David McCullagh reviews Maurice J. Casey's new book Hotel Lux, subtitled An Intimate History of Communism's Forgotten Radicals.
This book is crammed full of stories of fascinating people who led extraordinary lives – and yet one of the main characters is actually a building. The Hotel Lux of the title is described by author Maurice Casey as "the most remarkable hotel in modern history", and it’s not an exaggeration.
The hotel in central Moscow was used as "a boarding house for the international revolutionary elite", and it is here in the 1920s that we meet a vast cast of characters from across the world, who wanted to witness the birth of the Soviet Union, and work for the revolution which they believed would transform the world for the better.
Idealistic and committed, they complained about the Hotel Lux’s severe lack of bathrooms, and severe over-supply of bedbugs and rodents. And yet, they were better fed than most Russians at the time and were largely oblivious to the state coercion that was even then – pre-Stalin – being imposed on ordinary citizens.,
Among them was an Irishwoman, May O’Callaghan, a native of Wexford, who had spent time in Vienna before the First World War, and then London, where a job with the radical feminist Sylvia Pankhurst led her to meet sisters Nellie and Rose Cohen, raised in London’s East End by Jewish parents who had fled Tsarist Russia. Rose would become an undercover agent for the Communist International, the Comintern, but would later be executed on trumped up charges during the Stalinist Terror. Nellie would remain May’s lifelong friend.
In the late summer of 1924, May travelled to Moscow to take up a job with the Comintern where she would eventually rise to be head of English translation – the highest position attained in the organisation by an Irish person.
The central characters in this book are not by any stretch of the imagination leading figures, which is part of the appeal of their story.
The mid-1920s were an exciting time to be in Moscow – the Civil War was over, Stalinist repression was still in the future, and the Comintern, and the Hotel Lux, were full of idealistic people from many nations, sincerely believing that they were helping achieve a new, and better, world.
Among them was the third major figure in the book, Emmy Leonhard, born into privilege in Hamburg, who later participated in the abortive socialist revolution in Germany in 1918. She became romantically involved with a (separated, but still married) Dutch trade union leader. When she became pregnant, Soviet Russia, where the stigma of illegitimacy had been abolished, was an attractive destination. She had her first child, Elisa, there – her taxi fare to hospital, and her medical bills, were paid by her neighbour in the Hotel Lux, May O’Callaghan. Despite later ideological differences, the two women would remain close friends for the rest of their lives. Emmy eventually settled in Switzerland.
This photo shows Elisa, a woman born in Moscow in 1925, arm in arm with the love of her life Joyce.
— Maurice J Casey (@MauriceJCasey) August 29, 2024
Taken on Dublin's O'Connell Bridge around 1963, I found it in a garden shed in Galicia in 2021.
Let me tell you how 🧵 1/ pic.twitter.com/5Uc88GraVO
Years later, Emmy recalled the leading Bolsheviks she had met at the Hotel Lux – Nikolai Bukharin, Karl Radek, Leon Trotsky – who became victims of the Great Terror. "Stalin was also among them, but he was so uninteresting and unimportant that nobody ever thought that he was going to destroy all the others."
In 1927, May returned to London, where she introduced Nelly Cohen to her friend, the Irish writer Liam O’Flaherty. After a one-night stand, Nelly became pregnant (unknown to O’Flaherty). May tried to bring her to Moscow but found she was unable to return because she was the subject of rumours of Trotskyite leanings (apparently spread by office rivals anxious to steal her job). Instead they went to New York, where Nelly’s daughter Joyce was born, before returning to Britain.
Two girls then, Emmy’s daughter Elisa and Nelly’s daughter Joyce, connected by May and by the Hotel Lux, but living in different countries. In a twist which would be deemed too much of a coincidence for fiction, in the 1960s Joyce and Elisa became romantically involved and had a long and loving relationship.
Those are the bare bones of an astonishing tale that also serves as a good history of communism and of opposition to fascism in the first half of the twentieth century.
The central characters in this book are not by any stretch of the imagination leading figures, which is part of the appeal of their story. They were the foot soldiers of communism, and there is, as Casey argues, virtue in finding out just why they were attracted to the cause, and why some at least of them stuck with it even after the purges of the 1930s disillusioned many around the world.
As Casey explains in the introduction, the book also tells the story of how he followed the trail of his characters, not just through archives from Moscow to California, but also to an attic in the Cotswolds and a garden shed in Galicia, where he uncovered love letters, poems, children’s drawings, and other clues to help him put the jigsaw together.
His search began with a cryptic reference to an Irishwoman working in the Comintern and living in the Hotel Lux. The details of how he traced May O’Callaghan’s story is fascinating, while Casey is an engaging companion as he deals with snowstorms, a pandemic, and an orthodox Communist fellow-researcher in a Moscow archive.
As the latter observes of a file Casey had just unearthed from the Comintern files, "That’s a find". So is this book.
Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism's Forgotten Radicals is published by Footnote Press
