Hotel Lux: the guesthouse of world revolution
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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, Maurice 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.
Maurice, your book dives deep into the forgotten stories of the international revolutionaries who lived at the Hotel Lux 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? 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 um 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.
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