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

by Alex Butterworth

  ‘Business fever here throbs at will,’ wrote a French visitor to Chicago, ‘it rushes along these streets, as though before the devouring flame of a fire.’ The pursuit of money seemed unstoppable, immune even to economic crisis: the collapse of the New York stock market, the unprecedented bankruptcy of the United States treasury, and the run on banks that would see 500 of them go to the wall before the end of the year, with even greater hardship in store for the country’s poor.

  Korolenko was not a man who lacked perspective, or one given to easy hyperbole. An ex-internal exile to Siberia in 1879, he had been the only one of his party of convicts to survive the first winter in the freezing wasteland, thanks to the kindness of the women of the local tribe who had taken pity on him. Hardship and suffering were second nature to him, and his writer’s eye was drawn to scenes of humanity at its rawest, as in his account of a night-time visit to the slaughterhouses and meatpacking factories of Chicago. But it was the injustices of American society more than any nightmarish scenes of cattle being sledgehammered that horrified him during his month-long stay. By the time he sailed out of New York, the torch borne by the new Statue of Liberty that had shone with such hope on his arrival, seemed to ‘illuminate the entrance to an enormous grave’. He said he would rather be back in the Yakutsk penal colony than stay a day longer in the benighted Land of the Free.

  The recent arrests of Johann Most and Emma Goldman, in separate instances but both on trumped-up charges, may have influenced his distaste for America, along with the signs of spiritual corruption that he saw in its economic life, but there were more immediate and personal reasons for his stance. Support for the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom had begun to haemorrhage as popular sentiment turned further against politically troublesome immigrants of all hues. And in February 1893, after two previous ‘no’ votes in recent years, the Senate had finally acquiesced to the tsar’s demands that the United States strip his opponents of their privileged ‘political’ status, ratifying the treaty that would allow them to be extradited as common criminals.

  Aghast at the result, Mark Twain challenged the very ‘Americanism of the Senate’ with its ‘bootlicking adulation’ of ‘tsarist tyranny’, while in London Spence Watson thought it ‘the saddest news which any lover of liberty can receive’. There too, though, concern was mounting over how long Britain’s resilience could last in the face of similar pressures.

  Europe had not experienced anything quite like the armed confrontation seen at Homestead, but earlier bloodshed during strikes and May Day demonstrations in France and Spain, in 1891, had helped prompt anarchist revenge attacks that generated far more general alarm than Berkman’s attempt to assassinate Frick. Britain itself had not been immune from terrorist scares, with anarchists rather than Fenians now bearing the responsibility, and when troops opened fire on rioting strikers at the Featherstone colliery in September 1893, acts of vengeance seemed possible. Furthermore, as in America, immigrants rather than indigenous socialists were seen as the likely source of any trouble; those in the French and Italian colonies primarily, but the Russians too, supposedly by association.

  ‘Known to the outside world as the Terror… [the Brotherhood of Freedom] is an international secret society underlying and directing the operations of various bodies known as nihilists, anarchists, socialists – in fact, all those organisations which have for their object the reform or destruction, by peaceful or violent means, of society as it is presently constituted.’ The words come not from an Okhrana report, nor the imagination of a Sûreté informant, but from The Angel of the Revolution, published in 1893 by the first-time novelist George Griffith, one of an emerging generation of sensationalist writers who would fuse the genres of Vernian science fiction with future war prophecy to create something thrilling but fundamentally reactionary. Verne’s Robur the Conqueror had become, in Griffith’s hands, ‘Natas the Jew’, his airship no longer a lone sentinel of liberty, but the flagship of a fleet being readied over the horizon to seize the revolutionary moment when the opposing sides in a continent-wide war had fought themselves to exhaustion.

