Malatesta’s predicament exemplified that of the movement as a whole. The demonisation of the movements in the 1890s had provided the press with a compelling shorthand for the anarchist as a malign figure in the shadows, a bomb beneath his coat and hell-bent on destruction, and it was a cliché that enemies on all sides found highly advantageous to exploit. Even Signac’s innocent painting found itself tarred with the same brush. Up on the slopes of Montmartre, Henri Zisly’s anarchist group Les Naturiens pursued a libertarian existence that echoed Signac’s bucolic idyll, perplexing the police with their defiant choice of a life of near savagery in such close proximity to the metropolis. But while they won converts with their neo-Gaulish festivals and vegetarian banquets in honour of Rousseau, it was an attempted dynamite attack on the Sacré-Coeur in July 1895, rising ever higher on the skyline, and fantastical sketches of the destruction such a blast might cause published by the anarchist lithographer Théophile Steinlen, that caught the public imagination. These seemed to the general public to be a more credible representation of what life would be like In the Time of Anarchy than Signac’s flower-strewn paradise.
In recognition of the adverse circumstances, Signac altered the title of his painting to In the Time of Harmony but not even this compromise could secure its place in Victor Horta’s revolutionary art nouveau House of the People in Brussels, for which it had originally been destined. In fact, the previous year the Belgian authorities had revealed their nervousness towards anarchism, even in its most peaceable form, with the Free University’s last-minute decision to cancel Elisée Reclus’ fellowship. The decision had proved counterproductive. Rather than leave Brussels, Reclus had found an alternative venue for his lectures in the Freemasonic Loge des Amis Philanthropes, where his willingness to debate ideas with his audience had so energised the pedagogic process that, such was the demand to attend, arrangements were made for a breakaway New University to open its doors the following September.
Reclus had demonstrated how anarchists could turn marginalisation to their advantage, using their exclusion from the mainstream to shape new opportunities and a new identity that might in time deliver the objective of social revolution. While resident in Belgium, the geographer even took up the composition of songs to carry anarchist propaganda to the francophone peasantry. The project that was dearest to him, though, was the revival of his plans for a Great Globe, for he believed that ‘in the solemn contemplation of reliefs you participate so to speak with eternity… Globes must be temples which will make people grave and respectful.’ Conceived now on a scale of 1:100,000, at over a quarter of a mile in diameter, a third as high again as the Eiffel Tower and nearly twice the height of the Sacré-Coeur, Reclus hoped that it would be commissioned for the 1900 Paris Expo, where it would reassert the values of the Enlightenment which commerce and religion threatened to obscure.
It is amusing to imagine what Special Branch and French police agents in London must have made of the diagrams that Reclus sent to his nephew Paul, one of those charged in absentia in the Trial of the Thirty and who had remained in partial exile for some time after the amnesty of 1895. Complete with its proposed superstructure housing the external observation platforms, in profile the pointed egg-shape of the globe bore a strong resemblance to that of the most advanced terrorist grenades, whose eye-opening function it was meant to supersede. The allusion was surely unintentional, though, and the path to acceptance would not be easy for either Reclus’ proposals or the anarchism they projected.
In 1891, Oscar Wilde had proposed a geographical metaphor of his own for the development of socialism. ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at,’ he wrote in his essay, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, ‘for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.’ Since then, anarchists had ventured into treacherous territory in search of their ideal. Even now, though, as veterans of the recent rough seas charted a course to new and diverse destinations, the shores that awaited them held unforeseen hazards of their own.
‘There is a growing sense of harmony and reconciliation,’ Louise Michel had written, ‘the reactionaries are less harsh than they used to be, and the bombs are past history.’ But while the bombs may have fallen silent, her statement was otherwise wishful thinking, as would be shown in the onslaught of criticism to which the anarchist elements at the congress of the Second International would be subjected when it convened in London in July 1896. A determination that anarchism should remain recognised as a legitimate socialist creed, socialism in its ultimate and purest form indeed, had led Malatesta to help organise the event, but any hopes he may have had of shaping the agenda from the inside were soon revealed as futile.
