8 Spies and Tsaricides
The early life of Rachkovsky is detailed in Brachev, drawing extensively on the archives of the Okhrana’s foreign agency, though Aronson in his article for Kniga ‘The Jewish Press in Russia’, quoted by Poliakov, implies a rather later date than April 1879 for his appointment as managing editor of the newspaper Russian Jew. His feline demeanour is alluded to by Encausse, quoted in Cohn, while the physical description comes from his police file, compiled by Kletochnikov himself; Vakhrushev supplies further details of their friendship in the Third Section’s offices and of Rachkovsky’s exposure of Tikhomirov. The ruthless instincts Rachkovsky shared with Stieber and his dislike of the Prussian are assessed by Höhne, who also reveals the tip-off by Stieber regarding the Winter Palace bombing, based on Swiss sources, and the sensitivities surrounding the tsar’s mistress. The main source for the chapter’s history of Russian terrorism, however, is Footman, whose hugely impressive biography of Zhelyabov is a model of elegant economy, supplemented by Hingley regarding the train attacks and the conspirators’ ultimate execution. Clutterbuck’s thesis defines the signature technique of the Russian bombers as the use of an electrical charge to detonate homemade explosive, using a spotter and often tunnelling, but his argument that the Fenians rather than the nihilists were the true pioneers of dynamite terrorism is inconsequential. Gaucher describes Plekhanov’s resignation at the Voronezh Congress; Gaucher and Laporte were also the sources for the later story of Zhelyabov’s betrayal by Okladsky. Liubatovich’s disagreement with Tikhomirov, together with information about the death of Kravchinsky’s premature baby, is found in Engel; details of Figner’s role in the plots, including as mistress of the cheese shop and seducer of the stationmaster, are drawn from her memoirs; Confino quotes Engels musing to Marx on whether Nechaev was a provocateur or merely behaved like one. The reversals suffered by Russia in the Balkans are chronicled by Kennan; the rise of anti-Semitism in Russia by Byrnes and Poliakov, who considers the misrepresentation of the tsar’s Slavic assassin, Grinevitsky. Daly, Monas, Wright and Zuckerman cast light on Loris-Melikov’s ‘Dictatorship of the heart’ and the suspension of the Third Section.
9 Inconvenient Guests
The memoirs of Andrieux are a fount of entertaining gossip and reveal the self-regarding and capricious figure of whom his secretary Louis Lepine, later Paris’ most effective police prefect of the period, would comment ‘What was he not? The only thing he lacked, and that only just, was to be a dictator.’ Andrieux’s insights cover everything from the police ‘reptile fund’, to his funding of the anarchist newspaper, Michel’s praise of the nihilists and the seizure of anticlerical publications by Taxil. As Rhodes points out, Bertillon was one blind spot for Andrieux, who was unimpressed by the string-pulling of Bertillon’s illustrious father, president of the Society of Anthropology, and refused to back his experiments. For the furore around Hartmann’s arrest, the petitions for his release and the sleight of hand that resolved the situation, the APP and AN provided a rich resource: there is an echo of Reclus’ advocacy of the name ‘anarchism’ as a name in Hartmann’s declaration, noted by Senese, that ‘“Nihilist” is a word that interests the West and hence it is desirable to use it.’ Joll and Kennan furnish the detail of France’s military preparations and the geopolitical background to the chapter; the hugely successful tombola for the New Caledonian exiles, which saw money subscribed from both sides of the Atlantic, is mentioned by Martinez. Williams is the source for Rochefort’s coinage of the term ‘Opportunist’ and cowardly reputation as a duellist, Jellinek for the background to his insults against Gambetta and Reinarch, while Rochefort’s own Adventures and newspaper L’Intransigeant of March 1881 celebrate his scoop concerning the Geneva nihilists. Agent reports from his APP file for that month cover his banqueting there and advance warning of the London Congress. The Joly file in the same archive reveals the fact, intriguing for historians of the Protocols, that Rochefort’s lawyer and the author of the Dialogues were brothers, the former committing suicide at this time, in 1878, the latter a few years later. Sutcliffe examines the technology that transformed Paris; Barrows and Martinez the loss to France of skilled Communards; Casselle paints a vivid picture of the Expo, coordinated by Adolphe Alphand, and explains how the council of ministers pinned the blame on Andrieux for the 1881 confrontations at Père Lachaise.
