The World That Never Was (80 page)

Security around Plehve was tight. Rarely did he set foot outside the headquarters of the police department on the Fontanka Quay, where he kept an apartment; when travelling by rail, a special carriage was at his disposal, permanently guarded by police, whose doors would be locked and blinds lowered whenever it slowed into a station. Arrangements at his summer residence on Aptekarsk Island were no less rigorous, as the members of the combat unit sent to assassinate him with bombs and guns in July 1904 discovered. The attack failed, thanks to information supplied by Azef, who had himself bullied the reluctant conspirators to proceed. Only two weeks later, though, a bomb thrown into Plehve’s carriage by a member of the same unit as he drove for his daily meeting with the tsar blew the interior minister to pieces.

As director of the police department, Lopukhin was convinced that Azef’s double-dealing was responsible for Plehve’s death. The evidence was ambiguous. His tip-offs had led to the arrest of members of a rival group that had also been preparing an attack on Plehve, but perhaps only to prevent them from stealing his glory, and although Azef insisted that his warnings about the combat unit’s own plans had been sufficient for any competent police force to have prevented the attack, the truth was that they had in many respects been misleading. As for Azef’s personal motive: he was himself a Jew and had been seen shaking with fury after the Kishinev pogrom and cursing Plehve. On the wider context of the assassination, Lopukhin would later conclude that it had been Witte’s long-nurtured plan to use the revolutionaries to get rid not only of his rival, but subsequently of the tsar himself, who Witte saw as inadequate to the task of modernising reform that circumstances so urgently
required of him, and whom he wished to replace with his brother Grand Duke Michael.

The assassination of Plehve was certainly convenient for Witte who shifted the blame for the government’s least popular policies on to his dead rival. Among the most catastrophic of these was the ongoing war with Japan. Russia had provoked hostilities partly with the aim of raising nationalistic support for the tsar, but it had backfired from the very beginning, when the Japanese had inflicted serious damage on the Russian navy with a surprise attack. Since then, things had gone from bad to worse with further defeats in the Far East. Moreover, a British declaration of war had only narrowly been avoided when Russian ships sailing through the North Sea on their way to the Far East had opened fire on the boats of the British fishing fleet on the Dogger Bank, in the mistaken belief that they were Japanese raiders. The error was due to faulty intelligence supplied by Arkady Harting – the one-time Hekkelman and Landesen – on board the ship
Esmeralda
to winkle out subversive officers in the fleet.

‘Plehve’s end was received with semi-public rejoicing,’ reported one English journalist. ‘I met nobody who regretted his assassination or condemned the author. This attitude towards crime, although by no means new, struck me as one of the most sinister features of the situation.’ Azef’s decisions now seemingly vindicated by the court of public opinion, he was confirmed in his delusion that he was an absolute moral arbiter, judge, jury and executioner. And such was the thrall in which he held Rachkovsky’s ineffectual replacement Rataev that, having returned to Paris, there appeared to be no brake on Azef’s ambitions. The reports that he filed from revolutionary conferences could not be faulted, but his setting up of bomb factories boded ill, while his fascination with flying machines was still more ominous. In 1904, the last novel by the ageing Jules Verne, written under the influence of his reactionary son, once again caught the tenor of the times: a sequel to
Robur the Conqueror
entitled
The Master of the World
, its ‘hero of the air’, who had freed African slaves in the first book twenty years before, has become merely another amoral nihilist: a megalomaniac hell-bent on shaping the world to his demented will. Azef fitted the type exactly.

A lifetime spent among the anarchist community of France and the London colony had taught Louise Michel a certain detachment when it came to the endemic problem of agents provocateurs. ‘We love to have them in the party, because they always propose the most revolutionary
motions,’ she joked in a letter to Henri Rochefort when he tried to warn her against one suspicious character. It was just another example of the wistful humour that now characterised correspondence between the veterans of the movement: ‘Year One is so long in coming!’ Kropotkin had commented regarding a discussion about the approaching ‘Age of Liberty’.

