The World That
Never Was

FOR MATILDA AND THOMAS

Published by Vintage 2011
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Copyright © Alex Butterworth 2010

Alex Butterworth has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
The Bodley Head

Vintage
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780099551928

Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Alex Butterworth

Praise

Title

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Prologue: This Thing of Darkness

Dramatis Personae

Introduction

1 A Distant Horizon

2 Communards

3 From Prince to Anarchist

4 Around the World in 280 Days

5 To the People

6 Forward!

7 Propaganda by Deed

8 Spies and Tsaricides

9 Inconvenient Guests

10 Voices in the Fog

11 The Holy Brotherhood

12 A Great New Tide

13 The Making of the Martyrs

14 Decadence and Degeneration

15 The Revolution is Postponed

16 Deep Cover

17 The Russian Memorandum

18 Dynamite in the City of Light

19 Wicked Laws

20 The Mysteries of Bourdin and the Baron

21 A Time of Harmony

22 Conspiracy Theories

23 Agents Unmasked

24 War and Revolution

25 Coda

List of Illustrations

Timeline

Notes on Sources

Select Bibliography

Picture section

Acknowledgements

The anarchist Utopia of selfless cooperation may not have come much closer in the last hundred years, but throughout the years of this book’s preparation I have been fortunate enough to experience something like it in microcosm: any shortfall in the area of Mutual Aid is my own.

In France, the archivists at the Prefecture of Police under M. Gicquel, including Oliver Accarie-Pierson, Jean-Daniel Girard, Bernard Goupy and Mélik Benmiloud were invariably helpful on my repeated visits, as were Catherine Mérot and her colleagues at the Archives Nationales; Rossana Vaccaro at the Bibliothèque Jean Maitron, Université de Paris 1 deserves particular gratitude for visits to the stacks during closed hours, when the rest of Paris was on strike. In Amsterdam, I enjoyed the attentive care of Ella Molenaar at the International Institute of Social History, while Pierre-Alain Tailler at the Archives Générales du Royaume in Brussels was kind enough to direct me towards his exceptional assistant Felip Strubbe, whose committed burrowing generated some remarkable late revelations. The magisterial guidance of Zinaida Peregudova at the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow was greatly appreciated, even on those occasions when eagerly awaited files proved empty.

In America, Ronald M. Bulatoff at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University elucidated the complexities of the Okhrana Archive, while the library staff at the universities of Kansas and Rutgers expedited my microfilm investigations. In Great Britain, Janet Allen at Senate House Library of the University of London and Katya Rogatchevskaia at the British Library have been of particular help, while a Carlyle bursary from the London Library has enabled me to continue to use its remarkable resources; the staff of all three institutions, and those of the Bodleian Library, the National Archives in Kew, the University of Birmingham library and the Sheffield City Archives have all been patient with my enquiries. I have appreciated too the courtesy shown by Nigel Shankster in the archives of the Metropolitan Police, despite our differences of opinion.

In this regard, the Freedom of Information case that I initiated to gain access to the Special Branch ledgers from the 1890s has, over its prolonged course, evinced much generous legal advice: from Julia Apostle and Martin Soames at DLA Piper, John Ashton of the FOI Ltd Consultancy and Vanessa Milton at Random House. At the Information Commission, overwhelmed with applications, I have found Jo Pedder, Adam Sowerbutt, Antonia Swann and Caroline Howes to be consistently professional, prompt and scrupulous in their work on the case: the contrast with my experience of the Information Tribunal has been striking.

Among the many individuals who have shared with me their specialist knowledge and advice are Regula Boschler, Dr Lindsey Clutterbuck, Michel Cordillot of Université de Paris 8, Frank Engehausen of the Historisches Seminar at Heidelberg University, Aleksandr Ivanovich Kokurin, Dr Julia Mannheim and Adhaf Soueif; the doctoral theses of Dr Bob Henderson and Dr Pietro Dipaolo revealed some fascinating insights. Many friends too have helped in their various ways: Sarah Adams, Roland Chambers, Scott Goodfellow, Saira Shah and Pedro Ferreira with introductions, Jerry Brotton with references, Benjamin Carter with copying, Rachel Holmes with tussles over Tussy, Chris Morgan Jones with cocktails, Melissa Morandi with the geography of a fighting retreat, Tom Reiss with an untraceable book, Vijay Sharma with a prod in the right direction and John Wyver with a pointer to the right mairie. Colleagues among the governors at the Margaret McMillan Children’s Centre have provided a living example of the journey to Utopia. The sustained interest of Simon Ardizzone, Andy Beckett, Gail Eisenstadt, David Gale, Sara Holloway, Spencer Hyman, Deborah Levy and Stanislav Sermedjev has been a comfort, as has that of Ed Davey, whose database-building skills have been invaluable. Dominique Shafer’s late secretarial contribution was a godsend.

