Isaiah Berlin Isaiah Berlin was born in 1909 in Riga (then in the Russian Empire, now capital of Latvia), the son of Mendel Berlin, a prosperous timber merchant, and his wife Marie, née Volshonok. In 1915 the family moved to Andreapol, in Russia, and in 1917 to Petrograd (now St Petersburg), where they remained through both the Russian Revolutions of 1917, which Isaiah would remember witnessing. Despite early harrassment by the Bolsheviks, the family was permitted to return to Riga with Latvian citizenship in 1920; from there they emigrated, in 1921, to Britain. They lived in and around London; Isaiah attended St Paul’s School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he studied Greats (classical languages, ancient history, and philosophy) and PPE (politics, philosophy and econ...