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Hotel Lux: the guesthouse of world revolution
00:37:27
Maurice J Casey explores the history of a Moscow hotel that hosted revolutionaries from every corner of the world in the years following the Bolshevik Revolution
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- [00:00]
Host
Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. History is often told through the epic struggles of famous personalities or grand movements. But sometimes the voices of ordinary people break through, illuminating the past with a rare intimate light. In this episode, Morris J. Casey speaks to Danny Bird about his new book, Hotel lux, which follows three connected families through the upheavals of the 20th century. Bound by idealism, friendship and love, their journeys begin in 1920s Moscow, inside the legendary titular Hotel Lux, once a sanctuary for international revolutionaries drawn to the Soviet Union's bold vision for a better world.
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Danny Bird
Maurice, your book dives deep into the forgotten stories of the international revolutionaries who lived at the Hotel Luxe in Moscow in the decades following the October Revolution of 1917. How did you even begin to uncover their personal stories? And what were some of the challenges you faced while doing your research?
- [01:14]
Morris J. Casey
Well, Danny, this all began for me back in 2016. I had just started my PhD and my PhD topic was Irish Women and International Communism. My research process was basically I would find old memoirs, archival sources, and I would do a kind of control f and find mentions of Ireland or Irish people or Irish women. And that process more or less led me to an old, out of print communist memoir from 1936 called An American Testament. It was written by a man by the name of Joseph Freeman. He was born in Ukraine in the 1890s and the book described his life from his childhood in Ukraine through to his upbringing in emigration in the tenements of Brooklyn on through to his political journey through Greenwich village of the 1920s and then to Moscow in 1926, where he was billeted a room in the famous Hotel Lux, which was the dormitory of the international revolutionary elite, and particularly those who worked for the Communist International or Comintern. And in Moscow, his boss was an Irish woman who in this memoir he described as OB So I became fixated on who this Irish woman was. I was an expert in this absurdly specific area of Irish women and international communism. And yet I'd never heard of an Irish woman living and working in Moscow in the 1920s. And so I used Joseph Freeman's memoir to crack the case of who this woman was. And I learned that her real name was May O'Callaghan and she lived in room five of the Hotel Lux. And that initial discovery in 2016, that began a seven year long research adventure where I delved not only into Mayo Callaghan's life, but the lives of all the people who she knew when she lived in the Hotel lux in the 1920s.
- [03:26]
Danny Bird
And just on those individuals, were there any key figures, these revolutionaries that you focus on in the book that really moved or inspired you personally?
- [03:36]
Morris J. Casey
I think for me, so many of these lives that I researched in the book were moving and resonant in different ways. One of the genesis moments for the book, I think, being someone who was researching it in my 20s, spending some time in left wing organizations and I always felt in meetings or so on, I always thought to myself, God, these people, they sometimes take themselves a little bit too seriously. And when I discovered May O'Callaghan's world in the Hotel Lux, I saw her, or I read her writing letters where she said something very similar, that these people were taking themselves too seriously. So her world in the Hotel Lux was a world of radicals or revolutionaries, but all of whom saw some levity in the situation and understood that their lives were at times surreal. So the lives that I followed were moving in a sense that I really felt a sense of recognition in what these people were processing in the 1920s. At once trying to live a life that was full of humor and love and affection, but also at the same time living with very weighty ideas and moving towards something which they certainly felt by the late 1920s was a dark cloud that was going to pass over them. One of the lives I look at in the book is Life of Woman Culture. Elise Saborovsky, who was born in East Prussia in the 1880s and she lived in room 350 of the hotel. Elise Zaborovsky is known in Comancher and History for her role in a number of insurrectionary and clandestine movements. In particular a 1936 Brazilian communist insurrection. But what I discovered in researching her life was a different side to this coldly determined, common turn revolutionary. I found these letters that really showed a woman who was enormously vulnerable during her time in the hotel. She was infatuated with a man who didn't return her affections. And she was troubled by the rise of Stalin and by the increasing autocracy as she saw it within the communist movement. And her life as well, as I trace in the book, ends in a very dark place in Nazi Germany. So for me, beginning in that one place in time, the Hotel lux in the 1920s, and tracing the lives beyond it was a way of humanizing these huge ideological shifts and movements through these intimate relationships between the people who were there together in the Hotel Lux.
