The World That Never Was (60 page)

‘Are they affiliated to our anarchists?’ asked
Le Petit Parisien
during the trial of the Russian conspirators. ‘It is hardly likely, since their views are not the same and their methods of action are quite different.’ The prefecture was furious, and expeditiously presented a summary of its reasons for disagreeing with the line taken by the newspaper to Constans at the ministry of the interior. The police rooted their thesis in the congress of the Anarchist International in Switzerland of 1881, when the Russian delegates had taken it upon themselves to serve their foreign friends at dinner, in expression of brotherhood; ‘All true Russian nihilists are anarchists,’ one had ingratiatingly told the company, proposing that they should ‘act hand in hand in their strikes’; the Lyons bomb attack of that year was said also to have been a joint effort with nihilist technicians; Kropotkin’s straddling of the two movements was adduced as evidence, with Elisée Reclus fingered as the fulcrum of their cooperation. Since then, it was erroneously implied, the movements had grown closer together. Memos flew within the government, and a strategy to make anarchism and terrorism synonymous started to take shape.

Rachkovsky should have basked in the success of his enterprise. Within weeks of the tsar’s conversion to a new respect for the French government, secret negotiations for a Franco-Russian alliance had been initiated. As a practical gesture, the Russians, after toying with the idea of equipping their army with the British Enfield rifle, upped their order to the Lebel factory at Châtellerault. With Sarah Bernhardt rousing French patriotism to new heights with her portrayal of Jeanne d’Arc at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, and Admiral Colomb predicting in his speculative
book
The Great War of 189
—that hostilities could break out at any moment, and might be precipitated by an event such as the assassination of a crowned head in the Balkans, both sides were adjusting to the need for amity. A squadron of the French fleet was even invited to visit the port of Kronstadt the following summer, at the time of the annual Russian manoeuvres – a gesture of friendship that would be overshadowed only by the tsar peremptorily declaring ‘Enough, enough!’ after a single verse of the revolutionary hymn the ‘Marseillaise’ – and audiences at the opera stood for de Mohrenheim, cheering
‘Vive la Russie!’

Yet still Rachkovsky could not rest. It had been Landesen’s own choice to go into hiding and then flee to England, rather than stay and prove to the revolutionaries that he was truly one of them, as Rachkovsky had planned. Now, holed up in the Grand Hotel in the English seaside resort of Brighton, the eight years that Hekkelman had spent under deep cover as Landesen had left him close to a state of mental breakdown. If Rachkovsky was going to ensure that his agent remained safely in the fold, he needed to act decisively, and did so in a letter that was a masterpiece of manipulation. ‘Regard an informant as you would a beautiful woman with whom you are having an affair,’ the senior St Petersburg policeman, Zubatov, had been in the habit of telling his junior officers. ‘Dote upon her. One false move can lead to her disgrace.’ Rachkovsky’s letter, preserved in a barely legible draft in the Okhrana archives, veers between tenderness and a tone of bullying with an astonishing nimbleness.

‘I was so sorry to learn from your last letter how much you are suffering,’ he writes to Landesen:

What is it that
drags
you back to that
suffocating
place, from which you so long to escape? Why, instead of allowing your
wounded soul
to heal in peace, do you
let it fester?

… Of course, had you been arrested together with some others (which is what I recommended), then after a few
interesting
days in gaol, you would have been a free man once again…But you were tired of this old game. To regret anything now is not only too late but also will not do you any good.

… There is no hard legal evidence against you, but suspicions could grow, which, aided by a set of indisputable facts, might lead to a reasonable conclusion. This, as you well know, is more than sufficient, under the revolutionary code, to
sentence you without appeal
…Your attackers will no doubt be totally demoralised [when you fight back against] those repulsive, maddened Jew-cries of ‘crucify him!’ If someone should attack you, try to write something along the lines of the following:

‘It is with indignation that I perceive the continuing slanderous attacks on my person at the hands of my
dear
comrades. Like a mob of the possessed, you have lost your common sense and do nothing but howl fiercely to the pleasure of certain…Pharisees in our midst…Forget my personality and my past and forget how you led me out of Paris after the arrests. Continue to publish articles about me claiming that I had a horde of lovers and a weakness for roulette. Now, having sold out that “nihilists’ plot,” I can open my own harem and spend my days promenading the boulevards of Monaco like some golden cloud?! Oh, you are not revolutionaries, you are nothing but filthy human waste!’

