The World That Never Was (9 page)

France:
Suitcase of Rachkovsky’s papers sighted in Paris but then disappears

Russia:

Britain:

Other European:

United States:

Other:

Date: 1932

France:

Russia:

Britain:
Fred Charles retires to Whiteway Colony

Other European:

Italy:
Death of Malatesta

United States:

Other:

Introduction

In the early years of the twenty-first century, a British Home Secretary recommended that those wishing to understand what at that time was still termed the ‘War on Terror’ should look back to the 1890s. Parallels were widely drawn with the wave of bombings and assassinations that had swept Europe and America at the end of the nineteenth century, perpetrated by anarchists and nihilists for whom London and Switzerland had provided refuge. Then as now, it was remarked, disaffected young men from swollen immigrant communities had been radicalised by preachers of an extremist ideology and lured into violence. Some commentators wrote of ‘Islamo-anarchism’, while others remarked that Al-Zawahiri, the ‘brains’ of Al-Qaeda, had studied the revolutionary writings of the godfather of anarchism, Michael Bakunin.

The parallels were persuasive and the comparison of the new threat to western civilisation with one long since vanquished appeared almost comforting. Yet, such references are largely misleading when detached from any sense of the circumstances that moulded the revolutionaries of the nineteenth century, impelling them to seek an alternative and better future. When their world is viewed from the position they occupied at society’s margins, whether by choice or ill fortune, an era named for its glittering surface as a belle époque or Gilded Age is thrown into stark relief. The effect is uncanny, for many features of that landscape do indeed echo those of our own times but in ways that should shame us as well as causing deeper disquiet.

The obscene discrepancies of wealth between the rich and the poor were painfully obvious in the last decades of the nineteenth century, existing cheek by jowl in cities such as London, but they are scarcely less troublesome now, and still more extreme in the global village. Back then, the industrial exploitation of labour and the greed of the few generated social injustice and economic instability; the unwillingness of politicians to confront malign corporate and financial powers led to disillusionment,
even in purported democracies; and all was set against a background of economies staggering from crisis to crisis, uncertain how to tame a rampant, savage capitalism. Organised religion, discredited by science, flailed against its loss of authority, while others saw the greater spiritual threat in the nascent consumer culture and intrusiveness of advertising. Mass migration challenged the resilience of national cultures and created a strong cross-fertilised internationalism. Meanwhile, in a multi-polar world shaped by Great Power geopolitics, shifts in the balance of economic dynamism threatened peace, with alliances wrangled in the hope of averting or retarding the dance towards the precipice.

Extreme caution should be exercised in supposing that history ever even rhymes, let alone repeats itself. Nevertheless, the news headlines during the years that I have spent researching and writing this book have time and again left me with the impression that the intervening century has in some strange way folded back upon itself. We must sincerely hope that we too are not unknowingly caught up in such a deadly dance, and that the most extreme consequences of the flaws in that world are not to be repeated. Throughout the period in question a silent, secret clockwork of intrigue and manipulation was in operation to protect the status quo, just as it is today, yet then as now the risk of unforeseen consequences was not to be underestimated.

Framed by two revolutions, beginning with the Paris Commune of 1871 and ending with that staged by the Bolsheviks in October 1917, these are years tormented by the constant fear and possibility of violent upheaval. It was an age characterised by many contemporary social commentators as decadent or degenerate, a moment of crisis, perhaps even for the human species as a whole. The anarchists, seen as advocates of destruction and promulgators of terror, were often posited as the most shocking symptom of the malaise. The control, suppression and ultimate demonisation of their fiendish sect appeared to many a moral imperative, and was clearly as much a pleasure as a duty for many official defenders of law and order. For them ‘anarchism’ was a useful shorthand for the subversive threat posed by revolutionaries of all hues. Nor could the anarchists rely on the solidarity of their supposed brethren on the political left, to whom their liberal critique of state socialism was almost as intolerable as their socialist critique of capitalism was to those who wielded political power. With anarchism exposed to enemies on all sides, the violence perpetrated in its name by a few headstrong young men was more than enough to confirm the movement’s pariah status in perpetuity.

It was a fate scarcely deserved by the leading ideologues of the movement, some of them figures of international standing as scientists, who had vied with the dogmatic Marxists for the claim to champion a form of ‘scientific socialism’. Variously derided as utopian dreamers and reviled as desperate conspirators, with hindsight they emerge instead as plausible visionaries. Even the social democratic heirs of their fiercest critics would be hard pressed to deny that history has vindicated many of their remedies: female emancipation with state support for the care and education of children, collective social security, sustainable communities with power devolved as far as possible, with a federal United States of Europe to prevent the continent-wide wars that they foretold. The human spirit was to be celebrated against the dead hand of centralisation, and self-fulfilment would be achieved through creative work rather than material gain: the essence of the political agenda of ‘well-being’ now in vogue. Even their espousal of autonomous federated communities as the basis for a new form of society prefigures the ideas of localism and sustainability that many believe must now be implemented to preserve the health of the planet.

Peter Kropotkin’s theory of Mutual Aid, which asserted an evolutionary argument that cooperation rather than competition was the natural state of human relations, has received support from recent discoveries in the field of genetics. All that was required for mankind’s best instincts to flourish, he and his colleagues argued, was for the accreted institutions, hierarchies and privileges that had corrupted society to be swept away; left to their own devices, people would quickly and surely create a cooperative paradise. And yet it was this naïve optimism that left the movement so vulnerable to attack and manipulation.

