Less than 72 hours after the missing police chief’s daughter Barbara Lopukhin knocked at the door of Woburn Place and reassured everyone of her safety, Hastings compositor Alexis Sheftel boarded the RMS Lusitania in Liverpool and made the three thousand mile journey in steerage to start a new life in New York. The date was…
Category: Alexis Sheftel
The Barbara Lopukhin Kidnap Plot
Little more than a year after the Russian Free Library’s Alexei Teplov found himself dodging spies in Hastings, the seaside resort and its neighbour Bexhill on Sea, would feature in a more sinister tale of counter-espionage, when the daughter of the former Director of the Department of Police (Fontanka) in St Petersburg and Kishinev, Aleksey…
Spy Comedy in Hastings
On January 27th 1905, the Daily News announced that a “special staff of Russian police spies” had arrived in London. [1] The following month, the New York Times and The Daily Express would publish a more detailed report based on an interview with Vladimir Burtsev’s colleague, Georgii Ivanovich Rabinovitch, claiming much the same thing, only…
Jaakoff Prelooker — Under the Russian and British Flags
What brought Alexis Sheftel to Hastings is likely to consist of little more than guesswork but there are some clues, some of which bring us back round to bomb-making librarian, Alexei Teplov and his life after leaving Paris. But before we do that, we first need to take a look at the man who was…
Alexis Sheftel and the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom
In March 1901, a petition was published by a group of Russian exiles as part of a protest at the compulsory drafting of 183 students at Kiev University into the Tsar’s imperial army. According to a report that accompanied the petition, the same fate had befallen a further twenty-five students of St Petersburg University. According…
The Massels of Manchester and New York
Just how Alexis Sheftel found himself among the revolutionary exiles in London remains something of a mystery, but it’s possible that his dedication to the printing business may have had its roots in Ukraine, the country of his birth. One of the most active presses in Sheftel’s hometown of Kiev and Berdichev was the ‘Sheftel…