10 Voices in the Fog
The description of Michel’s return is taken from her memoirs and from Thomas, as are other details of her life at this time. Regarding relations between the Belgian and British police, Dilnot revealed the corruption scandal, Keunings deals with the Sûreté’s reforms, and Sherry the outing in disguise on which Vandervelde accompanies Vincent. Vincent’s reforms are examined by Porter, who also paints a memorable portrait of Williamson, but whose works are drawn on most extensively concerning the trial and arrest of Most. Carlson provides Most’s incriminating quote, ‘May the day not be far off when a similar occurrence will free us from tyranny’, Trautmann gives details of his principled defence lawyer. Like Porter, Quail is a major source for the chapter, as for so much regarding British anarchism: details taken from his work including Neve’s smuggling operation using mattresses and the punishment of the informant, and the informed speculation that Charles Hall who attended the London Congress was a police spy. Oliver recounts the eventual exposure of Serreaux five years later, Miller the disputes surrounding his involvement in the congress, the prospectus for which, signed partially anagrammatically by Brocher as ‘Rehorb’, lies in the IISH [Int 240/4]. Among those attending, Malatesta’s recent background prior to the congress appears in Nettlau, but Dipaola’s unpublished thesis, drawing on material in the Italian archives, provides captivating detail on his life in London at the time: the chinks in the wooden partitions of his lodgings through which Vincent spies, the whitewashed windows of the workshop he shares with Hartmann, behind which the device they are inventing is merely a pea-shelling machine for a competition, and his visits with Chaikovsky to the British Museum Library: Emsley refers to Special Branch’s request in 1883 for access to readers’ records. For the background to the discussion of ‘propaganda by deed’ and Cafiero’s call in Le Révolté to spread the anarchist gospel ‘by spoken and written words, by the dagger, the gun, dynamite’, Jensen and Cahm are both informative. The former notes the paradox of anarchists praising the use of dynamite by the People’s Will, whose hierarchical organisation they should have found abhorrent; he also notes the anarchist activity in Lyons; it is Vizetelly who explodes the myth of the Black Hand. Kropotkin’s offhand dismissal of England in favour of France, despite the presence in the West End of a theatrical adaption of the Verne novel Michael Strogoff that he is said to have inspired, is quoted by Oliver. Shipley evokes the Rose Street club’s Christmas party; Fleming, Cafiero’s incipient madness; Williams, the Union Générale krach; Poliakov, the anti-Semitic backlash. I was delighted to discover in the APP file for Jogand-Pages that Taxil’s satirical response had been to sell notes printed for the ‘Banque Sainte-Farce’, for which he was arrested on the boulevard des Italiens. Madox Ford reports Kropotkin’s belief in the ‘perdurability of the rabbit’, Kimball the flocks of spies who attended him; details of his arrest are taken from the AN files and of his trial from Fleming and Gallet.
11 The Holy Brotherhood
‘From above a hidden hand pushes the masses of people to a great crime’ wrote Simon Dubrow, the historian of the Jewish people, to the government-appointed Pahlen Committee in 1883. The question of whose the hand was behind the pogroms – and it existed – is a vexed one. Most have blamed reactionary elements, though Alexander III himself thought them ‘the work of anarchists’ (Russkii Evrei, 12 May 1881) and there was indeed anti-Semitism within the People’s Will, and even more a desire to exploit the chaos to revolutionary ends; Poliakov traces, in nascent form, the correlation between anti-Semitism and those who rejected modern life, as vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists and back-to-nature cultists.
