The new tsar was adamant that there should be no commutation of sentences, nor the slightest display of mercy. Sofia Perovskaya was hanged alongside her lover Zhelyabov on the Semyonovsky parade ground, a placard naming them as regicides around their necks. Rysakov was one of the three others who died the same day, spurned by his comrades for his treachery; Kibalchich another, his tragic struggle having failed, not only for the social justice which the tsar had appeared to impede, but for the right to intellectual self-fulfilment too. Having spent his last days scrawling plans for directional rocket engines, the specialism he had neglected while at liberty, Kibalchich had entrusted a document describing his vision of an aeronautic machine to the chief of the gendarmerie. His final wish was merely that his scientific peers confirm the practicality of his design – a first step towards space travel – so that he might ‘meet death calmly, knowing that my idea shall not die with me but will benefit the human race for which I am willing to sacrifice my life’. But as the trapdoor opened beneath his feet, his ideas had already begun to gather dust in the archives of the police department. Its director had concluded that ‘To give this to scientists for consideration now would hardly be expedient since it could only encourage wanton talk.’ Scientific genius and terrorism were disquieting bedfellows.
Alone among the main conspirators in being Jewish, only Gesia Gelfman was spared the noose, on account of her pregnancy. On top of her life sentence, her punishment was to have her child taken from her the moment it was born for an Orthodox Christian upbringing, and shortly after she died of grief. That the authorities considered her much-publicised involvement in the attack insufficient incitement to racially motived revenge was demonstrated by the description that was circulated of another of the conspirators, not as a typical Slav, as he had been referred to in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attack, but an ‘Oriental [with a] hooked nose’. For some, it seemed, the desire to galvanise anti-Semitic sentiment was of at least equal importance to identifying and catching the assassins.
Alexander III’s mentor Pobedonostsev was perfectly sincere in his belief that the Jews were a ‘great ulcer’ eating away at Russia: at once a threat to its spiritual and racial purity and the secret force behind any foreign diplomacy that threatened the national interest. In his ideal world, the five million Jews already restricted to the Pale of Settlement in the west of the country would be reduced by two thirds, half of whom would die and half emigrate, with the remaining third converted to Orthodoxy.
On 15 April 1881, Orthodox Easter, the first pogrom had broken out. Surprisingly, no firm evidence has ever come to light that the attacks on Russia’s Jews had been incited from above. Pobedonostsev, procurator of the Orthodox synod, would have understood all too well, though, how the conflation of the murdered tsar with Christ, the paschal lamb sacrificed by the Jews, might fuel the avengers’ anger. Two hundred and fifty separate outbreaks of violence followed in the next two years, the pogroms spreading, as if spontaneously, along the recently laid railways, leaving dozens dead, hundreds more badly beaten and Jewish property in ruins. The migration of seasonal workers, rather than any more sinister agency, is the preferred explanation. However, there was an uncanny uniformity to the attacks, with victims knowing that when the pogrom arrived, a three-day carnival of terror and humiliation was in store.
The origins of the supposedly secret society that was formed as the elite’s response to the assassination of the tsar are unclear. Intriguingly, though, the chief of the south-western railway, Sergei Witte, was later keen to claim the germ of the idea as his own. Having written to his uncle General Fedeev in the immediate aftermath of the tsar’s assassination, proposing that loyalists should combat the terrorists using their own methods, he was summoned to meet the commander of the emperor’s bodyguards, Count Vorontsov-Dashkov, and Count Peter Shuvalov, the ex-head of the disbanded Third Section, who there and then instructed him to swear an oath of allegiance ‘to the society formed on the basis of my letter.’ If it is true that the Holy Brotherhood was established with such speed, it makes it implausible that it was anything other than a long-cherished project for which a pretext had been found. The retired Colonel Stieber, a long-time ally of Shuvalov, now nearing the end of his life, would surely have nodded his grizzled head in approval.
