It was no accident that anarchism, more than any other element of socialism, should develop its own martyrology, casting itself in the tradition of the persecuted Gnostics and Anabaptists, and its enemies as a latter-day Inquisition. Inheriting the attributes of radical religion, its adherents could see themselves as the oppressed heroes in a Manichaean struggle for progress, and as such found eager recruits in the field of artistic expression, where bloodless revolution was a generational event and spiritual fulfilment through creativity the ultimate prize. Too few recognised, however, that the most important battle that the revolutionary movement needed to fight was in the field of counter-intelligence.
Although never an outright partisan of anarchism, Vladimir Burtsev showed exemplary tenacity in answering the intrigues of the Okhrana with investigations of his own. He would continue his crusade to uncover their spies, informants and provocateurs but could not match his success in exposing Azef and Harting, and by 1914 a number of ill-founded accusations had lost him the trust of those who, not long before, had looked to him for their protection. Briefly he flirted with Bolshevism, before turning implacably against Lenin.
The lives of many Russians who were prepared to reassess their loyalties were transformed, one way or the other, by the October Revolution of 1917: ex-Okhrana agents turned leaders of a soviet, like Rachkovsky’s forger Golovinsky, or revolutionary populists like Chaikovsky, who would lead the anti-Bolshevik government of the Northern Region during the civil war, around Archangel. For Burtsev it merely brought more of the same. Arrested on Trotsky’s first orders he would once again be sentenced to the Trubetskoi bastion of the Peter and Paul fortress, just as he had been twice before under the tsar. After his release and flight abroad, the ‘Sherlock Holmes of the Revolution’ would accept a job with the British secret services that allowed him to continue his fight against tyranny from the margins; the challenges for an émigré dissident were much as they had always been, only with Lenin rather than a tsar now in the Kremlin.
The trajectory of Burtsev’s career had left him with few illusions about where the current of political poison ran, from its source in Rachkovsky’s Okhrana, through into the murky waters of the interwar years. The inquiry into the provenance of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion began in earnest in 1920, when, in an article titled ‘The Jewish Peril: A disturbing pamphlet’, The Times had asked ‘What are these “protocols”? Are they authentic? If so, what malevolent assembly concocted these plans, and gloated over their exposition: prophecy in part fulfilled, in parts far gone in the way of fulfilment?’ In addition to the newspaper’s revelations concerning the work’s plagiarism of Joly’s Dialogues, the Russian Princess Catherine Radziwill revealed that Golovinsky himself had given her a copy in 1904, along with an explanation that Rachkovsky had indeed commissioned the forgery. However, neither of these new pieces of evidence could weaken the purchase that the Protocols had established as a propaganda weapon against Bolshevism, whose leaders were largely of Jewish extraction. Within a couple of years, two books elaborated on how the predictions in the Protocols had already been realised. Secret World Government, by an old Okhrana bureau chief called Spiridovich, and World Revolution, by the English proto-fascist Nesta Webster, fingered the diabolical banking family of the Rothschilds for everything from inciting the American Civil War and financing the Paris Commune, to the assassinations of Lincoln and Alexander II.
Societies turned upside down by war and revolution craved simple explanations for their misfortunes, and if blame could be laid squarely at the door of a conspiracy by an easily identified and little-loved ethnic group, so much the better. A touch of mysticism made the notion more intoxicating still: an account, for example, by the young Alfred Rosenberg of how, on opening a copy of the Protocols while a student in Moscow during the summer before the October Revolution, he had sensed ‘the masterful irony of higher powers in this strange happening’. A leading member of the German National Socialist Party since 1919, who would go on to be Nazism’s leading racial theorist, Rosenberg’s publication of a German translation of the Protocols in Munich in 1923 provided inspirational reading for his close colleague Adolf Hitler while in prison following the failed Beer Hall Putsch of that year.
The seed fell on fertile ground, prepared years earlier when the teenaged Hitler had attended meetings held in Vienna by sympathisers with the Union of the Russian People, which Rachkovsky had helped found. Now, with the leisure that prison afforded him, the arguments he had heard there for the extermination of the Jews, hardened by the fictional fears of world conspiracy propagated by the Protocols, were burnished with the same abuse of science that had been used to strip the immigrant centres of anarchist militancy of their humanity, decades before. ‘The struggle in which we are now engaged’, he wrote in Mein Kampf, ‘is similar to that waged by Pasteur and Kock in the last century. How many diseases must owe their origins to the Jewish virus! Only when we have eliminated the Jews will we regain our health.’
