sami people in northern Scandinavia.

He married the first time in 1883 and his wife died after long sickness in 1902. He remarried in 1904 and had two children with his new wife, Jenny Lindhagen.

Born in Stockholm, Carl Lindhagen studied law in Uppsala. He started his political career in the Liberal party, which in the time before democracy was considered a radical movement. He joined the Swedish Social Democratic Party in 1909, when he was already almost 50 years old. He soon joined the leftist opposition against the party leader Hjalmar Branting. The left-wing was headed by the young Communist Zeth Höglund, and in 1917 the group broke away from the mother party and formed the Social Democratic Left Party of Sweden (SSV).

As the chief magistrate of Stockholm, Carl Lindhagen, together with Ture Nerman and Fredrik Ström, was part of a small delegation that greeted Lenin during his short visit in Stockholm in April 1917. The Swedish Communists took Lenin to the PUB department store where they bought him a brand new suit so he would look good and clean coming back home to revolutionary Petrograd.

Carl Lindhagen originally supported Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, but he was also a pacifist and disagreed with some aspects of Communism. In 1921, he opposed the adoption of the Twenty-one Conditions of the ComIntern, and was thus expelled from SSV. He and fellow expellees formed a rump SSV. In 1923 he, along with the rest of his party, rejoined the Social Democratic Party.

See also

* Albert Lindhagen