Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia: A Revolutionary in the Time of Tsarism and Bolshevism 9781472578891, 9781472578907, 9781472578914

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Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia A Revolutionary in the Time of Tsarism and Bolshevism Robert Henderson

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Robert Henderson, 2017 Robert Henderson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-7889-1 ePDF: 978-1-4725-7890-7    eBook: 978-1-4725-7891-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover image: Vladimir L ’vovich Burtsev papers, Envelope A, Hoover Institution Archives. (Courtesy of Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University.) Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

To Elaine

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Note on Transliteration and Calendars

viii x xii

Introduction

1

Part I  The Most Hunted Man in Europe?

7

1 2 3 4

9

1862–1891: From Piety to Protest 1891–1894: The Time of ‘Small Deeds’ 1894–1899: Return to London 1899–1906: A Man with Few Enemies

100

Part II  The Sherlock Holmes of the Revolution

133

5 6 7

135

1907–1914: The Second Emigration 1914–1916: The Prodigal Returns 1917: Annus Rebellatrix

33 70

164 183

Part III  A Russian Don Quixote

211

8 1918–1921: White Paris 9 1922–1934: Fight the GPU! 10 1934–1942: Don Quixote’s Last Stand

213 226 241

Notes256 Bibliography 315 Index 338

List of Figures I.1

‘The Nestor of the Russian Revolutionary Movement.’ Portrait of Vladimir Lʹvovich Burtsev, 1904. The Anglo-Russian, vol. 8, no. 11 (November 1904), 859. xiv 2.1 Portrait of the young V. L. Burtsev, Paris, December 1891. GARF f. 1721 op. 1, del. 114, l. 8. Courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation.42 3.1 Narodovolets no. 1, April 1897, 1. British Library P.P.3554.cc.1. Courtesy of the British Library Board. 85 3.2 Burtsev in British court, Penny Illustrated Paper 1 January 1898, 7. British Library MFM. M37700 (1898). Courtesy of the British Library Board. 94 5.1 V. L. Burtsev in New York, 1910. GARF f. 1721 op. 1, del. 114, l. 11. Courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation. 156 6.1 V. L. Burtsev in the village of Monastyrskoe, Siberia, 1915. BA, S. Svatikov Collection, V. L. Burtsev Papers, box 2, folder 8. Courtesy of the Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University. 174 7.1 Petrogradskaia Gazeta, no. 61, March 1917, Prilozh. no. 19, 5. Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka. Courtesy of the Russian State Library. 184 8.1 Nashi Sharzhi (Our cartoons), Bich, Paris, December 1918, 6. BA, S. Svatikov Collection, V. L. Burtsev Papers, box 2, folder 8. Courtesy of the Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University. 215 8.2 V. L. Burtsev on the balcony of La Cause commune, Paris, c. 1922. © Roger Viollet, no. 14568–3. Courtesy of Roger Vaillet. 217 8.3 Russian National Committee. c. 1921. © Pierre Choumoff/Roger Viollet, no. 42443-2. Courtesy of Roger Vaillet. 223 9.1 Lazarʹ Rotshtein, trusted friend of Burtsev, Paris, c. 1922. © Pierre Choumoff/Roger Viollet, no. 14568-5 (section). Courtesy of Roger Vaillet. 236 10.1 V. L. Burtsev outside St Mark’s Basilica, Venice, 1930s. Vladimir Lʹvovich Burtsev papers, Envelope A, Hoover Institution Archives. Courtesy of Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University. 243

List of Figures 10.2 Death certificate, 3 September 1942. AAP-HP, Hôpital Hôtel-Dieu, Registre des Entrées, Hôpital Hôtel-Dieu, Registre des Entrées du 1 juillet au 31 décembre 1942, no. 9450. Courtesy of the Archives de lʹAssistance publique-Hôpitaux de Paris. 10.3 Grave of V. L. Burtsev, St Geneviève des Bois, Essonne, France. Photograph taken September 1994. (Author’s personal collection.) 10.4 Grave of V. L. Burtsev, St Geneviève des Bois, Essonne, France. Photograph taken October 2007. (Author’s personal collection.)

ix

252 254 254

Acknowledgements I am thankful to acknowledge grants in support of my research from the Royal Historical Society, the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies, the University of London’s Central Research Fund and the Department of History, Queen Mary, University of London. The production of this book was also greatly assisted by generous grants from Isobel Thornley’s Bequest to the University of London and from the Society of Authors, Authors’ Foundation (Elizabeth Longford Grant for a first work of historical biography). I first came across reference to the fascinating life of Vladimir Lʹvovich Burtsev some twenty-five years ago in the archives of the British Museum where, as a young Russian curator, I had been sent to carry out research at the suggestion of Mr Michael McLaren-Turner, then head of the Slavonic and East European Branch of the British Library’s Reference Division. I would now belatedly like to take this opportunity to thank both Mr McLaren-Turner and Dr Christine Thomas, head of the branch’s Russian Department, for granting me the time, freedom and opportunity to discover the joys of archival research, an activity which I found to be considerably more addictive and satisfying than my other curatorial duties and which unfortunately, therefore, had an adverse impact on my cataloguing and subject-indexing output. I have already, on previous occasions, acknowledged the invaluable assistance of successive British Museum archivists – Janet Wallace, Christopher Date, Gary Thorn and Stephanie Clarke – and I am pleased to do so again. Similarly, I would like once more to express my gratitude to the staff (too numerous to mention individually) of the Rare Books and Music reading room of the British Library at St Pancras, London. In addition, I would like to thank the staff from a number of other international archival repositories and libraries, in particular, Nina Ivanovna Abdullaeva and colleagues at the State Archive of the Russian Federation, Moscow; Carol A. Leadenham and Ronald M. Bulatoff of the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, California; and Tanya Chebotareva at the Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University, New York. I would also like to give thanks to Julian Putkowski, freelance historian and researcher, for his early interest, enthusiasm and help. I acknowledge with gratitude the encouragement, suggestions and other aid provided by Professor John Gonzalez of the Rozhkov Historical Research Centre, NSW; Dr Liudmila Novikova of Moscow State University; Professor R. C. Elwood of Carleton University, Ontario; and Professor David Saunders of Newcastle University. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the latter who not only allowed me access to his personal research notes on Burtsev but also gave me the confidence to undertake the work in hand. Since 2005 I have enjoyed a fruitful association with the School of History at Queen Mary University of London, first as a PhD student and later as an honorary member of staff and would like to thank fellow students and staff alike for their conviviality.

Acknowledgements

xi

Professors Miri Rubin and Catherine Merridale deserve special mention but above all, I am indebted to Dr Jonathan Smele for his endless support and encouragement. I could not have asked for a more productive relationship and I consider it a privilege to have worked under his tutelage. Simply put – this book could not have been written without him. My primary debt, however, is to my wife Elaine to whom I dedicate this book. She has selflessly shared with me the challenges of composition through good times and bad and has given me her unqualified support in this and other, more trivial pursuits. To describe her as long-suffering hardly does her justice. None of the above-named institutions or individuals, of course, is responsible for any errors or omissions which may be found in the book. I alone bear responsibility for this work in its final incarnation.

Note on Transliteration and Calendars Calendars Until February 1918, Russia used the Julian rather than the Gregorian calendar, with the effect that the Russian calendar was twelve days behind the Western calendar in the nineteenth century, and thirteen days behind at the beginning of the twentieth century. When referring to events in Russia prior to February 1918, I have given both dates, in the form 1 (13) March 1881 and 25 October (7 November) 1917. When referring to events elsewhere, I have always given the ‘new-style’ Western date. If only one date appears, it can be assumed that it is the date according to the Gregorian calendar.

Transliteration Russian names for places and people used in this book are transliterated according to a simplified version of the Library of Congress (LC) system: omitting diacritical marks and, for the most part, using the single letter ‘y’ in place of LC’s recommended ‘ii’ combination.

Figure I.1  ‘The Nestor of the Russian Revolutionary Movement.’ Portrait of Vladimir

Lʹvovich Burtsev, 1904. The Anglo-Russian, vol. 8, no. 11 (November 1904), 859.

Introduction

At about 2 o’clock in the afternoon of Thursday 16 December 1897, a group of English detectives under the command of Chief Inspector Melville of Scotland Yard gathered at the entrance to the Reading Room of the British Museum. Under some pretext, they called one of the readers present outside into the vestibule. That reader was Vladimir Lʹvovich Burtsev, a slight, bespectacled, shabbily dressed young Russian émigré journalist, who had been a regular visitor to the library for over six years. The Chief Inspector proceeded to read him a warrant for his arrest, charging him with a violation of the Offences against the Person Act 1861, and asked Burtsev to accompany him to Bow Street Police Station. The young Russian did not resist arrest; in fact he asked if he might first of all return to the Reading Room in order to hand back the books he had been consulting. Burtsev later recalled that the arrest was carried out so efficiently and with so little fuss that neither the Museum authorities nor any of the other readers were aware of what was happening. Within two hours, the detainee was brought before a magistrate and charged with having ‘solicited, encouraged, persuaded, and endeavoured to persuade persons to murder his Imperial Majesty the Emperor Nicholas II of Russia’.1 To all appearances, a more unlikely potential regicide would be hard to imagine. Vladimir Lʹvovich was described by one contemporary as ‘a mild-eyed, soft, kind man, simple in his manners, a typical Russian book-worm in appearance’, while another noted that ‘due to his spectacles he had a thoughtful air which made him resemble a Savonarola or an ascetic from the Middle Ages’.2 Nevertheless, the case was pushed to its conclusion with determination and some haste by the authorities. At the Old Bailey on 11 February 1898, after precisely fourteen minutes of deliberation, the jury returned a unanimous guilty verdict and the trial judge handed down the maximum sentence permissible by law – eighteen months’ solitary confinement with hard labour. Despite numerous appeals from Burtsev’s supporters in the émigré community and from members of the British liberal establishment, no mercy was shown. This kind and timid man would be obliged to serve out his sentence to the last day. Burtsev’s life demands to be examined if for no other reason than to review this trial in light of the new relevance which it has assumed in twenty-first-century Britain in relation to the ongoing debate on terrorism and state security. If one doubted the contemporary significance of Regina v. Burtsev, one need look no further than the trial of Muslim cleric Abu Hamza and the defendant’s subsequent appeal against conviction in 2007, when the Burtsev case was specifically referred

2

Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

to in the judgment of the court and the arguments used in the trial again brought up for discussion.3 From the moment of the arrest, the Burtsev Affair was eagerly followed by the national and international press and, at the conclusion of the trial, the sentence was warmly applauded in a leading article in The Times. But this was by no means a sentiment shared by all, for it was rightly suspected by many that the prosecution had been brought at the behest of Tsar Nicholas II, and indeed, within hours of the verdict, Prime Minister Lord Salisbury himself rushed to telegraph the news to St Petersburg. The Emperor of Russia was quick to express his personal satisfaction at the successful outcome of the trial – and well he might – for Burtsev’s imprisonment was the culmination of a relentless pursuit which had already lasted ten years and which, at various times, had involved the willing participation of a considerable number of the governments and police forces of Europe and the Balkans. At Scotland Yard, meanwhile, Chief Inspector Melville had also received congratulations on the crucial role he had played in the affair from an old and clandestine acquaintance, Mr Petr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, head of the ‘Foreign Agency’ of the Okhrana, the notorious secret political division of the Russian Department of Police. Who then was this outwardly innocuous-looking, yet seemingly thoroughly dangerous individual who had caused such concern to the world’s most powerful nations and their respective political police forces? Appearances, of course, can be deceptive and it is clear that not everyone saw in Burtsev the figure of a harmless bookworm. When first shown a photograph of the revolutionary, a senior French official described the impression thus: What I saw was the portrait of a man, still young, frail in appearance, pigeonchested and narrow-shouldered. His face made a great impression on me: it was haggard, sickly and ascetic, though illumined, or rather transfigured, by his eyes – eyes so full of fire and tenderness as to be quite fascinating. I at once understood the man’s ascendancy, his genius for suggestion and temptation, the strange magnetism which fires imagination and stirs to action and makes him such a formidable apostle of the revolutionary gospel.4

Burtsev himself was aware of how variously he was perceived, writing: ‘While I am at heart an ardent Socialist, to the extremists I have always seemed lukewarm and inclined to the side of the democratic radical. To the moderates, on the other hand, I am the very hydra of the revolution personified.’5 He was, without question, an intriguing and complex individual whose public persona was, indeed, at times, that of a passionate advocate of unity and moderation and, at others, a fervent proponent of violent political action. As we shall see, the difficulty in pinning him down has been caused, in part, by his refusal to align himself with any one political party (even though, throughout his life, he remained a committed revolutionary and one who was evidently feared by the tsarist autocracy). Indeed, in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement, it is difficult to imagine anyone who was ever subjected to such unremitting harassment and persecution and, for that reason alone, a study of his life has been long overdue. Considering the importance the authorities attached

Introduction

3

to this ‘formidable apostle of the revolutionary gospel’, it is surprising that, to date, comparatively little has been published on Burtsev either in the West or in Russia, and it is the aim of this study to attempt to fill that gap by examining the various periods of his remarkable life and review his political and journalistic activities which led, firstly, to his imprisonment and internal exile in tsarist Russia (twice) and which, in 1917, also saw him arrested by Trotsky, thereby granting him the dubious honour of being the first political prisoner of the new Bolshevik regime. But there is so much more to his life that is worthy of examination than these multiple, high-profile and completely unjustified incarcerations. Burtsev’s revolutionary career began in 1881 shortly after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and ended with his tragic solitary death in occupied Paris in 1942. During this sixty-year period, the revolutionary’s name was brought to public attention time and again, thanks to his direct and active involvement in an astonishingly wide range of the major political events of the day. The last international recognition he received was in Paris in 1937 when, on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, a banquet was given in his honour by the Russian émigré community and a number of his international associates. Sadly, since that time, like so many other opponents of the Soviet regime, Burtsev’s name all but vanished from the historical record. As we shall see, this vrag naroda (‘enemy of the people’), as he would later be dubbed by the Soviet authorities, was obliged to spend most of his fascinating but fragmented life outside Russia, and the present study is divided into three sections, corresponding roughly to the three periods of his forced emigration: the first spent in late-Victorian London, the second in pre-revolutionary Paris and the third, again in Paris, from the 1920s onwards. In my study, I attempt for the first time to accord Burtsev the retrospective recognition he deserves, by detailing his considerable achievements and describing the variety of roles he played – from that of the young radical, through his triumphant middle period as the so-called Sherlock Holmes of the Revolution, to his final tragic role as the ‘last of the Russian Don Quixotes’ – in his constant and allconsuming struggle to free Russia from tyranny, whether it be tsarist or Bolshevik. In so doing, I also hope to show the relevance of a number of aspects of Burtsev’s life to the world of the twenty-first century. In collecting data on my subject I was fortunate to be granted access to a number of Russian archives and thus, for the first time, have been able to bring a quantity of previously unpublished information into the public domain. I have also attempted to bring together into one unified narrative a number of finds from a diverse range of other archival repositories – not only Russian and British, but also French, American and Dutch. The objective is, through the examination of one remarkable and all-butforgotten life, to produce a new and fresh perspective on the historical events of the period. This has by no means been an easy task (not least thanks to Burtsev’s miniscule, scrawling handwriting, which even his closest friends found virtually indecipherable, but also due to the massive ‘paper-trail’ which he left behind), and I therefore apologize for any lacunae which readers discover in the narrative – there will, doubtless, be some.6 I make no apologies, however, for the fact that the study, while based on original, rigorous, academic research, may read at times (thanks to the nature of the life under examination) as a popular, historical, political thriller.

4

Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

It is perhaps due to the dispersed nature of primary materials (at times it felt as if Burtsev’s life story had been blown to smithereens and scattered to all ends of the earth) that no detailed biography of Burtsev has yet been published.7 He himself summarized his early life in emigration in an unfinished autobiography, The Struggle for a Free Russia (1882–1922).8 In addition, he published some reminiscences of other episodes in his life but, invaluable though these memoirs are, as is the rule with all first person narratives, they must be treated with some caution. Moreover, they were written in retrospect and, consequently, inaccuracies and omissions abound.9 The existing historiography on Burtsev, however, does not do him justice, though that is not to say his life has escaped academic scrutiny: certain specific aspects have already been covered in detail by a number of eminent scholars. As already alluded to, the famous trial of 1898 has been examined in some depth10 but other aspects of his early life in emigration had escaped study until the publication of F. D. Akhmerova’s excellent – though not widely available – work on the topic.11 Until relatively recently, Burtsev scholarship has dealt mainly with his activities in the decade prior to 1917, focussing primarily on the one-man counter-espionage agency he established in Paris and on the stunning success he achieved in unmasking a series of tsarist spies who had infiltrated the revolutionary movement abroad. (It has been claimed that, by 1914, thanks to his contacts in the ranks of the tsar’s Department of Police, Burtsev had succeeded – almost single-handedly – in destroying the Russian secret police network in Europe.) The milestone events of this period – the Azev, Garting and Malinovsky affairs – have been treated by, amongst others, Rita T. Kronenbitter (pseud), Nurit Schleifman, Fredric Zuckerman, Boris Nikolaevsky, Ralph Carter Elwood and, later, Anna Geifman and Leonid Praisman.12 All of the works by the above authors are of interest not only for their treatment of these specific events in Burtsev’s life but also in that they add some depth to Burtsev’s character, occasionally providing descriptions of certain of his personality traits. This is of particular importance given that, in general, he conducted his personal affairs with the utmost discretion, and a complete description of the private man is, therefore, difficult to reconstruct. The picture that does emerge from contemporary accounts is of a modest, even shy, individual. But, as we shall see, this quiet man was capable of great passions. As various episodes in his life testify, he was also able to endure great personal privations and intense suffering, both physical and mental. In this regard, his reminiscence of his incarcerations in prisons – British, Swiss and Russian (both tsarist and Soviet) – is particularly noteworthy. In short, Burtsev’s personality cannot be simply defined: he was an amalgamation of several complex often contradictory personae. Moreover, as Boris Sapir has advised, the young generation of historians should also know that, alongside his other accomplishments, Burtsev ‘inscribed his name in the historiography of the liberation movement in Russia’ by compiling the book Za sto let (‘A Century of Political Life in Russia [1800–1896]’) and by founding the illustrious journal Byloe (The Past).13 The former – a calendar of the revolutionary movement – has been described as an ‘essential work of reference for every Russian radical’ and was praised by no less an authority than V. I. Lenin.14 To this should be added Burtsev’s pioneering work in Russian investigative journalism, which

