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

by Alex Butterworth

  Elisée Reclus saw Russia’s ‘Bloody Sunday’ as heralding the glorious dawn of revolution. His enthusiasm was only dampened when, hurrying to Paris to deliver a speech, he succumbed to debilitating fatigue and had to ask a friend to deliver it for him. ‘Alas! I should speak to them in words of fire, and I only have an asthmatic puff to give them,’ he bemoaned to Kropotkin, whose own expectations of what would ensue were as high as his own. Yet Reclus’ hopes that events in Russia would herald ‘the conciliation of races in a federation of equity’ showed little sign of being fulfilled. Whilst anger at the events of Bloody Sunday had indeed compounded widespread and growing dissatisfaction with the tsarist autocracy, while the many strikes and minor insurrections that followed were a clear demonstration of latent threat, they were far from sufficient to wash away the regime. Nor did the architecture of repression show any sign of crumbling.

  Even the origins of the January revolution were muddied by the police’s use of conspiratorial tactics. At the head of the procession of workers to the Winter Palace had been Father Gapon, a man whose passionate commitment to the workers’ cause, throughout the years that he had led and organised the Union of Russian Factory and Mill Workers, had won him their high esteem. Walking beside him was Pinhas Rutenberg, a prominent member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, who had flung Gapon to the ground when the bullets started to fly. In saving his life, however, he cannot have known that Gapon had been close to the police for several years, his organisation one of those bankrolled by Zubatov. The massacre of the protesters in St Petersburg was primarily the result of confusion, poor communication and official overreaction, but the shock it generated served the purpose of those arguing that it was necessary for the authorities to tighten their grip.

  In a period marked by significant losses for the anarchist movement, Elisée Reclus chose a good moment to die, buoyed up on news read to him by his daughter of the mutiny of the crew on the Russian battleship Potemkin in June 1905. He was not one of those old hands of 1871 who blamed the demise of the Commune on its lack of military ruthlessness, but the thought of a battleship in the hands of its workers, free to roam the oceans, surely resonated deeply with both the geographer and the anarchist in him as he approached the end. For a few minutes in the midst of the Black Sea, when the sailors of the Russian fleet refused to fire on the renegades and allowed the Potemkin to sail away between a line of ironclads, it seemed that the long-gestated naval insurrection might indeed take hold. Barely ten days later, however, after pleas by the Potemkin‘s crew for a sympathetic country to refuel and provision the ship had fallen on deaf ears, the ship was abandoned in a neutral port, and would subsequently be renamed Panteleimon in an attempt to erase awkward memories of the episode. If the revolution was to progress to the stage of armed insurrection, the weapons would have to be supplied from outside Russia, even if that meant soliciting the support of hostile governments.

  Since the latter years of the previous century, growing international tensions had increased the likelihood of war between two or more of the Great Powers, and it seemed quite possible that a general conflagration of the kind that many had long predicted would be the outcome. France and Russia were allied in the case of war being declared on one or other, but the consequences if either initiated an attack was less certain. Equally, the question of what role Germany and Britain would play, whether as allies or enemies, had taxed the imagination of military planners and speculative novelists alike, with all permutations rehearsed. To revolutionaries like Kropotkin, however, such questions were less relevant than his expectation that the outbreak of hostilities would prompt an international general strike as a prelude to revolution, the prospect of which had helped focus minds at recent socialist congresses.

  Conflict with the underestimated Japan may have seemed an unlikely midwife of revolution, and yet it was anger at defeats inflicted by the Japanese navy, as well as with their own ill-treatment by officers, that had provoked the mutineers on the Potemkin. Moreover, it was Japanese intelligence, in the person of Colonel Akashi the military attaché in Stockholm, that agreed to furnish the putative revolutionaries in Russia with the material needed for the struggle.

