The World That Never Was (63 page)

It was a betrayal too far by Most. In Goldman’s eyes, nothing could excuse his cowardice and hypocrisy, and the blustering German was finally exposed as the empty vessel that many had long suspected him to be. Goldman, by contast, emerged as a model of candid loyalty and would be named ‘Queen of the Anarchists’ by the press: a sudden elevation that was nevertheless borne out by popular support within the movement, which only increased when she publicly took a horsewhip to Most. It had been Italian anarchists from the ‘Carlo Cafiero Group’ who had first inspired the Russian radicals in New York, and Most to whom they had rallied as the ‘Pioneers of Liberty’, but in Emma Goldman they now found a brave and vocal figurehead of their own race, who would soon attract the attention of Peter Kropotkin and Louise Michel, and international recognition.

Any hope that the Haymarket martyr August Spies had taken with him to the gallows – that the anarchist creed would fire the imagination of the American worker at large – was dead and buried, however. Not even the posthumous pardoning of three of the Haymarket martyrs by Governor Altgeld of Illinois, in 1893, could reverse the surging victory of capitalism, industry and commerce. For even as he took the brave step,
the city of Chicago, where radicalism had been rampant only seven years earlier, was busy welcoming up to 700,000 rapt visitors, including many Europeans, to the Columbia World’s Fair, and its celebration of the dawning age of ‘conspicuous consumption’.

At the time, the novelist Vladimir Korolenko was visiting America in Kravchinsky’s footsteps under cover of a journalistic commission, in order to discuss with Yegor Lazarev and other leading figures of the Friends how best to import
Free Russia
into Russia itself. Whilst there, Pinkerton agents in the pay of the Okhrana were constantly on his tail, but their presence was not what most dispirited him about New York and Chicago. His horrified impressions were expressed through the narrator of his novel
Sofron Ivanovich
, who felt himself ‘besieged by simple, repetitive advertising which wears its way hypnotically into the brain: Stephens Inks, Stephens Inks, Stephens Inks…Pears Soap, Pears Soap, Pears Soap’. During the Fair, not even the heavens above the city were spared, with advertisements projected on to clouds in grim realisation of Alfred Robida’s fanciful predictions. Off site, the Marshall Field’s department store offered a cornucopia of goods, while on display at the Fair itself were prototypes of products to tempt even the wariest shopper of the future: the high-frequency phosphorescent lighting with which the visionary Nichola Tesla was experimenting, the electrotachyscope and even the first electrical kitchen, complete with washing machine. The latter would actually attract Kropotkin’s approval, as an example of technology that would create leisure for the working man and woman.

‘Business fever here throbs at will,’ wrote a French visitor to Chicago, ‘it rushes along these streets, as though before the devouring flame of a fire.’ The pursuit of money seemed unstoppable, immune even to economic crisis: the collapse of the New York stock market, the unprecedented bankruptcy of the United States treasury, and the run on banks that would see 500 of them go to the wall before the end of the year, with even greater hardship in store for the country’s poor.

Korolenko was not a man who lacked perspective, or one given to easy hyperbole. An ex-internal exile to Siberia in 1879, he had been the only one of his party of convicts to survive the first winter in the freezing wasteland, thanks to the kindness of the women of the local tribe who had taken pity on him. Hardship and suffering were second nature to him, and his writer’s eye was drawn to scenes of humanity at its rawest, as in his account of a night-time visit to the slaughterhouses and meatpacking factories of Chicago. But it was the injustices of American society more than any nightmarish scenes of cattle being sledgehammered that
horrified him during his month-long stay. By the time he sailed out of New York, the torch borne by the new Statue of Liberty that had shone with such hope on his arrival, seemed to ‘illuminate the entrance to an enormous grave’. He said he would rather be back in the Yakutsk penal colony than stay a day longer in the benighted Land of the Free.