Introduction

5

has led to some commentators pointing to another example of his contemporary relevance, referring to him, quite justly, as the Russian predecessor of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame.15 And indeed, as we shall see, from his earliest foray into political commentary, Burtsev exhibited many of those qualities which, within a few years, in Paris, would earn him international acclaim as the so-called Sherlock Holmes of the Russian Revolution. The next phase in Burtsev’s political career began in 1914 and is one which has not been examined in any great detail. As the threat of war with Germany loomed, the revolutionary detective made use of his new-found fame to publicize the cause of ‘defencism’, attempting to persuade his comrades to declare an end to hostilities against the tsarist regime and to abandon their political activity until such time as the German threat to their homeland was quashed. His passion for the defence of Russia, before all else, is evidenced by his courageous decision to return home – in the certain knowledge of the consequences that would await a political renegade such as himself. On the matter of the conduct of the war, he was diametrically opposed to Lenin and the Bolsheviks – ‘defeatists’ all, whom Burtsev regarded as no better than simple traitors to the motherland and to the revolution. In 1917, after the fall of the tsar and during the short-lived reign of the Provisional Government, when his investigative services were again called upon, Burtsev showed himself to be one of Lenin’s most fervent opponents and one whom Trotsky was keen to silence at the earliest opportunity. One of the aims of the book is to trace Burtsev’s personal political development and describe the changes in his journalism and the transformation in political outlook which took place over the years and which saw him evolve from one of the tsarist autocracy’s most feared opponents into the ‘leader of the most frenzied wing of militant Russian nationalism’, as Trotsky would later describe him.16 The study will examine this continuing shift after the events of 1917 to the right in the political views of this militant socialist (and erstwhile terrorist) in his doomed mission to free Russia from the new, Bolshevik dictatorship. But, as Michael Hagemeister, amongst others, has shown, as well as striving selflessly throughout the 1920s and 1930s to attempt to unite the emigration against the Bolsheviks, Burtsev also managed to direct his energies to the fight against fascism and, at the famous Berne Trial, and later, made valuable contributions in the fight against the growth of anti-Semitism in Europe.17 One of Burtsev’s compatriots, who knew him during these final years in Paris, referred to the old revolutionary as the ‘last of the Don Quixotes’, which is a fitting description, pointing to his inexorable optimism and belief in the cause of a free Russia (when others had long since given up hope). Burtsev’s own history of the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published three years after Berne, was generally well received at the time, and it is encouraging to note that in recent years, new editions of this and of his unfinished autobiography have been published. The latest of these is T. L. Panteleeva’s excellent 2012 edition, which also includes other autobiographical materials relating to the period up to and including the Azef affair.18 The editor, in her introduction, mentions plans for an additional volume of memoirs and documents covering the later period of Burtsev’s life and I for one await the appearance of this volume with great excitement.

6

Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

Meanwhile, I present this study as a first attempt to evaluate in detail what I regard as a truly outstanding revolutionary life. Burtsev dedicated his unfinished autobiography ‘to those who will come after us’19 and, by the same token, it is my fervent hope that the current work may spark the interest of some future scholar to take up the fight and continue the examination of the life of this remarkable individual in his struggle for a free Russia.

Part I

The Most Hunted Man in Europe?

Ce nʹest pas en un ni deux mois, quʹon fait des choses dʹune pareille importance. La preuve, cʹest que voilà bien des années quʹon le poursuit.1

1

1862–1891: From Piety to Protest

A first betrayal Burtsev’s description of his family background and reminiscences of his early years are sketchy and inaccurate. From these alone it is difficult to gauge the extent of familial influence (if any) on the development of his radical outlook. Neither his father, Lev Aleksandrovich, a staff captain in the Orenburg Cossacks, nor his mother, Sof ʹia Aleksandrovna (née Alatortseva), the daughter of a Collegiate Assessor, were likely candidates to preach the ‘revolutionary gospel’ to any of their four children – Yuliia, Aleksandr, Vera and Vladimir.1 In 1870, after the early death of his father, Burtsev, then only eight years old, moved with his family from his birthplace, Fort Alexandrovsky on the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea,2 to the home of his paternal aunt and her well-todo merchant husband in the quiet provincial town of Birsk, in Ufa province, where his education and upbringing continued. After spending two years at the district school there, he moved on to the Ufa High School for Boys. Apparently, the young Burtsev found the first two years difficult but he recalled coming top of the class regularly in years three to six.3 His aunt and uncle, like the rest of the inhabitants of Birsk, were law-abiding, God-fearing folk, who, far from wishing to instil any radical views in their nephew, rather hoped that once he had finished his education he would either take over the management of his uncle’s distillery or become a doctor. However, not all of the young Burtsev’s antecedents were of the same stock. His paternal grandfather, Aleksandr Lʹvovich, for example, had been implicated in the Decembrist uprising and had been brought to trial in 1826.4 Moreover, it would appear that the grandfather’s rebellious spirit had passed down the line to reach not only Vladimir but also his elder brother Aleksandr, a graduate of the St Petersburg Technological Institute, who, in 1882, had been placed under secret police surveillance for corresponding with a former student at the Institute, the Jewish Social Democrat Yakov Rombro.5 It may be that Aleksandr, like his brother, would have gone on to pursue a revolutionary career had he not died of a brain haemorrhage only five years later, at the young age of twenty-nine. One can only hazard a guess at the possible psychological impact of this tragedy on his young sibling. By his own admission, Burtsev was a deeply religious child who regularly attended church, visited the local monastery and even, at one point, considered becoming a monk.6 He recalled one spiritual experience in particular when, at the age of fourteen,

10

Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

he accompanied his aunt on a pilgrimage to Moscow to tour the holy sites, take part in the services and see the numerous, supposedly miracle-working icons and relics. There, in one of the chapels of the Uspensky Cathedral in the Kremlin, he was shown and invited to kiss a particular relic which, it was claimed, was one of the nails with which Christ had been crucified and which still bore traces of the Saviour’s blood. Burtsev described the effect this experience had on him as transformational, producing a feeling of boundless elation and pride which shook him to his very soul, but which, at the same time, left him with a dull sense of deep-seated pain and anxiety.7 Some months after this Moscow pilgrimage, he fell ill and was obliged to spend some time in the hospital of his high school. There he whiled away the hours reading D. I. Pisarev’s famous article on Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and John William Draper’s The History of the Conflict between Religion and Science.8 (He continued to read voraciously from then on, spending a great deal of time in the well-stocked school library and becoming acquainted with the works of, amongst others, Plekhanov, Nekrasov, Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid.)9 Initially, the atheistic viewpoints of these authors made no impact on his faith but shortly thereafter he recalls undergoing some kind of spiritual crisis, suddenly realizing that in the Uspensky Cathedral he had been deceived, that Christ’s crucifixion nail was nothing but an ordinary nail, that the blood on the nail (if indeed it was blood) belonged to anyone but Christ and ‘that “they” knew, they had lied over and over to me, continuously, consciously, and had done so out of self-interest or for some other reason which was possibly even worse’.10 This, according to Burtsev, was his first ‘betrayal’ and, as will be shown, he was to experience many more such deceptions in his life, each in turn having a significant impact on the development of his personality and on his world outlook. With his religious beliefs now seriously undermined, the young Burtsev was also obliged, at this time, to review his faith in the tsar and his government. This was triggered by a series of rumours that started to reach his remote corner of the provinces concerning the arrest in various parts of Russia of ‘nihilists’, ‘socialists’ and other enemies of the tsar, and the reports of the numerous political trials that followed. Indeed, between 1871 and 1890, some 200 such trials took place.11 At this point, it may be worth describing in some detail the events that preceded these trials and the political consequences that ensued, for such events most certainly exerted a major influence on the young Burtsev’s political outlook.

The ‘will of the people’ In 1874, the mass khozhdenie v narod (Movement to the People) by supporters of the populist revolutionary society Zemlia i volia (Land and Freedom) was brought to a halt by police action. By the end of the year, of the thousands arrested, some 700 young agitators had been arraigned. The tsar was determined to prove to the country at large (and to the rest of the world) the extent of the sedition uncovered and, to that end, decided on a show trial. His hope was that the Russian people would be so horrified by the godless nature and the tremendous scale of the conspiracy that they would be

1862–1891: From Piety to Protest

11

driven back into the arms of their Tsar-Liberator. The meticulous preparations lasted over three years, during which time the list of the accused was gradually whittled down to manageable proportions. By the time legal proceedings finally got underway in October 1877, only 193 defendants remained in the dock. All were charged with belonging to a single conspiratorial society, the aim of which was alleged to be the violent overthrow of the government and ‘the slaughter of all officials and of the rich’. The trial ended some three months later with harsh sentences being handed down to virtually all the defendants.12 This ‘frivolous comedy’, as one of the key defendants termed it,13 proved to be of no benefit to the autocracy. Indeed, if anything, the event showed only how out of touch with his people Alexander II had become. International press coverage was uniformly critical of the heavy-handed prosecution, the weakness of the evidence and the disproportionate punishments. The special correspondent of The Times, for example, reported that ‘The judicial and extra-judicial administration have conducted this affair in such a way that very many people blame the authorities and sympathize with the accused’. The trial was, in his view, a ‘public scandal’.14 Moreover, within Russia, the outcomes of this (and other similar trials) were causing widespread outrage amongst the population at large, driving some of the opposition to extreme positions and provoking certain amongst them to the adoption of organized terror and to the policy of ‘propaganda by deed’. In late 1879, Land and Freedom split into two factions, the first of which, the Chernyi peredel (Black Partition), stressed the importance of propaganda amongst the workers, while the second, the Partiia narodnoi voli (Party of the People’s Will), adopted a policy of terrorist struggle and political assassination. Such incidents as Vera Zasulich’s attempted assassination of F. F. Trepov, the Governor of St Petersburg, in January 1878, inspired many to follow suit and sparked a series of assassinations.15 These attacks, in turn, prompted the Council of Ministers to issue a decree imposing closed military court trials for those accused of such offences and to pass a law giving Gendarmes increased powers to arrest anyone suspected of being linked to political offences or to ‘assemblies and demonstrations of a political nature’. Those so arrested could then be ‘administratively exiled’ by the Third Section and the Minister of the Interior, who were merely obliged to inform the Minister of Justice of the steps taken without any need to offer a justification for their actions.16 These new measures, however, did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of the People’s Will. In February 1879, the Governor of Kharʹkov, Prince D. N. Kropotkin was shot by the assassin Grigory Golʹdenberg. Then, in March, an attempt was made on the life of the new Head of the Third Section, A. R. Drentelʹn, followed the next month by Aleksandr Solovʹev’s attempt on the life of the tsar himself. This, the third attempt on the emperor’s life since his reign began, appeared to engender scant sympathy for him either at home or abroad. In Britain, for example, little interest was shown in his predicament.17 On the contrary, on 29 April 1879, in the House of Commons, to cries of ‘Hear, Hear!’ Sir Robert Peel (Third Baronet) asked whether: ‘Her Majesty’s Government will take any steps, in the interests of humanity, to mitigate the horrors and atrocities amid which a reign of terror is now being carried on in Russia over 80 millions of people’. He raised the question, he said, not in expectation of a satisfactory

12

Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

answer, ‘but in order to excite the attention of the House and to strike a chord of sympathy in this country for those who were suffering’.18 Meanwhile, within Russia, support for the radical opposition also appeared to be on the increase. Following its first meeting on 26 August 1879, the Executive Committee of the People’s Will issued a chilling decree condemning the tyrant tsar to death. A secret, unpublished, programme drawn up by the Committee at the same time, Podgotovitelʹnaia rabota partii (Preparatory Work of the Party), laid out detailed plans for of a coup dʹétat, and assigned a significant role to terror, terming it the ‘detonator of the uprising’ (detonator vosstanii).19 Thus, the party set about preparing for the uprising by adopting a wide-ranging programme of terrorist activities, combined with the dissemination of propaganda amongst workers, officers and students. Denouncing the emperor as ‘the personification of a despicable despotism, of all that is cowardly and sanguinary’20 the Executive Committee made yet further attempts on his life, which in turn convinced Alexander of the urgent need to review his security arrangements.21 Shortly thereafter, he appointed Count M. T. Loris-Melikhov as head of a new Supreme Administrative Commission for the Preservation of State Order and Public Tranquillity (Verkhovnaia rasporiaditelʹnaia komissiia po okhraneniiu gosudarstvennogo poriadka i obshchestvennogo spokoistviia) which assumed control of all the country’s security forces. In August 1880, the old Third Section was abolished to be replaced by the Department of State Police. These new, centralized arrangements, together with the collaboration of such police informants as Grigory Golʹdenberg and Ivan Okladsky, soon began to bear fruit.22 As the number of terrorist arrests grew, the Executive Committee was forced to take the decision to concentrate its remaining resources on its primary target, Alexander II, and, on 1 March 1881, achieved its goal when the ‘despicable despot’ was assassinated alongside the Catherine Canal in St Petersburg by the bombers N. I. Rysakov and I. I. Grinevitsky, assisted by the young Sof ʹia Perovskaia. Within Russia, the regicide was met with a national outpouring of grief and with a great spectacle of pomp and ceremony as the tsar’s body was transported from the Winter Palace to the Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul. However, the nation was by no means united in its anguish. In recent years, Alexander and his officials had lost the support of many, for a variety of reasons: the educated classes, for example, regarded the outcome of the Congress of Berlin, with Russia having to surrender much of what it had gained under the Treaty of San Stefano, as a national humiliation.23 Added to this, the summer of 1880 had seen a poor harvest, leading to a rise in the price of bread with consequent mumblings of discontent and dissatisfaction spreading amongst the peasantry and the urban poor.24 Moreover, as mentioned previously, the growing number of political trials was not having its desired effect of restoring the people’s faith in the tsar, while the increased propaganda activities of the People’s Will were attracting more popular support for radical solutions to the nation’s problems. Indeed, during this period many within Russia (including the young Burtsev himself) believed that acts of terror, even regicide, could be morally justified. As Burtsev recalled, both the Party of the People’s Will at that time and its ‘natural successor’, the Combat Organization of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries some twenty years later, attracted broad support amongst society at large:

1862–1891: From Piety to Protest

13

The government, apart from its bureaucracy and army, which stood aside from politics, enjoyed no support and was estranged from the entire country. Its estrangement from society was such that even in law-abiding circles all and each derived malicious pleasure from whatever had the smallest bearing on state authority. Although platonic, sympathy there undoubtedly was for the revolutionaries. This manifested itself in general sympathy for political terror and, specifically, for attempts on the life of the tsar. The terrorists expressed social protest. More than that – they embodied society’s hope. People wanted and expected terror. Many who had nothing in common with the terrorists and the revolutionaries in general began to empathize with their cause. Terror was welcomed, not only by extreme left-wing circles, but also by moderate ones.25

Burtsev’s views on the level of public support for terrorist acts are not shared by certain scholars who argue that, following the assassination of Alexander II, the revolutionary terrorists were left ‘without a shred of public sympathy’.26 Richard Pipes, on the other hand, believes that Burtsev’s judgement is supported by other evidence27 and, indeed, according to Vera Figner, former member of the Executive Committee of the People’s Will: Society saw no escape from the existing condition: one group sympathized with the violence while others regarded it only as a necessary evil – but even they applauded the valour and skill of the champion. Outsiders became reconciled to terrorism because of the disinterestedness of its motives; it redeemed itself through renunciation of material benefits, through the fact that the revolutionist was not satisfied with personal well-being … it redeemed itself by prison, exile, penal servitude and death.28

Moreover, sympathy for the terrorists and an understanding of why they felt obliged to embark on a programme of political assassination were not confined within the borders of the Russian Empire but was spreading throughout Europe and, indeed, to North America. For example, following the execution of those arrested in connection with Alexander’s murder, the Liberal Viscount Morley expressed his deep sympathy for the fate of one of them, Sof ʹia Perovskaia, the first woman in Russia to be executed for a political crime, describing her as a ‘saint in the revolutionary calendar’.29 Meanwhile, in France and elsewhere, mass meetings were held in support of those sentenced to death. As the reaction continued, criticisms of the brutality of the sentences grew both at home and abroad and so too did support for the opposition to the rule of the new despot, Alexander III. The young Burtsev was one such fervent supporter.30

First arrest: Sudeikin At this point in the battle between the revolutionaries and the autocracy, Burtsev had already come to a firm decision on where his sympathies lay. Like many of his

14

Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

generation in his small provincial town he had already formed strong anti-monarchist views and had gained the reputation of being a non-believer, a socialist and a revolutionary – although not a signed-up member of the People’s Will, he considered himself nonetheless to be a true Narodovolets.31 As the assassinations, arrests and trials continued, Burtsev moved, in 1880, to continue his studies at the Kazanʹ Imperial High School. Leaving there in the spring of 1882, he was then admitted to the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at St Petersburg University, where he pursued his studies from August 1882 to September 1884.32 During this period, however, circumstances did oblige him to take some time off. On 11 (23) November 1882, just a few days before his twentieth birthday, the teenager was one of 91 students arrested for attending one of a number of meetings at the university to protest at the expulsion of a fellow student who had drawn up a petition to protest at a vote of thanks which had been offered in the name of all students to the millionaire-speculator S. Poliakov, who had donated some 200,000 roubles to the university for the construction of a new student hostel. The protest meetings were broken up by the police, even though no political issues were being discussed but, as Burtsev recalled, ‘In those days the discussion of such issues as the expulsion of students from university was equivalent to expressing a desire to overthrow the existing state order’.33 He was imprisoned for a few weeks without trial in the cells of the Aleksandrovsky police station and it was during his confinement there that, for the first time in his life, he came face-to-face with professional revolutionaries and learned directly from them about the true nature and strength of the opposition.34 At that time, the decimation of the People’s Will was continuing apace, thanks in chief to the tactics of penetration, provocation and psychological warfare employed by Colonel G. P. Sudeikin of the St Petersburg police. Sudeikin’s activities were to have such an impact on Burtsev’s fate, that it is worth making a brief digression here to describe them. In the spring of 1878, following the murder of Captain Geiking, Staff Captain Georgy Porfirʹevich Sudeikin, recently transferred from Moscow, took over as head of the Department of Political Investigation in the Kiev Gendarmerie.35 Described later by Burtsev as ‘the most brazen-faced provocateur’,36 he soon achieved remarkable success, thanks to his skill in uncovering revolutionary plots, with the arrest of large numbers of Narodovoltsy. Indeed, thanks to his efforts, by February 1879 the terrorist movement in southern Russia had virtually been wiped out.37 In July 1881, as a reward for his achievements, Sudeikin was transferred to St Petersburg to serve under Chief of Police V. K. Plehve38 and quickly set about the creation of a secret department, the functions of which were: 1. To instigate, with the help of special active collaborators, quarrels and disputes amongst diverse revolutionary groups; 2. To spread false rumours to threaten and terrorize the revolutionary milieu; 3. To transmit accusations that the most dangerous revolutionaries were spying for the police and, at the same time, to discredit revolutionary proclamations and various printed organs by depicting them as provocations of the secret police.39

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Burtsev himself witnessed an example of Sudeikin’s working methods when, in late 1882, the latter distributed a hectographed appeal, under the name of Obshchestvo borʹby s terrorom (The Society for the Struggle against Terror), to all the student groups in St Petersburg. It called on them, quite simply, to spy on each other in return for pardons for previous crimes, or permits for subsidized travel abroad.40 The most infamous of his ‘active collaborators’ was, without question, Sergei Degaev, a member of the Executive Committee of the People’s Will who was ‘turned’ by Sudeikin following his arrest in 1882. Amongst the literally hundreds of revolutionaries Degaev betrayed during his ignoble career was Vera Figner, the only remaining founding member of the Executive Committee still at large, who was arrested on 10 (22) February 1883. To all intents and purposes, it was this arrest that spelled the end of the People’s Will as a significant force in the fight against tsarist tyranny. Degaev, however, was soon to fall under suspicion of collaboration and eventually made a full confession of his crime to those few comrades that remained. He was persuaded to make amends by assisting in Sudeikin’s murder and, after much procrastination, in December 1883 he succeeded in luring Sudeikin to his flat, where he helped two other revolutionaries carry out the execution before making his escape abroad.41 Sudeikin’s method of policing, however, continued to produce results even after his death and, consequently, the threat from the revolutionary opposition continued to recede. His influence and teachings were also kept alive by two of his ‘star pupils’, P. I. Rachkovsky and A. M. Gekkelʹman, both of whom, as will be shown, were to have a major impact on Burtsev’s fate at a later date.