… In my opinion, you have terminated relations with the revolutionaries once and for all, and having anything to do with them, even on a purely personal level, would mean betraying your convictions and do terrible injustice to yourself: you invested all your energy…your whole self into the last job. Enough! Try to view your past as nothing more than an unpleasant dream, bring your nerves in order, and try to focus your mind on the future, rather than looking back and torturing yourself over this memory or that. You certainly deserve to live an honest life and do a dignified job – not only as far as [your service to] the government, but also as far as your own conscience is concerned. So enjoy yourself, have some fun and rest until the autumn as the Lord guides you, fully unshackled from your own past and from all obligations. In the meantime I shall be in Petersburg, but on my return we will raise our glasses
to the new tracks along which your life will run
.

This was the head of the Paris Okhrana acting as psychotherapist, priest, life coach and consoling barman rolled into one, and it was a compelling performance. Rachkovsky gently reprimands, then straight away soothes. Indulging Hekkelman’s delusion, he appears genuinely to accept that Landesen is innocent in the whole affair, stepping into the dangerous territory where fact and fiction blur. A dose of anti-Semitism is injected to rouse the self-hating Jew in Hekkelman, but swiftly followed by a riposte intended to sting the shy, louche agent into indignation.

More than ever, as Hekkelman, or Landesen – or Arkady Harting, as he would soon become – listened to the sea wash the Sussex beach, he would have known himself to be Rachkovsky’s creature. When he later wrote from London to request that noblest of prizes – conversion to the Orthodox faith – Rachkovsky would see to it that his protégé’s christening was conducted with aristocrats and diplomats as guarantors: the stigma of being a Jewish boy from Pinsk would be forever erased. A pension of
1,000 francs a month was also agreed. And though there is no record of what services, if any, ‘Arkady Harting’ performed for his master during his sojourn in England, it was there that a new front was about to be opened in the Okhrana’s battle with the revolutionaries, whose propagandist activities were now better organised and more vexatious to Rachkovsky than they had ever been in Switzerland.

Even as the Okhrana chief congratulated himself on his ever growing power, however, one man aboard a ship passing through the Straits of Gibraltar threatened to become Rachkovsky’s nemesis. Cursed never to have his warnings about Hekkelman’s treachery believed, Vladimir Burtsev’s failure to prevent the framing of his comrades in Paris had been followed by the arrest of his travelling companion, again on a tip-off from Landesen, as he attempted to cross into Russia. Under surveillance in Romania, Burtsev had fled to Bulgaria where, again harassed, he had embarked on an English merchantman at the port of Galatz, bound for London. Then, while the ship was anchored in Constantinople, a flotilla of Turkish police vessels had attempted a blockade, telling the captain he must hand Burtsev over to the authorities and the Russian officials who accompanied them. ‘I will not,’ the captain of the SS
Ashlands
replied, ‘this is English territory! And I am a gentleman!’

It was a story the British newspapers would relish repeating on the ship’s arrival in London, along with accounts of how a burly Turkish hireling had insistently remained on board, awaiting an opportunity to grapple Burtsev into the sea, to be picked up by the Russian vessel that had followed them out of Constantinople harbour. The myth of English liberalism remained alive, but soon enough even the British press would fall prey to Rachkovsky’s wiles.

