The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents

by Alex Butterworth

  Taxil’s revelations furnished this ravening monster with witches to hunt, at the very moment when the opinion-makers of a decadent society were themselves demonstrating a growing interest in the occult. Little wonder then that Archbishop Meurin of Paris, one of Taxil’s many correspondents in the Church hierarchy, fell for his tales of the satanic Pope in Charleston. All it would have taken for the story to crumble was for Meurin or someone else to unearth Taxil’s true name – Gabriel Jogand-Pages – and to look back beyond his Freemasonic days to earlier deceptions: the shoal of killer sharks that harried the coast near his home town of Marseilles, in the nervous weeks after the fall of the Commune, or the submerged Roman city sighted beneath the waters of Lake Geneva. But nobody thought to do so. As a result, with no support but invented witnesses, and no one with the nerve or desire to expose his fraud, Taxil pursued his fiction to ever more vertiginous extremes. ‘Compared with the tugboat I had dispatched to hunt for sharks in the coves near Marseilles,’ he would later marvel, ‘the boat of Palladism was a true battleship… the battleship turned into a squadron … the squadron grew into a whole navy.’ When that time came he would reveal the genuine nature of his enterprise, but for the moment he continued to play the part of Freemasonry’s scourge with glee, furnishing his fearful, foolish society with a diabolic scapegoat on to which it could project its many anxieties. Indeed, it is hard not to see the goat-headed devil that is illustrated presiding over the rites in Taxil’s pamphlets as yet one more of his in-jokes.

  Even setting aside the contribution made to the ongoing struggle between progressives and conservatives by Taxil’s great fraud, Peter Rachkovsky would surely have followed the career of such a kindred spirit keenly. The manipulation of the credulous contemporary masses was increasingly the spymaster’s stock in trade, after all, and the Russian pogroms of 1881 had revealed to him how susceptible the late nineteenth century remained to the superstitious manias of the Middle Ages. Doubtless to his chagrin, he had not yet managed to pull off a coup on anything like the scale of Taxil’s, despite having planned a spectacular of his own during the centenary celebrations.

  In plotting an outrage to take place against the backdrop of the Expo, Rachkovsky may have remembered that his forebear as de Mohrenheim’s pet intelligencer, Wilhelm Stieber, had achieved his most significant success at the 1867 Paris Expo when the near death of Tsar Alexander II at the hands of would-be assassin Berezowski had poisoned Franco-Russian relations. Rachkovsky, though, desired the opposite effect: the yoking of France and Russia together against the common enemy of revolutionary terrorism.

  For the past four years the turncoat revolutionary Hekkelman, still operating under the name Landesen and Rachkovsky’s most prized undercover agent, had been living in Switzerland. There he had wormed his way into the core group of People’s Will policymakers by claiming a sympathetic ‘uncle’ prepared to pass on profits from the family firm to finance any special projects the nihilists had in mind, most particularly bomb-making. But then, in February 1889, a bomb being tested on the slopes of Mount Uetilberg by two philosophy students, both leading members of the new generation of the People’s Will, exploded prematurely: Dembo was mortally wounded, his Polish companion Dembski seriously so. As a result, a number of prominent Russian activists were expelled by Switzerland and Germany, but, like the exploding bomb itself, the reaction was a little too early and not quite damaging enough to serve Rachkovsky’s purposes.

  The chance that the Expo presented for a publicity coup may have been missed, but it also afforded new opportunities, for it was in the bustling bars of Paris that Landesen, generous to a fault in buying drinks for those who hung on his words of provocation, first encountered an impressionable Russian medical student by the name of Reinstein. He quickly inveigled his way into the young man’s life and trust.

