Radical crossroads Revolutionary Ireland and the fight against the Russian Empire
In a special St. Patrick’s Day edition of The Beet, historian and Hotel Lux author Maurice J. Casey looks back on the period from the 1880s to the 1920s, when Irish revolutionaries and a variety of radicals mobilizing against the Russian Empire found causes for comparison, solidarity, and even collaboration.
This story first appeared in The Beet, a monthly email dispatch from Meduza covering Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Sign up here to get the next issue delivered directly to your inbox.
On the afternoon of Easter Monday, 1916, Liam Tannam, an Irish republican, experienced a display of global anti-imperialist solidarity at a Dublin post office. Several hours earlier, a force of Irish revolutionaries, Tannam among them, had marched through the capital, seizing several buildings in the city center, intent on posing an armed challenge to British rule.
Tannam and his comrades occupied Dublin’s central post office during a foundational moment in the history of modern Ireland: the Easter Rising. Lasting just under a week, this Irish rebellion reduced much of central Dublin to rubble. And though it ended in military defeat for the rebels, their audacity galvanized a movement and inspired anti-colonial activists across the world.
Many Irish rebels had hoped for support from the wider world of anti-imperialists, including those challenging the Russian Empire. On that Monday afternoon in 1916, mere hours into the insurrection, one of Tannam’s comrades brought him to the window of the post office to reveal that such support had just arrived — in the form of two odd-looking sailors.
Recounting the event decades later, Tannam recalled a pair of “obviously foreign men” standing outside the building. With British troops already gathering strength to suppress the revolt, it seemed unlikely that the two were risking their lives to send letters. When Tannam asked what they wanted, one of the men replied: “I am from Sweden, my friend from Finland. We want to fight. May we come in?”
Bemused, Tannam asked why they wanted to fight the British. Still answering for the pair, the Swedish sailor said they were crew from a ship docked in Dublin. “Finland, a small country, Russia eat her up. Sweden, another small country, Russia eat her up, too. Russia with the British, therefore, we against,” he explained.
The rebels welcomed in the two anti-imperialist volunteers, but quickly relegated both men to backroom duties after the Finn accidentally fired off a round by knocking a cocked shotgun on the terrazzo floor.
The rebellion ended with the rebels surrendering to British forces, who carried out thousands of arrests. The Finnish volunteer, one “Tony Makapaltis,” was captured along with his Swedish comrade, but according to Tannam, the Swede “got out in no time” thanks to his consul. The Finn was not so lucky.
A list of those imprisoned following the Easter Rising indeed includes a name and address that stands out amid the pages of Irish surnames and Dublin hinterlands: “Makipaltis, Antle Zecks, Finland.” (The different spellings can be attributed to the imprecision of English-language speakers hearing a Finnish name. The Finnish rebel’s real name, as deciphered by historian Andrew Newby, was Antti Mäkipaltio.)
The story of how two men with historical grudges against the Russian Empire ended up supporting (though not, perhaps, actively helping) a major Irish nationalist uprising reflects a curious synchronicity. The most intensive period in Ireland’s fight against the British Empire and the revolutionary dissolution of the Russian Empire more or less coincided. Inevitably, those swept up in these chaotic events reached for analogies to explain what was happening around them. Some stuck with comparison as an intellectual exercise. Others — like our two sailors — moved from considering similarities to taking up a shared cause.
Allegories and fantasies
Ireland, Britain’s first colony, has long been a place where those fighting empires have sought inspiration. The island’s misfortune in becoming an early laboratory for colonialism also made it a school for anti-colonial tactics. Despite the significant language barrier and geographical distance, revolutionary thinkers living in the Russian Empire could find inspiration in their Irish counterparts’ strategies.
Perhaps the best known example of an Irish tactic translated across the world is the boycott. An organized campaign of social isolation, boycotting was refined during the period of Irish land agitation in the late nineteenth century known as the Land War. The collective ostracization of Charles Cunningham Boycott, a loathed landlord resident on a remote Irish island, gained international media attention in the early 1880s.
The term “boycotting” became widely understood in English and soon made its way into Russian as boikotirovat’. Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks word usage across its corpus of digitized texts, notes spikes in Russian-language usage of boikotirovat’ during revolutionary upsurge and counterreaction. Namely, in 1905 and again from 1917 to 1923. As the Russian Empire faced crisis and collapse, the tongues of anti-Tsarist activists were wrapping around the surname of a hated landlord in Ireland.
Meanwhile, certain national cultural circles took a more specialized interest in Ireland. In the revolutionary year of 1905, the Ukrainian poet and feminist activist Lesya Ukrainka published a translation of a booklet by the Irish language activist Francis Fahy detailing the movement to revitalize Irish Gaelic. The parallels with the Ukrainian movement aimed at bolstering the national language as part of a broader quest for independence are readily apparent. These exact echoes surely lead Ukrainka to search out and translate a work as obscure as Fahy’s pamphlet.
More broadly, Irish nationalists likely had German writers to thank for stirring the interest in their cause among revolutionaries active in the Russian Empire. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels together spilled much ink thinking through Ireland’s relationship to British imperialism, confronting their readers with the Irish question. During the Communist International’s early years, Bolshevik thinkers cited the case of Ireland when discussing the broader global fight against imperialism and capitalism.