From the ‘Peter and Paul’ to Siberia In February 1883, Burtsev was readmitted to the university to continue his studies. According to his memoirs, however, he rarely attended seminars or lectures, preferring instead to spend days at a time at the Public Library reading up on the political trials and consulting back issues of journals such as Vestnik Evropy (European Messenger), Zemstvo (Zemstvo) and Poriadok (Order), so as to better acquaint himself with the history of the revolutionary movement.42 This passion was one which would remain with him for the rest of his life and which we will examine in greater detail in due course. As well as immersing himself in the study of revolutionary history, it was also at this time that Burtsev embarked on his politically active life as he recalled seven years later in the first number of his journal Svobodnaia Rossiia (Free Russia).43 In his article, he described how he and many others like him had become disillusioned with the so-called Old Party of the People’s Will, which had been all but obliterated by Sudeikin, and which was now regarded as a weak and spineless organization devoid of revolutionary spirit. In St Petersburg, Burtsev had initially joined a ‘workers’ circle’ (rabochii kruzhok) composed of around seventeen, mainly student, members, whose aim was to carry out propaganda amongst the workers and attempt to revive the Movement to the People. In this, his group took the side of the poet P. F. Yakubovich’s ‘Young Party of the People’s Will’ (Molodaia partiia ‘Narodnoi voli’),

16

Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

which espoused ‘agrarian’ and ‘industrial’ terror: that is, the murder of landowners and factory bosses, as opposed to the political terror of the kind practised by the ‘Old’ People’s Will.44 That summer, however, having participated in another ‘movement to the people’, Burtsev realized the insignificance and irrelevance of the views of his St Petersburg working group to those living in the countryside and later came to reject non-political terror completely as a ‘study group tendency’ (kruzhkovaia tendentsiia). In late September 1884, he asked to be excused from his course at St Petersburg University and moved back to Kazanʹ, where he entered the Faculty of Law at the city’s university.45 A month later, he received news of the arrest in St Petersburg of the old and much-respected revolutionary German Aleksandrovich Lopatin, whom Burtsev had met for the first time the previous year when the former had returned from foreign exile and had travelled around various urban centres trying to recruit activists and sympathizers in an attempt to resuscitate the Party of the People’s Will.46 His arrest, however, led to the opposite result and, over the next few months, proved to have dire consequences for the opposition leading to the apprehension of ninety-seven revolutionaries, one of whom was Burtsev.47 The events that preceded his arrest are laid out in a Gendarmerie report for the period and are also described in some detail by Burtsev himself. They are worth recounting here, if for no other reason than that they give a rare early glimpse into Burtsev’s mental agility and cunning.48 He had previously given Lopatin a list of addresses of his acquaintances, which was confiscated by the police following the latter’s arrest.49 Then, in December 1884, Burtsev wrote pseudonymously and using chemical inks to one of the names on the list, a Yuliia Ponosova, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, who at that time was in St Petersburg on revolutionary business. In his letter he detailed how the distribution of revolutionary propaganda in Kazanʹ was progressing and asked for more material to be sent. He also referred to the arrest of Lopatin and others in St Petersburg and asked for more details. Due to his famously appalling handwriting, the pseudonym he used could be read as either ‘Vl. Korolev’ or ‘V. I. Korolev’. The letter, of course, was seized by the St Petersburg police and despatched back to Kazanʹ where the local Gendarmerie, after a few fruitless weeks spent interviewing countless Korolevs, Vladimir Ivanovichs and plain Vladimirs, eventually tracked Burtsev down, confirmed a handwriting match, and took him into custody.50 Rather than admitting to the authorship of the Ponosova letter, Burtsev devised a cunning plan which involved getting hold of some similar inks and paper and, from captivity, sending another letter to the same address. This communication, again intercepted by the St Petersburg police, described the arrests which were taking place in Kazanʹ including that of ‘some Burtsev or other’. Subsequently, a telegram was sent from the capital to Kazanʹ ordering Burtsev’s release, as it seemed obvious from this letter that a mistake had been made. Burtsev mockingly recalls the perplexity of the investigating Gendarmerie colonel in Kazanʹ upon receipt of the second letter, the latter saying to him, ‘You are either a completely innocent man, or an inveterate criminal’! Then, later, while trying to persuade another prisoner to betray Burtsev, the colonel is reported to have exclaimed, ‘No mercy should be shown to the likes of Burtsev – they should drown him like a pup!’51

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Unfortunately, in the end, the ruse did not come off – though why it failed is unclear. According to Burtsev, the police simply told Ponosova that he had confessed to being the author of the letter and at this news she gave in, admitted to her acquaintance with him and confirmed his authorship. According to the Gendarmerie report, however, the investigations into Burtsev and Ponosova had revealed that they were acquaintances of Lopatin who, when examined, admitted to knowing them and personally gave evidence that he ‘had despatched Burtsev, on more than one occasion, with assignments of a revolutionary nature to various parts of the Russian Empire’.52 If the latter version is correct, then it would lead one to conclude that Burtsev was yet again the victim of betrayal – this time at the hands of someone widely regarded as one of the most trustworthy and honourable revolutionaries of the period and, moreover, someone who, from 1908 onwards in emigration in Paris, would become one of Burtsev’s closest collaborators and friends. It is, however, almost impossible to accept that someone of Lopatin’s revolutionary pedigree would ever intentionally inform on a comrade. If, on the other hand, he did, then he received no reward for his help from Alexander III, for he was kept in prison without trial until 1887, when, at the famous ‘Trial of the 21’, he was given the death sentence, later commuted to life imprisonment. Lopatin was to spend the next eighteen years in solitary confinement in the Shlisselburg (Oreshek) Fortress before being released following the 1905 revolution, a tired and broken man. On reading Burtsev’s account of his arrest, one is almost left with the impression that he treated the whole affair as some huge game – even as he describes his transfer, after several months in prison in Kazanʹ, to the Preliminary Detention Centre53 in St Petersburg, he talks of his expectation of imminent release in an almost light-hearted manner. The tone of the narrative changes sharply, however, when he describes the horrors which he endured following his unexpected transfer, in the middle of the night, to the Trubetskoy Bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress, where, after being asked a few questions I was led into a room and, in the presence of the Colonel, the bastion overseer, a few Gendarmes and about a dozen convoy members, was forced to strip naked. They gave me slippers, placed me in the middle of the convoy and led me down the corridor to another room. Here they began a thorough bodily examination, combing through my hair, looking into my ears, probing around in my mouth and so on. I could feel how all of those present, some fifteen or twenty people, were attentively following the movements of the two Gendarmes examining me. What I experienced then I had never previously had to go through. I felt like some object which was being unceremoniously turned around in someone’s hands and studied. It was only then that I came to a full understanding of what it was to endure a strip-search in the Peter and Paul Fortress, about which rumours had created legends. Resistance was, of course, out of the question. I simply had to grit my teeth and try to numb myself to the experience. The search ended. No ‘seditious material’, as they termed it, had been found. They dressed me in a convict’s gown and slammed my cell door shut.54

One senses not only the author’s disgust at his degrading, inhuman treatment at the hands of his captors, but also an inability to comprehend the reasons why he should

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Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

be dealt with in such a manner. Even by the standards of the Russian police of the day, the punishment seemed to be out of all proportion to the crime committed: that of distributing propaganda. Then, during one of the interrogations, all became clear when it was revealed that he was suspected of participating in the murder of none other than General Sudeikin: I was astonished at the absurdity of the accusation, but at least it explained why they had transferred me with such caution. It turned out that the Gendarmes did not know the flat where the meetings between Degaev, Sudeikin’s killers, and Lopatin and the others had taken place. Then my landlady had testified, first from photographic evidence, and then by direct confrontation that all of these individuals had visited me in my flat. In fact, not a single one of them had ever paid me a visit.55

Thus, betrayed again and imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, Burtsev was obliged to spend a full year of solitary confinement in the Trubetskoy Bastion, although, somewhat remarkably, he survived ‘without any particularly dreadful consequences’.56 He was then sentenced, without trial, to four years’ exile in Siberia and moved to the Butyrka transit prison in Moscow, where he spent the winter of 1886. In May of the following year, he began his long journey, po etapam (in stages), as part of a transport of political prisoners, to his place of exile, the village of Malyshevskoe, in Irkutsk province, where he would arrive only in December of that year. Burtsev’s published autobiography contains little information on this period of exile, although he does devote some space to a fairly harsh criticism of a fellow exile, the Socialist-Revolutionary М. А. Natanson. Relations between the two would remain strained from this first encounter through to 1917 and beyond.57 Natanson appeared to be one of those who seemed satisfied to sit out the term of his exile without giving a thought to breaking free in order to continue the revolutionary struggle. Not so Burtsev. Suffice it to say that even before arriving in Siberia he had made up his mind to escape and this he set about doing on 3 (15) July 1888.58 Dressed for one part of the journey as a high school student, he managed to make his way, using a variety of means of transport, through Tomsk, Tyumenʹ, Permʹ, Kazanʹ and Saratov to Odessa, where he met up with the revolutionary Yury Rappoport and with him continued his journey across the border, passing through Cracow and Vienna and eventually arriving in Geneva in the autumn of 1888.59

Escape to Switzerland: ‘Free Russia’ and the birth of Russian investigative journalism On his journey from Siberia, Burtsev had made contact with a number of his compatriots along the way, one of whom was the Socialist-Revolutionary Olʹga Nikolaevna Figner, who was in exile in Kazanʹ with her husband when Burtsev passed through.60 She and other members of her circle in Russia asked Burtsev to take over the production of

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their journal Samoupravlenie (Self-Government) upon his arrival in Switzerland. The previous year, the journalist A. S. Belorusov and some of his revolutionary comrades had had the idea of setting up a free political journal abroad that would run articles sent from Russia and, with the assistance of V. K. Debagory-Mokrievich in Geneva, numbers one and two of the journal had already appeared (in December 1887 and May 1888, respectively). In February 1889, after a hiatus of almost a year, issue number three of Samoupravlenie appeared under Burtsev’s editorial control. Figner had given him permission to include additional materials from the émigré community and this he did. Both numbers three and four (the final number, which appeared in April 1889) contain contributions not only from revolutionaries within Russia, but also from émigrés such as Stepniak, Zasulich, Plekhanov, P. B. Akselʹrod, M. P. Dragomanov and I. I. Dobrovolsky. Burtsev was also one of the first to include translations of articles by the famous American explorer George Kennan, such as ‘Prison Life of Russian Revolutionaries’ and ‘The Final Declaration of the Russian Liberals’.61 Even at this early stage of his journalistic career, Burtsev was eager to demonstrate that the radicalism of the revolutionary opposition also received support abroad, citing Mark Twain, who, after one of Kennan’s lectures in Washington in the spring of 1889, made the memorable declaration: ‘If a government such as the current Russian one can only be brought down by dynamite, then thank God for dynamite’!62 While working on Samoupravlenie, Burtsev had also started up his own journal, Svobodnaia Rossiia (Free Russia), which he co-edited with Debagory-Mokrievich and Dragomanov.63 The journal’s draft political programme appeared on the front page of issue number three of May 1889 and is worth examining here, for it not only gives some indication of Burtsev’s own political outlook at that time, but the very nature of the political demands outlined shows the extent of the oppression which the Russian people were enduring. In their programme the editors demanded, firstly, the establishment of political freedom, which they saw as essential if Russia was to turn from a despotic state in which power lay in the hands of an unaccountable bureaucracy into a free state. To this end it was necessary to introduce a number of measures that could be termed either ‘transitional’ (perekhodnye) or ‘organic’ (organicheskie). There were six of the former: 1. The lifting of the current state of siege. (The abolition of the 1881 Statute on State Security.) 2. The return of rights to all those in administrative exile and the declaration of an amnesty for all political prisoners. 3. The dismantling of the State Police and the system of administrative exile. 4. The removal of all amendments to the Statute on Zemstvos and the Legal Statutes of 1864. 5. The reimplementation of the 1863 Universities’ Charter and the removal of all restrictions to the right to education by ministerial order and the removal of various constraints on grounds of religion or nationality. 6. The reinstatement of higher education courses for women.

Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

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The organic measures came under two headings: I. The immediate publication of a range of laws guaranteeing individual rights such as: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

inviolability of the person or dwelling by police without a court order inviolability of letters and telegrams freedom to choose one’s place of habitation and occupation inviolability of national languages in private and public life freedom of conscience and religious belief freedom of speech, of the press and of education freedom of assembly and freedom to petition freedom of associations and societies freedom to pursue civil and legal actions against all bureaucrats.

II. The following steps to be taken to allow the population to assume control of the behaviour of the current administration and to make possible the establishment of social self-government: 1. The immediate convocation of a conference of representatives from regional zemstvos to draw up proposals for administrative reform and changes to the Statute on Zemstvos of 1864. 2. The convocation of a conference of representatives from town dumas to draw up proposals for alterations to the Statute on Towns of 1870. 3. The summoning to the State Council of delegates from the above two conferences (with equal voting and speaking rights as the current members of the council) to embark on discussions of the bills drawn up by said conferences. 4. The introduction of zemstvo and town electoral organizations to all parts of the empire where these do not currently exist. 5. The granting of the right to all zemstvos to call joint conferences to decide on the implementation of measures of mutual benefit. 6. The setting of a date (by Imperial Decree) for the convocation of an all-state Zemskii Sobor with legislative powers to be composed of zemstvo and town duma representatives and also representatives from higher educational establishments. 7. Until such time as the Zemskii Sobor is established – the granting of the right to zemstvo and town dumas to petition the Supreme Power and the right to debate these requests in the State Council. 8. Following the establishment of the Zemskii Sobor – ministers to be appointed by the Emperor independently from the Zemskii Sobor, but to be answerable to the Zemskii Sobor which will have the power to take them to court before a special Supreme State Court. 9. A State (Supreme) Court – to be composed of permanent members chosen by the Emperor from a list of candidates drawn up for him by the Zemskii Sobor. It is this court which will deal with cases brought against ministers by private individuals. All in all, the programme could hardly be termed ‘radical’ – or at least no more so than any other political programme to be found in any other émigré journal of the

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day. Nowhere is there to be found any threat of political terror or assassination. Indeed, there is not even a call for the tsar to abdicate. One can understand why such a programme would anger old narodovoltsy currently residing in Switzerland, such as I. V. Dembo (Brinshtein), but it is at first unclear why it did not attract the support of the constitutionalists. In fact, Burtsev, as well as listing his demands for a constitution, had also wanted to publish a warning that if the government refused to meet these demands, then the consequence would be an open call to active revolutionary struggle. Both Dragomanov and Debagory-Mokrievich, however, were firmly opposed to such a statement, and it was clear that, with such a divergence in views on the editorial board, the journal could not continue for much longer.64 (As it so happened, Burtsev had already decided to leave Switzerland to try his luck in Paris and the events surrounding his stay in the French capital will be described in due course.) The remainder of issue number three of Svobodnaia Rossiia was given over to a series of political letters from Turgenev (in the main to Herzen) and to Burtsev’s reminiscence of his Siberian exile. Also included was an article which may be regarded as an early indication of the author’s propensity and flair for investigative journalism – a talent for which (as we shall see) he would later be recognized publicly and even referred to as the predecessor of Julian Assange of ‘WikiLeaks’ fame.65 The article in question was entitled Krovoprolitie v Iakutske (Bloodshed in Yakutsk). It was dated 25 March 1889 and concerned the massacre of a group of political convicts by soldiers in Siberia.66 The report was based on an undated, anonymous six-page letter which Burtsev had received from Russia, the original of which is to be found in The Russian State Archive of Social and Political History.67 Burtsev’s Free Russia article was the first press report of that tragedy which, the following year, was to cause outrage throughout the world.