Credulous as to the existence of a vast, international terrorist network, comprising myriad small self-sufficient cells in order to inhibit enemy penetration, the progenitors of the Holy Brotherhood structured their own organisation on the same model, with an added dash of the Masonic occult. At the apex of the Brotherhood stood a five-strong council of elders, each the designated contact for a subsidiary group of five, and so on, down to the sixth and eighth tiers of more than 3,000 cells, boasting such assertive or esoteric names as Talmud, Success or Genius. ‘I dedicate myself entirely to the protection of His Majesty the emperor and to the persecution of sedition which casts shame on the name of Russia,’ swore initiates, including the composer Peter Tchaikovsky: ‘Brother number 6, Assistance.’ They then received a macabre symbol of membership: a gold disc enamelled with the image of St Alexander Nevsky, his legs shattered as those of Alexander II had been by the fatal bomb.
Members of the Holy Brotherhood must have been intoxicated by its promise of state-sanctioned conspiracy but the confidence instilled by the supposed fraternal support of twenty thousand kindred spirits, the unseen members of nearly 4,000 cells, was wholly illusory. That the Brotherhood numbered scarcely more than 700, even at its peak, most of who were drawn from the idle rich of St Petersburg, including many members of the city’s Yacht Club, was one secret it guarded with particular care. Nevertheless, lavishly funded by state and private donations, the Brotherhood launched a torrent of initiatives, mostly illegal and ill-judged, that were in reality little more than the superannuated adolescent fantasies of men who should have known better. There was the swashbuckling plan to challenge both Kropotkin and Rochefort to duels, that the former denounced to the press in London, and another to dispatch femmes fatales to marry and then eliminate such troublesome figures as Lev Hartmann. And then there was the revolutionary journal it founded in Switzerland to disseminate provocative falsehoods, brazenly titled Pravda, or ‘Truth’. The inclusion of an article advocating the eradication of the landowning class, but specifically urging activists to blow up their cattle with explosives as an initial practical step towards revolution, however, took nobody in. Only the blue pencil of the censor shielded the Brotherhood from satire; the French Sûreté, however, felt no compunction about describing it as ‘a complete joke’, and it was not alone in finding its activities abroad to be a serious nuisance.
Within a short time, prominent figures of all persuasions were recoiling at the organisation’s notoriety. ‘The agents of the Brotherhood are compromising us everywhere,’ complained the interior minister, Count Ignatiev, to Pobedonostev, who himself wrote to the tsar to disown any association with the failing project. How the ousted Loris-Melikov viewed its activities was best illustrated by his willingness to use the exiled Peter Lavrov as a conduit for the secret warning he passed to Kropotkin of the Brotherhood’s murderous intentions. At a hazardous time for the new tsar’s government, when clarity of message was essential, the Brotherhood was fostering chaos and confusion. Mindful of how the aristocratic and officer-class profile of the Brotherhood’s membership resembled that of the groups which had cultivated troublesome court intrigues against past tsars, Pobedonostsev settled on drastic action and chose the fast-rising Lieutenant General Grigori Sudeikin as the ideal man to bring the dangerous farce of the Brotherhood to an end, appointing him to the new position of inspector of the secret police.
A slim and elegantly bewhiskered thirty-five-year-old of good breeding, with a scintillating, subtle mind and a ruthless dedication to his job, Grigori Sudeikin was said by some to have his eyes on the highest political prizes. His ticket to the top, the destruction of the Brotherhood, became a personal obsession: ‘The revol
utionaries are people, they have ideals,’ he wrote, ‘but this lot are a mob! A mob under protection! They are annoying me no end.’ With a keen grasp of the black arts, he ruthlessly identified the back channels that the Brotherhood had opened for negotiation with the terrorists as the salient point for his attack. All that was needed to seal its fate, Sudeikin realised, was to exaggerate the degree of collusion, and so he arranged the forging of a document that purported to originate from the executive committee of the People’s Will, discussing its coordination of strategy with the Brotherhood. Within weeks, recruitment to the Brotherhood was indefinitely suspended, and before long the organisation withered; certain members, however, may have internalised its principles.
