Allan Wallenius

Allan Wallenius (13 December 1890 – 15 September 1942) was a Swedish-speaking Finnish leftist figure and journalist from Turku. He was active in leftist circles in Finland, Sweden and the United States before settling in the Soviet Union in 1930. Wallenius was the editor of Ny Tid, paper of the American Communist Party between 1925 and 1929. He served as the director of the Communist International Library in Moscow. He was arrested during the Great Purge in 1938 and died in a prison in 1942.

Early life Wallenius was born in Dragsfjärd on 13 December 1890 into a Finnish Swede middle class family.

In the summer of 1925 Wallenius was sent by the Communist Party of Sweden to the United States to edit the Communist Party publication Ny Tid. In 1930, he settled in the Soviet Union. There he headed the Swedish section of the Communist University for National Minorities of the West in Leningrad. When the university was attached to the Lenin School he continued to serve in the post. He was arrested by the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) on 16 February 1938 and was sentenced to five years in prison. He was pardoned posthumously after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. They settled in the Soviet Union following the end of Wallenius's term as the editor of Ny Tid.