Sylvie Audoly, Brian Heller, Lisa Gallagher, Susanne Lea, Antoine Audouard, Anne-Marie Stott, Thomas Guillot and Galina Vinogradova have all provided the warmest of hospitality on my travels, while Constantin Tublin and Natasha Smirnova may well have saved me from frostbite in the depth of a Russian winter. I could not have had more delightful surroundings in which to write than Grove House, courtesy of Polly McLean and Rose McAfee, or to complete the book than Casa dei Fichi, for which my thanks to Jamie and Katherina Bielenberg-Bulloch and Christopher Bielenberg. The loan of Otherwise by Martin and Naomi Jennings has kept me afloat, Lesley Cusse’s password, connected. For their unconditional patronage, however, my deepest gratitude is to Stewart and Tamsin Wilkinson: Ivy Cottage is the refuge that every writer needs.

I have been supremely fortunate too in my research assistants, Luba Vinogradova, and Nika Frank whose youthful brilliance as a translator of Russian and German, scholar and critic I scarcely deserved. Dr Constance Bantman, Stephen Hancock and Professor Bernard Porter have all given greatly of their time to offer thorough, engaged and astute critiques that have saved me from many errors; they are, of course, exonerated of all responsibility for any that remain. Financial assistance received from the Authors Foundation, administered by the Society of Authors, in the form of a K. Blundell Trust award, offered a lifeline when completion of the archival research was in jeopardy, and was much appreciated.

Jörg Hensgen, Rowena Skelton-Wallace, Kay Peddle and Liam Relph at Bodley Head have offered timely support, David Milner an acute and sympathetic eye and ear; particular thanks are due to Will Sulkin for his unstinting commitment to the book in difficult circumstances and despite the author’s seemingly cavalier attitude to deadlines. Far more than an agent, Patrick Walsh has negotiated many obstacles on the book’s behalf: his team at Conville and Walsh, in particular Alex Christofi and Jake Smith-Bosanquet, deserve plaudits too. In New York, Christie Fletcher and Melissa Chinchilla found it the best of homes at Pantheon, where I am truly grateful for the support, enthusiasm and patience of Dan Frank, Jeff Alexander and Danny Yanez.

My greatest gratitude is due to my family, whose love, support and tolerance have been endlessly tested. My parents, Ros and Bas Butterworth, to whom I owe so much, and my in-laws, Penny and Sebastian Carter, have given of their time without complaint. Half the lives of my delightful children, Matilda and Thomas, have been spent in the book’s shadow, yet they have thrived regardless. For that and so much besides I owe a debt of inexpressible gratitude to my wife, Rebecca Carter, whose extra ordinary human qualities are matched by her supreme talent and tenacity as an editor: a vocation which she has long deserved to practise without domestic distractions.

Prologue

This Thing of Darkness

Paris, 1908

In the eyes of the world, the group that assembled daily in Boris Savinkov’s spartan Paris apartment in October 1908 would have represented the most formidable concentration of terrorists history had yet seen. The sixty-six-year-old Peter Kropotkin, a descendant of the Rurik dynasty of early tsars, may have appeared unthreatening, with his twinkling eyes, bushy white beard, paunch and distinguished, bald dome of a head, but some suspected him of having incited the 1901 assassination of McKinley, the American president. With him sat his Russian contemporaries, the revolutionaries Vera Figner and German Lopatin, who had only recently emerged from the terrible Schlüsselburg fortress, against whose vast walls they had listened to the freezing waters of the River Neva and Lake Ladoga lap ceaselessly for twenty years. Locked in solitary confinement, in cells designed to prevent any communication, they were there as leaders of the organisation that had assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881. And among the younger generation, scattered around the room, there were others who could count grand dukes, government ministers and police chiefs among their many victims. But whatever the suspicions at the French Sûreté, Scotland Yard or the Fontanka headquarters of the Russian Okhrana, whose agents loitered in the street outside, their purpose on this occasion was not to conspire, but to uncover the conspiracies of others.

Kropotkin, Lopatin and Figner – an exalted trio in the revolutionary pantheon – had been summoned to form a Jury of Honour, for a trial convened by the central committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party of Russia. Their task was to determine the truth or otherwise of an extraordinary accusation made by one of their number: that the movement’s most idolised hero, Evno Azef, was in fact in the pay of the Okhrana, and responsible for a shocking series of deceptions and betrayals. Commissioned for the weight of authority and experience that they could bring to bear in a case of unprecedented sensitivity, it was hoped that their status would ensure that, whatever the verdict, it would be beyond challenge.

It was a necessary precaution, for in this looking-glass trial, staffed exclusively by notorious lawbreakers, one thing above all was topsy-turvy. Vladimir Burtsev, the revolutionary movement’s self-appointed counter-intelligence expert, who had levelled the original accusation of treachery, had become the accused. Okhrana ruses to seed dissent in the revolutionary movement were all too common, and after his defamatory allegations concerning the legendary Azef, the Jury of Honour needed to settle the matter once and for all.

