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

by Alex Butterworth

  More than ever, as Hekkelman, or Landesen – or Arkady Harting, as he would soon become – listened to the sea wash the Sussex beach, he would have known himself to be Rachkovsky’s creature. When he later wrote from London to request that noblest of prizes – conversion to the Orthodox faith – Rachkovsky would see to it that his protégé’s christening was conducted with aristocrats and diplomats as guarantors: the stigma of being a Jewish boy from Pinsk would be forever erased. A pension of 1,000 francs a month was also agreed. And though there is no record of what services, if any, ‘Arkady Harting’ performed for his master during his sojourn in England, it was there that a new front was about to be opened in the Okhrana’s battle with the revolutionaries, whose propagandist activities were now better organised and more vexatious to Rachkovsky than they had ever been in Switzerland.

  Even as the Okhrana chief congratulated himself on his ever growing power, however, one man aboard a ship passing through the Straits of Gibraltar threatened to become Rachkovsky’s nemesis. Cursed never to have his warnings about Hekkelman’s treachery believed, Vladimir Burtsev’s failure to prevent the framing of his comrades in Paris had been followed by the arrest of his travelling companion, again on a tip-off from Landesen, as he attempted to cross into Russia. Under surveillance in Romania, Burtsev had fled to Bulgaria where, again harassed, he had embarked on an English merchantman at the port of Galatz, bound for London. Then, while the ship was anchored in Constantinople, a flotilla of Turkish police vessels had attempted a blockade, telling the captain he must hand Burtsev over to the authorities and the Russian officials who accompanied them. ‘I will not,’ the captain of the SS Ashlands replied, ‘this is English territory! And I am a gentleman!’

  It was a story the British newspapers would relish repeating on the ship’s arrival in London, along with accounts of how a burly Turkish hireling had insistently remained on board, awaiting an opportunity to grapple Burtsev into the sea, to be picked up by the Russian vessel that had followed them out of Constantinople harbour. The myth of English liberalism remained alive, but soon enough even the British press would fall prey to Rachkovsky’s wiles.

  17

  The Russian Memorandum

  Great Britain, America and Russia, 1890–1893

  The news of General Seliverstov’s assassination reached the Russian ambassador, de Mohrenheim, while he was attending the premiere of the new comedy Dernier Amour at Paris’ Théâtre du Gymnase: a whispered word in his ear that must have caused him to blanch. The ex-head of the St Petersburg police had been found dead in a room at the Hôtel de Bade on boulevard des Italiens, executed by a single shot to the head. It was December 1890, twelve years since Seliverstov’s predecessor in the job had been stabbed to death by Kravchinsky. Was the same assassin again at work? A news blackout on Seliverstov’s death was imposed, but the garrulousness of de Mohrenheim’s entourage soon had the press scrambling to uncover the whole sordid story. The French police agent ‘Pépin’ reported having heard from an old Communard that, ten years earlier, a revolutionary tribunal in Switzerland had indeed assigned Kravchinsky the task of carrying out the sentence of death that it had passed on Seliverstov. It soon became clear, however, that the alleged perpetrator, now calling himself ‘Stepniak’, had a watertight alibi, and one rather alarming to the Okhrana: he was, it was said, in America.

  Rachkovsky must have been furious that Kravchinsky, who since the conversion of Tikhomirov had become his greatest headache, had slipped through the net. The revolutionary’s popularity among the bohemian intelligentsia of England was irksome, but it was the widening scope of his propaganda activities that was most troubling, and which urgently required suppression. Having fled Russia a decade earlier, Kravchinsky had pledged ‘to win over the world for the Russian revolution, to throw on the scale the huge force of the public opinion in the most advanced countries’. Recent years had seen the pace of his propagandist effort accelerate and his audience grow ever more receptive.

  The acclaimed publication in 1883 of his account of the struggle against the tsar, Underground Russia, had opened the way for three further works examining the parlous condition of his homeland. Then, in 1889, his first novel The Career of a Nihilist had been published, at a time when his name was being mentioned as a possible compromise leader of the English socialist movement. It was a runaway success. Kravchinsky’s talents ‘would have made his…fortune if turned into the profitable channel of sensation novel writing,’ raved Science magazine of the book’s dramatic narrative, and others concurred. As much as any literary merit the book may have had, though, it was the shocking reports from Russia then appearing in the headlines that ensured its popularity with the circulating libraries that dominated English reading culture. And the impact of those reports was felt on both sides of the Atlantic.

