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

by Alex Butterworth

  Zubatov’s strategy was taken straight from Rachkovsky’s playbook, but when it came to the informer Evno Azef, Zubatov and Rachkovsky disagreed. It was Zubatov who had first recruited Azef as an informant in 1893, sending him to Germany; more recently he had recalled him to Moscow, ignoring Rachkovsky’s past expressions of disquiet about his reliability. Azef had quickly appeared to repay Zubatov’s trust, his reports providing an inside view of the Russian émigrés’ efforts towards unification. What was more, he rose quickly through the ranks of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, officially founded in Russia only in 1902, and became a key member of its combat unit, whose members playfully referred to themselves as ‘anarchists’ in homage to the bombers and assassins in France, Spain and elsewhere. Provocation may or may not have been the original reason for Azef’s infiltration, but was almost inevitable if informants became involved in the planning and execution of terrorism in order to retain credibility with their colleagues. In the case of an agent with Azef’s amoral attitude, the risk of treachery was considerable. For the moment, though, he successfully countered any doubts that his police handlers expressed about his reliability with accusations of his own concerning their blundering response to his warnings.

  Somewhat surprisingly, it was another element of Zubatov’s highly interventionist policing strategy that ultimately cost him his job. Calculating that the economic circumstances of Russian workers were of greater interest to them than abstract ideas of political and constitutional change, in May 1901 Zubatov had gained the support of General Trepov, the head of the police department, for the creation of police-funded unions to manage popular discontent. The tactic had seemed to work. Less than a year later, 50,000 union members came out to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Tsar Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs, and Zubatov was promoted to director of a special section of the police department, with a brief to extend the initiative across the provinces. But his tenure was to be short-lived. In the summer of 1903, when strike action by the police-funded unions rapidly spread across southern Russia, the hardliners gained traction with their argument that there should be no concessions lest the masses be encouraged to ask for more.

  For Zubatov, it spelled the end of his career. Plehve had recently inherited the ministry of the interior, following the assassination of the previous incumbent Sipyagin by the combat unit in which Azef was prominent. Now Plehve seized the opportunity to mount a proxy attack on his rival, the finance minister Sergei Witte, of whom Zubatov and Rachkovsky were favourites. Zubatov was stripped of his position, scurrilous rumours were circulated that he was a secret revolutionary sympathiser, and funding of the unions abruptly cut. Even as the revolutionaries gained strength, bitter splits in the government were hindering the work of the police.

  ‘New times – new problems; the sooner we reorganise the better,’ Rachkovsky had written to his superiors, but Trepov’s replacement, Alexei Lopukhin, had started asking awkward questions about the legitimacy of the Okhrana man’s activities in Paris. There was, of course, ample evidence for Rachkovsky’s abuses of power. In addition to the bombings in Liège and the role of his agent Jagolkovsky in the assassination of General Seliverstov, there was his exploitation of contacts in the French police to settle personal scores, and his profiteering. Fees for brokering commercial deals between France and Russia had bolstered his salary of 12,000 rubles to make him a rich man, but there was the suspicion too that he had used some part of the foreign agency’s considerable budget to play the stock market. Such dubious practices might, though, have been allowed to pass unnoticed were it not for the petty factionalism at the tsar’s court.

  Rachkovsky’s Achilles heel proved to be his fraught relationship with the mystical demi-monde of Paris. The fact that those inclined to intrigue were perennially attracted to the esoteric had made the murky waters of mysticism an irresistible fishing ground for Rachkovsky, and had doubtless yielded a good catch, some years before, as he orchestrated the Franco-Russian alliance. However, in the process he had made dangerous enemies, and it was one of these, Gérard Encausse, who returned to haunt him. The occult credentials of Encausse, once an assistant hypnotist at the Salpêtrière hospital but now better known as the seer ‘Papus’ and a Gnostic bishop, had brought him to the attention of the Russian imperial family. In 1901, writing as ‘Niet’ in the right-wing Echo de Paris, he had censured Rachkovsky and Witte for their alleged conspiratorial dealings with a Jewish financial syndicate, and was now intent on using his influence to destroy them.