  The Okhrana had become aware of details of the plan to transport Japanese-funded weapons via Finland thanks to its interception of correspondence between Nicholas Chaikovsky and the captain of the SS John Grafton. The operation to track its cargo would be led by Arkady Harting, newly installed as head of the Berlin bureau: the 1,000 reports it sent to St Petersburg in less than two years spoke of his determination to make his mark. Other agents had been deployed to seven ports on the English, Dutch and Belgian coasts to signal the ship’s departure; Lev Beitner and his wife, also now an agent, were reporting from the heart of the émigré community in Brussels. Azef, meanwhile, had persuaded his colleagues to designate him as the man to collect their share of the vast consignment of 5,000 pistols, more than 10,000 Swiss rifles, and millions of rounds of ammunition at the far end.

  Intelligence from Harting that the John Grafton was due to dock near Jakobstad on the Gulf of Bothnia reached St Petersburg soon enough for the battleship Asia to intercept and force her aground on sandbanks. Explosions were set off to suggest that the arms had been destroyed in the ship’s hold, but what really happened was typically opaque, with the captain of the Asia seemingly bribed to allow at least some of the weapons to be salvaged.

  Kropotkin, grieving over Reclus’ death, neverthess shared the Frenchman’s optimism that Russia would be the scene of the long-awaited revolution and was determined to take an active part. ‘The real anarchist party, in the true sense of the word, is in the process of final formation in Russia,’ he would claim that autumn, having begun training with a rifle for his role on the barricades on his planned return to the land of his birth, after a thirty-year absence. He was briefly encouraged by the emergence in St Petersburg on 13 October of the first soviet, or workers’ council, whose inspiration was broadly anarchistic, though Leon Trotsky would later appropriate much of the credit. The publication four days later of the tsar’s constitutional October Manifesto, in which he renounced autocratic rule, and his ministers’ strategic decision to allow time for the political mood of the country to settle before further repression, gave the soviet a temporary reprieve. But then, on 3 December, an insurrection in Moscow provided the pretext for the full wrath of the police department to be unleashed.

  ‘You would only be one among many, and you above all ought not to be exposed to any accident in this year in which we have already lost Louise Michel and Elisée Reclus,’ the future historian of anarchism, Max Nettlau, wrote to Kropotkin, arguing against his return to Russia. It was good advice. The fighters who took to the streets in Moscow might have looked down at their rifles – vintage 1871 Vetterlins salvaged from the John Grafton – and imagined themselves the heirs and avengers of the Communards, but they too faced defeat. The retribution they suffered may not have been anywhere near so sanguinary as that of Bloody Week, but the police action supervised by Colonel Gerasimov was ruthless enough. And behind Gerasimov stood a superior who saw the crushing of revolution as a ticket to job security and the St Petersburg high life: Peter Rachkovsky.

  Witte’s loyalty to Rachkovsky had seen him recalled to the police service at the beginning of the year, a fortnight after the uprising in January 1905 and within twenty-four hours of the SR combat unit’s assassination of Grand Duke Sergei, a profoundly conservative influence on his nephew, the young Tsar Nicholas. After the series of pale imitations who had tried to fill his shoes, the original intriguer found his stock at a premium, regardless of the antipathy of the imperial family. It was Gerasimov’s footwork that led to the foiling of a bomb attack intended to kill four senior tsarist figures during a commemoration service for Alexander II, and the subsequent seizure of twenty bomb-makers in a raid on the Hotel Bristol in St Petersburg. Nevertheless, Rachkovsky basked in the reflected glory, and his contribution was rewarded in July with the crea
tion for him of the new post of chief of police for the Russian Empire.

  After three years languishing in Poland, the old Paris chief was again in his element. The presses he installed in the basement of the police department churned out propaganda to deviously incite resistance to the compromises offered by the tsar in the October Manifesto, with the aim of raising the political temperature. His encouragement of the nationalist movement, the Black Hundreds, and of militant cells in the associated new Union of the Russian People further fanned the flames of civil strife. Yet Rachkovsky could not escape the ghosts of his past. By early 1906, Sergei Witte’s influence in government was waning, and yet still the extraordinary power vested in Agent Azef continued to wreak havoc with the Okhrana’s attempts to control the revolutionaries.

