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an extract from Curious Muswell Hill by Andrew Whitehead being published by Five Leaves in June 2025 |
Thoroughly bourgeois Muswell Hill has been home to quite a number of thoroughly revolutionary émigrés. South Africa’s Oliver Tambo, as we shall see, is commemorated in all sorts of ways, and he did stay in Muswell Hill for a rather long time. But perhaps the first prominent political émigré to move to Muswell Hill, and arguably the most distinguished, was Peter Kropotkin.
Kropotkin was a Russian aristocrat and anarchist. He renounced his inherited rank, but the rest of the world continued to regard him as Prince Kropotkin. And his only child, Alexandra or Sasha, relished being of noble birth. During long years of exile in England, Kropotkin seems to have much preferred the genteel suburbs to the more conspiratorial climes of Soho or Stepney. He made his home in Harrow, then Acton, and moved on to Bromley before heading to what contemporaries called Highgate - as if! - in 1907. Four years later, he headed to his last British home, in Brighton.
His modest ‘Highgate’ residence was at 5 Onslow Villas. This substantial and stylish mansion was one of the first suburban houses on Muswell Hill Road to the east of Highgate Woods. The ten houses that made up Onslow Villas were probably built at about the same time as the northern section of Onslow Gardens, in 1890 or thereabouts. The villa, ‘Viola’, would still have felt fairly new when Kropotkin and his family moved in.
Peter Kropotkin is perhaps the most revered and important anarchist political thinker - a geographer, a propagandist, an intellectual and an innovative political scientist. He was a powerful proponent of mutual aid and co-operation rather than top-down policies and political practices. And with his bald head, round glasses and bushy grey beard, he came across as almost the epitome of the wise, good natured and ever so slightly eccentric purveyor of political wisdom. He was also widely admired as a kind, considerate and deeply moral man - the opposite of the general depiction of anarchists in the popular media at that time (and before, and since).
By the time he moved to Muswell Hill, Kropotkin was in his mid-sixties and in poor health. He continued to speak and write and also arranged for anarchist literature to be deposited in the British Library. He was a family man and hugely fond of his daughter, Sasha. She married while living in Onslow Villas. Her husband was another Russian political exile, Boris Lebedev. On the marriage certificate, her profession was given as ‘Princess’ and her father’s as ‘Prince’. How grand can you get!
Sasha mixed in literary circles and was a good friend – and perhaps lover – of the writer W. Somerset Maugham, who based several of his characters on her. Gerald Festus Kelly, a friend of Maugham (whom he painted eighteen times), painted her portrait in 1912 or thereabouts, capturing her confidence and intelligence as well as her striking looks.
Peter Kropotkin is perhaps the most revered and important anarchist political thinker - a geographer, a propagandist, an intellectual and an innovative political scientist. He was a powerful proponent of mutual aid and co-operation rather than top-down policies and political practices. And with his bald head, round glasses and bushy grey beard, he came across as almost the epitome of the wise, good natured and ever so slightly eccentric purveyor of political wisdom. He was also widely admired as a kind, considerate and deeply moral man - the opposite of the general depiction of anarchists in the popular media at that time (and before, and since).
By the time he moved to Muswell Hill, Kropotkin was in his mid-sixties and in poor health. He continued to speak and write and also arranged for anarchist literature to be deposited in the British Library. He was a family man and hugely fond of his daughter, Sasha. She married while living in Onslow Villas. Her husband was another Russian political exile, Boris Lebedev. On the marriage certificate, her profession was given as ‘Princess’ and her father’s as ‘Prince’. How grand can you get!
Sasha mixed in literary circles and was a good friend – and perhaps lover – of the writer W. Somerset Maugham, who based several of his characters on her. Gerald Festus Kelly, a friend of Maugham (whom he painted eighteen times), painted her portrait in 1912 or thereabouts, capturing her confidence and intelligence as well as her striking looks.
Courtesy of Crawford Art Gallery, Cork
During the First World War, Peter Kropotkin broke with many other prominent anarchists by supporting the allied war effort against German militarism. When the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia in the 1917 revolution, Kropotkin - along with so many Russian anarchists in exile - returned home. But not before returning to North London to visit his anarchist comrade Rudolf Rocker who was interned at Alexandra Palace.
Sasha and her husband also went back to Russia and organised her father’s funeral there in February 1921. The Bolsheviks, who had begun to turn on other left revolutionary groups, promised to release scores of imprisoned anarchists to attend the service, but in the event only a handful of detainees were allowed out. The American anarchist Emma Goldman delivered a eulogy. That funeral is regarded as the last public mustering of Russian anarchists before they were outlawed. Within months, Kropotkin’s works were once again banned in the land of his birth. Sasha outlived her father by more than forty years, dying in 1966. She lived for much of her adult life in New York and while protective of her father’s reputation was towards the end of her life more a Republican than a revolutionary.
Almost a century after Kropotkin settled into Onslow Villas, another Russian oppositionist, Alexander Litvinenko, moved to Muswell Hill. On 1 November 2006, he headed from his home in Osier Crescent, off Coppetts Road, and travelled by bus and tube to a hotel in Grosvenor Square. He met there two supposed former KGB agents and took a sip of green tea. Back home, he started to vomit. He had been poisoned with radioactive polonium and died three weeks later; he was buried in a lead-lined coffin in Highgate cemetery. Several years later, a public inquiry concluded that Litvinenko had probably been killed by order of Russia’s security service and with the approval of Vladimir Putin. On his death bed, Litvinenko had declared: ‘You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world, Mr. Putin, will reverberate in your ears for the rest of your life.’