The World That Never Was (78 page)

Burtsev was arrested on 16 December in the foyer of the British Museum Library. Melville had the added pleasure of seeing his officer invade London’s great temple of learning, whose stacks had nourished the subversive passions of so many native and émigré troublemakers down the years. Burtsev’s lodgings were swiftly raided and his archive impounded; a question had to be asked in Parliament before assurances were forthcoming from Special Branch that the material would not be passed on to the Okhrana. When Burtsev’s case finally came to court, the public gallery was packed with British policemen in plain clothes, to prevent genuine spectators gaining admission, and Kropotkin, Chaikovsky and
Volkhovsky were among only a handful of Burtsev’s friends able to find a place. Rachkovsky himself declined to attend, lest his presence incite anti-Russian feeling.

Burtsev attempted an appeal to the British sense of fair play. ‘We ourselves would naturally prefer to write books than make bombs,’ he told the court, asking that it give the same answer to Russian despotism as the captain of the SS
Ashlands
had, years before, when the Okhrana demanded he hand Burtsev over in Constantinople harbour: ‘I will not; I am a gentleman.’ Ten years of hard labour for incitement to murder Tsar Nicholas II was what the prosecution demanded, but Burtsev was sentenced to only eighteen months, which he served first in Pentonville, then in Wormwood Scrubs. Rachkovsky’s subsequent letter to Melville was full of sarcastic praise for an English jury system that both men knew had half thwarted their plan. The prime minister too must secretly have been disappointed. While Burtsev had been awaiting trial, Salisbury had proposed an entente to Russia and was asking for help in the ‘delicate’ matter of stemming the tide of Jewish immigrants. An exemplary punishment for Burtsev would have suited him well.

If Burtsev’s imprisonment was only a moderate victory for Rachkovsky, he would be able to console himself with greater successes as more assassinations turned the tide of political opinion ever further in his favour. Indeed, an event in Trafalgar Square the previous May had already inspired the murder of the Spanish prime minister, Cánovas. Ten thousand people had gathered there to listen to a group of innocent escapees from the infamous Montjuich prison in Barcelona, who exposed the terrible wounds inflicted on them in an attempt to extract confessions of their part in the bomb attack on the previous year’s Corpus Christi procession in the city. Inflamed by what he had seen and heard, a southern Italian by the name of Michele Angiolillo acquired a pistol and left for Paris, where he paused only to attend a lecture by Henri Rochefort, before heading for Spain in search of vengeance. Deterred by a friend from attacking the royal family, he instead tracked Cánovas to a spa town where the prime minister was taking a cure, and there shot him dead.

Then, in September 1898, in circumstances of similar tranquillity, on the shores of Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc rising sublime in the background, the sixty-one-year-old queen of Hungary and empress of Austria fell victim to yet another Italian anarchist, Luigi Lucheni. Sissi, as the
empress was affectionately known, was walking down to the lakeside when the man stepped into her path from behind a tree. The blow to the chest was sudden and unexpected and then her assailant fled. ‘What could that man have wanted? Perhaps to steal my watch,’ she muttered as she hurried on, so as not to miss her ferry. It was not until it had steamed away from the jetty that she felt any pain. The stiletto blade had barely left a mark as it entered her heart, but within half an hour she was dead.

Lucheni was caught and brought to the late Empress’s hotel, smiling, quietly cynical, where the manager’s son-in-law struck him in the face; an Austrian baron had to be restrained from doing worse. For those enjoying their privileged leisure in the pure autumnal air, the attack represented an incomprehensible eruption of violence from a distant world. ‘I have avenged my life,’ the pitiful lone assassin would tell the court, ‘long live anarchy and death to society!’ Often misinterpreted, ‘propaganda by deed’ had finally come to mean no more than envious arbitrary retribution; the last resort of the hopeless, the damaged and the dispossessed.