The Yakutsk massacre and Kara tragedy: British public outrage On their arrival at Yakutsk, a transport of some thirty administrative exiles received orders from the vice-governor that they were to proceed immediately to more distant places of exile. The exiles were aware that to undertake such a journey at that time of year without proper preparation and provisions would result in certain death for many and, therefore, they drew up a petition of protest. Following confusing and contradictory orders from the police, the exiles refused to leave the house where they had been stationed. The police and soldiers apparently lost patience and opened fire, resulting in six deaths and numerous wounded. Those who remained alive were then court-martialled for insurrection. All were found guilty and sentenced to long terms of penal servitude, with the exception of three who were sentenced to death and subsequently hanged. An example of the barbarity of the sentence is evidenced by the fate of one of the accused who, injured during the affray was still unable to walk and so was taken to the scaffold in his bed. This was lifted onto its end, the noose placed around the prisoner’s neck and the bed removed.68 Later that year Burtsev sent articles to, amongst others, Stepniak in London and thereby succeeded in getting the story into the foreign press. On 16 December 1889, The Times carried its first report of the tragedy, describing it as ‘one of the worst

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Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

instances of arbitrary and cruel conduct to be found, even in the records of Siberian prisons’. Ten days later, it carried a lengthy editorial in which it declared: ‘It is a story which the Russian government cannot afford to pass over. Superior to public opinion as it professes to be, there is a point beyond which it cannot go in disregarding the verdict of mankind.’69 As Burtsev recalled: ‘All the English newspapers were full of indignant articles against the barbaric acts of the Russian government. The European press declared that it was impossible to reconcile oneself with such barbarism. General sympathy was on the side of the suffering exiles. I remember also articles in Clemenceau’s Justice and reports in the Swiss press.’70 The next report of maltreatment of political prisoners to reach the press concerned the Kara outrage of November 1889. Following provocation from the Director of Kara prison in eastern Siberia, the former teacher and member of the People’s Will Nadia Sigida retaliated by slapping him in the face. For this offence she was stripped and given 100 lashes. As The Times reported, ‘such infamies were not perpetrated on ladies of rank and position even in the time of the Emperor Nicholas’.71 Sigida died two days later and, in protest, three of the other women prisoners committed suicide. When news reached the nearby men’s prison, two of the inmates there followed suit.72 As news of these atrocities spread, the level of public protest grew and, as Burtsev recorded, the strength of feeling was particularly pronounced in England.73 A series of meetings was arranged in London, culminating, on 9 March 1890, in an angry protest march and rally in Hyde Park that attracted a great deal of supportive press attention. Russian exiles in London were invited to the demonstration with Burtsev himself paying a brief visit as a delegate from Paris.74 The public’s sense of outrage at these crimes would be expressed by Algernon Swinburne in his ‘Ode to Russia’, which appeared in the press later that year and began as follows: Out of hell a word comes hissing, dark as doom, Fierce as fire, and foul as plague-polluted gloom; Out of hell wherein the sinless damned endure More than ever sin conceived of pains impure; More than ever ground men’s living souls to dust; Worse than madness ever dreamed of murderous lust.

But Swinburne went further. In reference to Alexander III, the poet called on God or man to ‘smite and send him howling down his father’s way’, and then ended with the expression of an opinion (similar to that of Mark Twain) that such regicide was necessary and that it could be justified and forgiven: Down the way of Czars, awhile in vain deferred, Bid the Second Alexander light the Third. How for shame shall men rebuke them? how may we Blame, whose fathers died, and slew, to leave us free? We, though all the world cry out upon them, know, Were our strife as theirs, we could not strike but so; Could not cower, and could not kiss the hands that smite; Could not meet them armed in sunlit battle’s light.75

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This strength of public feeling also found expression in governmental circles which in turn resulted in a noticeable cooling in Anglo-Russian diplomatic relations, and this in turn, as we shall see, presented a considerable problem for the Russian Department of Police.

The Foreign Agency: Foundation of the Zagranichnaia agentura For some time past Russia had been attempting to enlist the assistance of the British police in ‘the watching of the refugees who congregate in London’.76 (By crushing all opposition at home following the assassination of Alexander II, the government had, effectively, created a rod for its own back by forcing the revolutionaries abroad, thereby removing them from the control and supervision of the Department of Police.) The problem of these political refugees had soon grown to such a scale that the Russian government deemed it essential that, with or without the formal assistance of the British and the other European police forces, these fugitives had to be watched over and, where appropriate, sent back to face justice in Russia. With that in mind, in July 1883, the director of the Department of Police, Plehve, had set up a Zagranichnaia agentura (Foreign Agency) in the Russian embassy in Paris, whence agents could be despatched to any other European country, including Britain. The Agency was headed initially by Court Counsellor P. V. Korvin-Krukovsky, who, unfortunately, enjoyed little success in the post and was replaced in the summer of 1884 by that star pupil and close associate of Sudeikin, Petr Ivanovich Rachkovsky.77 It is interesting to note here that the attention of the British public had long since been drawn to the duplicitous career of this former police informer, whose fate would be so closely intertwined with that of Burtsev. As early as 1879, the Daily News had published a warning from the editors of Narodnaia volia (the journal of the ‘People’s Will’) ‘referring to one Ratchkofsky, an employee in the Ministry of Justice, and contributor to the newspapers Novosti and The Russian Jew – as being in the pay of the Third Section (Secret Police).’78 Rachkovsky had crept through the ranks of the police and then, following the assassination of his superior Sudeikin, had been sent to Paris to track down Degaev’s wife, hoping thereby to discover the whereabouts of the murderer himself. Unsuccessful in his task, Rachkovsky nevertheless stayed on in Paris, took a French wife and, following his appointment to the Foreign Agency, gradually started to put his stamp on the organization. In a letter of 1885 to a senior French policeman, Rachkovsky showed he was a true follower of Sudeikin, clearly spelling out his intentions thus: ‘I am endeavouring to demoralize the radical émigré politically, to inject discord among revolutionary forces, to weaken them, and at the same time to suppress every revolutionary act in its origin.’79 It was his view that Russia’s problems lay not with Russians but non-Russians, ‘Jews, Ukrainians, Poles and other inhabitants of Russian Lands’ and in the years to come he would provide yet more proof of these deep-rooted racist and anti-Semitic beliefs. The new Head of the Foreign Agency quickly set about developing close relationships with French police, politicians, publishers and journalists and recruiting new operatives – usually local ex-policemen, such as Henri Bint, formerly a member of the Sûreté who in 1881 had been persuaded by the Russian embassy in Paris to become

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Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

a full-time spy for the Foreign Agency’s precursor, the Sviashchennaia druzhina (Holy Brotherhood).80 Bint was to remain a paid employee of the Russian police in Paris through to 1917, during which time, as we shall see, he would cross paths, and swords, with Vladimir Burtsev. Bint it was who, in November 1886, as part of a group of agents acting under Rachkovsky’s orders, was responsible for an audacious attack on the Geneva printing press of the Vestnik Narodnoi Voli (Herald of the Party of the People’s Will). For this act of sabotage, carried out in complete violation of Swiss laws, Rachkovsky and his agents received increases in their salaries and were warmly praised by the Russian Minister of the Interior D. A. Tolstoy. Glowing with success, on the night of 1–2 February 1887, they carried out a second equally successful and equally lawless attack on another revolutionary press.81 Rachkovsky had also recruited, at an early stage, another of Sudeikin’s informants, Abram Gekkelʹman (later known as Landezen and later still as A. M. Garting). His and Burtsev’s paths were also to cross on a number of fateful occasions, with the latter claiming that he had first accused the former of provocation as early as 1884.82 As a student in St Petersburg at the same time as Burtsev, Gekkelʹman had been recruited into the Okhrana and, shortly afterwards, had left for Dorpat (Tartu). However, suspected of provocation in connection with arrests of some revolutionaries, he relocated in 1885 to Zurich under the assumed name of Landezen, a well-to-do student and son of a Polish banker.83 There he made the acquaintance of the émigrés Tikhomirov, Lavrov, A. N. Bakh and E. A. Serebriakov and duly reported back on their activities to Rachkovsky in Paris. Under the latter’s guidance he helped wreck a range of revolutionary enterprises throughout Switzerland (including the Geneva printing press already mentioned) and it was in Geneva, in early 1889, that he was first introduced to Burtsev, a meeting which the latter described as ‘one of the most fateful of my life, the significance of which I came to realise only the following year’.84 The far-reaching effects this encounter was to have on the lives of a group of revolutionary émigrés in Paris will be described later in this chapter. Rachkovsky and Landezen also showed themselves to be as masterful in the art of psychological warfare as their teacher Sudeikin. For evidence of this, one need look no further than the fall from grace of Lev Tikhomirov, renowned former member of the Executive Committee of the People’s Will and author of that group’s 1881 Declaration to Alexander III. Shortly after Rachkovsky’s arrival in Paris, Tikhomirov was placed under constant surveillance. Over the next few years he appears gradually to have been worn down by the persistent petty campaign waged against him by both Rachkovsky and Landezen. Tikhomirov would find that his letters went missing, doctors would refuse to treat his child and money transfers were mysteriously held up at the post office while scurrilous telegrams under his name were sent to his acquaintances.85 A chilling example of the merciless attitude shown to his victim by Rachkovsky is to be found in the latter’s February 1887 report to the Department of Police: Thus I have succeeded in reducing this previously unassailable revolutionary authority, surrounded by his aureole of a regicide, to the level of an ordinary scoundrel, who is mocked by the entire emigration and who has now completely lost any significance. Thanks to the measures which I have adopted, Tikhomirov

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has been driven, literally, to madness which in turn has led to a total mental and physical collapse. As things stand at the moment, there can be no doubt that the time will soon come when the Russian government will be able to take this regicide under its control without having to resort to any risks, but completely legally, as a Russian subject who has gone mad while abroad.86

And so it transpired that on 12 September 1888, a broken Tikhomirov sent off a petition to the tsar making it known that he wished to renounce the revolution, plead forgiveness and be allowed to return to Russia. By the end of the year, Rachkovsky had helped finance and circulate a pamphlet by Tikhomirov entitled Pochemu ia perestal bytʹ revoliutsionerom (Why I Ceased to be a Revolutionary) that caused great anger, confusion and discord in the ranks of the revolutionaries both at home and abroad.87 By now Rachkovsky had completely infiltrated and demoralized Russian émigré communities on the continent, but he still could not reach those living in Britain. There is an unsubstantiated claim that he made an investigatory trip to London in June 1888 at the time of the Whitechapel Murders88 but he did not turn his full attention to the English capital until the early 1890s, when more émigrés, such as Burtsev, started to make their way over the Channel to what by then had become almost their only safe haven in Europe. At least in England, the revolutionaries felt, they could be sure of a sympathetic welcome.

British attitudes to Russia Britain had long been sympathetic to and supportive of the oppressed subjects of the tsar and these sentiments had been reinforced at the start of the 1880s with the arrival in Britain of the likes of Petr Kropotkin and Sergei Stepniak, who were able to give firsthand accounts of the plight of their countrymen. Kropotkin, expelled from Switzerland a few months after the assassination of Alexander II, at the insistence of the Russian government, had made his way to England, where he remained for the next thirtyodd years, with only one break of four years (spent mainly in a French prison). He attracted a great deal of attention from a wide spectrum of the public both in Britain and on the continent for his scholarship and for his radical political views. In the course of the 1880s, he contributed a series of articles on Russian prisons to the journal The Nineteenth Century and succeeded in developing relationships with a range of English liberals, such as Edward Robert Pease and George Bernard Shaw, who were appalled at the stories coming out of Russia of the inherent unfairness and inhumanity of the tsarist regime. Kropotkin was soon joined in his English exile by the old revolutionary Nikolai Chaikovsky, and shortly thereafter by Vera Zasulich and Stepniak, whose influential book Podpolʹnaia Rossiia was first published to great acclaim in England as Underground Russia in May 1883. In the course of the 1880s, Stepniak was to go on to produce three books and numerous articles, all highlighting the injustices of the Russian autocracy.89 Towards the end of the 1880s, the number of British supporters of reform in Russia was greatly increased following the publication, in The Century Magazine, of a series of articles by the American George Kennan, describing his impressions of his earlier visits

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Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

to Siberia and his meetings there with exiled revolutionaries such as E. K. BrezhkoBrezhkovskaia and Feliks Volkhovsky.90 Kennan also lectured extensively in America, Canada and Britain, drawing large crowds, sometimes numbering in the thousands. As a result of this growth in awareness of the political situation in Russia, and following on from Burtsev’s horrific press reports of the Siberian outrages described earlier, a group of British liberals and radicals headed by Liberal MP Robert Spence Watson (and encouraged by Stepniak) decided on the pressing need to form a society to publicize the brutalities of life under the tsars. Thus was born the influential Society of Friends of Russian Freedom (SFRF). The importance of the Society and its journal Free Russia in increasing public awareness ‘of the position of all Russia’ in the course of the 1890s (and, indeed, through to its demise during the First World War) should not be underestimated, nor should the activities of its Russian Free Press Fund (RFPF), which the Society had set up soon after its formation and whose initial purpose was the provision of aid for the support of escaped exiles.91 At this stage, with Yakutsk and Kara very much in the news and with his government coming in for growing criticism in Britain and elsewhere over the policies of religious intolerance and Russification of K. P. Pobedonostsev, his Procurator of the Holy Synod, Alexander III must have been only too aware of his lack of friends on the international stage. There was, however, one important exception, for it was clear that for the British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, at least, the Anglo-Russian relationship was all-important and had to be protected. During his diplomatic travels, Salisbury and his wife had made the acquaintance of several Russian ministers and civil servants and had become particularly close to the diplomatist Count Nikolai Pavlovich Ignatʹev. Whether at the request of the latter or for some other reason unknown, Salisbury wrote in early 1891 to his ambassador in St Petersburg, Sir Robert Morier, forbidding him from raising an official complaint with the tsar about the recent Siberian atrocities.92 These revolutionaries may well have attracted the support of some English liberals but their godless activities would never be condoned by the deeply religious Salisbury. Meanwhile, Rachkovsky’s Foreign Agency attempted to limit the damage caused by ‘placing’ a story containing a different version of the Siberian events in the Daily Mail. Unfortunately for them, this version was so riddled with inaccuracies (confusing Irkutsk with Yakutsk, for example) that it was roundly ridiculed as clearly emanating from ‘the London lodgings of the Russian Secret Police’.93 Another distraction was urgently required and was conveniently found the following month, in May 1890, when, with Rachkovsky’s assistance, the French police dramatically uncovered a Russian terrorist bomb factory in the very heart of Paris. This resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of a number of Russian revolutionaries and, as we shall see, it was only by great good fortune that Vladimir Burtsev was not one of those to be deprived of their liberty.

The Paris bomb factory Diplomatic relations between Russia and France had been in a very poor state since the Kropotkin affair of 1886.94 The Russian anarchist had been arrested by the French police four years earlier and charged with being a member of the International Working Men’s

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Association. He was sentenced to five years imprisonment but, following an outcry in the French press, he was amnestied in 1886 and returned immediately to Britain. This amnesty was to put an immense strain on relations between Alexander III and France, to the point where the tsar was even considering severing diplomatic relations. This damaged relationship continued until, in 1890, the French found themselves with the opportunity to offer a new service to the Russian government. As the historian and secretary to the Senate Ernest Daudet recalled, on this occasion ‘the attitude of the French government revealed a praiseworthy determination in its zeal and its good intentions towards Russia’.95 In March of that year, Ernest Constans, the French Minister of the Interior, had received a police report that in Paris a group of Russian émigrés who had been under surveillance for some months previously were constructing bombs which they intended to use against the tsar. In May, Russian ambassador Mohrenheim demanded that those concerned be arrested before they had the chance to leave for Russia and, on the orders of Constans, in the early hours of 29 May 1890, a band of thirteen Russian émigrés who had been testing their bombs in the Bois de Meudon, were rounded up.96 Burtsev, who had left the capital shortly beforehand was in Constantinople when he learned that a number of his comrades were amongst those detained and realized that he himself was most fortunate not to be one of them. In July of the previous year, following disagreements amongst the editorial board of Svobodnaia Rossiia, he had left Geneva for Paris to try to drum up support for his latest project – a new journal, entitled Zemskii sobor (Assembly of the Land), which would ‘take a clear revolutionary line and at the same time would call for national unity’.97 He was by no means the only émigré to leave Switzerland during this period. Earlier that year in the Peterstobel woods, near Zurich, Dembo, the old narodovolets, had blown himself up while experimenting with explosives but before he died the Swiss authorities had managed to extract enough information from him to establish grounds for the expulsion of thirteen of his associates, many of whom then moved on to Paris.98 On his arrival in the French capital, Burtsev took up residence in the flat of I. N. Kashintsev (Ananʹev) on the Boulevard St Jacques. As he later recalled, the flat was visited on a regular basis by numerous other members of the People’s Will, some of whom, former associates of Dembo such as Boris Reinshtein and Aleksandr Lavrenius, asked if they might carry out some chemical experiments there. In his autobiography, Burtsev was quick to point out that he himself was not a chemist, that he was merely an onlooker and not an active participant, though this could be seen as something of a nineteenth-century equivalent of the ‘I smoked but didn’t inhale’ defence.99 But, whatever the actual nature of Burtsev’s involvement was, the conspirators’ experiments were doomed to failure from the outset for the simple reason that the group had long since been infiltrated by the informant Landezen, whose bona fides had been guaranteed, unfortunately, by Burtsev himself. The police spy had attached himself to Reinshtein’s group and become ever more deeply involved in its secret activities in the flat of the latter on the Rue de la Glacière. Burtsev and some of his associates had been planning long before to try to cross back into Russia to regain contact and develop links with activists there. In particular, Burtsev was keen to find backing for his projected journal and, in early May 1890, set

