Under Large Candelabra

Charlie Taylor reviews “Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals” by Maurice J. Casey.

By Charlie TaylorNovember 26, 2024

• History

• Politics

UNDER THE LARGE candelabra of the Aleksandrovsky Hall, a motley mix of émigré translators transliterated the Russian revolution. Ruth Kennell, an activist from East London, wrote back from Moscow describing the room as a “staff of men and women from every country of the world.” Their presence appeared to be a literal symbol of the revolutionary 1920s; signing off her letter, she exclaimed: “What a paradise Moscow is for the rebels and outcasts of the capitalist world!”

For a brief period in the 1920s, the intermixing of East London suffragettes, Irish radicals, American and English communists, Dutch trade unionists, and anti-colonial activists was not as unusual as you might expect. For historian Maurice J. Casey, the Hotel Lux, a boarding house for the new international revolutionary elite, offers a starting point to rethink the interconnectedness of a series of radical, ostensibly different lives. By centering on one Moscow hotel, Casey’s new group biography, Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals, enables the start of a story that transcends borders, nations, oceans, and continents.

Following the 1917 revolution, the new Soviet state sought to bring in a series of foreign language specialists for its publications and propaganda. After the formation of the Communist International (Comintern) in March 1919, a call was sent out to a range of subsidiary parties across the world for national communist parties to affiliate with the fledgling revolutionary state. Based in Moscow, Comintern sought to become the administrative center of the coming world revolution. The Hotel Lux, requisitioned by the state as one of the “Palaces of the Soviets,” became a true melting pot of the fledgling international revolution.

Day-to-day life in the Lux, however, was a far cry from the parties, soirees, and literary gatherings that often characterize retellings of émigré life in Moscow. Comintern officials were obsessed with the interpretation of meaning and the accuracy of translation in its official documents and propaganda. Many émigrés worked in a chain of continuous interpretation, in which an army of translators ferried papers and transcriptions to give delegates direct translation of speeches at congresses. Far from glamorous revolutionary activity, being an activist in Moscow was often defined by monotonous, deskbound administrative work.

Mediated by letter correspondence, unpublished memoirs, postcards, and autobiographies, Casey’s story filters through a truly immense amount of archival research. The historian uncovers friendships and relationships that, once forged in the Lux, withstood the tests to come. “The life of each guest who entered the hotel provides the historian with a kaleidoscopic impression of the twentieth century,” he writes, and spanning from war to revolution, we are provided with a snapshot of a solidarity practiced not only in words but also in deeds. Casey’s focus on the emotionality of revolutionary experience therefore builds out from an analysis of revolutionary friendship, and how it formed the basis for genuinely transnational and trans-ideological bonds.

Alongside its function as a meeting point for international revolutionaries, the Lux became an enclave for the political experimentation of the early 1920s, as living in proximity to radicals from across the world transformed many of the guests ideologically. Visiting Moscow provided a chance not just to see the revolution in action but also to talk to like-minded activists about their shared hopes of changing the world. In a letter back home to her mother, Kennell emphasized how a walk through Moscow at night was tinged with revolutionary energy, as “the red banner fluttered like flames through the thick snowflakes.”

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Such a setup could threaten to become a rise-and-fall narrative, recounting how a series of early utopian hopes are undermined by a series of missteps by hopeful and often naive revolutionaries. Yet Casey’s sensitive archival reconstructions avoid these standard tropes in historiography. Privileging more casual encounters from private soirees and bedroom parties to transatlantic voyages, Casey presents the early dreams of a generation of communists as more than just a series of competing ideological platforms, revolutionary slogans, or dialectical images; rather, participation in revolutionary politics is conceptualized from the interpersonal bonds that built solidarity. The framework allows for a humanistic account of a story so often dominated by ideologues and bureaucrats.

Joseph Freeman’s account of his time at the Lux (published in 1936 as An American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics) contains a footnoted reference to an Irish radical who had worked in Comintern under the pseudonym “O’C.” For his part, Casey finds it unusual that someone who “had moved in the radical literary and political circles of Dublin and London” makes up little more than an insignificant reference. Tracing down the name to an archival database of personal papers, Casey finds a reference in the archival catalog of an American librarian who had lived in Moscow in the 1920s. The scanned letters finally reveal the name behind the pseudonym: May O’Callaghan.

