On April 13, 2026, at 6:15 PM, a lecture by Dr. Olga Solovyeva entitled A Spiral of History: Iosif Trumpeldor, Nikolai Russel, Kōtoku Shūsui and the “Hamadera Moment” will take place.
The lecture will be held at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies, University of Art and Design Linz, in Vienna, but it will also be possible to join the event online.
Details about the lecture and the link to the meeting can be found in the announcement below:
Abstrakt wykładu:
The lecture follows the biographical and ideological trajectories of the Russian-Belarusian revolutionary Populist Nikolai Sudzilovski-Russel, the Japanese anarchist Kōtoku Shūsui, and the early Zionist activist Iosif Trumpeldor whose lives overlapped for about six months in their educational activism for prisoners of the Russo-Japanese war during Trumpeldor’s internment in the Hamadera camp in Japan. This ›Hamadera moment‹ of a Russian-Jewish-Japanese encounter reveals a meeting point of ideologies often regarded as incompatible—Russel’s internationalism and Trumpeldor’s Zionism in the context of the Japanese transnational anarchism and pacifism. Trumpeldor’s and Russel’s activities inside and outside the POW camp, facilitated by the Japanese anarchists, reveal the cross-fertilization of intellectual and transcultural experiences which contributed to forming the early thought-practice of the ›Jewish state‹ as a multi-national, parliamentary democracy. The lecture recovers the place of Asian revolutionaries in creating the global democratic paradigm.