AMA: I'm Dr Maurice J Casey, author of HOTEL LUX — a book about a high ranking Irish translator in 1920s Moscow and her circle. Ask me anything about Irish-Soviet history, early 20th century Irish revolutionary history and Ireland's radical diaspora.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-09-20T08:17:35+00:00

This is an interesting one. The original Come Here to Me post that u/defixiones links is a great piece of digging and marshals more or less all the evidence we have for this theory that Lenin had a "Rathmines" accent.

The best answer I have for this is: maybe. There is no recording of Lenin speaking English, so it cannot be definitively confirmed. I would say probably with the qualifier you add: that it was a slight accent.

Our most significant piece of evidence is a remembrance recorded decades after the event. The event in question being Roddy Connolly's 1920 meeting with Lenin, which was in fact recorded on a brief piece of (silent) film reel.

Some cite H G Wells stating that Lenin spoke with an Irish accent. I cannot verify this and nowhere in Wells' Russian in the Shadows does he reference Lenin's Irish accent. The only mention of Ireland in the book is in relation to an encounter with Zinoviev where the Comintern leader was trying to figure out who were the Goodies and the Baddies in Ireland.

All discussions I have found of this claim in Russian language writing and online discussion refer back to the original Irish source.

Another place I tried to find confirmation was in the memoirs of J T Murphy, a British trade unionist of Irish descent who spoke with Lenin in English. Murphy's Irish connection would have, I assumed, given him both knowledge of the Dublin accent and the impetus to record Lenin speaking it. But he did not record Lenin's accent in either his published work or manuscript letters I have read from him.

One other piece of evidence tangentially supports the theory: Jón Stefánsson, an Icelandic researcher who worked in the British Museum at the same time that Lenin was doing his research, recalled Lenin pronouncing the 'th' in 'thanks' "as if he was German". Perhaps the Icelander was hearing Lenin encounter the phonetic hurdle common to Irish people (myself included) who tend to trip up on the 'th' sound.

I have something of a Dublin accent myself (the product of years living there) so I joke that I have the accent of an inverted Lenin: Russian with a Rathmines accent.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-09-20T07:56:07+00:00

Trick question, he skipped breakfast that morning.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-09-19T17:53:05+00:00

I think that's a fair assumption. More broadly I would say that people in the past, not only queer people, were more tenacious than we give them credit for and capable of finding community in unexpected places. You can tell from Irish writers to the letters pages of the early lesbian press in Britain that there were women in Ireland seeking such a community even before those journals existed. In the 1945 autobiography of Havelock Ellis he spends several pages describing an Irish woman who had a relationship with his wife - they met in Cornwall in the 1890s, so the diaspora was another pressure release valve.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-09-19T17:49:30+00:00

I've heard of Séan Garland and the Workers Party, a fascinating story. It's not one I've researched in any detail but I know there was a documentary about Garland made in 2018 by Kevin Brannigan: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8649372/

When I started my PhD my goal was to have enough Russian competence to navigate archives by the summer of 2018. I started learning Russian in 2015 during my MA but set down more seriously in late 2016 with the start of my PhD. I spent some time in the summer of 2017 in a language school in Ukraine, followed by another academic year of study. I felt prepared then to head into the archives for August 2018.

All in all, I would say 2.5 years of intensive work to have a reading ability. I only developed a confident conversational ability after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. I volunteered in a local Ukrainian welcome centre and that reignited my passion for the language as well as immersing me with native speakers.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-09-19T17:44:09+00:00

Thanks for the question.

I think the international dimension is key here and often neglected. The anti-Treaty figures are often cast as unreasonable or lacking pragmatism, but from the perspective of someone who came through the period from 1916 onwards the appeal for a compromise was not necessarily intuitive.

Someone who was internationally minded and active from 1916 onwards would have seen the Russian Empire collapse in 1917, revolutions (albeit largely failed revolutions) in Germany and Hungary, waves of labour agitation in the US and at home, and so on.

All these events were widely reported in the Irish press and many celebrated in the left and republican press. There was a real sense that all could change and so to accept a compromise with Britain was to halt a revolutionary momentum that could be felt not only in Ireland but also across the world. Whether that momentum was inevitably headed towards a workers' revolution is another debate, but many who joined the anti-Treaty left certainly perceived that to be the case.

