The World That Never Was (57 page)

It had been on Clemenceau’s suggestion that Tikhomirov had disappeared to the echoing seclusion of a rented house in Le Raincy to the east of Paris, during the commotion caused by Kropotkin’s release from prison and as the Russian government pressed for all revolutionaries harboured by France to be expelled. At first, the solitude came as a relief, after years of unrelenting anxiety and unpleasantness. It had been a torment for a refined and fastidious man of considerable intellectual accomplishment such as he to live cheek by jowl with cruder companions among the émigrés of Paris, eating his meals direct from the paper in which the food came wrapped. Worse by far, though, had been the surveillance agents whose perpetual presence tightened the screw on his insecurity. ‘In the street he is constantly turning round. He is in a half-trembling state,’ wrote a journalist who interviewed him at the time, while so grave had been his disturbed mental state that at one point a friendly visitor had felt obliged to call the doctor. At Le Raincy, Rachkovsky’s agents were still in attendance, loitering at the end of the overgrown garden, but the nature of the siege was at least clear.

The tense, still atmosphere in the house had another explanation. For weeks on end, after his son fell ill with spinal meningitis, Tikhomirov had tended the boy as others despaired, forcing open his mouth to spoon
in the medicine that no one else believed could save him. And while the outside world of the belle époque looked to General Boulanger to fill its hollowed-out soul with military glamour and nationalism, it was the old mystical religion that poured into the spiritual void felt by Tikhomirov. A positivist atheist, he had found himself praying, albeit in ‘an unconventional way’, offering whatever bargains he could to the Almighty in exchange for his son’s life. Miraculously, the boy survived.

An intellectual and a writer, Tikhomirov had never been suited to the life of an active revolutionary and his nerves had long been frayed. Imprisoned during the round-ups of the Chaikovskyists a decade earlier, he had witnessed at first hand the vicious beating administered to Bogoliubov by General Trepov: an object lesson in the powerlessness of the outsider. After his release, Tikhomirov’s more robust companions in the People’s Will had tried to insulate him from situations requiring physical courage, but his vulnerability had been confirmed when the police were tipped off about his subversive activities. Attempts to lie low after the tsar’s assassination only brought further fears of exposure: he was haunted by the memory of watching those convicted of the killing drawn on carts beneath his apartment window, while he nearly fainted with fear lest the maid recognise them as his friends. Then, exiled in Geneva, he had made the catastrophic decision over how to deal with Degaev’s confession of treachery that resulted in Vera Figner’s arrest. Even the murder of Colonel Sudeikin, which he had instructed Degaev to carry out, had backfired by focusing the Okhrana’s attention even more ruthlessly on the émigrés abroad. He now found himself unable to avoid the more fundamental question of whether his entire revolutionary career had been a terrible mistake.

Rachkovsky’s agents tracked every shift in Tikhomirov’s mood, and noted his every movement: the gradually lengthening walks in the garden at Le Raincy with his convalescent child, their picking of berries, conversations with local children, even his patting of dogs. Back in Russia it had been Rachkovsky himself, while operating undercover among the revolutionaries, who had identified Tikhomirov to the police, and knowing of his psychological fragility, Rachkovsky may have always considered him susceptible to turning. After a second raid on the Geneva press in early 1887 turned up fragments of paper bearing Tikhomirov’s despairing scribbles, Rachkovsky stepped up the pressure.

Crucial assistance was provided by the journalist Jules Hansen, recently added to the Okhrana payroll on a retainer of 400 francs a month.
A small, bespectacled man with a retiring demeanour, Hansen’s lack of physical presence had earned him the nickname ‘the shrew’ in his native Copenhagen; to those in the know, however, the quality of his contacts at the Danish and tsarist courts and his powers as a propagandist fully warranted the more respectful sobriquet of ‘the president’. Under Hansen’s guidance, such esteemed journalists as Calmette of
Le Figaro
and Maurras of
Le Petit Parisien
turned their fire on the revolutionary émigrés, with Tikhomirov their prime target. Fodder was provided by an incriminating pamphlet entitled
Confessions of a Nihilist
– published under Tikhomirov’s name, but in reality forged at the embassy. Rachkovsky also engineered the publication of an anonymous attack on the ‘uncontrollable rule’ that Tikhomirov and Lavrov allegedly exercised over the émigrés. Caught in a pincer movement, Tikhomirov had scant emotional resources left to deal with the attacks.

