The World That Never Was (61 page)

For some time, Kravchinsky had been lobbying influential figures in the English political Establishment in an attempt to coax them away from their liberal complacency and adherence to peaceful protest. ‘It is very easy for Alexander III to allow himself to be persuaded that he is doing his sacred duty in maintaining a political regime which is causing such awful misery and sufferings,’ he wrote to Mrs Spence Watson, the wife of one of the leading Liberals outside Parliament, insisting that ‘in Russia, as everywhere else, freedom will be won by fighting and not otherwise’. Soon afterwards, her husband Robert proposed a society that would raise public awareness of Russia’s despotism through a regular series of pamphlets.

Kravchinsky insisted that neither he nor Kropotkin should be named as instigators of the scheme, which he thought would be best publicised as a fundamentally English affair. But questions of presentation were not allowed to delay the launch of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom on 30 April 1890. Two days later, May Day saw the best attendance yet in a series of Free Russia rallies in Hyde Park, at which speakers included George Bernard Shaw, Marx’s sons-in-law Aveling and Lafargue, and the Member of Parliament Robert Cunninghame Graham; as William Morris had advised, the English were not patronising the Russians, but standing as their friends and equals in the struggle. And by the summer the first edition of
Free Russia
, featuring a full exposé of the Yakutsk massacre, was in the hands of readers.

When the Russian ambassador to London, Yegor de Staal, informed St Petersburg that ‘the agitation raised against Russia on the grounds of the exaggerated rumours of merciless treatment of prisoners in Siberia has still not subsided’, Rachkovsky could offer no immediate answer and several months later was still writing of Britain as ‘alien and not at all conducive to the agency’s work’. Even Olga Novikoff, with her bulging book of contacts in London high society, was impotent to shift public opinion, grousing to the turncoat Tikhomirov about how ‘That accursed Stepniak is inciting each and all in England against all that is dear to Russia. It’s a terrible, terrible disaster.’ Events in Russia, though, would soon compound their problems, and further boost the circulation of the society’s newspaper. When news filtered through of the country’s widespread
famine, British public opinion was outraged by the Russian government’s shameful response.

Fear and pride had conspired to create a climate of denial around the tsar. ‘There are no famine victims. There are merely regions suffering from a poor harvest,’ he declared when a group of officers proposed cancelling their regimental dinner and donating the cost to the starving, while a subscription by the French people in aid of the famine victims was also rejected. ‘Russia does not need charity,’ Ambassador de Mohrenheim insisted to the French press while on vacation in Aix-les-Bains, but the fraudulence of the official line was exposed when aid sent secretly by the émigrés, via Leo Tolstoy, was received with pitiful gratitude. And to ensure that the message of tsarist incompetence reached those suffering from it most directly, a lithographic copying centre was set up in St Petersburg to reproduce
Free Russia
for domestic distribution.

Meanwhile, Kravchinsky, previously nervous about his poor spoken English, was finally prevailed upon by Kennan to visit the United States on a lecture tour and, unlike his co-editor Felix Volkhovsky who habitually spoke to audiences wearing chains on his ankles and wrists, he would rely on his verbal powers to make an impact.

Establishing a base in Boston, just as Bakunin had thirty years earlier, Kravchinsky used literary discussion of the novels of Tolstoy and Turgenev as a Trojan Horse to gain him entry into the society of America’s literary opinion-makers. ‘One of the most important things I ever heard…large, bold and massive to an extraordinary degree,’ enthused the critical luminary William Dean Howells of Kravchinsky’s lecture on novels that were known more by repute than in translation, and took the revolutionary under his wing. After dining with the Russian at home and in his club, and even taking him on a visit to a local fire station where Kravchinsky slid down a brass pole, the American critic’s initial impression was confirmed: ‘One of those wonderful clear heads that seem to belong to other races than ours.’

