The Spark that Lit the Revolution: Lenin in London and the Politics that Changed the World
By Robert Henderson
IB Tauris, £25
            

Lenin warned against turning leaders into icons after their deaths. Unlike most of the biographies of a man whose ideas increasingly resound amid the world’s accumulating crises, Robert Henderson’s archival snapshots put human flesh on the intellectual and political bones of a figure who remains either revered or hated to this day.

Seeking a base to edit and publish Iskra (the spark), the official paper of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), safe from the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police, Lenin made a number of fleeting visits to London in the first decade of the 20th century.

The first of these was in 1902 for the party’s second congress, which saw the crucial split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.

Henderson is just as interested in the London of the time, when the East End, known as “the little Russian island,” became the refuge of Russian socialists, anarchists and dissidents of all complexions, including spies and agents provocateurs.

In London’s relative safety, most of them found a second home in the British Museum reading room, which provided them with a wealth of material to support their publishing and political activities. Lenin was one of the first to apply for his reader’s ticket. 

The book interestingly examines the fragmentary evidence of a possible romantic involvement between the married Lenin and a woman who, despite being a co-founder of the RSDLP, has been largely airbrushed from history.

Apollinariya Yakubova is indeed an intriguing figure, fully worthy of Henderson’s investigation, including a full postscript chapter on her life. Despite all the author’s detailed research and speculative conjecture, however, he admits with some regret that “such matters cannot be documented.”

Henderson’s work is clearly a doctoral thesis, here engagingly prepared for a wider public readership. He reaches for catchy section headlines such as “Lenin: Master conspirator or police patsy?” – but certainly captures the atmosphere of Edwardian London and brings to life many of the players – with its wealth of photographs – in the early moves of a game that would indeed change the world.