- [06:19]
Danny Bird
Let's talk a bit about the Hotel Lux itself. How did it end up becoming the so called headquarters of the world revolution and. And who were Some of the interesting characters who passed through its doors.
- [06:29]
Morris J. Casey
So the hotel began its life as a commercial initiative by the Filipov Baking family, who were the bakers to the czars. So in the late era of the Russian Empire, they set up this Hotel Luxe in central Moscow. After the Revolution, the Bolsheviks are in need of spaces to host their revolutionary guests from abroad, to hold their congresses and meetings and. And so they requisition or seize control of the hotel and converted it into the dormitory for visiting revolutionaries coming from abroad. So from 1920 onwards, suddenly this hotel, which used to really appeal to the boutique traveling classes of Europe, now had the insurrectionaries and people fleeing charges of sedition. Many of the major figures of early 20th century communism passed through, through the hotel. A young Ho Chi Minh was there briefly, until some issues with rodents led to him getting a different room. A young Tito as well passed through. And in the late 1930s, what you find is really the first upper echelon of post war East Germany also spends the Second World War in the Hotel Lux. And so you can see the early East German Politburo essentially forms one within the hotel. While all of these leading figures are interesting and the lives in the hotel are very fascinating, everyone who passed through the hotel in the 1920s was in some way extraordinary. You had to be an unusual person to end up there. And what you find in so much of the memoir literature is the extraordinary atmosphere that existed. So M.N. roy, who becomes a leading figure in the Indian National Congress, he lived there in the 1920s and he writes in his memoirs about the absolutely barnstorming parties and how just across the road from the hotel there was an off license, essentially a cooperative store that would sell alcohol to Hotel Lux guests past the kind of legal opening hours. So everyone would run across, get their bottles of wine before it brought down the shutters, and they'd come back to the hotel and they'd push the chairs back and sing songs. And meanwhile you'd have visitors just coming in for the evening, leaving figures Trotsky, Bukharin, all these other figures who wanted to speak with the visiting revolutionaries and chat through the issues of the day that were facing the international movement.
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Danny Bird
Your book captures the whole spectrum, from the idealism to the eventual disillusionment of these communists over the span of the last century. What do you think drew these people to Communism in the first place? And how did they manage the tension between their ideals and the twists and turns of Soviet politics?
- [09:19]
Morris J. Casey
That question for me is the key question that has always kept me so fascinated by this whole history and this whole topic. And in a way, it's a story that you need to tell through each individual. A number of the figures that I look at in the book came from Jewish emigre families. So I look at the Cohen sisters, Nellie and Rose. Their parents were Polish Jewish emigrants who arrived in East London in the 1880s. I look at Joseph Freeman, who I mentioned earlier, whose family left Ukraine in the early 20th century. And so for those families, the Russian Revolution stood for something very specific, which was the end of a regime that had persecuted them and others like them, and the arrival of a supposed era of liberation. And so you find many, many of the Jewish migrants who come to Moscow in the 1920s. For them, it is a journey of ancestral return. Joseph Freeman, when he was living in the Lux and when he was working in the Kremlin palace translating speeches, he recounted being moved to tears when he was in the former palace of the Tsars. And he saw the son of one of his colleagues, a young Jewish boy, playing in this palace. And suddenly he realized that this former headquarters of the people had oppressed his own family, suddenly was home and host to people just like him. So there's that kind of personal connection to the revolution. Then there's people like Mayo Callan, who's the central figure really of the book. She came from a middle class Irish Catholic background, not the kind that you'd expect to find in revolutionary Moscow, but she had spent much of her youth in turn of the century Vienna, which is a real vibrant cultural world. And for her, a lot of what attracted her to Moscow was that sense of cultural experimentation, new forms of drama, new forms of art. And she became very heavily involved in Soviet avant garde circles as a kind of an observer, a participant in the different soirees and parties at the Dachsh that were happening in the 1920s. So really there was such a broad spectrum of reasons that brought people to the Hotel Lux. And really, it was individual to each person. But what