VISITORS flocked to Marx House on London’s Clerkenwell Green on Saturday to mark 100 years since Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin died.

The Marx Memorial Library held a conference on the founder of the Soviet state and Lenin’s connection to London and the building itself, from which he edited the underground Bolshevik newspaper Iskra (the Spark) from 1902 to 1903.

Library director Meirian Jump opened the day by describing Lenin’s links to the historic building and inviting guests to visit the Lenin room, from which he edited the paper, while historian Robert Henderson, former curator of the Russian collection at the British Library, spoke of Lenin’s time as a political exile in London, Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya’s lives in the British capital and the organisation of Bolshevik congresses there, themes of his recent book The Spark that Lit the Revolution.