Among the Brothers who were left searching for new fields in which to employ their morally dubious talents was Peter Rachkovsky. Since his exposure as a police infiltration agent in early 1880, he had drifted from assignment to assignment on the north-western periphery of the Russian Empire, first in Vilnius, then Cracow. His career stalling, due to his superiors’ concern that he might be recognised, the advent of the Holy Brotherhood had offered Rachkovsky a timely opportunity, and he had promptly asked permission to return to Moscow and enrol. Quick-witted and calculating, he would have relished the Brotherhood’s cavalier attitude to the law when plotting its intrigues, while the slosh of the millions of rubles in the Brotherhood’s coffers would have appealed to his mercenary side and reaffirmed his fading belief in the personal profit he might derive from his chosen trade. There had been useful contacts to be made too, including perhaps Matvei Golovinsky, who would prove accomplished at contriving fraudulent evidence of heinous Jewish conspiracies. What Rachkovsky really needed, however, was a mentor to ease his professional advancement.
Colonel Sudeikin had been watching and assessing Rachkovsky for some time prior to May 1882, when he finally decided to overlook Rachkovsky’s poor judgement in joining the Brotherhood and approached him with an offer of employment in the St Petersburg Okhrana. Rachkovsky accepted and it was not long before he had risen to become Sudeikin’s invaluable lieutenant, a position that put him on a higher career trajectory than he could possibly have realised.
Determined to infiltrate the ranks of the People’s Will that Vera Figner was striving to rebuild, Sudeikin needed informants. It was to this end that in late 1882 he targeted Captain Sergei Degaev, a recent recruit to the executive committee of the People’s Will from among the disillusioned officers of the naval base at Kronstadt, whose character flaws of egotism and vanity suggested him as a likely candidate for ‘turning’. Tracked down to Odessa, on leads supplied by his captured brother, Degaev was arrested in a raid on the underground printing workshop that he had been assigned to establish there. Flattered by Sudeikin’s attention and the discussion of how they might help each other achieve their ambitions, Degaev became a paid agent of the Okhrana. What followed, however, would provide Rachkovsky with a masterclass in the subtleties and, ultimately, the fatal risks of psychological manipulation.
Exploiting the trust placed in him by the leading exiles in Switzerland, Degaev caused havoc among his colleagues, luring them into Okhrana traps and gathering information to assist Sudeikin in his raids. Vera Figner, the leading figure of the movement, was betrayed to Sudeikin in short order, arrested on re-entering Russia and handed a life sentence. Tikhomirov was more circumspect, however, refusing to take Degaev’s story at face value. Doubts remained even when Degaev revealed the identity of a prominent police informant in the ranks of the People’s Will, an asset deemed expendable by Sudeikin if his exposure bought his new agent’s credibility.
Under interrogation by his colleagues on the executive committee of the People’s Will, Degaev broke down and revealed his treachery, pleading for forgiveness. The request was granted but at the price of a deadly penance: he must murder Sudeikin. Degaev appeared genuinely discombobulated: torn between envy and duty, loyalty and ambition, from this point on his actions appeared to be calculated solely by short-term personal advantage. As such, Degaev acceded willingly, at first, to Sudeikin’s suggestion that he act as an agent provocateur in inciting the assassination of two key figures of the reactionary Establishment, Grand Prince Vladimir and the interior minister, Count Dmitri Tolstoy. It was a devious plot meant to elevate the frustrated policeman to a ministerial post, while cutting the ground from beneath the feet of Degaev’s critics in the People’s Will, and he dearly wanted to believe that it might work. It was with great reluctance, therefore, that in December 1883 Degaev finally gave in to pressure and fulfilled his promise to the executive committee.
A gruesome scene would have confronted Rachkovsky in the apartment to which Degaev had lured his mentor the day before. Shortly after Sudeikin’s arrival, two People’s Will accomplices had emerged from hiding: one had fired the pistol shot that entered his abdominal cavity and burst the tissue of his liver, another had repeatedly bludgeoned his skull with a crowbar. The agents of the Okhrana did not take long to identify the main culprit and put his associates under surveillance, but Degaev had gone to ground and it took until the end of the year for them to catch his scent, when his wife was sighted in Paris. Immediately, Rachkovsky was dispatched to locate Madame Degaev and track down Sergei himself.