  For Kravchinsky and his colleagues, struggling to maintain support for the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom in England and to unify opposition to the tsar’s rule among the disparate émigré groups across Europe, the conflation of their endeavours with the apparent anarchist threat to democratic society, as it filtered through into fiction, posed a severe challenge. Their friends remained supportive, expressing intense frustration towards the troublemakers. ‘As for anarchism we utterly and entirely condemn it, all of us, Stepniak as much as anyone,’ Olive Garnett confided to her diary. ‘The blind folly of it makes one lose patience with & account blameable even such a man as Krapotkine.’ There were further violent shocks in store, however, in the midst of which, just days short of the end of 1893, a pair of articles by ‘Z’ and ‘Ivanov’ would appear in the New Review entitled ‘Anarchists: Their Methods and Organisation’, which drew heavily on the content of the Russian Memorandum, mixing in with their many and varied calumnies the unambiguous assertion that ‘Stepniak’ and Kravchinsky, the assassin of General Mezentsev, were one and the same.

  The allegations that Mezentsev’s killer had hesitated several times, for ‘psychological reasons’, and then ‘plunged the knife into the wound again and again’ were inaccurate yet graphic and unpleasant. Almost as distressing to Constance Garnett, though, may have been the pointed reference to Kravchinsky’s ‘shallow theories of free love’ and the imputation that his friends in literary circles were being duped. ‘Selfishly I feared that I might lose my Stepniak – the artist – in the Stepniak I do not know, the nihilist, the terrorist and—’ she would remember, unable to write the word ‘assassin’. It was doubtless one effect which the true authors of the ‘Ivanov’ article, Rachkovsky and Madame Novikoff, had hoped to achieve, though their aim in associating past and present acts of terror, in Russia and France, and potentially in Britain too, was far wider.

  When the Russian Memorandum had first been presented to the British government nearly two years earlier, it had emphasised the danger posed by the anti-tsarist émigrés in relation to ‘military conspiracies…bombs and dynamite’. It was certainly convenient for Rachkovsky that events since had brought home to the western democracies the nature of the threat, on their own territory, reinforcing the message sent out by the 1890 bomb plot that he had contrived with his agent Landesen. But his growing skill in ‘perception management’ saw to it that appearances were accepted and inconvenient questions suppressed. During the trial of those entrapped in that sting operation, the defence lawyer had tried to expose the Okhrana’s role but with scant success, and the possible involvement of the organisation in subsequent acts of ‘anarchist’ terrorism was scarcely hinted at in print.

  Yet while Rachkovsky was forthright in denouncing the conspiracies of his enemies, the scope of his own conspiratorial skulduggery during those years had been far more ambitious. How he had succeeded in keeping his activities concealed for so long is a story in itself.

  18

  Dynamite in the City of Light

  London and Paris, 1890–1892

  Almost two decades after their passage to New Caledonia aboard the Virginie, Henri Rochefort and Louise Michel again found themselves exiled together on an island, though on this occasion the journey had merely required them to buy a ticket for the boat train across the Channel. Rochefort had arrived first in Britain, in the summer of 1889, fleeing the sentence of transportation to a fortified enclosure that hung over him for his involvement in Boulanger’s plot to seize power. Unlike Michel, whose circumstances would be very different when she arrived in July 1890, he lived in considerable comfort. Having sold his Paris home for a reported million francs, and dabbling in the antiquities trade to supplement an income from the newspaper L’Intransigeant, still run out of Paris but left in the safe editorial hands of his appointee Edward Vaughan, he soon established himself in a grand town house in Cla
rence Terrace, overlooking Regent’s Park.

  He had not, however, left behind in Paris his appetite for either politics or status, and was busily ingratiating himself with his British hosts. To oil his admission to the salons of London he donated a Landseer painting to the National Gallery, but was helped too by introductions from Madame Olga Novikoff, the ‘MP’ for Russia, as one English wag termed her. A propagandist and diplomatic coquette, Novikoff’s relationship with both Rochefort and the English Establishment raised intriguing questions about Russian foreign policy.

  Through her friendship with Gladstone and other leading figures in the Liberal Party, Novikoff had long teased Britain with the possibility of rapprochement with Russia and continued to do so; now Salisbury’s Conservative Party was showing interest. Yet Britain was increasingly fretful over maintaining its naval pre-eminence and the possibly re-entry of the Russian fleet into the Mediterranean. One naval reform followed another in quick succession; fiction such as The Taking of Dover predicted an inevitable war with a Franco-Russian alliance as soon as 1894. As Elisée Reclus had astutely remarked in his Universal Geography, whilst seemingly at the height of its power, a lack of geographical cohesion left the British Empire vulnerable to attack. As to Russia and her relationship with France’s Boulangists, the press had caught Ambassador de Mohrenheim out paying a visit to the general during Boulanger’s spell in the wilderness in Clermont-Ferrand, three years earlier, but since then discretion had ruled. The Third Republic and Alexander III’s Russia were, after all, prospective allies, and Boulanger now an enemy of the state.