united them, what united so many of them, was a sense that they would reflect on later in life that their time in the hotel was a crossroads. It was a moment of hope and expectation and dreams that in many case were later dashed. One thing I traced throughout the book is how people responded to the twists and turns, to the terror of the late 30s, to the later, broader stagnation of the Soviet state. And I've tried to focus on this category of radicals that really fascinated me, people who saw their dreams crash against these really dark and cataclysmic realities and yet still managed to try and think through those original ideas of hope and justice that drew them into the movement and tried to reformulate their politics around those basic principles. And that's why my book doesn't just contain itself within the standard period of the kind of common turn which goes from about 1919 to 1943, but rather looks at people's own lifetimes and looks at how people who became politically active in the 1910s remained in many cases idealistic until the 1960s, the 1970s, when they were in their 80s or even their 90s. And that's always fascinating me, I think, as someone who's living through a historical moment which is full of headlines and news that can make us feel very despondent about the human future. It has been massively meaningful for me to study another generation who experienced something like that, constant reversals in fortune, and yet who held onto that initial kernel of hope, that idea that things changed once before and so they might change once again.
- [13:42]
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Morris J. Casey
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- [14:09]
Host
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- [14:11]
Danny Bird
In details, it's fascinating to think that while these people were involved in global revolutionary movements, they also had to juggle their personal relationships, whether it was family, friendships, or even love. How did their personal lives intersect with their political activism?
- [14:26]
Morris J. Casey
My book subtitle refers to this being an intimate history of this world. And one thing I really wanted to focus was precisely on that idea. How does your personal life, your friendships, your enemies, your families, your lovers, how did your relationships with those people shape your political ideals and vice versa? How does your revolutionary commitment shape your personal relationships? I was very fortunate in the world I started digging into that it had a number of quite complex, sometimes quite radical family setups. So two of the close friends of May O'Callaghan, this woman who lived in room five of the hotel Luxe, were women who had to navigate the raising of children in response to political shifts. So one of the first women she befriended in the Hotel Lux was a German woman called Emmy Leonhard, who arrived to the hotel pregnant with her first daughter, Elisa. Now, Elisa's father was a married man. He was not married to Emmy, the mother of his child. And so she lived in the Soviet state, which was the only state in Europe at that time which didn't have the legal category of childhood illegitimacy. So life in Russia for her was a way of relieving herself of that stigma that existed elsewhere. A similar thing happens with another one of Mae's friends, Nellie Cohen, this woman from an East London Jewish background. She has an affair with one of May's friends, she becomes pregnant. And again, May and Nellie search for a way of navigating childhood beyond social norms at that time and maternal care outside and trying to refute this stigma that's surrounded mothers who raised their children in unusual pairings, like two women, May and Nellie, raising this child. So revolutionary politics gave a legitimation for novel and you could say feminist family projects in a way that really fascinated me. But of course, there was the ideals of what personal relationships would look like in a world of equality and justice role. But then there was the practicalities of the Hotel Luxe being a place where you had often young people in their 20s, some of them away from family, some of them single to begin with, cloistered together. And so there was lots of different relationships that I came across. There was some quite unusual dynamics. Joseph Freeman, who lived in room 349 of the hotel Luxury, on his last night in the hotel, he has a quite rambunctious leaving party, and he ends up sleeping with three women in one night, two of whom, I believe were married. This causes one of his other friends to write a long diatribe on what sex looks like under socialism. So again, it's this. These moments of the personal triggering people to think politically and. And vice versa, people's political thinking compelling them to act in certain ways in their personal relationships, and untangling all that everyday human messiness of what personal life was like in a revolutionary project was really key to this whole book for me and this whole research.