So it was that, for three weeks, the distinguished jurors sat behind a table and listened as the neat, intense figure of Vladimir Burtsev, with his light goatee beard and steel-rimmed spectacles, earnestly explained how the revolutionary they all knew as the ‘Frenchman’ or ‘Fat One’ at the same time figured on the Okhrana payroll as ‘Vinogradov’, ‘Kapustin’, ‘Philipovsky’ and ‘Raskin’. Their Azef had bound his comrades in a cult of self-sacrifice by his sheer charisma, relished the destruction of the tsar’s allies and fantasised about remote-control electrochemical bombs and flying machines that could deliver terror ever more effectively. The Okhrana’s Azef had set his comrades up for mass arrest by the political police in raids that stretched from the forests of Finland to the centre of Moscow, then celebrated at orgies laid on by his secret-police handler in a private room of the luxurious Malyi Iaroslavets restaurant. A St Petersburg apartment was, Burtsev alleged, reserved exclusively for the fortnightly meetings at which Raskin-Azef and the head of the Okhrana coordinated their priorities. This Azef thought nothing of murdering comrades, or betraying them for execution, to cover his tracks. And his heinous treachery was tinged with the macabre: once, on being shown the head of an unknown suicide bomber preserved in a jar of vodka by his police handler, he had appeared to relish identifying it as that of ‘Admiral’ Kudryavtsev, a rival from the Maximalist faction of terrorists.

As those in the courtroom listened to Burtsev’s allegations, an instinct for psychic self-protection closed their minds. To the veteran revolutionaries Azef was a potent avenger of past wrongs, while the younger generation had allowed themselves to become emotionally enslaved to their mentor’s mystique. For either group to entertain the possibility that Azef might be a traitor was to peer into an abyss. How, they demanded, could Burtsev possibly prove such an absurdity? That very day, Savinkov told the court, he was awaiting news of Tsar Nicholas’ assassination on board the new naval cruiser Rurik during its maiden voyage, according to a plan formulated by Azef. What comparable proof of his own commitment to the cause could Burtsev offer? Was the truth not, in fact, that it was Burtsev himself who had been turned by the Okhrana and assigned to destabilise their organisation? Why, others pressed, did Burtsev refuse to name his witnesses, if they actually existed, unless they were of such questionable reliability as to make protecting their anonymity a safer strategy for him to pursue? Vera Figner, whose long imprisonment had done nothing to soften her pitiless dark eyes, snarled at Burtsev that once his infamy was confirmed he would have no choice but to make good on his promise to blow out his own brains.

Under such pressure, Burtsev played his trump card. Shortly before the Jury of Honour had convened, he confided, feeling their rapt attention, he had tracked down the ex-chief of the Russian political police, Alexei Lopukhin, to Cologne. Discreetly, he had followed him on to a train, hesitating until they were under steam before he entered his compartment. Lopukhin might have been expected to flinch at the appearance of a possible assassin, and curse the loss of the protection he had enjoyed when in police service: the armed guard of crack agents and the locked carriages and shuttered windows. Instead, encountering one of his enemies on neutral territory, he treated him like an honoured foe. At Burtsev’s suggestion, the pair settled down to a guessing game: he would hazard a description of the police department’s foremost secret agent, and Lopukhin would confirm only whether his surmise was correct …

As Burtsev concluded his compelling tale, German Lopatin groaned. ‘What’s the use of talking?’ he said. ‘It’s all clear now.’ Azef had refused to attend the trial, arguing that a sense of affront prevented him from being present in the courtroom to clear his name. His punishment was therefore decided in absentia. A villa would be rented with a tunnel that led to a cave just across the Italian border where the traitor could be hanged without diplomatic repercussions. Realising that the man he had trusted above all others had played him for a fool, Savinkov bayed loudest for blood.

*

Until Burtsev had delivered his bombshell, only the elderly Kropotkin had been resolute in his support of his thesis. There was a personal sympathy, certainly, for Burtsev who, like his own younger self, had managed to escape from the tsarist police in the most dramatic fashion. And Kropotkin may have remembered too how, over thirty years before, he had spent many hours trying to convince a sceptical German Lopatin, now his co-juror, of his own credibility: that his aristocratic background should not stand in the way of his joining the revolutionaries. Most of all, though, he possessed a hard-earned understanding of the bottomless depths that the chiefs of the Russian political police would plumb in their scheming. In the course of his career as one of anarchism’s greatest theorists and leading activists, he had repeatedly seen idealistic men and women across the world fall prey to the wiles of agents provocateurs. Kropotkin had come to believe where persistent charges of spying and provocation were made by a number of individuals over a period of time, that the smoke nearly always signalled fire.

Stepping out into the rue La Fontaine, after the agreement of Azef’s sentence, careless of the watchful eyes that swivelled towards him over upturned collars and twitching newspapers, Kropotkin would have felt a mixture of relief and dismay: that the traitor had been unmasked, but that the struggle to which he had devoted his life had engendered such a creature. The exposure of Azef was surely to be celebrated for the light it shed into the diabolical realm of shadows where he had dwelt: a world in which the boundaries of reality and invention were blurred. Kropotkin had many regrets about anarchism’s long drift into the use of terror tactics, and must have been tempted to blame the intrigues and provocations of the secret police, and imagine the cancer excised. And yet, in many ways, Evno Azef embodied the central paradox of the political philosophy that Kropotkin had done so much to develop and promulgate. Simple in his brute appetites, yet dizzyingly adept as a conspirator, Azef’s unusual blend of attributes shaped him into a phenomenon of a sort that no one involved in the revolutionary struggle had adequately foreseen.