  ‘The revolution is not advancing; the energies are asleep; the consciences are dead,’ Landesen complained to Reinstein and his friends, repeatedly urging them during the coming months to join him in a bomb-making operation on French soil. Or rather, to undertake the actual production themselves, since Landesen, a dapper, scented and well-suited young man with floppy blond hair, preferred not to remove his gloves. Reinstein at first resisted the provocation, cleaving to Kibalchich’s notion that the movement would be dishonoured if it did not make all the materièl it needed within the motherland; but by March 1890, Landesen had persuaded him of the legitimacy of testing explosives outside Russia, with news of a proposed visit to France by the tsar later in the year perhaps providing a practical incentive. The next two months were spent in preparation, bringing into the conspiracy several other violent opponents of the Russian regime, including a number of women with dramatic, first-hand experience of tsarist persecution.

  Still only twenty-two years old, Sofia Fedorova had first been arrested five years earlier, when caught taking food and clothing to her imprisoned parents in St Petersburg. Escaping detention, she then set up an underground printing press which was raided and her female colleague seized, but again Fedorova escaped the police, leaping from a window, only to be recaptured and sentenced to eight years of hard labour. For her final escape she slipped over the gunwales of a convict barge in western Siberia, and crossed the 3,000 miles back to St Petersburg, alone and hunted, before making her way to Paris where she heard that the current cause célèbre in the émigré community – the suicide of five women in the prison camp at Kara after one of them had been viciously beaten – involved her old colleague from the printing press. Others in Reinstein’s group – some proposed by Landesen, some by Rachkovsky – had reasons of their own for joining the conspiracy, and particular talents to contribute: Lavrenius the inventor; Nakashidze the technician, summoned from London to assist; the brilliant Suzanne ‘Tauba’ Bromberg, a poor Jewish girl and gold medallist medical student; Dembski, who had survived the accidental blast in Switzerland; and Stepanov, a relative veteran of the revolutionary underworld. Not even Stepanov, though, quite had Fedorova’s fiery motivation.

  The grenades Landesen advocated were in the shape of tubes and spheres, and featured a novel design: highly explosive panclastite, with a fragile serpentine tube of glass placed at the heart of each bomb to trigger the reaction when it cracked on impact. After gathering to test the devices in woods at Bondy, each member of the group was sent away by Landesen with samples wrapped in newspaper to store until required, along with written details of the part they were to play in the conspiracy. Not all were so naïve as to accept the dangerous gift at face value. Stepanov had nurtured suspicions about Landesen since before the demonstration in the woods: he would later reveal that he considered Rachkovsky’s provocateur to be ‘a real boulevardier’ who knew ‘the whole of Establishment Paris’. Vladimir Burtsev, absent on an expedition to smuggle revolutionary literature into Russia, wrote from Romania to warn his friends in Paris: he was being tailed by the local Okhrana agents and had finally realised that it must have been Landesen who, having waved him off from the station in Paris, had given Rachkovsky details of his itinerary.

  Burtsev’s warning arrived too late, though; the die had been cast. Even the handful of plotters who reluctantly approached the French police with their concerns found themselves cold-shouldered for several crucial days. Landesen went to ground, and Rachkovsky’s factotum, the journalist Jules Hansen, delivered a complete dramatis personae for the plot to a grateful minister of the interior, Constans, who immediately ordered their arrest. Before dawn on 29 May, French police battered down the doors of the conspirators and the word ‘arrested’ was written in quick succession next to all but one of the twenty-seven names on their hit list. The four days that the warrant for Landesen’s arrest was held up in the system gave him enough time to disappear.

  ‘At last!’ cried the tsar, when informed of the interdiction of a revolutionary plot on which he had been continually briefed, ‘So France has a government at last!’ The contribution made by the arrests to the establishment of friend
ly relations between Russia and France was, Hansen believed, ‘immense’, and de Mohrenheim was effusive in his letter to Goron, the prefect of police: ‘Your Excellency, Monsieur le Préfet and, permit me to add, my dearest, truest and great friend!… I hope to shake your hand in the near future with the greatest, most sincere and unchanging affection and friendly devotion.’ The indignation expressed by the French security services when some of the less tractable and more influential powers suggested that they had merely been carrying out orders from St Petersburg soon evaporated in the warm light of such appreciation, and Rachkovsky was more than happy to concede that he had known little of the explosives until informed by Monsieur Loze of the Sûreté. Any lingering awkwardness or unease over the disappearance of Landesen, the leading conspirator, was washed away in a rush of rewards for French functionaries, from police officers to the president. ‘They have reached the point of making the republic the mouchard of the world,’ one old deputy was overheard remarking. ‘Ferry bends his knee to Bismarck, but Constans kneels before the tsar.’ The world at large, however, accepted the story of the plotters at face value.

