Following the success of Jane Rosen’s Sam Johnson Memorial Lecture in December 2024, the Manchester St. Petersburg Friendship Society was pleased to propose Sergei Nikitin to deliver the 2025 Memorial Lecture.
Lecture title: Friends and Comrades: How Quakers helped Russians to survive famine and epidemic
Date: Thursday 4th December 2025 at 06:00 pm to 08:00 pm
Venue: The Manchester Histories Hub on the Lower Ground Floor of Manchester Central Library.
This is a hybrid event. We warmly encourage you to join us in person at Manchester Histories Hub, where you will have the opportunity to meet the author, purchase a copy of the book, and have it signed. For those unable to attend in person, an online attendance option is available. A link to join will be emailed to registered attendees in the days leading up to the event.
Book free tickets here: Sam Johnson Memorial Lecture 2025 Tickets, Thu, Dec 4, 2025 at 6:00 PM | Eventbrite
More information about Sergei Nikitin and his lecture: In his important book, Friends and Comrades: How Quakers helped Russians to survive famine and epidemic, Sergei Nikitin documents the relief work done by British and American Quakers in Russia during and after the First World War, during the Famine in the Volga basin area. Providing emergency relief, medical aid, and food, Quakers provided essential care to many thousands of the War refugees and ordinary Russians in 1916-1931. Drawing on a wealth of archival sources, diaries, and memoirs, the book explores the fraught relationship between the Friends and the Russian state officials. In this lecture, Sergei presents a story never before told in Russia or in the West: how the Religious Society of Friends worked in Russia under the Tsarist government and the Bolsheviks for 15 years in the 20th century. As the British historian Robert Service said: “Sergei has written an exemplary, vivid, and well-researched account of the Quaker relief mission to Russia.”
Sergei Nikitin was born in Gomel, USSR, in 1957. He studied the physics of semiconductors at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute and worked at scientific research institutes in Leningrad and Gatchina. Sergei has been involved in historical research work on the Quakers in Russia since 1996. In 1999, he started his job for an international Quaker organisation Friends House Moscow as a director of the office. From 2003 he had worked as the Head of Amnesty International representative office in Russia for 14 years. In June 2017 Sergei retired and moved with his family to High Peak, Derbyshire, UK. His book “When Quakers Were Saving Russia” (in Russian) was published in Moscow in 2020. It was published in the UK – titled “Friends and Comrades. How Quakers helped Russians to survive famine and epidemics” – in 2022.