Judged by the standards of political pragmatism, the position adopted by Kropotkin and others was catastrophic on many counts. At a time when many other socialist factions were busily marshalling their troops and handing executive power to conspiratorial elites, anarchism eschewed formal organisation or leadership of any sort, recoiling from coercion and central control. By placing such deep faith in the individual conscience and allowing validity to every honestly held opinion, consensus was inevitably elusive, while the movement left itself defenceless, almost on principle, against both malicious infiltration and co-option by those who sought to use political idealism as a cover for criminal intent. And whilst the anarchist philosophers’ hopes that the social revolution might come to pass with little or no bloodshed was doubtless sincere, it is hard to excuse their failure to forestall the extremes of violence to which their
acolytes were driven by frustration at the absence of any popular appetite for a more creative apocalypse. A dangerous credulity, though, was not the exclusive preserve of those who awaited Utopia.

Faced with a world of increasing complexity and rapid change, a complacent bourgeoisie craved easy explanations of anything that challenged its easeful existence. In such circumstances, the phenomenon of the all-encompassing ‘conspiracy theory’ was able to take root. The fanciful notion of an internationally coordinated anarchist revolution of which the isolated attacks with bombs, knives and revolvers marked the first skirmishes was only one example. Others drew in the credulous masses with fantastical stories of Freemasonic satanism and megalomaniac supermen. It was a fictitious conspiracy that harnessed the rising tide of anti-Semitism, though, which would truly define the genre:
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. And although public opinion was not yet ready to embrace the simplest, most ruthless solutions to such a perceived threat, the contemporary debate over criminal anthropology and eugenics darkly foreshadowed what lay ahead. That such ideas were advanced from and encouraged by the political left, with the most humane intentions, is typical of the paradoxical nature of the period.

From out of the midst of a tangled knot of forgeries, provocation, black propaganda, misplaced idealism and twisted political allegiances the horrors of world war, totalitarianism and genocide that plagued the twentieth century would grow, having already set deep roots. Credible theses have been advanced that the origins of fascism lie in nineteenth-century anarchism, or that the French nationalism of the
fin de siècle
, which itself embraced elements from the radical left, may have been the progenitor of Nazism. My interest here, however, is merely to unpick the elaborate deceptions and intrigues generated by all sides, in an attempt to discern the confluence of factors that led to the first international ‘War on Terror’ and the consequences that flowed from it. For amidst a welter of alarmism and misdirection, a genuine conspiracy of sorts does lie buried, less cogent and universal than that described by the
Protocols
, despite them sharing a common author, but far-reaching nonetheless. And if there are valuable lessons to be learned from the period, the most imperative are perhaps to be discovered here, however uncomfortable they may be.

In exploring such a murky world, I have been unsurprised that the evidence has been elusive and the official paper trail often sparse. How welcome would be the reappearance of the suitcase, last seen in Paris during the 1930s, containing the private papers of Peter Rachkovsky, the head of Russia’s foreign Okhrana and the fulcrum for so much of the
intrigue in the period. How convenient if the files relating to the Okhrana’s activities in London, and its relations with the American Pinkerton Agency, had not at some point been emptied; or, indeed, if the Belgian cabinet had forgotten to instruct that key police reports should disappear into secret dossiers, never to emerge again.

What has taken me aback, however, has been the tenacity with which the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch in London have sought to prevent access to their apparently limited records from the period: a number of ledgers, listing communications received from a wide range of sources. Along with the correspondence itself, for many years the ledgers themselves had been thought lost: pulped in the war effort, it was claimed, or destroyed by a bomb. Since their surprising reappearance in 2001, to be used as the basis of a doctoral thesis by a serving Special Branch officer, such access has not been replicated for other researchers, despite a Freedom of Information case I have pursued for several years. Following a ruling in favour of disclosure by the Information Commissioner and reprimands for the Metropolitan Police handling of the case, the police appeal to the Information Tribunal in 2009 resulted in the universal redaction of all names contained in the documents. The censored material raises as many questions as it answers.

Nevertheless, enough documentary evidence is available for a patient researcher to piece together a picture of this clandestine world of late nineteenth-century policing. The spiriting to America of the Okhrana’s Paris archive following the revolution in Russia, unveiled at the Hoover Institute in the 1950s, has preserved a rich resource; so too have the archives of the Paris Prefecture of Police, whose basement contains box upon box of material, including agents’ field reports, readily accessible to the public on request. Official documents jostle with a fascinating mass of material of more questionable reliability: reports from duplicitous informants, eager to prove themselves indispensible by passing off conjecture as fact; press coverage of false-flag police operations. And then there are the memoirs published by policemen and revolutionaries, all with an agenda to promote, or a desire to dramatise or justify their achievements.

The world that this book sets out to portray is one of slippery truths, where the key to success lies in the manipulation of popular opinion, where masters of deception weave webs of such complexity that they will ultimately trap themselves, and a clinical paranoiac offers some of the most perspicacious testimony. I have chosen to represent it in a mode that emphasises narrative over analysis, and in order to capture something of the subjective experience of those involved, at times I have taken the
protagonists at their own estimation, recounting stories that they told about themselves as fact. For the fullest exploration of those decisions, as well as for additional material relating to certain areas covered, the reader should look to the online notes that accompany this book: those published here offer only minimal citation.