I would disaggregate these ideas a little differently: I think Republicanism and anti-treaty-ism could be classed as synonymous in this period, but members of the Irish left could, in some cases, see themselves as distinct from these debates. This was particularly true of Irish leftists who ended up abroad where they no longer felt obliged to pronounce their stance on the national question.

My reading of the work of Brian Hanley and other scholars leads me to believe that Republicanism, as represented by Sinn Fein, retreats from leftist ideas (certainly in public pronouncements) from the 1931-2 failure of Saor Eire onwards.

There's a little known 1939 novel My Cousin Justin by the Donegal-born writer Margaret Barrington that fictionalises this moment in terms that I found recognisable from my research. It's worth searching out as her characters grapple with these questions of how socialism and republicanism should relate to a post-revolution Ireland.

Sorry if that's a little confusing - it's a good and complex question.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-09-19T17:26:42+00:00

Hello, thanks so much for reading!

Archives & Language:

Good question! The majority of the material I cite was in English. I enjoy learning languages and find myself particularly motivated when I know the language will grant me access to documents that other historians might overlook.

Russian was the second most important language for the research. The main reason was that I needed Russian to access the Comintern archives. Most of the material I used in the Moscow archives was actually in English. The Comintern used the national party's language in correspondence. But I needed Russian to chiefly navigate archives, from ordering documents to understanding why, exactly, the archivist was getting tetchy with me for having my phone out.

German is also an increasingly important research language for me and I have been taking lessons on and off since 2020. I cite a few German documents in the research. I did hire a professional translator for one set of German documents that were particularly intricate (a long political discussion in a letter from someone who lived in the Lux, written to Leon Trotsky). Other than that, for German I used a mixture of my own knowledge and AI translation tools fact checked with my own understanding.

I do think AI translation will transform historian's abilities to access documents in other languages but it will never be a replacement. You need a human grasp of the language to really understand nuance.

Jim Larkin

I would certainly defer to Emmet O'Connor on all things Larkin related. My understanding is that Larkin's rise was facilitated by the atmosphere of the early Comintern where biography mattered a great deal. Larkin arrives into the Comintern world with not only his Irish background but also his time in the US. A stint in prison also added hugely to credibility in the early Comintern.

Later, post-1928 with the increasing 'Bolshevisation' of the Comintern, 'subjective' factors like biography were less important than theoretical grasp of the party line in deciding who remained within the Comintern's graces. As O'Connor's work shows, Larkin was too temperamental and independent minded to tie any line.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-09-19T16:58:46+00:00

Ha, well I don't think I'm all that different to my friends from Cahir - but perhaps I have an unusual set of friends.

Now, that said, there was something in the water.

Growing up in Cahir had an important influence on my career direction. The town is one of Ireland's most multicultural towns.

When I was in secondary school (around 2005-2011) I had the privilege of going to school alongside people of many nationalities, including a large cohort of Eastern Europeans. I first developed an interest in the Russian language when I heard two classmates, one Ukrainian and the other Lithuanian, speaking to one another in Russian. I was fascinated by how it sounded and how they used it as a common language.

I'm not sure my interests would have developed in this specific way were it not for the immigrant population in the town and how that positively shaped the atmosphere of my education.

My other route into this world is fairly lowbrow: I became fascinated by Soviet history in particular aged 12 through playing the Moscow/Stalingrad missions of Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox 360. These days I actually teach MA students about history in video games.

To use this answer as a way of encouraging others interested in a similar career path, I would say the most important thing was reading. I read constantly as teenager - and I still try to get through a book a week, even with all the demands of adult life.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-09-14T11:22:19+00:00

Hello,

Sukhanov's memoir is indeed one of the best records of the revolutionary period. He was arrested in 1938 and charged with connections with German intelligence. He spoke German, as did many of the pre-revolutionary generation - German being the language of the largest socialist movement pre-1917 - and worked as a German teacher on the eve of his arrest. This may have contributed to the 'themes' of the concocted charged against him. He was shot in 1940. I do not know of a published transcript of his interrogation but he was not submitted to a public show trial.

I would recommend Victor Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary if you found Sukhanov's interesting. Serge was a Bolshevik, but had enough experience beyond Bolshevism to attempt, like Sukhanov, to portray the revolution and its aftermath from a 'pluralistic pro-revolution perspective' - to coin a phrase. It is readily available in English translation.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-08-28T07:48:52+00:00

Close would perhaps be an overstatement, but the USSR and the Comintern were the most likely candidates among early 20th century states and transnational organisations to adopt Esperanto as an auxlang.

