The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents

by Alex Butterworth

  Short of the paunch and neat pointed beard he subsequently acquired, the arch-intriguer of later years is already recognisable, of whom it would be said that ‘his slightly too ingratiating manner and his suave way of speaking – made one think of a great feline carefully concealing its claws.’ For the moment, though, Rachkovsky was not yet the capricious master but still the plaything of others, whose dangerous games would come close to destroying him. Hauled in for interrogation by the Third Section in the spring of 1879, over his association with a certain Semionovsky who was suspected of concealing the assassin Kravchinsky, Rachkovsky was obliged to declare his true allegiance once and for all. He would, he confirmed, render the police whatever services they asked of him; his offer was gratefully accepted, and he was directed to infiltrate the People’s Will without delay.

  In only a few months, concurrent with Rachkovsky establishing himself in St Petersburg, the People’s Will organisation, or Narodnaya Volya, had come to dominate the radical landscape in Russia, although its numbers remained intentionally small. With its immediate roots in the uncompromising ‘Troglodyte’ or ‘Death and Freedom’ faction of the populist movement, most of its prime movers were familiar names from the Chaikovsky Circle: men and women who had remained in Russia during the worst of the persecution, and become radicalised by the punishments inflicted on their comrades. For Lev Tikhomirov, the traumatic memory of Bogoliubov’s vicious beating was compounded by the knowledge that humiliation had since sent the poor man mad, while others had witnessed naïve students, detained without charge while ‘going to the people’, locked in cages and then hung over the latrines until they passed out from the fumes. The toll of political prisoners who had died from neglect or mistreatment already approached seventy.

  Among the populists who had risen rapidly through the depleted ranks of their local cells, many had come to recognise that a new level of ruthlessness and professionalism was required if anything resembling social justice was to be secured. Zhelyabov was one such, the son of serfs, who as a child had witnessed his aunt dragged away by the bailiff to be raped by the local landowner, and had enrolled in the radical movement following one of his frequent and groundless arrests. Frustrated by the failure of past efforts to force concessions from the tsar, Zhelyabov already concluded that ‘History moves too slowly. It needs a push. Otherwise the whole nation will be rotten and gone to seed before the liberals get anything done.’ And then there was the scientist Kibalchich, who as a student of physiology under Elie Cyon had rioted in 1874 against his professor’s reactionary influence in the university, and for the crime of lending a prohibited book to a peasant had subsequently spent three years in prison, pending the pronouncement of his two-month sentence. Now a fully fledged militant, his fascination with rocket design was put on ice, while he devoted himself to the construction and testing of terrorist bombs in his home laboratory.

  The aspiration that the rest of society might join the radicals in demanding change had reached its high watermark at the beginning of 1878, when the Trial of the 193 ended in acquittal for a large majority of the defendants, many of whom had been held for several years. The impudent Myshkin, who had railed in court against ‘a farce…worse than a farce…worse than a brothel where girls sell their bodies to earn a living’, received a sentence, though, of ten years’ hard labour. In St Petersburg a heady atmosphere engulfed those who had been freed: ‘People thronged their apartments from morning to night. It was an interrupted revolutionary club, where ninety to a hundred visitors attended in a day; friends brought with them strangers who wished to shake hands with those whom they had looked upon as buried alive.’ Yet almost immediately the steel door of repression had again swung shut: extrajudicial measures were introduced to excise any leniency from the system, and a number of those acquitted were nevertheless sent into internal exile on the tsar’s prerogative; jury trials were abandoned, with hearings moved from civil to military courts, and the investigative procedures of the Third Section sharpened.

