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Russian migrants in Victorian Birmingham

L

Ls48029

knowlegable brummie
Looking at some members of my family tree who settled in Birmingham in 1901 from rural Oxfordshire, I can see that a significant number of the households in the surrounding properties on Hurst Street seemed to be Russian, yet so far I haven't been able to fund a lot of good resources to understand the Russian migration to Birmingham, and I am very interested in this as it would have been a complete juxtaposition from their previous existence, to have encountered migrants of different faiths and nationalities. are there any good learning resources on this? Was the Russian migrant population in Birmingham largely Jewish?
Thank you!
 
Ls48029 said:
Looking at some members of my family tree who settled in Birmingham in 1901 from rural Oxfordshire, I can see that a significant number of the households in the surrounding properties on Hurst Street seemed to be Russian, yet so far I haven't been able to fund a lot of good resources to understand the Russian migration to Birmingham, and I am very interested in this as it would have been a complete juxtaposition from their previous existence, to have encountered migrants of different faiths and nationalities. are there any good learning resources on this? Was the Russian migrant population in Birmingham largely Jewish?
Thank you!
Click to expand...
More general, but gives an overview. https://www.jewishbirmingham.org/history-of-the-community.html
 
Thinking about the answer to your question, I agree with A. Sparks that the majority of Russians who settled in Birmingham would seem to be Jewish. There was a failed Revolution in 1905 and the successful one in 1917. There was a wave of anti-semitic pogroms in 1903-1906.

Some of the non-Jewish Russians who came to Birmingham had fought for the Whites in the Civil War, these include Nikolai Bachtin a friend of Wittgenstein, who taught at Birmingham University. He taught there from 1938 and lived in Selly Oak. While he developed communist sympathies, he wisely did not return to Russia. (His brother Mikhail Bakhtin became famous in literary circles, they lost contact in the Revolution). So for Russians unsympathetic to Stalin and Jewish Russians there were excellent reasons to move to Paris, the UK or America.
 
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