Maurice J Casey, an Irish radical academic, gives us a compelling insight, in Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals (Footnote, 1924), into a network of comrades drawn to Russia after the 1917 October Revolution. He traces their personal-political histories and their fate as Stalinism took grip of the party and state apparatus during the 1920s. The book is much more than that, though, giving voice to these “forgotten radicals” in such a way as to illuminate the mechanisms of power that revolutionaries encountered, resisted and succumbed to. The book is a constellation of case studies focused on these particular individuals and it is itself an example of how to do committed historical research.
Internationalism and feminism
The book, which centres on Hotel Lux on Tverskaya Street in Moscow, a building which was taken over and repurposed by the Bolsheviks as the dormitory centre for international visitors, mostly for those working for the Third International (the “Communist International” which became the “Cominform” before being wound down by Stalin), either for those attending congresses of the organisation or as functionaries in the Comintern apparatus.
Head of English translation at the Comintern, and billeted at Hotel Lux, for example, was May O’Callaghan (who finished her working life behind the counter in Collet’s bookshop in Charing Cross Road). Casey weaves May’s life story with those of the sisters Nellie Cohen (who remained faithful to the Communist Party after she returned to Britain) and Rose Cohen, who perished in the Stalinist purges. Rose studied in Moscow at the “Lenin School” and then worked on Moscow News as its foreign news editor. It could have been that May survived for so long after Stalin seized power, despite her friendship with known “Trotskyites,” because she described herself in a Comintern questionnaire as “bezpartinaya” (without party membership).
The internationalism of the Hotel Lux residents, and now of this book in its faithful retelling of their lives, is given a nice twist early on when Casey makes the case that the links between the Irish and Russian revolution were a vital motivating force for many of the main characters. Casey is sensitive to what he anachronistically (and he knows this) calls the “queer” aspects of life around Hotel Lux, and the book is intersectional in its attention to national independence and to women’s liberation.
Indeed, May O’Callaghan and Nellie Cohen became close friends during their time working for Sylvia Pankhurst’s Suffragette Dreadnought newspaper, and were active, as was Sylvia, in solidarity campaigns with Dublin workers on strike before the First World War. The centring of Ireland and women’s liberation in the book is fascinating, and Casey suggests that the formation of Pankhurst’s “People’s Army of the East End” in 1913 was modelled on James Connolly’s “Irish Citizen Army.” After the Russian Revolution, May and Nellie, and others around the Pankhurst group (which aimed to be the British Section of the Third International, and styled itself as such), were involved in the “People’s Russian Information Bureau,” propaganda support work for the revolution.
Stalinism and fascism
There are many other characters in the book alongside May and Nellie and Rose, and there is a very interesting discussion of the political agency of children in the production of Alpenpost and then La Guinguette by the children of Emmy Leonhard, who left the German Communist Party after the disastrous ultraleft “Third Period” Stalinist refusal to build joint anti-fascist activity, and Edo Fimmen, General Secretary of the International Transport Workers Federation. Emmy became a Trotskyist while Edo worked as an honest tireless anti-fascist trade union leader. The little anti-Nazi publications sent from the children to their father in exile were not mobilising the masses, but now are a moving testimonial to what a radical life might look like.
The children are important to the narrative later on in the book, and they are emblematic of the link between personal, familial and organisational state politics, a link that is made over and again in this enthusiastic retelling of those who once lived in Hotel Lux. There are elements of joy, of the encounter between revolutionaries from around the world at a time of hope, and there are some chilling descriptions of the way that petty “office politics” became charged with danger, for some with death.
The book traces a long time line, from well before the arrival of the main protagonists at Hotel Lux to their lives afterwards, telling of times of rehabilitation after the Khrushchev 1956 “secret” speech to communist party leaders, and of the more recent scandalous erasure of the history of anti-Stalinist resistance by the Putin regime, the removal of the “Posledny Adres” or “Last Address” Memorial plaques to victims, including for Rose Cohen. It is only possible to touch on a few aspects of this marvellous book, a book that also functions as a history of the internal structure of the revolution that occurred in Russia and its betrayal.
Scholarship and impact
Apart from anything else, Hotel Lux is inspiringly written.. At many points the book reads like a detective story as Casey stumbles across evidence in archives from around the world, including Cornwall and Galicia as well as in Russia, the United States and Canada. Moments of insight link the histories of these inhabitants of Hotel Lux in extraordinarily surprising ways, and there are some fantastic “reveals,” in which Casey himself is evidently astonished at what he finds.
You learn along the way about what it really means to track and map the past in such a way as to open up lessons for the future. It is about bureaucracy and solidarity, bad faith and optimism, betrayal and steadfastness. This is an enthralling book about historical “academic” research that breaks the boundaries that usually divide universities from real-world political struggle. It is for all active revolutionary Marxists to read, and to give as presents to their comrades and friends. Five stars (as they say in Higher Education circles anxious about research ratings) for great scholarship and “impact.”
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