It was a moment of the kind that the leading anarchists of the last decade had long awaited, brimming with the potential for revolutionary change. Yet the most outspoken foot soldiers of the Socialist League remained on the fringes of the strike, preferring to exploit the holiday atmosphere that engulfed the East End to propagandise rather than engage with the more reformist agenda of those trade unionists who had devoted so much time and effort to preparing the ground among the dock workers. ‘Members of the league do not in any way compromise their principles by taking part in strikes,’ pronounced the Commonweal, whose editorial policy William Morris could no longer effectively steer. When the strike ended with the dockers settling for their initial pay demands being met, Malatesta, Kropotkin and others, though unsurprised, could not hide their disappointment. The scale of the popular protest had changed the political game in Britain, radically altering any calculation of how best the transformation of society might be effected. But the strike had also underlined just how cripplingly close the internal divisions within the anarchist movement – between ‘associationists’ such as Malatesta and the firebrand ‘individualists’ – came to being an outright schism.
Among each nationality to be found in London, the differences were writ large, with the ‘individualists’ eschewing the hard work and onerous compromises of practical politics and collective endeavour in favour of the untrammelled egotism of the criminal. So absolute was their position, indeed, that it seemed less as though anarchists were sloughing off the repressive dictates of society by illegal action, than that those disposed to criminality were adopting anarchism as a political figleaf.
Prominent among the Italian émigrés, Parmeggiani and Pini were so outraged by the suggestion of a socialist newspaper in Italy that their political espousal of expropriation was merely a cover for robbery, and that their pernicious influence suggested them as police agents, that they had travelled across Europe to attempt the assassination of its editor, Farina, by stabbing. After Pini’s arrest in Paris during their return journey to London, Malatesta would frequently meet with Parmeggiani, but it was an uneasy relationship. Jean Grave, since Kropotkin’s imprisonment, the effective editor of Le Révolté, renamed La Révolte since its move to Paris, came out in favour of the individualists’ position among the French, arguing that each man must act according to the dictates of his conscience, though the suggestion that this might extend as far as pimping his wife or turning police informant suggests a certain irony. When Grave in turn was imprisoned, however, the newspaper’s line would further harden under the caretaker editorship of Elisée Reclus’ nephew, Paul. Meanwhile, 1888 had seen hardliners and outspoken firebrands take over the Socialist League, among them Henry Samuels, Charles Mowbray, David Nicoll and even Frank Kitz, all of whom drifted ever more towards the individualist extreme.
William Morris strived to maintain the organisation as a broad church, but the strain was growing. ‘He disliked the violence that was creeping into his meetings,’ Ford Madox Ford would recollect, wryly adding that ‘He had founded them solely with the idea of promoting human kindness and peopling the earth with large-bosomed women dressed in Walter Crane gowns, and bearing great sheaves of full-eared corn.’ But there was a growing swell of resentment towards Morris among the more headstrong anarchists who, on one occasion, terminated a meeting in Hammersmith by throwing red pepper on the stove: an event observed and noted by a Special Branch informant. ‘Morris, who used to walk up and down the aisles like a rather melancholy sea captain on the quarterdeck in his nautical pea jacket was forced to flee uttering passionate sneezes that jerked his white hairs backwards and forwards like the waves of the sea,’ Ford would remember.
‘Agitate! Educate! Organise!’ Morris had written only a few months earlier. ‘Agitate, that the workers may be stirred and awakened to a sense of their position. Educate, that they may know the reasons of the evils they suffer. Organise, that we and they may overthrow the system that bears down and makes us what we are.’ But for Morris socialism had always been about the imagination: the capacity to inhabit, in prospect, a better world of spiritual and artistic fulfilment. When he started writing News from Nowhere in late 1889, it was not simply out of the need to reconcile his practical and ideal politics, nor to answer the ugly, mechanised and corporatist version of socialism predicted in the American Edward Bellamy’s 1888 book Looking Backward. It was to present a cogent vision of the world as he wished it to be, as a means to inspire hope and courage.
‘There were six persons present, and consequently six sections of the party were represented, four of which had strong but divergent anarchist opinions,’ the narrator tells us in the preface, preoccupied with the factionalism of the league. A night of tossing and turning, however, propels him into a twenty-first century in which the nuisances of the 1880s have vanished, replaced by the communism of which Morris dreamed, realised down to the last detail: a federalised society, living in simple harmony, its craftsmanship underpinned by technology that supported the relative leisure enjoyed by its citizens rather than alienating them from the creative pleasures of work. It was a neo-medieval Utopia, informed perhaps by Kropotkin’s research into guilds as a model for post-revolutionary organisation, but also Morris’ belief that medieval man had accepted limits on his freedom willingly because they were ‘the product of his own conscience’.
Whilst Morris moulded his ideal society of the distant future from the best of the past, the proximate cause of the revolution out of which it was born was drawn from his own experience: a massacre of demonstrators in Trafalgar Square by troops serving the military dictatorship of ‘a brisk young general’. Conflating Boulanger and Bloody Sunday, along with strong echoes of the Paris Commune, Morris demonstrated how in minds permeated by socialist education such brutality from the authorities would provoke revulsion and a successful general strike. Aided by ‘the rapidly approaching breakdown of the whole system founded on the world-market and its supply; which now becomes so clear to all people’, and a food supply guaranteed by the revolutionaries, the logistics of which Kropotkin was also researching and would present in his The Conquest of Bread, power would shift from the privileged to the workers with relatively little bloodshed.
Dynamite would be held in reserve as a last resort: the passive resistance of unarmed protesters would win the day. Sailing up the Thames at the end of the book, and back into the reality of 1890, the narrator expresses the hope that ‘if others can see it as I have seen it, then may it be called a vision rather than a dream’. There were darker visions at work, though, beside which Morris’ promised Utopia would struggle to take root.
16
Deep Cover
Paris, 1887–1890
From the centre of his web of operations in the Russian Embassy, Peter Rachkovsky’s operations against the émigrés continued, his methods becoming ever more subtle and various. The psychological game he played during 1887 with Lev Tikhomirov, the effective leader of the rump of the People’s Will in exile and among his highest priority targets, called for particular patience and self-restraint. By forgoing the simple gratification of eliminating the man who had ordered Sudeikin’s murder, he hoped to achieve an altogether more profound reward.
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-trembl
ing 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 hav
e 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.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 40