28

Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

off for Russia with his friend Yury Rappoport, with whom he had left his homeland to begin his life in emigration only some eighteen months previously. Their venture, however, had no hope of success. As Burtsev later recalled, one of those who saw them off at the station was Landezen himself and so from the very outset the Foreign Agency was aware of their every move. Sensing they were being followed, Burtsev persuaded his companion that they should travel through Austria to Romania and try to cross the border there, but on arrival he still had forebodings and refused to cross. The two decided, therefore, to go their separate ways. A few days later, Burtsev received news that his friend had indeed been arrested as he tried to re-enter Russia.100 In an attempt to throw the tsarist police off his track, Burtsev travelled first down the Danube to Belgrade, then back into Romania. Next he boarded a steamer to Constantinople, in the hope of catching another steamer to Batumi. It was on his arrival in Constantinople that he learned of the arrest of his comrades in Paris. When he noticed that the name of Landezen did not appear amongst those held by the police, it became immediately clear to Burtsev that there was now no possibility of him crossing into Russia, that they had all been betrayed and that the informant could be none other than Landezen. He wrote at once to his contacts in Paris detailing his suspicions but initially found no one to support his accusations. Gradually, however, as those in custody also started to voice their doubts, Landezen’s guilt became apparent. Earlier in the year, when the informer had reported back to the Foreign Agency concerning Reinshtein’s bomb-making experiments, Rachkovsky had not only encouraged him to become more closely involved, but had also informed the French Police, hoping that the granting of such a favour might pay dividends in the future.101 However, the trial of the nine accused, which was heard at the Assises de la Seine on 5 July 1890, was not as successful as Rachkovsky would have wished. Alexandre Millerand (who would later serve as president of France from 1920 to 1924) acted as one of the defence lawyers for the accused and took the opportunity to expose the role not only of the police spy Gekkelʹman-Landezen but also of his controller, the Head of the Foreign Agency himself. At the time, the French press and public (and indeed the judge) fully supported Millerand in his accusations, so much so that Landezen was sentenced, in absentia, to the maximum term allowed of five years’ imprisonment while, of the others, two were acquitted and the remaining six received three-year sentences only.102 According to the historian Maurice Laporte, Millerand had been assisted in his exposure of this Russian police provocation by documents provided by Burtsev.103 However, not everyone was in agreement with this account of the revolutionary’s role in Landezen’s exposure. The émigré publisher M. K. Elpidin, for example, believed that Burtsev had been completely taken in by Landezen when they first met in Geneva and roundly criticized him for his inability to judge people. It was entirely Burtsev’s fault, according to Elpidin, that the Paris group had been infiltrated. Moreover, he declared that Burtsev had played no part in Landezen’s exposure, which, he said, had come about thanks only to the work of the ‘excellent and intelligent counsel for the defence’. It was Elpidin’s opinion that ‘This is what comes of being unable to understand people. The fate of all those thus compromised must lie on the conscience of Monsieur Burtsev.’104 Whilst acknowledging Burtsev’s great thirst for knowledge

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and his undoubted accomplishments in the field of literary publishing, Elpidin went on to criticize him further (and on a distinctly personal level), describing their first encounter at his home in Switzerland in the late 1880s thus: ‘His manners left much to be desired. For example, without permission he would climb up onto your book cases and scatter the books around; you’d tell him to sit down, be patient and wait to be given a catalogue; he would sit for no more than a minute and then he’d be up messing about again.’105 The reason for Elpidin’s criticism and dislike of Burtsev may be explained, however, by the fact that he himself had been recruited into the Okhrana by Henri Bint and had been on their payroll as an informer since 1887.106 Meanwhile, as the Paris trial progressed, Burtsev had managed to shake off his police tail in Sofia. The respite was, however, temporary and, as the Russian police closed in, the pressure began to tell. Burtsev later recalled the state of depression he found himself in when, travelling down the Danube, he felt the full weight of his ‘dead end’ (bezvykhodnoe polozhenie) and described the torments he was enduring: I was in a state of total spiritual collapse and felt that my most intimate and precious feelings had been insulted. I remembered the traitor’s [Landezen’s] words and promises, and imagined how, at that moment, he would be celebrating in the company of our enemies. As I thought of all the possible terrible consequences of his betrayal a radical means of escape suddenly came to me. We were sailing along in such a way that at any time I could easily throw myself overboard and no-one would have the slightest chance of saving me. I walked up to the edge – one step more and my escape from this ‘dead end’ would be final.107

Fortunately, Burtsev did not take that final step but, as his Department of Police dossier shows, his position at this point was perilous indeed.

The Balkans pursuit: ‘The goods have arrived’ The role played by the Russian Department of Police’s Balkan Agency in Burtsev’s fate has escaped any serious examination by Western researchers to date. The Agency itself was set up in the late nineteenth century in Bucharest with an area of responsibility covering Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Austro-Hungary.108 From 1890 to 1901, it was headed by General A. I. Budzilovich and it is thanks, in large part, to his meticulous reports that the story of Burtsev’s pursuit through the Balkans in December 1890 can be revealed.109 On 30 November the general had received information that Burtsev had reentered Romania and was now in the port of Galaţi on the Danube where he intended to board a freight ship bound either for Russia, or for Constantinople and England. He quickly telegraphed the news to St Petersburg and so triggered a remarkable sequence of events which is worth relating in detail here, for it demonstrates the full extent of Russian police operations and the all-pervading influence of the tsar’s government in the area at the time. Moreover, it provides yet further proof of the determination of these authorities to recapture the renegade Burtsev at any cost (and, in addition, to provide further support for the claim that Burtsev was indeed ‘the most hunted man in Europe’).

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Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

Budzilovich had first received news of a possible sighting of his quarry in Ploieşti on 27 November. Having earlier thrown the police off his track in Sofia, Burtsev had travelled via Plovdiv to Constantinople and then into Romania via the port of Constanţa. Arriving next at Ploieşti he hid at the home of the Romanian socialist leader Dobrogeanu-Gherea (Solomon Kats), where, amongst others, he met a certain medical assistant named Fedorov.110 It was this latter, known to Budzilovich as agent ‘Miku’, who contacted his controller with the news of the mysterious arrival. Miku received a quick reply asking him to find out if the individual was indeed ‘Volodia’ and, if so, to telegraph immediately using the code tovar pribyl (the goods have arrived).111 The desired answer arrived two days later, followed by Miku himself who demanded 1,000 roubles for information concerning Burtsev’s exact location; otherwise he would ‘spoil it’. Hearing of this ultimatum, Chief of Police Durnovo angrily replied ‘Let him spoil it then!’ but quickly changed his mind.112 After all, the tsar himself was anxious that this dangerous fanatic should be dealt with and so his recapture had to be treated as a top priority. Urgent telegrams were therefore sent out to all heads of Gendarmerie at the Russian Black Sea ports telling them of Burtsev’s possible arrival and ordering them to search meticulously all boats arriving from Constantinople and the Danube ports.113 Durnovo also wrote to I. A. Zinovʹev, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that, ‘bearing in mind the particular importance of Burtsev’s arrest’, he had decided to send Rotmeister Budzilovich to Constantinople to establish the fugitive’s whereabouts and to arrange for his arrest. He requested that the Russian General Consul be forewarned of Budzilovich’s arrival in the Porte and that he be sent copies of information received, together with a photograph of Burtsev.114 Budzilovich arrived in Constantinople on 8 December to the news that Burtsev, accompanied by his comrade, the Georgian anarchist V. N. Cherkezov, had boarded an English steamship, the SS Ashlands, the previous day and was now heading down the Danube bound for Constantinople and England.115 However, portents of a troubled voyage ahead appeared almost immediately. The Times reported that the ship, under the command of a certain Captain Rees, ran aground in the lower reaches of the Danube and it was only by discharging part of the ship’s cargo that the captain succeeded in refloating her. Worse was to come for, on entering the port of Sulina and trying to turn the vessel, the captain managed to collide with the Greek lighter Ainos which sustained damage and sprung a leak.116 While such incidents may lead one initially to entertain doubts as to the seamanship of the unfortunate captain, as later events showed, his navigational skills were, in fact, beyond question, as too were his moral rectitude and courage. Meanwhile, unaware of the events unfolding at the mouth of the Danube, General Budzilovich, in a state of high anxiety, awaited the arrival of his important ‘goods’. Over the next twelve days he sent a series of telegrams to St Petersburg all to the effect that there was little or nothing to report. On 17 December, with the ship still nowhere in sight, Ambassador A. I. Nelidov reported from Constantinople that he had informed the Sultan’s police of their intentions with regard to Burtsev and that they had agreed to cooperate. Nelidov had also arranged with a Russian trading organization for a launch to be made available for Budzilovich and had put the general in touch with

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the head of the Sultan’s secret police, Ahmed Pasha.117 The ambassador did, however, express his concern that, due to the poor quality of police surveillance in Sulina, they risked compromising themselves and the affair. It was his view that, if Burtsev had any contacts at all, they would doubtless have informed him long since that he was being followed and that he would therefore be unlikely to appear on deck.118 Budzilovich, together with his Turkish hosts and a band of Russian agents dressed in Turkish police uniform, made daily trips up the Bosphorus in search of the elusive steamship. These outings passed without incident until 18 December, when the Turkish Minister of Police, Nazim Bei, himself arrived on a launch. Apparently, tensions existed between the secret police chief Ahmed Pasha and the minister, who, it was suspected, wished to spite his rival by capturing Burtsev himself. That day, Burtsev did not show up but the following evening news was received that the Ashlands had dropped anchor at Kavak, at the entrance to the Bosphorus. Nazim Bei’s party headed out immediately on their motor-launch, sailed past the Ashlands and moored nearby. At midnight on the same day Budzilovich and his party set off on a Russian steamship, whose flag had been taken down and whose name had been painted out. Arriving at Kavak they too dropped anchor at a safe distance.119 The following day, 20 December, at 7.30 in the morning, the general set off back to Constantinople, constantly looking behind him through his binoculars for the Ashlands to appear, which it did at around 9.00 am.120 They kept to a kilometre’s distance in front of the ship while Nazim Bei’s party remained roughly the same distance behind. At 10.30 am. the Ashlands dropped anchor off Beşiktaş, opposite the Sultan’s palace, and started to take on coal and water. Then, in mid-afternoon the police got their first sight of their quarry walking on deck. By 4.00 pm, however, realizing that Burtsev was not going to risk going ashore, Budzilovich formulated a daring, if somewhat unorthodox, plan. He had approached a strong, athletic Greek man who had agreed, for payment of 1,000 francs, to board the Ashlands under the guise of a fruit seller, walk up to Burtsev, grab him and jump with him into the Bosphorus where four boats would be waiting to pick them up. The Minister of Police Nazim Bei, however, prevented the general from putting his ingenious plan into effect for fear that the Greek might drown. Clearly, the death by misadventure of a Greek citizen would be a cause of some concern to the Turkish authorities, whereas that of a hapless Russian political refugee did not even merit comment!121 Now, with his master plan scuppered, the general had to fall back on ‘plan B’. Captain Rees later gave his version of the events which then unfolded.122 While the captain was onshore, a Turkish pasha boarded the ship and offered one of the officers £160 if he would give up Burtsev. When Rees was summoned back, the offer was repeated with the hint that it could be increased to £500 or even more. The captain indignantly replied that, as an English gentleman, he would not countenance such an offer and, seeing the danger that faced his passenger, immediately enlisted him as a member of his crew. The Turkish authorities then made a veiled threat to the effect that unless Burtsev was handed over, the ship would be detained and painstakingly searched from bow to stern, as had happened to two English vessels a few days earlier. At this, Rees declared that his ship was an integral part of British soil and refused to allow any such

32

Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

action to take place. The local British consul was summoned and in his presence the captain made a formal complaint regarding the ship’s detention. It took over a week for news of Burtsev’s plight to reach London and it was only on 29 December that Robert Spence Watson of the SFRF, with the support of the Rt. Hon. John Morley, wrote to Sir James Fergusson, Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office expressing his concerns. The Foreign Office replied on 2 January that a telegraph had been sent to their ambassador in Constantinople asking him to look into the matter.123 By this time, however, the port commander in Constantinople appeared to have given up, asking Rees only if he would mind conveying ‘a poor man’ to Gallipoli. Rees agreed, though, suspecting the man to be a detective, placed him in the chart house while sending Burtsev to another part of the ship. (Many years later Rees’s suspicions were confirmed when Burtsev identified this ‘poor man’ as none other than Rachkovsky’s right-hand man, Henri Bint.124) On their arrival at Gallipoli, the ‘poor man’ was duly taken ashore but at this point a Turkish police launch came alongside and the interrogation of Rees with regard to his passenger began over again. The captain described how he kept them talking until his ship was in the right position and then boldly steamed astern at full speed carrying the police boat away in his wash. Then he gave the command for the engines to be reversed and steamed ahead at full speed, thus managing to get past the shore batteries which, he suspected, might have opened fire had the police managed to get back in time to sound the alarm. It was thanks to this skilful manoeuvre that the ship managed to continue its journey free from further molestation and arrive safely at Surrey Commercial Dock on Tuesday 6 January 1891.125 Thus it was that Burtsev arrived at last in London, the new centre of the Russian emigration in Europe, which was to be his home, on and off, for the next fourteen or so years. Unfortunately, he was to find the initial experience of life in the English capital every bit as difficult as it had been for Kropotkin some fifteen years earlier. Burtsev later described those first few years as ‘the loneliest period of my life in emigration’, explaining: ‘The final years of the reign of Alexander III were difficult for all Russians. The reaction had crushed all, both within Russia and abroad. There was no sign of any active revolutionary struggle nor any significant social protest. We had entered a time of “small deeds”.’126 The extent of that reaction and the nature of the ‘small deeds’ which Burtsev and his compatriots in emigration performed in their fight against it will be examined in detail in the next chapter.

2

1891–1894: The Time of ‘Small Deeds’

From Paris to London That dark period of Burtsev’s life, encompassing the first few years after his arrival in London in January 1891, constitutes something of a black hole in his biography. Burtsev devotes no more than a sentence to it in his recollections, noting merely that during that time he travelled through Europe, attempting unsuccessfully to make contact with revolutionaries in Russia.1 Most previous studies of his life have added little more information. However, the gap can be filled by reference to two collections of primary sources: the Hoover Institution’s Okhrana archive and the Russian Department of Police files in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). These sources can also be used to throw more light on the significant developments within the Foreign Agency of the Russian Department of Police during the period in question, in particular the expansion of its operations into London. Until now, scant attention has been paid to this period of the Agency’s history.2 The chapter also provides a fresh insight into Anglo-Russian diplomatic relations of the period, thanks to the discovery in the British national archives of a hitherto unpublished document – the so-called Russian memorandum – which, according to the historian N. V. Ivanova, was drawn up by the Russian government in 1890 in an attempt to counter the influence on British policy of the recently founded Society of Friends of Russian Freedom.3 In addition, thanks to the discovery of previously unpublished Russian archival documents, new light can be thrown on the levels of assistance which a number of major European powers were prepared to offer the Russian government in its pursuit of political fugitives such as Burtsev. Reports of the Ashlands incident had preceded the ship’s arrival in London with enthusiastic follow-ups continuing to appear in the press for some weeks to come.4 In mid-January, at the National Liberal Club, an illuminated address, signed by a number of MPs among others, was presented to Captain Rees as a token of appreciation for ‘the great service rendered by him in the assertion of the English right of asylum’.5 Meanwhile, the London émigré community had already made a collection and despatched a deputation, headed by Feliks Volkhovsky, to the docks. There the delegates boarded the ship and presented a silver cup to the captain ‘in recognition of his conduct and skill in saving the refugee Bourtzev’.6 Volkhovsky had already met Burtsev on his arrival and, in an attempt to elude the attentions of the tsarist police, had whisked him off to his home in North London. It was clear enough that the young émigré had gained the reputation of being something of a prize in St Petersburg and his

34

Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

move to London had by no means guaranteed his safety. Burtsev was, of course, aware of his predicament, though it would appear that he had no idea of the notoriety he had achieved, nor of the level of interest which was being shown in his case in the very highest of circles in Russia. As he was being hounded throughout Europe, Minister of the Interior I. N. Durnovo7 sent regular progress reports of the pursuit to Alexander III himself and it is noteworthy that the latter considered Burtsev’s arrest important enough to merit the addition of his own manuscript ‘imperial resolutions’ to these reports. One such resolution reads ‘I hope that he will be caught’, while another records the tsar’s indignation at the news that Burtsev had again eluded capture.8 Despite Volkhovsky’s best efforts, however, the Department of Police did not remain in the dark for long with regard to the whereabouts of its prey. As Rachkovsky wrote in his report to Chief of Police P. N. Durnovo9 of January 1891: ‘From newspaper reports Your Highness will already be aware of Burtsev’s triumphal arrival in England. However, despite the popularity obtained in such an exceptional manner he has quickly faded into the background, settling in one of the distant regions of London, 130 St John’s, Upper Holloway, under the pseudonym Smith.’10 In the same report, the Head of the Foreign Agency detailed Burtsev’s contacts with members of the Russian Free Press Fund – Stepniak, Volkhovsky and Kelchevsky11 – and described the contents of his correspondence with those few of his colleagues still remaining in Paris. This information had not come into Rachkovsky’s possession via some Russian agent on the ground in London but from a letter sent by Burtsev a few days after his arrival to an old associate in Paris, M. I. Gurovich.12 This was not the first time his letters to Gurovich had fallen into Rachkovsky’s hands: during his unsuccessful attempt to cross back into Russia the previous year Burtsev had written to Gurovich twice from Sofia.13 All three letters in the Okhrana Archive are copies rather than originals, which fact may lead one to believe they had been ‘perlustrated’ (intercepted en route and opened). However, this is unlikely, given what is known of Gurovich’s later career. Mikhail Ivanovich Gurovich – real name Moisei Davidovich Gurevich – was arrested in 1880 for his involvement in the revolutionary movement and exiled to Siberia. Following his release in 1890, he was recruited almost immediately into the Department of Police in St Petersburg as a secret agent. It is therefore almost certain that Gurovich, the latest in the long line of Burtsev’s deceivers, would have passed on his letters to Rachkovsky directly on receipt.14 In his letter to Gurovich from London, Burtsev returned to the theme of the need for a unified opposition, deploring the Parisian émigrés’ criticisms of Stepniak and the Free Russia group and pointing out that the latter was run not by Russians but by their British sympathizers. He also expressed his regrets at having to remain in London but feared that an early return to Paris would result in his arrest on the grounds of his supposed involvement in the bomb factory affair of the previous spring. Indeed, since that affair, the attitude of the French government and public towards the émigré community had cooled noticeably and, later that year, relations would be dealt yet another blow when the former head of the Russian police, General N. D. Seliverstov, was assassinated in the heart of the French capital. The general, who had only held the post temporarily following the assassination of Mezentsev in 1878, was shot in his hotel room on 18 November 1890 by S. Padlewski, a

1891–1894: The Time of ‘Small Deeds’

35

Polish socialist agitator.15 No one at the time was quite sure whether Padlewski’s motive was personal or political, but that did not prevent Russian ambassador Morenheim demanding of Monsieur Lozé, the Prefect of Police (and, since the bomb factory affair, his ‘dear, true and excellent friend’), that he take a tougher stance on the refugees.16 Lozé was happy to oblige, immediately withdrawing the licence of the Franco-Russian Club, a dance hall in the Rue Royale where Padlewski had worked and which Seliverstov had been known to frequent. At the same time, steps were taken to expel a number of foreign radicals. Two such unfortunates were Stanislaw and Maria Mendelssohn, an elderly Polish socialist couple. Following a relentless campaign of harassment by the French police, Mendelssohn had first been detained (for four weeks) at the time of the bomb factory plot and then again following Seliverstov’s murder. The Times was in no doubt as to who was responsible for their persecution and expulsion, stating that ‘Mr Mendelssohn’s experiences of French justice constitute a striking illustration of the subservience of the French authorities to the exigencies of the Russian Embassy’.17 Interviewed on his arrival in London, Mendelssohn indicated his suspicions with regard to the assassination, reporting that the previous year a deputation of refugees had called on the Prefect of Police to warn him that if he did not take measures to check the aggressions and persecutions directed against Russian refugees by the Russian police detectives and agents provocateurs in Paris, some step would be taken, something would be done, which it was in the interest of the French Government to prevent. There would have been no question of bombs and General Seliverstoff might still be living if M. Lozé had taken better note of this warning.18

Indeed, much later, Minister of the Interior Plehve would accuse Rachkovsky of direct involvement in Seliverstov’s murder.19 But, whatever the exact nature of Rachkovsky’s role in the incident, the assassination marked the end of Paris as a safe haven for the Russian political emigration. Only a handful of émigrés chose to stay on in the French capital (among them L. Shishko and N. Rusanov),20 while the only one of any real stature who remained there was P. L. Lavrov but he was deemed ‘off limits’ due to his fame.21 Now, thanks to a combination of the anti-émigré policies of the governments of Austria and Germany and Rachkovsky’s and Landezen’s ruthless efforts in Switzerland, the revolutionary emigration found itself with nowhere else to turn but London, where life would prove to be considerably more difficult for them, not only because of the higher cost of living, but also due to the simple fact that few of their number could speak English. With his enemies thus conveniently corralled, Rachkovsky now deemed it time to cross the Channel himself and expand his operations into the British capital.