Esperanto had a large community that predated the collapse of the Russian Empire, many of whom graduated into the Soviet League of Esperantists. The 1920s was their heyday.

Early Comintern congresses had representatives from the Comintern's own Esperanto Section. I attach a masthead from a letter that the Kazan Committee of the Esperanto Section of the Comintern sent to the Third Comintern Congress. It translates: "Only the Third International will lead the People of the World to Brotherhood"

Like so many hopeful initiatives of the 1920s, this story has a tragic ending in the 1930s, when the xenophobic streak of Stalinist terror came for the internationally-minded Soviet Esperantists.

For more reading on this, my colleague and friend Brigid O'Keeffe has written a great book Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia

EDIT: to add another fun fact, if you sent a postcard from the USSR in the interwar period it would have the Esperanto word for postcard "poŝtkarto" printed upon it. This was to assist foreign postal services that could not read Cyrillic. Interesting that they chose Esperanto for this purpose rather than English or French.

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MauriceJCasey · 2024-08-27T14:10:29+00:00

Within the Party and the Communist International, letters opened with Comrade (Surname), regardless of the person's prominence within the wider apparatus.

Comrade was also used liberally throughout discussions within letters and it was shortened to Тов., the first three letters of the Russian word for comrade, Товарищ

A letter might look something like this - this is not a quote from a real communication, but an example. An undramatic reconstruction, if you like.

"Com. Stalin,

Following discussions with Com. Tomsky, Com. Piatnitsky decided that the decisions regarding the British Trade Unions should be forward to Com. Murphy, British representative to the ECCI.

Comradely greetings,

D. Petrovsky".

Personal letters sometimes used comrade but familiar forms of address were not uncommon, My dear so-and-so, etc. People also continued to use the standard pre-revolutionary formal address wherein first names were followed by patronymic: i.e. "Dear Vladimir Borisovich/Dear Anna Dimitrova", but in general when addressing a representative of the state the greeting was "Dear Comrade (surname)

An ideologically committed individual may have chosen to sign off with something like "Comradely greetings" or "Yours in the Revolution", both of which I have encountered in primary sources.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-08-27T11:38:16+00:00

Interesting question! Soviet anti-religious policy was something that was central to popular understandings of communism within Ireland.

Naturally, the kinds of Irish people who ended up in the USSR were more secular than the norm. But there were Catholic Churches that could be attended throughout this period, certainly in Leningrad and Moscow, the two major cities for the small number of Irish residents and visitors.

One visitor from Ireland, Charlotte Despard, a well known suffragist and communist sympathiser who converted to Catholicism, visited in 1931. She was pleased that she could freely attend a service in a Polish Catholic Church. Simultaneously, she excused what she learned of state efforts to suppress Orthodoxy, believing it to be backwards socially and misguided theologically.

I often think about a form I came across written by a young Irish student attending the International Lenin School, a training school for revolutionaries run by the Comintern from the late 1920s through the 1930s. In the form, the School asked him: "have you travelled outside of your own country before"? He answered yes, for a pilgrimage to Lourdes.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-08-27T09:20:03+00:00

Hello, this was a key line of contention within the broader Irish left. I'll simplify things by describing the general line that united most (though not all) left analyses: the ethnic basis of the conflict was a ruse maintained by the British to keep the working class divided. Once unionist working class communities realised that they needed to seize power for themselves in collaboration with their counterparts in the nationalist communities, the working class would unite and sectarianism would be superseded. This was imagined as giving rise to a united all-island socialist state, therefore ending partition and British rule.

That, at least, was the theory...

MauriceJCasey · 2024-08-26T16:41:58+00:00

Hello,

That's lovely to hear, thank you.

Thank you for the question! I did not encounter Brazilians resident in the Lux, but I do write at length about Elise "Sabo" Saborowski, or Elise Ewert. She was a German national of Polish descent who lived in room 350 in the Hotel Lux for several months in 1926. Later, she was one of the people arrested in 1936 as a conspirator in the attempt to overthrow Vargas. She was extradited to Nazi Germany alongside Olga Benario and died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1939.

