Relief and revolution: Russian émigrés’ political remittances and the building of political transnationalism

This article examines the transnational networks based in Britain between 1881 and 1914 that aspired to affect Russian politics from abroad. It contends that the emigration of Russian revolutionaries to Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was only the first in a series of continued political movements across national borders and beyond state structures. Rather than examining the migration of Russian political exiles as a singular flight of movement undertaken in desperation, I argue that these émigrés’ westward migration initiated transnational communities that coalesced around a common conception of fundamental political rights, that could be claimed regardless of nationality, and that these activist cohorts, in turn engaged in public endeavours designed to influence governmental actions and foment political change. For many prominent Russian radicals, emigration to places like Britain was not an enforced exile from interventions in the politics of their homeland, but rather a means to continue anti-tsarist agitation through transnational collaborative activist networks, and the international movement and exchange, rather than unidirectional distribution, of money, communications, propaganda and people; interventions that I define as political remittances.