Tireless to the end, Michel continued to tour France giving lectures, her clothes bundled up in a white cloth, her face ever more wrinkled, her shoulders more stooped. The crowds had shrunk too, down from the thousands she had once routinely attracted to mere hundreds. ‘People here are fools,’ she said of the French. ‘It seems history is going to pass them by. But look at Russia…There’ll be spectacular events in the land of Gorky and Kropotkin. I can feel it growing, swelling, I can feel the revolution that will sweep them all away, tsars, grand dukes, the whole Slavic bureaucracy, that entire, enormous house of death …’ In the course of several years of intermittent illness, Michel had experienced trance-like moments of mystical insight, but her prescience had never before been so acute.

Aged only sixty-eight, Michel was still touring when she died in January 1905. Her frail body, that had endured so much, was carried back from the provincial town in which she had been lecturing; for its arrival at the Gare de Lyon, several hundred troops were summoned to maintain public order. As the cortège passed through Paris, from the centre out to the eastern suburbs, past Père Lachaise where the Communards had made their last stand to her final resting place in Levallois-Perret, the crowd swelled to tens of thousands: nothing like it had been seen, it was said, since the funeral of Victor Hugo. ‘Long live the Russian Revolution! Long live anarchy!’ they shouted, though the first news of events in St Petersburg can only just have been coming through.

On the morning of 22 January, six columns of workers from the industrial suburbs had converged in the Russian capital and set off for the Winter Palace, where they would present a petition to the tsar or his representatives asking for labour reform and an end to the futile war against Japan. It was a Sunday, and the icons and imperial symbols they carried aloft, like the songs they sang in honour of the tsar, signalled patriotism and piety: a message of peaceful intent that had been communicated in advance to the authorities. The authorities, though, appeared not to have heeded it. Blocking the procession’s approach to the palace were 12,000 troops, their guns loaded with live rounds which, when fired into the approaching marchers, mowed down up to 200 and injured hundreds more.

Elisée Reclus saw Russia’s ‘Bloody Sunday’ as heralding the glorious dawn of revolution. His enthusiasm was only dampened when, hurrying to Paris to deliver a speech, he succumbed to debilitating fatigue and had to ask a friend to deliver it for him. ‘Alas! I should speak to them in words of fire, and I only have an asthmatic puff to give them,’ he bemoaned to Kropotkin, whose own expectations of what would ensue were as high as his own. Yet Reclus’ hopes that events in Russia would herald ‘the conciliation of races in a federation of equity’ showed little sign of being fulfilled. Whilst anger at the events of Bloody Sunday had indeed compounded widespread and growing dissatisfaction with the tsarist autocracy, while the many strikes and minor insurrections that followed were a clear demonstration of latent threat, they were far from sufficient to wash away the regime. Nor did the architecture of repression show any sign of crumbling.

Even the origins of the January revolution were muddied by the police’s use of conspiratorial tactics. At the head of the procession of workers to the Winter Palace had been Father Gapon, a man whose passionate commitment to the workers’ cause, throughout the years that he had led and organised the Union of Russian Factory and Mill Workers, had won him their high esteem. Walking beside him was Pinhas Rutenberg, a prominent member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, who had flung Gapon to the ground when the bullets started to fly. In saving his life, however, he cannot have known that Gapon had been close to the police for several years, his organisation one of those bankrolled by Zubatov. The massacre of the protesters in St Petersburg was primarily the result of confusion, poor communication and official overreaction, but the shock it generated served the purpose of those arguing that it was necessary for the authorities to tighten their grip.

