The World That Never Was (79 page)

Only a few years earlier, Kropotkin had thrilled to news of technological advances from the Chicago World’s Fair, but he would have been less pleased to hear how certain innovations were applied in 1901. The electric chair was still a relatively novel form of capital punishment, barely ten years old, when Czolgosz was strapped in and subjected to three highvoltage surges; forbidden to film, Edison’s company nevertheless made it a public execution by means of a reconstruction.

Across America, anarchists faced a harsher purge than anything since Haymarket. Emma Goldman was arrested and interrogated, those in Chicago who had published their concerns likewise; Johann Most, who had the almost comic misfortune to have rerun an old article on tyrannicide to fill a space in
Freiheit
a week before the assassination, was sent to prison for another year; Alexander Berkman, less than halfway through his twenty-two year sentence for the attempt on Frick’s life, was returned to solitary confinement; John Turner, the English anarchist who had converted the young David Nicoll years before, was detained entering the country for a speaking tour and placed in a cage, too low for him to stand, until deported.

It was left to Benjamin Tucker, the editor of
Liberty
, to make the case that not all anarchists were alike: that many of their number in America were lawyers, teachers, librarians, college professors, inventors and even millionaires. To the extent that anyone paid attention, his words can only have raised fears of the hidden enemy in their midst. America, it seemed, had already decided to espouse the simple ‘truth’ that McKinley’s successor President Theodore Roosevelt would succinctly express in 1908: ‘when compared with the suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance’.

23
Agents Unmasked

Russia, London and Paris, 1901–1909

For an anarchist to avert an attempt on Rachkovsky’s life, after all that had transpired, would have required enormous moral self-discipline. Yet such was surely Kropotkin’s intent when, in 1900, he condemned a plan by the young revolutionary Nicholas Pauli to assassinate the Okhrana chief. Whether Pauli was a true threat to Rachkovsky was questionable. Rachkovsky certainly led his superiors in St Petersburg to believe so, but by boasting of the danger the spymaster may simply have meant to burnish his reputation as sedition’s greatest foe. However, Pauli’s plot would have had disturbing echoes for Rachkovsky. Usually scrupulous in vetting his informants, Rachkovsky had allowed Pauli to insinuate himself into his trust, just as twenty years earlier his mentor General Sudeikin had fatally misjudged Degaev. That no political murders had been committed in Russia since that time can have afforded Rachkovsky only small comfort, since he surely foresaw that the fashion for assassination in western Europe would soon spread east with a vengeance.

Even before President McKinley was killed in 1900, the officials of the tsar’s government lived in mortal fear. Then, in February 1901, the education minister Bogelpov was shot dead, and a month later, potshots were fired into Pobedonostsev’s apartment. Both attacks were perpetrated by recent graduates of St Petersburg’s universities, where tension had been rising after the police had publicly beaten student demonstrators in contravention of the unwritten rules of engagement. They were seen, though, to presage a far larger confrontation between revolutionaries and the dominant forces of reaction – one that the authorities were prepared to meet head-on. ‘We shall provoke you to acts of terror and then we shall crush you,’ one captured revolutionary was told by the St Petersburg chief of police, Zubatov.

Zubatov’s strategy was taken straight from Rachkovsky’s playbook,
but when it came to the informer Evno Azef, Zubatov and Rachkovsky disagreed. It was Zubatov who had first recruited Azef as an informant in 1893, sending him to Germany; more recently he had recalled him to Moscow, ignoring Rachkovsky’s past expressions of disquiet about his reliability. Azef had quickly appeared to repay Zubatov’s trust, his reports providing an inside view of the Russian émigrés’ efforts towards unification. What was more, he rose quickly through the ranks of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, officially founded in Russia only in 1902, and became a key member of its combat unit, whose members playfully referred to themselves as ‘anarchists’ in homage to the bombers and assassins in France, Spain and elsewhere. Provocation may or may not have been the original reason for Azef’s infiltration, but was almost inevitable if informants became involved in the planning and execution of terrorism in order to retain credibility with their colleagues. In the case of an agent with Azef’s amoral attitude, the risk of treachery was considerable. For the moment, though, he successfully countered any doubts that his police handlers expressed about his reliability with accusations of his own concerning their blundering response to his warnings.

