Lenin (centre) with Roddy Connolly (centre-right) at the Second World Congress of the Communist International, Petrograd, July 1920.
It is early July, 1920. Roddy Connolly, teenage participant in the Easter Rising, is travelling without a passport in a cargo boat through the Norwegian fiords. The destination: Soviet Russia. As they edge towards the northern tips of the Kola Peninsula, the boat is blown off course by an incoming storm, pushing them some 250 miles towards the North Pole. After bouts of seasickness, they eventually dock in a besieged Murmansk, where Connolly begins a three-day rail journey across Civil War-torn Russia. Finally, he reaches revolutionary Petrograd, just in time for the opening of the Second World Congress of the Communist International. On arrival he is warmly greeted by Vladimir Lenin, who informs him that not only has he read his father’s book Labour and Irish History, but that he rates him “head and shoulders” above his contemporaries in the European socialist movement.(1)
Roddy’s father was James Connolly, the Scottish-Irish revolutionary who led the Easter Rising of 1916. Though carried out by a relatively small number of poorly armed soldiers, the Rising had consequences all out of proportion to the military strength of its participants. It set in motion a chain of events that would eventually lead to the formation of an independent Irish Republic. As we approach the 100-year anniversary of this historic event, there is a chapter that remains untold: the story of how the Rising was remembered in the Soviet Union.
