Faced with a world of increasing complexity and rapid change, a complacent bourgeoisie craved easy explanations of anything that challenged its easeful existence. In such circumstances, the phenomenon of the all-encompassing ‘conspiracy theory’ was able to take root. The fanciful notion of an internationally coordinated anarchist revolution of which the isolated attacks with bombs, knives and revolvers marked the first skirmishes was only one example. Others drew in the credulous masses with fantastical stories of Freemasonic satanism and megalomaniac supermen. It was a fictitious conspiracy that harnessed the rising tide of anti-Semitism, though, which would truly define the genre: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And although public opinion was not yet ready to embrace the simplest, most ruthless solutions to such a perceived threat, the contemporary debate over criminal anthropology and eugenics darkly foreshadowed what lay ahead. That such ideas were advanced from and encouraged by the political left, with the most humane intentions, is typical of the paradoxical nature of the period.
From out of the midst of a tangled knot of forgeries, provocation, black propaganda, misplaced idealism and twisted political allegiances the horrors of world war, totalitarianism and genocide that plagued the twentieth century would grow, having already set deep roots. Credible theses have been advanced that the origins of fascism lie in nineteenth-century anarchism, or that the French nationalism of the fin de siècle, which itself embraced elements from the radical left, may have been the progenitor of Nazism. My interest here, however, is merely to unpick the elaborate deceptions and intrigues generated by all sides, in an attempt to discern the confluence of factors that led to the first international ‘War on Terror’ and the consequences that flowed from it. For amidst a welter of alarmism and misdirection, a genuine conspiracy of sorts does lie buried, less cogent and universal than that described by the Protocols, despite them sharing a common author, but far-reaching nonetheless. And if there are valuable lessons to be learned from the period, the most imperative are perhaps to be discovered here, however uncomfortable they may be.
In exploring such a murky world, I have been unsurprised that the evidence has been elusive and the official paper trail often sparse. How welcome would be the reappearance of the suitcase, last seen in Paris during the 1930s, containing the private papers of Peter Rachkovsky, the head of Russia’s foreign Okhrana and the fulcrum for so much of the intrigue in the period. How convenient if the files relating to the Okhrana’s activities in London, and its relations with the American Pinkerton Agency, had not at some point been emptied; or, indeed, if the Belgian cabinet had forgotten to instruct that key police reports should disappear into secret dossiers, never to emerge again.
What has taken me aback, however, has been the tenacity with which the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch in London have sought to prevent access to their apparently limited records from the period: a number of ledgers, listing communications received from a wide range of sources. Along with the correspondence itself, for many years the ledgers themselves had been thought lost: pulped in the war effort, it was claimed, or destroyed by a bomb. Since their surprising reappearance in 2001, to be used as the basis of a doctoral thesis by a serving Special Branch officer, such access has not been replicated for other researchers, despite a Freedom of Information case I have pursued for several years. Following a ruling in favour of disclosure by the Information Commissioner and reprimands for the Metropolitan Police handling of the case, the police appeal to the Information Tribunal in 2009 resulted in the universal redaction of all names contained in the documents. The censored material raises as many questions as it answers.
Nevertheless, enough documentary evidence is available for a patient researcher to piece together a picture of this clandestine world of late nineteenth-century policing. The spiriting to America of the Okhrana’s Paris archive following the revolution in Russia, unveiled at the Hoover Institute in the 1950s, has preserved a rich resource; so too have the archives of the Paris Prefecture of Police, whose basement contains box upon box of material, including agents’ field reports, readily accessible to the public on request. Official documents jostle with a fascinating mass of material of more questionable reliability: reports from duplicitous informants, eager to prove themselves indispensible by passing off conjecture as fact; press coverage of false-flag police operations. And then there are the memoirs published by policemen and revolutionaries, all with an agenda to promote, or a desire to dramatise or justify their achievements.
The world that this book sets out to portray is one of slippery truths, where the key to success lies in the manipulation of popular opinion, where masters of deception weave webs of such complexity that they will ultimately trap themselves, and a clinical paranoiac offers some of the most perspicacious testimony. I have chosen to represent it in a mode that emphasises narrative over analysis, and in order to capture something of the subjective experience of those involved, at times I have taken the protagonists at their own estimation, recounting stories that they told about themselves as fact. For the fullest exploration of those decisions, as well as for additional material relating to certain areas covered, the reader should look to the online notes that accompany this book: those published here offer only minimal citation.
Works of literature that are more ostensibly fictional, or offer a creative interpretation of the period in some other form, are presented more critically. Radical politics and cultural bohemia frequently rubbed shoulders, each in search of new truths and on a quest to reshape reality, and the art and literature of the period are uncommonly revealing about both the life of that milieu, and the ideas that informed it. The fantastical genre of ‘anticipatory’ fiction, then so popular, at first articulated the promise of technological progress to which the anarchists looked for the foundations of a utopian future, but latterly evoked the destructive horrors of which anarchism was thought capable. Similarly, the social realist novels of the day offer an unequalled insight into the hardship and injustices of everyday life, and occasionally open windows too into the underworld of intrigue.