‘The only resemblance between the individual anarchists and us is that of a name,’ Reclus had recently protested, but not even the campaign of denigration waged by Parmeggiani’s L’Anonymat group against Kropotkin, Malato and Pouget could persuade the Marxists and social democrats to acknowledge the reality, when there was so much for them to gain by not doing so. ‘What we advocate is free association and union, the absence of authority, minds free from fetters, independence and well-being of all. Before all others it is we who preach tolerance for all – whether we think their opinions right or wrong – we do not wish to crush them by force or otherwise,’ Gustav Landauer reminded the delegates, but failed to shame Liebknecht, Lafargue and the other Marxists into matching those ideals. Minds were made up, even before his assertion that ‘What we fight is state socialism, levelling from above, bureaucracy’, setting the stage for a coup even more decisive than that staged by Marx and Engels against Bakunin a quarter-century earlier.
Having delayed her planned move to America to be present at the congress, Louise Michel attended for its second day and the showdown. The dice were heavily loaded against the anarchists, who were poorly represented: offers by Special Branch to subsidise the cost of a one-way Channel crossing at the time of the amnesty the previous year had left the once thriving London colonies sadly depleted. The followers of Marx, by contrast, had succeeded in packing the congress with delegates shipped in from Germany and Belgium as well as many local supporters. Malatesta’s oratory failed to break down their disciplined obstructionism, despite the attempts of the British trade unionist Tom Mann and others to win him a hearing. ‘Were I not an anarchist already, that congress would have made me one,’ wrote Michel, after witnessing the expulsion of her colleagues; an excommunication, in effect, by a new ‘state religion’ of Marx with its own ‘infallible hierarchy’.
Even this decisive schism in the socialist movement was not without its benefits, however, with many of the heretics from the congress impelled towards a consensus on the vexed question of how the future society to which anarchism aspired should be organised. For too long, the rival claims of communism and collectivism – ownership in common, or on a cooperative basis, with some degree of private property – had clouded anarchism’s clarity of purpose. Now, the young Fernand Pelloutier joined with Emile Pouget to clarify the issue. Inspired by the dynamic example set by the British unions, and his own recent work in France in bringing together the representation of different industries with the city-specific work of the bourses du travail, Pelloutier advocated ‘a hybrid of anarchist and trade unionism known as anarcho-syndicalism or revolutionary socialism’. The project breathed new life into the vision of autonomous but associated units of economic activity that Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin had all held up as a viable basis for social transformation, but also provided a robust base from which eventually to launch a general strike, as the mechanism for effecting peaceful revolutionary change.
The London Congress of 1896 was notable too, however, for those who were absent: Kropotkin, Kravchinsky and Morris. Kropotkin, weary of the predictable and unproductive debate that characterised past meetings, and perhaps reading the runes, had decided in advance not to attend. It was not only the final marginalisation of the anarchists, though, that caused the c
ongress to mark the end of an era. The recent death of Kravchinsky and failing health of Morris would have left Kropotkin, had he attended, without two of those contemporaries closest to him.
The valedictory tone of News from Nowhere in 1890 had marked William Morris’ turn away from socialism and back to his artistic activities, in particular the exquisite printing of the Kelmscott Press, but since 1893 he had once again begun to appear at public meetings of the Social Democratic Federation. Its brand of bureaucratic socialism was scarcely more to his taste, though, than the anarchism that had driven him from his own Socialist League, and he had wearily bemoaned to a leading Fabian that ‘The world is going your way, Webb, but it is not the right way in the end.’ The last lecture he delivered before his death that autumn was to the newly formed Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising, denouncing the plague of billboard advertising that had begun to disfigure the landscapes he so loved and from which he had drawn such inspiration. As a sideways attack on the capitalist culture of consumption, it chimed perfectly with the oblique approach to revolution increasingly being adopted by his lasting friends in the anarchist movement.
