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Andrew Rothstein

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Born: September 25 1898

Died: 2121 09 19941994

Russian-British journalist.

Rothstein, who was to became a significant figure in British Communism, was born in London to Jewish Russian political emigrants. His subsequent life was always tinged by the identity of his father, Theodore Rothstein . He had been obliged to emigrate from Russia for political reasons and, from 1890, settled in Britain for the next 30 years.

Theodore joined the Social Democratic Federation in 1895, being very much part of its left wing; in 1901, he also joined the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party as a British-based member. The RSDLP would split into two factions, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and Rothstein would support the Bolsheviks all the way. Lenin frequently visited Rothstein and his family on his own visits to London, as in 1905.

The SDF leader, H.M. Hyndman, was acutely disturbed by the election to the SDF executive in 1900 of Theodore Rothstein. For he and Zelda Kahan, who was also of Russian-Jewish origin, led the opposition inside the SDF to Hyndman's growing support for British militarism arising from his mistrust of German imperial ambitions, which was tinged by more than a whiff of ant-semitism.

Theodore Rothstein supported the unity process that led to the formation in 1911, by a merger between a number of socialist groups and the SDF to create the British Socialist Party. Both the young Andrew and his father were strongly against the 1914-18 war, even though Theodore Rothstein was working for the Foreign Office and the War Office as a Russian translator.

He was decisive in the move to oust the Hyndman national chauvinist clique in the BSP in 1916 and also took part in founding of the Communist Party of Great Britain. But he partly returned to Russia in 1920 and then increasingly became more involved in the new Russia to the extent that he remained there permanently. From 1921 to 1930 he was engaged in diplomatic work, starting with being the Soviet representative in Iran in 1921. He became Director of the Institute of World Economy and World Politics and, from 1939, was an Academician, receiving the Order of Lenin. Theodore also wrote a number of significant books, he wrote on Egypt, and his From Chartism to Labourism was a pioneering work on British labour and trade union history.

After winning a London County Council scholarship, Andrew Rothstein studied History at Oxford and served in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and Hampshire Yeomanry from 1917-19. He was a corporal when he discovered that his unit was about to be sent to Archangel, the Russian port where British troops had been sent to assist the Tsarist forces resistance to the new Soviet government, led by the Bolsheviks. Only one soldier volunteered to go to Russia, the rest stuck with Rothstein. This was the first of many rebellions and mutinies in the British Army against the intervention in Russia, involving up to 30,000 troops at its height, the history of which was later documented by Andrew Rothstein in his Soldiers' Strikes of 1919.

Andrew Rothstein was a foundation member of Communist Party in 1920 and was the man who recruited Tom Wintringham to the communist cause. Rothstein met Sylvia Pankhurst on several occasions and said that he thought her "energetic and sincere but in a one-sided way, she always had a bunch of devoted women around her but often would think nothing of intercepting propaganda material being brought for my father and printing them as articles in her own paper. She was an unscrupulous woman." At the suggestion of the Comintern, a second British Unity Congress was held, with Pankhurst's group participating. Although a merger ensued, Rothstein recalled events as that "she broke away again after about three months".

When Andrew Rothstein returned to Oxford, he found that he had been deprived of an army grant to assist his return to university and was thus unable to

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Andrew Rothstein

Andrew Rothstein

Books from Andrew Rothstein

Peter the Great and Marlborough: Politics and Diplomacy in Converging Wars

A History of the U.S.S.R.

Collected Works, volume 36

The Soldiers' Strikes of 1919

History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Write for Mathematics

Collected Works, Volume 15: March 1908-August 1909

Profilo dell'economia sovietica

British Foreign Policy and Its Critics, 1830-1950

Karl Marx’s Workers’ Inquiry: International History, Reception and Responses