Born in Ireland in 1881, O’Callaghan had followed her older sister to Austria where she studied at the University of Vienna and tutored students in English. Traveling back to London at the behest of her sister’s husband, with the idea of going on to the United States to help his shipping business, she was kept in the city by the outbreak of World War I. In need of work, she replied to an advertisement for a subeditor position at the feminist journal The Woman’s Dreadnought, then run by the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst. At 400 Old Ford Road, in London’s East End, we meet Casey’s other main protagonists: the sisters Nellie and Rose Cohen. Nellie Cohen was a secretary to Pankhurst; all it took was a radical employer, a job posting, and a shared flat between Cohen and O’Callaghan to connect these disparate and unexpected revolutionaries to Moscow.

May O’Callaghan arrived in Moscow in 1924, her hotel room overlooking Tverskaya Street. With a front row seat to the drama of late-1920s Soviet politics, and an ear to a series of global radicals who would traverse the Lux, she is an ideal historical protagonist and, luckily for Casey, left behind a wealth of previously unused archival material. Over time, her connections grew through attending parties and readings; she soon became a regular around literary Moscow. Few could have expected that one of the best-connected foreigners to the Soviet avant-garde had come from a coastal village in rural Ireland.

With stories like these, Casey illuminates the ways in which the world of international communism was shaped as much by personal interdependence as it was by rigid political allegiances. A rather old-school view of Moscow as a den of troublesome Bolsheviks, back-alley deals, and espionage is readily dispersed, replaced by a far more nuanced retelling. The sources Casey finds point to a vibrant bohemian social community where like-minded radicals bonded over shared ideals, romantic competition, literary debate, and ultimately friendship.

Much like his radical forebears, Casey, too, traveled to Moscow, accompanying the stories he would uncover. These smaller encounters with the archive provide a nice break between the narrative that unfolds; a snowstorm in Oregon makes a research trip especially difficult, while navigating the Russian archives brings up unexpected finds. As Casey was trying to track down acquaintances of Nellie Cohen’s daughter Joyce Rathbone, who had died in 2010, he came across the website of Armand D’Angour, “a classical scholar interested in ancient music.” It just so happened that Rathbone had been a beloved music teacher in his youth—perhaps even more incredibly, D’Angour was now the dean of Casey’s Oxford college.

Discovering the whereabouts of Rathbone’s personal papers at a nearby cottage in the Cotswolds, Casey uncovers a series of love letters written between Joyce and Elisa Leonhard, whose mothers, Nellie Cohen and Emmy Leonhard, were friends at the Lux in the 1920s. At the heart of this uncovered love story was May O’Callaghan, who had paid for a taxi so that Emmy Leonhard could give birth to Elisa in Moscow. O’Callaghan had similarly brought Cohen to New York to manage her pregnancy with Joyce. Beyond the curtain of world-historical events, the wider reverberations of friendship forged in the Lux had inadvertently brought the two daughters together.

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All too often, the archive remains frustratingly out of reach, a monolith of control and surveillance, of questions that remain unanswered, and often unanswerable. Here, however, a series of incredible archival finds are accompanied by an astute and sensitive historical guide. Privileging a history of emotionality—a history ostensibly of radical friendship—opens up a powerful tale of female resistance and agency. And, by favoring a historical reconstruction based on a litany of egodocuments—sources such as letters, diaries, and memoirs that reveal the subjective historical self, or how individuals construct themselves in relation to their worlds—the egos themselves melt away, mediated by an extremely deft hand that reconstructs their lives as though the story is being told in their own words.

Casey doesn’t shy away from the richness of the material he comes across. Another highlight is a series of children’s newspapers written by Emmy Leonhard’s children during their exile in the Alps after escaping Nazi Germany. Written in English, Dutch, and French, the incredibly serious schoolgirl newspaper, titled the Alpenpost, reveals a series of contemporary political essays, alongside important editorial updates such as a “local news” section, which announced the arrival of a new cat, Tigre. As a fascinating insight into the pastime of two young girls torn from their home and living in exile, it provides unique insight into how children experienced the war years.

Occasionally, it can feel as if the book escapes Casey’s grip. The vastness of this archival exercise illustrates a series of broad arguments that sometimes coalesce over one another. Of these, it is unclear which one to prioritize. In other words, what sits at the core of Casey’s project? Is it an act of remembrance of the revolutionary past (which the Russian state has, historically, tried to sanitize and control for its contemporary political goals); a wider reflection on the historical questions around becoming a revolutionary, with the specific moral compromises such a life involved; or a focus on the personal relationships forged and broken through revolutionary experience?

In Casey’s rendering of these lives, the intellectual and political project of communism comes alive as a vast human project designed to reshape humanity. In the process, it can be hard to separate the image of the early revolution from its aftermath. “[T]his was the crossroads of so many lives and movements,” Casey writes. “All paths to the future still seemed open. More terrible outcomes remained unimaginable.”