Our Friends from the East: Russian Revolutionaries and British Radicals, 1852-1917

From 1852, when Alexander Gertsen (1812-70) first arrived in Britain, until 1917, there was a constant flow of Russian émigrés to these shores, among them tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from persecution or forced conversion. The large numbers of Russian Jews settling in the East End of London formed a backdrop against which the political drama was played out, but their fates were gradually caught up in British working-class life, with its pressures of poverty and deprivation, and they were forced to adjust and to settle in Britain with more or less willingness just as their hosts were more or less willing to accept them. To that extent, these were immigrants to Britain, not emigrants living within the country.

Other refugees, however, were purely political, anti-Tsarist in their views, and they settled at best on the margins of British life, with no intention of staying once Russia had become less dangerous for them. Their views ranged from the libertarianism of Gertsen to the outright anarchist-communism of Kropotkin, but all were equally repugnant to the Tsarist authorities. In Britain they sought, and mostly found, a kind of official indifference. They were neither celebrated nor persecuted so long as they did not continue their revolutionary activities on British soil.

Other potential asylum-giving countries such as France or Switzerland tended to have variable relations with the Russian homeland. They were sometimes willing to receive refugees from Tsarist authority, but might hand them back when a human sacrifice was needed for the sake of good relations. In spite of its poor climate and cuisine, and the notorious insularity of its population, Britain represented a relatively secure asylum.

Alexander Gertsen (whose name is often Germanised as Herzen, and who wrote under the pseudonym Iskander) was one of the leading Westernisers in the Russia of the 1830s and 1840s, advocating the West as a model for the future of Russia. The illegitimate son of an aristocrat, his criticisms of the Tsarist system led to several periods of house arrest on his country estate followed by flight abroad. He first came to Britain in 1852 after a disillusioning journey through Western Europe in the wake of the revolutions of 1848, and stayed for a dozen years. His book On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia , which was particularly praised and publicised by the Chartist W.J. Linton, preceded him to England and made his reputation as a journalist. Through Linton, he met another Chartist, Ernest Jones. He also met Thomas Carlyle and Robert Owen in his first few months in Britain. One useful acquaintance, probably struck up via Linton or Giuseppe Mazzini, was Joseph Cowen junior, a wealthy Newcastle supporter of Polish liberation. The two remained in contact throughout Gertsen’s exile. Cowen helped the spread of Gertsen’s many publications by transporting them, packed into cargo crates, to Russia. In his newspaper The Newcastle Chronicle , Cowen was a tireless champion of the cause of Russian liberation, also publishing Kropotkin in the 1880s.

What Gertsen found in London, however, was more than just British radicals: it was also an international community of refugees from the 1848 movements throughout Europe – Mazzini, Ledru-Rollin, Kossuth, Gottfried Kinkel, Stanislas Worcell among others. Internationalism was to remain a powerful component of Gertsen’s world-view, to the extent that, on the death of Tsar Nicholas I in 1855, he employed London urchins to go around the streets announcing: ‘Hurrah! Impernickel is dead!’

This did not, however, distract him from the cause of Russian liberation: he set up the first uncensored Cyrillic press in Britain at his own expense (the Free Russian Press) and published large numbers of books and journals, often on bible paper for transport to Russia in the false bottoms of specially made suitcases. He sold his works through Trübner’s bookshop opposite the British Museum, an obligatory stop on the ‘grand tours’ undertaken by Russians in Western Europe, with its stock of uncensored Russian publications. In the works he now published, notably Russian Serfdom (first printed in 1855 in the ex-Chartist Edward Pigott’s periodical The Leader ), he developed an idea that was to inform Russian revolutionary writing thereafter: that a distinction should be made between the Russian people and the Russian government, the one – ‘popular Russia’ – exploited and fundamentally revolutionary, the other – ‘official Russia’ – exploiting and fundamentally conservative. However, once the longed-for emancipation of the serfs was proclaimed in 1861, Gertsen found himself outmoded as an ideologist and in dire financial straits. Circulation of his publications sank, he moved to Switzerland in 1865, thence to France, where he died in Paris in 1870.

The history of the Russian intelligentsia is conventionally categorised into decades of the nineteenth century – Gertsen on this reckoning was  ‘a man of the 1840s’. It would be another two decades before Russian refugees established contact with British radicals  on anything like the same scale. The ‘man of the 60s’, Prince P.V. Dolgorukov (1816-68) was an aristocrat from an ancient family of boyar origin. Like Gertsen, he experienced internal exile before emigrating to Western Europe in 1859. In London he was one of Gertsen’s collaborators on the journal The Bell , before setting up his own Cyrillic printing press, publishing journals of his own and writing books, one of which, La Vérité sur la Russie (Paris, 1861), cost him his Russian citizenship.

