Duncan Bowie on anarchists in London
A Devilish Kind of Courage by Andrew Whitehead published by Reaktion Books
The story of the Houndsditch murders and the Sidney Street siege of January 1911 has been told before. Whitehead, a leading historian of British anarchism, not only retells the story in a comprehensible and readable narrative, but has found new sources in the London Metropolitan and national Archives including newspaper reports, Home Office, police and fire brigade records.
The anarchists involved were of Latvian and Russian origin, whose contacts with the indigenous anarchist movement were limited. They were members of the Jubilee Street anarchist club and knew Rudolf Rocker and the Jewish anarchists in the Arbayter Fraynd group. They also knew the Italian anarchist Enrico Malatesta who ran an engineering workshop in Islington at the time and (unwittingly) provided equipment used in the raid on the Houndsditch jeweller’s shop, which led to the death of three policemen and one of the raiders, George Gardstein, who had shot the policemen.
One of the more curious aspects of the story is that Malatesta, though interviewed by the police, avoided any charge, conviction and deportation. As the two surviving raiders , Fritz Svars and Josef Sokoloff were killed in the Sidney Street siege, dying in the fire, which was probably instigated by the police to smoke out the raiders who fought off the police and army for several hours, there was no one left to convict of an actual crime and the police failed to pursue any of the raiders associates, with the exception of Nina Vassileva, Gardstein’s girlfriend. She was convicted of being an associate of the gang, before being released on appeal.
The Houndsditch raid and the Sidney Street siege are always associated with “Peter the Painter” though there is no evidence that he was either directly involved in the raid or the siege. Identified by the police at the time as Peter Piatkov, his real name, only recently revealed, was actually Janis Zaklis. Zaklis had a long history of socialist and anarchist activism in Latvia (then under Russian Tsarist control), being a leading figure in the Latvian insurrection in 1905 before being expelled from the socialist party for unauthorised activity, taking several colleagues with him and then active in Latvian exile circles in London, Marseilles and the US.
While the East End events of 1910 were unprecedented as far as British politics were concerned, and attracted massive media attention, the Latvian revolutionaries had an extensive record of expropriations and armed conflict with the authorities in Latvia and in the US. In the UK, the group had been involved in unsuccessful attempts at robberies in Tottenham and Motherwell in Scotland. While Whitehead traces the activities of the Latvian group before and after Sidney Street, reference should be made to the earlier extraordinary study by Phillip Ruff, A Towering Flame, published in 2019, which provided a detailed chronological narrative of the group’s activities from Latvian sources.
Few of the Latvian and Russian anarchists spoke English, and it is unsurprising that they had little contact with the British labour movement. However two of the Latvian exiles in London who remained socialists did – Jakob Peters, who was in fact Svars’ cousin, who was a member of the British Socialist Party and on returning to Russia, became deputy head of the Bolshevik Cheka after 1917, and Alexandr Zernis, who was to translate a study of the Revolution in the Baltic Provinces of Russia, published by the Independent Labour Party in its Socialist Library series in 1907 (with a foreword by none other than Ramsay Macdonald), which was published anonymously but actually written by the Latvian socialist Hermanis Punga (who went on to become foreign minister of independent Latvia). Zernis joined the Tolstoyan colony at Tuckton house near Bournemouth run by Vladimir Chertkov. Incidentally, Zernis was the father of Melita Norwood, revealed in 1999 as having been a long-term Russian agent (and inspiration for the 2018 film Red Joan).
One interesting aspect of Whitehead’s study is his focus on the role of the popular media in turning the siege into a sensational event and creating the myth of ‘Peter the Painter’. The years before the First World War saw the origin of tabloid popular journalism, with papers such as The Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and The Chronicle giving massive coverage to the events, with much use of photographs. Moreover, four newsreel companies attended the siege, with newsreels being played across London within hours of the events.
Much of the coverage was explicitly anti-Semitic, with the press arguing that the fact that the Latvian anarchists were in the country and armed showed that the 1905 Aliens Act was ineffective. The fact that Winston Churchill as Home Secretary in the Liberal administration attended the siege for a few hours wearing his silk top hat, surrounded by armed policemen and soldiers, enhanced the sensational coverage.
What was however curious about the aftermath of the siege is that the associates of the anarchist gang, such as Malatesta and Rocker and the anarchist philosopher, Kropotkin, (who all disassociated themselves from expropriatory tactics) were not arrested and that the courts dealt with the anarchists arrested leniently- all with the exception of Vassileva were released immediately, including Svars’s girlfriend, Luba Milstein, with Vassileva discharged after a few weeks by the Lord Chief Justice. There was considerable sympathy with opponents of Tsarism, though clearly a wish that revolutionaries would limit their expropriatory activities and arms dealings to their home country. It was only with the outbreak of war in 1914, that Asquith’s government tightened up its policy on aliens.