A detailed look at Father Georgy Gapon, the Russian Orthodox priest who led the Bloody Sunday Revolution in 1905 and who was brutally murdered in March 1906. This essay explores the various responses to his death and the role it may have played in the development of Russia’s Zionist and Revolutionary movements. At two o’…
Category: Russia
Death of Gapon Part II — The Assassin’s Tale
Manuilov & Rachkovsky As a journalist in Paris, Manuilov had found himself in the employ of Vladimir Burtsev’s nemesis, Pyotr Rachkovsky, the notorious chief of Russia’s Secret Police in Europe.[1] It was also Manuilov, by this time a very able and experienced intriguer, who had played a central part of Gapon’s alleged plans to re-start…
Death of Gapon Part III — Bialystok. Was Gapon antisemitic?
Passover in Western Europe would have started on April 9th and ended on April 17th. But again, it’s hard to draw any firm conclusions about the time and the date that Rutenberg chose to murder Gapon. It was a vaguely religious period for both Jews and Christians, and as we saw at Kishinev, it was…
J.G. ROBIN — The Incredible Rise and Fall of the Ukrainian Gatsby
The scholar Thomas P. Riggio was among the first to explore the similarities between Theodore Dreiser’s Mr X in Twelve Men and Fitzgerald’s titular hero, Jay Gatsby, but few if any have explored Robin’s life in any real detail. This mini-book takes a look at the life and times of the sky-rocket millionaire from his…
Trotsky in Brownsville, Brooklyn, February 1917
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,…
Modernism under Surveillance. A look at some ‘Literary Bolsheviks’ of the 1920s.
During the war, the essayist and critic H. L. Mencken was quizzed on several occasions about his German heritage and the contact he had with ‘enemy’ oculist Dr Wilhelm Sohler and Victor Hugo Erpf, a Baltimore businessman who had been arrested and imprisoned as a spy in April 1917. By this point in time, Mencken…
Storms of a Russian Spring — Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky, Maxim Gorky and Pinchas Rutenberg
Benzion Netanyahu, father of Binyamin Netanyahu served as chief aide and secretary to Ukrainian defence organizer, Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky, the leader of the rightwing Revisionist breed of Zionism, precursor to the now-ruling Likud party. This essay explores the role played by the 1905 Revolution in the creation of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine. The energetic…
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…
Leon Goldman, Iskra and the Spark That Lit a Massacre
The socialist revolutionary, Leon Isaakovich Goldman, arrived in Kishinev (modern-day Chișinău) in May 1901, approximately two years before the infamous Kishinev Massacre, a murderous attack on Jews that was every bit as savage as the pogrom of October 7. Leon’s arrival in the town followed a secret trip to Munich, where he had met and…
Sir Bernard Pares Russophile, Adventurer … Secret Agent
The role played by scholar, academic and adventurer Bernard Pares in Britain’s relationship with Imperial Russia and the signing of the Anglo-Russian Convention continues to be overlooked in popular history. This article explores the complex relationship between Pares’ groundwork for the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce in 1907, the British Russia Bureau during the First World…