Not long after Malatesta had died, it was the enduring toxicity of the Protocols that brought Burtsev to Berne in Switzerland in 1935, where the local Jewish communities had lodged a legal challenge against the book’s Nazi propagators. For too long the mystery of its provenance had fed public curiosity, and allowed the unscrupulous to insist that it was genuine. Laying to rest any residual uncertainty had become a moral imperative, which even the lack of hard, documentary evidence could not be allowed to impede. Alexandre du Chayla, who had corroborated Princess Radziwill’s wholly unreliable tale of Rachkovsky’s involvement with an account of his own meeting with the Protocols’ first Russian editor, Sergei Nilus, agreed to testify; the secret 4,000-franc fee he commanded was yet another symptom of the ugly opportunism that had all along surrounded the book. Boris Nikolaevsky, the historian who, five years earlier, had had the chance to inspect a suitcase containing Rachkovsky’s private papers, agreed to conceal from the court his own conviction that the claims of Radziwill and du Chayla were groundless.
Burtsev was faced with a dilemma of his own, for whilst he had a good story to tell of how the Protocols had arrived in the world, one that was clear and coherent, it lacked any sure foundation. For when he had approached Rachkovsky to buy his collection of key Okhrana documents and a fragmentary memoir, his offer had been rebuffed, and, following the revolution of 1917, the vast and precious archive of the Paris Okhrana vanished into thin air, or into smoke and ash, as would later be claimed. There was little doubt, though, about which way Burtsev would jump. And just as he had learned from the Okhrana’s methodology of surveillance and record-keeping in the 1890s, modelling his counter-intelligence activities on theirs, he now played his part with aplomb in weaving a myth of Okhrana conspiracy around the document’s origins as strange and compelling as that contained in the Protocols themselves: one that drew together high finance, espionage, diplomacy, court intrigue and personal rivalry. It is a testament to the subtle complexity of Rachkovsky’s devious mind that Burtsev’s story remains to this day only too plausible.
Rachkovsky’s dark genius would be demonstrated too by the abiding influence that the Okhrana’s methods exercised over the clandestine war waged between the heirs of communist revolution and capitalistic democracy for decades to come. The sixteen crates containing the lost archives of the Paris Okhrana finally came to light in 1957, proudly revealed to the press by the Hoover Institute in California, into whose safekeeping they had been entrusted by the last tsarist ambassador to France after he had smuggled them out of Paris in the 1920s. Since its inception in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency had, it would later be revealed, analysed the archive closely in the process of developing its own tradecraft. The same thing was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain. When it lifted, Oleg Kalugin, the highest-ranking Soviet intelligence officer ever to cast light on the inner workings of the KGB, confirmed that Okhrana methods had also been taught to the organisation’s agents throughout the Cold War. There is a striking irony in the
fact that, while the Okhrana files and piled boxes of crumbling agent reports in the Paris Prefecture of Police provide a treasure trove of insights into late nineteenth-century policing of terrorism, only in Britain – so proud in the nineteenth century of its liberal traditions of policing – is access to the scant surviving documentary evidence of Special Branch’s early anti-anarchist activities still tenaciously guarded. Democracy and the existence of a political police force are, it seems, perhaps only compatible as long as certain more uncomfortable truths about the price of political stability are kept secret.
The greatest experiment in communism and the greatest abuser of its ideals, the Soviet Union was not, of course without its own more grotesque hypocrisies. But however undeserving its leaders’ claims to be the custodians of the nineteenth-century dream of freedom and equality, it is likely that, without them, the early dreamers might never have been memorialised. There might have been no Kropotkin Street and Metro station in Moscow, no crater named after Kibalchich on the dark side of the moon; and who would have thought to place a ribbon cut from a Communard flag in the rocket named Voskhod, or Dawn, which launched into space in 1964?
From space, humankind could finally gaze upon the delicate blue globe that was its home, as Elisée Reclus had once planned to make possible through the artifice of his epic construction. Such a vision would, he was certain, prise open even the stoniest heart to the apprehension of a fraternity that ignored national borders, and divisions of class or religion. The world as it might one day be.