With feline cunning, in the autumn of 1887 Rachkovsky had moved in for the kill, targeting Tikhomirov’s innate elitism, which vainly saw the utopian dreams of the Chaikovskyists as having been squandered by the actions of the ignorant. The approach Rachkovsky made was surprisingly solicitous, proposing that the Okhrana sponsor Tikhomirov to the tune of 300 francs to pen an account of the intellectual journey that led him to renounce revolution and terrorism: an opportunity to settle his account with the merciful God who had saved his son. The result was a triumph for Rachkovsky. On its publication,
Why Did I Stop Being a Revolutionary?
created a sensation. Uninhibited not only in its denunciation of terrorism, but its refutation of the entire rationale of the author’s past life, it was the product of a nervous breakdown, yet deftly projected its psychological origins on to the subjects of its critique. ‘Our ideals, liberal, radical and socialist, are the most enormous madness,’ he wrote, ‘a terrible lie, and furthermore, a stupid lie.’ Tikhomirov’s unconditional regret that his ‘misguided former colleagues’ had failed to recognise autocracy as the most fitting form of government for Russia led Rachkovsky to suggest that he seek the path of atonement, and petition the tsar – God’s holy representative on earth – for forgiveness.

Tikhomirov’s appeal to the tsar in late 1888 was timely. The first attempt on Alexander III’s life little more than a year earlier had served as a reminder of the continuing terrorist threat, while the execution of those responsible had stoked the outrage and resentment of a new generation of revolutionaries. In quick succession new radical circles were formed by Blagoev, Tochissky and Brusnev, only to be as speedily
suppressed by the Okhrana, which was operating with a new professionalism from its base on the Fontanka Quay in St Petersburg. The death of one of the People’s Will’s assassins who was hanged, however, lit a fire that would burn quietly for many years before flaring up to consume the country. When Alexander Ulyanov, a brilliant law student, went to the scaffold, the childhood desire of his equally able younger brother, Vladimir Ilyich, to be in everything ‘like Sasha’ was now translated into the revolutionary field. Thanks in part to Rachkovsky’s suppression of the People’s Will, the young man looked for leadership to Plekhanov, who had scorned Tikhomirov’s book.

Among the Russian elite, however, Tikhomirov was greeted as the returning prodigal: there were even private dinners with Pobedonostsev, who arranged for him to do penance in a monastery and placed his writings on the school curriculum. Once back in Paris, Tikhomirov was welcomed into the most fashionable salons, the firm friend of Juliette Adam and Madame Olga Novikoff, who now divided her time between London, Paris and the Riviera. His response to personal attacks in the left-wing press testified to the influence of the company he was keeping, but perhaps also to the elusive nature of the double standards by which they lived: ‘The Jews! The scum!’ Tikhomirov cursed, unaware of the strange hypocrisies that allowed the arch anti-Semite Novikoff to carry on an affair with the Jewish author of
The Conventional Lies of our Civilisation
, Max Nordau. (‘We can only snatch an occasional moment,’ she panted, in one letter to him of December 1888. ‘I can’t believe I am trusting what a woman says, but you are not a woman in spirit’ he replied, somewhat ungallantly.)

Rachkovsky’s long manipulation of Tikhomirov had finally defeated the man responsible for the murder of Rachkovsky’s mentor, Colonel Sudeikin, and who had described the members of the Holy Brotherhood as ‘political savages and adventurers, parasitically sucking the people’s lifeblood’. Unlike the funding for most of the ‘perception management’ that Rachkovsky was engineering in the French press, the money for discrediting Tikhomirov had come not from the Okhrana coffers, but his own pocket. But if Rachkovsky, bitter that Degaev had slipped through his hands, craved his enemy’s complete destruction, the rehabilitation of a chastened, pious Tikhomirov was a great propaganda coup in the eyes of those who mattered, and the pragmatic Rachkovsky must have known that it served his purposes well.

