Lev Rabeneck in the 1950s at his London flat.

LEV RABENECK, BORN 1883
RUSSIAN BUSINESSMAN

Lev Rabeneck was born in Moscow. After schooling in Montreux, Switzerland, and Moscow, he studied chemistry at the Imperial Higher Technical School in Moscow, followed by postraguate study in Dresden, Germany. His first job was with the family’s cotton textile business. where in due course he became a director. In 1919 the family, s Finnish subjects, were taken hostage by the Bolsheviks and were exchanged at the Finnish froniter for Bolsheviks held as hostages by the Finns. The family had to abandon their factories in Russia, and moved to England. There Lev Rabeneck developed a varied business career.

Included in his memoir is an account of his friendship, as a student, with Anton Chekov at the end of Chekov’s life. This arose from a chance encounter with Chekov and his wife at a hotel they were staying at in Badenweiler, a small spa in the Black Forest in southern Germany.

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