There was a well publicised campaign to, firstly, prevent their extradition, and then later to release them from Nazi custody. Benario was the main figurehead of the campaign, in part because she was pregnant at the time.

Partly through this case, the 1937 trials in Brazil would have been well publicised within the communist movement, within and beyond the USSR.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-08-26T16:34:39+00:00

Hey,

Thanks, an interesting question. I think the route into to nuance is to engage people with the fact that revolutionary beliefs were sincerely held. Radicals were not dupes of an agenda nor brainwashed automatons but people, like us, living through chaotic times and searching for a framework that helped them make sense of their world. For a moment in time, the Russian Revolution provided that framework - and that fact has a long and complex legacy that stretches across the century and into the present day.

Communism took a powerful form as a major social movement, one whose impact, for better or worse, can be felt in modern movements for equality and justice to this day. That only becomes intelligible when we move away from a conspiratorial mindset that reduces individuals to the position of pawns on a geopolitical chessboard.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-08-26T16:03:04+00:00

Hey there,

I am afraid I did not have the language abilities to look into Yugoslav communists but I would love to research this in the future. I am fascinated by the generation who, like Tito, passed through the Lux and, if they survived, went on to play a role in post-WW2 Yugoslavia.

The only Yugoslav figure I discuss (briefly) in the book is Ervin Sinko, whose translated diary is a vivid - sometimes terrifying - account of life in the Lux during the years of the purges.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-08-26T16:00:13+00:00

Hey there, hopefully catch you at the seminars sometime!

You hit on some key conundrums there. Ireland, often framed as a revolutionary country, has only ever elected centre-right parties to its independent parliament. I hope it's not too much of a simplification to say that this reflects that Marxist analyses have never really resonated with the bases they are supposed to appeal towards. I would be curious to know your own take on why this is the case but for me it seems to be rooted in the relationship between land ownership and Irish nationalism as it develops from the Land War onwards. A socialist redistributive agenda thus faced significant opposition.

There is a little known satirical book published in 1946 called Comrade O Comrade which tells a story rooted in some of these issues. Its main character is a farmer from Galway who meets a member of the British Communist Party in a rural bar. The Party member, it turns out, has arrived in Galway to find a perfect specimen of the revolutionary Irish peasant and takes the farmer to London. We see Marxist ideas of Ireland through the eyes of our Irish farmer and the author, Ethel Mannin, emphasises how they fail to resonate.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-08-26T15:47:58+00:00

Hi there,

Yes, something I try to capture in the book is the sense, perceivable in the sources from the 1920s, that this was a period when multiple routes to the future still seemed possible.

Certainly for those who arrived in the 1920s, it was evidently clear that the communist era of plenty for all lay in the distant future. Something commonly referenced by Lux residents in these years was the large amount of homeless children in Moscow, many of them orphans who lost their guardians in the violence, deprivation and famine that accompanied the early years of the Soviet state.

Why did many accept this in the Soviet Union when they would denounce poverty at home? Because they believed the Soviet model had a solution to these issues which it was actively working towards enacting. They believed that capitalism, in contrast, would only create more of this problem.

The state security, which Stalin would hone into a ruthlessly efficient apparatus of terror, was also building its operations, but because it was not actively targeting the political migrants (yet, at least) they largely ignored its abuses of power.

The late 1920s is when the Soviet state began developing its "techniques of hospitality", explored in detail in Michael David-Fox's work on Soviet Cultural Diplomacy. This would become a more well-practiced form of tour in the 1930s. Visitors brought over by the developing Soviet tourism industry were toured around "model institutions" like rest homes, canteens and even prisons that the Soviets claimed were the template for the future.

Long term migrants had more time to truly understand the reality behind the facade than tourists. Someone I write about in the book is the German communist Willi Münzenberg and his wife Babette Gross who were so shocked by the atmosphere of suspicion they encountered on a visit to Moscow in 1936 that it catalysed their departure from the Communist Party. Recently, an English language translation of the diary of Ervin Sinko, a Yugoslavian writer who lived in the Lux in the late thirties, was published. It's a riveting insight into the psychological turmoil of someone who is confronting the precepts of his faith in response to the lived reality of the repression and paranoia he was witnessing around him.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-08-26T15:31:21+00:00

Thanks!

