The year is 1903, Tsarist Russia is in political turmoil and in a small office in Clerkenwell a man called Vladimir Ulyanov is scribbling about revolution.
April 22 marks the 150th birthday of Ulyanov, better known by his pseudonym, Lenin. The founder of the USSR made his mark in Moscow but many of his revolutionary ideas developed in Islington.
To commemorate the occasion, the Marx Memorial Library is holding a series of events in April, including a film screening about Lenin’s life and a lecture from a Cambridge University academic Dr David Lane.
Lenin spent much of the time between 1902 and 1905 in North London. He lived in Percy Circus, near King’s Cross, and is rumoured to have met Stalin for the first time in The Crown Tavern on Clerkenwell Green in 1905.
While that anecdote is disputed, we do know that from 1902 to 1903 Lenin edited Iskra, or ‘Spark’, in Clerkenwell. The revolutionary newspaper took its name from the Russian poet Alexander Odoevsky’s quip, “from a spark a fire will flare up”. Lenin led the publication for several years, managing a team of exiled Russians in a small office at 37a Clerkenwell Green, where the Marx Memorial Library is now based.
Through the newspaper, the exiled Marxist championed socialist revolution and political freedom in his homeland. It was the first publication to advocate violence as a means of obtaining a socialist Russia. Iskra was smuggled into the country and quickly became the most successful underground Russian newspaper. The publication stoked discontent with Tsar Nicholas II’s reign and recruited activists to Lenin’s cause.
His legacy lives on at the offices where Iskra was edited. The building now houses the Marx Memorial Library, home to the UK’s largest collection of Marxist, socialist and communist literature. A Lenin room contains busts of the revolutionary, old editions of Iskra and copies of his other writings.
The Library will host Dr Lane on 18 April and trade unionist Jonathan White on 23 April to discuss Lenin’s life and legacy in Islington. All events will be live-streamed if coronavirus social distancing recommendations are extended beyond March.
To coincide with Lenin’s birthday, the Library has also raised £55,000 in donations to repair the damage from a flood to the Library in September, according to Meirian Jump, the library manager and archivist.
Jump says Londoners still have plenty to learn from the USSR’s founder: ““We’re a library of socialism and the working class movement and Lenin had some things to say on that topic that are worth keeping in mind.”
London was receptive to exiled revolutionaries in a way that other European countries were not. Lenin was also able to obtain books from the British Museum reading room that were confiscated in Russia and other European capitals and trade unionists in Britain provided the revolutionaries with financial backing.
Jump points out that Clerkenwell “has an interesting history as a gathering place near to the City of London”, where revolutionaries would meet before going into the city centre.
Beyond Clerkenwell, there are plenty of Islington locales with links to the Russian Revolution.
At The Three Johns pub in Angel, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks clashed in 1903. Fifty Russian Revolutionaries met there in August 1903 to discuss the path forward for revolution. At this point, the Russian revolutionary movement split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
Lenin led the Bolsheviks, who advocated hard-line, centralised political party, against the Mensheviks, a group in favour of a more democratic, broader-based movement that targeted reform over revolution. Lenin lost a vote on party membership in the pub and left the Iskra editorial staff. But the Bolsheviks would go on to isolate and defeat their revolutionary rivals.
Today Islington’s left-wing traditions and its history of high-stakes political meetings live on. In a more civilised meeting than in The Three Angels, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown met in Granita restaurant on Upper Street in 1994 to strike a gentleman’s agreement. Over fish and a bottle of wine, the pair agreed that Brown would not run for the Labour leadership, allowing Blair to lead the party to power in 1997.
Today, Islington remains red. Jeremy Corbyn and Emily Thornberry have lived in the borough for decades. Both have visited the Marx Memorial Library and Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell is its vice-president.
But if recent election results are anything to go by, the Left’s chances of a Leninist power grab are few and far between.