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Danny Bird
One of the most intense parts of your book was how Stalin's paranoia and the purges during the 1930s impacted the residents of the Hotel Luxury. What was the atmosphere like in the hotel during that time and how did it change the international Communist movement?
- [18:13]
Morris J. Casey
I talked earlier about the 20s as a period of hope and parties in the hotel, and that changes drastically by the mid to late 1930s. For one thing, the physical structure of the Hotel changes. So a whole extra floor is added in the early 1930s, which is a useful thing because the hotel does need to expand in size, because after 1933, with the Nazi rise to power, suddenly you have a new need for a whole new cohort of refugees, German revolutionaries fleeing that Nazi rise to power. So the demographics of the hotel becomes filled with these German revolutionaries, and it's really those revolutionaries who bear the brunt of the terror of the late 1930s. And it's why there's quite a bit of German language writing about the hotel memoir, writing in particular, of the generation that survived the 1930s. One diarist that I came across in my research was a Yugoslavian man by the name of Ervin Cinco. He kept a diary of a year or so in the Hotel Lux that just crossed over with the Terror, the most intense year of the terror, really, 1937. And he wrote about being at a gathering in one of the Lux hotel rooms, and he began to critique Stalin's cult of paranoia. And another guest drew him away from the radiator and towards another corner of the room. And it dawned on him that the reason that he was being drawn away from the radiator was because the guests believed that there were listening devices hidden within it. So the walls kind of leak paranoia, in a way, in the 1930s. To give a very simple summary of why the terror of the late 1930s impacts the hotel so severely, it's really that this mass wave of arrests is focused around a paranoid idea that there are saboteurs within the Soviet Union. It's easier to cast foreigners as traitors than Soviet citizens. And while the terror will, of course, sweep all sectors of Soviet society, it has a particularly xenophobic streak, which is why this hotel, which has migrants from all over the world, becomes such a site of arrests. And again, this is how the events of Soviet history play out, even in terms of the physical construction of the hotel itself. There was a wing at the back of the hotel, which in the 1920s was for paying tourists, but by the late 1930s, is being used as a home for wives and children of the men who've been arrested. So for me, this contrast between the lux in the 20s and the 30s, but also the lives of people who passed through the Lux in both phases of its life, really speak to how you can use this one location to tell every aspect of the communist experience in the early 20th century, from this delirious optimism to this terrified disenchantment.
- [21:37]
Danny Bird
You've already touched upon this, but of course you really focus on the human side of these historical figures who would otherwise just be seen through the lens of their political actions. How important was it for you to bring out their personal, more intimate stories?
- [21:52]
Morris J. Casey
When I really went into the archives and I saw the letters that these people wrote to one another and how many of them had survived, I was astonished by how richly textured these letters were, how full of hope and humor and tragedy they were. And I was searching for a narrative style, a way of bringing those vivid fragments of human lives into the scope of the story itself. But I realized as I was researching and as I was writing, this wasn't just a kind of an addition to a political story, it was central to it. How these relationships were navigated were the kernels of what gave people political hope. So I focus, for example, in the book, really throughout the book, this lifelong friendship between these two women, May O'Callaghan and Nellie Cohen, and their radical decision to raise a child together as two women in the late 1920s. And that for them is a decision that can't be separated from their political ideals. And so for me, the personal and the everyday had to be woven into the political story, because one doesn't make sense without the other. It's impossible to really grasp what drew people into that, that movement at that moment, because of course, we see it backwards. We read it through what came of the movement in the 30s, the 40s and the 50s, the mass violence, the atrocities, and the frankly atrocious record of, of that political experiment in the 20th century. And so to really capture what brought people to it, as one of the people who I write about in the book writes, it needs to be recaptured at the living experience of a generation. That's how we cross that sea of blood that separates us from them and begin to get a sense of how this system of beliefs became a whole pattern of lived practices.