  Nothing the accused could say in court carried any credibility. ‘How many of the bombs did you make?’ asked the defence counsel; ‘None,’ replied Reinstein, ‘I received them all from Landesen.’ ‘Always Landesen,’ the lawyer shrugged, dubiously, suggesting that it was too easy to lay all the blame on the one conspirator who got away. And when it was put to Reinstein that neither he nor his companions in the dock required any provocation, he merely replied with resignation, ‘Oh! How that would suit the Russian ambassador!’ With half the French press in Rachkovsky’s pocket, nobody was listening, its readership distracted by reports of Lavrenius’ improbable claim that the ‘bomb’ in Stepanov’s possession was in fact an experimental version of a propulsion engine for manned balloons: one that not even the testimony of his old professor and the production of a patent application could persuade the court to accept. Only the sentencing of Landesen to five years in absentia roused a degree of unease.

  It was left to Rochefort’s L’Intransigeant to voice its founder’s bitter disillusionment, from his exile across the Channel: ‘Really, the only punishable fault of the nihilists, so viciously sentenced last Saturday, is to have believed that the France of today is the old France, a refuge for the proscribed and friend of the persecuted.’ In fact, the manner in which the bomb plot was presented to the public cleverly struck a number of populist chords, and in other circumstances might easily have persuaded the fickle Rochefort to swing behind the government position. The conspiracy had been Israelite in origin, and backed by Jewish money, announced polemics published in the Russian newspapers Novosti and Grazhdanin, which emphasised the ethnicity of a number of the plotters and demanded reprisals against Jews throughout the empire. Such an interpretation was promoted in France too, where Edouard Drumont, editor of La France Juive, had just founded the Anti-Semitic League of France as ‘an instrument of national resurrection’ that would ‘fight the pernicious influence of the grasping Jewish financiers, whose clandestine and merciless conspiracy jeopardises the welfare, honour and security of France’. And only days before the arrest of the bombers, threats against Baron Adolphe de Rothschild himself had raised fears of an anti-Semitic terror campaign.

  ‘Are they affiliated to our anarchists?’ asked Le Petit Parisien during the trial of the Russian conspirators. ‘It is hardly likely, since their views are not the same and their methods of action are quite different.’ The prefecture was furious, and expeditiously presented a summary of its reasons for disagreeing with the line taken by the newspaper to Constans at the ministry of the interior. The police rooted their thesis in the congress of the Anarchist International in Switzerland of 1881, when the Russian delegates had taken it upon themselves to serve their foreign friends at dinner, in expression of brotherhood; ‘All true Russian nihilists are anarchists,’ one had ingratiatingly told the company, proposing that they should ‘act hand in hand in their strikes’; the Lyons bomb attack of that year was said also to have been a joint effort with nihilist technicians; Kropotkin’s straddling of the two movements was adduced as evidence, with Elisée Reclus fingered as the fulcrum of their cooperation. Since then, it was erroneously implied, the movements had grown closer together. Memos flew within the government, and a strategy to make anarchism and terrorism synonymous started to take shape.

  Rachkovsky should have basked in the success of his enterprise. Within weeks of the tsar’s conversion to a new respect for the French government, secret negotiations for a Franco-Russian alliance had been initiated. As a practical gesture, the Russians, after toying with the idea of equipping their army with the British Enfield rifle, upped their order to the Lebel factory at Châtellerault. With Sarah Bernhardt rousing French patriotism to new heights with her portrayal of Jeanne d’Arc at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, and Admiral Colomb predicting in his speculative book The Great War of 189—that hostilities could break out at any moment, and might be precipitated by an event such as the assassination of a crowned head in the Balkans, both sides were adjusting to the need for amity. A squadron of the French fleet was even invited to visit the port of Kronstadt the following summer, at the time of the annual Russian manoeuvres – a gesture of friendship that would be overshadowed only by the tsar peremptorily declaring ‘Enough, enough!’ after a single verse of the revolutionary hymn the ‘Marseillaise’ – and audiences at the opera stood for de Mohrenheim, cheering ‘Vive la Russie!’

