Rachkovsky appears never to have been a favourite of the late tsar, who had once scrawled the single word ‘villain’ next to Rachkovsky’s name in an official report. And yet for fourteen years, Alexander III’s towering physical presence and authority had maintained stability and held Russia on a tight course of religious and political conservatism. In stark contrast, his son Nicholas, on hearing of his succession, is said to have wept not for his lost father but at his own unreadiness to inherit the throne: a sound self-assessment that would leave him dependent on the influence of his advisers. According to one popular joke, so fickle was the young tsar that whoever had last spoken to him could be considered the most powerful man in Russia, with the serious consequence that the court was riven by factionalism. It was a situation whose risks were illustrated in tragic fashion on the very day of Nicholas II’s coronation in the gilded splendour of the Kremlin’s Uspensky Cathedral, when his entourage had insulated the new tsar from news of the stampede by peasants on the nearby Khodynka Field that had left almost 1,400 dead. The decision that he would proceed as planned to a ball at the French Embassy left a lasting impression of callous aloofness on the peasant population, which compounded their irritation at Nicholas’s recent dismissal of proposals for constitutional change as ‘senseless dreams’.
For Rachkovsky, there was no option but to choose sides and his preference was clear: the progressive Witte, determined to drag peasant Russia into the modern world. Witte was still an enthusiast for railway expansion, as he had been when he claimed to have seeded the idea of the Holy Brotherhood, and an advocate of an active credit system, migration to cities and the division of labour. Implicit in Rachkovsky’s choice of patron, however, was the acquisition of powerful enemies: the politically conservative Plehve, who as director of police had never quite trusted Rachkovsky, and Pobedonostsev, procurator of the Orthodox synod, a deeply thoughtful man who nevertheless hated all originality and innovation, and was committed to the resettlement of migrant peasants in villages subject to the traditional social binding of church and family. Rachkovsky’s audience with Pope Leo XIII in the Vatican, where he allegedly attempted to broker a rapprochement between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, might almost have been designed to pique Pobedonostsev. Witte must have hoped that ease and wealth had not blunted Rachkovsky’s capacity for subtler intrigues and that he could rely on him to serve his interests. The coming years would be fertile in opportunity.
One crisp October morning in 1896, dignitaries gathered on the Left Bank of the Seine near the Esplanades des Invalides for the ceremony to lay the cornerstone of the bridge that would be France’s tribute to Alexander III. Standing slightly apart, Rachkovsky looked on hawkishly. The safety of Tsar Nicholas II, there to honour his late father, was always the Okhrana chief’s top priority and should have commanded his full attention. Yet despite his duties, Rachkovsky may have allowed himself to exchange a knowing glance with one or two familiar figures. Boisdeffre was present, the general with whom he had dealt over the French alliance, as was Henri Rochefort who had travelled a long way politically since 1881, when the nihilists had entrusted him alone with the inside story of a previous tsar’s assassination. That the reactionary soldier and the radical marquis had recently found common ground was strange enough, with Rochefort considering his new friend for the Boulanger role in the dictatorship of which he still dreamed. Stranger still, though, was the possibility that both shared a secret with the Russian spymaster that was far more explosive: one that within weeks would seep out into the public domain.
The Dreyfus Affair, when it broke that November, would redraw the political fault lines that divided French society, with dramatic effect. Nearly two years had passed since Maurice Barrès had described the ritual humiliation of the Jewish army captain from the ministry of war convicted of spying for Germany, in terms reminiscent of those more usually applied to the criminal degenerate. ‘As he came towards us with his cap thrust down over his forehead, his pince-nez on his ethnic nose, his eyes dry and furious, his foreign physiognomy, his impassive stillness,’ Barrès wrote, ‘the very atmosphere he exuded revolted even the most self-controlled of spectators.’ In a brutal spectacle, the braid and buttons were ripped from Dreyfus’ uniform by a towering blond Breton, who then proceeded to break the disgraced officer’s sword over his knee; a prelude to Dreyfus’ transportation to Devil’s Island, where only weeks before the rebel anarchists had been massacred. A scintillating literary talent whose anarchism had brought him full circle to that dangerous place where the extremes of right and left overlap and where an extreme form of nationalistic socialism would later be born, Barrès relished the scene, and few public figures questioned the sentence unless, like Clemenceau, to criticise its leniency. Now all that was about to change.
