Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism's Forgotten Radicals

The extraordinary story of a group of forgotten radicals who found themselves drawn to communist Moscow’s hotbed of international revolutionary activity: the Hotel Lux.

Hotel Lux follows Irish radical May O’Callaghan and her friends, three revolutionary families brought together by their vision for a communist future and their time spent in the Comintern’s Moscow living quarters, the Hotel Lux.

Historian Maurice Casey reveals the connections and disconnections of a group of forgotten communist activists whose lives collided in 1920s Moscow: a brilliant Irish translator, a maverick author, the rebel daughters of an East London Jewish family, and a family of determined German anti-fascists.

The dramatic and interlocking histories of the O’Flahertys, Cohens and Leonhards offer an intimate insight into the legacies of the Russian Revolution from its earliest idealism through to the brutal Stalinist purges and beyond. Hotel Lux uncovers a world of forgotten radicals who saw their hopes and dreams crash against reality yet retained their faith in a beautiful future for all.

Culminating in a queer love story that saw the daughters of the Cohens and Leonhards create an enduring partnership even as their parents’ political visions crumbled, this is a multi-generational rebel odyssey and a history of international communism, one which looks as much to the future as it does to the past.

Maurice Casey is an Irish historian of 20th century revolutionary movements with a particular focus on international communism, and is also an also an expert in Irish diaspora history, queer history and the impact of grassroots activism in modern Ireland.

With degrees from Trinity College Dublin and Cambridge University, he is a Fulbright Scholar and also studied at Stanford and Oxford before joining Queen’s University, Belfast as a Research Fellow. In addition to academic journals, his writing has appeared in the Irish Times, History Today, History Ireland, Contingent Magazine and others. He has spoken to public audiences in Ireland, the UK, Russia, and the US.