The International Student Conference

Abstract

While the youth movements of the West were being grouped into the new WAY, a similar process was going on in the student movement. Olof Palme, the chairman of the International Committee of the Swedish Federation of Students (SFS), was the heart and soul of the drive to create a new organization. The traditional neutrality of Sweden did not stop its student leaders from having the best of relations with the American authorities.¹ We find Palme, on his return from the Prague Congress, which he had attended as an observer, informing the American embassy in Stockholm that he had decided to create a new non-communist International. We learn from a telegram of the embassy to the State Department that he had also given them the names of the Swedish communists who had been present in Prague.²