Anarchism’s ultimate aim was to usher in a society of perfect beings; a heaven on earth in which harmonious coexistence was achieved without coercion or the impositions of distant authority, but rather arose out of each individual’s enlightened recognition of their mutual respect and dependency. Such a world, Kropotkin believed, would flourish naturally once the age-old cages of commerce, hierarchy and oppression that stunted and distorted human nature were torn down. Until then an anarchist programme of education could usefully preserve a generation from such taint, and prepare it to claim mankind’s birthright in full. There were those, however, who acted on the impulse to hasten the advent of that paradise, or else out of vengeance or frustration, taking only their own vaunted conscience as their guide.

Though consistent with anarchism’s idealistic tenets, such a creed was a recipe for disaster in a flawed society whose injustices already drove men to insanity and crime. For when the movement’s ideological leaders refused on principle to disown murder, violent theft or even paid collaboration with the police, if it helped feed a starving mouth or might advance the cause, the scope for the malicious manipulation of susceptible minds was boundless.

The world was far from what Kropotkin had dreamed it might become, but was there no hope for the future? Adjoining Savinkov’s apartment block in rue La Fontaine stood the architect Guimard’s newly constructed art nouveau masterpiece, Castel Béranger. In the sinuous, organic forms of its gated entrance – in the mysterious leaves and tendrils of its decorative wrought iron, that curled up from the ground like smoke, then whiplashed back – ideas central to his political creed had been distilled into a compelling visual form: individualism challenged uniformity, while progress vanquished convention. And yet the Paris in which he had spent the last three weeks – a belle époque city of exclusive pleasures and spasmodic street violence – fell far short of the aspirations expressed in its architecture.

The filigree ironwork that vaulted the new Grand Palais, the crowds that issued periodically from the stations of the recently tunnelled Métro, and the soaring pylon of the Eiffel Tower eloquently expressed the great era of change that had passed since Kropotkin’s first visit to the city three decades before. But there was scant evidence that the human ingenuity expended on the technological advances of the age had been matched by developments in the political and social spheres. While the years had mellowed the elegant masonry in which Baron Haussmann, Emperor Napoleon III’s prefect of the Seine, had rebuilt Paris in the 1860s, the crushing bourgeois values of self-interest and conformity celebrated in his mass-produced blocks still held sway. Fear of a rising Germany had ten years earlier driven the French Republic into a shameful alliance with despotic Russia, and more recently it had become a full and eager signatory to the draconian St Petersburg protocol on international anti-anarchist police cooperation. Worst of all, it was old radical associates of Kropotkin’s like Georges Clemenceau, prime minister for the past two years, who bore much of the responsibility for betraying the principles on which the Third Republic had been founded.

Kropotkin nevertheless retained an unshakeable faith that the rebirth of society was imminent. Perhaps in tacit acknowledgement of his part in allowing the creation of monsters like Azef, he would devote his last years to the culminating project of his life: a work of moral philosophy for the dawning age of social revolution. That future, Kropotkin was quite certain, would be born in war and strife. A renewal of hostilities between Germany and France, which had threatened repeatedly during the three decades and more since Bismarck’s armies had besieged Paris, would at long last precipitate a fight for justice against the forces of reaction. It would come soon – next week, perhaps, or the week after – and its challenges could only be met if the lessons of past failures had been fully addressed. Those who remained of his generation, who had lived through those failures, must point the way.

He would have thought of them often during his time in Paris: the men and women of the Commune, who for eight extraordinary weeks of insurrection during the spring of 1871 had risen up to create their own autonomous government in the city. Some of them, now dead of old age, had become Kropotkin’s closest friends: the geographer Elisée Reclus, who had been captured during the Communards’ first, disastrous sortie against the Versaillais forces intent on crushing their social experiment; Louise Michel, the Red Virgin, who had still been there at the doomed defence of the Issy fortress, and throughout the Communards’ tragic, fighting retreat across the city.

It had been stories of the Paris Commune that had helped inspire Kropotkin to leave behind his life as a leading light of Russia’s scientific Establishment and devote himself to the revolutionary cause. Ten years after first hearing the wistful recollections of Communard exiles, drinking in a Swiss tavern in the immediate aftermath of defeat, he had written them down. ‘I will never forget’, one had said, ‘those delightful moments of deliverance. How I came down from my supper chamber in the Latin Quarter to join that immense open-air club which filled the boulevards from one end of Paris to the other. Everyone talked about public affairs; all mere personal preoccupations were forgotten; no more thought of buying or selling; all felt ready to advance towards the future.’ Both Reclus and Michel had died in 1905, the year when revolution had finally touched Russia, only to end before it could begin, but that optimism remained alive.

In his obituary of Reclus, Kropotkin had paid tribute to the role played by his fellow geographer during the 1870 Siege of Paris, when he had served as an assistant to the great balloonist Nadar, whose daring aeronauts ferried messages out of the city and over the Prussian lines. Had his cerebral, reticent old friend really been one of those fearless men who floated aloft in the balloons, braving the Prussian sharpshooters? Had Reclus looked down across Paris from a vantage point higher than that from the tower, that was then not yet even a glimmer in Eiffel’s eye, and dreamed of what the world might be? It mattered so much from where you saw things, and what you wanted to see. For fiction could so easily be confused with truth, and truth relegated to the realm of fiction.

