Sergei Stepniak is obviously key to the story of the Friends of Russian Freedom, in 1890s London, as well as to the life of Constance Garnett.

So, as an exercise, I thought I’d try and see what we could learn about Sergei Stepniak’s life in London from publicly available documents.

But by what name was he known by to the British authorities?

He was born Sergei Mikhailovitch Kravchinski, but like many Russian revolutionaries of the time habitually used a pseudonym, in his case Stepniak, which means something like “steppe dweller”. 

At the time most people in England were unfamiliar with Russian names and naming conventions, which made identifying him a tad difficult.

However, in the newspaper reports of his death he was usually referred to a M. Serguis Stepnyak or sometimes Stepniak, so I went with that.

The M is of course short for monsieur, and was used at the time in English to signify that the foreigner was a gentleman or someone of equivalent class to a gentleman – his title would most likely  have been gospodin – having learned Russian in Soviet times I am incredibly vague about pre revolutionary styles and titles, and who would have been referred to as what.

Using familysearch.org, it was easy enough to find his death certificate and probate records, and to find that his wife was indeed known in English as Fanny Stepniak.

Fanny is not really a Russian name, but because it was used for the name of Fanya Kaplan, who tried to assassinate Lenin I assumed that Fanny Stepniak used Fanny as an anglicisation of Fanya.

Unfortunately, Fanya is not really a common Russian name either, and that leads to a problem.

I tried searching for the Stepniaks in the 1891 census, and they are not there, whether because they deliberately dodged the census by wishing to remain anonymous, or were abroad. Fanny Stepniak appears in the 1901 and 1911 censuses as a widow engaged in literary work, so perhaps she really did use the name Fanny in England, and not Fanya as I assumed,  and she is also referred to as Fanny on her death certificate.

Unusually for a Russian, she does not give a patronymic – for example, Sergei was formally Sergei Mikhailovitch as his father’s forename was Mikhail. 

For the moment her actual identity is a mystery to me.

I did try searching for Kravchinski, Sergei’s  original surname, as opposed to his pseudonym, and came up with a complete blank.

While some orthodox church records from Ukraine have been digitised – Sergei was born in the Kherson governate of the Russian empire which is now part of Ukraine –  many have not, and of course as war and revolution have meant that many records have been lost.

More importantly for our purposes, Kravchinski does not appear in the 1891 census, suggesting that if they were in Britain at the time they must have been using yet another pseudonym…