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

Author:Alex Butterworth
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307379030
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: 2010-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

‘Two thousand men who smoke, drink and chat, and seven or eight hundred women who laugh, drink, smoke, and offer the greatest gaity in the world,’ marvelled one Russian aristocrat after his first visit to the Folies-Bergère. It was a world in which Peter Rachkovsky had made himself at home, a spider at the heart of his expanding web of spies and informants, alert for the slightest sign of weakness or insecurity that he might exploit, yet utterly insouciant. ‘Nothing in his appearance reveals his sinister affairs,’ one acquaintance of the time would recall. ‘Fat, restless, always with an ever-present smile on his lips, he made me think of some genial fellow on an excursion.’ The perfect disguise in a city where, it was observed, ‘pleasure is a social necessity’. It is all too easy to imagine Rachkovsky sweet-talking international dignitaries at such nightspots, between indulging his well-attested appetite for the petite young women of Paris. And while the hedonistic Russian aristocrat concluded his letter to his mistress in the St Petersburg ballet by joking that ‘We must annex Russia to this capital city, or else for preference this city to Russia’, Rachkovsky treated the proposition more seriously.

In the three years since his arrival, Rachkovsky had transformed a Paris bureau whose operations had lagged far behind the ‘excellent and conscientious’ work being carried out in Berlin and Vienna. Brushing aside rivals with a mixture of cunning and sheer dedication, Rachkovsky had made Paris the main bastion of ‘the systematic and covert surveillance of the Russian emigration abroad’ which Plehve, then overall chief of the police department and now deputy interior minister, had declared to be his top priority.

Nevertheless, the changes came at a price. As well as the basic running costs of the outfit, which included payments to freelance agents and to traitors in the revolutionary ranks for information rendered, there were the portiers and postmen to bribe for turning a blind eye to the perlustration of letters (copied and returned within the day) and fees to pay to prostitutes, whose reports of pillow talk afforded Rachkovsky access to the intimate thoughts of the émigré community. And whilst he had managed to negotiate an increase in the bureau’s budget, first to 132,000 francs and then by a further 50 per cent, there were fresh mutterings in St Petersburg about the lack of any conspicuous return on its investment, with Kropotkin’s release and Tikhomirov’s continued propaganda activities causing particular unease. Hampered by the bureaucracy of the Sûreté that impeded any cooperation, Rachkovsky had been playing a clever game, designed to ensure steady rather than spectacular results. It was now becoming clear, though, that to secure his position he needed a sensational success. The opportunity finally presented itself at the end of 1886.

‘On Saturday night printing press in Geneva successfully destroyed by me, fifth volume of the Herald and all revolutionary publications. Details by post,’ Rachkovsky telegraphed to St Petersburg on 11 November, signing himself off as Monsieur Léonard, his wife’s maiden name.

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