  ‘I want you to take serious measures to terminate all relations between Rachkovsky and the French police once and for all,’ the tsar wrote to Durnovo, now the senior figure in the government; ‘I am sure that you will carry out my order quickly and precisely.’ The consequences for Rachkovsky were devastating. Nothing could save him, not even the replacement of Durnovo as chairman of the committee of ministers by his patron, Witte. Stripped of both his position and influence in France, he had no option but to accept an old friend’s offer to manage a factory in Warsaw. It was a long fall from grace for the man who had been the most feared security agent in western Europe, but more twists and turns of fate lay ahead for him before the current struggle for power in Russia was resolved.

  Among the criticisms levelled at Rachkovsky was that he had ‘created in the public opinion abroad the belief that Russia stands on the brink of revolution and that its political order is in danger’. In reality, it was merely a question of Rachkovsky revealing the reality of what most within the Russian government feared. ‘Twenty years ago when I was director of the department of police,’ Plehve told Nicholas II on his appointment, ‘if someone had told me that revolution was possible in Russia I would have smiled, but now we are on the eve of that revolution.’ It was partly a ministerial pitch for resources and latitude, of course, just as the alarmist reports he forwarded to Witte were intended to force his rival on to the back foot. There is no doubt, though, that Plehve sincerely believed in the urgent imperative of neutralising the revolutionaries’ appeal to Russia’s peasants and industrial workers. And if that meant manipulating those peasants’ most atavistic instincts, then he was more than happy to countenance such a policy.

  The provocations contrived by Rachkovsky and Zubatov had been as nothing compared to those employed in the Bessarabian city of Kishinev in the spring of 1903. The police and interior ministry were scrupulous in ensuring that the origins of the pogroms could not be traced back to them but, unlike in 1881, this time their hand was clearly behind everything, from the incendiary manifestos that began to circulate that Easter to the document proclaiming that the tsar exonerated in advance all those who attacked the city’s Jews. When more than twenty groups of armed youths spread out through the city, late in the afternoon of 6 April, the police stood aside. Nor did they make any attempt to intervene as the gangs rampaged through the Jewish quarter, murdering, mutilating and raping the occupants of any house not marked with a white cross. Nearly fifty were dead and hundreds seriously injured before Plehve instructed that the killing should be stopped. Smaller-scale pogroms would occur across Russia in the following months, deflecting popular discontent with the government on to an easy target, as anti-Semitic propaganda became widespread.

  The idea of the global Jewish conspiracy had a long pedigree in Russia, with the publication of the Book of Kahal preceding the Odessa pogrom of 1871, while the appearance of Osman Bey’s World Conquest by the Jews a decade later coincided with revenge attacks for the tsar’s assassination. Following the massacre in Kishinev, in August 1903 the notion was propagated anew by the publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Znamya (the Banner), the organ of the nascent extreme nationalist movement the Black Hundreds, a recrudescence of the worse aspects of the Holy Brotherhood of the early 1880s. But whilst the Holy Brotherhood had supposedly been the brainchild of a young Witte, and had numbered Rachkovsky among its members, it was now Plehve who was playing the anti-Semitic card most aggressive
ly, while Witte sought to calm the situation, under pressure from the western European bankers on whose financing his project of modernisation relied. Had the ‘discovery’, or rather forging, of the Protocols really been the brainchild of Rachkovsky, following the raid on de Cyon’s villa, the document’s extraordinary propagandist power would already seem to have escaped his control.