17
The Russian Memorandum

Great Britain, America and Russia, 1890–1893

The news of General Seliverstov’s assassination reached the Russian ambassador, de Mohrenheim, while he was attending the premiere of the new comedy
Dernier Amour
at Paris’ Théâtre du Gymnase: a whispered word in his ear that must have caused him to blanch. The ex-head of the St Petersburg police had been found dead in a room at the Hôtel de Bade on boulevard des Italiens, executed by a single shot to the head. It was December 1890, twelve years since Seliverstov’s predecessor in the job had been stabbed to death by Kravchinsky. Was the same assassin again at work? A news blackout on Seliverstov’s death was imposed, but the garrulousness of de Mohrenheim’s entourage soon had the press scrambling to uncover the whole sordid story. The French police agent ‘Pépin’ reported having heard from an old Communard that, ten years earlier, a revolutionary tribunal in Switzerland had indeed assigned Kravchinsky the task of carrying out the sentence of death that it had passed on Seliverstov. It soon became clear, however, that the alleged perpetrator, now calling himself ‘Stepniak’, had a watertight alibi, and one rather alarming to the Okhrana: he was, it was said, in America.

Rachkovsky must have been furious that Kravchinsky, who since the conversion of Tikhomirov had become his greatest headache, had slipped through the net. The revolutionary’s popularity among the bohemian intelligentsia of England was irksome, but it was the widening scope of his propaganda activities that was most troubling, and which urgently required suppression. Having fled Russia a decade earlier, Kravchinsky had pledged ‘to win over the world for the Russian revolution, to throw on the scale the huge force of the public opinion in the most advanced countries’. Recent years had seen the pace of his propagandist effort accelerate and his audience grow ever more receptive.

The acclaimed publication in 1883 of his account of the struggle against
the tsar,
Underground Russia
, had opened the way for three further works examining the parlous condition of his homeland. Then, in 1889, his first novel
The Career of a Nihilist
had been published, at a time when his name was being mentioned as a possible compromise leader of the English socialist movement. It was a runaway success. Kravchinsky’s talents ‘would have made his…fortune if turned into the profitable channel of sensation novel writing,’ raved
Science
magazine of the book’s dramatic narrative, and others concurred. As much as any literary merit the book may have had, though, it was the shocking reports from Russia then appearing in the headlines that ensured its popularity with the circulating libraries that dominated English reading culture. And the impact of those reports was felt on both sides of the Atlantic.

On a tour of Russia in the mid-1880s with the Western Union Telegraph expedition, the American explorer George Kennan had been impressed by his official hosts’ apparent cooperation. The result was a book,
Tent Life in Siberia
, which described the exemplary penal colonies he had been shown. Kravchinsky and Kropotkin had both chided him for his credulity. As a consequence, when Kennan secured a commission from
Century
magazine to revisit the tsarist prison camps at Siberia in 1887, he was more thorough in his investigations. His shocking accounts of the abuses endured by the political prisoners overshadowed even the efforts of such esteemed apologists for the tsarist regime as the English editor of the
Pall Mall Gazette
, W. T. Stead.

Despite having shown his guest considerable hospitality, Constantine Pobedonostsev was dubbed by Kennan ‘the Russian Torquemada’ with reference to the notorious leader of the Spanish Inquisition. Graphic illustrations punctuated articles in a wide range of magazines, bringing home to readers the abject misery endured by Russia’s internal exiles. In blistering rain and snow, with guards on either side, columns of the dispossessed were described marching out of St Petersburg, their lanterns swinging forlornly as family members reached out in vain with last letters; then the journey across thousands of miles of wilderness, hard and dangerous, by barge, road and sledge; the overnight stops, shoulders jammed against the barred windows of their compounds as they strained to hand over precious pennies to an old woman in exchange for the scant rations in her basket; and, at last, the godforsaken clapboard towns where they were expected to make a life, labouring under guard, amidst the relentless ice of the tundra.

Since Kennan’s return, matters in Russia had deteriorated still further. A crackdown on discipline among the convicts had caused protests, leading
to further repression. The mass suicide of women prisoners at Kara, in protest at one of their number dying two days after being given a hundred lashes, was followed in April 1889 by what became known outside Russia as the Yakutsk massacre. An angry demonstration by thirty-four exiles against their ill-treatment had led to reprisals that left four dead, two fatally wounded, and three others condemned to death.