Klier presents the most persuasive argument, for genuinely spontaneous violence, which Plehve sent urgent telegrams in an attempt to quell; nevertheless, Berk’s suggestion that many stationmasters on the railway were members of the Holy Brotherhood identifies a possible mechanism for the persistent spread of the pogroms. Peregudova presents her findings from the GARF archive, F. 1766.OP.1.D.1–5za (1881–1883) concerning the Brotherhood and offers a useful introduction to it, though it is quite thoroughly examined by Talerov and by Lukashevich who maps the Brotherhood’s structure, alludes to Tchaikovsky’s involvement and considers Sudeikin’s criticisms of it. ‘Sviashchennaia druzhina (Pis’mo v redaktsiiu)’ was Kropotkin’s insurance, to be disclosed by The Times should any ill fate befall him. An entry in the APP file on Loris-Melikov, BA 1162, for June 1881 makes clear the scorn in which the Brotherhood was held throughout western Europe. Marx and Engels, in the preface to the 1882 Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto, refer to the new tsar as ‘a prisoner of war of the revolution’, while in Russia he was known simply as the ‘Gatchina prisoner’; ‘K biografii Aleksandra III’ in Byloe, however, reveals his letters of 1885 demanding that the military follow his orders to slacken restrictive security around him. Footman is among the sources for Kibalchich’s pleas for scientific validation for his rocket design. Pipes is the source for much of Degaev’s double-dealing, Tidmarsh for Sudeikin’s intended power grab, Brachev for his engagement with the Holy Brotherhood and recruitment of Rachkovsky, and ‘Degaevshchina’ in Byloe, April 1906, for the post-mortem after his murder. Lemke examines Sudeikin’s operational innovations, which contributed to the capture of Figner, and considers Semiakin’s report that compared the Paris office unfavourably with the activities of the consuls in Vienna and Berlin; the career of Korvin-Krukovsky is largely reconstructed from his APP file, BA 881. The scene of Rachkovsky’s arrival in Paris is imagined, referencing fumigators described in Pemble; Kantor reveals Duclerc’s opening of police files on the émigrés to Zhukov, presumably including APP BA 196, which identifies the flat of the author L’Isle Adam as a focal point for those planning attacks in Russia. Zvoliansky’s support of Rachkovsky and the recruitment of Hekkelman draws on Agafonov and Fischer, who pinpoints the student friendship between Hekkelman and Burtsev that the latter in Chasing Agents Provocateurs appears eager to obscure. Daly reveals the Holy Brotherhood’s previous employment of Bint, from the Barlat Brigade, while Kennan suggests that Juliette Adam’s St Petersburg visit in January 1882 included private dinners with Paul Demidov, a prime funder of the Brotherhood. Rachkovsky’s polite dismissal of de Mohrenheim’s interference is taken from Svatikov, his letter to Fragnon quoted by Johnson. Yarmolinsky and Biriukov are the source for Frey in Russia, Frey’s letter of 2 July 1886 for his lobbying of Kropotkin and Kravchinsky in London on the ‘religion of Humanity’.