The ‘man of the 70s’ was Petr Lavrovich Lavrov (1823-1900). In his Historical Letters (1869), he advocated a gradual form of socialism for Russia as opposed to the revolutionary form that fellow radical Kropotkin began to support in the early 1870s. Lavrov’s book caused a sensation among Russia’s youth on its appearance there, resulting in his exile to Paris. Lavrov experienced double exile when, following the Paris Commune of 1871, he was forced to flee to Britain. Here he re-established Gertsen’s cyrillic press  and published an almanac (1873-77) and bi-monthly magazine (in 1875 and 1876): both, confusingly, appeared under the title, Vpered! (‘Forward!’).

Britain, its post-Chartist slumber enhanced by the opium of developing economic prosperity under energetic capitalist stewardship, was not at this time minded to react strongly to the presence of radical political refugees. As Kropotkin noted of his own brief visits in the 1870s:

For one who held advanced socialist opinions, there was no atmosphere to breathe in. There was no sign of that animated socialist movement which I found so largely developed on my return in 1886.

The period of political quietism on the left spanned three decades. It ended in the early 1880s when the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), the Socialist League and the Fabian Society were founded in quick succession. Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, the son of a military officer of aristocratic lineage, became a revolutionary and, after two spells in prison, settled in Britain in 1886. Here he supported himself by writing regularly for The Times and the Geographical Journal . He was helped by his British supporters, chief among them Charlotte Wilson. The wife of a City stockbroker, Mrs Wilson had broken with the Fabians (she had been a founder member) during the ‘influenza of anarchism’ which, according to George Bernard Shaw, had broken out among them in the mid-1880s.

Before settling in Britain, Kropotkin was known primarily as a theorist of anarchism. During his thirty-year period of exile he established himself throughout Europe as a writer on a variety of topics – scientific, social and political –  from an anarchist point of view. He also became a familiar society figure: Oscar Wilde in De Profundis referred to him as ‘a man with the soul of that beautiful white Christ that seems coming out of Russia’ whose life was one of the two most perfect that he had known in his experience (the other being the French poet Verlaine).

Although Kropotkin took little part in revolutionary activity while in Britain he certainly made his mark by espousing left-wing causes. In 1887 he played a prominent part in the meeting organised in central London to protest against the execution of the Chicago martyrs (anarchists executed for political protests); he attended the famous Sunday evening meetings of William Morris’s Hammersmith Socialist Society; he strongly supported the dockers’ strike of 1889, collaborating for the purpose with the Liberal cabinet minister John Burns; he lent his weight to the campaign against the 1905 Aliens Act; he spoke on a variety of topical issues at lecture societies throughout Britain: he made clear his antipathetic views on eugenics; and he was also the prime mover of the British anarchist movement. In time he became a kind of guru of the left, in much the same way as Bernard Shaw. His correspondence shows this clearly in the stream of letters from members of the British public asking for his advice on a wide range of matters. He did not admire Shaw, however, whom he often described as a facetious clown.

During his exile Kropotkin constantly engaged in activities designed to denigrate ‘official Russia’. He spoke out against attempts to make Tsarism  respectable or to involve it in alliances with Western European countries. In this he was abetted by the Russian refugee community and he took a full part in the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom (SFRF) formed in 1891. It was Kropotkin who was selected by radical MPs in the Parliamentary Russian Committee to document the repressive activities of the Russian government in the wake of the unsuccessful 1905 Revolution in Russia. His reputation  not only as a revolutionary but also as a trained scientist, used to dealing respectfully with facts, no doubt prompted the choice.

The extent of Kropotkin’s public activity was acknowledged in 1912 when his seventieth birthday was marked by a large gathering of his friends and admirers at the Adelphi Theatre. Unfortunately, the subject himself had escaped the London fog and drizzle for his health’s sake. However, he was deeply touched by the gesture in his honour.

