The World That Never Was (81 page)

‘You would only be one among many, and you above all ought not to be exposed to any accident in this year in which we have already lost Louise Michel and Elisée Reclus,’ the future historian of anarchism, Max Nettlau, wrote to Kropotkin, arguing against his return to Russia. It was good advice. The fighters who took to the streets in Moscow might have looked down at their rifles – vintage 1871 Vetterlins salvaged from the
John Grafton –
and imagined themselves the heirs and avengers of the Communards, but they too faced defeat. The retribution they suffered may not have been anywhere near so sanguinary as that of Bloody Week, but the police action supervised by Colonel Gerasimov was ruthless enough. And behind Gerasimov stood a superior who saw the crushing of revolution as a ticket to job security and the St Petersburg high life: Peter Rachkovsky.

Witte’s loyalty to Rachkovsky had seen him recalled to the police service at the beginning of the year, a fortnight after the uprising in January 1905 and within twenty-four hours of the SR combat unit’s assassination of Grand Duke Sergei, a profoundly conservative influence on his nephew,
the young Tsar Nicholas. After the series of pale imitations who had tried to fill his shoes, the original intriguer found his stock at a premium, regardless of the antipathy of the imperial family. It was Gerasimov’s footwork that led to the foiling of a bomb attack intended to kill four senior tsarist figures during a commemoration service for Alexander II, and the subsequent seizure of twenty bomb-makers in a raid on the Hotel Bristol in St Petersburg. Nevertheless, Rachkovsky basked in the reflected glory, and his contribution was rewarded in July with the creation for him of the new post of chief of police for the Russian Empire.

After three years languishing in Poland, the old Paris chief was again in his element. The presses he installed in the basement of the police department churned out propaganda to deviously incite resistance to the compromises offered by the tsar in the October Manifesto, with the aim of raising the political temperature. His encouragement of the nationalist movement, the Black Hundreds, and of militant cells in the associated new Union of the Russian People further fanned the flames of civil strife. Yet Rachkovsky could not escape the ghosts of his past. By early 1906, Sergei Witte’s influence in government was waning, and yet still the extraordinary power vested in Agent Azef continued to wreak havoc with the Okhrana’s attempts to control the revolutionaries.

The fate of Father Gapon, the ambiguous figure who had led the 1905 demonstration, revealed the extent to which things had got out of hand. Within days of Bloody Sunday, his beard shaved off, Gapon had fled Russia for France. From Marseilles he had travelled to Rome, then to Paris and on to London where he stayed in the family home of Ford Madox Ford, and met with the émigré revolutionaries, throwing in his lot, it was said, with the arms smugglers. Such business, though, seemed almost incidental to the delight he took in his celebrity. The defrocked ex-priest slipped easily into the role of playboy, putting behind him the not so distant memories of comforting dissident convicts on their way to penal exile. Fame and luxury fed his sense that he had become untouchable, however, and bred incaution. Returning to Russia in November 1905, possibly in a deal to ensure him safe passage, Gapon renewed his relationship with the Okhrana, undertaking to play the part of peacemaker. As part of the arrangement, in February 1906, he also agreed to recruit the Socialist Revolutionary Rutenberg, the man who had saved him on Bloody Sunday. For Gapon to reveal his secret dealings with the Okhrana to Rutenberg, however, was a fatal miscalculation, for the loyal socialist informed the party leadership and steps were taken to terminate both the traitor Gapon and the man who was pulling his strings, Rachkovsky.

Rachkovsky must have approached his meeting with Azef a few weeks later with some trepidation, given the complexity of the agent’s allegiances and cover stories. He had, after all, recently avoided several proposed rendezvous with Gapon and Rutenberg, correctly suspecting them to be a trap, since when Gapon had fallen silent. Even steeled to hear the worst, however, Rachkovsky can scarcely have predicted how Azef’s mockery would force him to gaze into the abyss of doubt and insecurity into which his own nefarious activities had in the past plunged so many others. ‘Do you know where Gapon is now?’ Azef taunted; ‘He is hanging in a lonely country house…and you could easily have shared his fate.’ It was a shameless assertion of the power Azef now wielded over his controller.