12 A Great News Tide
Martinez is the source for Hyndman’s visit to the Commune, together with a young Conservative barrister who found ‘much in it to deserve… the admiration of an intelligent and practical statesman’, Hulse for his decision to found the Democratic Federation to ‘undertake the propaganda that Marx and Engels were neglecting in England’. It was Hulse’s prismatic account of the lives of five diverse socialists in England – Kropotkin, Morris and Kravchinsky among them – that helped crystallise the structure of this book, as well as furnishing much pertinent detail concerning the relationships between them. It is primarily Tsuzuki’s account of Carpenter’s life that informed his appearances, in combination with research in SCL, and Rowbotham’s earlier writings: sadly, her magisterial biography of Carpenter was published too late to figure in my research. Noteworthy in the appendix of Carpenter’s My Days and Dreams, the foremost of his own works to be used, is his explanation that his opposition strength of conviction stemmed from being born at what he regarded as the zenith of commercialism. Reclus’ warning against withdrawal to the life of the small community is found in ‘An Anarchist on Anarchy’; Rykwert discusses the irony that although Ruskin’s books had a wide readership, they failed to rouse the British middle class to social action; while Kinna discusses how Morris’ purpose in 1883 was ‘to reconcile Marx with Ruskin’. Her work together with that of Thompson and, above all, McCarthy’s masterful biography of Morris have informed my sense of the origins and development of his socialism, with Morris’ own How I Became a Socialist and Collected Letters the obvious autobiographical point of reference. For a grass-roots perspective on the tensions in the movement, the ‘bloodthirsty resolutions’ that had earlier concerned Scheu and the part played by Lane in the schism, Quail is once again invaluable, as is Shipley for Kitz’s sense of the socialist tradition and his relationship with Morris. In many respects, Kravchinsky remained something of a mystery even to his close friends, Kropotkin reflecting in the commemorative pamphlet Vospominaniia o Kravchinskom of 1907, ‘We know about the external occurrences in his life, we possess his works, but we know too little about his interior life: it slips away from us.’ BA 1133 and 196 in the APP reveal the extent of confusion at this time in France over his true identity, something which Olga Novikoff attempted to resolve in Britain by the insinuations about the murderer of General Mezentsev in her Pall Mall Gazette article of July 1886. Whyte considers her role in British life and the propagandist value of her brother’s death; Szamuely, British attitudes to Russia more generally. Hollingworth, Hulse and Senese all contributed to my sense of Kravchinsky’s propaganda strategies and his place in the British socialist movement; the Russian’s use of the words ‘toy revolutionaries’ comes from Shaw, whom Kravchinsky alone could argue into silence, quoted by Senese, Maudsley and intellectual degeneracy are discussed in Pick, while Beaumont’s survey of British utopian writing has been of great assistance.
13 The Making of the Martyrs
The far-flung network of imperial German police agents informed Berlin, according to Hohne, that Most ‘promises to kill people of property and position and that’s why he is popular’. From the arrival of the ‘king-killer’, through his tour speaking to audiences that included, by Freiheit‘s reckoning, 5,000 in the Cooper’s Union Great Hall, to his evasive manoeuvres after Haymarket, Most’s American career is closely tracked by Trautmann. Lingg’s association with Reinsdorf and others that upstaged Most, is revealed by the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung of 30 April 1885. Three historians have provided the bulk of the information deployed in the chapter after the economic and social conditions of Chicago, of which Green’s well-contextualised account of the bombing and martyrdom of the convicted men is the most recent. Nelson and d’Eramo both discuss the parties for the Commune and the Dawn of Liberty: the former explores the organisation of the socialists and the basement paramilitaries; the latter is illuminating on the addresses at Pittsburgh in 1883, the subject of the Red Squads, the industrialists’ purchase of a Gatling gun and, latterly, the planting of bombs at Chicago’s anarchist headquarters in the wake of the Haymarket debacle. Victor Dave’s torn letter of resignation from the Socialist League was found in file 1205/1 at the IISH, a tangible artefact of the ‘Bruderkrieg’ explored by Carlson, who considers the intrigues of the elusive figure of Reuss, and Neve’s smuggling operations, and Quail, who additionally discusses Lane’s organisational success, Morris’ excitement at the idea of imminent revolution, and Engels’ concern about the anarchists of the Socialist League. Abraham Cahan wrote of Eleanor Marx’s ‘brilliant words’ to a gathering of 3,000 in New York in protest against the persecution of the Haymarket Martyrs, Oliver of the previous South Place meeting she addressed, alongside Kravchinsky and Kropotkin.
