History could have taken a different turn in 1569. In that year, Ivan the Terrible was at the height of his power and yet gravely paranoid about plots against his life. Seeing England as an
ideal ally (and a sanctuary if his rule in Russia were threatened), he offered himself in marriage to Queen Elizabeth I, sending the young Queen of England expensive furs and fine fabrics.
England and Muscovy had established trade relations more than a decade before, after the explorer Richard Chancellor, seeking a northeast passage to Asia, had landed on the White Sea Coast.
Elizabeth — the unrequited object of many European monarch’s matrimonial desires — spurned Ivan’s offer of marriage, which is possibly what led him to pen a rude letter to her on October 28, 1570 (inset, page 55), in which he claimed others were running the country, not she, and that she “flowe [flourish] in your maydenlike estate like a maide.” Needless to say, this did not help Ivan’s chances. But the two autocrats continued to correspond, and Elizabeth even agreed to offer Ivan asylum, should he need it, so long as he paid his own way.
In 1582, Ivan again explored a matrimonial union with England, this time with Elizabeth’s cousin. Again it came to nought.
Ivan the Terrible never made it to London, but a century later, his most famous successor did. Peter the Great’s visit was part of the “Great Embassy” that took the tsar across Europe. England at the time was a rising power whose increasingly formidable reputation rested on trade and growing mastery of the seas. For Peter, with his lifelong obsession with all things naval, the opportunity to visit England – as well as its great rivals on continental Europe – was too good to miss.
Peter arrived in January 1698, and spent more than four months in the English capital. He initially lodged in a house with the unremarkable address of 21 Norfolk Street, on the north side of the River Thames near where Temple tube (metro) station now stands. The house has perhaps unsurprisingly disappeared, as has the nearby pub on Great Tower Street that was renamed “The Czar of Muscovy” in honor of the young monarch – and in particular in memory of his drinking habits, which apparently impressed even the hard-living locals of London at the time. There is, however, a Muscovy Street just around the corner.
More traces of Peter remain on the south side of the Thames, in the Deptford district. Like much of modern southeast London, Deptford today presents an odd mix of run-down, inner-city landscapes and urban-regeneration schemes – the latter particularly prevalent along the river towards the more affluent suburb of Greenwich, home to the Meridian and Observatory of the same name, where Peter studied under Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed. This might seem a peculiar place for a monarch to pick as his temporary home. However, the south bank of the Thames has historically developed much more slowly than its northern counterpart; in Peter’s day, Deptford was a relatively affluent riverside settlement on the road running to Greenwich and Eltham, where Henry VIII grew up in the medieval palace. More importantly for Peter, though, Deptford was home to the royal dockyards, and hence the Royal Navy.
In Deptford, Peter was given as accommodation Sayes Court, the house of diarist John Evelyn. While the young tsar thoroughly enjoyed the privacy afforded by this capacious house on the banks of the Thames, for Evelyn the experience proved to be more painful. Peter and his entourage comprehensively trashed the place during their three months there. Neither the house, nor the gardens that Evelyn had spent decades cultivating, were spared as the Russians ran riot (a favorite drinking game, apparently, was to bundle each other into wheelbarrows and ram them into Evelyn’s pride and joy, a 400-foot-long holly hedgerow). A government commission headed by Sir Christopher Wren (fresh from building St Paul’s Cathedral) estimated the cost of the damage at about £350 – or well over £500,000 pounds (just under a million dollars) in today’s money. The government duly paid up.
