Life
Theodore Rothstein was born 1871 in the Imperial Russian city of Kovno, Vilna Governorate (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), the son of a Jewish family.
Rothstein left Russia in 1890 for political reasons and settled in Britain. He worked as a journalist in the area of foreign policy for The Tribune, the The Daily News, The Manchester Guardian, and became a member of the National Union of Journalists. Furthermore he was active in London as a correspondent for some radical Russian newspapers. Rothstein also wrote articles for Die Neue Zeit, the organ of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which represented the direct way of a consistent Marxism and in which took place debates regarding Marxism and socialism.
In 1895, he joined the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) which was founded by Henry Hyndman in 1884. He occupied the left wing of the party as a prominent theorists and forward thinker, and in 1900 he was elected to its executive. Within the SDF's successor, the British Socialist Party (BSP), was he a leader of the opposition to Hyndman's support for the war. After Hyndman and his supporters left the BSP, Rothstein became a leading figure in the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He also joined the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party as a British member in 1901, siding with the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks and becoming a close comrade of Lenin, who often stayed at Rothstein's house on Clapton Square in the Hackney area of London.
He caused sensation in 1910 in which he published "Egypt's Ruin", an analysis of Egypt's systematic exploitation by the British after the occupation, evidenced by British government documents and correspondent reports from London newspapers regarding Egypt. Although Rothstein was a convinced opponent of the first World War I, he worked for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the British War Office as a Russian translator and interpreter.
However, following an invitation to Moscow 1920, he could not travel back to Britain due to the Russian Civil War and its political complications. He remained in Russia, became a member of the Bolshevik Party, took on the chairmanship of the "University reform commission" (1920–1921), became the Ambassador to Tehran (1921–1922) and was from 1922 on a member of the "Collegium of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs". Rothstein was appointed director of the Institute of World Economy and Politics in Moscow.
Rothstein's son, Andrew, remained in Britain and also became a prominent communist.
Rothstein died in Moscow in 1953.
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