With the railways into Paris closed by the siege of 1870, the platforms of the Gare d’Orléans became production lines supplying balloons to Nadar’s aerostatic service.
An anonymous photograph looking down from the Butte Montmartre onto the artillery park that housed many of the National Guard’s cannon, whose attempted seizure by the regular army was the catalyst for civil war.
Père-Lachaise cemetery, scene of the last stand of the Communards on 28 May 1871; the survivors were executed against what would become known as the Mur des Fédérés, at the rear of the cemetery, which remains a site of annual pilgrimage.
It would be three decades before the anarchist artist Maximilien Luce exorcised his traumatic childhood memories of the Bloody Week in his vast canvas of 1903/4, A Paris Street in May 1871. (image credit 1)
For those communards deported to New Caledonia, eight years would pass before an amnesty allowed them to return.
A surge in peaceful political activism by Russia’s radical youth in the 1870s prompted severe Tsarist repression; many hundreds were imprisoned for long periods without trial. (image credit 2)
Within weeks of the Tsar’s death, seemingly spontaneous pogroms against the Jews swept through Russia. (image credit 3)
In early 1881, less than two years after The People’s Will faction adopted a strategy of terrorist violence, Tsar Alexander II was finally killed by bomb-throwing assassins. (image credit 4)
When Rachkovsky arrived in Paris in 1884 fumigators had been installed to protect against the cholera epidemic then sweeping southern Europe. (image credit 6)
New conceptions of disease suggested irresistible metaphors for social malaise. Here a cartoon from the anarchist newspaper Père Peinard proposes that Capitalism should be seen as ‘The True Cholera’. (image credit 7)
The French artist who illustrated the murder of Colonel Sudeikin, Rachkovsky’s police mentor, exaggerated the number of assailants but not the brutality of the attack. (image credit 5)
Although a historical illustrator by trade, the most extraordinary work of Albert Robida offered visions of airborne commerce and technological warfare that recollect the work of Jules Verne. (image credit 10)
Spectators on the Eiffel Tower view the celebrations of the Franco-Russian alliance that Rachkovsky had helped orchestrate from behind the scenes. (image credit 9)
The only known photograph of Peter Rachkovsky
By the 1890s, after years of struggling to have his anthropometric system of criminal identification accepted, Alphonse Bertillon was the pride of the Paris Prefecture of Police. (image credit 11)
Among the many anarchist refugees to England who had their details recorded were Jean Battola who as ‘Degnai’ was said to be the instigator of the Walsall bomb plot, and Charles Malato, Rochefort’s secretary and the author of The Delights of Exile.
Though photographed by Bertillon after his arrest, it was a very different image of the anarchist bomber Ravachol that his comrades promoted: that of the iconic martyr. (image credit 8)
The garrotting of innocent anarchists accused of insurrection in Xerez was a significant incitement to terrorism for their comrades in France and elsewhere. (image credit 12)
Two months after Bourdin was killed when the bomb he was carrying exploded near Greenwich Observatory, Pauwels died similarly during a planned attack on the Madeline Church in Paris, his corpse photographed by the police.
