The World That Never Was (44 page)

The prefecture’s ‘Agent Arnold’, keeping watch over Korvin-Krukovsky’s activities, struggled to conceal his contempt for the dilettante’s affectations. Of greater interest to his superiors, though, were observations concerning the huge sums of money paid monthly into his bank account by figures linked to the Orléanist claimant to the French throne. As far back as the autumn of 1881, the Sûreté had noted the apparent use of agents provocateurs by the Russians in Paris. Such intrigues might be overlooked as long as they were confined to flushing out the remnants of the People’s Will among the émigré community, but became intolerable if they intruded into the volatile domestic politics of France. At a time when the previously unknown League of French Nihilists was boasting in a leaked manifesto of its secret three-year campaign to poison
hundreds of bourgeois families, that certainly now appeared the case.

In April 1884, the end of Prince Orlov’s tenure at the embassy provided the occasion for Korvin-Krukovsky’s recall on the pretext of financial laxity. The new Russian ambassador to France was Baron de Mohrenheim, the very man who, as a lowly consular attaché in Berlin nearly thirty years earlier, had arranged for Wilhelm Stieber to be smuggled across the city in a laundry basket and offered a job working for the Russians. Now an austere senior statesman with cropped grey hair and a waxed moustache, de Mohrenheim enjoyed the lasting favour of Alexander III for having facilitated his courtship of the Danish Princess Dagmar, now the tsar’s wife, during his posting to Copenhagen in the 1870s, and yet he remained acutely aware of his vulnerability to the vagaries of court politics. Now that Stieber had quit the stage, de Mohrenheim was eager to recruit a new spymaster to take up the baton, and Rachkovsky appeared a promising candidate: one sufficiently independent of any faction, yet adept at feigning friendship and allegiance wherever necessary.

In the heady atmosphere of bohemian Paris in the 1880s, myriad rival sects flourished that cut across the clearly demarcated battle lines of reaction and revolution in the Russian émigré community. To understand their agendas, even to insinuate oneself into their trust, was to gain a powerful advantage in the deadly and secret games being played out. The contacts that Rachkovsky could draw upon from his time in the Holy Brotherhood stood him in good stead.

His ‘Trojan Horse’ appears to have been a young woman by the name of Yuliana Glinka, the granddaughter of a colonel whose Masonic affiliations had led to his arrest for involvement in the Decembrists’ plot of 1825 against Tsar Nicholas I. Glinka had inherited her forebear’s fascination with mysticism along with his taste for conspiracy. Recommended by a high-ranking family friend, she plunged into the city’s occult subculture as Rachkovsky’s proxy. In this she was helped no end by the sponsorship of Juliette Adam, the feminist wife of an ex-prefect of police and senator, who had been the doyenne of literary-political Paris for the best part of two decades, and was now editor of the influential
Nouvelle Revue
. It was perhaps no coincidence that three years earlier, when visiting St Petersburg, Adam had dined in the homes of some of the most generous funders of the Holy Brotherhood.

By the end of 1884, when Glinka’s lover arrived from Russia, she was fully immersed in a demi-monde of dizzying complexity. Madame Blavatsky, who Glinka now numbered among her friends, was the cousin
of Sergei Witte, and her works were published in Russia by the arch-nationalist journalist and ideologue Mikhail Katkov; Adam was in correspondence with Louise Michel, through whom she had sent clothes to the prisoners in New Caledonia, and was a friend of Henri Rochefort, who some even suggested had been her erstwhile lover in the 1860s, and the father of her child. Endless permutations of intrigue opened up to Rachkovsky, and when Ambassador de Mohrenheim’s own contacts were factored in, the possibilities became even more elaborate. Of particular note, in this respect, was Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, the French occultist, whose marriage to the Danish Countess Keller, a close friend of the new tsarina, had made him the favoured guru of the Russian court.

