The World That Never Was (76 page)

With a new efficiency, the Russian police department had distilled the product of its intensive surveillance of suspected subversives, in Russia and abroad, into a diagrammatic representation of the whole vast web of revolutionary activity. Taken in isolation, the colour-coded lines that fanned out from the central individual on each chart allowed seemingly tenuous relationships to be traced deep into the revolutionary underworld, revealing complicity where least expected; cross-referenced, with up to 300 suspects mentioned on each sheet, they mapped the far-reaching curiosity of a formidable police state. This system alone might have explained why a large portion of the printed material smuggled into Russia by the Friends failed to reach its destination, but the true, unidentified cause actually lay closer to home.

Some of the packages whose shipment the Okhrana agent Evalenko, posing as the Friends’ American librarian ‘Vladimir Sergeyev’, had volunteered to oversee were destroyed by him as soon as they arrived from the presses; others he forwarded to Russia having supplied details that allowed their interception by the border police. Meanwhile, in London, the Okhrana agent Lev Beitner had so thoroughly infiltrated himself into the organisation and the society surrounding it that when he applied for a reader’s ticket for the British Museum Library, it was Garnett’s own brother, Richard, an employee, who provided a reference. Drawing on the intelligence he had gathered, Rachkovsky reported to St Petersburg that Kravchinsky and his associates were involved with other previously antagonistic émigré groups around Europe in the creation of ‘a central organisation that would unite them all and help to join efforts and resources, forge and sustain contacts with revolutionaries back home’.

A unified distribution network might bring together the disparate émigré groups in a common front; without it, they would surely only atomise further. Rachkovsky was determined to see it sabotaged, and his agent Evalenko had already begun the dirty work, helping to seed the discord between Lazarev and Kravchinsky that, ironically in light of Kravchinsky’s past actions and reputation, had its origin in his resistance to Lazarev’s demands for the Russian revolutionary movement to adopt more militant
tactics. Then, having effectively destroyed the American wing of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom from within, in late 1895 Evalenko was recalled to London to continue his mischief-making there.

Early that summer, Constance Garnett’s sister Olive had written of how Kravchinsky had confided in her that he ‘wanted a new life, to elope with someone, not to be set down to work’. There was perhaps an element of flirtation in the words of a man who had once taught the art of coquettishness to Vera Zasulich and knew that both Garnett sisters doted on him and despised his wife. However, after fifteen years of onerous exile, with little progress to see for his efforts, Kravchinsky’s anguish was probably all too real. As the year drew to an end, and the rest of London prepared for Christmas, Kravchinsky remained hard at work thrashing out the details of a new journal that he was to edit, which would create a united front of Russian socialists and liberals against autocracy. On the subject of elopement, he appeared to have reconciled himself to quietly cuckolding Constance’s husband Edward, and had ‘promised to get a bear’s ham from Russia’ for his visit to the Garnett family’s new country cottage when it was completed in the New Year. First, though, on 23 December, he was scheduled to attend a crucial meeting to discuss editorial policy.

From Kravchinsky’s home in Bedford Park in West London, whose calm streets Camille Pissarro had recently painted, it was only a short walk to where Volkhovsky and Lazarev awaited him. Both were old friends, veterans of the Trial of the 193 twenty years before, but in Lazarev he would face a man reconverted to terrorism, quite possibly under Evalenko’s influence, and determined to sway Kravchinsky, a founder member of the Independent Labour Party, from his commitment to the principle that social justice should be achieved through peaceful change. Distracted or distraught, Kravchinsky’s state of mind can only be guessed at when, swinging his legs across the stile at the end of his road, he wandered on to the tracks of the North London Railway. Rounding the distant bend, the attentive driver pulled on the power vacuum brakes of his engine, but when the train came to a stop Kravchinsky’s body lay mangled beneath the second carriage.

Foul play was ruled out, suicide not mentioned. Friends considerately explained the accident by reference to Kravchinsky’s early experiences in the Bosnian gaols, an episode never before mentioned, where he had supposedly acquired the ability to will himself deaf in order to stay sane amid the cacophony. ‘How else could I endure English dinner parties?’ they remembered him joking. Olive Garnett cropped her hair in grief. Rachkovsky’s reaction to the news was doubtless rather different.