Within days of his confrontation with Azef, Rachkovsky was once again dismissed from his post for misconduct, and reduced to serving as a shadowy intermediary between officialdom and the reactionary militias. There was a generous golden handshake and his Order of St Stanislas, the highest of the honours he had so far accrued, was upgraded to First Class, though the tsar doubtless agreed to both with bad grace. Rachkovsky’s methods, however, lived on in police policy. Indeed, Witte’s successor as chairman of the committee of ministers, Peter Stolypin, who became Russia’s prime minister in July 1906, would go so far as to declare that, ‘it is the duty of all to acquire provocateurs and increase investigations in every direction’.

The rapidly burgeoning number of Okhrana agents was nevertheless far outpaced by the recruitment of informants, to the extent that one observer remarked on how before long there would be no one left in Russia who was not either a spy or spied upon. As the quality of evidence required for the conviction of revolutionaries fell, the apprehension of suspects by the official police was supplemented by citizen’s arrests by the Black Hundreds, and during the latter months of 1906, a system of mobile courts martial was established to process cases promptly and
in situ
. By October 1906, 70,000 of the regime’s supposed enemies had been detained, and over the next three years, 26,000 were sentenced to death or hard labour, and roughly 3,000 executed. So vast were the numbers that death and punishment became hideously close to abstractions. Whereas a decade earlier a single anarchist bomb explosion, or punitive execution by the state, roused half the world to protest, now such occurrences could pass almost unnoticed amidst the generalised violence.

Yet despite the rapid process of depersonalisation, individuals and their relationships still played a crucial role. After the demotion of Rachkovsky,
Azef showed a new dedication to the Okhrana and Gerasimov, who since taking over as his contact had demonstrated a refreshing concern and professionalism towards his powerful agent. It was as though mutual respect was all Azef needed to remain loyal. Azef’s days, though, were numbered.

Since Vladimir Burtsev’s release from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1899, he had returned to his anti-tsarist work, first in England and then Switzerland. If anything, persecution had sharpened his desire to root out informants and provocateurs, lending his freelance counter-intelligence activities a new ruthlessness as he slowly closed in on Azef. A letter purportedly delivered to him in 1905 by a ‘veiled lady’, that useful fiction familiar from Esterhazy and the Dreyfus Affair, had raised suspicions about one member of the party’s combat unit, Tatarov, who had been hunted down to his family home in Warsaw and stabbed to death. The tip-off, though, referred to Azef as a second traitor.

Throughout his years as a police agent, Azef had become adept at deflecting any suspicions of his treachery. On this occasion, he easily persuaded colleagues, with whom he had conspired on numerous assassinations, of the malicious absurdity of the charge. Bitter experience, though, had taught Burtsev to take nothing at face value and he was not so easily mollified. The foreknowledge of the group’s activities that the police showed did not appear to have stopped with Tatarov’s elimination. And the more Burtsev investigated Azef, the closer his profile seemed to that of an Okhrana agent: he would plot attacks but always absent himself from their execution, and had repeatedly been in locations across Europe when betrayals had taken place. When Burtsev spotted him – one of Russia’s most wanted men, driving through St Petersburg, untouched and carefree at a time of mass arrests – the unthinkable became for him a certainty. Others, though, would require more persuasion.

So began a lengthy period of research for Burtsev. He went first to Paris in search of evidence and, eventually, in 1908, back to London. As much as things had changed there since his arrest, more had stayed the same. Chief Inspector Melville may no longer have been with the Special Branch, having stepped down from his post somewhat abruptly, shortly after Rachkovsky had been eased out of his job at the Paris
agentura
. The subsequent unease in the Metropolitan Police over informants and provocation may suggest a cause. And yet, freed from the straitjacket of political accountability to pursue a semi-official freelance career, his fortunes had only risen, as he engaged in ‘spectacular duties which entailed
extensive travel on the Continent’ and finally accepted the rewards and honours from foreign governments that his previous position had required him to decline. Nor could the employment of former officers of Special Branch by the Okhrana, at generous rates, leave any doubt about the close relationship between the organisations. The intimations of past complicity in Joseph Conrad’s novel
The Secret Agent
, published in 1907, had passed largely unnoticed, due to its small original readership. Burtsev, however, would have had no difficulty equating the fictional Mr Vladimir with Rachkovsky, or believing that the novel’s dark elements of intrigue, provocation and betrayal were thinly fictionalised reportage.