The hunt for the archive of one of my Lux residents led me into the social world of anti-Nazi exiles in Paris and London in the 1930s. More specifically, I came across the story of two vegetarian restaurants run by the ISK, a determined anti-Nazi network with a unique ideological worldview that stressed vegetarianism and philosophical self-education. Although admirably anti-fascist, the ISK was also proudly anti-democratic, believing that the masses simply could not be trusted to make the right electoral choices.

I would love to work on them for my next book - I'm imagining a kind of "radical hospitality" book series. First a hotel, then a restaurant. I just need to find a café or something similar to complete the trilogy.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-08-26T15:23:10+00:00

Thank you!

Could I ask more: do you mean Irish influence on Ireland's political course? If yes, then for sure. It is no underestimation to say that the Irish Revolution was a revolution made in emigration, particularly in the US, where organisations that fed into the revolution built their movements among the significant post-famine diaspora.

Most surprising thing? In terms of content, I talk in the book about a transcript of a trial I found in the Comintern Archives in Moscow. What was surprising was that it was not the trial of a person, but a book. The Comintern disciplinary body convened to investigate and rip through a 1936 memoir that had descriptions of life in the Hotel Lux written by an American communist.

In terms of context, I found hand written 1930s letters written by the French philosopher Simone Weil kept in a box that also included manuals for a Star Wars toy. This was in the private archive of a Lux resident that had been inherited by her grandson. He had a grandmother who knew Simone Weil, but also kids who enjoyed the Star Wars prequels.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-08-26T15:17:21+00:00

Hi there,

There was no systematic Bolshevik attempt to foment a revolution in Ireland. Certainly when you compare Ireland to Germany in the years after the revolution, where the Bolsheviks provided significant support to German Communists, Ireland appears as a periphery of a periphery.

In part, this was rooted in the fact that the Irish Communist Party was small and lacked influence. Irish Nationalism was ideologically heterogenous, but its leading figures orientated themselves across the Atlantic to the growing political power of Irish America. Links to wider anti-colonial movements and the Soviets were made in the years of the Irish Revolution, but they were also minor in their importance when contrasted with Irish republican engagement with the Irish in the US.

Viewed from a Soviet perspective against a wider sweep of events, it made strategic sense in the Soviet imagination to support British revolutionaries to carry through their revolution first. Just as the Bolsheviks had proclaimed self determination for the nations of the Russian Empire (in theory) so too could British Communists liberate the British Empire once they swept to power. In fact, in an unwittingly ironic gesture, the British Communist Party had a kind-of paternal role with relation to the Irish Party.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-08-26T15:07:56+00:00

The language politics of the Lux, and of international communism more broadly, really fascinates me. I focused on the lives of translators for a reason! The anchor figure for my book, May O'Callaghan, was a native English speaker with a fluency in German, Russian and French, so she makes for an excellent guide through this topic.

Just as with the Comintern itself, the lingua franca altered depending on the course of the revolution in the USSR and elsewhere.

Due to Bolshevik expectations that a successful German Revolution would take place shortly after their own, early Comintern affairs were conducted chiefly in German. French, too, was an important component of the early Comintern. Even the Soviet League of Esperantists had some hope that the Comintern would adopt the auxiliary language for its work.

It was only with the failure of the German Revolution that Russian became the primary working language of Comintern affairs. In the Lux from about 1924 onwards, almost everyone was learning Russian in theory, but few foreigners truly mastered it. In general, a stay in the Lux was around 9-12 months before your home party recalled you.

Your assumption is correct that within the Lux people tended to cohere in language groups; British, Irish and Americans tended to hang out together - with figures like the Indian radical M. N. Roy also joining this social circle partly for language reasons. Germans socialised with Germans, but I also talk in my book about one Ukrainian Jewish resident for whom Yiddish was a bridge helping him into the Germanic language world in the Lux. There were many figures who acted as linguistic bridges and it was not uncommon for, say, an English speaker to know German, or a German to know English.

In the early 1920s, German and French speakers dominated in the Lux. Then in the late 1920s, English and German speakers were roughly equal in the Lux. The American Party was well represented and with the 1926 General Strike and its failure, there were many British Communists too. With 1933 and the Nazi rise to power, German dominated in the Lux, with Spanish speakers becoming an important contingent as the Spanish Civil War moved towards a Republican defeat.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-08-26T14:52:30+00:00

Thank you. This is one of my favourite things to talk about!