  Yet still Rachkovsky could not rest. It had been Landesen’s own choice to go into hiding and then flee to England, rather than stay and prove to the revolutionaries that he was truly one of them, as Rachkovsky had planned. Now, holed up in the Grand Hotel in the English seaside resort of Brighton, the eight years that Hekkelman had spent under deep cover as Landesen had left him close to a state of mental breakdown. If Rachkovsky was going to ensure that his agent remained safely in the fold, he needed to act decisively, and did so in a letter that was a masterpiece of manipulation. ‘Regard an informant as you would a beautiful woman with whom you are having an affair,’ the senior St Petersburg policeman, Zubatov, had been in the habit of telling his junior officers. ‘Dote upon her. One false move can lead to her disgrace.’ Rachkovsky’s letter, preserved in a barely legible draft in the Okhrana archives, veers between tenderness and a tone of bullying with an astonishing nimbleness.

  ‘I was so sorry to learn from your last letter how much you are suffering,’ he writes to Landesen:

  What is it that drags you back to that suffocating place, from which you so long to escape? Why, instead of allowing your wounded soul to heal in peace, do you let it fester?

  … Of course, had you been arrested together with some others (which is what I recommended), then after a few interesting days in gaol, you would have been a free man once again…But you were tired of this old game. To regret anything now is not only too late but also will not do you any good.

  … There is no hard legal evidence against you, but suspicions could grow, which, aided by a set of indisputable facts, might lead to a reasonable conclusion. This, as you well know, is more than sufficient, under the revolutionary code, to sentence you without appeal …Your attackers will no doubt be totally demoralised [when you fight back against] those repulsive, maddened Jew-cries of ‘crucify him!’ If someone should attack you, try to write something along the lines of the following:

  ‘It is with indignation that I perceive the continuing slanderous attacks on my person at the hands of my dear comrades. Like a mob of the possessed, you have lost your common sense and do nothing but howl fiercely to the pleasure of certain…Pharisees in our midst…Forget my personality and my past and forget how you led me out of Paris after the arrests. Continue to publish articles about me claiming that I had a horde of lovers and a weakness for roulette. Now, having sold out that “nihilists’ plot,” I can open my own harem and spend my days promenading the boulevards of
Monaco like some golden cloud?! Oh, you are not revolutionaries, you are nothing but filthy human waste!’

  … In my opinion, you have terminated relations with the revolutionaries once and for all, and having anything to do with them, even on a purely personal level, would mean betraying your convictions and do terrible injustice to yourself: you invested all your energy…your whole self into the last job. Enough! Try to view your past as nothing more than an unpleasant dream, bring your nerves in order, and try to focus your mind on the future, rather than looking back and torturing yourself over this memory or that. You certainly deserve to live an honest life and do a dignified job – not only as far as [your service to] the government, but also as far as your own conscience is concerned. So enjoy yourself, have some fun and rest until the autumn as the Lord guides you, fully unshackled from your own past and from all obligations. In the meantime I shall be in Petersburg, but on my return we will raise our glasses to the new tracks along which your life will run.

  This was the head of the Paris Okhrana acting as psychotherapist, priest, life coach and consoling barman rolled into one, and it was a compelling performance. Rachkovsky gently reprimands, then straight away soothes. Indulging Hekkelman’s delusion, he appears genuinely to accept that Landesen is innocent in the whole affair, stepping into the dangerous territory where fact and fiction blur. A dose of anti-Semitism is injected to rouse the self-hating Jew in Hekkelman, but swiftly followed by a riposte intended to sting the shy, louche agent into indignation.