  The delegates attending the congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party in Brussels that July saw clearly how the Kishinev pogrom and its imitations would, according to the resolution proposed by the Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, ‘serve in the hands of the police as a means by which the latter seek to hold back the growth of class-consciousness among the proletariat’, and were urged to expose the reactionary origins of anti-Semitism. By demonstrating how easily the masses could be led by their baser instincts, the pogrom also illustrated his assertion that the peasantry would prove readily tractable to government bribes should revolution ever truly threaten. To counter this, argued Vladimir Ulyanov, soon to be known as ‘Lenin’, a conspiratorial party of dedicated revolutionaries should be formed to lead the masses on the straight path to victory. It was a proposal quite at odds with the populist principles of the movement, but Lenin and his recent ally Plekhanov had contrived a coup, ensuring that, during the congress, their supporters would be in the majority. Outvoted, the veterans of the movement, including Vera Zasulich, were ousted from their posts on its journal Iskra, and by a clever propagandist sleight of hand, permanently labelled as a minority, or ‘Mensheviks’. Lenin and his cohorts asserted their brief claim to be the majority: the ‘Bolsheviks’.

  It was a tragedy for Zasulich, who had been the agent of reconciliation between Plekhanov and Lenin after their past disagreements, and was now the butt of their humour, the former joking to his new friend that ‘she takes me for Trepov’, presumably in reference to the chief of police whom she had tried to shoot dead a quarter-century before. Plehve, by contrast, was more than satisfied by the schism, but also that the ascendancy of the little-known theoretician, Lenin, simplified the task of the police, whose tactics were already adapted to combating the kind of militancy he proposed. The interior minister’s strategy had certainly made considerable advances against the Social Revolutionaries: by late 1903 its combat unit had been reduced to a mere rump under the direction of the police agent Evno Azef, following the arrest of the team’s charismatic leader, Gershuni. Even the protracted campaign for concerted international action against subversives had gained new momentum, as a result of President McKinley’s assassination, and the ten countries who convened in St Petersburg in March 1904 finally agreed on a ‘Secret Protocol for the International War on Anarchism’, supporting information-sharing and deportation. Britain, France and the United States stayed away, but even they were prepared to cooperate. Any resentment Rachkovsky felt at the lack of credit he received for a scheme that Plehve had opposed when Rachkovsky had originally presented it years before would soon receive a bloody salve.

  Security around Plehve was tight. Rarely did he set foot outside the headquarters of the police department on the Fontanka Quay, where he kept an apartment; when travelling by rail, a special carriage was at his disposal, permanently guarded by police, whose doors would be locked and blinds lowered whenever it slowed into a station. Arrangements at his summer residence on Aptekarsk Island were no less rigorous, as the members of the combat unit sent to assassinate him with bombs and guns in July 1904 discovered. The attack failed, thanks to information supplied by Azef, who had himself bullied the reluctant conspirators to proceed. Only two weeks later, though, a bomb thrown into Plehve’s carriage by a member of the same unit as he drove for his daily meeting with the tsar blew the interior minister to pieces.

  As director of the police department, Lopukhin was convinced that Azef’s double-dealing was responsible for Plehve’s death. The evidence was ambiguous. His tip-offs had led to the arrest of members of a rival group that had also been preparing an attack on Plehve, but perhaps only to prevent them from stealing his glory, and although Azef insisted that his warnings about the combat unit’s own plans had been sufficient for any competent police force to have prevented the attack, the truth was that they had in many respects been misleading. As for Azef’s personal motive: he was himself a Jew and had been seen shaking with fury after the Kishinev pogrom and cursing Plehve. On the wider context of the assassination, Lopukhin would later conclude that it had been Witte’s long-nurtured plan to use the revolutionaries to get rid not only of his rival, but subsequently of the tsar himself, who Witte saw as inadequate to the task of modernising reform that circumstances so urgently required of him, and whom he wished to replace with his brother Grand Duke Michael.