  On a tour of Russia in the mid-1880s with the Western Union Telegraph expedition, the American explorer George Kennan had been impressed by his official hosts’ apparent cooperation. The result was a book, Tent Life in Siberia, which described the exemplary penal colonies he had been shown. Kravchinsky and Kropotkin had both chided him for his credulity. As a consequence, when Kennan secured a commission from Century magazine to revisit the tsarist prison camps at Siberia in 1887, he was more thorough in his investigations. His shocking accounts of the abuses endured by the political prisoners overshadowed even the efforts of such esteemed apologists for the tsarist regime as the English editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, W. T. Stead.

  Despite having shown his guest considerable hospitality, Constantine Pobedonostsev was dubbed by Kennan ‘the Russian Torquemada’ with reference to the notorious leader of the Spanish Inquisition. Graphic illustrations punctuated articles in a wide range of magazines, bringing home to readers the abject misery endured by Russia’s internal exiles. In blistering rain and snow, with guards on either side, columns of the dispossessed were described marching out of St Petersburg, their lanterns swinging forlornly as family members reached out in vain with last letters; then the journey across thousands of miles of wilderness, hard and dangerous, by barge, road and sledge; the overnight stops, shoulders jammed against the barred windows of their compounds as they strained to hand over precious pennies to an old woman in exchange for the scant rations in her basket; and, at last, the godforsaken clapboard towns where they were expected to make a life, labouring under guard, amidst the relentless ice of the tundra.

  Since Kennan’s return, matters in Russia had deteriorated still further. A crackdown on discipline among the convicts had caused protests, leading to further repression. The mass suicide of women prisoners at Kara, in protest at one of their number dying two days after being given a hundred lashes, was followed in April 1889 by what became known outside Russia as the Yakutsk massacre. An angry demonstration by thirty-four exiles against their ill-treatment had led to reprisals that left four dead, two fatally wounded, and three others condemned to death.

  For some time, Kravchinsky had been lobbying influential figures in the English political Establishment in an attempt to coax them away from their liberal complacency and adherence to peaceful protest. ‘It is very easy for Alexander III to allow himself to be persuaded that he is doing his sacred duty in maintaining a political regime which is causing such awful misery and sufferings,’ he wrote to Mrs Spence Watson, the wife of one of the leading Liberals outside Parliament, insisting that ‘in Russia, as everywhere else, freedom will be won by fighting and not otherwise’. Soon afterwards, her husband Robert proposed a society that would raise public awareness of Russia’s despotism through a regular series of pamphlets.

  Kravchinsky insisted that neither he nor Kropotkin should be named as instigators of the scheme, which he thought would be best publicised as a fundamentally English affair. But questions of presentation were not allowed to delay the launch of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom on 30 April 1890. Two days later, May Day saw the best attendance yet in a series of Free Russia rallies in Hyde Park, at which sp
eakers included George Bernard Shaw, Marx’s sons-in-law Aveling and Lafargue, and the Member of Parliament Robert Cunninghame Graham; as William Morris had advised, the English were not patronising the Russians, but standing as their friends and equals in the struggle. And by the summer the first edition of Free Russia, featuring a full exposé of the Yakutsk massacre, was in the hands of readers.

  When the Russian ambassador to London, Yegor de Staal, informed St Petersburg that ‘the agitation raised against Russia on the grounds of the exaggerated rumours of merciless treatment of prisoners in Siberia has still not subsided’, Rachkovsky could offer no immediate answer and several months later was still writing of Britain as ‘alien and not at all conducive to the agency’s work’. Even Olga Novikoff, with her bulging book of contacts in London high society, was impotent to shift public opinion, grousing to the turncoat Tikhomirov about how ‘That accursed Stepniak is inciting each and all in England against all that is dear to Russia. It’s a terrible, terrible disaster.’ Events in Russia, though, would soon compound their problems, and further boost the circulation of the society’s newspaper. When news filtered through of the country’s widespread famine, British public opinion was outraged by the Russian government’s shameful response.