  And yet whilst Boulanger himself was a liability, bellicose and unpredictable, what he represented continued to appeal to Russia as much as it did to Rochefort: a strong nationalism and latent anti-Semitism. Boulanger was no longer a useful cipher, distracted by his love for his mistress, who was now dying: Rochefort had remarked the change, observing that the general’s ‘thoughts, ears and eyes were elsewhere’ when he visited London and the Covent Garden Opera in 1890. Even before Boulanger shot himself dead on his lover’s grave the following September, Russia may have been looking for an alternative instrument through whom to shape and shake up republican France.

  Were Rochefort a candidate for the role, his supporters could comfort themselves that he had put his radical past behind him: an old Communard had recently leaned into Rochefort’s carriage on Regent Street and slapped him with a glove, challenging him to a duel for his betrayal of the cause. Anarchists and Boulangists, though, had joined together against the republic, and distasteful as it was, Novikoff may have hoped that the two extremes of French politics might once again be harnessed in the future. If Rochefort found himself in need of help to build bridges with his old friends on the left, the presence of Louise Michel in London would have been useful. She lived scarcely ten minutes’ walk away from his grand house in Clarence Terrace. But that short distance spanned the extremes of London society.

  A stone’s throw further on from Charlotte Street, where Michel was staying, lay the sheer destitution of the slums of Seven Dials and the St Giles rookery, home to the ‘stink industries’ whose squalid labour underpinned the glamour of the nearby West End; in these slums ‘you burned the stair rails and banisters, the door jambs, the window frames for fuel’, and bobbies on the beat were few, being loath to venture in. The enclave north of Soho was one notch better, 400 French households crowding the terraced houses, the pavements walked by what the Baedeker guide charmingly described as ‘a motley crowd of labourers, to which dusky visages and foreign costumes impart a curious and picturesque air’.

  It had been the May Day demonstrations of 1890, designated at the Paris Congress of 1889 as a date for mass protests demanding an eight-hour day, that had condemned Michel to a spell living in the streets where so many Communards had settled long before. While she was campaigning in the provinces, predicting her own martyrdom in incendiary speeches, the police had swooped to take her out of circulation for the day itself. When told she would be freed, the shameful anticlimax drove her to smash anything to hand in her cell. The doctor who ordered ‘her immediate removal to a special asylum for treatment’, recorded a diagnosis of ‘auditory hallucinations that provoke her to violence’. Michel had long claimed to hear the ‘voices from below’, but that had been a mere figure of speech. Perhaps the bullet still rattling around her skull had triggered something; more likely, the failure of the demonstrations, in a Paris heavily garrisoned for the occasion, was too much for a woman perpetually tormented by the bitter memory of past defeats to bear.

  Michel fitted in easily in London, bringing with her Charlotte Vauvelle, her long-time companion from New Caledonia. A living legend to many, Michel would gossip in the grocery shop of the old Communard Victor Richard, an unofficial clearing house for newly arrived compagnons, or drink and curse the republic in the notorious Autonomie Club, which had recently moved to Windmill Street from its previous location only a few doors down from Michel’s own home. And when it came to the younger generation of immigrants – for whom the Commune was no longer a source of personal trauma but rather a mythic horror, known only from the sad eyes and gaunt features of those who refused to speak about the past – they adored her. Michel’s threat of ‘little engines’ to be used against the police in the speeches that had prompted her most recent arrest would have been a passport into their hearts.

  Commanding the respect and affection of her countrymen was one thing; earning enough to supply even her modest needs, and fund her generosity to the anarchist community, quite another. Michel could, if necessary, rely on the kindness of wealthy friends, with Duchess d’Uzès an obliging patroness, but it was not enough. In her search for financial independence she found herself coming into the orbit of a very different set of Russians from those with whom Rochefort socialised, and indirectly into contact with a Russian government agent of a very different kind to Madame Novikoff.