The first challenge to the soundness of the verdict came from another anarchist, the journalist Bernard Lazare, who had been an outspoken presence at the recent London Congress. For while Barrès, Drumont and Rochefort had spent their time feeding fresh meat to the beast of anti-Semitism, hungry again after gorging itself on the Panama scandal, Lazare had taken a considered interest as further evidence came to light. The proof of Dreyfus’ guilt – an incriminating document purportedly in his handwriting – had been thrown into doubt by the discovery in a war-ministry wastebasket of a suspicious letter bearing an identical hand: that of a Major Esterhazy. Battle was joined in the press, with neither side conceding an inch. The socialists were slow to engage, and two months later Jules Guesde would still be insisting that the passion evinced by the affair was merely a ‘bourgeois civil war’. Many anarchists, though, recognised behind the anti-Semitism a more far-reaching reactionary agenda that had forged a fearsome cohesion in the radical, nationalistic right. Louise Michel, torn between her gratitude to Rochefort on the one hand and, on the other, friendship for the passionate Dreyfusard, Sébastien Faure, was rare in remaining neutral: a position that left her utterly isolated.
As Rochefort wove a complex conspiracy claiming that a Jewish syndicate was conspiring against France, did he know that his amplified prejudice was merely providing a smokescreen to conceal a real conspiracy that was scarcely less alarming? If so, he had aligned himself not only with General Boisdeffre but with key figures from the earlier struggle against terrorism. When the graphology expert Monsieur Gobert refused to bow to pressure from the military to verify the letter, Alphonse Bertillon, the criminal anthropologist, was happy to step in with elaborate justifications of Dreyfus’ guilt. Most intriguing of all, however, were the rumours that circulated of a Russian angle to the skullduggery. Forged intelligence overstating France’s military strength had, it was suggested, been supplied to reassure the late tsar as he wavered before signing the alliance; Dreyfus’ imprisonment in solitary confinement was to prevent him from divulging what he knew. If true, it would have put both Boisdeffre and Rachkovsky in the frame.
The French government, however, issued a statement absolving all foreign embassies of involvement in the affair, but the full truth will never be known, for as the novelist Emile Zola would mention in his famous open letter to President Faure of January 1898, ‘papers were disappearing, then as they continue to do to this day’. And yet, in a revealing paradox, other papers were simultaneously appearing in the most mysterious ways, with Esterhazy claiming that the document used to exonerate him, fraudulently as it proved, had been handed over by a ‘veiled lady’ outside, of all places, the Sacré-Coeur.
Frauds and forgeries were, of course, a practised part of Rachkovsky’s repertoire of intrigue, and it is tempting to imagine him taking a connoisseur’s interest in other successful practitioners. Might he, then, have been in the queue of top-hatted gentlemen waiting to check in their sticks and umbrellas at the cloakroom of the Paris Geographical Society on Easter Monday 1897, a strict requirement for admission to the auditorium on this most intriguing of nights? Against a backdrop of heightening political tensions, the foyer was abuzz with the promise of an
appearance by a certain Diane Vaughan. Descended from the seventeenth-century English mystic Thomas Vaughan, it was said, she was the author of The Restoration of Palladism, a Transition Decreed by the Sanctum Regnum to Prepare the Public Cult of Lucifer. She was also the alleged source of the extraordinary revelations about satanic Freemasonry made by the ex-Freemason Leo Taxil.
Rachkovsky would certainly have admired Taxil’s ambition, or rather that of Gabriel Jogand-Pages, the true identity of the charlatan. Building on a decade of fantastical fear-mongering, in the autumn of 1896 Taxil had been the prime mover behind the Anti-Masonic Congress, marching through the streets of Trent at the head of a torch-bearing procession 18,000 strong. A petition from Spain asserting that Freemasonry was indeed a ‘dark and diabolical sect, the enemy of God’ contained more than 100,000 signatures, while there was little ambiguity about the anti-Semitism later in the declaration by delegates, including dozens of Catholic bishops, that Freemasonry was the ‘Synagogue of Satan’. After much pleasurable alarmism had been indulged in, though, doubts had finally been raised about the reliability of Taxil’s sources. The Geographical Society event was the outcome: Jogand-Pages’ punchline to his grotesquely overextended joke.