One week after the empress’ death, a plan for an international police league was jointly proposed by the Swiss and Austrian government; by the end of September Italy had seized the initiative by issuing invitations to the leading nations to attend a conference on the subject, to be held in Rome that November. It was, in effect, the revival of the scheme that Rachkovsky had tried in vain to initiate nearly five years earlier, but one that Russia now welcomed after the recent foiling of a planned attack in Moscow. Once again western anarchists had provided technical assistance in planting explosives in a renovated church where the tsar was to worship. Wires emerging from freshly applied plaster had aroused suspicion, in the nick of time.

Agreement among the twenty-one countries that attended the Rome Anti-Anarchist Conference in late 1898 was inevitably elusive, but by the end of a month of discussions a consensus had been thrashed out. ‘Anarchism’ would be defined as any activity ‘having as its aim the destruction, through violent means, of all social organisation’: broad enough, at a push, to encompass Russia’s revolutionaries, yet explicitly refusing to dignify such violence with any plausible political motive that might be used to mitigate criminal charges. Information would be shared and new legislation enacted internationally, to facilitate the suppression of ‘anarchism’; the possession of explosives would be outlawed, and a mandatory death penalty prescribed for the assassination of heads of state.

Only Britain declined to sign, despite the presence among the international police delegates of the Home Office’s dynamite expert, Colonel Majendie, who believed that the only way to eradicate terrorism was to ensure that its perpetrators and advocates were ‘debarred from either shelter or sympathy in any part of the civilised world’. However, as Anderson briefed the Home Office soon after the conference closed, the British government’s position had been determined not by its liberal idealism but by the cynical calculation that any tightening of its laws might ‘reveal to anarchists the limits which the police were supposed to keep within’.

‘The congress opened and shut its doors with no more noise than a congress of spectres,’ wrote Louise Michel. ‘The sound of a single human voice (that of the English delegate) refusing to sign measures contrary to liberty, made the phantoms vanish like a nightmare fleeing before dawn.’ She must have already filed the article before she learned that it would appear in what was to be the last ever edition of the
Adult
, the journal of the Legitimation League, which campaigned for equal rights for those born out of wedlock, along with a raft of other libertarian causes. The prosecution of its editor George Bedborough for attempting to ‘debauch and corrupt the morals of the liege subjects of our Lady the Queen’ indicated a new desire in Special Branch to stamp out anarchism in whatever form it found it.

When, three years earlier, Melville’s forerunner as chief inspector, Littlechild, by then working as a private investigator hired by Lord Queensbury, had produced the evidence that secured the conviction of Oscar Wilde for gross indecency, Wilde’s advocacy of anarchism had been entirely incidental to the question of sexual morality. Sweeney’s infiltration of the league and entrapment of Bedborough, from whom he bought a copy of Havelock Ellis’
Sexual Inversion
, and his gloating at having stopped a ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ in its tracks, indicated a rather sinister shift in Special Branch’s agenda. It was all the more disturbing in light of the end-time beliefs of its overseer, that spare-time millenarian Robert Anderson, whose exegesis of the Book of Daniel, published in 1895, identified the Zionist call for a Jewish homeland as a sign of the approaching apocalypse which he so earnestly craved. ‘Democracy in its full development is one of the surest roads to despotism,’ he wrote, ‘the voice of prophecy is clear, that the HOUR is coming, and the MAN.’

As convener of the Anti-Anarchist Conference, Italy’s fear of an international threat would prove well founded, with more assassinations by its citizens and on its soil not long in coming. But whilst familiar names
would be linked to the killings, their involvement was once again rather different than it appeared, though that would not prevent further calumnies being heaped upon them.

Having disappeared from London in 1897, Malatesta had reappeared soon after in Ancona at a time of peasant riots, only to be arrested in 1898 and transported for a term of five years to the island of Lampedusa, where several thousand socialists had been sent in recent years on grounds laid down in the Crispi Laws. With the connivance of the governor of the penal colony, yet another dramatic escape ensued, by fishing boat to Malta, and by the following August, Malatesta had made his way to the United States. A month later he was addressing the émigré silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, and it was there that he became himself a victim of the violent emotions that were washing through the movement, when an argument with hard-line individualists ended with a shot wounding him in the leg. Before a second shot could be fired, his assailant was disarmed by, it was said, a compatriot whose experience of the Italian legal system echoed Malatesta’s own: Gaetano Bresci.