Today, traces of this more prosperous era in Deptford’s history can be found dotted around the district. Sayes Court still exists, but in rather different form – a housing tower block on Evelyn Street.* Just behind the block can be found Czar Street, and five minutes bracing walk down the river is a statue to Peter the Great by Mihail Chemiakin and Vyacheslav Bukhayev. The statue, which stands on the site of the old docks, was given by the city of Moscow to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Peter the Great’s visit to London, and unveiled shortly after the tercentenary, in 2001. Peter, telescope in one hand and long-stemmed meerschaum pipe in the other, stands facing downriver, flanked by a dwarf on his right and a throne on his left. Climbing up the steps to stand alongside Peter or sit on the throne is a somewhat odd experience; the tsar, larger than life, towers over the whole ensemble. But the real sense of déjà vu comes when you follow Peter’s gaze downriver. The view would be immediately familiar to any native of St. Petersburg: the broad sweep of the river; the low-rise construction on the left bank; the more desolate, industrial landscape (with the exception of the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, built after Peter’s day) on the right.
over the centuries, London has developed a reputation as an immigrant-friendly city, a melting-pot that takes a relaxed attitude to incomers from around the globe. Perhaps because of the sense of security and isolation from the rest of Europe afforded by the thin stretch of water separating Britain from France, the city has also proved enduringly attractive to political undesirables from other countries and those seeking refuge from persecution in their homelands. In the nineteenth century, it offered such refuge to a number of such figures whose life and work would later turn Russia upside down.
Karl Marx moved to London in 1849 and lived here until his death in 1883. Living first in Soho and then in the more genteel (relatively speaking) surroundings of the northern suburb of Kentish Town, he wrote, debated, schemed and plotted his way through more than 30 years in the capital. During this time, with a reputation that reached across borders, the usually impoverished Marx proved a magnet for radical thinkers from across the continent, including the Russian philosopher of anarchism Mikhail Bakunin, with whom he had a characteristically prickly relationship. Marx is now buried in Highgate Cemetery, where an imposing monument attracts pilgrims from around the world – as the bearded sage himself did during his lifetime. They come to leave messages on scraps of paper or just to stand in contemplation. A number of followers of Marx’s teachings, many from countries in the Middle East, are also buried nearby.
Some years later, the man who put Marx’s ideas into practice in Russia also spent time in London. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (aka Lenin) visited the British capital on at least six occasions in the first few years of the twentieth century, spending significant amounts of time studying Marx’s writings in the reading room of the British Library (which now has a comprehensive page on its website detailing the activities at the library of the future leader of the Revolution: bit.ly/9j4cfs). In London, Lenin also set up the newspaper Iskra (“The Spark”), which was printed by a press in a building in the Clerkenwell district that is now home to the Marx Memorial Library.
Like Lenin, the most famous Russian resident of London in the previous century also took advantage of the city’s tolerant atmosphere to publish works attacking the tsarist system. Alexander Herzen founded his Free Russian Press during a 12-year period of exile in the city, publishing among other things the newspaper Kolokol (“Bell”). Although his entire stay in the city – from 1852 to 1864 – overlapped with that of Marx, the two men did not get along. Herzen is also one of only a few Russians to be honored with one of the blue plaques that adorn various buildings around the city to commemorate famous previous inhabitants or events; in Herzen’s case, the plaque can be found at the house in Orsett Terrace, just a few minutes’ walk from Paddington station in northwest London, where Herzen lived for three years. At the other side of the city, at 6 Crescent Road in the southeastern suburb of Bromley, a blue plaque marks the incongruously middle-class house where the “anarchist prince” Pyotr Kropotkin lived for almost 30 years, from 1886 to 1914.
Yet another “Russian” plaque adorns the house at 152 King’s Road in London’s fashionable Chelsea. The plaque remembers Princess Serafina Astafieva, a dancer with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, who established an influential ballet school in Chelsea that numbered among its graduates the two grandest of grandes dames of British ballet – Alicia Markova and Margot Fonteyn – as well as a number of leading dancers. The London connection to Russian ballet can be traced further to Ivy House, a plush 18th-century building in the affluent northern suburb of Hampstead that was home to Anna Pavlova after she emigrated from Russia just before the First World War. The building today is home to London’s Jewish Cultural Centre, and also houses a dance studio named after the house’s former famous owner.
where russians go, stereotypes invariably follow. In the post-Soviet era, London has proved to be no exception. As Russia’s newly minted elite embarked on a round of high living and conspicuous consumption, London became “Londongrad” or “Moscow-on-Thames.” Stories and rumors abounded of fabulous bar bills and night-club antics. Russian money was frequently blamed for the inflated prices of high-end real estate, though in truth London’s property market had been booming since the early 1990s (house prices tripled between 1995 and 2005).
