Some years later when he was asked by the Swedish Social Democratic Party's leader Hjalmar Branting what had made him a socialist, Nerman answered that it had been the questioning of religion.

The year 1905 saw both a revolution in Russia and revolutionary development in Scandinavia as Norway declared itself independent from the rule of the Swedish crown.

In 1909, Nerman moved to the northern city of Sundsvall where he started working as a writer for a Social Democratic newspaper called Nya Samhället, (New Society).

Ture Nerman joined the Swedish Social Democratic Party and soon became part of the left wing together with Zeth Höglund.

Nerman had met Liebknecht briefly a couple of years earlier on a socialist gathering in Stockholm, but this time they got to know each other well.

In his autobiography, Nerman writes that he was surprised and impressed to learn that Liebknecht could speak almost fluent Swedish and liked to sing songs by Bellman.

In November 1912, Nerman attended the special emergency convention of the Socialist International, which had been summoned to Basel in Switzerland, due to the outbreak of the Balkan Wars.

At the convention, the leaders of all the European Socialist parties agreed to stand together internationally to prevent any future wars.

His friend Karl Liebknecht stood alone in the Berlin Reichstag, and against 110 of his own Party members, when he voted against German war credits.

It united the remaining international socialist anti-war movement, whose more prominent leaders were Vladimir Lenin, Grigory Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky from Russia, Robert Grimm from Switzerland, and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht from Germany.

Ture Nerman then started a tour speaking to American workers, mostly of Scandinavian origin, in Minneapolis and Chicago.

Zeth Höglund and Ture Nerman, now considering themselves Communists, were expelled from the Party together with other prominent radicals such as Kata Dalström, Fredrik Ström and Stockholm's mayor Carl Lindhagen.

For instance, 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 Russia.

At the end of the summer of 1918, Ture Nerman traveled together with Angelica Balabanoff and Anton Nilson to Bolshevik Russia.

The next day Nerman attended a rally outside the Winter Palace, in which Zinoviev and Balabanoff spoke to the red soldiers heading out to fight in the civil war.

After spending some days in Petrograd, the trip continued to Moscow, where Nerman was greeted by Kamenev and his wife, the sister of Trotsky.

Nerman mentioned that the Swedish press, and even the Social Democratic newspapers, wrote almost every day that the Soviet government was about to fall, but still it remained.

The positive energies he had massed from his experience in revolutionary Russia were replaced with devastation after hearing of the failed German revolution of 1918/1919, and the murdering of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

Ture Nerman made his second trip to Russia with Otto Grimlund in the spring of 1920, where he got to meet with Lenin, this time as the guest, after having been the host in Stockholm April 1917.

In 1929, the Comintern made sure that the power of the Swedish Communist Party was taken over by the minority fraction of Stalinists led by Hugo Sillén.

The majority of the party's members, the non-Stalinists, were expelled, including Ture Nerman, Karl Kilbom and Nils Flyg.

The minority (Stalinists) seized the party's headquarter and its archives, but the majority (non-Stalinists) managed to keep control over the newspaper Politiken.

In 1931 Ture Nerman, 44 years old, was elected to the first chamber of the Riksdag, where he served till 1937 as a representative of the independent communist Party.

In 1937, Ture Nerman and his friend August Spångberg, traveled to Spain where General Francisco Franco's National faction had taken power and a civil war was ravaging the country.

The Nationalists under Francisco Franco benefited from the massive support of Nazi-Germany (financial and military: Legion Condor) and fascist Italy.

On 3 May, serious fighting between the different leftist groups broke out in Barcelona, and Hotel Victoria, where the Swedes were staying, was caught in the crossfire which lasted for three days.

At the same hotel, Ture Nerman for the first time met Willy Brandt, (the German Social Democrat who would later live in exile Sweden during World War II and after that become Chancellor of West Germany.)

Afterwards, by orders from the Comintern, Stalinist press all over the world would claim that the Swedish "Trotskyist Fascists" Ture Nerman and August Spångberg were the masterminds of the battle in Barcelona.

On 20 April 1933, a couple of months after Hitler had taken power in Germany, Nerman stood up in the Swedish parliament and demanded that Sweden should grant asylum for all German Jews who would like to come.

[5] The red Soviet flag with the hammer and the sickle outside his house in Blidö, an island in the Stockholm archipelago, was an ironic reference to his earlier beliefs.