Dramatis Personae

Anderson, Sir Robert. Born 1841 in Dublin, son of Crown Solicitor, became leading anti-Fenian in Ireland then at Scotland Yard, before being displaced to Home Office. Recalled as assistant commissioner. Published apocalyptic interpretations of Bible. Died 1918.

Andrieux, Louis. Born 1840. Republican lawyer involved in suppression of Lyons commune, then Opportunist deputy. Appointed prefect of police in 1880, he served less than two years, later flirting with Boulangism. Senator from 1903, died 1931. Louis Aragon, Dadaist, communist and founding exponent of surrealism, was his illegitimate son.

Aveling, Eleanor Marx, known as ‘Tussy’. Born 1855. Youngest daughter of Karl Marx, secretary to father, and socialist activist in her own right. With SDF, Socialist League and Independent Labour Party, she galvanised support for the Haymarket Martyrs. Died by suicide 1898, using Prussic acid supplied by partner Edward Aveling.

Azef, Evno. Born 1869. Recruited by Okhrana while an impoverished student in 1893, made a career as agent and double agent, rising in Socialist Revolutionary Party to effective leadership of its Fighting Organisation, with role in provoking assassinations. Exposed by Burtsev in 1908. Died Berlin, 1918.

Bakunin, Michael. Born 1814. Russian revolutionary. Involved in 1848 uprising in Paris and 1849 insurrection in Dresden. Escaped from Siberian exile in 1861, established commune in Lyons in 1870, challenged Marx’s dominance of the International, becoming an inspiration to a younger generation of anarchists until his death in 1876.

Berkman, Alexander. Born 1870 in Lithuania, emigrated to US in 1888 where worked as typesetter for Most and became lover of Emma Goldman, before fourteen years’ imprisonment for attempted assassination of industrialist Frick. Deported to Russia in 1917, left for Germany in 1921, then France, where he died in 1936.

Bint, Henri. Ex-officer of the Sûreté hired as a French agent of the Holy Brotherhood in 1882, then employed by the Paris Okhrana office throughout Rachkovsky’s tenure as its director. A participant in the celebrated raid on the People’s Will Swiss printing works, Charlotte Bullier, honeypot bait, may have been cousin. Would later claim to have hired Golovinsky to forge Protocols. After Bolshevik Revolution, worked for Cheka.

Bourdin, Martial. Born 1868. French anarchist, lived in America before London Charlotte Street colony, where his sister had married incendiary English anarchist H. B. Samuels. Close to Emile Henry, he died from wounds in Greenwich Park on 15 February 1894, when a bomb he was carrying accidentally exploded.

Brocher, Gustave. Born 1850. Raised as Fourierist, became priest but after Commune went to teach in Russia. In London from 1875 involved with Lavrov’s Forward! and Most’s Freiheit, he organised the 1881 anarchist London Congress, joined Socialist League as anarchist and adopted five orphans of the Commune. Died 1930.

Burtsev, Vladimir. Born 1862. Joined People’s Will following tsar’s assassination, imprisoned in Peter and Paul Fortress, then active abroad as increasingly prominent militant anti-tsarist and in counter-intelligence. After imprisonment in Britain, exposed leading Okhrana agents, but opposed Bolsheviks after 1917 revolution. Died 1942.

Cafiero, Carlo. Born 1846 into aristocratic Italian family and known as ‘Count’, recruited by Marx to convert Italy to the cause but was won over to Bakunin’s vision of anarchistic socialism. Funded Bakunin’s folly of the villa La Baronata as a revolutionary base. Mentally ill from 1882, he lived until 1892 in and out of lunatic asylums.

Carpenter, Edward. Born 1844. Studied theology at Cambridge, discovered his homosexuality, gave up the cloth, taught in working communities, settling on smallholding at Millthorpe near Sheffield. Leading socialist figure and campaigner against discrimination for sexual orientation. Died 1929.

Caserio, Sante Geronimo. Born 1873 in Italy, lived southern France. Executed 1894 for assassination of President Sadi Carnot.

Chaikovksy, Nicholas. Born 1851. Studied as a mathematician in St Petersburg, where he galvanised circle of radical propagandists in early 1870s. After crisis of faith, returned to England from America to continue propaganda campaign. Involved in gunrunning to Russia but later opposed Bolsheviks. Died 1926.

Charles, Fred. Born Fred Charles Slaughter. Member of Socialist League, travelled to Zurich in attempt to secure Neve’s release, attended 1889 Paris Congress, then resident in Sheffield and Walsall, where involved in bomb plot. Sentenced to ten years in prison. Later worked at Ruskin College, Oxford, and joined Whiteway Colony in Cotswolds.

Clemenceau, Georges. Born 1841. Moderate mayor of Montmartre in 1871. Held ministerial posts in 1880s, was compromised in the Panama scandal but pro-Dreyfus as newspaper editor. As minister of interior and president of the Council in 1906 repressed strikes; returned to latter position in 1917 after eight years out of government. Died 1929.

Coulon, Auguste. Member of Dublin Socialist League in 1886, moved to London where recruited as informant for Special Branch and possibly other police services. Involved in provoking the Walsall bomb affair, and would later claim to be working for the ‘International Police’.

Creaghe, Dr John O’Dwyer. Born 1841, medical education in Boston, emigrated to Buenos Aires in 1874, where a leading anarchist. Returned to Sheffield in 1890 for a year where spread incendiary ideas before returning to Argentina.