But whilst Kravchinsky’s message that the pogroms against the Jews in Russia had been propagated by the government struck home, concerns persisted about the violence that underpinned the revolutionaries’ own strategy to force constitutional change, with Howells reluctant to lend his name to support for such methods. Others, though, had no such qualms and were happy to sign up, including the author Mark Twain.

‘If such a government cannot be overthrown otherwise than by dynamite, then thank God for dynamite!’ Twain had proclaimed the previous year, leaping to his feet in the audience at one of Kennan’s lectures on
the Kara outrage. As an angry sentimentalist, with an outspoken antipathy to that most ‘grotesque of all the swindles invented by man – monarchy’, Twain was perfectly receptive to Kravchinsky’s message, believing that America, having received the support of France in its struggle to overthrow despotism during its own revolution a century before, was beholden to remember its origins and lend its support to those now engaged in the fight for political justice.

The endorsement of such prominent moral arbiters gave Kravchinsky good reason to hope that the idea of Russian freedom would fall on fertile ground, and plans were made to establish an American branch of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom. Before Kravchinsky could see the project realised, however, a message arrived from Volkhovsky summoning him back to London to assist in resolving tensions with colleagues in Europe that had unexpectedly become inflamed. Under intense pressure to stem the tide of anti-tsarist propaganda, Rachkovsky may have been finding it hard to land a clean blow, but he had been far from idle.

In Paris, the rumours about Kravchinsky’s involvement with the murder of General Seliverstov had refused to go away merely because it had been shown that he could not have carried out the attack in person. Agent ‘Pépin’, who had originally pointed the finger at Kravchinsky, quickly came up with a variant account, based on information supposedly received from an anonymous source. The true culprit, he asserted, was a young, London-based Pole called Stanislaw Padlewski, whom Kravchinsky had instructed to kill the general.

There were sightings of Padlewski in Spain and Italy, but no one stopped to enquire further about the real reason for the assassin’s frequent trips, in the past, to Paris and Italy, or his unexplained connection with Rachkovsky’s old agent, Yuliana Glinka. Nor did anyone give much credence to the lonely voices daring to claim that Padlewski was himself mixed up with the Okhrana, and that the killing was a false-flag operation. It would be more than a decade before one of Rachkovsky’s agents, Cyprien Jagolkovsky, revealed his role in Seliverstov’s murder, and another ten years before the notion was publicly aired that the Okhrana chief himself had organised the hit to rid himself of a possible threat to his position.

In the meantime, Rachkovsky had doggedly pursued his agenda of demonising the Russian émigrés in the eyes of the British public, in the hope of facilitating political action against them. January 1891 had seen
him meet the Russian interior minister, Durnovo, in Nice, to discuss his proposed strategy and his request to be posted to London, since his efforts to date had effectively driven the key émigrés across the Channel. Durnovo’s immediate reaction was to report to St Petersburg what Rachkovsky had told him of the ease and affluence that the London émigrés enjoyed thanks to their ‘ghastly agitation of the English’. The eventual outcome, however, was the drafting of what would become known as the ‘Russian Memorandum’ that laid out the argument for why the British government should take action against those enemies of the tsar to whom it had granted asylum. Sent by the Russian foreign ministry to Ambassador de Staal in London, it was then passed on to Her Majesty’s Government. Neither Lord Salisbury’s tacit support, however, for surveillance of Russians entering through English ports, nor the redoubled lobbying efforts of Madame Novikoff produced the desired effect. ‘This is not a very reassuring result,’ would be Tsar Alexander’s terse reaction to the lack of progress.

There were, however, other weapons in Rachkovsky’s arsenal, not the least of which was his seasoned tactic of sowing dissent. Kravchinsky’s great talent, well attested by those around him, was his skill as a conciliator, working to bring into alignment the disparate groups of Russian revolutionaries spread across Europe. That ability was put to the test. Even before the first edition of
Free Russia
hit the news-stands, co-editor Felix Volkhovsky had been attacked by Plekhanov’s group in Switzerland for his high-handedness in ignoring all those who did not share the newspaper’s relatively liberal agenda, and by Peter Lavrov for emphasising the search for political over economic freedom. Thanks in part to Kravchinsky’s past kindnesses to Plekhanov, whom he had subsidised to take a rest cure when he was suffering from tuberculosis, the flurry of accusations temporarily abated. But then, during Kravchinsky’s absence in America, a series of black operations orchestrated by Rachkovsky, and implemented by the expert forgers at rue de Grenelle, stoked the fires of mistrust and resentment.