  The fate of Father Gapon, the ambiguous figure who had led the 1905 demonstration, revealed the extent to which things had got out of hand. Within days of Bloody Sunday, his beard shaved off, Gapon had fled Russia for France. From Marseilles he had travelled to Rome, then to Paris and on to London where he stayed in the family home of Ford Madox Ford, and met with the émigré revolutionaries, throwing in his lot, it was said, with the arms smugglers. Such business, though, seemed almost incidental to the delight he took in his celebrity. The defrocked ex-priest slipped easily into the role of playboy, putting behind him the not so distant memories of comforting dissident convicts on their way to penal exile. Fame and luxury fed his sense that he had become untouchable, however, and bred incaution. Returning to Russia in November 1905, possibly in a deal to ensure him safe passage, Gapon renewed his relationship with the Okhrana, undertaking to play the part of peacemaker. As part of the arrangement, in February 1906, he also agreed to recruit the Socialist Revolutionary Rutenberg, the man who had saved him on Bloody Sunday. For Gapon to reveal his secret dealings with the Okhrana to Rutenberg, however, was a fatal miscalculation, for the loyal socialist informed the party leadership and steps were taken to terminate both the traitor Gapon and the man who was pulling his strings, Rachkovsky.

  Rachkovsky must have approached his meeting with Azef a few weeks later with some trepidation, given the complexity of the agent’s allegiances and cover stories. He had, after all, recently avoided several proposed rendezvous with Gapon and Rutenberg, correctly suspecting them to be a trap, since when Gapon had fallen silent. Even steeled to hear the worst, however, Rachkovsky can scarcely have predicted how Azef’s mockery would force him to gaze into the abyss of doubt and insecurity into which his own nefarious activities had in the past plunged so many others. ‘Do you know where Gapon is now?’ Azef taunted; ‘He is hanging in a lonely country house…and you could easily have shared his fate.’ It was a shameless assertion of the power Azef now wielded over his controller.

  Within days of his confrontation with Azef, Rachkovsky was once again dismissed from his post for misconduct, and reduced to serving as a shadowy intermediary between officialdom and the reactionary militias. There was a generous golden handshake and his Order of St Stanislas, the highest of the honours he had so far accrued, was upgraded to First Class, though the tsar doubtless agreed to both with bad grace. Rachkovsky’s methods, however, lived on in police policy. Indeed, Witte’s successor as chairman of the committee of ministers, Peter Stolypin, who became Russia’s prime minister in July 1906, would go so far as to declare that, ‘it is the duty of all to acquire provocateurs and increase investigations in every direction’.

  The rapidly burgeoning number of Okhrana agents was nevertheless far outpaced by the recruitment of informants, to the extent that one observer remarked on how before long there would be no one left in Russia who was not either a spy or spied upon. As the quality of evidence required for the conviction of revolutionaries fell, the apprehension of suspects by the official police was supplemented by citizen’s arrests by the Black Hundreds, and during the latter months of 1906, a system of mobile courts martial was established to process cases promptly and in situ. By October 1906, 70,000 of the regime’s supposed enemies had been detained, and over the next three years, 26,000 were sentenced to death or hard labour, and roughly 3,000 executed. So vast were the numbers that death and punishment became hideously close to abstractions. Whereas a decade earlier a single anarchist bomb explosion, or punitive execution by the state, roused half the world to protest, now such occurrences could pass almost unnoticed amidst the generalised violence.

  Yet despite the rapid process of depersonalisation, individuals and their relationships still played a crucial role. After the demotion of Rachkovsky, Azef showed a new dedication to the Okhrana and Gerasimov, who since taking over as his contact had demonstrated a refreshing concern and professionalism towards his powerful agent. It was as though mutual respect was all Azef needed to remain loyal. Azef’s days, though, were numbered.

  Since Vladimir Burtsev’s release from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1899, he had returned to his anti-tsarist work, first in England and then Switzerland. If anything, persecution had sharpened his desire to root out informants and provocateurs, lending his freelance counter-intelligence activities a new ruthlessness as he slowly closed in on Azef. A letter purportedly delivered to him in 1905 by a ‘veiled lady’, that useful fiction familiar from Esterhazy and the Dreyfus Affair, had raised suspicions about one member of the party’s combat unit, Tatarov, who had been hunted down to his family home in Warsaw and stabbed to death. The tip-off, though, referred to Azef as a second traitor.