Bresci, though, was himself no moderate, and was even then practising his own marksmanship, shooting the tops off bottles in his yard. Outraged by the treatment of protesters in Italy the previous year, when an army cannon had opened fire on a crowd, a group in Paterson would nominate him as its agent of revenge. It was a task he accepted as an honour since his own sister had been among the ninety killed, and having returned to Italy, on 29 July 1900 he shot dead King Umberto, whose reign had begun twenty-two years earlier with the release from prison of Malatesta and Kravchinsky.

In rural Ohio, Leon Czolgosz, the son of Polish immigrant farmers and rabbit trappers, followed the news reports of Bresci’s trial devotedly. His parents noted how he took the paper to bed with him, but did not recognise the extent to which he idolised Bresci. Soon he started attending anarchist meetings in Chicago, sometimes three a week, and in May 1901 was in the audience in Cleveland for a lecture delivered by Emma Goldman, towards the end of her three-month speaking tour with Kropotkin, in which she ‘deprecated the idea that all anarchists were in favour of violence and bomb-throwing’. Whether he had met the two luminaries of the movement before, at the Hull House educational settlement in Chicago, as some would suggest, he now approached Goldman for advice on what he should read to advance his understanding of the cause, which she was happy to supply.

Once back in Chicago, however, Czolgosz’s behaviour became stranger
and more obsessive, and his views more incendiary and outspoken. ‘Say, have you any secret societies?’ he asked his new comrades, ‘I hear that anarchists are plotting something like Bresci; the man was selected by the comrades to do the deed that was done.’ By late August, his colleagues had begun to suspect him as a police provocateur and, when he failed to appear at their meetings for a while, published a description of him in
Free Society
, together with a warning that they had ‘confirmed themselves of his identity and were on the point of exposing him’.

A few days later, President McKinley was dead, gunned down with a revolver that Czolgosz had hidden in his bandaged hand, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. ‘I done my duty,’ was all he had to say as he was apprehended in the Temple of Music, while outside the film crew from the Edison Company, who had been following McKinley’s visit, had to satisfy themselves with the reaction of the awaiting crowd. Unlike many anarchist assassins or bombers of the recent past, Czolgosz could offer no eloquent justification for his action, referring merely to his dislike of McKinley’s talk of prosperity when so many were poor. And despite Goldman’s recommendations, he had read little anarchist literature, the members of the Chicago group told police.

Called upon to explain the assassin’s state of mind and his motivation, medical experts seized the opportunity to ride their hobby horses. One stated baldly that Czolgosz had been ‘drifting towards dementia precox of the hebephrenic form’, another declared himself certain that ‘he was not a degenerate because his skull was symmetrical and his ears did not protrude, nor were they of abnormal size’. Based solely on his reading of the newspaper reports, Cesare Lombroso was willing to venture a bold diagnosis from the far side of the Atlantic, declaring that Czolgosz was, like all anarchists, ‘under the spell of a kind of monomania, or the absolute obsession by a single idea which produces hypersensitiveness and makes them excessively sensitive to the influence of others’.

The crux of the assassin’s trial, however, was precisely the issue that the Rome Conference had worked so hard to render inadmissible: whether there could be any mitigation for anarchist violence, on the grounds of insanity or political belief. A witness for the defence, Mr Channing was in little doubt of the defendant’s madness, even if that madness had proved evanescent: given temporary release by the murderous act itself, he suggested, the delusions had for the moment dissipated, to the extent that Czolgosz had little sense of what he had done. To this, the sophistry of an opposing expert provided a convenient answer: since whatever delusion Czolgosz had suffered from was consistent with a set of political
beliefs, he could be considered perfectly sane. Which was to say, in effect, that all anarchists suffered from a special kind of madness, that was reprehensible rather than exculpatory. It was so neat a formulation that even when the superintendent of police in Cleveland testified that he had found no clear link between the accused and any anarchist organisation, his opinion was easily set aside.