First to appear was a pamphlet entitled
A Confession by an Old Revolutionary Veteran
, which accused Kravchinsky and the other London émigrés of having sold themselves to the British police; then, an open letter purportedly written by Plekhanov further denounced the London group. After Lavrov’s ‘Group of Veterans’ had re-established contact between the old People’s Will organisations in Russia’s major cities, his name too was put to a forged document which lamented that there was no prospect of a social revolution in Russia, announced that its author
was to retreat to a monastery, and signed off with an implausible ‘Amen’. Those impugned were quick to scorn the ruse, roundly denying any involvement, while
Free Russia
left its readers in no doubt about the documents’ true source: ‘The spies are dancing a jig,’ it confirmed in a note to its readers. Yet for all the inconvenience caused to Kravchinsky, and despite Rachkovsky’s boast of the previous autumn that by infiltrating agents into the London émigré community he had brought it ‘under our full control’, in early 1892, the Anglo-Saxon world remained largely impervious to the Okhrana’s wiles.

‘S—, I have been given to understand, had been concerned in some very dreadful affairs indeed. Perhaps he would blow me up. Perhaps he would convert me,’ wrote one journalist, approaching an interview with the notorious revolutionary with trepidation, only for his fears to be assuaged by an evening spent at Kravchinsky’s St John’s Wood house. Though the furnishings were somewhat exotic – ‘couches and settees had the places that in mere bourgeois homes would have been occupied by stiff-backed chairs’ – the man himself was thoroughly congenial: ‘capable of enjoying a good dinner’, and irresistibly charming as he sat sipping spiced tea and languidly smoking a cigarette. Conversation flowed easily around the sceptical Kravchinsky’s adventure of the previous evening, ghost-hunting in Westminster Abbey, and the intriguing prospects raised by psychic research. Always, though, it returned to his perennial theme: the brutality of tsarist Russia, the degradations experienced by its people, and the just cause of revolution in the quest for democracy. So powerful was Kravchinsky’s evocation of Russian misery that even his dire prediction that ‘when the peasants do wake up, their revolution will put the French one into the shade’ was recorded by his rapt interviewer without demur.

Nor was it only the press that Kravchinsky and Volkhovsky courted with their Slavic charm, as they insinuated themselves ever deeper into the supportive sympathy of their British hosts. The Garnett sisters, Olive and Constance, epitomised the susceptibility of literary and artistic bohemia to the Russian émigrés’ radical chic, and the strong erotic appeal that they exercised. Constance’s decision to live in Fitzroy Square, in the heart of the French anarchist colony, had already singled her out as a woman with a taste for adventure beyond that offered by her timid, bookish and sexually inhibited husband, Edward. Her head was turned first by Volkhovsky and his compelling history of twelve years spent in Siberian exile following the Trial of the 193 and his subsequent escape down the River Amur to Japan, who set about teaching Russian to the sisters.
By turns intellectually austere and vainly sensuous, his very unpredictability seemed to draw in Englishwomen. ‘One day he was a pathetic broken down old man, the next he would look twenty years younger, put a rose in his buttonhole, and lay himself out very successfully to please and entertain,’ Constance’s sister commented, and would marvel that, when he left, ‘It is so curious to awake from Siberia to a Surrey Lane.’ But if Volkhovsky had been intriguing to the sisters, Kravchinsky was much more so. On being introduced to him when visiting his new home in the model Arts and Crafts suburb of Bedford Park, Constance found him barely resistible. With doting friends like the socially well-connected Garnett sisters, Kravchinsky’s respectability was firmly underwritten.