22
Conspiracy Theories

Europe and America, 1896–1901

Taking stock in early 1896, Rachkovsky could have reflected on two turbulent but largely efffective years for himself and the foreign Okhrana. In the weeks before the bombs of Henry and Bourdin had exploded, he had appeared more vulnerable than at any time since his arrival in Paris. Neither the fact that he had recently exercised ‘more influence on the course of our rapprochement with France than did our ambassadors’, in the words of the Russian finance minister, Sergei Witte, nor his success in ‘exerting pressure on the local press…in the battle against the émigrés’ in London, had been enough to make his position secure. Ambassador de Mohrenheim, his supporter for many years, looked ripe for ignominious retirement, tarnished by his involvement in the Panama scandal and deemed increasingly unreliable after a debilitating bout of influenza, while Rachkovsky had been criticised for his indiscreet dealings with the French government.

The visit that January of Ivan Manasevich-Manuilov from the ministry of the interior, whom Rachkovsky suspected of collecting ‘information about my personal life, my financial position abroad, about the staff of the
agentura
, and about my relations with the prefecture and the embassy in Paris’, must have appeared the prelude to his removal from post. Yet Rachkovsky had quickly turned the situation around, swatting away ‘the nimble Jew’ who was ‘ready to do anything for a goodly sum’, and earning fitting recognition for his efforts. The bonus of 10,000 rubles that he received in April, nominally for his work in swaying the press, must also have been in tacit acknowledgement of his feats of provocation: fortunately for him, it was paid before the embarrassment of Liège. Yet, despite Liège, few of his superiors could have doubted that Rachkovsky’s deft exploitation of the anarchist bombings was largely to thank when, late in the year, the Russian department of police’s magazine
Obzor
reported
‘a marked cooling of the English towards the supposedly innocent but persecuted Russian dissidents’.

The way ahead, though, was less clear. A flurry of warnings from British and French police about mooted attacks on Russian targets after the death of Alexander III, and the involvement of a group of Berlin anarchists in a planned assassination of the new tsar in Moscow, maintained a sense of imminent danger. So too did the discussions between Lazarev and Burtsev, among others, about a renewal of revolutionary violence in Russia to offset the drift towards reformism in the movement led by the charismatic Georgi Plekhanov and his Social Democrats, the official standard-bearers for the ideas of Marx. Times were changing, though, and Rachkovsky had to reposition himself accordingly: both with regard to the declining threat of terrorism in the West, and more crucially the change of ruler in Russia.

Rachkovsky appears never to have been a favourite of the late tsar, who had once scrawled the single word ‘villain’ next to Rachkovsky’s name in an official report. And yet for fourteen years, Alexander III’s towering physical presence and authority had maintained stability and held Russia on a tight course of religious and political conservatism. In stark contrast, his son Nicholas, on hearing of his succession, is said to have wept not for his lost father but at his own unreadiness to inherit the throne: a sound self-assessment that would leave him dependent on the influence of his advisers. According to one popular joke, so fickle was the young tsar that whoever had last spoken to him could be considered the most powerful man in Russia, with the serious consequence that the court was riven by factionalism. It was a situation whose risks were illustrated in tragic fashion on the very day of Nicholas II’s coronation in the gilded splendour of the Kremlin’s Uspensky Cathedral, when his entourage had insulated the new tsar from news of the stampede by peasants on the nearby Khodynka Field that had left almost 1,400 dead. The decision that he would proceed as planned to a ball at the French Embassy left a lasting impression of callous aloofness on the peasant population, which compounded their irritation at Nicholas’s recent dismissal of proposals for constitutional change as ‘senseless dreams’.

