In 1905, in the Finnish city of Tampere, Vladimir Lenin met Joseph Stalin for the first time. They and two dozen or so revolutionaries began to map out plans to overthrow the tsar and bring down the Russian empire. The story is vividly chronicled in Tampere’s Lenin Museum, a venue that thousands of Soviet citizens used to descend on each year, in official groups; in these different times, it is seen as something of an embarrassment by the city authorities.
Since the collapse of Soviet communism in 1991, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Finland’s accession to Nato in 2023, the museum has successively changed its exhibits. It still tells the remarkable story of that secret meeting a century ago, when Finland was part of the tsarist Russian empire, but enjoyed a certain autonomy until it gained independence immediately after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.
