1931
Right bloc · L/MThe Ådalen shootings shock the nation; Sweden abandons the gold standard.
1931 infographic: Ådalen, Gold Standard, Karlfeldt Nobel
Codex imagegen orientation image using the page's 1931 anchors: Ådalen, Gold Standard, Karlfeldt Nobel. Generated image, not source evidence.
Highlights
- Ådalen shootings: On 14 May 1931, army troops fired into a crowd of striking workers in Ådalen; five people were killed, including 20-year-old bystander Eira Söderberg. The incident radicalised the labour movement and contributed decisively to the Social Democrats' 1932 election victory.
- Gold standard abandoned: In September 1931, following Britain, Sweden suspended the gold backing of the krona; the Riksbank immediately declared stable domestic price levels the primary goal of monetary policy — the first country in the world to adopt an explicit price-level target.
- Nobel laureates lost: Two Nobel Prize winners died in 1931: poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt (8 April, Literature 1931) and Archbishop Nathan Söderblom (12 July, Peace 1930).
Events in this year
1931-05-14 1931 Ådalen Shootings On 14 May 1931, during a strike in the Ådalen sawmill district of northern Sweden, army troops opened fire on a workers' protest march, killing five and wounding several more. The most violent labour incident in modern Swedish history, Ådalen became the symbolic anti-model against which the consensus-based industrial relations of the Swedish Model would later be built. Crisis 1931-09-27 Sweden adopts a price-stability monetary target On 27 September 1931 Sweden left the gold standard and made preservation of the krona's domestic purchasing power the monetary-policy aim, later framed by the Riksbank as the first central-bank price-stability target. Economy 1931-12-10 Erik Axel Karlfeldt receives the Nobel Prize in Literature posthumously The 1931 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded posthumously to Swedish poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt for his poetry, adding a cultural-canon event to a year otherwise dominated by labour and monetary crises. Culture