  Fear and pride had conspired to create a climate of denial around the tsar. ‘There are no famine victims. There are merely regions suffering from a poor harvest,’ he declared when a group of officers proposed cancelling their regimental dinner and donating the cost to the starving, while a subscription by the French people in aid of the famine victims was also rejected. ‘Russia does not need charity,’ Ambassador de Mohrenheim insisted to the French press while on vacation in Aix-les-Bains, but the fraudulence of the official line was exposed when aid sent secretly by the émigrés, via Leo Tolstoy, was received with pitiful gratitude. And to ensure that the message of tsarist incompetence reached those suffering from it most directly, a lithographic copying centre was set up in St Petersburg to reproduce Free Russia for domestic distribution.

  Meanwhile, Kravchinsky, previously nervous about his poor spoken English, was finally prevailed upon by Kennan to visit the United States on a lecture tour and, unlike his co-editor Felix Volkhovsky who habitually spoke to audiences wearing chains on his ankles and wrists, he would rely on his verbal powers to make an impact.

  Establishing a base in Boston, just as Bakunin had thirty years earlier, Kravchinsky used literary discussion of the novels of Tolstoy and Turgenev as a Trojan Horse to gain him entry into the society of America’s literary opinion-makers. ‘One of the most important things I ever heard…large, bold and massive to an extraordinary degree,’ enthused the critical luminary William Dean Howells of Kravchinsky’s lecture on novels that were known more by repute than in translation, and took the revolutionary under his wing. After dining with the Russian at home and in his club, and even taking him on a visit to a local fire station where Kravchinsky slid down a brass pole, the American critic’s initial impression was confirmed: ‘One of those wonderful clear heads that seem to belong to other races than ours.’

  But whilst Kravchinsky’s message that the pogroms against the Jews in Russia had been propagated by the government struck home, concerns persisted about the violence that underpinned the revolutionaries’ own strategy to force constitutional change, with Howells reluctant to lend his name to support for such methods. Others, though, had no such qualms and were happy to sign up, including the author Mark Twain.

  ‘If such a government cannot be overthrown otherwise than by dynamite, then thank God for dynamite!’ Twain had proclaimed the previous year, leaping to his feet in the audience at one of Kennan’s lectures on the Kara outrage. As an angry sentimentalist, with an outspoken antipathy to that most ‘grotesque of all the swindles invented by man – monarchy’, Twain was perfectly receptive to Kravchinsky’s message, believing that America, having received the support of France in its struggle to overthrow despotism during its own revolution a century before, was beholden to remember its origins and lend its support to those now engaged in the fight for political justice.

  The endorsement of such prominent moral arbiters gave Kravchinsky good reason to hope that the idea of Russian freedom would fall on fertile ground, and plans were made to establish an American branch of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom. Before Kravchinsky could see the project realised, however, a message arrived from Volkhovsky summoning him back to London to assist in resolving tensions with colleagues in Europe that had unexpectedly become inflamed. Under intense pressure to stem the tide of anti-tsarist propaganda, Rachkovsky may have been finding it hard to land a clean blow, but he had been far from idle.

  In Paris, the rumours about Kravchinsky’s involvement with the murder of General Seliverstov had refused to go away merely because it had been shown that he could not have carried out the attack in person. Agent ‘Pépin’, who had originally pointed the finger at Kravchinsky, quickly came up with a variant account, based on information supposedly received from an anonymous source. The true culprit, he asserted, was a young, London-based Pole called Stanislaw Padlewski, whom Kravchinsky had instructed to kill the general.

  There were sightings of Padlewski in Spain and Italy, but no one stopped to enquire further about the real reason for the assassin’s frequent trips, in the past, to Paris and Italy, or his unexplained connection with Rachkovsky’s old agent, Yuliana Glinka. Nor did anyone give much credence to the lonely voices daring to claim that Padlewski was himself mixed up with the Okhrana, and that the killing was a false-flag operation. It would be more than a decade before one of Rachkovsky’s agents, Cyprien Jagolkovsky, revealed his role in Seliverstov’s murder, and another ten years before the notion was publicly aired that the Okhrana chief himself had organised the hit to rid himself of a possible threat to his position.