D’Alveydre was an evangelist of ‘synarchy’, a political philosophy conceived explicity to counter the anarchist threat of revolution, advocating a strict, caste-like social hierarchy and transcendent authority as the path to the new society. It was an aim that he tried to realise through his personal friendships with the crowned heads of Europe. And as with Blavatsky, who was, it has been suggested, recruited on to the Okhrana payroll at this time, he brought with him into Rachkovsky’s orbit a coterie of devotees: men like Gérard Encausse, a physician then working with hypnosis in Charcot’s psychiatric experiments at the Salpêtrière hospital, who was temporarily in thrall to d’Alveydre’s reactionary teachings. Inevitably, however, rivals too lurked in the Parisian shadows, the most prominent being Elie Cyon, or ‘de Cyon’ as the ex-professor of physiology now called himself, the aristocratic prefix intended to add lustre to his honorary position as a privy councillor to the tsar. But while de Cyon had already staked his place as an international deal-broker, the novelist Turgenev, for one, considered him a ‘great scoundrel’, and his reactionary views had led to the rejection of his application for a chair at the Sorbonne.

Rachkovsky’s priority, however, was to make himself indispensable to any in St Petersburg who doubted his abilities, which above all meant the new director of police, Vyacheslav von Plehve, who was soon to become deputy minister of the interior. When de Mohrenheim had the temerity to prompt Rachkovsky, over a tip-off claiming that Alexander II’s widow was plotting with the émigrés and funding their activities, Rachkovsky’s response to his interference was stinging. If the Princess Yurievskaya were channelling money to the group, he tartly replied, he would certainly have heard of it. There were solid grounds for his growing confidence. German Lopatin, elected as leader of the meagre remnants of the People’s Will that were still at liberty, at a meeting of the executive in Paris early
in 1884, had been apprehended in St Petersburg before the year was out, having just returned from France with an incriminating list of those who might rebuild the movement; Tikhomirov, the other key figure in exile, was ‘surrounded by shipwrecked men, the debris of every imaginable circle and grouping’, his psychological state becoming ever more fragile.

Nevertheless, Rachkovsky was far from complacent. Writing to Fragnon, the recently appointed chief of the Sûreté, he explained his strategy: ‘I am endeavouring to demoralise [the émigrés] politically, to inject discord among revolutionary forces, to weaken them, and at the same time to suppress every revolutionary act at its source.’ It was an attitude which paid professional dividends when, late in 1884, Police Councillor Sergei Zvoliansky, who had been sent to assess progress at the Paris
agentura
and smooth its relations with the French government, reported back that Rachkovsky should be given the time and space to build up his team without interruption or interference.

Since its inception, the Paris Okhrana had depended on the assistance, official and unofficial, of the French Sûreté, the investigative arm of the prefecture of police. Indeed its first detectives, known as the Barlet Brigade after their leader, Alexandre Barlet, had been hired from the ranks of the Sûreté’s ex-officers. The Sûreté was, however, an unreliable organisation, staffed by those on punitive redeployment from elsewhere in the French police service and prone to leaks; staff were even known to moonlight for
La Lanterne
, writing articles attacking their own colleagues. The very ease with which Sûreté files found their way on to Rachkovsky’s desk must have alarmed him, while the poor quality of much of the intelligence would have sounded a further warning. And on those occasions when Rachkovsky went to meet the incumbent prefect of police, Gustave Mace, in person, the tiny waiting room that visitors had to share with prostitutes and drunkards – sometimes squeezed in beside the hereditary state executioner, Louis Deibler – must have left a poor impression. The Paris Okhrana clearly needed fresh blood.

In developing his own stable of operatives, Rachkovsky learned from the mistakes that had cost Sudeikin his life. Even the security of the
agentura
’s offices was reinforced, with the addition of a second locking door and bars on the windows; the three clerical assistants and code-breakers who worked behind these fortifications were of proven loyalty, while a member of the Barlet Brigade, Riant, was bribed to spy on his colleagues. When it came to the kind of clandestine and provocative operations in which Rachkovsky would specialise – in particular those requiring deep-cover agents – it was impossible to exercise too much caution: he knew
only too well how prolonged periods immersed in deception and betrayal could eat away at a man’s psyche and corrode his loyalty.

It was Police Councillor Zvoliansky who had initiated the recruitment of Abraham Hekkelman to the Paris bureau, suggesting to Rachkovsky that ‘he could be one of our most useful agents’. Amongst those in the know, Hekkelman’s sangfroid was legendary, having consistently turned the tables on any colleague in the People’s Will who had accused him of being an informant: even his old university friend, Burtsev, had been tricked into leaping to his defence, in the face of compelling evidence of his guilt. No exception would be made, however, to Rachkovsky’s fastidious vetting of recruits and Hekkelman underwent four days of intense probing and indoctrination. Debriefed over and over again about past examples of carelessness in both Russia and Switzerland, his psychological resilience was tested and tempered. The intensive process paid off, its primary product an operative of steely ruthlessness who was impervious to suspicion and, as a by-product, a relationship was forged between agent and controller of constantly affirmative intimacy that would make both men rich and powerful.