The London agency is born A mere three days before Burtsev’s arrival in London, the Vienna correspondent of The Times filed an intriguing report that purported to describe in detail the structure of the Foreign Agency in Europe:

36

Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia I learn on good authority that since the assassination of General Seliverstoff the foreign section of the Russian Secret Police has been reorganized. The central office continues to be in Paris, but sub-agencies have been created at Zurich, Berne, Geneva, Mentone, and Montpellier. In each of the sub-offices agents may be commissioned directly for special work, and 84 new agents have been added to the large staff which previously existed. There is a London agency but it is controlled by that in Paris. In Germany and Austria it has not been found necessary to establish agencies, as the governments of those two countries are known to keep a sharp look-out over political suspects of all kinds. Consequently, these lands are not favourite places of residence with Russian refugees. Italy also is not much patronized by Russians at war with the ‘Third Section’. Unfortunately, for the costly system of espionage which the Russian Government considers essential to the maintenance of its authority, it appears that all the proceedings of the foreign police bureaus, and the features of the principal agents, are thoroughly well known to the revolutionary committees. While the police try to introduce spies among the committees, the committees seem to have plenty of secret friends among the police.22

This report demonstrates the truth of the principle that one should not believe everything one reads in the press, even if the newspaper in question happens to be The Times. The suggestion that ‘the large staff which previously existed’ had been supplemented by a staggering eighty-four new agents simply beggars belief and cannot be substantiated from the archives. Although the reminiscences of certain revolutionaries (among them Kropotkin) might lead one to believe that a tsarist spy lurked on every street corner of every European city, the reality is that, at the time this report was written, the Foreign Agency was comprised of very few employees. It has been estimated that even at the height of its operations, in 1914, the Agency could boast no more than forty detectives in Europe. Elsewhere the figure is put at forty detectives and twenty-five secret agents or ‘internals’,23 while an official report on the Foreign Agency dating from 1913 lists a total of only twenty-three active secret agents.24 One can be sure that in 1891 there were far fewer operatives on the street. Moreover, what The Times’ correspondent meant by his reference to ‘sub-agencies’ is far from clear. While the Russian Department of Police might indeed have felt it desirable or prudent to have an agent in all the major centres of the emigration in Switzerland and France, it is doubtful that resources would have allowed them to establish and run ‘commissioning sub-offices’ in these locations. One should, therefore, question either the reporter’s sources of information or his motivation. In this respect, it is interesting to note that the reliability and the antiRussian tone of this particular journalist’s despatches had, for some time already, been a matter of concern to Sir Robert Morier, Her Majesty’s ambassador to St Petersburg, who, in a secret despatch to Lord Salisbury, wrote: ‘As regards the Vienna correspondent of The Times I have taken much trouble for the last three years to test the accuracy of the sensational news with which he poisons public opinion in Europe by systematic mendacity. In no single instance have I succeeded in detecting him speaking the truth.’25 And indeed, the Vienna correspondent’s assertion that the Russian secret police had an agency in London is yet another example of his erroneous reporting.

1891–1894: The Time of ‘Small Deeds’

37

Direct proof of this can be found in Rachkovsky’s reports of the period to his superiors in St Petersburg. Although, as mentioned earlier, there is some uncertainty as to whether the Head of the Foreign Agency had previously visited London, there is no doubt that it was not until the spring of 1891 that he crossed the Channel with the express intention of investigating the ‘establishment of special surveillance’ in the British capital. He reported then that Burtsev, Volkhovsky and Voinich were staying at 13, Grove Gardens, St John’s Wood (the home of Stepniak at that time), and also described a meeting he had had at the Russian embassy with the chargé d’affaires, Butenev.26 In St Petersburg, Director of Police Durnovo continued to receive progress reports from his head of European operations throughout the year and even made a trip to Nice for a meeting with him in April to discuss the expansion of Foreign Agency operations. Immediately after that encounter the police chief wrote back to St Petersburg reporting that a kruzhok had formed in London and detailing the funds which would be required to enable surveillance operations to be carried out effectively.27 He reported then that Rachkovsky had already placed three agents in the capital at a cost of 2,250 francs per month, with operations being run by a former French agent recommended by Lozé. This individual alone (as yet unidentified) received 1,200 francs per month for his services.28 Durnovo now recommended that a further 2,000 francs per month be made available to enable the employment of a further three ‘external’ (naruzhnye) agents.29 It would appear that these funds were forthcoming, for, by September of that year, Rachkovsky was already reporting the successful foundation of an agency in London and, moreover, was boasting of the infiltration of an agent into the local emigration, declaring that now, ‘All the London émigrés and all those who have dealings with them are under our complete control.’30 In the years that followed, more agents were recruited as business expanded and, fortunately, more is known of them than of the illusive first head of London operations. In the spring of 1892, for example, a young Polish émigré, Bolesław Maliankewicz, writing from Pell St. in the heart of the East End, offered his services as a spy to St Petersburg, saying he had gained the trust of Kropotkin, Lavrov, Stepniak, Volkhovsky and others in the London emigration. The true extent of Maliankewicz’s service will be examined in detail later, as will the contributions of other London agents – such as Lev Beitner, Vladislav Milevsky and Edgar Jean Farce – but for the moment, suffice it to say that by the time Rachkovsky left his post as Head of the Foreign Agency eleven years later, in 1902, the cost of his London operations had grown to 6,000 francs per month. This was roughly a third of the total Agency costs, three times that of the Swiss Agency and more than double that expended in Galicia.31

The Russian memorandum Such apparently rapid successes on the part of the Russian secret police did not augur well for Burtsev and his beleaguered associates on the banks of the Thames and worse was to come, for, almost immediately, the Russian government opened a second, political front against them. Tsarist ministers had, of course, expressed

38

Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

their anxieties concerning political fugitives to the British government on numerous earlier occasions. As early as 1878, M. F. Bartolomei, the envoy of Alexander II, had unsuccessfully proposed police collaboration on the surveillance of known radical refugees in London,32 but by the 1890s the situation had changed, with the tsar’s ministers adopting a more aggressive attitude towards those countries that offered sanctuary to Russian political émigrés. An indication of St Petersburg’s new, belligerent foreign policy came shortly after Burtsev’s arrival in London, when Ambassador Morier reported a conversation with the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs N. K. de Giers in which the latter had described a circular issued to all tsarist representatives in Europe (including Baron E. de Staal, ambassador in London). The circular criticized Bulgaria for its apparent willingness to harbour known ‘nihilists’ and named thirteen of them: De Giers added that the Russian government did not ask for their extradition but wished to signalize [sic] to the governments of Europe the state of things in Bulgaria and the dangers which would flow there from if Bulgaria became not only the city [sic] of refuge for the anarchical elements expelled from elsewhere but a centre where honourable and lucrative employment was secured to criminals escaped from penal servitude, if they could establish their qualifications for office by complicity in projects for the assassination of the Czar.33

It was clear that this scarcely veiled threat was directed not only at Bulgaria but at any other European state that chose to offer sanctuary to these renegades and so it would have come as no surprise when, in London, on 5 March 1892, de Staal called upon Lord Salisbury and communicated a detailed memorandum to him ‘complaining of the increasing numbers and activity of Russian anarchists in England and requesting that they may be placed under police surveillance’.34 This, the so-called Russian memorandum, was first mentioned by N. V. Ivanova in her 1967 essay on the Russian political emigration in England and then, some twenty years later, by Donald Senese in his biography of Stepniak.35 Neither of these scholars, however, had had sight of the memorandum itself but knew of its existence only by references made to it in other archival documents.36 During a visit to GARF in April 2007, however, I was fortunate enough to discover a draft version of this important document.37 In addition, I located a transcription of de Staal’s spoken communication in the National Archives at Kew.38 The contents of both are worth describing in detail here. The memorandum was not written in 1890, as both Ivanova and Senese have asserted: containing references to publications which appeared later, it can be dated to around January–February 1892 at the earliest. It began thus: The number of Russian revolutionaries and nihilists based in England, which was already considerable, has acquired, during these past years, a number of recruits expelled from Switzerland, France and elsewhere. The activities of this emigration, under the aegis of the ‘right of asylum’ have grown in intensity and are currently conducted by such coryphées of terrorist revolution as Prince Kropotkin, Chaikovsky, Kravchinsky (the assassin of General Mezentsev, known

1891–1894: The Time of ‘Small Deeds’

39

under the name of Stepniak), Felix Volkhovsky, Vladimir Burtsev, Michel Voinich (Kelchevsky), Michel-Moise Harmidor (Baranov), Hesper Serebriakov, Stanislaw Mendelssohn and his wife Marie, Aleksandr Lavrenius and many others besides.

The memorandum then described the support given by the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom to the named individuals. This support, it alleged, had allowed them to publish in their journal Free Russia ‘the grossest calumnies against the Russian government which are received with only too much credulity by a public unfamiliar with Russian affairs’. De Staal was all the more appalled by the fact that a number of the members of the Society occupied positions of honour. Indeed, he underlined the fact that, of the thirty-nine members on its committee, ten were members of parliament and four were clergymen. De Staal was also able to list the names of a number of Polish revolutionaries, who, from their base in London, ran a relief fund for political refugees in Poland. Committee members included the aforementioned Mendelssohns and ‘Alexandre Dembski, who was involved in bomb-making in Zurich’. He also described how Free Russia, no. 8 (1891), had carried an announcement in Russian informing the public that five émigrés (namely, Volkhovsky, Kelchevsky, Stepniak, Chaikovsky and Shishko)39 had organized a society, the Fondes littéraires russes, for the publication of revolutionary works in Russian.40 The memorandum drew attention to the first publication of that society: Stepniak’s brochure What We Need and the Beginning of the End,41 in which the author laid out the programme of the future revolution. Both Ivanova and Senese have made reference to this brochure, which contained certain phrases of a particularly incendiary nature and which de Staal was anxious to draw to Salisbury’s attention. Without sight of the original memorandum, however, neither commentator could point to the specific phrase which caused the ambassador such alarm. As can now be revealed, the passage in question concerns Stepniak’s direct specification as legitimate means of action of ‘les complots militaires, l’assaut nocturne du palais, les bombes, la dynamite’.42 (The precise importance of this phrase to Burtsev’s fate will become clear shortly.) Ambassador de Staal was appalled too that such seditious works should be freely available in a number of London bookshops and helpfully supplied addresses in Hammersmith and in the East End where they could be obtained. The memorandum ended thus: ‘This succinct exposé should serve as proof that the activities of the abovementioned groups are not limited to socialist theory, but are rather given over in the main to direct revolutionary propaganda and that these groups will overlook no means which may help them achieve their ends.’43 Salisbury assured the ambassador that he would bring the matter to the attention of the police but explained that no steps could be taken to prevent the preaching or publication of revolutionary doctrines except in cases where there was direct incitement to assassination. However, as Salisbury’s private secretary Eric Barrington noted (as he forwarded a copy of the memorandum to Sir Edward Bradford of the Metropolitan Police), it appeared that Stepniak had indeed used language which would bring him within the law.44 Commissioner Bradford, though, was not quite of the same opinion. His overall view was that:

40

Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia There is no doubt that these men are plotting schemes of war and violence against the authorities in Russia, but police vigilance hitherto has failed to obtain proof of any overt act such as would bring them practically within the criminal law. Indeed, the moral support which they receive from many public men in England, as noticed in the memo leads them to maintain an appearance of moderation as to their aims & projects. I have examined both the earliest numbers of their journal ‘Free Russia’, and I find nothing that we would take notice of. In fact, the attacks on the Russian government are characterised by moderation as compared with what is published with impunity in English papers against the government of our country. I had Stepniak’s ‘What is wanted’ read by a competent person whom I directed to furnish me with a translation of any passages of a dangerous kind. As a result, he has given me the very same sentence that is quoted in the memo. This doubtless is thoroughly bad, and it is possible that although it stands alone the gentlemen of the Committee might on account of it refuse to allow the pamphlet to be recommended by ‘Free Russia’.45

This document bears an additional manuscript note to the effect that Lord Salisbury did not think it worth communicating Bradford’s remarks to de Staal. The First Minister did, however, send a response to the Russian embassy in which he echoed Bradford’s opinion with regard to the relative moderation of the attacks and also played up the restraining influence which the SFRF exerted on the refugees.46 It is interesting to note that Salisbury did not choose to comment on de Staal’s indictment of Stepniak, nor to agree that the latter’s call for ‘military plots, nocturnal attacks on the palace, bombs and dynamite’47 was ‘thoroughly bad’ and might rightly be regarded as incitement to murder. It is even more interesting, therefore, that some six years later it would be the repetition of this very phrase in his journal Narodovolets that would lead to Burtsev’s conviction in an English court. From Salisbury’s response it would appear that, at this stage at least, Britain was not prepared to give in to the Russian government’s demands concerning the suppression of anti-tsarist activities on its territory, as other European states had done. According to de Staal, however, the head of Her Majesty’s government was at least prepared to issue an order that ‘these Russian émigrés and their English minions’ (prispeshniki) should be placed under police surveillance’.48 And, indeed, British government archives show that Salisbury was prepared to offer some assistance in this respect. While still drawing the line at passing on intelligence concerning the activities of Russian politicals on British soil, the government was willing to forward any information it had concerning their activities abroad. For example, on 8 June 1892, a mere three months after de Staal’s visit, Salisbury secretly contacted the Russian embassy to forward a Home Office letter that detailed the movements of one of those named in the memorandum. He informed de Staal that the ‘Russian nihilist’ Alexandre Dembski had recently left London for the continent and that British Foreign Office representatives in Berlin and Copenhagen had been instructed to inform the local police authorities.49 Moreover, their interest in Dembski did not stop there. In January the following year he was a member of a group of five Russians who were spotted by the port police in Dover disembarking from the Calais steamer and tracked all the way to the home of Mendelssohn in West Kensington.50

1891–1894: The Time of ‘Small Deeds’

41

So, the Russian request for police collaboration first made to Foreign Secretary Salisbury by chargé dʹaffaires Bartolomei some fourteen years earlier had at last been approved, in part, by First Minister Salisbury, with Scotland Yard being given the goahead to commence surveillance of foreign radicals on British soil. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that the British government had started to show a willingness to cooperate (in matters of foreign intelligence at least) at an even earlier date. In September 1891, the Foreign Office had received news from Paris that the Jewish philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch had been approached by ‘two Nihilist Delegates’ who ‘asked for a subvention of one million francs in furtherance of their new plan of action. They had decided to desist from any attempts in Russia itself where they felt they were now powerless and intended to watch for purposes of assassination of all the members of the Imperial family who might be travelling abroad. Cannes, Monte Carlo, Algeria were mentioned as places where this could be successfully practised.’51 Salisbury quite rightly suspected this to be ‘a plant of some kind’, noting that ‘the Nihilists are not such idiots as to have told their real plans to Hirsch’, but he duly passed the information on to St Petersburg and received a note of thanks from Foreign Minister de Giers, who thought it either, ‘a simple bit of bravado on the part of the nihilists, or they may wish to put the Russian police off their guard against attempts on the lives of the Imperial Family in this country, or they may have been honest in what they told Baron Hirsch they intended to do in the future’.52 Another (perhaps more likely) alternative not mentioned by the minister was that the two mysterious Nihilist Delegates, describing such an alarming expansion of their foul terrorist campaign into the very heart of Europe itself, may well have been Foreign Agency provocateurs who were simply carrying out the order of their chief, P. I. Rachkovsky. Why the British government’s attitude to Russian political fugitives should have changed at this time is not immediately clear. Certainly, the tsar’s government had for some time been pressing a number of countries to enter into more wide-ranging extradition treaties that would not treat ‘political’ criminals as exceptions to the law. Russia had already agreed such treaties with Austria and Germany and more recently, to the great horror of Western liberals, they appeared to be on the brink of an agreement with the United States.53 Britain, however, had held back. Although an Anglo-Russian treaty for the mutual extradition of fugitive criminals had been agreed in 1887, it allowed only for the expatriation of ‘ordinary’ and not ‘political’ criminals. And, indeed, the National Archives contains evidence that, on more than one occasion, the Russian ambassador availed himself of the opportunity afforded him under the terms of this convention to apply for the extradition of certain Russian criminals.54 The London ‘politicals’, however, despite these encouraging signs of British compliance, continued in their vocal opposition – safely beyond the reach of Alexander III, and much to his dismay.55 To silence them would require a different approach entirely.