The recent arrests of Johann Most and Emma Goldman, in separate instances but both on trumped-up charges, may have influenced his distaste for America, along with the signs of spiritual corruption that he saw in its economic life, but there were more immediate and personal reasons for his stance. Support for the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom had begun to haemorrhage as popular sentiment turned further against politically troublesome immigrants of all hues. And in February 1893, after two previous ‘no’ votes in recent years, the Senate had finally acquiesced to the tsar’s demands that the United States strip his opponents of their privileged ‘political’ status, ratifying the treaty that would allow them to be extradited as common criminals.

Aghast at the result, Mark Twain challenged the very ‘Americanism of the Senate’ with its ‘bootlicking adulation’ of ‘tsarist tyranny’, while in London Spence Watson thought it ‘the saddest news which any lover of liberty can receive’. There too, though, concern was mounting over how long Britain’s resilience could last in the face of similar pressures.

Europe had not experienced anything quite like the armed confrontation seen at Homestead, but earlier bloodshed during strikes and May Day demonstrations in France and Spain, in 1891, had helped prompt anarchist revenge attacks that generated far more general alarm than Berkman’s attempt to assassinate Frick. Britain itself had not been immune from terrorist scares, with anarchists rather than Fenians now bearing the responsibility, and when troops opened fire on rioting strikers at the Featherstone colliery in September 1893, acts of vengeance seemed possible. Furthermore, as in America, immigrants rather than indigenous socialists were seen as the likely source of any trouble; those in the French and Italian colonies primarily, but the Russians too, supposedly by association.

‘Known to the outside world as the Terror… [the Brotherhood of Freedom] is an international secret society underlying and directing the operations of various bodies known as nihilists, anarchists, socialists – in fact, all those organisations which have for their object the reform or destruction, by peaceful or violent means, of society as it is presently constituted.’ The words come not from an Okhrana report, nor the imagination
of a Sûreté informant, but from
The Angel of the Revolution
, published in 1893 by the first-time novelist George Griffith, one of an emerging generation of sensationalist writers who would fuse the genres of Vernian science fiction with future war prophecy to create something thrilling but fundamentally reactionary. Verne’s
Robur the Conqueror
had become, in Griffith’s hands, ‘Natas the Jew’, his airship no longer a lone sentinel of liberty, but the flagship of a fleet being readied over the horizon to seize the revolutionary moment when the opposing sides in a continent-wide war had fought themselves to exhaustion.

For Kravchinsky and his colleagues, struggling to maintain support for the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom in England and to unify opposition to the tsar’s rule among the disparate émigré groups across Europe, the conflation of their endeavours with the apparent anarchist threat to democratic society, as it filtered through into fiction, posed a severe challenge. Their friends remained supportive, expressing intense frustration towards the troublemakers. ‘As for anarchism we utterly and entirely condemn it, all of us, Stepniak as much as anyone,’ Olive Garnett confided to her diary. ‘The blind folly of it makes one lose patience with & account blameable even such a man as Krapotkine.’ There were further violent shocks in store, however, in the midst of which, just days short of the end of 1893, a pair of articles by ‘Z’ and ‘Ivanov’ would appear in the
New Review
entitled ‘Anarchists: Their Methods and Organisation’, which drew heavily on the content of the Russian Memorandum, mixing in with their many and varied calumnies the unambiguous assertion that ‘Stepniak’ and Kravchinsky, the assassin of General Mezentsev, were one and the same.

The allegations that Mezentsev’s killer had hesitated several times, for ‘psychological reasons’, and then ‘plunged the knife into the wound again and again’ were inaccurate yet graphic and unpleasant. Almost as distressing to Constance Garnett, though, may have been the pointed reference to Kravchinsky’s ‘shallow theories of free love’ and the imputation that his friends in literary circles were being duped. ‘Selfishly I feared that I might lose my Stepniak – the artist – in the Stepniak I do not know, the nihilist, the terrorist and—’ she would remember, unable to write the word ‘assassin’. It was doubtless one effect which the true authors of the ‘Ivanov’ article, Rachkovsky and Madame Novikoff, had hoped to achieve, though their aim in associating past and present acts of terror, in Russia and France, and potentially in Britain too, was far wider.