- [24:07]
Danny Bird
Looking more broadly now at the history of communism and revolutionary movements, what do you think the experience of these international radicals at Hotel Lux teaches us about political idealism and in solidarity and also of the human cost of ideological struggles?
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Morris J. Casey
Well, I think something that I came to understand through this research was the socialist experiment of the 20th century often gets told as a cautionary tale about the inevitability of human greed and the inevitability of self centered practices of kind of survival, of the fittest style, human nature. But what I discovered in all of my research was, if not a counterpoint, then certainly a corollary, that what is also an irrepressible human trait is this desire for something better, this desire to act in solidarity with other people. And I try to avoid, of course, highlighting certain people as heroes in this story. But naturally, there are some people who emerge from the tale more sympathetic than others. One of the families that are central to the story are the Leonhardt family, who spent the 1930s on Europe's refugee routes because the father in the family, Edo, was organizing the anti Nazi resistance in German maritime networks and on railroads as well. And so I think that that generation of revolutionaries asked questions that we are still asking today. How do we resist the rise of movements built around hatred? How do we build solidarity towards a more just and equitable society? The answers they provided do not provide us with a easily replicable path to achieving success. But it's nonetheless important to think through those questions and to think through why those questions keep recurring and how we might learn from this experience and the tragedy and the trauma to build movements that avoid many of those past mistakes.
- [26:28]
Danny Bird
It's been over 30 years since the breakup of the Soviet Union, and some might say that the legacy of the October Revolution has pretty much all but faded. What do you think the stories of the people at the heart of your book can offer us in the 21st century?
- [26:42]
Morris J. Casey
My book, without spoiling the plot arc of the story, is, at its heart, a love story. And what I was searching for was a different kind of family history. Let's say I was looking for my political ancestors. I wasn't looking for saints and heroes that I could hold up as faultless idols. I was looking for people who were living through a chaotic time, trying to make sense of the world around them, getting things wrong, getting certain things right. And I was looking for echoes and resonance of my own political ideas, but my own political experiences and personal experiences as well. And it never ceased to amaze me just how many of those echoes I found in the archive of those kind of lives of complexity and struggle and messiness. And yet, from all that messiness, I was able to find something incredible, a totally unexpected love story. And that love story became a way for an entire generation of almost disenchanted radicals to see that there was still something just and something that could vindicate the sacrifice of their political lives. And so I've written a book about a political experiment that undoubtedly ended in disaster. And yet I hope I've written it in such a way that you don't finish the book thinking, well, what was all the point of that? I hope you finished the book thinking, there's reason for political hope. There's reason to act as a community and fight for something better, because people did it before and their lives had meaning and value.
- [28:32]
Danny Bird
Finally, Maurice, I'd love to know, what did this research inspire in you personally? You talk in the conclusion, and you've alluded to it here, that there's almost an irrepressible human drive to create a better world. Can you share more on that?
- [28:45]
Morris J. Casey
If we think of the cast of characters in the book, they're not the standard cast of characters for a history of early 20th century radical politics. They're not the ideologues. They were not the major theorists. The world that I look at were the people who did the kind of drudge work of the revolution, the translators, the typesetters, the sub editors, the people who were filing the receipts of the people coming back for the revolutionary missions abroad and for me telling their stories. I found a lot of meaning in those stories because it showed that many different elements go in to building this kind of grand project, and people found value and meaning even in those different kind of minor operations in the grander dream, the grander scheme of things. And so for me, what the book has inspired is both a faith in telling these human stories and the value of giving these people a life beyond the archive. And I hope it inspires people working on other different historical topics as well to find those unnamed people who never believed that they would find their own historian. I hope it inspires other people to be that historian to those kind of unnamed figures, those everyday foot soldiers in the grander projects for a more equal world, many of whom led compromised lives, many of whom held ideas that may look strange just today. But at the same time, that's what makes this all so human and so fascinating. It's that kind of messiness of those lives.
- [30:32]
Host
That was Maurice J. Casey, whose book Hotel An Intimate History of Communism's Forgotten Radicals, is out now, published by Footnote Press.