What You Did Not Tell by Mark Mazower

Author:Mark Mazower
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2017-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Highgate

A strong Russian connection has attached itself to Highgate over the years. Guryev, a phosphates magnate, is reportedly the current owner of the mansion that stands at the top of West Hill—a dour monstrosity called Witanhurst whose twenty-five or more bedrooms make it, one is told, the largest private house in London after the queen’s. Lower down, the perimeter of Beechwood House is patrolled by the billionaire Alisher Usmanov’s security guards. Decades before the neighborhood turned into what sociologists of global real estate refer to as Alpha Territory, the Soviet trade delegation down the road was lodging its employees in houses on the Holly Lodge Estate, some fifty families at least by 1971 when many of them were fingered for expulsion by the British government. Unlike the billionaires they did not hide away. They swam in the Men’s Bathing Pond on Hampstead Heath along with the Hasids, the ex-NCOs, and the sun worshippers, and they were a familiar presence at the Duke of St. Albans at the bottom of West Hill where locals complained that they did not drink much and spoke Russian all the time. Many of them were KGB, and it was common knowledge locally that MI5 ran a safe house across the way to keep an eye on them.

Yet when Dad’s parents moved there, all this was in the future and such Russian connections as Highgate possessed were fading. They were mostly Leftist, drawn by the proximity to Karl Marx’s tomb, which was still on the original shabby family plot in Highgate Cemetery, watched over by an old gravedigger who could remember the day the great man had been buried. Before the First World War a few elderly survivors of that era were still around, like the eighty-year-old revolutionary Karl Blind, and Fanny Stepniak, the widow of a Russian friend of Friedrich Engels. Another Russian, Old Zund—Aaron Zundelevich, a living link to the Vilna socialists of the 1870s—spent his final years near the Heath in a tiny flat overflowing with rare revolutionary pamphlets. And the great anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin, who had first settled in London in 1876, lived for a time with his family in a neat Edwardian terraced house on Muswell Hill Road.

By the early 1920s, they were all gone. Old Zund had died and so had Blind. Kropotkin had returned to Russia where he died in poverty. Bolsheviks like Maxim Litvinov and Samuel Rothstein had gone back to serve the revolution. The flotsam of the Romanov ancien régime mostly preferred other parts of London. The Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, a notoriously stupid grandson of Tsar Nicholas I, had rented Kenwood in the last years before it was opened to the public, but by the end of the First World War he had left too and in the 1920s Kenwood opened its grounds to the hoi polloi.

Thus when they moved across the Heath from South Hill Park to the Holly Lodge Estate, a new development on Highgate West Hill, Max and Frouma saw around them not Little Moscow but a London developer’s dream of an English garden village.

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