Somewhat surprisingly, it was another element of Zubatov’s highly interventionist policing strategy that ultimately cost him his job. Calculating that the economic circumstances of Russian workers were of greater interest to them than abstract ideas of political and constitutional change, in May 1901 Zubatov had gained the support of General Trepov, the head of the police department, for the creation of police-funded unions to manage popular discontent. The tactic had seemed to work. Less than a year later, 50,000 union members came out to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Tsar Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs, and Zubatov was promoted to director of a special section of the police department, with a brief to extend the initiative across the provinces. But his tenure was to be short-lived. In the summer of 1903, when strike action by the police-funded unions rapidly spread across southern Russia, the hardliners gained traction with their argument that there should be no concessions lest the masses be encouraged to ask for more.

For Zubatov, it spelled the end of his career. Plehve had recently inherited the ministry of the interior, following the assassination of the previous incumbent Sipyagin by the combat unit in which Azef was prominent. Now Plehve seized the opportunity to mount a proxy attack on his rival, the finance minister Sergei Witte, of whom Zubatov and Rachkovsky were favourites. Zubatov was stripped of his position, scurrilous rumours were circulated that he was a secret revolutionary sympathiser, and funding
of the unions abruptly cut. Even as the revolutionaries gained strength, bitter splits in the government were hindering the work of the police.

‘New times – new problems; the sooner we reorganise the better,’ Rachkovsky had written to his superiors, but Trepov’s replacement, Alexei Lopukhin, had started asking awkward questions about the legitimacy of the Okhrana man’s activities in Paris. There was, of course, ample evidence for Rachkovsky’s abuses of power. In addition to the bombings in Liège and the role of his agent Jagolkovsky in the assassination of General Seliverstov, there was his exploitation of contacts in the French police to settle personal scores, and his profiteering. Fees for brokering commercial deals between France and Russia had bolstered his salary of 12,000 rubles to make him a rich man, but there was the suspicion too that he had used some part of the foreign agency’s considerable budget to play the stock market. Such dubious practices might, though, have been allowed to pass unnoticed were it not for the petty factionalism at the tsar’s court.

Rachkovsky’s Achilles heel proved to be his fraught relationship with the mystical demi-monde of Paris. The fact that those inclined to intrigue were perennially attracted to the esoteric had made the murky waters of mysticism an irresistible fishing ground for Rachkovsky, and had doubtless yielded a good catch, some years before, as he orchestrated the Franco-Russian alliance. However, in the process he had made dangerous enemies, and it was one of these, Gérard Encausse, who returned to haunt him. The occult credentials of Encausse, once an assistant hypnotist at the Salpêtrière hospital but now better known as the seer ‘Papus’ and a Gnostic bishop, had brought him to the attention of the Russian imperial family. In 1901, writing as ‘Niet’ in the right-wing
Echo de Paris
, he had censured Rachkovsky and Witte for their alleged conspiratorial dealings with a Jewish financial syndicate, and was now intent on using his influence to destroy them.

‘I want you to take serious measures to terminate all relations between Rachkovsky and the French police once and for all,’ the tsar wrote to Durnovo, now the senior figure in the government; ‘I am sure that you will carry out my order quickly and precisely.’ The consequences for Rachkovsky were devastating. Nothing could save him, not even the replacement of Durnovo as chairman of the committee of ministers by his patron, Witte. Stripped of both his position and influence in France, he had no option but to accept an old friend’s offer to manage a factory in Warsaw. It was a long fall from grace for the man who had been the most feared security agent in western Europe, but more twists and turns
of fate lay ahead for him before the current struggle for power in Russia was resolved.

Among the criticisms levelled at Rachkovsky was that he had ‘created in the public opinion abroad the belief that Russia stands on the brink of revolution and that its political order is in danger’. In reality, it was merely a question of Rachkovsky revealing the reality of what most within the Russian government feared. ‘Twenty years ago when I was director of the department of police,’ Plehve told Nicholas II on his appointment, ‘if someone had told me that revolution was possible in Russia I would have smiled, but now we are on the eve of that revolution.’ It was partly a ministerial pitch for resources and latitude, of course, just as the alarmist reports he forwarded to Witte were intended to force his rival on to the back foot. There is no doubt, though, that Plehve sincerely believed in the urgent imperative of neutralising the revolutionaries’ appeal to Russia’s peasants and industrial workers. And if that meant manipulating those peasants’ most atavistic instincts, then he was more than happy to countenance such a policy.