It had been almost a year earlier, however, standing on the steps of Waterloo station on 28 December 1895, that Morris had delivered his final outdoor address to the mourners at Kravchinsky’s funeral, 200 of whom then boarded the train run by the London Necropolis Company to accompany his coffin on the twenty-mile journey to Brookwood Cemetery. ‘It was a significant and striking spectacle, this assemblage of socialists, nihilists, anarchists, and outlaws of every European country, gathered together in the heart of London to pay respect to the memory of their dead leader,’ The Times told its readers. The sadness of those present was all the greater that his death was so premature and unnecessary, while its cause seemed scarcely credible, in the case of a man who had always lived by his wits.
Recent years had undoubtedly imposed great strains on Kravchinsky, as he risked the safety of even those closest to him in the cause of Russian freedom, only to find himself repeatedly thwarted in his task by the ruthless efficiency of his enemies, and the unscrupulous tactics that they were prepared to employ. When, on the eve of 1894, he had sent Constance Garnett into the depths of icy Russia on a risky mission to distribute money and collect information, she had returned deeply unnerved by the police surveillance to which she had been subjected, and which had caused her to burn all her entire precious cargo of letters and documents back to London before she reached the border. Almost as bad, it had been while she was away, leaving her six-month-old baby in the care of her husband, that Rachkovsky had placed the article in the British press that exposed her beloved Kravchinsky as Mezentsev’s murderer and made pointed reference to his ‘shallow theories of free love’. The personal awkwardness was as nothing to Kravchinsky, however, compared to the damage being done by the Okhrana to the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom.
With a new efficiency, the Russian police department had distilled the product of its intensive surveillance of suspected subversives, in Russia and abroad, into a diagrammatic representation of the whole vast web of revolutionary activity. Taken in isolation, the colour-coded lines that fanned out from the central individual on each chart allowed seemingly tenuous relationships to be traced deep into the revolutionary underworld, revealing complicity where least expected; cross-referenced, with up to 300 suspects mentioned on each sheet, they mapped the far-reaching curiosity of a formidable police state. This system alone might have explained why a large portion of the printed material smuggled into Russia by the Friends failed to reach its destination, but the true, unidentified cause actually lay closer to home.
Some of the packages whose shipment the Okhrana agent Evalenko, posing as the Friends’ American librarian ‘Vladimir Sergeyev’, had volunteered to oversee were destroyed by him as soon as they arrived from the presses; others he forwarded to Russia having supplied details that allowed their interception by the border police. Meanwhile, in London, the Okhrana agent Lev Beitner had so thoroughly infiltrated himself into the organisation and the society surrounding it that when he applied for a reader’s ticket for the British Museum Library, it was Garnett’s own brother, Richard, an employee, who provided a reference. Drawing on the intelligence he had gathered, Rachkovsky reported to St Petersburg that Kravchinsky and his associates were involved with other previously antagonistic émigré groups around Europe in the creation of ‘a central organisation that would unite them all and help to join efforts and resources, forge and sustain contacts with revolutionaries back home’.
A unified distribution network might bring together the disparate émigré groups in a common front; without it, they would surely only atomise further. Rachkovsky was determined to see it sabotaged, and his agent Evalenko had already begun the dirty work, helping to seed the discord between Lazarev and Kravchinsky that, ironically in light of Kravchinsky’s past actions and reputation, had its origin in his resistance to Lazarev’s demands for the Russian revolutionary movement to adopt more militant tactics. Then, having effectively destroyed the American wing of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom from within, in late 1895 Evalenko was recalled to London to continue his mischief-making there.
Early that summer, Constance Garnett’s sister Olive had written of how Kravchinsky had confided in her that he ‘wanted a new life, to elope with someone, not to be set down to work’. There was perhaps an element of flirtation in the words of a man who had once taught the art of coquettishness to Vera Zasulich and knew that both Garnett sisters doted on him and despised his wife. However, after fifteen years of onerous exile, with little progress to see for his efforts, Kravchinsky’s anguish was probably all too real. As the year drew to an end, and the rest of London prepared for Christmas, Kravchinsky remained hard at work thrashing out the details of a new journal that he was to edit, which would create a united front of Russian socialists and liberals against autocracy. On the subject of elopement, he appeared to have reconciled himself to quietly cuckolding Constance’s husband Edward, and had ‘promised to get a bear’s ham from Russia’ for his visit to the Garnett family’s new country cottage when it was completed in the New Year. First, though, on 23 December, he was scheduled to attend a crucial meeting to discuss editorial policy.