  The assassination of Plehve was certainly convenient for Witte who shifted the blame for the government’s least popular policies on to his dead rival. Among the most catastrophic of these was the ongoing war with Japan. Russia had provoked hostilities partly with the aim of raising nationalistic support for the tsar, but it had backfired from the very beginning, when the Japanese had inflicted serious damage on the Russian navy with a surprise attack. Since then, things had gone from bad to worse with further defeats in the Far East. Moreover, a British declaration of war had only narrowly been avoided when Russian ships sailing through the North Sea on their way to the Far East had opened fire on the boats of the British fishing fleet on the Dogger Bank, in the mistaken belief that they were Japanese raiders. The error was due to faulty intelligence supplied by Arkady Harting – the one-time Hekkelman and Landesen – on board the ship Esmeralda to winkle out subversive officers in the fleet.

  ‘Plehve’s end was received with semi-public rejoicing,’ reported one English journalist. ‘I met nobody who regretted his assassination or condemned the author. This attitude towards crime, although by no means new, struck me as one of the most sinister features of the situation.’ Azef’s decisions now seemingly vindicated by the court of public opinion, he was confirmed in his delusion that he was an absolute moral arbiter, judge, jury and executioner. And such was the thrall in which he held Rachkovsky’s ineffectual replacement Rataev that, having returned to Paris, there appeared to be no brake on Azef’s ambitions. The reports that he filed from revolutionary conferences could not be faulted, but his setting up of bomb factories boded ill, while his fascination with flying machines was still more ominous. In 1904, the last novel by the ageing Jules Verne, written under the influence of his reactionary son, once again caught the tenor of the times: a sequel to Robur the Conqueror entitled The Master of the World, its ‘hero of the air’, who had freed African slaves in the first book twenty years before, has become merely another amoral nihilist: a megalomaniac hell-bent on shaping the world to his demented will. Azef fitted the type exactly.

  A lifetime spent among the anarchist community of France and the London colony had taught Louise Michel a certain detachment when it came to the endemic problem of agents provocateurs. ‘We love to have them in the party, because they always propose the most revolutionary motions,’ she joked in a letter to Henri Rochefort when he tried to warn her against one suspicious character. It was just another example of the wistful humour that now characterised correspondence between the veterans of the movement: ‘Year One is so long in coming!’ Kropotkin had commented regarding a discussion about the approaching ‘Age of Liberty’.

  Tireless to the end, Michel continued to tour France giving lectures, her clothes bundled up in a white cloth, her face ever more wrinkled, her shoulders more stooped. The crowds had shrunk too, down from the thousands she had once routinely attracted to mere hundreds. ‘People here are fools,’ she said of the French. ‘It seems history is going to pass them by. But look at Russia…There’ll be spectacular events in the land of Gorky and Kropotkin. I can feel it growing, swelling, I can feel the revolution that will sweep them all away, tsars, grand dukes, the whole Slavic bureaucracy, that entire, enormous house of death …’ In the course of several years of intermitte
nt illness, Michel had experienced trance-like moments of mystical insight, but her prescience had never before been so acute.

  Aged only sixty-eight, Michel was still touring when she died in January 1905. Her frail body, that had endured so much, was carried back from the provincial town in which she had been lecturing; for its arrival at the Gare de Lyon, several hundred troops were summoned to maintain public order. As the cortège passed through Paris, from the centre out to the eastern suburbs, past Père Lachaise where the Communards had made their last stand to her final resting place in Levallois-Perret, the crowd swelled to tens of thousands: nothing like it had been seen, it was said, since the funeral of Victor Hugo. ‘Long live the Russian Revolution! Long live anarchy!’ they shouted, though the first news of events in St Petersburg can only just have been coming through.

  On the morning of 22 January, six columns of workers from the industrial suburbs had converged in the Russian capital and set off for the Winter Palace, where they would present a petition to the tsar or his representatives asking for labour reform and an end to the futile war against Japan. It was a Sunday, and the icons and imperial symbols they carried aloft, like the songs they sang in honour of the tsar, signalled patriotism and piety: a message of peaceful intent that had been communicated in advance to the authorities. The authorities, though, appeared not to have heeded it. Blocking the procession’s approach to the palace were 12,000 troops, their guns loaded with live rounds which, when fired into the approaching marchers, mowed down up to 200 and injured hundreds more.