When the Russian Memorandum had first been presented to the British government nearly two years earlier, it had emphasised the danger posed
by the anti-tsarist émigrés in relation to ‘military conspiracies…bombs and dynamite’. It was certainly convenient for Rachkovsky that events since had brought home to the western democracies the nature of the threat, on their own territory, reinforcing the message sent out by the 1890 bomb plot that he had contrived with his agent Landesen. But his growing skill in ‘perception management’ saw to it that appearances were accepted and inconvenient questions suppressed. During the trial of those entrapped in that sting operation, the defence lawyer had tried to expose the Okhrana’s role but with scant success, and the possible involvement of the organisation in subsequent acts of ‘anarchist’ terrorism was scarcely hinted at in print.

Yet while Rachkovsky was forthright in denouncing the conspiracies of his enemies, the scope of his own conspiratorial skulduggery during those years had been far more ambitious. How he had succeeded in keeping his activities concealed for so long is a story in itself.

18
Dynamite in the City of Light

London and Paris, 1890–1892

Almost two decades after their passage to New Caledonia aboard the
Virginie
, Henri Rochefort and Louise Michel again found themselves exiled together on an island, though on this occasion the journey had merely required them to buy a ticket for the boat train across the Channel. Rochefort had arrived first in Britain, in the summer of 1889, fleeing the sentence of transportation to a fortified enclosure that hung over him for his involvement in Boulanger’s plot to seize power. Unlike Michel, whose circumstances would be very different when she arrived in July 1890, he lived in considerable comfort. Having sold his Paris home for a reported million francs, and dabbling in the antiquities trade to supplement an income from the newspaper
L’Intransigeant
, still run out of Paris but left in the safe editorial hands of his appointee Edward Vaughan, he soon established himself in a grand town house in Clarence Terrace, overlooking Regent’s Park.

He had not, however, left behind in Paris his appetite for either politics or status, and was busily ingratiating himself with his British hosts. To oil his admission to the salons of London he donated a Landseer painting to the National Gallery, but was helped too by introductions from Madame Olga Novikoff, the ‘MP’ for Russia, as one English wag termed her. A propagandist and diplomatic coquette, Novikoff’s relationship with both Rochefort and the English Establishment raised intriguing questions about Russian foreign policy.

Through her friendship with Gladstone and other leading figures in the Liberal Party, Novikoff had long teased Britain with the possibility of rapprochement with Russia and continued to do so; now Salisbury’s Conservative Party was showing interest. Yet Britain was increasingly fretful over maintaining its naval pre-eminence and the possibly re-entry of the Russian fleet into the Mediterranean. One naval reform followed another in quick succession; fiction such as
The Taking of Dover
predicted an inevitable
war with a Franco-Russian alliance as soon as 1894. As Elisée Reclus had astutely remarked in his
Universal Geography
, whilst seemingly at the height of its power, a lack of geographical cohesion left the British Empire vulnerable to attack. As to Russia and her relationship with France’s Boulangists, the press had caught Ambassador de Mohrenheim out paying a visit to the general during Boulanger’s spell in the wilderness in Clermont-Ferrand, three years earlier, but since then discretion had ruled. The Third Republic and Alexander III’s Russia were, after all, prospective allies, and Boulanger now an enemy of the state.

And yet whilst Boulanger himself was a liability, bellicose and unpredictable, what he represented continued to appeal to Russia as much as it did to Rochefort: a strong nationalism and latent anti-Semitism. Boulanger was no longer a useful cipher, distracted by his love for his mistress, who was now dying: Rochefort had remarked the change, observing that the general’s ‘thoughts, ears and eyes were elsewhere’ when he visited London and the Covent Garden Opera in 1890. Even before Boulanger shot himself dead on his lover’s grave the following September, Russia may have been looking for an alternative instrument through whom to shape and shake up republican France.