The breakthrough came for Burtsev with the decision of Russia’s disgraced ex-director of police, Lopukhin, to divulge enough of what he knew about Azef to prove his guilt. Whatever Lopukhin’s motivation, whether a desire to have the last word in his long-running rivalry with Rachkovsky, or to avenge the murder of his patron Plehve that Azef was suspected of orchestrating, his admission saved Burtsev from humiliation and probably worse. For the revolutionary movement was deeply wounded by Burtsev’s claims, and he himself had been summoned to trial in Paris, in the apartment of Azef’s Socialist Revolutionary colleague, Boris Savinkov, on the rue La Fontaine.

Past the looping filigree of the art nouveau Castel Béranger next door Burtsev walked, day after day in the autumn of 1908; past the police tails assigned to Kropotkin, Figner and Lopatin; and up the stairs to the spartan room in which the Jury of Honour sat in judgement. And day after day he met their cold stares of accusation that cast him as the villain, with no ally except Kropotkin who had more experience in such matters, and replied to their questions with further evidence. Finally, though, Burtsev was compelled to play his trump card, in breach of his word to Lopukhin, after which Azef’s guilt could no longer be disputed.

Even after the jury had announced its verdict, however, distrust gnawed deep, the uncertainty created by Azef’s conviction almost as damaging as the original treachery. Despite the jury’s sensational decision, still not everyone would accept Azef’s guilt, and he was allowed to escape the court’s sentence of capital punishment and slip away, hiding at first in a Balkan monastery. Once the excitement of the trial had died down, Kropotkin found himself unable to shake off concerns about the tangle of duplicities, past and present. ‘Among other things,’ he wrote to Burtsev, ‘the question that troubles me is this: did Chernov and Natanson know that Azef was in the service of the police, and did they consider him to be their great Kletochnikov or not?’ Chernov was a founder member of
the Socialist Revolutinary Party, the others names from long ago: Natanson, whose embryonic circle Chaikovsky had inherited in the early 1870s; Kletochnikov, the People’s Will mole in the police, the first and perhaps the only man whom Rachkovsky had trusted too much.

Just before Christmas 1908, Kropotkin went to Switzerland on the instructions of his doctor, who had advised clear mountain air after the damp of England. It was his first visit since he had been expelled in 1881. Though sixty-six and in weak health, Kropotkin could not be held back from spending his time there revising the text of
The Great French Revolution
, a grass-roots re-examination of the seminal event, first conceived on his release from Clairvaux prison in 1886. There must have been free moments for memories too, though: of his work with Reclus, tracing the outlines of anarchism, all those years ago; of the congresses and the endless, tiresome arguments; of the nights he had sat, his political vision as yet unformed, listening to tales of the brief, wondrous life of the Commune. And yet recent experiences had surely shaded such optimistic memories with pathos. ‘Unhappy Europe! Thou shalt perish by the moral insanity of thy children!’ said the fictional Russian ambassador at the end of Conrad’s
The Secret Agent
. Kropotkin may have felt similarly, when informed of the exposure of yet another turncoat. ‘But what is this?’ he complained, ‘Now the revolution has become a sport: “If they arrest me, I will go over to their side!”’

Okhrana infiltration agent turned chief of the Berlin station Arkady Harting was, for once, in no mood for devious games. On New Year’s Day, 1909, he bluntly demanded of his superiors in the police department that Lopukhin be punished for the information he had divulged to Burtsev, with the result that Lopukhin was promptly dispatched to a posting in Siberia. Harting may well have guessed that after Azef’s exposure, he would be the next target of Burtsev’s investigative zeal, and that Lopukhin might divulge his true identity too. For Burtsev was caught up in his own private psychodrama. Years before, he had twice been tricked by his old friend Hekkelman into defending him against accusations of treachery: an error on Burtsev’s part that had since cost many comrades their lives or freedom. Would Burtsev now conclude that tearing down Hekkelman’s carefully constructed new identity as ‘Harting’ was his best chance of catharsis?

After years of patient research, Burtsev’s revelations about Harting were perfectly timed. Harting had only recently been posted back to Paris as head of Rachkovsky’s old
agentura
, to all appearances an elegant European aristocrat and famous socialite who had added the
grand cordon
of the Légion d’honneur to a drawer full of similar decorations. But then,
on the morning of 15 June 1909, the story broke. ‘The Scandal of the Russian Police’ screamed the headline in
La République
, in what was a common theme. The fêted baron was revealed to be none other than Michel Landesen, the fugitive bomber of the Raincy Affair, sentenced by a French court to five years
in absentia
in 1890.