For Rachkovsky, there was no option but to choose sides and his preference was clear: the progressive Witte, determined to drag peasant Russia into the modern world. Witte was still an enthusiast for railway expansion, as he had been when he claimed to have seeded the idea of the Holy Brotherhood, and an advocate of an active credit system, migration to cities and the division of labour. Implicit in Rachkovsky’s choice
of patron, however, was the acquisition of powerful enemies: the politically conservative Plehve, who as director of police had never quite trusted Rachkovsky, and Pobedonostsev, procurator of the Orthodox synod, a deeply thoughtful man who nevertheless hated all originality and innovation, and was committed to the resettlement of migrant peasants in villages subject to the traditional social binding of church and family. Rachkovsky’s audience with Pope Leo XIII in the Vatican, where he allegedly attempted to broker a rapprochement between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, might almost have been designed to pique Pobedonostsev. Witte must have hoped that ease and wealth had not blunted Rachkovsky’s capacity for subtler intrigues and that he could rely on him to serve his interests. The coming years would be fertile in opportunity.

One crisp October morning in 1896, dignitaries gathered on the Left Bank of the Seine near the Esplanades des Invalides for the ceremony to lay the cornerstone of the bridge that would be France’s tribute to Alexander III. Standing slightly apart, Rachkovsky looked on hawkishly. The safety of Tsar Nicholas II, there to honour his late father, was always the Okhrana chief’s top priority and should have commanded his full attention. Yet despite his duties, Rachkovsky may have allowed himself to exchange a knowing glance with one or two familiar figures. Boisdeffre was present, the general with whom he had dealt over the French alliance, as was Henri Rochefort who had travelled a long way politically since 1881, when the nihilists had entrusted him alone with the inside story of a previous tsar’s assassination. That the reactionary soldier and the radical marquis had recently found common ground was strange enough, with Rochefort considering his new friend for the Boulanger role in the dictatorship of which he still dreamed. Stranger still, though, was the possibility that both shared a secret with the Russian spymaster that was far more explosive: one that within weeks would seep out into the public domain.

The Dreyfus Affair, when it broke that November, would redraw the political fault lines that divided French society, with dramatic effect. Nearly two years had passed since Maurice Barrès had described the ritual humiliation of the Jewish army captain from the ministry of war convicted of spying for Germany, in terms reminiscent of those more usually applied to the criminal degenerate. ‘As he came towards us with his cap thrust down over his forehead, his pince-nez on his ethnic nose, his eyes dry
and furious, his foreign physiognomy, his impassive stillness,’ Barrès wrote, ‘the very atmosphere he exuded revolted even the most self-controlled of spectators.’ In a brutal spectacle, the braid and buttons were ripped from Dreyfus’ uniform by a towering blond Breton, who then proceeded to break the disgraced officer’s sword over his knee; a prelude to Dreyfus’ transportation to Devil’s Island, where only weeks before the rebel anarchists had been massacred. A scintillating literary talent whose anarchism had brought him full circle to that dangerous place where the extremes of right and left overlap and where an extreme form of nationalistic socialism would later be born, Barrès relished the scene, and few public figures questioned the sentence unless, like Clemenceau, to criticise its leniency. Now all that was about to change.

The first challenge to the soundness of the verdict came from another anarchist, the journalist Bernard Lazare, who had been an outspoken presence at the recent London Congress. For while Barrès, Drumont and Rochefort had spent their time feeding fresh meat to the beast of anti-Semitism, hungry again after gorging itself on the Panama scandal, Lazare had taken a considered interest as further evidence came to light. The proof of Dreyfus’ guilt – an incriminating document purportedly in his handwriting – had been thrown into doubt by the discovery in a war-ministry wastebasket of a suspicious letter bearing an identical hand: that of a Major Esterhazy. Battle was joined in the press, with neither side conceding an inch. The socialists were slow to engage, and two months later Jules Guesde would still be insisting that the passion evinced by the affair was merely a ‘bourgeois civil war’. Many anarchists, though, recognised behind the anti-Semitism a more far-reaching reactionary agenda that had forged a fearsome cohesion in the radical, nationalistic right. Louise Michel, torn between her gratitude to Rochefort on the one hand and, on the other, friendship for the passionate Dreyfusard, Sébastien Faure, was rare in remaining neutral: a position that left her utterly isolated.