The secret agent and the lovesick terrorist Despite the increase in the number of Foreign Agency spies on the streets of London, Burtsev somehow managed to go unmolested for most of this his first year in the

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Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

capital. Of his movements during the year we know only that on 6 March 1891, like so many émigrés before him, he was drawn to the riches of the library of the British Museum and, giving his address as 6, Shouldham St W1, was issued with his first Reader’s Ticket.56 Much more will be said later of Burtsev’s love affair with this remarkable institution and of the complex role it was to play throughout his life in emigration. For the time being, however, let us assume only that, for most of the year that followed, he was a regular visitor to Great Russell Street, where, under the great dome of the Reading Room, he diligently pursued his historical studies.57 The next documented reference to his movements is to be found in a Foreign Agency report of February 1892, which describes a brief visit he made to Paris under the assumed name of Kvaskov.58 In response to a query concerning Burtsev’s whereabouts from Chief of Police Durnovo in early 1892, Rachkovsky provided yet more evidence of his cosy relationship with the Prefect of Paris, Monsieur Lozé: I have the honour respectfully to report that the émigré Burtsev referred to, having arrived in Paris in November last lived here at 13 Rue des Beaux-Arts until 15 January and then returned to London where he has now settled at no 43 Frederick Street, Gray’s Inn Road. During his stay in Paris he met up with the local revolutionaries recommending to them the necessity for unified action against the government. As a result of this and, deeming the activities of this émigré

Figure 2.1  Portrait of the young V. L. Burtsev, Paris, December 1891. GARF f. 1721 op. 1, del. 114, l. 8.

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unquestionably harmful, I approached the Prefect of Paris with the request that he be expelled from France, this measure, however, was not put into effect, for Burtsev, noticing that he was being watched, fled Paris leaving behind his effects with the landlady at the hotel.59

It was while staying at this hotel on the Rue des Beaux-Arts in the heart of the Latin Quarter that Burtsev first made the acquaintance of a certain Madame Charlotte Bullier, who, ‘acting on the best of intentions’, helped him escape from the French police who, at Rachkovsky’s bidding, had come to arrest him.60 The exact details of how the two first met and of how his escape was effected are unknown, but the end result of their encounter was that Burtsev fell head over heels in love with this French enchantress.61 The ensuing affair, packed as it was with passion, intrigue, jealousy, betrayal, abandonment and remorse, would put any ‘Mills and Boon’ romance to shame, and its recounting here might be seen as somewhat out of place were it not for the fact that the story also throws new light on a number of topics central to the present study, such as the methods used by the police in their surveillance of Russian political émigrés and the extent of international police  – and, indeed, governmental – cooperation in these activities. Moreover, the impact which this affair had on Burtsev’s character has not, hitherto, been examined in any detail. Indeed, his relationship with Bullier has been described only once in a short chapter by an obscure author, included, apparently as an afterthought, in an equally obscure booklet published to mark the tenth anniversary of the fall of the autocracy and containing essays dealing exclusively with the liberation of revolutionaries from tsarist prisons and exile.62 It is difficult to imagine a more incongruous environment in which to place the story of an émigré love affair. Moreover, the essay in question is incomplete, being based solely on Department of Police documents held in the Russian archives. Now, drawing also on the Okhrana archive held at the Hoover Institution, a fuller account of the relationship and its significance can be offered. According to the novelist Yury Davydov, certain background details on Bullier are to be found in her Department of Police dossier in the Moscow archives.63 From this source we learn that, at an early age, Mademoiselle Charlotte married Monsieur Bullier, a fairly well-to-do wine merchant of Marseilles. For reasons unknown, the couple then left for Paris, where they settled in the Rue des Beaux-Arts. Apparently, Monsieur Bullier died soon afterwards, leaving Charlotte to carry on with the business. Shortly after their encounter on the Left Bank of the Seine, Burtsev and Bullier entered into what was to become a lengthy and passionate correspondence that was to last until the summer of 1893. Unbeknownst to Burtsev, however, Bullier had simultaneously entered into dealings with the Russian Department of Police in St Petersburg and, in due course, relations of a professional (and perhaps even personal) nature with the Head of the Foreign Agency in Paris, to whom she faithfully forwarded Burtsev’s every communication. A huge file of some 200 pages containing, in the main, Burtsev’s letters to Bullier and hers to Rachkovsky, together with correspondence between the latter and his masters in St Petersburg, forms a part of the Hoover Institution’s Okhrana archive. They offer, on the one hand, a fascinating insight into Burtsev’s

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Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia

closely guarded personal life and, on the other, a glimpse into the murky world of tsarist secret intelligence operations in Europe. In one of his earliest letters to Bullier, Burtsev stated his lack of concern at the increased presence of Russian agents in London: ‘In England there is no danger for me; I am known here under my own name and although Russian spies see me they can do nothing to me under English law.’64 Six years later he would realize his mistake in treating the Russian secret police with such flippancy. Indeed, on the very day he wrote thus, mocking the powerlessness of Russian spies, his new amour was writing to the Head of the Department of Police in St Petersburg informing him that she knew of Burtsev’s whereabouts, claiming that she could deliver him up to them and inquiring ‘what reward she might receive for this service’.65 This rather set the tone for the exchanges to come. Durnovo quickly placed Bullier under Rachkovsky’s control and, as Burtsev’s letters started to roll in to the offices of the Foreign Agency in the basement of the Russian embassy in the rue de Grenelle, Rachkovsky and his new agent began to draw up their plans for the final capture of the elusive refugee. Whether Bullier was initially driven to her acts of betrayal simply by the prospect of monetary gain is unknown. In one of her early letters to Rachkovsky, while clearly showing her business acumen, she also gave a rather confusing picture of where she stood politically with regard to Russia: I do not know your government, Sir. So far I have not seen much evidence of its liberalism, but in spite of that we must come to an agreement and set out some conditions before going any further. I believe that, thanks to my intelligence, I merit your confidence and, if I succeed to do what until now no one has succeeded in doing, not only will I think I have proved myself, but also that I have been of merit to Russia.66

Under Rachkovsky’s guidance, Bullier quickly set about cementing her relationship with Burtsev. In light of his recent experiences in Paris, the latter was, understandably, still wary of setting foot outside of England and so Bullier travelled to London to try to lure him abroad. Returning after a second visit in July 1892, she reported: I have persuaded Burtsev to come with me for a holiday to Switzerland. He will stop working. He still has another eight days of work to get through, then he will belong to me. From Switzerland we will make an excursion to wherever you wish. I would only ask that you telegraph me with instructions on what I should do. Today I have great hopes of success.67

As will be shown later, Rachkovsky’s intention was to lure Burtsev to some country where the authorities were more sympathetic to the Russian government, and where, without too much fuss, the police might be willing to hand him over to their Russian counterparts. The Switzerland trip, however, did not come off (doubtless, as a result of Burtsev’s caution) but Bullier persevered, reporting the following month that she had persuaded him to come to Paris. Unfortunately for her, that visit too came to nothing.

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In general, Burtsev’s letters to her contain little of a political nature. Although one does occasionally pick up the odd piece of information on his whereabouts or some vague remarks about his future plans (written, it should be said, in very poor French), this is hardly the level of information the Russian police would have been either expecting or willing to pay for. Moreover, Bullier’s letters to her ‘control’ contain, in the main, nothing of substance but rather are peppered with irrelevant asides of a somewhat personal nature. These letters do, however, occasionally allow one to glean some information on her relationship with Rachkovsky. Thus, in one she thanks him for the pretty bouquet he has sent and hopes he has fully recovered from his indisposition; in another she mentions a box of grapes she has sent him, which she trusts he will enjoy. Later, she complains of headaches, bronchitis, a need for a rest cure and so on and, later still, one senses that her relationship with Rachkovsky might have developed into something more than strictly professional. In short, the correspondence is pervaded by a sense of rank amateurism. Nowhere, at this time, is any mention made of payments being received for services rendered – at least not until mid-September 1892, when Bullier, apparently aggrieved at the lack of attention she was receiving, decided to write directly to Tsar Alexander, informing him that, seven months earlier, she had put a proposal to the Chief of Police in St Petersburg who had charged her with an extremely important and delicate task and that, since then, ‘out of a sense of love for Russia and the sovereign for whom she was prepared to give up her life’, she had spared neither effort nor money and had even risked her own safety. Finally, she asked that she be summoned to St Petersburg so that she might ‘personally impart some information of direct relevance to his Imperial Majesty’.68 Her impertinence elicited a speedy response from Police Chief Durnovo, who sent Rachkovsky a copy of her petition to the tsar, asking what, if any, ‘indications of a political character’ the petitioner had in her possession and what recompense she merited.69 Rachkovsky sent his opinion on the terms she should be offered (300 francs a month, if she could lure Burtsev abroad) and, a few weeks later, received Durnovo’s assent, with the comment that ‘her demands for [an additional] 1,000 francs should not be entertained (all the more so because I don’t really believe her promises)’.70 Bullier had made her request for these funds partly to compensate her for the monies she had been sending to Burtsev, hoping in this way to entice him back to Paris. One can sense her increasing exasperation as the year 1892 drew to a close and yet, despite her best efforts, her quarry still refused to cross the Channel. In late November she made another brief and fruitless trip to London; then, in December, suggested he come to Paris just for twenty-four hours, but still he demurred. At the same time, she was aware that doubts were creeping into Rachkovsky’s mind that she could deliver on her promises and so she attempted to reassure her employer with a note in which her frustration was only too evident: Already nine months have passed since we have been together, working for the same cause. I have put myself at your government’s disposition by putting myself at yours. I hoped to succeed in a short space of time but as you said to me – one does not accomplish things of such importance in one or two months. And the proof of that is – you have already been pursuing him for years. You said to me once, that if I could deliver B. to you then I would no longer have to worry about my future and

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Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia that I would be well looked after. I believed you when you said there would be a fortune for me and I was very happy. But, despite all the desire to make money and all the devotion which I have for you personally I repeat to you – I cannot wait!71

Finally, Bullier’s efforts seemed to have paid off when Burtsev relented and agreed to come to Paris to greet his old friend A. L. Teplov, who was due to be released from prison.72 As the date of Burtsev’s arrival approached, Bullier felt more confident in her demands for payment from Rachkovsky: ‘Your silence tells me that “they” have refused what I asked for. They might at least give me 200 francs till February. I have belonged to you for ten months and you know that I am the only one who can deliver B. to you. Give me an advance. I am ill, perhaps even gravely…’73 And Burtsev’s letters too became all the more passionate, playful and expectant: Dear Madame, It is very likely that you will scold me again! Of course, I am always at fault before you: It has already been two days since I last wrote to Paris! Yes, scold me, Madame, I am a criminal not only before the Russian state but before you. Two whole days! For that I should be hung at least, like this –

And here, at the foot of the page, Burtsev, ‘formidable apostle of the revolutionary gospel’ and lovesick fool, had inserted a small drawing of a hanging man with the note, ‘le gibet – cʹest Mr. B. pour quʹil ne répondrais à la lettre de Mme B’.74 But perhaps he could be forgiven, for it is quite possible that this was the first time young Vladimir had experienced such raw sexual emotion. Though what the exact qualities were which this French enchantress possessed that so aroused these passions are, unfortunately, unknown – as yet no portrait or description of Bullier has been found. Conversely, had Bullier possessed no ulterior motive, one wonders whether she might still have been drawn towards this raw youth. A police report of a slightly later date lists Burtsev’s distinguishing features as follows: ‘Height: 2 arshins 7 vershoks [roughly 1. 73m or 5′ 8″], lean build, brunette, two small warts on the left cheek, small moustache and beard, dark brown eyebrows, dark grey eyes, long nose, normal mouth, missing a tooth on lower left jaw, round chin, long face, three warts on the neck, wearer of spectacles or pince-nez’.75 But, warts and missing tooth aside, it would be harsh to describe Burtsev as unattractive as evidenced by a contemporaneous portrait (see Figure 2.1). However that may be, it was not long before the condemned man succumbed fully to Bullier’s wiles and was persuaded finally to cross the Channel prompting her to send a triumphant telegram to the new Chief of Police in St Petersburg, N. I. Petrov, in which she proudly declared, ‘Burtsev is with me. I await orders. Devoted as ever’.76 Rachkovsky and his agent could now set about putting their plan into effect.

Bullier’s ‘combination no. 1’ The plan, in essence, was for the Department of Police to fund a ‘European tour’ for Bullier and Burtsev that would take them to the South of France, onwards through Italy and arriving finally in Austria, where, it was anticipated, a responsive police force

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would effect Burtsev’s return to Russia. Bullier, having obtained a false passport for Burtsev (thanks, ironically, to the good offices of the Foreign Agency), duly set off on her travels with her charge on 3 April 1893 and it is curious indeed that, even as they departed, the Russian police had no idea how this ultra-cautious revolutionary was to be persuaded to cross the final border into Austria – a country that he would have known all too well had friendly relations with Russia. Bullier, however, seemed confident of success but at their first stop in Montpellier her plans had already started to unravel. It was here that Burtsev noticed a fault in his passport: the number ‘2’ had been so badly composed in one instance that his age looked more like ‘47’ than ‘27’. This worried him greatly and he expressed his unwillingness to continue but Bullier persuaded him that she would arrange for a replacement to be sent on to them at a later stage of their journey. This seemed to set his mind at rest and they moved on. Meanwhile, she contacted Rachkovsky in a fury: ‘Ah, if only I could help you to get a move on with the passport and get the “2” redone! I do not understand this negligence. And of course, you should be aware, Monsieur, it is not a sheep that I am leading here: he has given us a hard enough time already.’77 The two travelling companions called next at Cannes, where Burtsev had hoped to introduce himself to the old émigré Petr Fedorovich Alisov, with whom he was sure he had much in common. A man of some means, Alisov had found himself in emigration and in opposition to the Russian government from the 1860s. Like Burtsev, he did not belong to any revolutionary organization but had published numerous articles on revolutionary topics. Then, from the 1870s onwards, he published, at his own expense, a series of broadsides against successive tsars and their governments.78 In July 1893, at the prompting of ‘a comrade’, he brought his thoughts on terrorism together in a short volume entitled simply Terror: Letter to a Comrade.79 The ‘comrade’ in question was none other than Burtsev, who, as will later become clear, shared many of Alisov’s extreme political views and who felt that such a volume ‘would be very useful at the present moment’.80 Alisov preached pure terror – decentralized and systematic – believing that the People’s Will had made the mistake of spending too much time on propaganda rather than engaging full-time in terroristic activities.81 On the other hand, he, again like Burtsev, supported his comparatively moderate Free Russia comrades in London and congratulated them for drawing to the world’s attention the horrific events in Russia, believing that it was thanks to their reporting of Burtsev’s revelations regarding the Yakutsk murders and the death by flogging of Nadezhda Sigida that the Russian government had been obliged to pass a law expressly forbidding the use of the whip even for common criminals.82 Later, together with Kashintsev and Zhuk, Alisov would work closely with Burtsev (the ‘chief troubadour of terrorism in the émigré press’ as one historian has called him) contributing a number of articles to his Narodovolets.83 However, Alisov’s association with Burtsev was not destined to begin with the latter’s arrival in Cannes in the spring of 1893. Realizing he did not have Alisov’s address, Burtsev wished to stay on until he had sought his soulmate out but was again persuaded by his demanding sputnik to continue their journey. Passing through Nice they arrived in Genoa on 12 April, by which time Burtsev’s passport had been corrected and sent on. During their three-day stay in Genoa, Burtsev began to regret his failure to meet up with Alisov and decided to write to him, care of a bookshop in Cannes that would be sure to

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know his address. Requiring a response, he demanded of Bullier the address of the Nice representative of her wine company who, he suggested, could receive Alisov’s reply and forward it poste restante to Milan, for Burtsev to pick up the following week. It was at this point that a most astonishingly convoluted and contrived plot as to how to deliver Burtsev into the hands of the Russian police started to take shape in Bullier’s head. It is of some significance that, despite Rachkovsky’s reputation as a master provocateur and his impressive track record in bringing a range of political fugitives to justice, there is little evidence to suggest that he played the leading role in drawing up plans for Burtsev’s recapture. As documents from the Okhrana archive show, both now and later it was Bullier who showed the initiative, took centre stage and, simultaneously, directed the action. She described the details of this, her first plan, in a letter to Rachkovsky from Genoa.84 In short, the plan involved her first giving Burtsev a fictitious name and address for her Nice representative. Thus, if Alisov did receive Burtsev’s letter, his reply would never get back to Burtsev. Next, knowing that Burtsev had never seen Alisov’s handwriting, Bullier dictated a letter under the latter’s name, which she had Rachkovsky translate into Russian. She also sent him a draft letter in French under the name of her fictitious Nice representative with the instruction that Rachkovsky despatch one of his best agents as quickly as possible to Cannes and then to Nice to put the respective letters into the post, and then to continue to Vienna to await her arrival. The Alisov letter referred to his imminent departure on a tour of Europe. Rachkovsky was then to produce another letter purporting to be from Alisov. This was to be posted from Vienna and would ask Burtsev to come there. Thus, Bullier hoped, her young amour would be suitably mollified by Alisov’s presence in the Austrian capital to cross the border, there to fall into the hands of the waiting police. Rachkovsky, although entertaining serious doubts as to the wisdom of such a convoluted plan, nevertheless did agree to assign his longest serving agent, Vladislav Milevsky, to the task.85 On 17 April, Rachkovsky received a telegram from Bullier in Milan, confirming that Burtsev had received the first Alisov letter and that they were moving inexorably closer to the Austrian border – next stop Verona.86 Meanwhile, Rachkovsky had dutifully been reporting back to St Petersburg with progress updates. Petrov, the new Director of Police, had not been idle since taking up his post and described to Rachkovsky an ‘arrangement’ which had been arrived at with the Austrian government: Concerning the possibility of the detention of Burtsev in Vienna and his secret transfer to us, our chargé d’affaires has entered into a confidential arrangement with the Austrian government whereby Count Kálnoky has announced that the Viennese police will issue a warrant for Burtsev’s arrest, but that his expulsion across our border may be problematic if he is found to have in his possession a passport or money and cannot therefore be considered a vagrant. Consequently, I would ask you to enquire of Bullier if she might before (or else immediately upon) their arrival in Vienna, take Burtsev’s personal documents from him, and if possible his money too, and then arrange it so that Milevsky points Burtsev out to the police at the moment he is in that position which meets those conditions which would make it necessary for him to be expelled and sent back over the border to us. Send me a telegram about the outcome as a matter of urgency.87

