I recently revisited archive notes I compiled on Russian Revolutionary returnees: Russian Empire-born emigrants who decided to return home from Western Europe and the US following the collapse of Tsarism.
Many know the stories of people like Emma Goldman, the anarchist deported back to Russia from the US during the 1919 Red Scare, or Maxim Litvinov, the Bolshevik diplomat sent home in a prisoner exchange with the British spy Bruce Lockhart. Many more know about Lenin arriving at Finland Station following the February Revolution.
But there was also a largely forgotten migration of former citizens of the Russian Empire who made their perilous way across Europe to their former homelands in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 Revolutions.
They were a ragtag band of labourers, poets, trade unionists, translators and other assorted minor players in the revolutionary drama, whose roles did not merit a place on a sealed train carriage bound for Petrograd.
Many passed through the Northern Underground, a revolutionary ‘underground railroad’ of sorts that a previous generation of political exiles created to smuggle books and people into the Russian Empire through Scandinavia and Finland.
I found these revolutionary return emigrants mostly through their anketii, questionnaires they were obliged to fill out after transiting across the Soviet frontier.
Often, this is the only place in the archive I have been able to find them: brief insights into working-class lives captured at what must have been a moment of profound transition, moving from the old world into an exciting and unpredictable future.
Here are a couple of suggestive life stories from my notes
Polya Samuelovich Solovitchich: Born in Odesa, 1891, crosses into Soviet territory in March 1921. On his questionnaire he described nationality as Jewish. Solovitchich spent 16 years in London and claimed to have participated in the 1905 revolution in Odesa. From 1917 to 1918 he was on a Russian emigrant’s committee in London. Included in his folder is a blue party card for the communist group the Workers’ Socialist Federation, headed by Sylvia Pankhurst.
Philip Kandler: Date and place of birth unknown, returns to Russia in September 1917 after two decades in England. Kandler claimed to have been an anarcho communist from 1906-1913 and a Communist Party member from October 1918. He fought against ‘Cossacks’ in Ukraine in the Red Army alongside other Jewish soldiers, first in Kyiv and later Nikolaev. He also claimed to have translated Oscar Wilde into Yiddish. Kandler wrote an autobiographical statement that is included in his folder and dated to May 1920:
‘After the defeat of the Russian Revolution in 1905 all of London was flooded with Revolutionary Political emigrants a lively revolutionary movement began in England. I first entered the the Jewish Speaking Anarchist Communist group getting gradually acquainted with socialist literature and new horizons appeared before me and with great enthusiasm I began my life as a Revolutionist.’
P. Kandler, ‘My Past’, 31 May 1920, Russian State Archive for Socio-Political History, f. 495, op. 198, d. 902 l. 5
At the end of the statement, Kandler requested permission ‘to return to England with full knowledge as a Professional Instructor of the Communist Platform and knowing that the unions of England are still rocked in their conservative cradle’.
Kandler and Solovitchich raise a number of research questions I’ve not yet found the sources to answer. The chief question I have: what became of them? It was a question I had hoped to answer in a research project on the return emigrants, now shelved indefinitely.
But who knows, maybe one day I’ll be able to return to the archives where I can trace the afterlives of obscure people like Kandler and Solovitchich.
Exile has become, once more, a prominent feature of Russian political lives (a process detailed in Arkady Ostrovskii’s podcast Next Year in Moscow)
If the likes of my post-1917 returnees remind us of anything, it’s that unlikely returns are sometimes made possible in unexpected moments.