Chimerical though the notions of an international conspiracy largely were, the geographical scope of the anarchist movement and activities of the associated revolutionaries was truly global. Rarely at rest for long, the group of protagonists with whom the book is particularly concerned were time and again dispersed by exile, deportation or flight, travelling to make a stand wherever the prospects of insurrection appeared most auspicious. Their interweaving paths are tracked across five continents, while the communities in St Petersburg, Paris, London and elsewhere where they occasionally coalesced, for congresses or in search of refuge, are more closely explored. Equal attention, though, is given to the police officials who hang on the anarchists’ tails, or else lurk in the shadows with dubious intent. The book’s overall progression is chronological, though the reader should be aware that consecutive chapters often overlap in time to keep pace with the disparate lives of their subjects. Individuals and themes may disappear into the background for some time, but their strands of story are more likely to resurface.
Russia, although a relative backwater for anarchism, figures prominently as a disseminator of terrorism and focus of revolutionary zeal. Paradoxically, Spain and Germany, hotbeds of anarchism and socialism, remain largely offstage except where events there impinge on the story elsewhere: more discrete in their national movements, they each warrant books to themselves, of which kind many exist. At crucial junctures in my story, much original research is deployed. Elsewhere, the panorama described is largely a work of synthesis, and I am therefore grateful to all those on whose specialist research I have drawn, especially where it is yet to be published.
To the Victorian public, proud of their national tradition of liberal policing and of Britain as a beacon of tolerance, the very idea of a political police carried the stigma of foreign despotism. In the nineteenth century, Britain’s elected politicians would never have dared venture anything resembling the ki
nd of legislation that recent years have seen passed with barely a blink of the public eye, to threaten civil liberties that have for generations been taken for granted. That changing times demand changing laws is hard to dispute, but if new powers are to be conceded it is essential that we be ever more vigilant in guarding against their abuse. Likewise, if our political leaders are allowed blithely to insist that ‘history’ should be their judge, then we should at least be in no doubt that the historians of the future will have access to the material necessary to hold those leaders to account for any deceptions they may have practised. Histories bearing an official sanction, of the kind that appeal to today’s security services, are not a satisfactory alternative. This book is a pebble cast on the other side of the scales.
Prologue
This Thing of Darkness
Paris, 1908
In the eyes of the world, the group that assembled daily in Boris Savinkov’s spartan Paris apartment in October 1908 would have represented the most formidable concentration of terrorists history had yet seen. The sixty-six-year-old Peter Kropotkin, a descendant of the Rurik dynasty of early tsars, may have appeared unthreatening, with his twinkling eyes, bushy white beard, paunch and distinguished, bald dome of a head, but some suspected him of having incited the 1901 assassination of McKinley, the American president. With him sat his Russian contemporaries, the revolutionaries Vera Figner and German Lopatin, who had only recently emerged from the terrible Schlüsselburg fortress, against whose vast walls they had listened to the freezing waters of the River Neva and Lake Ladoga lap ceaselessly for twenty years. Locked in solitary confinement, in cells designed to prevent any communication, they were there as leaders of the organisation that had assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881. And among the younger generation, scattered around the room, there were others who could count grand dukes, government ministers and police chiefs among their many victims. But whatever the suspicions at the French Sûreté, Scotland Yard or the Fontanka headquarters of the Russian Okhrana, whose agents loitered in the street outside, their purpose on this occasion was not to conspire, but to uncover the conspiracies of others.
Kropotkin, Lopatin and Figner – an exalted trio in the revolutionary pantheon – had been summoned to form a Jury of Honour, for a trial convened by the central committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party of Russia. Their task was to determine the truth or otherwise of an extraordinary accusation made by one of their number: that the movement’s most idolised hero, Evno Azef, was in fact in the pay of the Okhrana, and responsible for a shocking series of deceptions and betrayals. Commissioned for the weight of authority and experience that they could bring to bear in a case of unprecedented sensitivity, it was hoped that their status would ensure that, whatever the verdict, it would be beyond challenge.
It was a necessary precaution, for in this looking-glass trial, staffed exclusively by notorious lawbreakers, one thing above all was topsy-turvy. Vladimir Burtsev, the revolutionary movement’s self-appointed counter-intelligence expert, who had levelled the original accusation of treachery, had become the accused. Okhrana ruses to seed dissent in the revolutionary movement were all too common, and after his defamatory allegations concerning the legendary Azef, the Jury of Honour needed to settle the matter once and for all.