  Throughout his years as a police agent, Azef had become adept at deflecting any suspicions of his treachery. On this occasion, he easily persuaded colleagues, with whom he had conspired on numerous assassinations, of the malicious absurdity of the charge. Bitter experience, though, had taught Burtsev to take nothing at face value and he was not so easily mollified. The foreknowledge of the group’s activities that the police showed did not appear to have stopped with Tatarov’s elimination. And the more Burtsev investigated Azef, the closer his profile seemed to that of an Okhrana agent: he would plot attacks but always absent himself from their execution, and had repeatedly been in locations across Europe when betrayals had taken place. When Burtsev spotted him – one of Russia’s most wanted men, driving through St Petersburg, untouched and carefree at a time of mass arrests – the unthinkable became for him a certainty. Others, though, would require more persuasion.

  So began a lengthy period of research for Burtsev. He went first to Paris in search of evidence and, eventually, in 1908, back to London. As much as things had changed there since his arrest, more had stayed the same. Chief Inspector Melville may no longer have been with the Special Branch, having stepped down from his post somewhat abruptly, shortly after Rachkovsky had been eased out of his job at the Paris agentura. The subsequent unease in the Metropolitan Police over informants and provocation may suggest a cause. And yet, freed from the straitjacket of political accountability to pursue a semi-official freelance career, his fortunes had only risen, as he engaged in ‘spectacular duties which entailed extensive travel on the Continent’ and finally accepted the rewards and honours from foreign governments that his previous position had required him to decline. Nor could the employment of former officers of Special Branch by the Okhrana, at generous rates, leave any doubt about the close relationship between the organisations. The intimations of past complicity in Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent, published in 1907, had passed largely unnoticed, due to its small original readership. Burtsev, however, would have had no difficulty equating the fictional Mr Vladimir with Rachkovsky, or believing that the novel’s dark elements of intrigue, provocation and betrayal were thinly fictionalised reportage.

  The breakthrough came for Burtsev with the decision of Russia’s disgraced ex-director of police, Lopukhin, to divulge enough of what he knew about Azef to prove his guilt. Whatever Lopukhin’s motivation, whether a desire to have the last word in his long-running rivalry with Rachkovsky, or to avenge the murder of his patron Plehve that Azef was suspected of orchestrating, h
is admission saved Burtsev from humiliation and probably worse. For the revolutionary movement was deeply wounded by Burtsev’s claims, and he himself had been summoned to trial in Paris, in the apartment of Azef’s Socialist Revolutionary colleague, Boris Savinkov, on the rue La Fontaine.

  Past the looping filigree of the art nouveau Castel Béranger next door Burtsev walked, day after day in the autumn of 1908; past the police tails assigned to Kropotkin, Figner and Lopatin; and up the stairs to the spartan room in which the Jury of Honour sat in judgement. And day after day he met their cold stares of accusation that cast him as the villain, with no ally except Kropotkin who had more experience in such matters, and replied to their questions with further evidence. Finally, though, Burtsev was compelled to play his trump card, in breach of his word to Lopukhin, after which Azef’s guilt could no longer be disputed.

  Even after the jury had announced its verdict, however, distrust gnawed deep, the uncertainty created by Azef’s conviction almost as damaging as the original treachery. Despite the jury’s sensational decision, still not everyone would accept Azef’s guilt, and he was allowed to escape the court’s sentence of capital punishment and slip away, hiding at first in a Balkan monastery. Once the excitement of the trial had died down, Kropotkin found himself unable to shake off concerns about the tangle of duplicities, past and present. ‘Among other things,’ he wrote to Burtsev, ‘the question that troubles me is this: did Chernov and Natanson know that Azef was in the service of the police, and did they consider him to be their great Kletochnikov or not?’ Chernov was a founder member of the Socialist Revolutinary Party, the others names from long ago: Natanson, whose embryonic circle Chaikovsky had inherited in the early 1870s; Kletochnikov, the People’s Will mole in the police, the first and perhaps the only man whom Rachkovsky had trusted too much.