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…
Category: Russia
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…
‘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…
Lenin’s London: 6 Oakley Square & Winifrede Gottschalk Paul
In November 1911, Lenin made one of his last visits to London. The future Soviet leader is believed to have been in town to give a lecture on ‘Stolypin and the Revolution’. The lecture took place at King’s Hall in London’s East End, a venue whose popularity with political exiles meant that it had much…
America, My Glorious Land. Poets, Assassins and The American Dream
In 1900, Captain James V. Martin, the man at the centre of the American Relief Administration scandal, published an anti-Expansionist pamphlet sponsored by Andrew Carnegie and William Jennings Bryan. This story explores the unlikely hand of friendship extended by American Populists to Russian Revolutionaries at the time of the McKinley Assassination. No one event, however…
American Relief Administration Scandal – Captain James V. Martin, Herbert Hoover & Russia
The Original Russian Job: The forgotten story of how a ‘secret compact’ between Churchill and America very nearly saved Russia from Lenin and the Soviet Union. This is the story of James V. Martin, an aviation pioneer who blew the whistle on American plans to smash the Bolsheviks at the height of post-war trade negotiations…
A ‘Secret Mission’ to Russia. How F. Scott Fitzgerald very nearly became a spy.
In 1917, F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, was nearly recruited for a covert mission to Russia, posing as a Red Cross secretary for Father Sigourney Fay. The mission, tied to US State Department interests during the Russian Revolution, aimed to gauge religious freedom and political shifts. Complicated by secret diplomacy and escalating…