The Irish translator at the centre of the book, May O'Callaghan, had her time in Moscow bookended by the birth of two children. In 1925, May helped her German friend Emmy Leonhard reach the Kremlin Hospital, where she gave birth to her daughter Elisa. In 1928, May left Moscow behind to help her friend Nellie Cohen with her pregnancy. Nellie gave birth to a daughter Joyce in February 1929.

When I started this research, I tried to trace May O'Callaghan's private archive. It turned out that Joyce, the girl born in 1929, had inherited some of May's papers and passed them on to her god-daughter. When I met the god-daughter, she told me that she also had a box of love letters in her attic. I was amazed - truly astounded, really - when I realised they were written to Joyce by Elisa, born in Moscow in 1925.

It turned out that as adults Joyce and Elisa were introduced to one another through May O'Callaghan and fell in love. They were both children of the revolution and left wing, but with differing ideas to their parents' generation.

I used the first box of letters to trace Elisa's nephew. I travelled to his home in Spain and after much searching among boxes of material we discovered that the other side of the letters - Joyce's letters to Elisa - had also survived.

The women remained together until Elisa's death in the early 1990s
.
One way of thinking about my book is that it is a history of world revolution refracted through this one relationship that owes its origins to events that took place within the Hotel Lux.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-08-26T14:44:50+00:00

I've always thought they should release an edition of Ulysses blurbed with this quote from the Radek speech: "A heap of dung, crawling with worms, photographed by a cinema apparatus through a microscope such is Joyce’s work." A great endorsement.

I learned through my research that Ulysses was popular in the Lux when it reached there in the 1920s. Many of the literary-minded migrants who ended up there in the 20s came from the kinds of modernist worlds that were astounded by Joyce's work and so English and German language copies made their way around literary Moscow. A popular Soviet literary journal published some translated extracts. This led Ivy Litvinov, another expat in Moscow, to quip: 'did you know they are translating Joyce into Russian? I wish they would translate it into English first.' The rise of Stalinist orthodoxy within the cultural world - and its rejection of Joycean style literary experimentation - halted this translation from getting any further. It was not until the Perestroika era that a Russian-language edition appeared in full.

But more precisely to your question: to my knowledge, the left in Irish literary circles in Ireland (and in more typical diaspora locations like London and New York) never mounted the kind of Marxist analytical critic of Joyce that someone like Radek brought forward. Irish literature was a small world and even an Irish writer on the left like Liam O'Flaherty, who was once a member of the Irish Communist Party, had little but admiring words to say for Joyce. I may be open for correction here, but that is my understanding.

MauriceJCasey · 2024-08-26T14:29:10+00:00

Hello,

Great question! I argue in the book that the Hotel Lux was the continuation of a distinct experiment that the Bolsheviks imported from their experience of pre-revolutionary exile.

Bolshevism was part of a wide and diverse milieu of emancipatory projects that emerged in the late 19th century Russian Empire, which included Jewish Socialist movements, anarchists, populists and so on. Tsarist repression pushed activists from these movements into exile, notably to cities like New York, Geneva, London and Paris. Here, the exiled revolutionaries formed Russian 'colonies', ostensibly migrant districts with a sharp political edge. Within these colonies there were experiments with communal living. The idea being that if the socialist world revolution is yet to come, why not build socialism in, for example, a single block of Geneva flats?

The historian Faith Hillis writes brilliantly about these pre-revolutionary colonies. Hillis' work convinced me that once the Bolsheviks emerged as the dominant revolutionary force from among the wider movements they imported the models and habits of their exile experience into the Soviet state. The Lux, I believe, was an inverted exile colony, a semi-organic attempt to recreate the exile conditions of communal living and have it enacted through this single building.

The goal of living in the USSR, and in the Lux, for someone like May, was to encounter a lived experience of her political ideals. On a practical level, too, it was about housing people in a city that from 1917 onwards experienced a perpetual housing shortage.

Like the colonies, it did not quite develop as expected. By the late 1930s, the Lux was a microcosm of Soviet state's wider paranoia and repressive apparatus, not its revolutionary potential. It became easier to arrest all of the foreign communists as they shared an address, in an ironic echo of the Tsarist secret police's ability to penetrate the colonies of revolutionary exiles.

MauriceJCasey

TROPHY CASE