Cyon, Elie de. Born 1842. Leading Russian physiologist in St Petersburg, his virulent conservatism outraged students and forced his move to Paris where he was refused position at Sorbonne but naturalised. Broker of international deals for Russia, his French citizenship was revoked for double-dealing with Germany. Died 1912.

Czolgosz, Leon. Born 1873. Son of Polish immigrants, worked as rabbit trapper and wire-winder until inspired by Bresci to assassinate President McKinley. Executed 1901.

Dave, Victor. Belgian anarchist active in Socialist League and involved in long-standing dispute with Peukert, each holding the other to be a police informant.

Degaev, Sergei. Born 1857. Army captain expelled for his radicalism, whose brother had been involved in attempt on tsar’s life, he betrayed Vera Figner to Colonel Sudeikin, whom he subsequently murdered. Lived out his life in America as Alexander Pell, academic mathematician.

Durnovo, Peter. Born 1845. Russian director of police from 1884 to 1893, then briefly interior minister from 1905, having served as assistant minister for five years previously. Died 1915.

Encausse, Gérard, latterly known as ‘Papus’. Born 1865. Assisted Charcot with hypnosis experiments at La Salpêtrière while involved in esoteric research, becoming Gnostic bishop and mystic. Wrote against Witte and Rachkovsky in 1901 as ‘Niet’ and influenced Imperial Russian family against them. Died 1916.

Evalenko, Aleksandr. Volunteered services to Okhrana in Russia and emigrated to New York, where infiltrated Society of Friends of Russian Freedom as ‘Sergeyev’, destroying the movement from within. Returned to London to continue work there.

Fénéon, Félix. Born 1861. Art critic, impresario and anarchist with day job at French War Ministry, he championed work of Seurat and Signac, among others, coining term Neo-Impressionism. Friend of Emile Henry, charged with concealing explosive material, acquitted at Trial of Thirty. Editor of Revue Blanche.

Ferré, Théophile. Born 1846. A militant Blanquist and member of the Montmartre Vigilance Committee during Paris siege, he was elected to a seat on the Commune council, assisted Rigault with the police and security of the Commune, and signed the orders for the execution of hostages. Executed by firing squad at Satory, November 1871.

Figner, Vera. Born 1852. Returned to Russia in 1875 from medical studies in Zurich, becoming a committed revolutionary and member of the executive committee of the People’s Will, involved in plots against tsar. Attempted to revive the organisation after assassination of tsar, but betrayed by Degaev and imprisoned in the Schlüsselburg Fortress until 1905. Participated in the Jury of Honour in 1908 and was celebrated in St Petersburg in 1917. Died Moscow during Second World War.

Flourens, Emile. Born 1841. Younger brother of Gustave, served as minister for foreign affairs 1886–88.

Flourens, Gustave. Born 1838. Radical journalist and revolutionary adventurer during the Second Empire, active in Cretan rising, led insurrections against Government of National Defence in winter of 1870 and was killed while leading the great sortie towards Versailles in early days of the Commune.

Frey, William. Born 1839. Mathematical prodigy, in 1867 renounced successful career as geodetic surveyor for communal life in America. Following collapse of colony in Kansas, returned to London to establish a positivist cult. His arguments with Lavrov fascinated émigré nihilists in 1887.

Freycinet, Charles de. Born 1828. Served as chief of Gambetta’s military cabinet in Tours in 1870. Opportunist republican, he led three ministries in 1880s and early 1890s.

Gallifet, Marquis de. Born 1830. Made his military reputation during 1867 French intervention in Mexico, confirmed by heroism at Sedan. Ruthless Versaillais commander during Bloody Week. Briefly minister of war 1899. Died 1909.

Gambetta, Léon. Born 1838. Son of a grocer from Cahors, he was an eloquent republican lawyer in opposition to the Second Empire in the late 1860s. Chosen while minister of interior for the Government of National Defence to escape Paris by balloon and organise Tours relief force. Disenchanted by the National Defence but took no part in the Commune and became powerful voice of opposition to MacMahon’s presidency. His long-awaited premiership began in late 1881 but lasted barely two months. Died 1882 following an accident with a revolver.

Goldman, Emma. Born Lithuania, 1869. Emigrated to America 1885 where drawn to anarchism under influence of Johann Most, who encouraged her public speaking. Following imprisonment of lover Alexander Berkman, she became the leading figure of the anarchist movement in America, frequently courting internment. Deported to Russia with Berkman in 1919, she abhorred the Bolshevik Terror, and returned to the West to live out her days in England and Canada.

Golovinsky, Matvei. A family friend of Dostoevsky, he joined the Holy Brotherhood in the early 1880s and subsequently the Okhrana, but following exposure by Gorky as an informant he moved to Paris to work as a forger for Rachkovsky, allegedly creating The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Joined Bolsheviks in 1917, playing an important role in the St Petersburg soviet.

Grave, Jean. Born 1854. Cobbler by trade, became acting editor of Le Révolté at the invitation of Reclus and made the role his own for thirty years, going on to edit the renamed La Révolte and Temps Nouveaux, and becoming known as the ‘Pope of the rue Mouffetard’ for his opinionated influence. Intermittently imprisoned for his views such as those in The Dying Society and Anarchy, he was acquitted at the Trial of the Thirty. Signed the Manifesto of the Sixteen in support of war with Germany. Died 1938.