From Kravchinsky’s home in Bedford Park in West London, whose calm streets Camille Pissarro had recently painted, it was only a short walk to where Volkhovsky and Lazarev awaited him. Both were old friends, veterans of the Trial of the 193 twenty years before, but in Lazarev he would face a man reconverted to terrorism, quite possibly under Evalenko’s influence, and determined to sway Kravchinsky, a founder member of the Independent Labour Party, from his commitment to the principle that social justice should be achieved through peaceful change. Distracted or distraught, Kravchinsky’s state of mind can only be guessed at when, swinging his legs across the stile at the end of his road, he wandered on to the tracks of the North London Railway. Rounding the distant bend, the attentive driver pulled on the power vacuum brakes of his engine, but when the train came to a stop Kravchinsky’s body lay mangled beneath the second carriage.
Foul play was ruled out, suicide not mentioned. Friends considerately explained the accident by reference to Kravchinsky’s early experiences in the Bosnian gaols, an episode never before mentioned, where he had supposedly acquired the ability to will himself deaf in order to stay sane amid the cacophony. ‘How else could I endure English dinner parties?’ they remembered him joking. Olive Garnett cropped her hair in grief. Rachkovsky’s reaction to the news was doubtless rather different.
22
Conspiracy Theories
Europe and America, 1896–1901
Taking stock in early 1896, Rachkovsky could have reflected on two turbulent but largely efffective years for himself and the foreign Okhrana. In the weeks before the bombs of Henry and Bourdin had exploded, he had appeared more vulnerable than at any time since his arrival in Paris. Neither the fact that he
had recently exercised ‘more influence on the course of our rapprochement with France than did our ambassadors’, in the words of the Russian finance minister, Sergei Witte, nor his success in ‘exerting pressure on the local press…in the battle against the émigrés’ in London, had been enough to make his position secure. Ambassador de Mohrenheim, his supporter for many years, looked ripe for ignominious retirement, tarnished by his involvement in the Panama scandal and deemed increasingly unreliable after a debilitating bout of influenza, while Rachkovsky had been criticised for his indiscreet dealings with the French government.
The visit that January of Ivan Manasevich-Manuilov from the ministry of the interior, whom Rachkovsky suspected of collecting ‘information about my personal life, my financial position abroad, about the staff of the agentura, and about my relations with the prefecture and the embassy in Paris’, must have appeared the prelude to his removal from post. Yet Rachkovsky had quickly turned the situation around, swatting away ‘the nimble Jew’ who was ‘ready to do anything for a goodly sum’, and earning fitting recognition for his efforts. The bonus of 10,000 rubles that he received in April, nominally for his work in swaying the press, must also have been in tacit acknowledgement of his feats of provocation: fortunately for him, it was paid before the embarrassment of Liège. Yet, despite Liège, few of his superiors could have doubted that Rachkovsky’s deft exploitation of the anarchist bombings was largely to thank when, late in the year, the Russian department of police’s magazine Obzor reported ‘a marked cooling of the English towards the supposedly innocent but persecuted Russian dissidents’.
The way ahead, though, was less clear. A flurry of warnings from British and French police about mooted attacks on Russian targets after the death of Alexander III, and the involvement of a group of Berlin anarchists in a planned assassination of the new tsar in Moscow, maintained a sense of imminent danger. So too did the discussions between Lazarev and Burtsev, among others, about a renewal of revolutionary violence in Russia to offset the drift towards reformism in the movement led by the charismatic Georgi Plekhanov and his Social Democrats, the official standard-bearers for the ideas of Marx. Times were changing, though, and Rachkovsky had to reposition himself accordingly: both with regard to the declining threat of terrorism in the West, and more crucially the change of ruler in Russia.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 54