So it was that, for three weeks, the distinguished jurors sat behind a table and listened as the neat, intense figure of Vladimir Burtsev, with his light goatee beard and steel-rimmed spectacles, earnestly explained how the revolutionary they all knew as the ‘Frenchman’ or ‘Fat One’ at the same time figured on the Okhrana payroll as ‘Vinogradov’, ‘Kapustin’, ‘Philipovsky’ and ‘Raskin’. Their Azef had bound his comrades in a cult of self-sacrifice by his sheer charisma, relished the destruction of the tsar’s allies and fantasised about remote-control electrochemical bombs and flying machines that could deliver terror ever more effectively. The Okhrana’s Azef had set his comrades up for mass arrest by the political police in raids that stretched from the forests of Finland to the centre of Moscow, then celebrated at orgies laid on by his secret-police handler in a private room of the luxurious Malyi Iaroslavets restaurant. A St Petersburg apartment was, Burtsev alleged, reserved exclusively for the fortnightly meetings at which Raskin-Azef and the head of the Okhrana coordinated their priorities. This Azef thought nothing of murdering comrades, or betraying them for execution, to cover his tracks. And his heinous treachery was tinged with the macabre: once, on being shown the head of an unknown suicide bomber preserved in a jar of vodka by his police handler, he had appeared to relish identifying it as that of ‘Admiral’ Kudryavtsev, a rival from the Maximalist faction of terrorists.
As those in the courtroom listened to Burtsev’s allegations, an instinct for psychic self-protection closed their minds. To the veteran revolutionaries Azef was a potent avenger of past wrongs, while the younger generation had allowed themselves to become emotionally enslaved to their mentor’s mystique. For either group to entertain the possibility that Azef might be a traitor was to peer into an abyss. How, they demanded, could Burtsev possibly prove such an absurdity? That very day, Savinkov told the court, he was awaiting news of Tsar Nicholas’ assassination on board the new naval cruiser Rurik during its maiden voyage, according to a plan formulated by Azef. What comparable proof of his own commitment to the cause could Burtsev offer? Was the truth not, in fact, that it was Burtsev himself who had been turned by the Okhrana and assigned to destabilise their organisation? Why, others pressed, did Burtsev refuse to name his witnesses, if they actually existed, unless they were of such questionable reliability as to make protecting their anonymity a safer strategy for him to pursue? Vera Figner, whose long imprisonment had done nothing to soften her pitiless dark eyes, snarled at Burtsev that once his infamy was confirmed he would have no choice but to make good on his promise to blow out his own brains.
Under such pressure, Burtsev played his trump card. Shortly before the Jury of Honour had convened, he confided, feeling their rapt attention, he had tracked down the ex-chief of the Russian political police, Alexei Lopukhin, to Cologne. Discreetly, he had followed him on to a train, hesitating until they were under steam before he entered his compartment. Lopukhin might have been expected to flinch at the appearance of a possible assassin, and curse the loss of the protection he had enjoyed when in police service: the armed guard of crack agents and the locked carriages and shuttered windows. Instead, encountering one of his enemies on neutral territory, he treated him like an honoured foe. At Burtsev’s suggestion, the pair settled down to a guessing game: he would hazard a description of the police department’s foremost secret agent, and Lopukhin would confirm only whether his surmise was correct…
As Burtsev concluded his compelling tale, German Lopatin groaned. ‘What’s the use of talking?’ he said. ‘It’s all clear now.’ Azef had refused to attend the trial, arguing that a sense of affront prevented him from being present in the courtroom to clear his name. His punishment was therefore decided in absentia. A villa would be rented with a tunnel that led to a cave just across the Italian border where the traitor could be hanged without diplomatic repercussions. Realising that the man he had trusted above all others had played him for a fool, Savinkov bayed loudest for blood.
Until Burtsev had delivered his bombshell, only the elderly Kropotkin had been resolute in his support of his thesis. There was a personal sympathy, certainly, for Burtsev who, like his own younger self, had managed to escape from the tsarist police in the most dramatic fashion. And Kropotkin may have remembered too how, over thirty years before, he had spent many hours trying to convince a sceptical German Lopatin, now his co-juror, of his own credibility: that his aristocratic background should not stand in the way of his joining the revolutionaries. Most of all, though, he possessed a hard-earned understanding of the bottomless depths that the chiefs of the Russian political police would plumb in their scheming. In the course of his career as one of anarchism’s greatest theorists and leading activists, he had repe
atedly seen idealistic men and women across the world fall prey to the wiles of agents provocateurs. Kropotkin had come to believe where persistent charges of spying and provocation were made by a number of individuals over a period of time, that the smoke nearly always signalled fire.
Stepping out into the rue La Fontaine, after the agreement of Azef’s sentence, careless of the watchful eyes that swivelled towards him over upturned collars and twitching newspapers, Kropotkin would have felt a mixture of relief and dismay: that the traitor had been unmasked, but that the struggle to which he had devoted his life had engendered such a creature. The exposure of Azef was surely to be celebrated for the light it shed into the diabolical realm of shadows where he had dwelt: a world in which the boundaries of reality and invention were blurred. Kropotkin had many regrets about anarchism’s long drift into the use of terror tactics, and must have been tempted to blame the intrigues and provocations of the secret police, and imagine the cancer excised. And yet, in many ways, Evno Azef embodied the central paradox of the political philosophy that Kropotkin had done so much to develop and promulgate. Simple in his brute appetites, yet dizzyingly adept as a conspirator, Azef’s unusual blend of attributes shaped him into a phenomenon of a sort that no one involved in the revolutionary struggle had adequately foreseen.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 6