Grousset, Paschal. Born 1844. Editor-in-chief of La Marseillaise, became representative for foreign affairs under the Commune, was imprisoned on New Caledonia but escaped with Henri Rochefort. Collaborated with Jules Verne on various novels as ‘André Laurie’, he was elected as a socialist deputy in 1893, having made educational reform the focus of his study and writing. Died 1909.

Guillaume, James. Born 1844. Teacher by profession and follower of Bakunin, prominent in establishing Jura Federation and St Imier Congress, and Kropotkin’s first point of contact with federalist ideas, though the two later disagreed. Biographer of Bakunin and anarchist historian of the First International. Died 1916.

Hansen, Jules. Born 1829. Well-connected Danish journalist known as ‘Shrew’ or ‘President’ recruited by Rachkovsky to coordinate propaganda campaign in Paris. Took French citizenship and appointed counsellor of embassy for French diplomatic service, he operated as high-level conduit and fixer.

Harting, Baron Arkady. Born Abraham Hekkelman. Recruited to the Okhrana while a student in St Petersburg, was adopted by Rachkovsky and sent among émigrés under cover name of Landesen. Contrived 1890 nihilist bomb plot in France, escaping five-year sentence in absentia to re-establish himself as respectable Arkady Harting in Belgium. Later appointed head of the Foreign Okhrana, but past life exposed in 1909. Disappeared to Belgium under official protection.

Hartmann, Lev. Born Archangel, 1850. Arrested 1876 and released a year later, he became member of the executive committee of the People’s Will. Fled to France following involvement in bomb attack aimed at tsar’s train in 1879, arrested in Paris but surreptitiously deported to England. Active abroad as propagandist until death in 1913.

Hekkelman – see Harting.

Henry, Emile. Born 1872. Raised in exiled Communard family, frustrated by lack of academic and career opportunities, was drawn by brother Fortune into anarchist circles. His intended bombing of Carmaux mine offices in Paris killed five in rue des Bons Enfants police station in late 1892; arrested after attack on Café Terminus in early 1894, eloquent at trial, he was executed that May.

Jagolkovsky, Cyprien. Deep-cover agent of the Paris Okhrana, active in Switzerland, France and Belgium. Would later admit to role in assassination of General Seliverstoff, and played key role in Liège bombings as Baron Ungern-Sternberg.

Jenkinson, Edward. Anti-Fenian policeman, ousted Anderson from post to run autonomous unit in Scotland Yard, contriving Jubilee Plot against Queen Victoria. Subsequently sidelined.

Jogand-Pages, Gabriel, used pseudonym Léo Taxil. Born 1854. Ferocious anti-Catholic journalist and hoaxer, expelled from Masons for scurrilous attacks on the Pope, he professed to be reconciled with the Church in 1885, turning his fire instead on Freemasonry which he exposed with supporting forged testimony as a satanic cult.

Kibalchich, Nicholas. Born 1853, the son of a local priest. Educated in engineering and medicine, he attended lectures by de Cyon. Arrested 1875 for lending a banned book to a peasant and sentenced to two months in prison at the Trial of the 193. Became technical explosives expert of the People’s Will, setting aside his groundbreaking interest in jet propulsion. Arrested in March 1881 for his part in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, he was hanged the following month.

Kletochnikov, Nicholas. Born 1848, he infilitrated the Third Section on behalf of the People’s Will. Arrested I January 1881 having betrayed Rachkovsky, he was tried in the Trial of the Twenty in 1882 and died in the Peter and Paul Fortress the following year.

Kravchinsky, Sergei. Born 1851. Already a radical while in artillery school, resigned his commission in 1871, joining the Chaikovsky Circle the following year. Fought in the Balkans against the Turks in 1875–6, then involved in planning of Matese revolt near Naples before arrest. Amnestied in Italy, he returned to Russia where he assassinated General Mezentsev in August 1878 but escaped capture, from 1883 resident in London where active in propaganda, founding the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom and the Russian Free Press, and native socialist movement. Killed by a train in 1895.

Kropotkin, Alexander. The closest of Peter Kropotkin’s siblings to him in age, their early correspondence traces development of their political thought, Alexander adhering more closely to the moderate Lavrov. Arrested soon after Peter’s imprisonment in 1875, after decade in Siberian exile committed suicide shortly before his planned release.

Kropotkin, Prince Peter. Born 1842. Descendant of the royal Rurik dynasty, led geographical expeditions in Siberia and Arctic, but prioritised political activities over his scientific interests. Escaping imprisonment as a propagandist of the Chaikovsky Circle, he fled to western Europe where he took a leading role in development and promulgation of anarchist ideas from Switzerland, France and England, despite expulsions and further spells in prison. Developed theories of Mutual Aid and anarchist communism. Opposed Bolshevism following return to Russia in 1917, where he died four years later.

Landesen – see Harting.

Lingg, Louis. Born Germany, 1864. Experience of economic oppression made him an anarchist, known to Reinsdorf. Arrived Chicago, 1885, arrested the following year on suspicion of involvement with the Haymarket bombing and sentenced to death. Beat the gallows by biting down on explosive cartridge.