Perhaps the most spectacular illustration of London’s growing obsession with Russian money came when Roman Abramovich bought West London-based football (“soccer” in the U.S.) club Chelsea in the summer of 2003, for a reported £140 million. The acquisition catapulted the previously publicity-averse Abramovich to the center of media attention and transformed Chelsea into a major player in the English league and beyond. The club had, it is true, spent most of its existence until then in the top division of English football, but had never won much in the way of trophies; apart from lifting the FA Cup (English football’s pre-eminent knock-out competition) in 2000, fans had to look back to the 1950s for the club’s previous major honor, when it finished top of the league in the 1954-55 season.
With Abramovich bankrolling the recruitment of star players, newly installed manager Jose Mourinho led Chelsea to two straight league titles, in the 2004-05 and 2005-06 seasons. Despite breaking the British transfer record to sign Ukrainian striker Andriy Shevchenko for £30 million in 2006, Mourinho was sacked in 2007, allegedly after falling out with Abramovich. However, after a three-season hiatus, Chelsea this season clinched its third league title of the decade, under Italian über-coach Carlo Ancelotti. What is more, the club took the FA Cup shortly afterward, clinching its first-ever domestic league-and-cup double.
But London’s transformation into Londongrad took a sinister turn in 2006 with the very public death of Alexander Litvinenko. The former KGB agent (now buried, like Karl Marx, in Highgate Cemetery) was allegedly poisoned with polonium in a bar at the Millennium Hotel on Grosvenor Square (also home to the U.S. Embassy). In the weeks and months that followed, the radioactive trail appeared – to UK law-enforcement agencies at least – to lead conclusively to Moscow, and specifically to two other ex-spooks, Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoy. Pledges of co-operation from both sides, however, have led to nothing; Lugovoy has since been elected a deputy to the Russian Duma, a position which gives him immunity from prosecution and extradition. The case remains open.
Despite the stock description of Litvinenko that took root in the British media and beyond as a dissident and fierce critic of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, he had until his death been a marginal figure, little known outside his immediate coterie or the circles of professional Kremlin-watchers. Like many former KGB officers, Litvinenko navigated the turbulent waters of 1990s Moscow before fleeing to London in 2000, there claiming asylum, apparently in fear of his life after a falling out with Putin. The full, complicated tale is unfolded alongside many others in a fascinating book by Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley. Titled, perhaps inevitably, Londongrad,* the book revels in depicting how the British capital became a second (or even first) home to many of Russia’s super-rich, and is awash with details of bidding wars for houses, complicated business transactions and personal and national political scandals.
For most Russians, however, life in the British capital is rather more mundane. For those interested in doing business, London is attractive for a number of reasons. There are the swanky restaurants, bars and clubs, boutiques and shops where they and their families regularly splash the cash that gets them in the papers. And there is London’s status as a major cultural centre. But probably more important is the favorable legal environment (the city has been called the libel capital of the world, given the plaintiff-friendly nature of UK laws against defamation), and booming, deregulated capital markets that welcome investors with open arms and offer them ready access to financing (without being harried by the sort of rigorous investigations of where their money came from, something that might deter some Russians from, say, looking to New York).
Many successful Russian businesspeople also see the UK’s educational system as a desirable destination for their offspring. Given that English is the global language of business and London is Europe’s pre-eminent financial center, the cachet and networking opportunities afforded by a British education are irresistible. What is more, Britain’s schools (particularly the private, fee-paying variety) and universities have always enjoyed a reputation for openness to foreign students. As well as top-ranked Oxford and Cambridge, the London School of Economics (LSE) has been a major beneficiary. Russian-speaking students now form a sizeable presence at the school. In fact, LSE’s Russian-speaking student community has in the past few years established the highly successful Russian Business Week, which has attracted top-caliber speakers and guests like Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin and Ruben Vardanian, CEO of the Moscow-based investment bank Troika Dialog.
