Our Friends from the East: Russian Revolutionaries and British Radicals, 1852-1917
John Slatter celebrates the far-ranging contributions of Russian political émigrés to British life in the half-century before 1917.
From 1852, when Alexander Gertsen (1812-70) first arrived in Britain, until 1917, there was a constant flow of Russian émigrés to these shores, among them tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from persecution or forced conversion. The large numbers of Russian Jews settling in the East End of London formed a backdrop against which the political drama was played out, but their fates were gradually caught up in British working-class life, with its pressures of poverty and deprivation, and they were forced to adjust and to settle in Britain with more or less willingness just as their hosts were more or less willing to accept them. To that extent, these were immigrants to Britain, not emigrants living within the country.
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