Littlechild, John. Born 1848. Dolly Williamson’s assistant from 1883, with responsibility for Irish Special Branch, became first head of Special Branch in 1888; promoted to chief inspector two years later but resigned in 1893 to pursue career as private investigator.

Lombroso, Cesare. Born 1835. Socialist in his youth, later theorist of criminal anthropology and founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology, he worked at University of Turin. Asserted that criminals could be identified by atavistic physiology and measurement of craniology; his work appealed to eugenicists.

Lopatin, German. Early member of the Chaikovsky Circle, he resisted Kropotkin joining. The first translator of Marx’s Das Kapital into Russian, he briefly became leader in exile of the People’s Will in 1883 before his arrest and imprisonment in the Schlüsselburg Fortress. Emerged after twenty years to sit on Burtsev Jury of Honour.

Lopukhin, Alexei. Appointed director of the police department by Plehve in 1892, became associate minister of the interior, but fell from grace. Divulged details of Okhrana agents to Burtsev and was exiled to post in Siberia.

Mace, Gustave-Placide. Head of the Sûreté 1879–84, latterly encouraging Bertillon’s methods of scientific detection.

Malato de Cornet, Charles. Born 1857. Accompanied his father, a prominent Communard, to New Caledonia. Published The Philosophy of Anarchy in 1889, was close to many individualists such as Martin and Emile Henry, and became secretary to Rochefort in London during the early 1890s and a bridge to the younger anarchists. Later acquitted of involvement with an assassination attempt on the king of Spain, he became one of the signatories of the Manifesto of the Sixteen, in support of war with Germany. Died 1938.

Malatesta, Errico. Born 1853. Expelled from medical studies, became an acolyte of and emissary for Bakunin, promoting insurrectionary tactics, then an active theorist and propagandist for anarchism in travels that took in much of Europe, Egypt and North and South America. Resident in London, working in menial jobs for many years from 1889, he was nevertheless seen as the mastermind of plots worldwide. Returned to Italy 1919, but was under house arrest by fascists for much of the rest of his life. Died 1932.

Malon, Benoît. Born 1841. One of the first French members of the International, from its foundation, became mayor of 17e arrondissement in 1870, was elected to the National Assembly and sat on the Commune council. On returning to France from Swiss exile he joined the French Workers Party. Died 1893.

Melville, William. Born 1850. Moved to London from Ireland at an early age, joined police in 1872, working for Criminal Investigation Department and Special Irish Branch, becoming superintendent of Special Branch in 1893, when known to anarchists as ‘Le Vil Melville’ for his ruthless policing of them. Later illustrious career in British intelligence.

Mezentsev, General Nicholas. Born 1827. Director of the Third Section of the police from 1876, he was stabbed to death two years later by Kravchinsky.

Michel, Louise. Born 1830. The illegitimate daughter of country gentry, she became a schoolteacher and, following her move to Paris, a socialist, joining the Montmartre Vigilance Committee and cementing her iconic reputation during the Commune. A deportee to New Caledonia, she was uncompromising regarding the amnesty, as so much else, and remained a totemic figure in the anarchist movement until her death in 1905.

Morris, William. Born 1834. Designer, author, poet, artist and artistic entrepreneur, he became one of the most prominent British socialists in the 1880s in the Social Democratic Federation, before joining the Socialist League and founding Commonweal. Disillusioned by tensions with anarchists he withdrew but remained active, publishing the utopian novel News from Nowhere.

Most, Johann. Born 1846. Socialist journalist in Austria and Germany and a Marxist member of the Reichstag from 1874, he was forced into exile in London in 1879, where he founded Freiheit. Imprisoned for celebrating the assassination of the tsar, he arrived in the United States in 1883, becoming the foremost evangelist for violent interpretation of ‘propaganda by deed’, publishing a handbook on explosives, The Science of Revolutionary Warfare. Many times imprisoned, he died in 1906.

Mowbray, Charles. English anarchist orator, co-editor of Commonweal in 1890s, he appears to have been a police spy.

Nadar, Felix. Born 1820. Celebrated photographer, writer and aeronaut.

Nechaev, Sergei. Born 1847, the son of a serf, formed a revolutionary circle as a student in St Petersburg in 1868, faked his own arrest and escape and presented himself to Bakunin in Switzerland. In Russia, he organised the murder of a rival student radical, Ivanov, again fled but was extradited and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Made contact with the People’s Will leadership shortly before the assassination of Alexander II to encourage their plans. Died in prison, 1883.

Neve, Johann. Born Denmark, 1844. Peripatetic from London to Paris to New York for several years, took a key role in organising the Social Democratic Club in London with Frank Kitz in 1877, and as editor of Most’s Freiheit. Established revolutionary cells in Germany and Switzerland in early 1880s, despite arrest and brief imprisonment, but betrayed by Reuss he spent ten years in terrible prison conditions before dying in 1896.

Nicoll, David. An aesthete in his youth, encouraged into anarchism by veteran John Turner, took a leading role in Commonweal. Imprisoned for incitement, he made many accusations of provocation against colleagues and was shunned for his paranoia, despite accuracy of his claims in defence of Walsall anarchists and others.