The bomb that Emile Henry left in the Café Terminus in February, 1894, was intended to strike directly at the bourgeoisie as they enjoyed their leisure. (image credit 13)
By 1893 the anarchist of the popular imagination was a megalomaniac hell-bent on destruction; the airborne anti-hero of sixteen-year-old E. Douglas Fawcett’s Hartmann the Anarchist deviates from type only in his concern for his mother’s disapproval. (image credit 14)
Paul Signac’s In a Time of Harmony of 1895 offered an alternative vision of an anarchist utopia in the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in Western Europe. (image credit 15)
List of Illustrations
The anonymous photograph of the artillery park, Parc d’artillerie de la Butte Montmartre (18 mars 1871) is from of the Musée Carnavalet in Paris; Maximilien Luce’s A Paris Street in May 1871, or The Commune1 is courtesy of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, © Photo RMN – Hervé Lewandowski. the arrest of a suspected Nihilist in St Petersburg2 and the assault on a Jew in the presence of the military at Kiev3 are from the Illustrated London News of 6 March 1880 and 4 June 1881 respectively, the assassination of the Tsar4 from L’Univers illustré, March 1881. The assassination of Sudeikin in St Petersburg5 is from Le Monde Illustré, 1884, as is the image of measures taken against the epidemic: the disinfection hall at the Gare de Lyon,6 1884. ‘Capitalist: The Real Cholera’7 is taken from the German edition of Dubois’s Le Peril Anarchiste (Die Anarchistische Gefahr, Amsterdam, 1894), along with the reproduction of the woodcut of Ravachol before the guillotine.8 the celebrations of the Franco-Russian alliance on the Eiffel Tower9 are from Le Petit Journal, 11 November 1893; the reproduction of Robida’s drawing in le Vingtieme Siecle10 is from Beraldi’s Un caricaturiste prophète, Paris, 1916. The image of Bertillon’s judicial anthropometry11 comes from Le Journal Illustré, 16 November 1890, the garroting of the Xerez anarchists12 from Le Petit Journal, 27 February 1892, and the Café Terminus explosion13 from Le Monde Illustré, No. 1925, 1894. The photographs of Malato, Battola and the dead Pauwels are courtesy of the Paris Préfecture de Police, all rights reserved. Shelling the Houses of Parliament14 comes from Hartmann the Anarchist, or, The Doom of the Great City by E. Douglas Fawcett, London, 1893; Signac’s Au Temps d’harmonie,15 photographed by Jean-Luc Tabuteau, is courtesy of the Mairie de Montreuil. The archive of Louis Bonnier containing the designs for Reclus’s Globe Terrestre is held by the Centre d’archives d’architecture du XXe siècle, Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, and the image is published courtesy of the Lordonnois family. All other illustrations are from the author’s private collection.
Notes on Sources
Concern for the portability of a book that is a work of wide-ranging synthesis has led to discursive bibliographical notes being provided for each chapter, rather than specific footnotes. The intention is to assign credit to all those whose research has been most useful, provide an overview of the original research undertaken in particular areas, and to signal those rare instances where a greater degree of licence has been employed in reconstructing scenes. Detaile
d citations and additional material, including many digressions that had to be excluded from the published text, can be found online at www.theworldthatneverwas.com or via www.alexbutterworth.co.uk. It is hoped that, over time, the site will provide a growing resource for those interested in the individuals and themes that figure in the book or are tangential to it.
Prologue
My account of Kropotkin’s involvement in the 1908 Jury of Honour draws on descriptions of visits he had made to France in recent years. When Kropotkin had disembarked at Dieppe in 1896, the French police had been forewarned by Special Branch and put him straight back on the next boat to England: only in 1905 had his return been officially sanctioned. Confino offers a vivid account of his illicit visit in 1901, based on letters and police reports: the trips to a Turkish hammam, visits to Clemenceau and tea with girls in Tyrolean straw hats all under surveillance by the ‘international police’. On that occasion he gave agent ‘Sambain’ the slip and would have recognised him again in 1908. In fact the jury first convened in the home of Roubinovitch, only moving to Savinkov’s apartment shortly afterwards, while for security Kropotkin stayed with the artist Bréal, as G. Marx observes. Some licence is therefore taken in re-creating the street scene, and Kropotkin’s reflections on a changed Paris and his journey through its streets, though less than by Gaucher in his description of the three old revolutionaries descending from a carriage; in other respects, however, his account of the trial is informative. Figner’s memoirs tell of life in Schlüsselburg, and the eighteen years Lopatin spent in solitary confinement; Fischer mentions her suggestion to Burtsev of suicide. Miller discusses Kropotkin’s concern with agents provocateurs and fears regarding penetration of the anarchist movement; he also elucidates how dispirited Kropotkin was by the experience of the trial. Accounts of the investigation and trial appeared in Burtsev’s journal of history, Byloe, though a degree of ambiguity surrounds Lopukhin’s testimony and the ex-police chief’s motivation for cooperating, as Ruud and Stepanov consider. Zuckerman, Rubinstein and Geifman all survey the career and trial of Azef; the latter favours an interpretation that he was never more than incidentally disloyal to his police employers, lending too little credence to the testimony of revolutionaries. My sense of the iconoclastic optimism represented by art nouveau comes from Sutcliffe. The various recollections of the Commune are noted in Kropotkin’s autobiographical writings, while the papers that Savinkov had to clear each day were work in progress on his novel Pale Horse.
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