Revolutionary A listers visit Whitechapel.

The Brotherhood Church

In a recent edition of BBC’s Radio 4's Making History programme there was an illuminating piece about the 5^th Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Party that took place in London in 1907.   

What was by all accounts a bad tempered event was attended by a star studded cast of Russian Revolutionary luminaries, including Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Dzerzhinsky, Gorky and the exotically named Rosa Luxembourg.  The event was held in the Brotherhood Church in Southgate Road, Hackney and many of the Russian participants bedded down in a block of flats in nearby Whitechapel which still stands today.  Apparently the door through which they entered is a now fire exit adjacent to a Bangladeshi Restaurant!  It is incredible to think that this event, attended by so many leading historical figures and at which the Bolshevik/Menshevik split deepened, took place largely unremarked.  The presenter of the BBC programme, Tom Holland, expressed the opinion that it might at least be appropriate to mark the spot with some sort of plaque.  An earlier congress held ironically at what is now the headquarters of Saatchi and Saatchi in Charlotte Street has also gone un-noted.

Of course England in the 19^th and early 20^th Century was a haven for radicals and revolutionaries.  Most people know that Karl Marx lived here and spent a good deal of time in the British Library.

In the course of putting together one of the talks I am giving at Gainsborough’s House in September, I have been reacquainting myself with a  possibly less well known, but equally influential, revolutionary figure, Alexander Herzen.  Unable to return to Russia on account of his subversive activities, Herzen spent many years in London in the middle of the 19th Century setting up the Free Russian Press which printed the radical journals The Polar Star and The Bell or 'Kolokol'.  He also entertained many contemporary revolutionary leaders from Europe and beyond, including the anarchist Michael Bakunin.   For over 10 years Kolokol, an early Private Eye equivalent, was smuggled into Russia, where it was widely read.  It is said that it even reached the office of the Tsar.

One of the sites of the Russian Free Press is recorded by a Blue Plaque in Judd Street.

If you want to find out more about Herzen and other opponents of Russia autocracy from the worlds of journalism and the arts,  come along to the Art of Resistance session at Gainsborough’s House on Wednesday 4^th October…only a month or so short* of the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 2017.

  

*The October Revolution took place in early November using the new style calendar.