after nearly two decades of post-Soviet immigration and investment, London now has an established Russian-speaking community (which includes Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Kazakhs, among others) that numbers, according to most estimates, well more than a quarter-million souls. This is quite impressive, given the travails that many from the former Soviet Union experience when trying to obtain a UK visa. And, according to Maxim Bouev, a St. Petersburg native who moved to Britain more than a decade ago, “The sense of national identity in London among the people who came from the former USSR is much stronger felt and respected than when you are in Russia.” Thus, Russian speakers from across the former Soviet empire attend monthly networking events held at Home House by the RussiansInUK group, yet they also often live in communities of, say, Lithuanians and Kazakhs that are geographically concentrated in different parts of the city.
RussiansInUK was set up “three or four years ago” by Anya Portnik, who was among the first wave of post-Soviet emigration and has lived in London since 1993. Portnik says there is no special affinity among Russian speakers in London based purely on the fact of their common language. In fact, there can be friction between different sections of the community; for example, Portnik says, there are radical differences of opinion over the behavior of students who come over from Russia, some of whom seem to spend most of their time in London spreading their parents’ cash around in expensive nightclubs. For the city as a whole, though, the addition of a large and generally well-integrated Russian-speaking community has proved an enriching experience – even if, as Bouev says, Russian-speakers themselves have to put up with the same old stereotypes: “You still hear an immediate reference to vodka. Mentioning of Russian nouveaux riches comes as a rule after that.”
Vodka and nouveaux riches notwithstanding, Russian culture is firmly established on London’s diverse multinational panorama. For several years, a Russian New Year festival took place in early January on Trafalgar Square. When that died out, the city administration inaugurated a Maslenitsa festival to replace it. Along with the obligatory bliny, this year’s festival introduced Londoners to the delights of Russian folk ensembles, including St. Petersburg’s renowned Terem Quartet, plus the Tom Waits stylings of the City on the Neva’s cult heroes Billy’s Band.
Russian cultural organizations are also flourishing. Academica Rossica, for example, has for more than a decade been organizing cultural events including the Slovo Literary Festival and an annual film festival. The revamping of Pushkin House – a venerable institution on Bloomsbury Square that can trace its history back to before the Revolution – has also proved to be a resounding success. As well as hosting a packed cultural program including film showings, art exhibitions, lectures, book launches and concerts (often with the direct participation of its director Julian Gallant, who also happens to be a concert pianist), Pushkin House boasts a library and a Russian-language centre. There are also galleries such as Calvert 22 dedicated to the promotion of Russian art, while 2009 saw the inception of a Russian Art Fair, which enjoyed enough success to move to a larger venue this year.
it has been 440 years since Ivan the Terrible sought out a “special relationship” between Britain and Russia (and between himself and Queen Elizabeth). Over the ensuing four centuries the Russian and British empires fought wars against and alongside one another, competing for influence in Central Asia, Europe and much of the world. Today, as the dust of the Cold War (and Soviet imperial collapse) settles, a period of cautious détente has taken hold. Military and ideological competition have been replaced by cultural cross-pollination. While English vocabulary and culture infiltrate Russian society, an immense Russian imprint is spreading throughout the British capital, ranging from film to art, to commerce and education, to football and music. One can only wonder what Ivan and Elizabeth might have thought. RL
* The building known as Sayes Court was all but entirely demolished in 1728, and St. Nicholas’s parish workhouse built on its site. During World War I it was annexed by the army to enlarge its Supply Reserve Depot at the old cattle market. The building was destroyed in WWII and the area is now known as Convoy’s Wharf, although a small park does remain. [bit.ly/cDsN9l]
Russian emigre and constructivist architect Berthold Lubetkin [bit.ly/9tbhB0] also had a sizeable impact on London, including for a time a controversial memorial plaque to Lenin. [bit.ly/bl9Ywa]
* A title shared with a fine recent detective novel, set in London and Moscow, by Reggie Nadelson.
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