Adam Hjalmar Egede-Nissen (29 June 1868 – 4 April 1953), was a Norwegian postmaster and politician, began his political career in the Liberal Party and was first elected to the Storting (parliament) in 1900. He later switched to the Labour Party before eventually joining the Communist Party of Norway, serving as party chairman from 1934 to 1946. Life and work Parents Adam Hjalmar Egede-Nissen was born on an Øvre Rinnan farm at Frol (today part of Levanger) in Nord-Trøndelag, where his father Paul Christian Egede-Nissen (1835–1891) was then serving in the medical corps of the Norwegian Army. Having qualified as a medical doctor in 1858 and having been active as a military physician in the Italian liberation struggle led by Giuseppe Garibaldi, by 1863 Paul Egede-Nissen was practicing medicine in Tromsø; in 1867 he was a commissioned officer with the rank of major and was a regimental surgeon stationed with the army at Levanger. Adam Egede-Nissen's mother was Sophie Amalie Normann of Harstad (1826–1912), widow of Søren Schøning (1816–1861), who had been a merchant on Grøtøya in Kvaløya municipality; she married his father in 1863, and the couple had two children, Pauline Fayette Egede-Nissen (born 1864) and Søren Kristian Henrik Egede-Nissen (born 1866) before their last child, Adam Egede-Nissen, was born in 1868. Besides his two full siblings, he had a stepbrother, Jakob Schøning. Youth and early career Adam Egede-Nissen graduated from Trondheim Cathedral School in 1886, receiving his Cand philol. (master's degree) two years later. In 1887 he was appointed as a post office assistant in Nordland county; and in 1890 as a mail clerk; he transferred in the following year to become a mail clerk in Bergen. He was postmaster in Vardø (in Finnmark near the Russian border) from 1897 to 1911, when he became postmaster in Stavanger. On 13 May 1899, during his time in Vardø, he founded the newspaper "Finnmarken"; he was its editor for many years. Egede-Nissen was a member of the Vardø city council from 1903 to 1911. With Vardø being the easternmost town in Norway — and indeed in all of Western Europe — it formed a thriving duty-free centre for the Pomor trade of Norwegian pollock for Russian rye grain and other goods brought by merchants from Arkhangelsk. Making use of his contacts with Russian merchants and officials, Egede-Nissen was among the first Norwegians to establish working links with anti-Tsarist Russian groups.