The mystery is not why Trotsky was at the reception in Brownsville, Brooklyn but who had arranged it. The staff members of Forverts, including its editor-in-chief, Abraham Cahan, were based predominantly in Manhattan. Ludwig Lore, another of his regular contacts at Forverts, was holed-up at 55th Street, some six miles west in Borough Park. Furthermore,…
Category: Russia
Unravelling Trotsky’s Stay in New York, Jan-March 1917 – Part I
An article written by rights activist, Henry Moskowitz, in February 1918, said that to understand Leon Trotsky’s infamous sudden visit to the Lower East Side of New York in January the previous year, you also had to understand the local landscape upon which his “powerful figure” was “silhouetted”. Its streets “were black with men, women…
Nachman Syrkin arrives in New York
After a closer look at travel records it appears that Alexei Sheftel was joined in New York by one of Chaim Weizmann’s closest allies, the Socialist Zionist, Nachman Syrkin, who immediately prior to moving to America had spent much of his time in London and Berlin. Press reports in July and August 1907 see him…
Alexis Sheftel’s Stars and Stripes Revolution
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…
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…
George Shanks and the Protocols Matrix
On the 100th anniversary of the book being exposed as a forgery, a recent discovery I made in the archives in Dublin suggests that the 1920 British translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (The Jewish Peril) was not the work of ‘lone wolf’ anti-Semite George Shanks, but part of a sophisticated propaganda…
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…
‘Zionism versus Bolshevism’ – Winston Churchill, Illustrated Sunday Herald
Content warning: In the following story and podcast I am going to be shining the spotlight on some very unpleasant material. We’ll be dealing with issues of race and ethnicity, so use your discretion and prioritize your wellbeing. Churchill’s ‘Zionism versus Bolshevism’ for the Illustrated Sunday Herald must rank as one of the most controversial…