  Michel had met Kravchinsky in Paris during the congress of 1889, and kept his calling card, in the corner of which she had made a tiny sketch in ink; whether of a fizzing bomb or a blossoming tree it is hard to tell. Kropotkin, though, she had known far longer, since the London Congress of 1881, their contentious release from prison on the same date in 1886 forming a further bond. It was to him that she now turned, requesting an introduction to the agency that arranged his lectures, under the impression that Kropotkin was considered almost a god by those around him, and his influence irresistible.

  In reality, Kropotkin’s affiliation with his old Russian comrades was already becoming attenuated. ‘Is it even possible to write the history of our objectives, convulsions and errors, of the egotism of our comrades and their shortcomings?’ would be his acerbic reply when asked to contribute to a series of memoirs of leading figures in the nihilist movement. He despaired of Russia being ready for the onerous honour of leading the revolution, as Marx had predicted it would, in his dying years. And when the editors of the newly revived journal of the People’s Will approached him to participate in 1891, he would excuse himself on the grounds that he was committing all his strength and attention to the international anarchist cause, in the firm belief that ‘every step forward towards the coming revolution in western Europe also hastens the revolution in Russia’. Before long, though, in private he would be laying the same charge of egotism against the anarchists of the West.

  Eventually, Kropotkin would secure Michel representation for her lectures, but only by undertaking to be present as her translator; for the moment her English was too accented to be readily intelligible. In the next scheme for which Michel solicited his help, however, his prestige and that of the other prominent names in English socialism that he brought on board could provide an immediate benefit.

  The suggestion that Michel found a school to be run on anarchist principles came initially from Auguste Coulon, a half-French, half-Irish member of the Socialist League. It appealed to her immediately as a project that would allow her to reconcile the polit
ical engagement and nurturing sentimentality that formed the two poles of her identity; a year after the first progressive private school in England had been founded at Abbotsholme, the moment seemed propitious for the creation of a truly libertarian institution. It would serve those who wanted ‘to keep their children out of the hands of those professors of the modern school divinely inspired and licensed by the state, who teach, consciously or unconsciously, the doctrine of popular sacrifice to the power of the state and to the profit of the privileged class’. And who better to partner her than Coulon himself, who boasted scholarly credentials as the co-author of Hossfeld’s New and Successful Method for Learning the German Language?

  A prospectus was printed, and premises were taken at the heart of the French enclave, in Fitzroy Square, whose grand houses, which had been prime addresses for the aristocracy a century earlier, were now subdivided into a maze of cramped rental rooms and workshops or else occupied by affluent British bohemians. Walter Crane provided the woodcut for the school’s letterhead, and a quotation from Bakunin was prominently displayed: ‘The whole education of children and their instruction must be founded on the scientific development of reason, not on that of faith; on the development of personal dignity and independence … and above all on respect for humanity.’ Morris served on the five-man steering committee along with Malatesta, Kropotkin’s involvement assuaging any unease Morris felt at the involvement of Coulon, who was becoming known as one of the more inflammatory contributors to the Commonweal for his ‘International Notes’.

  Michel would teach the piano, Coulon classes in French and German, while among other members of staff was listed a young Margaret McMillan, who in years to come would become the great pioneer of progressive schooling in England. There appeared to be good cause for optimism. Yet on the very day that Michel wrote out the order for the new school’s stationery – ‘6 boxes of pens; 4 bottles of ordinary ink; 6 dozen pen cases’ – the British steamer SS Utopia sank off Gibraltar with catastrophic loss of life, after hitting submerged rocks. She should perhaps have taken the ship’s fate as an omen, and looked for the unseen hazards in her own project, for Coulon had been on the British Special Branch payroll for three months under the code name ‘Pyatt’, a curious approximation of the name of Rochefort’s great journalistic rival of twenty years earlier, Félix Pyat, who had died in 1889. As to his possible relationship with foreign forces, there would later be much speculation. One thing is certain: during Coulon’s breaks from teaching, when he stepped out into Fitzroy Square to chat with the neighbours such as the Battolas or perhaps greet Constance Garnett, his actions were rarely disinterested.