The Marx Library is a living resource. Along with its Spanish Collection, the Russia Collection demonstrates a determination to use new media to portray historical events in a way, which makes them accessible to an ever wider audience.

It brings together memories and artefacts including a stamp collection, historical moments and events, records of meetings, banners, newspaper collections, diaries, exhibitions and ephemera, which chart a unique relationship between Russian and British citizens and institutions and working class political parties and trades unions.

As early as 1934, just a year after it was established, Dr Osiakovsky gave a lecture at the Library on Russian art from the 17th century to the 1930s.

Viscount Hastings - who had painted a fresco at the Hall of Science at the Chicago World Fair - and Clifford White painted a rare mural on the Library wall which prominently depicts Lenin. Hastings had served as an apprentice to Diego Rivera and the influence is plain to see.

Correspondence and factory classes in the mid-thirties dealt with the USSR and the League of Nations. Lenin and Krupskaya came to the Library and Lenin worked with Harry Quelch at the offices of the Twentieth Century Press where Russian compositors, printers and proofreaders would come to print The Iskra. Lenin's use of the presses had been brokered by Theodore Rothstein. His son Andrew, went on to become President of Marx Library.

Once printed, Iskra was then smuggled in to Russia to be distributed. Seventeen issues - numbers 22-38 - were printed in this way. In later years, Tom Quelch an apprentice printer at Twentieth Century Press during Lenin's sojourn and who helped found the Library, wrote fondly in his memoirs of Lenin and his later re acquaintance with him when he toured Russia in 1920.

As the Library grew it developed many hundreds of discussion groups and travelling tutors around the country. It developed a Science Faculty and Britain's best-known scientists such s JBS Haldane came to lecture. In 1941 he could be found lecturing on Science in Industry and Social Services in the USSR.

Leading trade unionists such as Harry Adams, President of the Building Workers' Union lectured on the Construction Industry in the USSR.

The Library was contracted to develop courses for the Cooperative Society and Women's Guilds on The Soviet Union - Its Land and People.

During the war, with the popularity of Russia at an all time high, the Library extended its network of groups from the North East to South Wales and to Devon. After the war, Soviet citizens began to visit in person, in appreciable numbers, as when a delegation of 25 historians from the USSR Academy of Sciences visited in 1965.

Many times the Library has been used as a backdrop to television and film programmes about the USSR. Granada TV took over the library to shoot a film for the 50th Anniversary of the October Revolution, in 1967. To mark the same anniversary, items were sent from the USSR to be used in a major exhibition, which the Library co-hosted with Camden Central Library, topped off with guest lectures by AJP Taylor and Dr Ralph Milliband.

The fall of the USSR impacted on the Library cutting many former academic and solidarity ties. But this served to stimulate greater effort to understand the march of Russian and Soviet history. Today relations have been rebuilt with Russian institutions and Libraries, trade unions, Russian Presence UK and, of course, the Embassy of the Russian Federation. In May 2010 Director of Archives Dr John Callow visited Moscow to speak on Fascism, War and the Historical memory.