Hekkelman must have recognised straight away that something special could come out of the promised partnership. When approached by Zvoliansky, he had demanded 1,000 francs a month and a posting to Paris, with all its fleshly delights. Rachkovsky persuaded him to work for less than a third of that sum, and to immediately return to Switzerland under cover, this time as ‘Landesen’, a name borrowed from an influential Latvian family. But there were benefits to sweeten the pill: direct access to the dossiers Rachkovsky had already compiled on those émigrés Hekkelman would encounter, and a well-financed cover story, setting him up as the son of affluent parents. Landesen’s fictitious private income, drawn as necessary from the Okhrana coffers and available to fund whatever schemes he dreamed up to entrap his targets, was a sleight of hand typical of Rachkovsky.

For once, the Paris Okhrana chief could write in something like good faith to Fragnon in 1885 that ‘all my internal agents are of deep conviction and…receive no salary but to enable them to live and proceed actively among the émigrés, never on a lucrative basis!’ For Rachkovsky to make any further claim to virtue or honesty, however, would have been wholly disingenuous: prominent among his early initiatives were provocations designed to lure credulous émigrés into the most heinous crimes of which they may never have otherwise conceived.

The burden of responsibilities that Rachkovsky had assumed since
coming to Paris made it hardly surprising that his original objective slipped through the net. As the ship returning the failed colony-builder William Frey to London in the autumn of 1884 crossed the Atlantic, it might have passed the one carrying a disguised Sergei Degaev in the opposite direction. And by early 1885, when the tsar handed the tsarina her first fabulously jewelled Easter egg, wrought by his favourite French goldsmith Peter Carl Fabergé, Degaev was already making a new life for himself in America. Reborn as Alexander Pell, he would in time become head of the mathematics department at the University of South Dakota. He would never return to Russia.

Frey, having established a business in London selling tooth-breaking wholewheat rusks, and with it a tiny cult following, did go back to his homeland on a brief trip that spring, that involved two notable encounters. The first was with the novelist Leo Tolstoy, converted some years earlier by another ex-resident of Cedar Vale to a life lived according to the literal interpretation of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount – a religious form of anarchism – since when he had been regularly harassed and censored by the police. ‘Yes, my friend…you are quite right. Thanks, thanks for your wise and honest words!’ the author of
War and Peace
and
Anna Karenina
told his sage visitor, having listened to him speak for some time. The utopian insight Frey had offered? The suitability of fruit and nuts to the human diet.

Frey’s second, more fleeting encounter was with a brilliant young zoology student who attended a lecture by Frey. Neither Alexander Ilyich Ulyanov, nor his younger brother Vladimir Ilyich, would have any truck with vegetarianism, but in the years to come first one, and then the other – under the
nom de guerre
‘Lenin’ – became the most deadly of all the tsar’s enemies.

12
A Great New Tide

England, 1881–1885

The year 1881, noted one British observer, ‘marked the oncoming of a great new tide of human life over the western world…It was a fascinating and enthusiastic period…The socialist and anarchist propaganda, the feminist and suffrage upheaval, the huge trade-union growth, the theosophic movement, the new currents in the theatrical, music and artistic worlds, the torrent even of change in the religious world – all constituted so many streams and headwaters converging, as it were, to a great river.’

The words were those of thirty-seven-year-old Edward Carpenter who, after a decade of committed grass-roots engagement with the education of the working man, could claim a closer affinity with those making waves across the Continent than most Englishmen. In 1871 he had abandoned his life as a curate to visit Paris in the terrible aftermath of the Bloody Week, and had been arrested on the outskirts and interrogated by Stieber’s police on suspicion of being a Communard refugee. By the time he returned to France two years later, for a rest cure on the Riviera, he had settled on a new vocation: to ‘somehow go and make life with the mass of the people and the manual workers’. It was the same impulse that was then sending the Chaikovsky Circle on their campaign ‘to the people’.