  The freelance, uncoordinated nature of a series of attacks in spring 1879 only invited further repression. Kropotkin’s cousin, Dmitri, had been the first victim, shot in February; two months later, on 2 April, it was Tsar Alexander II himself who was in the firing line. Ambushed while walking in the grounds of the Winter Palace, the tsar frantically dodged five bullets and was saved only by the presence of mind of a loyal peasant who nudged the assassin’s elbow. The hanging that followed was among fifteen executions for politically motivated crimes that year, including one as punishment for purely propagandist activities. Gone were the traditional Russian scruples about the sanctity of human life, which made it so difficult to recruit to the post of public executioner that one man covered all the European provinces. Now the job was often left to amateurs, fortified with vodka to the point of oblivion, and grotesquely clumsy: ill-tied nooses sent condemned men sprawling to the ground, only for them to be strung up again until the task was accomplished.

  Observing the huddles of political prisoners waiting under guard to be led out of the city on the first stage of their long march to Siberia, even radicals previously inhibited about the use of violence were forced to reassess their position. The security of the movement had always warranted extreme sanctions against traitors: the euphemistic ‘withdrawal from circulation’. The appearance in court of one informant from Kiev, who had been been repeatedly stabbed and left for dead, his face dissolved by the application of lime, offered an even more powerful warning than the note left with him: ‘This is what happens to spies.’ Logic dictated that such defensive measures should be applied equally to those who controlled the informants, but implied terrible ramifications. ‘If you decide to kill a spy, why shouldn’t you punish the policeman who encourages his base profession and who profits from his information by making more arrests?’ was how Kravchinsky presented the argument, ‘or even the chief of police who directs the whole thing? Finally and inevitably comes the tsar himself, whose power spurred the whole gang into action.’

  It was this question that the leaders of the radical movement were summoned to debate in the forest of Voronezh in June 1879. Determined to stage a coup against any in the movement who resisted their terroristic agenda, the ‘Troglodytes’ had convened for a preliminary meeting, to plan strategy, in the nearby spa town of Lipetsk, in whose mineral waters no fish could survive. Whilst grimacing aristocrats downed their restorative draughts, Zhelyabov plotted with his extremist colleagues to administer a bitter and deadly medicine of his own. In readiness for the life ahead, he had already separated from his wife and young family to avoid their being persecuted for his future deeds, while his earlier fascination with the explosive charges used by the fishing fleet in Kiev to bring stunned shoals floating to the surface, hinted at what he had in mind.

  By the time the members of the more moderate Land and Liberty faction of populists arrived at the designated clearing in the Voronezh forest, the trap was truly set. When the moderate Georgi Plekhanov leaned nonchalantly back on a tree to mockingly read out an article arguing the legitimacy of terrorism, he expected most of those present to endorse his abhorrence of such sentiments. Their silence left him nonplussed: ‘In that case, gentlemen, I have nothing more to say,’ was all he could muster. His colleagues were ready to cast aside the fundamental principle of non-violence which had guided the movement ever since the end of Nechaev’s short and brutal career nine years earlier, although many still cavilled at Tikhomirov’s argument for the formation of an organisational elite to coordinate a new strategy that would punch through to political power.

  ‘It was my belief’, one of the young women present would recollect, ‘that the revolutionary idea could be a life-giving force only when it was the antithesis of all coercion – state, social and even personal coercion, tsarist and Jacobin alike. Of course it was possible for a narrow group of ambitious men to replace one form of coercion by another. But neither the people nor educated society would follow them consciously, and
only a conscious movement can impart new principles to public life.’ The fear was that they might recreate just those circumstances that had seen the decay of the French Revolution into dictatorship.

  For a hard core, however, including Kibalchich and Vera Figner, Tikhomirov’s recommendations were compelling. Some months would pass before the schism in the Russian radical movement would crystallise, but the Voronezh conference marked the fateful moment when hope gave way to anger. That their extremist policy had been necessitated precisely by their failure to inspire the ‘people’ to rise up was conveniently overlooked as they named their splinter organisation the People’s Will.

