The eight-year premiership of Sven Linderot is very much the formative period of modern Swedish society. Born in the woods of northern Östergötland, Linderot was the son of a glassmaker, and by the age of ten he himself worked in the glassworks at Rejmyre. He joined the Social Democratic Party in 1914, and when the party split in 1917, he joined the revolutionary wing. During the splintering of the 1930s, Linderot remained loyal to Stalin and the Comintern, and took this opinion so far that during the early part of World War II, it appeared as though his party might support the enemy in the event of Russian invasion. Sure enough, Linderot and his party came to fight the German occupation tooth and nail, and when the Soviet tanks rolled in, they were the first to celebrate.
In 1947, Linderot was invited to form a provisional government by the Soviet occupation, an offer that he accepted warmly, and through careful manoeuvring of parliamentary support, a left-wing popular front was formed between the Communist Party, the surviving portions of the Socialist Party, and most of the Social Democrats, bar a few members of the right wing of that party who viewed a government imposed by the occupation force as illegitimate. Initially, the Social Democrat backbench demanded that Zeth Höglund, a former communist who had rejoined the party but not renounced his revolutionary ideology, be made Prime Minister, but he refused the job, leaving Linderot unopposed by the members of his own coalition.
Linderot's first order of business was nationalisation, specifically that of the transport network, which was taken over by the state and made to conform to a common standard - all railways were re-gauged to standard gauge, and the previously quite shoddy country roads were paved over and given proper signage. Thanks to oil imports from the Soviet Union, the rationing of petrol was ended in 1949, and car usage rose sharply during the Linderot years. Thanks to the relatively low damage sustained by infrastructure during the war, Swedish heavy industry boomed over the late 1940s, and the government made efforts to nationalise that as well. Small business, however, was largely left in private hands, although taxes were raised and caps set on profits and assets for all private enterprise.
In the meantime, however, a crisis had broken out. There was still a large opposition block in Parliament, and the right wing certainly wasn't going to sit idly by and watch as the country was completely nationalised. For them, the straw that broke the camel's back came in May of 1948, when it was discovered that the Minister of the Interior, Johan Brädefors, had been packing the police force with Communist sympathisers in an effort to ensure control over the institution in case of civil disorder. Liberal MPs called for Brädefors' resignation, and the Conservatives went one step further by demanding the resignation of the entire cabinet and its replacement by a non-socialist caretaker government that would sit until the election the same September. These calls fell on deaf ears, and the Government continued to ignore the protests until a group of Social Democrats joined in the calls for resignation, threatening a majority for a potential vote of no confidence. At this point, Brädefors sent the Stockholm police to purge the second chamber of Parliament of the anti-government members. Around a quarter of the members were made to resign, and around half of those subsequently went to jail for sedition.
Linderot formed a new cabinet, consisting of members of the Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the Farmers' League - however, these parties had all been infiltrated by Communists, and most of their MPs were Communist fellow travellers. The new cabinet immediately announced that the MPs elected in the September election would form a constitutional assembly, and that the Conservative Party had been deemed a "malicious anti-government organisation" and barred from participating in the election. Some members wouldn't stand for this, and founded the National Progressive Party to allow right-wingers to contest the election.
The election of 1948 would prove the least free and fair since universal suffrage was introduced. While the secret ballot remained in place, the d'Hondt method previously used to allot members for each constituency was replaced by the modified Sainte-Lagüe method, which would over-represent larger parties and shut out smaller ones. The election campaign saw the opposition painted as capitalist traitors who wouldn't hesitate to sell the country to Wall Street if given the option. There was extensive harassment of voters by Communist party officials outside polling stations, and the traditional giving out of party-specific ballot papers at the entrances was escalated to the point where functionaries would in many cases hand the voters finished envelopes and rush them past the other ballots. Most likely to have caused the outcome of the election, however, was the fact that several opposition members and sympathisers had been arrested for sedition in the weeks leading up to election day, and as there were often policemen or Communist Party officials in the polling stations, no one wanted to be seen taking a Liberal or National Progressive ballot with them behind the curtain.
When combined, these factors meant that the Communist Party won more than thirty percent of the vote, displacing the Social Democrats as the biggest party for the first time since 1914. Combined with their support organisations, as the other left-wing parties can be said to have been by this point, they had an absolute majority, and the constitution pushed through the assembly was an explicitly socialist one. The Communist Party was declared to be "the vanguard of the socialist revolution and the defender of the freedom of the working class" and all political organisations not professing socialism in one form or another were outlawed. The monarchy was abolished, and in its place was to be a State President, elected for a single seven-year term by Parliament. Incidentally, the upper chamber of Parliament was abolished, and the remaining unicameral parliament was expanded to 300 members. The constitution went into effect on New Year's Day 1950, after “elections” had been held to the new parliament, and the Kingdom of Sweden, a kingdom in name only up until this point, became the Swedish Democratic Republic.
This change, although protested by liberals and conservatives, actually came as some relief to much of the working class, as it seemed to them like there would finally be peace and stability. Linderot remained personally popular, as he'd overseen a relatively speedy recovery from the war, and this continued over the course of his premiership, as industry was expanded and bomb damage to cities repaired. In Stockholm, an underground tram line was built to connect the southern and western suburban tramways; this was upgraded to a full metro in 1955, and trainsets were bought from Russia to replace the “Ängby trams” then in service. A number of other trade agreements were made with the Soviet Union over the course of the 1950s, and Swedish-made cars soon became a status symbol in much of the Eastern Bloc.
Before the 1953 parliamentary elections, the Communists and Social Democrats announced that they were going to merge, forming a single United Labour Party. The Social Democratic Party had long been dominated by Communist fellow travellers, so this announcement came as a surprise to no one, but it still marked the end of the political unification process started after the war. The new party joined the Cominform, and very quickly aligned itself with Moscow in all important aspects of policy. After Stalin's death later the same year, the Swedish party took a precariously neutral stance, no longer openly praising Stalin, but also not disavowing his ideology or legacy. Linderot's history of supporting Stalinism meant that the party never quite joined the anti-Stalinist wave that swept the Eastern Bloc during Khrushchev's period as General Secretary.
The remaining non-Communist parties were corralled into a common “Popular Front”, which was in theory a national unity government consisting of ideologically diverse parties, but in practice a convenient blanket organisation for Communist support groups in various sections of society, including the LO, the League of Women for Communism, the Communist Youth League, as well as the Liberal, Agrarian and National Progressive parties, all of which had adopted socialism since the constitution of 1949 was passed. This coalition put forth a common list, which was allowed to compete with the United Labour list in general elections; however, no other lists were allowed. This made the Swedish election system one of the freest in the Eastern Bloc, but since both lists were closely aligned with the government, there was precious little actual choice for voters.
Linderot's period as prime minister ended in October of 1955, when he died of a stroke in his office. He was succeeded as party leader by the more moderate Zeth Höglund, who would preside over a significantly less calm period in history.
