Review of Feliks Volkhovskii: A Revolutionary Life by Michael Hughes

Published in SCRSS Digest, Issue SD-33, Spring 2025 (journal of the Society for Co-operation in Russian & Soviet Studies)

Book Reviews

 

Feliks Volkhovskii: A Revolutionary Life

By Michael Hughes (Open Book Publishers, 2024, 336pp; ISBN: 978-1-80511-194-8, Pbk, £22.95; ISBN: 978-1-80511-196-2, pdf free to download at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0385)

This new book is the result of the interest in Feliks Volkhovskii pursued for many years by Professor Michael Hughes of Lancaster University, searching many archives around the world (in his own words). It is extraordinarily rich in detail and digression, supported by a forest of footnotes, which at times make the text rather indigestible.

The reader will gain insights into the nature of revolutionary activity in Russia and in late nineteenth-century London, where so many Russian revolutionaries found sanctuary in exile. The most famous are Alexander Herzen (1812–1870), who lived in London from 1852 to 1865 where he published The Bell, and Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin, 1870–1924), who, as I outline below, travelled to London on five occasions from 1902 to 1911.

Hughes, an Anglican lay reader, has written on Anglo-Russian relations, especially those between Anglicanism and Orthodoxy. His previous monograph was a biography of Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1903 to 1928 (Routledge, 2017).

In his preface, Hughes writes: “I am perhaps an unlikely biographer of a revolutionary like Volkhovskii. Much of my work over the past few decades has focused on individuals who were firmly ensconced in the social and political establishment of their assorted homelands. I have also spent a good deal of time exploring the lives of conservative-minded figures who sought refuge from the chaos of modernity in an imagined world of social harmony and order.”

Volkhovskii was a lesser-known Russian revolutionary, who was born in July 1846 in Poltava in central Ukraine and died in August 1914, at the age of 68, in London. His family had a mixed heritage of Polish-speaking Catholics and Russian Orthodox. Through his close relations with household serfs, he became fluent in Ukrainian, and this helped to fuel his hatred of the Russian autocracy.

He was first arrested aged 21 in 1868, though soon released, as his activity was judged not to be revolutionary. In 1871–72 he was accused of fomenting student unrest and spent two years in prison awaiting trial, but was acquitted and moved to Odessa. He was arrested again in 1874 and taken to Moscow, and was in prison in Moscow and then St Petersburg. In 1877 he was a defendant in the ‘Trial of the 193’, was sentenced to exile in Siberia, where he spent two years, before settling in Tomsk in 1881. In 1889 he escaped first to Toronto, then in 1890 to London, where he spent the rest of his life. He initiated the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, and its newspaper Free Russia, which attracted the support of the liberal elite.

In 1901–2 Volkhovskii became active in the Socialist Revolutionary Party (the SRs), but was already too ill to play any part in the 1905 Revolution in Russia. He was a prolific writer for newspapers and journals, especially on literature, but “seldom touched on questions of ideology or revolutionary tactics narrowly understood”.

In 1902–3 Lenin lived in London, and edited the revolutionary newspaper Iskra in the building which is now the Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell, where his office has been preserved. He took part in the fateful 1903 second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), where it split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Lenin returned to London in April–May 1905 for the third Congress of the RSDLP, and in May–June 1907 for its fifth Congress, at which there were 366 delegates. His fifth and final visit was in November 1911.

In 1908, working in the British Museum Library on his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin lived on the first floor of what is now 36 Tavistock Place, WC1 (formerly numbered 21), where – with the Mayor of Camden – I unveiled a blue plaque in 2012. The plaque, the initiative of the Marchmont Association, reads: “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1870–1924, founder of the USSR, lived here in 1908.”

Volkhovskii never met Lenin, and they would have had little in common.

Bill Bowring