  In the more innocent age that was now drawing to a close, the radicals had referred to the feared agents of the Third Section, whose unofficial uniform made them quite easily identifiable, as ‘the pea green overcoats’. Now, though, as the struggle shifted into the world of conspiracy, both sides were developing a more sophisticated approach to concealment and infiltration. The populist heirs of the Chaikovsky Circle had already scored a remarkable intelligence coup by placing a mole at the very heart of the tsarist security service. It had taken Nicholas Kletochnikov, a young graduate, considerable time and tenacity to acquire his post as confidential clerk to the investigation department of the Third Section: first he had insinuated himself into the maternal affection of his reactionary landlady, next convinced her that he shared her political views; only then had she felt inspired to recommend him for recruitment. Although Peter Rachkovsky did not yet know it, the police headquarters were severely compromised and a single misplaced word could blow his cover.

  Rachkovsky’s successes as a police spy had been swift and significant. Once the recommendations of the Archangel radicals had paved his way to acceptance by the People’s Will, he had promptly betrayed the very friend about whom the police had first interrogated him, and soon after had exposed the previously unsuspected Tikhomirov as the pseudonymous ‘Tigrich’, whose identification was a Third Section priority. But as each new arrest narrowed the field of possible traitors in The People’s Will, his associates were becoming suspicious. In the end, Rachkovsky’s own incaution gave the game away.

  To gain credibility in his undercover role, Rachkovsky had acted as a decoy on behalf of the radicals, donning a wanted-man’s coat to distract the police while the real subject of their surveillance caught a train for Odessa using a forged passport. Unable to resist sharing his amusement at the ruse with his Third Section colleagues, Rachkovsky had chosen the People’s Will plant Kletochnikov as his confidant; as Kletochnikov had by this time been awarded the Order of St Stanislas, perhaps Rachkovsky felt his loyalty was beyond question. The next edition of the Narodnaya volya newspaper exposed Rachkovsky’s treachery. Spirited away to Vilnius under police protection, he was lucky to escape with his life. Never again would he take anyone at face value.

  Temporarily, Kletochnikov’s colleagues in the People’s Will had the advantage, armed with a steady flow of privileged information about their opponents’ plans and state of knowledge, and when necessary with invaluable tip-offs.

  The 13,000 miles of railway track that had been laid in the preceding decade, financed for the tsar by loans from Western capitalists, must have appeared a terrible affront to the People’s Will, whose members prided themselves on standing in the vanguard of science and enlightenment. A piece of autocratic sleight of hand, it stole their progressive thunder, dressing cold-hearted reaction in the stuff of forward-looking optimism. For despite representing a practical statement of control and confidence, the expanding railway network was experienced by the tsar’s subjects as a monumental act of generosity that embraced them all. By striking the tyrant down as he raced along these sleek new tracks, using state-of-the art explosives, the People’s Will could symbolically reclaim their rightful place as heirs to the future, while laying bare the tsar’s hubris and vulnerability. In expectation of the tsar’s return from the imperial family’s winter vacation at the Black Sea resort of Yalta, the decision was taken to mine the railway network simultaneously at three points, hundreds of miles apart, covering the most likely permutations in the tsar’s itinerary.

  Targeting the first possible route, Vera Figner was dispatched to employ her female wiles to assist one of the radicals in securing a job with the railway company near Odessa. The sob story she told concerned a manservant in St Petersburg who was being sent south in search of fresh air for his consumptive wife. It was an approach fraught with risks, and Figner barely escaped an interview with her first mark, Baron Ungern-Sternberg, with her honour intact; as the governor of the region, the Baltic aristocrat had assumed that her approach implied recognition of his seigneurial rights. Dusting herself off, Figner next aimed lower, enthralling the local railway master with the sleek velvet and swaying peacock plumes of her outfit. Frolenko, the movement’s master of disguise, fresh from springing three revolutionaries from prison by posing as their gaoler, was chosen to take the part of the railway guard and plant the bombs.

