In the heady early days of communism, the Hotel Lux on Moscow’s Tverskaya Street was a haven for party officials and like-minded guests from abroad.
Perhaps ominously, it also had a growing rodent problem, as the privatised luxury of the building’s origins gave way to nationalised neglect. A Vietnamese visitor, Ho Chi Minh, had to change rooms once because of rats.
During the purges of the late 1930s, the Lux would become a Soviet version of Hotel California, except that if you were under suspicion from Stalin, you couldn’t check out any time you liked. Arrest and execution were a common fate for residents suspected of being spies and other enemies.
But in the mid-1920s, the Lux was a “living quarters for the world revolution”. And among its residents for several years then was a forty-something Irishwoman, May O’Callaghan, whose contribution to revolutionary history has until now gone unnoticed in the land of her birth.
Red lines – Frank McNally on the little-known story of an Irish translator in 1920s Moscow
Litvinoff the land – Frank McNally with more on a Russian revolutionary’s Irish past
A matter of perspective – Colm Keena on lessons from a trip to Vietnam
A tale of two harps – Tim Fanning on Paraguay and the harp
O’Callaghan’s story was the subject of a fascinating Dublin History Festival talk on Tuesday at Richmond Barracks, given by Queen’s University historian Maurice Casey and based on his new book about the hotel, subtitled: “An intimate history of communism’s forgotten radicals.”
Born to a middle-class Wexford family in 1881, Julia Mary “May” O’Callaghan was an unlikely communist. Her father was an RIC head constable. And although she was deemed clever enough to merit third-level education, unusual for women at the time, social convention decreed she couldn’t expect much of a career from it.
Her rarefied academic career nevertheless set her on the road to Moscow, which first passed through Austria. Following a married sister there, O’Callaghan studied languages at the University of Vienna.
But from Vienna, she later intended to travel west, to America, to promote her Austrian brother-in-law’s business. Instead, she got as far only as England before the first World War intervened to keep her this side of the Atlantic.
Stuck in London and needing work, she found a job as sub-editor with The Woman’s Dreadnought, a suffragist journal published by Sylvia Pankhurst, who had been impressed by the Irishwoman’s charisma and sense of humour.
Thanks in part to O’Callaghan, the Dreadnought became noted for its sympathetic coverage of Ireland in the revolutionary years. In the meantime, the job also pitched her into the east end of London, then teeming with Jewish migrants from eastern Europe, many with radical political views.
Among the friends O’Callaghan made there was a young woman of Polish extraction, Nellie Cohen, who would in time provide this story with another Irish twist.
It was her mastery of languages, Russian in particular, that in 1924 brought O’Callaghan to the Soviet Union, a country anxious to get its message out to the world and with no shortage of speeches to translate.
Her job earned her one of the more prestigious addresses in the Hotel Lux: Room No 5, overlooking the street with its many parades. It became a social centre and the scene of a sort of literary salon.
O’Callaghan’s revolutionary tastes by now extended to literature.
An admirer of Joyce’s Ulysses, she wrote the first critique of his work in Russian, using the pseudonym “Eugene Fogarty”.
During her four years in the Lux, she somehow never actually joined the communist party.
Nor, in a later life that lasted until 1973, did she retain her radical leanings.
Even so, by the time she left Moscow, she had somehow gained a reputation as a Trotskyite, which prevented her ever returning.
That may have saved her life.
Perhaps the greatest legacy of her communist sojourn was a story of enduring friendship and eventually love – lesbian love at that.
O’Callaghan herself was probably what we now call gay, but conflicted about expressing it.
She was especially close to two women who both became mothers. Indeed, her time in Moscow was bookended by their pregnancies.
First it was Emmy Leonhard, a German communist and fellow translator for whose taxi to and stay in the Kremlin hospital – to give birth to a daughter Elisa in 1925 – O’Callaghan paid.
The other pregnancy was the Irish sub-plot mentioned earlier. Visitors to the Lux in those years included Tom O’Flaherty, whose writer brother Liam was a friend of O’Callaghan from the Dreadnought days.
And it was back in London in 1928, through May’s introduction, that Nellie Cohen met the more famous sibling. A whiskey-fuelled one-night-stand later, she was pregnant.
Liam O’Flaherty wouldn’t know about his daughter Joyce for 30 years and then denied her for a time. In the meantime, having left Moscow to be with her expectant friend, O’Callaghan helped Cohen raise the child.
Decades later, circa 1963, the grown-up babies were photographed together on Dublin’s O’Connell Bridge (probably by Abraham Feldman, aka Arthur Fields, who for more than half a century patrolled that spot with his camera).
The picture is included in Casey’s book. Linking arms, the women look like any two female friends of the era. In fact, as the author discovered during his researches, they were a loving couple by then: one of the happier outcomes of tumultuous events in London and Moscow 40 years before.