The émigré colony established in London in the 1880s comprised a number of other well-known and influential figures; S.M. Stepniak-Kravchinskiy (1851-95), N.V. Chaikovskiy (1850-1926) and F.V. Volkhovskiy (1846-1914) among others. Stepniak came to Britain as a literary celebrity with a book on the Russian revolutionary movement, Underground Russia (London, 1883), published just before his arrival. In Britain, he published in English the books Russia under the Tzars (1885), The Russian Storm-Cloud ; or Russia in her relations to neighbouring countries (1886), The Russian Peasantry (1888), King Stork and King Log: A study of modern Russia . (1895) and Nihilism as it is (1895), in addition to numerous shorter works in English and many others in Russian. Stepniak died in a railway accident while still in his prime and thousands attended his funeral, at which William Morris spoke.

Stepniak, Kropotkin, Chaikovskiy and Volkhovskiy entered into a collaboration that was to have a strong influence not only on the Russian revolutionary movement in the 1890s, but also on British public opinion for the quarter-century preceding the First World War. In 1891 they formed the Russian Free Press Fund (RFPF), and the Anglo-Russian Society of Friends of Russian Freedom (SFRF), to influence British public opinion. The leading RFPF members lectured to societies, groups and political parties all over Britain on topics like the iniquities of the Tsarist system and the virtues of the Russian peasantry. Stepniak, and after his death Feliks Volkhovskiy, edited the English-language monthly organ of the SFRF, Free Russia . This continued to appear every month up to 1910 and then less regularly until Volkhovskiy’s own death in 1914.

The SFRF helped change British attitudes from a blanket Russophobia to a more nuanced attitude, encompassing condemnation for ‘official Russia’, a liking for the Russian people (who were perceived as suffering under that government) and support for the revolutionary movement (seen as that government’s most implacable and effective enemy). The society recruited British members, many of whom were already or were to become experts on Russia: the radical journalist G.H. Perris, the Tolstoyan Aylmer Maude, who had spent his youth in Russia, the Newcastle Liberal solicitor Robert Spence Watson, among others. Stepniak’s realism and understanding of British society led him to insist on inviting bishops on to the committees of his anti-Tsarist organisations to give them respectability. In this way, a far wider swathe of British public opinion became interested in the struggle for freedom in Russia.

Not only radicals, but liberals and even Tories had been swayed by the rhetoric of the Russian refugees. The argument opposing ‘official’ and ‘popular Russia’ had been accepted throughout Britain. As the Tory MP W. Earl Hodgson concluded in his account of his Night With A Nihilist (the nihilist in question was Stepniak), if he had been born in Russia, he too would be a nihilist! The influence of the SFRF Russians extended beyond politics alone, ushering in a heightened awareness of Russian culture generally.

Following on Tolstoy’s ‘spiritual crisis’ of the 1870s, a number of Russians began to adopt the ‘simple’, ‘pure’ Christian life which he was advocating. It involved foregoing meat-eating, profit-making and sex and the rejection of military conscription. Tolstoy himself was largely left alone on his estate by the government, as a patrician from an ancient noble family and also a world-famous writer, although he was eventually excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church. However, following the accession to the throne of Nicholas II in 1894, the Orthodox Church was encouraged to proceed on an ideological crusade against sectarians. Tolstoyans began to figure among those persecuted: the Dukhobors, a religious peasant sect who rejected conscription, for instance, felt constrained to emigrate in 1898 to Canada. Tolstoy’s literary amanuensis, V.G. Chertkov (1854-1936), had emigrated to Britain the previous year.

From this time can be dated the emergence of Tolstoyanism as an intellectual force in Britain, with its renunciation of the world as it is in favour of ideals best realised in a small commune. Like Kropotkin, Chertkov was of wealthy aristocratic social status, which he renounced in order to live and work with Tolstoy. He came to Britain in 1897 and set up a Russian Tolstoyan colony first at Purleigh in Essex and then at Christchurch in Hampshire. This colony was visited by English Tolstoyans who then set up their own experiments in communal living.

Among the first of these was John Coleman Kenworthy (1863-1948), a British idealist who, from being a follower of Ruskin’s anti-industrial ideas, turned in the mid-1890s to the more radical ideas of Tolstoy. In 1894 he founded the first Brotherhood Church, in Croydon, Surrey, and afterwards the Croydon colony of Tolstoyans. The colony had disbanded by the end of the decade, but was the seed from which sprouted many other experiments in communal living such as  Whiteway, Worcs, and Clousden Hill in Northumbria. Chertkov also used his wealth to set up two presses: the Free Age Press which published translations of Tolstoy’s writings at low prices and in large print runs, and the Svobodnoe slovo (Free Word) press which published in Russian Tolstoy’s censored writings, and the works of those whose religious or political views made them congenial to the Tolstoyans. By 1906, there were well over a hundred Russian-language editions. Thus the first complete edition of Tolstoy’s late novel Resurrection was published in Britain at the Christchurch Svovodnoe slovo press. Interestingly, the British Unitarians also came into the category of the congenial, and a number of their writings were translated into Russian and published by Svobodnoe slovo over the years until Chertkov returned to Russia in 1907.