  Leading the second team, Zhelyabov posed as an industrialist looking to set up a tannery in Alexandrovsk, near the railway boom town of Kharkov. His target was a section of track on the Simferopol–St Petersburg line, the tsar’s most direct route home, along which police patrols passed every three or four hours. Nerves of steel and a high level of concentration were required, and the mere presence of the zealous, charismatic Zhelyabov helped maintain the group’s morale: ‘He was a man who compelled attention at first glance,’ wrote one of his colleagues; ‘he spoke quietly, in a low full bass, with determination and conviction, on the necessity of terror.’ Women succumbed readily to his charms, but in the heroine of the third team, Sofia Perovskaya, he met his match: while she tamed his philandering ways, he won her over from a distrust of men, rooted in hatred for her tyrannical father.

  The third route seemed the least likely, as it would require the tsar to divert his journey to Moscow, but Perovskaya and her comrades were not deterred. From the small house they had purchased near the railway line, only a couple of miles out from the Moscow terminus, a fifty-yard-tunnel had to be dug before the middle of November. The men worked in shifts, arriving before daybreak and continuing until the early hours. For weeks on end they edged forward: the bookish Morozov, wilting under the physical effort; the conceited Grigori Goldenburg, at whose hand Dmitri Kropotkin had died, and who insisted on being at the forefront of any action; and Lev Hartmann, one of those freed from prison by Frolenko and since co-opted to the executive committee of the People’s Will. Four others helped too, taking their turn at digging. They advanced a scant four yards each day, inserting props that sagged under the weight of the earth overhead and continually bailing out the water that seeped in, threatening to flood the tunnel. The wet sandy soil they excavated while wedged into the tunnel on their hands and knees, with scarcely room to wield their tools, was scattered as discreetly as possible over the yard outside. Piles of it filled the rooms of the house and its outbuildings, which smelled like a grave. The possibility of collapse loomed large as the tunnel passed beneath a muddy track; even the reinforced props creaked and bowed whenever a laden water cart passed overhead, and the sappers carried poison to ensure a speedy death should they be entombed.

  While the men tunnelled, Perovskaya sat cradling a pistol, ready to fire at a bottle of nitroglycerine and blow them all up should the alarm be rung on the upper floor to warn of approaching police. Incidental problems were resolved with a quick wit: clever procrastination when an old resident arrived to retrieve her possessions from the soil-filled shed; a superstitious rant to deter neighbours who came rushing to extinguish a fire; the invocation of a cat with an inexhaustible appetite to explain the quantities of provisions observed entering the house. When a gendarme and local surveyor arrived to assess a mortgage application made by the group to fund the purchase of a drill, Perovskaya’s sangfroid saw them through. And day by arduous day, the intermittent thunder and clack of train wheels sounded out
the diggers’ growing proximity to the line, and the approaching moment when their work would be tested.

  Then disaster struck. Dispatched to collect a case of dynamite and meet Kibalchich so that the scientist and bomb-making expert could advise him in its use, Goldenburg was arrested; after a mix-up over their rendezvous, Kibalchich arrived just in time to see him dragged away. Fresh explosives were sourced, but then, at the last moment, the Moscow electricians who had promised to provide Hartmann with the battery needed to detonate the charge haggled over the price. Lacking access to ready cash, Hartmann handed over his engraved gold watch: lavish overpayment and an incriminating error that would nearly cost him dear.

  At last, though, everything was set. The three groups waited in feverish anticipation to know which route the tsar would take. At the last minute news came through. Fearing seasickness in rough weather, the tsar had decided against the Odessa route. If Zhelyabov failed, it would be down to the Moscow unit.

  It was the night of 19 November 1879. Reeling from lack of sleep, having for months been leading the double life of aspiring businessman and local personality by day and ruthless terrorist by night, Zhelyabov could do no more. Heavy rain had flooded the depression between the high railway embankment and the position from which he would stake out the passing train, leaving him and his collaborators drenched and shivering as they buried their bombs and laid the wires. But as he watched the first decoy train pass and awaited the arrival of the second, as advised by spies in Simferopol, he must have felt confident that his moment of glory was fast approaching. Calmly he counted: one, two, three carriages, then the fourth. Was that the tsar at the window? Timing it perfectly, he pressed the lever. Nothing, save the sound of the train rolling on, uninterrupted. The bomb had failed to detonate.