This specifically Marxist interest in Ireland had a legacy in wider Soviet culture, too, as seen in the 1937 Soviet film adaptation of Treasure Island. Of course, pirates amassing booty (what Marx described as “capital”) for personal enrichment is not a heroic activity for socialists. To make the plot more ideologically amenable, Soviet filmmakers had the Irish rebel protagonists use their treasure to fund arms for a rebellion against Britain. The film ends with our heroes riding away beneath a flag emblazoned with an Irish harp.
Unlikely collaborators?
As with the case of a Finnish sailor taking up arms against the British in a Dublin post office, sometimes the global movement of people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century led migrants onto radical crossroads. It was these intimate Irish connections to those seeking to upend the Russian Empire — and not a mutual intellectual study of revolutionary tactics — that would ultimately forge the most impactful connections between the enemies of Kings and Tsars.
Although anti-Tsarist migrants from the Russian Empire participated in the Irish Revolution, including Latvians Konrad Peterson and Sidney Arnold, the most impactful allegiances were crafted in sites of exile and diaspora. Nineteenth-century migration patterns created working-class city districts where Irish accents could be heard alongside those speaking Russian, Yiddish, and other national languages of the Russian Empire.
Jewish migrants from places like Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland — many of them fleeing antisemitic violence — also settled in East London from the 1880s onwards, where they found themselves living alongside a large community of Irish Catholics who fled Ireland’s Great Famine in the 1840s. In March 1917, representatives of the East London Jewish community hosted a meeting to welcome the overthrow of Tsarism in Russia. Sylvia Pankhurst’s The Woman’s Dreadnought reported that attendees showed great enthusiasm for an Irish woman speaker who, like those who organized the event, “belonged to a race which is oppressed.”
Inhabitants of New York’s migrant districts had much in common with East London’s recent and not-so-recent arrivals. Russian radical Platon Kerzhentsev, for example, shared a New York boarding house with an Irish literary couple on the eve of the Irish and Russian revolutions; he would become a prominent Bolshevik cultural official and the first Soviet historian of Ireland. Gesturing once more towards the sense of a shared cause, one Irish feminist on tour the year before the Irish War of Independence, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, told an East Harlem audience that “the Russians, the Jews, and the Irish” were the “three great revolutionary forces that would, in truth, make the world safe for democracy.”
In both the Russian and Irish cases, the overthrow of imperial powers gave way to civil war. Ireland’s Civil War (1922–1923) ended with the establishment of the Irish Free State governed by conservative nationalists who sought a place in the liberal postwar order. Russia’s Civil War (1918–1922) consolidated the control of the Bolsheviks, who were intent on upending the liberal order through communist revolutions.
As the ending of the Soviet Treasure Island suggests, Ireland still held a place in the Soviet imagination as a rebel country. But most Irish nationalists, influenced by a conservative Catholic social ethos, did not consider themselves socialists, let alone communists. The beleaguered intellectuals of the Irish radical left, meanwhile, largely believed the Bolshevik claim that the October Revolution had liberated nations from imperialist domination. There were, however, some exceptions to this leftist tendency to take the Soviets at their word.
Irish nationalists upstairs, Georgian Mensheviks downstairs
For a brief period in the early 1920s, a single London address, 32 Queen’s Gate, was home to a stage actor, an Irish-speaking literary couple, and exiled Georgian Mensheviks. This sitcom-ready scenario was the work of Nannie Florence Dryhurst, a Dublin-raised radical then in her early sixties.
Although Georgian independence became Dryhurst’s primary cause in the 1920s, her interest in the country dated back decades to her involvement in the world of exiled anarchists in London in the early 1880s. Living in the imperial metropolis, Dryhurst navigated both Irish nationalist circles and networks linked to the anarchist periodical Freedom. Her politics undergirded her friendships with the Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin and the Georgian nationalist and anarchist Varlam Cherkezishvili.
Flanked by anarchist aristocrats, Dryhurst became an active campaigner for national self-determination with an expansive anti-colonial vision that went beyond her native Ireland. After visiting Georgia in 1905 at the suggestion of her friend Cherkezishvili, the plight of this Caucasus nation vied for her attention with the Irish cause. Although initially enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution in 1917, she aligned herself against the Bolsheviks as a keen supporter of the Georgian Republic after it declared independence in 1918.
Following the Soviet repression of the Georgian Republic in 1921, Dryhurst revived her Georgian solidarity networks in London. She found a home for a Georgian Menshevik “support committee” at 32 Queen’s Gate and installed her daughter and son-in-law (both Irish nationalist writers) in the upstairs apartment to help cover the rent.
Dryhurst’s granddaughter and biographer Maire Gaster, who was a child in these years, recalled how the family residences “gave hospitality to people whose names rang strangely in our ears.” According to her granddaughter, Dryhurst was “campaigning for Georgia till the day she died” in 1930.
Hello, I’m Eilish Hart, the editor of The Beet. Thanks for taking the time to read our work! Our newsletter delivers underreported stories like this one to subscribers once a month. Like all of Meduza’s reporting, it’s free to read but relies on support from readers like you. Please consider donating to our crowdfunding campaign.
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Maurice J. Casey is a visiting fellow at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge. He received his doctorate in history from the University of Oxford. His first book, Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals, was published in 2024.