14 Decadence and Degeneration
The sentiment unleashed at Hugo’s funeral is described by Robb, who also examines the myth surrounding the republican author, of whom Zola wrote that he had ‘become a religion in French letters, by which I mean a sort of police force for maintaining order’; Shattuck quotes Barrès on the erotic sublimation of grief, and his work informs my sense of much about Paris d
uring the period. Bullard discusses the memories and myths of the savagery at Satory that haunted the Communards. Freud’s letters convey his impression of the uncanny city; Pick surveys the state of French psychiatry, considering Charcot’s ideas of visual derangement as a symptom of mental degeneracy, from which he thought the ‘roaring colourists’ of post-Impressionism, as Nordau refers to them, might be suffering. Anderson, B. describes the second exhibition of the Salon des Indépendants, at which Seurat and Signac burst upon the scene, while Roslak’s sensitive study of Signac traces a thread through artistic and anarchistic theory and Reclus’ understanding of the world as a geographer; Hutton puts their work in a social and cultural context. I am gratified to find my own interpretation of La Grande Jatte roughly coincides with that of Robert Hughes. While promoting the pair of artists, Félix Fénéon found time to edit the mess of Rimbaud’s extraordinary poems into the exquisite shape of Illuminations, as I discovered in Halperin’s biography. The ballad to Louise Michel by the young poet’s lover, Verlaine, which appeared in Le Décadent in December 1886, compares her to Joan of Arc and says she is ‘far’ from Leo Taxil. Expelled from the Freemasons five years earlier for publishing the salacious Secret Love Life of Pope Pius IX, Taxil aka Jogand-Pages had recently rediscovered Catholicism; the claim in the APP report of 25 July 1885 that ‘nobody, absolutely nobody believes in the sincerity of this conversion’ was misguided, as the coming decade would amply prove. On the demi-monde of nightclubs and cults, Shattuck, Sonn, Casselle and Varias all offer fascinating detail, the last quoting Crueul’s ‘a thing to be mocked’; Costello describes the Robida projection shows and Jouan explores his images; Debans cites the Russian’s desire to annex Paris; Brachev, in Foreign Secret Service, quotes Encausse on Rachkovsky’s liking for Parisian girls. André unpacks the tangled world of mysticism and details Encausse’s other life as Charcot’s hypnotist; Osterrieder makes the links between d’Alveydre, Danish royalty, the Pandit and the conspiracy with the maharajah. The story of the Boulanger phenomenon is derived from many sources, but best diagnosed by Gildea as what happened when the ‘republican concentration’ broke down. The general’s interest in the Decazeville miners comes from Barrows, that of Rochefort in those at Anzin and in the soldiers sent to Tonkin from Williams, who also recounts the marquis’ suspicious ability to predict the steps to a coming conflict with Bismarck, and his demands for a dictatorship; the gossip about Pain and the Mahdi is from Rochefort’s Adventures. Boulanger’s friend, Captain Hippolyte Barthélemy, published Avant La Bataille at the time of the Schnaebele Incident, insisting that any rapprochement with Germany be through force of arms. Reclus, in his letters to Groess, expected war, while one agent’s report in APP BA 75 claims he was preparing ‘a seditious movement…to thwart the efforts of the French armies’; at the same time, Engels was warning Germany that any war would draw in the continent, cause destruction equal to the Thirty Years War and ‘be followed by the collapse of countless European states and the disappearance of dozens of monarchies’. Rochefort in his Adventures blamed the whole incident on ‘German financial Jewry’ yet, as Williams remarks, took Jewish money for the Boulangist campaign. Kennan reveals General Bogdanovich’s attempt to orchestrate a Franco-Russian alliance as early as January 1887. Mace expresses his frustration with the organisation of the police in his memoirs, while Stead describes its factionalism and inefficiency, and Longoni the waiting room. Agafonov, Vakhrushev and Zuckerman are among the sources for Rachkovsky’s Okhrana operation in Paris, Gaucher for the Moscow disguise wardrobe, and Byloe of July 1917 for the details of the printing-press raid. The APP file on de Mohrenheim records France’s anxieties about his movements, Le Temps for 2 December 1887 the packed meeting at Salle Favie addressed by Michel, and the dynamite threats made there. Barrows quotes the conservative Mazade on the ‘decisive crisis’; she also considers how psychologists of crowd activity such as Taine and Le Bon analysed the Boulanger phenomenon and socialist protests. The letters written by Michel after her shooting are published in the collection Je vous écris de ma nuit.
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