  In the meantime, Rachkovsky had doggedly pursued his agenda of demonising the Russian émigrés in the eyes of the British public, in the hope of facilitating political action against them. January 1891 had seen him meet the Russian interior minister, Durnovo, in Nice, to discuss his proposed strategy and his request to be posted to London, since his efforts to date had effectively driven the key émigrés across the Channel. Durnovo’s immediate reaction was to report to St Petersburg what Rachkovsky had told him of the ease and affluence that the London émigrés enjoyed thanks to their ‘ghastly agitation of the English’. The eventual outcome, however, was the drafting of what would become known as the ‘Russian Memorandum’ that laid out the argument for why the British government should take action against those enemies of the tsar to whom it had granted asylum. Sent by the Russian foreign ministry to Ambassador de Staal in London, it was then passed on to Her Majesty’s Government. Neither Lord Salisbury’s tacit support, however, for surveillance of Russians entering through English ports, nor the redoubled lobbying efforts of Madame Novikoff produced the desired effect. ‘This is not a very reassuring result,’ would be Tsar Alexander’s terse reaction to the lack of progress.

  There were, however, other weapons in Rachkovsky’s arsenal, not the least of which was his seasoned tactic of sowing dissent. Kravchinsky’s great talent, well attested by those around him, was his skill as a conciliator, working to bring into alignment the disparate groups of Russian revolutionaries spread across Europe. That ability was put to the test. Even before the first edition of Free Russia hit the news-stands, co-editor Felix Volkhovsky had been attacked by Plekhanov’s group in Switzerland for his high-handedness in ignoring all those who did not share the newspaper’s relatively liberal agenda, and by Peter Lavrov for emphasising the search for political over economic freedom. Thanks in part to Kravchinsky’s past kindnesses to Plekhanov, whom he had subsidised to take a rest cure when he was suffering from tuberculosis, the flurry of accusations temporarily abated. But then, during Kravchinsky’s absence in America, a series of black operations orchestrated by Rachkovsky, and implemented by the expert forgers at rue de Grenelle, stoked the fir
es of mistrust and resentment.

  First to appear was a pamphlet entitled A Confession by an Old Revolutionary Veteran, which accused Kravchinsky and the other London émigrés of having sold themselves to the British police; then, an open letter purportedly written by Plekhanov further denounced the London group. After Lavrov’s ‘Group of Veterans’ had re-established contact between the old People’s Will organisations in Russia’s major cities, his name too was put to a forged document which lamented that there was no prospect of a social revolution in Russia, announced that its author was to retreat to a monastery, and signed off with an implausible ‘Amen’. Those impugned were quick to scorn the ruse, roundly denying any involvement, while Free Russia left its readers in no doubt about the documents’ true source: ‘The spies are dancing a jig,’ it confirmed in a note to its readers. Yet for all the inconvenience caused to Kravchinsky, and despite Rachkovsky’s boast of the previous autumn that by infiltrating agents into the London émigré community he had brought it ‘under our full control’, in early 1892, the Anglo-Saxon world remained largely impervious to the Okhrana’s wiles.

  ‘S—, I have been given to understand, had been concerned in some very dreadful affairs indeed. Perhaps he would blow me up. Perhaps he would convert me,’ wrote one journalist, approaching an interview with the notorious revolutionary with trepidation, only for his fears to be assuaged by an evening spent at Kravchinsky’s St John’s Wood house. Though the furnishings were somewhat exotic – ‘couches and settees had the places that in mere bourgeois homes would have been occupied by stiff-backed chairs’ – the man himself was thoroughly congenial: ‘capable of enjoying a good dinner’, and irresistibly charming as he sat sipping spiced tea and languidly smoking a cigarette. Conversation flowed easily around the sceptical Kravchinsky’s adventure of the previous evening, ghost-hunting in Westminster Abbey, and the intriguing prospects raised by psychic research. Always, though, it returned to his perennial theme: the brutality of tsarist Russia, the degradations experienced by its people, and the just cause of revolution in the quest for democracy. So powerful was Kravchinsky’s evocation of Russian misery that even his dire prediction that ‘when the peasants do wake up, their revolution will put the French one into the shade’ was recorded by his rapt interviewer without demur.