To begin with Taxil regaled the audience with an account of his earlier hoaxes: the scam of the sharks troubling the fishermen of the Riviera, the year after the Commune, and of the mysterious city under the waters of Lake Geneva that so many travelled to see while anarchism was being defined nearby. And yet, he teased, ‘compared with the tugboat I had dispatched hunting for sharks in the coves off Marseilles in my early years, the boat of Palladism was a true battleship…the battleship turned into a squadron. And when Miss Diana Vaughan became my auxiliary, the squadron grew into a full navy.’ Taxil had fooled even the Pope, despite having previously satirised His Holiness’ sexual habits: invited to the Vatican, he received a papal endorsement of his campaign against the Masons. And yet every word that Taxil wrote or spoke had been a fraud. Those terribly plausible stories of devils with telephones, of orgiastic rituals and Satan’s global conspiracy were revealed, to widespread astonishment, as so much nonsense. Among the audience at the Geographical Society whose anger and astonishment Jogand-Pages now fled, only the winner of the prize draw for a typewriter left with anything other than shattered illusions. And even he was the unwitting victim of yet another joke: the ‘Diana Vaughan’ whose name Jogand-Pages had borrowed, was a saleswoman for Remington.
‘They accepted my tales as gospel truth,’ Taxil observed of those he had duped for so long, ‘and the more I lied for the purpose of showing that I lied, the more convinced they became that I was a paragon of veracity.’ To anyone of good conscience these words would have invited them to question the appeal of conspiracy stories that flattered their most atavistic tribalism; to someone like Rachkovsky they merely inspired greater deviousness.
The opportunity for Rachkovsky to implement the lesson of Taxil’s audacity may have arisen not long afterwards. Sergei Witte, his powerful political ally, had responded to attacks made on him by de Cyon in the Nouvelle Revue, with their dangerous claims that he was conspiring to seize power, by trying and failing to force their author’s return to Russia. Stripped of his Russian nationality, and with French hospitality exhausted, de Cyon had taken up residence in Switzerland as a stateless person, and it was to his villa in Territet that Rachkovsky’s agents pursued him, in a raid reminiscent of that on the People’s Will’s presses a decade before. Their objective may have been the seizure of material incriminating de Cyon himself. It would later be claimed, however, that they had discovered a very different kind of document: one that would shock and astound readers with a vivid blueprint for the long-gestated Jewish takeover of the world.
How The Protocols of the Elders of Zion came into existence is even more obscure than the hidden details of the Drefyus Affair. And yet, for all the many theories about the provenance of the forged document, with its cunning representation of anarchists, socialists, Masons and liberals as the dupes of a diabolic Jewish plot, its roots clearly lie in the world over which Rachkovsky presided. It is not only the contemporary allusions that point to such a conclusion: the construction of the Paris Métro, for example, or the document’s own claim to be the secret agenda of the first Zionist Congress, organised in Basel in the summer of 1896 by Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau, whose secret lover was the Okhrana agent Madame Novikoff. Nor is it the employment in the Okhrana’s Paris offices at the time of the skilled forger Matvei Golovinsky, who like Rachkovsky and his loyal French agent Bint was an old member of the Holy Brotherhood.
The most telling facts of all concern, rather, the literary work on which the forgery was based, The Dialogues between Machiavelli and Montesquieu in Hell, a satire of Napoleon III’s despotic manipulation of public opinion, and the context of its composition in 1867 by Albert Joly, while he was an exile in Brussels. Thirty years on, few would still have remembered Joly’s work, long since out of print. But when Joly had been in Brussels, so too had Rochefort, who may well have consulted him about routes by which to smuggle La Lanterne into France. Albert Joly, moreover, was the brother of the lawyer Maurice Joly, who had defended Henri Rochefort before the military tribunal in 1872 at Gambetta’s request, and would subsequently be hounded to suicide for it by his client. If anyone had proposed the old booklet to Rachkovsky as the basis for a trick to demonise the Jews, Rochefort appears the likeliest candidate.