If the Tolstoyans renounced violence, other revolutionaries took the opposite view. There were many connections between British revolutionary socialists and their Russian equivalents. In 1903, 1905 and 1907 official Congresses of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party were wholly or partly held in London. For a time in 1903, Lenin was able to continue publishing Iskra , the Party’s journal, only by using facilities provided by the British SDF and its Twentieth Century Press. In 1904, British socialists participated in running guns to Russia, packed in barrels of lard. This successful operation encouraged further transports of weapons during and after the 1905 Revolution. In 1907, the British authorities put a stop to it by searching the homes of British SDF members, where they found guns and a great deal of ammunition due to be shipped out to Russia on the British steamer John Grafton .

Following the 1905 Revolution, a new brand of Russian revolutionary began to come through to the West. Inured to battle conditions, the new refugees drew little distinction between revolutionary and criminal activity: ‘expropriations’ for the cause (i.e., robberies) and ‘courts of honour’ (‘kangaroo courts’) for errant comrades were viewed as justified in pursuit of the overall aim. It is in this context that the suspected participation of Russians (‘Peter the Painter’) in the Sidney Street siege and Houndsditch murders of 1911 must be seen. The Great War put an end to much of this.

Georgiy Valentinovich Chicherin (1872-1936) was of aristocratic descent. A Menshevik, he went into exile in Belgium after 1905, and in 1914 was swept into Britain following the advance of the German Imperial Army. In Britain, under the influence of the war and its destructive effects on the International, Chicherin turned to Bolshevism. One of the stages of this conversion can be seen in his campaign to prevent an Anglo-Russian convention on conscription. When conscription of British men into the army was introduced by the government of Britain in 1916, large numbers of unnaturalised Russian Jewish men in London or Leeds became the objects of a campaign – often of barely disguised anti-semitic inspiration – to get them to volunteer for the British army or to be forced into the Russian Imperial one. Chicherin, with his British helper Mrs Mary Bridges Adams, wrote at length and frequently to the British authorities on the subject of conscription into the Russian army and against the prosecution of the Great War. With hindsight, had there been a flow of radicalised Russians from Britain into that beleaguered force, Chicherin’s aim of a Russian revolution might well have been accomplished even sooner than it was. He set up a Committee of Delegates of Russian Socialist Groups in London (CoDoRSGiL) which brought the main radical Jewish groups into the fold, and belaboured the government over the Convention. Nonetheless the Convention was negotiated in the summer of 1917, by Russia’s new Provisional Government, but practical problems of transport delayed its execution until the autumn. By then, the Bolshevik government in Petrograd had no wish to accept anyone willing to fight the Great War. Chicherin himself was interned in Brixton Prison until January 1918 and released to travel back to Russia where he was appointed People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Ironically, the only unnaturalised Russians to be sent back were a community of Lithuanian miners who had settled in Scotland. These were presumably returned before any Jews in order to convince wavering government supporters that the Convention was not framed with antisemitic intent.

The campaign against conscription of unnaturalised Russian Jews into the Russian army had repercussions on the anti-war left, which Chicherin had mobilised in his campaign against conscription. This was the curious episode of summer 1917 when, imitating the Russian workers’ councils, Bertrand Russell and other British anti-war activists set up soviets, with an extensive radical agenda, across Britain. London, Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester and other large British cities were the scene for large-scale gatherings of the left, which tried to enlist popular support for a broad socialist and anti-war programme. However, to publicise such gatherings was to raise opposition too. Gangs of servicemen and others, no doubt organised by the authorities, broke up the British soviets. The movement behind these continued, however, evolving into the British Communist Party (CP) in 1920.

As Lenin himself realised, the success of the effort to crystallise support for the Bolshevik Revolution owed a great deal to the ‘unrivalled range of international connections’ of the Party. He could have added, but understandably did not, that the enemies of that revolution were likewise able to draw on support from many countries in pursuit of their aims. All this was due in no small measure to the spotlight which the efforts of the political refugees over decades had succeeded in throwing on Russia and Russians, more perhaps, in the United Kingdom than anywhere else.

John Slatter was formerly a lecturer in Russian at the University of Durham.