Now married to a Frenchwoman, Rachkovsky had recently moved to a grand villa in the western suburb of Saint-Cloud: a property to which
his salary from the Okhrana is unlikely to have stretched, even with bonuses for his continued success. In the Paris of the late 1880s, anyone well connected and with an iota of cunning could create a fortune; kickbacks were so easy to come by. The Russian ambassador, de Mohrenheim, certainly took advantage of the opportunities, accepting vast secret donations from the Panama Canal Company for his connivance in its deception, and was also said to be in receipt of a regular slice of the interest paid by the Russian government on the huge French loans arranged by his friend, the Franco-Danish financier Emile Hoskier, so that Russia need no longer be in such deep debt to Germany. During the winter of 1888, 640 million rubles of debt were transferred from Berlin to Paris, and collecting the crumbs from the table made de Mohrenheim a rich man. It seems likely that Rachkovsky feathered his own nest too, safe in the knowledge that, at a time when Russia’s goodwill was so valued, for the French press to investigate the financial interests of its embassy staff would have been nothing short of unpatriotic. And yet to those with a vested interest in the transactions, the corruption appeared brazen. For his attempts to mediate a rival loan deal, Elie de Cyon received a cool million francs, but at the cost of what remained of his tattered reputation, being labelled as one of the greatest ‘rascals of our age’ by the French, and ‘a mendacious and venal Jew with revolutionary tendencies’ by the Germans.

Rachkovsky’s diplomatic and propagandist sidelines were proving ever more absorbing to him. Besides lobbying for the French foreign ministry to decline to take Bulgaria’s side in a disagreement with Russia, there would soon be the delicate matter of the rifles manufactured by the French company Lebel on which to keep an eye. While the initial order, after a sample had impressed Grand Duke Vladimir, commander of the Russian Imperial Guard, might only be for 5,000, if every member of the Russian army received the weapon, as their French counterparts had, it would facilitate military coordination between the countries. But Rachkovsky was stretching himself thin. If he was to be effective in pursuing his other interests, it was essential that he maintain the indispensable nature of his counter-subversive work as the Okhrana’s spymaster.

With the centenary of the French Revolution in 1889 fast approaching, when Paris was to host a Universal Exposition, there would be abundant opportunities for him to work his wiles. That Russia would not officially attend – having used Kropotkin’s release as a pretext to announce its withdrawal from a celebration of democracy that the tsar would, in any
circumstances, have found distinctly uncomfortable – need not impede his intrigues.

One thing was certain, as the great Exposition prepared to open in May 1889: it wasn’t going to be Boulanger who brought about a Franco-Russian coalition. Ironically, it was an eccentric Russian religious adventurer by the name of Ashinov who helped precipitate the final collapse of the Boulangist project, when his missionaries mistakenly occupied the fort in the small port of Obock, a French colonial possession in the Gulf of Aden. The new French minister of the interior, Ernest Constans, indicated that he was inclined to treat the incursion as a declaration of war. Perhaps, too, he saw the political potential of the situation, for when the journal of the Boulangist League of Patriots accused the government of betraying the national interest by its hostility to Russia, Constans promptly announced that its editor would be charged with treason, with Boulanger and Rochefort implicated by association. Boulanger promptly took fright and, rather than lead the crowds who were once again baying for a march on the Elysée Palace, allowed the crafty chief of police, Louis Lepine, to bundle him and his mistress on to a train to Belgium, and into exile.

‘Not a man, but a wet rag,’ Duchess d’Uzès said of her ex-protégé. To all practical purposes, Boulangism was finished, the general’s sudden departure seen by most as an admission of guilt. Rochefort’s faltering influence over French public opinion could no longer ensure his safety from arrest, and he soon followed his hero into exile. To Louise Michel, the threatened trial and Boulanger’s departure were ‘just another burlesque, signifying a society in its slow death throes’, but the opportunists in government could, for the moment, breathe a sigh of relief. For the few months of the Expo, it was hoped the simmering discontent of the past few years might be contained, or else subsumed in the ferment of artistic creativity that was its correlative. And what better symbol of their optimism than the edifice that had won the competition to be the centrepiece of the Exposition: Eiffel’s extraordinary iron pylon, which for the past two years had been gradually rising skyward over Paris, its four great feet held steady by the use of pneumatic props as it grew.