The provocations contrived by Rachkovsky and Zubatov had been as nothing compared to those employed in the Bessarabian city of Kishinev in the spring of 1903. The police and interior ministry were scrupulous in ensuring that the origins of the pogroms could not be traced back to them but, unlike in 1881, this time their hand was clearly behind everything, from the incendiary manifestos that began to circulate that Easter to the document proclaiming that the tsar exonerated in advance all those who attacked the city’s Jews. When more than twenty groups of armed youths spread out through the city, late in the afternoon of 6 April, the police stood aside. Nor did they make any attempt to intervene as the gangs rampaged through the Jewish quarter, murdering, mutilating and raping the occupants of any house not marked with a white cross. Nearly fifty were dead and hundreds seriously injured before Plehve instructed that the killing should be stopped. Smaller-scale pogroms would occur across Russia in the following months, deflecting popular discontent with the government on to an easy target, as anti-Semitic propaganda became widespread.

The idea of the global Jewish conspiracy had a long pedigree in Russia, with the publication of the
Book of Kahal
preceding the Odessa pogrom of 1871, while the appearance of Osman Bey’s
World Conquest by the Jews
a decade later coincided with revenge attacks for the tsar’s assassination. Following the massacre in Kishinev, in August 1903 the notion was propagated anew by the publication of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
in
Znamya
(the
Banner)
, the organ of the nascent extreme nationalist movement the Black Hundreds, a recrudescence of the worse aspects of the Holy Brotherhood of the early 1880s. But whilst the Holy Brotherhood had supposedly been the brainchild of a young Witte, and had numbered Rachkovsky among its members, it was now Plehve who was playing the anti-Semitic card most aggressively, while Witte sought to calm the situation, under pressure from the western European bankers on whose financing his project of modernisation relied. Had the ‘discovery’, or rather forging, of the
Protocols
really been the brainchild of Rachkovsky, following the raid on de Cyon’s villa, the document’s extraordinary propagandist power would already seem to have escaped his control.

The delegates attending the congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party in Brussels that July saw clearly how the Kishinev pogrom and its imitations would, according to the resolution proposed by the Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, ‘serve in the hands of the police as a means by which the latter seek to hold back the growth of class-consciousness among the proletariat’, and were urged to expose the reactionary origins of anti-Semitism. By demonstrating how easily the masses could be led by their baser instincts, the pogrom also illustrated his assertion that the peasantry would prove readily tractable to government bribes should revolution ever truly threaten. To counter this, argued Vladimir Ulyanov, soon to be known as ‘Lenin’, a conspiratorial party of dedicated revolutionaries should be formed to lead the masses on the straight path to victory. It was a proposal quite at odds with the populist principles of the movement, but Lenin and his recent ally Plekhanov had contrived a coup, ensuring that, during the congress, their supporters would be in the majority. Outvoted, the veterans of the movement, including Vera Zasulich, were ousted from their posts on its journal
Iskra
, and by a clever propagandist sleight of hand, permanently labelled as a minority, or ‘Mensheviks’. Lenin and his cohorts asserted their brief claim to be the majority: the ‘Bolsheviks’.

It was a tragedy for Zasulich, who had been the agent of reconciliation between Plekhanov and Lenin after their past disagreements, and was now the butt of their humour, the former joking to his new friend that ‘she takes me for Trepov’, presumably in reference to the chief of police whom she had tried to shoot dead a quarter-century before. Plehve, by contrast, was more than satisfied by the schism, but also that the ascendancy of the little-known theoretician, Lenin, simplified the task of the police, whose tactics were already adapted to combating the kind of militancy he proposed. The interior minister’s strategy had certainly made
considerable advances against the Social Revolutionaries: by late 1903 its combat unit had been reduced to a mere rump under the direction of the police agent Evno Azef, following the arrest of the team’s charismatic leader, Gershuni. Even the protracted campaign for concerted international action against subversives had gained new momentum, as a result of President McKinley’s assassination, and the ten countries who convened in St Petersburg in March 1904 finally agreed on a ‘Secret Protocol for the International War on Anarchism’, supporting information-sharing and deportation. Britain, France and the United States stayed away, but even they were prepared to cooperate. Any resentment Rachkovsky felt at the lack of credit he received for a scheme that Plehve had opposed when Rachkovsky had originally presented it years before would soon receive a bloody salve.