As the thirty-two-year-old Peter Rachkovsky closed the carriage door behind him on a cold, bleak St Petersburg and settled into his seat for the long journey to the west, he must have felt a certain sense of satisfaction. The Russian Embassy in Paris had been told to cooperate with him for the period of his inquiries, and he had been sanctioned to conduct the investigation according to his own initiative. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. When he stepped out on to the platform of Gare du Nord in Paris two days later, where censers puffed out smoke to fumigate the germs of the cholera epidemic that was sweeping the southern part of the Continent, he was surely resolved to make his mark in the world’s most glamorous metropolis.
The Imperial Russian Embassy on the rue de Grenelle would have made a grand impression as Rachkovsky crunched across the gravel of its courtyard and under the broad glass canopy that sheltered its entrance. But in the two rooms of the wing occupied by the Okhrana’s foreign agency, the director of the Paris bureau, Peter Korvin-Krukovsky, was running a shockingly ineffectual operation. A minor wordsmith with connections in the French literary world, whose personal fame rested on his co-authorship with Alexandre Dumas of the 1877 play Les Davicheffs, Korvin-Krukovsky had originally been employed by the Russian government to help soften French press attitudes towards Alexander III at the time of his coronation. How this stopgap public-relations officer had since been so over-promoted was a mystery to everyone and a source of ongoing interest, both professional and prurient, for the surveillance agents of the Sûreté. The complexity of his romantic life alone was sufficient to explain any inattention to his job: having married Stella Colas, star of the Odéon theatre, he had since moved in with her sister, who happened to be the ex-mistress of his own brother-in-law, Baron de Foelckersahmb. But even the need to counter the runaway success of Victorien Sardou’s new revenge drama, Fedora – with Sarah Bernhardt returning to the Paris stage to play a heroine inspired by Figner and Perovskaya – could not justify his continued dabbling in theatre.
The prefecture’s ‘Agent Arnold’, keeping watch over Korvin-Krukovsky’s activities, struggled to conceal his contempt for the dilettante’s affectations. Of greater interest to his superiors, though, were observations concerning the huge sums of money paid monthly into his bank account by figures linked to the Orléanist claimant to the French throne. As far back as the autumn of 1881, the Sûreté had noted the apparent use of agents provocateurs by the Russians in Paris. Such intrigues might be overlooked as long as they were confined to flushing out the remnants of the People’s Will among the émigré community, but became intolerable if they intruded into the volatile domestic politics of France. At a time when the previously unknown League of French Nihilists was boasting in a leaked manif
esto of its secret three-year campaign to poison hundreds of bourgeois families, that certainly now appeared the case.
In April 1884, the end of Prince Orlov’s tenure at the embassy provided the occasion for Korvin-Krukovsky’s recall on the pretext of financial laxity. The new Russian ambassador to France was Baron de Mohrenheim, the very man who, as a lowly consular attaché in Berlin nearly thirty years earlier, had arranged for Wilhelm Stieber to be smuggled across the city in a laundry basket and offered a job working for the Russians. Now an austere senior statesman with cropped grey hair and a waxed moustache, de Mohrenheim enjoyed the lasting favour of Alexander III for having facilitated his courtship of the Danish Princess Dagmar, now the tsar’s wife, during his posting to Copenhagen in the 1870s, and yet he remained acutely aware of his vulnerability to the vagaries of court politics. Now that Stieber had quit the stage, de Mohrenheim was eager to recruit a new spymaster to take up the baton, and Rachkovsky appeared a promising candidate: one sufficiently independent of any faction, yet adept at feigning friendship and allegiance wherever necessary.
In the heady atmosphere of bohemian Paris in the 1880s, myriad rival sects flourished that cut across the clearly demarcated battle lines of reaction and revolution in the Russian émigré community. To understand their agendas, even to insinuate oneself into their trust, was to gain a powerful advantage in the deadly and secret games being played out. The contacts that Rachkovsky could draw upon from his time in the Holy Brotherhood stood him in good stead.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 30
