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All posts in category Russians in London

Discovering Ivy Litvinov

A post for Women’s History Month A few weeks ago whilst preparing for my final-year undergraduate Dostoevsky class I plucked an old translation from my shelf that I’d bought a couple of years previously at the Amnesty shop in Shoreditch boxpark. I’d barely looked at it before – I tend to collect old Dostoevsky translations […]

Herzen’s Free Russian Press: plaque unveiled on Judd Street

It’s not often in my line of work that research has a concrete, physical and permanent (as far as anything can be) public outcome, so it was with great pleasure yesterday that I attended the unveiling of a new plaque commemorating the work of the Free Russian Press at 61 Judd Street in London. I […]

The Free Russian Press in London

When I wrote a post on Herzen in London, my focus was primarily on the man himself, rather than his publishing activities. But much of the discussion generated by the post recently has focused on the Free Russian Press (Вольная русская типография), leading me to conduct some further research, supported significantly by the contributions of three readers: […]

The games Russian boys play

Whilst doing some research for my Russians in London series (to be resumed at some unspecified point), I came across a truly unexpected document from the pages of Chums, a middle-class boys’ weekly magazine published between 1892 and 1941, later associated with the scout movement, but in its early years probably most notable for its […]

Russians in London (ish)

Walking though the city the other day, I came across this sculpture set into the wall of the BBVA bank at 108 Cannon Street: Sensing a certain Russianness about it, I stopped for a closer look, and discovered that the sculptor was none other than Zurab Tsereteli, monument builder extraordinaire and president of the Russian […]

Lenin in London: A Reply to Helen Rappaport

I recently received a comment from Helen Rappaport, responding to the criticisms I made of of her book Conspirator: Lenin in Exile (New York: Perseus, 2010) in my post on Lenin in London. You can read her comments on my Contact Me page, but I have decided to reply here rather than there, as I […]

Russians in London: the anarchist threat

For my final post in the series (for now), I want to discuss events rather than individuals. As a couple of my recent posts have suggested, by the end of the nineteenth century, the nature and number of Russian visitors to, and settlers in, London had changed considerably. It was no longer the preserve of […]

Document: An Appeal to Public Opinion

In my last post, I referred to a political pamphlet from 1916, An Appeal to Public Opinion: Should the Russian Refugees be Deported? It was published by the Committee of Delegates of the Russian Socialist Groups in London in response to the threat to deport Russian immigrants who refused to serve in the British Army, […]

Russians in London: Russian and Jewish radicals

In this post, the penultimate in the series, instead of focusing on a single figure, I’m going to explore one of the lines that connects Russian radicals, and in particular their agitational/publishing activities, to the work of their Russian-Jewish counterparts. Some may suggest that this stretches the definition of ‘Russians’ too far, as Jews would […]

Russians in London: Lenin

I’m no fan of Lenin, but he spent a good deal of time in London, so must be included in this series. I haven’t chosen this mugshot as an expression of my disapproval – it’s just that most of the photos that are available were taken after the revolution, and this one is the closest […]