When Herzl witnessed the humiliation of Captain Dreyfus in 1895, it was the visceral anti-Semitic hatred he saw and felt in the crowd that convinced him that only in a Jewish homeland could the safety of his race be guaranteed. At the time he cannot have guessed the sordid intrigues that had led to the scene, but still less can he have imagined the conspiracy that would be forged to demonise the Zionist movement he founded. Rochefort and Rachkovsky had both demonstrated, in their different ways, that they had few scruples when it came to settling scores and making their political points.
Compared to the knotty intrigues that Rachkovsky was ravelling and unravelling in France, the problem posed by the enquiring mind of the revolutionary movement’s counter-intelligence agent Vladimir Burtsev in London should have been relatively straightforward to resolve. Yet despite Rachkovsky’s best efforts, Burtsev continued to be an irritant. ‘The conflict of the Russian government with revolutionaries has long ago lost its primitive character and has now become a regular science,’ Burtsev wrote, and responded accordingly. Having himself been the victim of betrayal on more than one occasion, he set about compiling an archive of notes and dossiers on police agents for the purposes of rooting out informers and provocateurs. For anyone to turn his own techniques against him was intolerable for Rachkovsky, but his antipathy towards Burtsev may have had a personal edge too.
For several years Rachkovsky had run a honey-pot operation against Burtsev. The woman involved was Charlotte Bullier, a rich young widow and possible cousin of Rachkovsky’s agent Henri Bint. Bullier first met Burtsev in Paris in 1892, winning his trust with an offer of assistance in evading the French police. Over the next two years they conducted a tempestuous affair, in the flesh and by letter, as Bullier repeatedly sought and failed to lure her lover abroad for romantic trysts, in order to deliver him to her Okhrana paymaster. If Burtsev sometimes felt dazed by the experience, it may have been due as much to the sleeping drugs with which she dosed him, in order to read and report on his letters, as mere sexual obsession. Either way, he nearly fell prey to her wiles. Eventually answering her invitations to travel to Marseilles to be with her, he found himself locked into his cabin. Bullier’s attempt to get her captive to Russia was only foiled by the lack of transport, although the head of the police department in St Petersburg was tempted to dispatch a warship from the Black Sea fleet for the purpose.
The gifts and intimate notes exchanged between Bullier and Rachkovsky hint that he too was in thrall to her charms, perhaps exacerbating his antipathy to Burtsev. When in 1897 the
revolutionary finally overstepped the line, publishing a newspaper called Narodovolets that advocated a resumption of the old terror tactics of the People’s Will, Rachkovsky was certainly ready to pounce. The first signs were not encouraging. A demand from Russia’s chargé d’affaires in London that Lord Salisbury’s government take urgent action against Burtsev was diplomatically dismissed. ‘I could not answer for it that upon that jury some person might not be found, whose prejudices might prevent him from recognising the heinousness of the offences with which the prisoner has been charged,’ the prime minister explained. His authorisation of a secret payment for Hilda Czarina, a ‘speciality dancer’ from Brighton, to change her name, at the request of the Russian Embassy, scarcely made amends. Rachkovsky, though, knew someone who shared his disdain for the ‘pedantic concern’ that the English displayed towards ancient legal tradition, and could help him negotiate the obstacles.
For the benefit of his superiors, Chief Inspector Melville grumbled at having ‘to play the part of host to the Russian secret service’ during the tsar’s visits to Queen Victoria at Balmoral, but the time he spent there with Harting and Rachkovsky appears to have been perfectly convivial, and in private correspondence with the latter he sang to a very different tune. Burtsev and his associates were ‘common murderers’, Melville informed Rachkovsky, whom he would like to ‘chase from one end of London to the other’ and whose prosecution, he thought, would help ‘alert the public and the government to the menace posed by the anarchists’. Doubtless the gifts of gold jewellery from the tsar went down well with Melville’s wife, but even setting aside his underhand offer to assist Rachkovsky in 1892, the chief inspector’s disdainful attitude to the democratic rule of law was shocking, if nothing new.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 55