In a period marked by significant losses for the anarchist movement, Elisée Reclus chose a good moment to die, buoyed up on news read to him by his daughter of the mutiny of the crew on the Russian battleship
Potemkin
in June 1905. He was not one of those old hands of 1871 who blamed the demise of the Commune on its lack of military ruthlessness, but the thought of a battleship in the hands of its workers, free to roam the oceans, surely resonated deeply with both the geographer and the anarchist in him as he approached the end. For a few minutes in the midst of the Black Sea, when the sailors of the Russian fleet refused to fire on the renegades and allowed the
Potemkin
to sail away between a line of ironclads, it seemed that the long-gestated naval insurrection might indeed take hold. Barely ten days later, however, after pleas by the
Potemkin
‘s
crew for a sympathetic country to refuel and provision the ship had fallen on deaf ears, the ship was abandoned in a neutral port, and would subsequently be renamed
Panteleimon
in an attempt to erase awkward memories of the episode. If the revolution was to progress to the stage of armed insurrection, the weapons would have to be supplied from outside Russia, even if that meant soliciting the support of hostile governments.

Since the latter years of the previous century, growing international tensions had increased the likelihood of war between two or more of the Great Powers, and it seemed quite possible that a general conflagration of the kind that many had long predicted would be the outcome. France and Russia were allied in the case of war being declared on one or other, but the consequences if either initiated an attack was less certain. Equally, the question of what role Germany and Britain would play, whether as allies or enemies, had taxed the imagination of military planners and speculative novelists alike, with all permutations rehearsed. To revolutionaries like Kropotkin, however, such questions were less relevant than his expectation that the outbreak of hostilities would prompt an international general strike as a prelude to revolution, the prospect of which had helped focus minds at recent socialist congresses.

Conflict with the underestimated Japan may have seemed an unlikely midwife of revolution, and yet it was anger at defeats inflicted by the Japanese navy, as well as with their own ill-treatment by officers, that had provoked the mutineers on the
Potemkin
. Moreover, it was Japanese intelligence, in the person of Colonel Akashi the military attaché in Stockholm, that agreed to furnish the putative revolutionaries in Russia with the material needed for the struggle.

The Okhrana had become aware of details of the plan to transport Japanese-funded weapons via Finland thanks to its interception of correspondence between Nicholas Chaikovsky and the captain of the SS
John Grafton
. The operation to track its cargo would be led by Arkady Harting, newly installed as head of the Berlin bureau: the 1,000 reports it sent to St Petersburg in less than two years spoke of his determination to make his mark. Other agents had been deployed to seven ports on the English, Dutch and Belgian coasts to signal the ship’s departure; Lev Beitner and his wife, also now an agent, were reporting from the heart of the émigré community in Brussels. Azef, meanwhile, had persuaded his colleagues to designate him as the man to collect their share of the vast consignment of 5,000 pistols, more than 10,000 Swiss rifles, and millions of rounds of ammunition at the far end.

Intelligence from Harting that the
John Grafton
was due to dock near Jakobstad on the Gulf of Bothnia reached St Petersburg soon enough for the battleship
Asia
to intercept and force her aground on sandbanks. Explosions were set off to suggest that the arms had been destroyed in the ship’s hold, but what really happened was typically opaque, with the captain of the
Asia
seemingly bribed to allow at least some of the weapons to be salvaged.

Kropotkin, grieving over Reclus’ death, neverthess shared the Frenchman’s optimism that Russia would be the scene of the long-awaited revolution and was determined to take an active part. ‘The real anarchist party, in the true sense of the word, is in the process of final formation in Russia,’ he would claim that autumn, having begun training with a rifle for his role on the barricades on his planned return to the land of his birth, after a thirty-year absence. He was briefly encouraged by the emergence in St Petersburg on 13 October of the first soviet, or workers’ council, whose inspiration was broadly anarchistic, though Leon Trotsky would later appropriate much of the credit. The publication four days later of the tsar’s constitutional October Manifesto, in which he renounced autocratic rule, and his ministers’ strategic decision to allow time for the political mood of the country to settle before further repression, gave the soviet a temporary reprieve. But then, on 3 December, an insurrection in Moscow provided the pretext for the full wrath of the police department to be unleashed.