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That Count Gustav Kálnoky, the Austrian Foreign Secretary, should have been prepared so blatantly to enter into such a dishonest agreement with St Petersburg in order to secure the arrest of a refugee who had, in fact, committed no crime under international law, almost beggars belief. That he suggested the use of the underhand means of arresting Burtsev as a vagrant rather than enforcing the existing extradition agreement with Russia suggests a rather cowardly wish to avoid any risk of a public outcry. However, Kálnoky’s Russophile tendencies had been well-known since 1880 when he had undertaken a brief and successful posting as ambassador to St Petersburg. His willingness to deliver Burtsev up to the tsar was simply another example of his eagerness to please. The Russian government’s underhand approach to Kálnoky also offers further proof (if such were needed) of its determination to bring Burtsev to justice and of the price which Alexander III had placed on the young revolutionary’s head. Indeed, the lengths which the Russian government were prepared to go to in order to secure his capture were truly excessive, as recently discovered Russian archival documents show.88 The plot to lure Burtsev to Austria had, in fact, been in preparation since as early as July of the previous year, when the then Chief of Police Durnovo had written to K. A. Gubastov, Russian General Consul in Vienna, explaining their plans to entice their quarry to the Tyrol and asking him if he could approach the Austrian government to seek its help in transferring Burtsev to them.89 At that time Kálnoky had replied wishing the Russians success in their project and saying he had passed the request on to Minister-President Count Eduard Taaffe. He warned, however, that due to the length of time it would take to transport the prisoner from the Tyrol to the Russian border, it was likely the press would get to hear about it and cause problems for the government. In Kálnoky’s view, the affair might be simplified considerably if Burtsev could be captured in Vienna, whence he could be transferred to Russia in one night. St Petersburg also kept Rachkovsky informed of developments.90 For a time no further progress was made; then, following Durnovo’s dismissal in early 1893, Rachkovsky contacted his replacement Petrov to explain Burtsev’s relationship with Bullier – ‘he is in love with her!’ – and from then on kept the new director regularly informed of their progress as they slowly made their way to the Austrian border.91 Meanwhile, Petrov renewed contact with Gubastov in Vienna: ‘In view of the serious revolutionary significance of Burtsev who has not ceased his harmful agitation in France and England I would beg your Excellency to enter into a confidential arrangement with the President of the Viennese Police and ask for his assistance in Burtsev’s arrest and secret transfer to the Russian border.’92 However, complications set in. It transpired that even if Burtsev could be arrested as a beggar, under Austrian law, he could only be expelled via a border-crossing of his own choosing. Following a flurry of telegrams, Minister of the Interior I. N. Durnovo became involved, writing in strict confidence to Deputy Foreign Minister N. P. Shishkin93 and asking him to do all in his power to persuade his contacts in Vienna to bend the rules and ‘to hand Burtsev over in secret even if it transpired he had passport and money on his person when arrested’.94 But even this intervention was of no use: Kálnoky reported that he could not persuade Taaffe to hand Burtsev over to the Russians in view of recent interpellations parliamentaires. Instead, he would be expelled at the border-crossing nearest to

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Vienna, namely, Oderberg (i.e. Bohumín, now in the Czech Republic), which lay on the border with Imperial Germany. As the two travellers edged ever closer to Austria, a frenzied new correspondence therefore sprang up between Petrov and D. V. Kazarinov, Russian consul in Berlin. The former wondered – could the Germans be persuaded to hand the refugee over? Since the secret Reinsurance Treaty with Bismark had been allowed to lapse and Russia had begun to move towards a full military alliance with France, relations between St Petersburg and Berlin were certainly not as friendly as they had been; but, as Petrov remarked, the Germans had been of assistance in the past.95 Then, at last, on 22 April, success appeared to be within their grasp. A telegram was received from Kazarinov informing them that Prussian Prime Minister Count Botho zu Eulenburg had signalled his willingness to do the deed!96 Under such circumstances, one cannot help but sympathize with Burtsev’s plight and marvel at how, with the police and governments of all Europe seemingly in pursuit, he had managed to escape capture for so long. And, indeed, on this occasion too, he succeeded in evading arrest. Petrov was informed of the news in a telegram from ‘Leonard’ (Rachkovsky’s Paris pseudonym) that read: ‘Our enterprise concerning the travellers can be considered as having failed. Vladimir refuses to enter Austria from Verona.’97 Burtsev, once more appearing to sense danger ahead, had decided to extend his stay in Italy and refused point-blank to cross the Austrian border. Bullier urgently telegraphed the Russian embassy in Paris for guidance and received the advice that she should suggest Salzburg as a safer alternative to Vienna. Burtsev, however, had decided to head for Switzerland to visit friends in Zurich, apparently promising to join up with Bullier in Salzburg for a brief visit at a later date. Having arrived in Salzburg, though, and having sent Burtsev details of her address, Bullier then received the reply that her companion had hurt his leg and now could not join her. Fearing her plans were about to disintegrate, she rushed to Zurich, where she found Burtsev in the company of some émigrés, two of whom happened to be women. In a jealous rage Bullier decided to return to France immediately and demanded to be taken to the station but by the time the train left she had calmed down sufficiently to promise Burtsev that she would send for him from Paris.98 Little is known of Burtsev’s activities and contacts during this brief stay in Zurich other than his own recollection that it was there, in the flat of the student Konstantin Grankovsky, that he had his first fateful encounter with a young man by the name of Lev Dmitrievich Beitner who befriended him and who, from that moment on (as will later be described), devoted his life to his friend’s betrayal.99 At this stage, however, the newly recruited police informer could do nothing to prevent the collapse of Rachkovsky’s and Bullier’s enterprise. Whereas Petrov and his associates in the Department of Police must have been hugely disappointed in the outcome of their scheme, Minister of the Interior Durnovo was philosophical, writing to his foreign minister and asking him to pass on his warmest thanks to Count Eulenburg for his willingness to hand Burtsev over. In the same letter he laid out proposals for closer cooperation between the departments of political police of both countries and pointed out that there was nothing new in such collaboration, citing Paris and Brussels as examples.100 In this context, therefore, the Burtsev incident (or non-incident) can be considered to be of some significance to the wider issue of cooperation between the ministries of the interior and the political police

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forces of Europe. Even at such times when, in general terms, diplomatic relations were strained, it would appear that common cause could at least be found in the pursuit of political refugees.

Bullier’s ‘combination no. 2’ The despondent and lovesick revolutionary had returned to London in early May 1893 but his ardour was soon re-aroused when, true to her word, Bullier called him to Paris and he, with great excitement, started to make arrangements for their next rendezvous. Burtsev’s letter to Bullier of 19 May reveals a rare glimpse of the passionate side of this most secretive of men: You say I am not thrifty? Who says so? Madame? ha! ha! ha! I am dying of laughter. I know that very well. You are too terrible! If Madame goes to London for two weeks it would cost her 2,000 francs. It is I who should buy a big stick, and I will. You will see. Yes, you will see how it is after I give you some blows with my stick [coups de baton]. I give you my word of honour! I hope to receive 20 francs tomorrow and consequently will leave London on Sunday at 9 o’clock in the evening, and I will arrive on Monday at around 8.30–9.00 when you shall be, as is your wont, in bed. A bientôt, Votre Vladimir. P.S. I have just reread your letter and I am beside myself. Oh, yes! You shall see!101

The following day, Bullier dutifully forwarded this billet-doux to Rachkovsky, callously commenting, ‘My brother is truly in high spirits!! I have erased one line which is only of personal interest to me; please excuse me, it would have made you laugh too much!!!’ (Indeed, the original letter does contain one line which has been heavily crossed out.)102 Wide-eyed and expectant, Burtsev arrived in Paris on Monday 21 May 1893 and moved into the flat which Bullier had rented for them just around the corner from Rue des Beaux-Arts, at 21 Rue Bonaparte. She had already devised another plot to capture the unsuspecting refugee but suddenly received the devastating news from Rachkovsky that, following the fiasco of the European trip, the Department of Police no longer wished to have any dealings with her. Bullier’s immediate and angry response, which she sent direct to Petrov in St Petersburg, detailed with astonishing frankness her true feelings for Burtsev and the remarkable lengths to which she had been prepared to go in her deception. It is difficult to believe that some of the methods used to obtain information from her victim were her own invention. For example, the idea that she should drug Burtsev and then copy out his papers while he slept must surely, one feels, have come from Rachkovsky. Bullier’s letter is worth quoting here at length: [I was informed] today that you have lost almost all confidence in me and that you will issue no further orders on this case. I understand that over the years you have dispensed a great deal of money on B. without result, and the sacrifices you made for our trip are no more than a grain of

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Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia salt in comparison to the sums you have spent in the past. I too have made many sacrifices, and will continue to do so since I am persuaded that this man is doing harm to his country and that his time will come… God will not protect him. As I write, he lies there asleep, completely at peace and with not a care in the world. To attract this thoroughly suspicious man to me I have made the greatest sacrifice a woman such as I could make. Let there be no doubt about it! He does not possess a single attractive trait… I swear to you! Horribly filthy, full of vermin, I have stripped him naked and washed him, I have dressed him, fed him, sheltered him and much, much more besides, without mentioning the amount of money which for the past seventeen months I have put towards the cause. I have abandoned everything and devoted my life to this. Often, as he slept, I have with trembling hands taken his letters and papers to read and copy. I have even traced them myself. In other words, Monsieur, I have exposed myself to danger on numerous occasions for, if he suspected that I was giving him narcotics, I would be at his mercy, for we both live together completely on our own. I am his confidante. He tells me political things which are so appalling I hardly dare believe them. But there we are. He is still with me and by rights he should be with you. It is not possible for me to abandon my work. I have been involved in it for so long and he has abused me so much that I cannot simply let him go like that.103

Bullier then confidently proceeded to outline the details of her next outrageous plan for Burtsev’s capture: I have just returned from Marseilles where I went to draw up an agreement with a captain of a merchant ship with whom I am acquainted. I offered him 5,000 francs and he has accepted. I can count on his devotion and discretion. So, B. and I shall go to Marseilles because he wants to go to Romania by sea; I shall recommend this ship to him – the captain can promise him what he likes but instead of plotting a course for Romania he will set sail for Russia or Constantinople. En route B. will be kept below deck. It is not the first time the captain has carried out such work. His boat only carries merchandise and no passengers which is what B. absolutely insists on – he always prefers to travel this way. Now, if on arrival in Marseilles he changes his mind I will suggest we take a short boat trip which he adores and, with the help of the captain and two of his sturdy crew, we’ll send him on his way in any event. I can report that the boat is moored in an isolated spot so that its night time departure will be seen by no one. I would ask you for an advance to offset the initial expenses and for one of your policemen to accompany the boat. I would willingly go myself but I suffer terribly from sea-sickness and, besides, I think a man would be better for the job. On arriving at the destination the captain should be given what I promised him. I have no personal interest in these 5,000 francs. This is the way I wish it to be. Could I ask you sir, as soon as you have read my letter, to telegraph me with instructions on what I should do, and give orders to the relevant person. I would ask you once more to do all this as it would almost serve to recompense me for all

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the troubles he has caused me, and for all the devotion I have put to the service of His Majesty, the Emperor of Russia.104

Petrov forwarded the letter to Rachkovsky, expressing his doubts as to the likelihood of success of Bullier’s latest proposal: I attach herewith a copy of a declaration from C. Bullier outlining a new combination whose aim is to effect the capture of V. Burtsev. May I ask you to tell the lady in question in future not to send any declarations to St Petersburg but that all instructions and explanations should be received locally from you. In addition, I find it necessary to add that if Madame Bullier was to come up with any really sensible proposition which might lead to some tangible results then you might inform the Department of this; otherwise, all fantastic projects, such as the present one, should be declined.105

However, for whatever reason – possibly Rachkovsky’s intervention – the Chief of Police seems to have had a rapid change of heart, for the ‘fantastic project’ was set in motion and, perhaps somewhat remarkably, four days later, Petrov received the startling news that Burtsev had been detained in Marseilles and was locked in the cabin of the said steamship whose captain now required payment.106 At last, it seemed, the elusive fugitive was within Rachkovsky’s grasp. On receiving his 5,000 francs, the captain would sail across the Mediterranean to Constantinople, where Burtsev would be transferred to a Russian ship. Unfortunately for Rachkovsky, however, his nemesis was fated to slip through his fingers yet again. As the Head of the Foreign Agency explained in a telegram to St Petersburg on 29 June 1893, Bullier had not acted according to his wishes and he had therefore been obliged to send agent Milevsky to Marseilles to bring this ‘foolish undertaking’ to an end. It had transpired that the steamship was not powerful enough to make the journey to Constantinople without calling to refuel at ports such as Messina and Piraeus, where strict quarantines were in operation and where scandal was sure to ensue if the imprisoned Burtsev was discovered.107 Rachkovsky, therefore, resigned himself to the fact that he would have to free his quarry, but regretted so bitterly having to carry out this action that, the following day, he sent an urgent telegram to the Department of Police: ‘To release [him] is unthinkable. Burtsev is threatening to create a huge scandal. Hard labour will be on the cards for many.’108 Rachkovsky at this point seemed to have lost all sense of reason, demanding that a steamboat be immediately despatched from the Black Sea to Marseilles. He received the reply, however, that no such ship was available (although, apparently, Petrov himself had to be dissuaded from sending a warship!).109 The game was up. It is perhaps surprising that, on his release from captivity, the misused revolutionary did not immediately seize the opportunity to ‘create a huge scandal’ and round on Rachkovsky and his masters in St Petersburg with accusations of gross incompetence and profligacy.110 Rachkovsky, however, was not surprised by his opponent’s silence. He had already reassured Petrov that it was unlikely there would be repercussions and that, if the story ever did come into the open, he had reliable friends in the French

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press (and indeed in government circles) who would spin the whole episode into some elaborate affair which had been manufactured jointly by Burtsev and Bullier.111 In all the years that followed, Burtsev never once made mention of his European encounters with the Russian secret police during this period, nor of his association with his deceptive French mistress. It has been suggested that he remained silent simply out of embarrassment that he, the ultra-cautious revolutionary conspirator, should have so nearly fallen into Rachkovsky’s hands. However, it is perhaps more likely that he maintained his silence for the simple reason that to do otherwise would have obliged him to relive the pain which his betrayal at the hands of his first love had caused him. Thus ended Burtsev’s association with his French adventuress. There is, however, a coda to the Bullier tale. A year after the Marseilles debacle, Rachkovsky received the following communication from Petrov: Charlotte Bullier, who is known to you, while visiting St Petersburg in May this year, delivered a petition regarding payment for the services in the case of the capture of Vladimir Burtsev. Although the services rendered by the petitioner in this case produced no tangible results, nevertheless, however, in view of the material expenses she has incurred and in view of her willingness to be of service to our government Mme. Bullier, by order of the Minister of Internal Affairs has been awarded 5,000 francs as a final settlement. On receipt of these monies Bullier personally signed a declaration that she would now refrain from making any further claims or demands. In passing this information on to you I would ask that you enter into no further dealings with said personage.112

What became of Bullier thereafter is unknown, though Yury Davydov tells the romantic tale (again unsubstantiated) of her visiting Burtsev in prison in London and, some years later, dying (in an appropriately operatic and tragic manner) of galloping consumption before finally being laid to rest in the Russian cemetery at St Geneviève des Bois on the outskirts of Paris (which was also, fittingly, the final resting place of Burtsev himself). In the Davydov version, Bullier, on her deathbed, gave instructions that a final message be passed, word for word, to ‘Monsieur Burtsoff ’: ‘I am guilty. You are guilty. But we loved one another. Nothing else is worth a centime. Farewell!’113 Unsubstantiated or not, such an ending more than fits the bill for such a tale of passion.

The London trials of ‘Monsieur Richter’: The tale of an unlikely mole Following his release from the cabin of the Marseilles steamship, an emotionally bruised Burtsev headed back to Zurich to tend his wounds. There he lived quietly for almost a year under the assumed name of ‘Livschits’, the pseudonym he had adopted some years earlier when he had boarded the SS Ashlands in Romania. Little is known of his life during this period other than what is contained in his Okhrana file. And

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here it is important to reveal the exact source of the information on which the Russian police relied at this time. A few months earlier, a young Russian student, by the name of Evno Fishelevich Azef, had arrived in Karlsruhe, Germany, and had written to the Okhrana offering, for a consideration, to inform on the local Russian student community. The Department agreed in principle and opened an agent’s dossier on him, but insisted that he also branch out across the border into Switzerland and supply them with details of the émigrés in Zurich.114 Burtsev would later recall having a ‘fleeting encounter’ with his young compatriot, quite unaware that the latter was regularly sending agent reports back to St Petersburg passing on details such as Burtsev’s address – 29, Kronenstrasse – and other information such as the fact that in early 1894, he was responsible for setting up an independent kruzhok whose members occupied themselves with the despatch to Russia of the publications of the London-based revolutionaries and also that he occasionally corresponded with contacts in Russia using another of his noms de plume, ‘Levintis’.115 It may well indeed have been thanks to information supplied by Azef that the Okhrana obtained possession of a lengthy and fascinating letter from Burtsev to a student in St Petersburg, the contents of which shall be described in due course. Meanwhile, Burtsev continued his day-to-day existence in Zurich, in apparent ignorance of the covert surveillance he had been placed under. And there he may well have remained indefinitely had he not received a call to action in the spring of 1894 from Egor ʹ Lazarev and his comrades in the RFPF. He was being summoned back to London to assist in a new literary undertaking and Lazarev, aware of Burtsev’s other love affair – that with the Library of the British Museum – would have been perfectly confident that his invitation would not be rejected. Burtsev returned to London on Sunday 10 June 1894 and took up residence near the British Museum at 29, Francis St., Tottenham Court Road – or ‘Tottengame Court Road’ as Rachkovsky transcribed it in his report to his superiors in St Petersburg. This document is contained in a four-volume Department of Police dossier devoted to the investigation of Burtsev held at the State Archive of the Russian Federation.116 Although incomplete (sadly, volume one is missing) the remaining three volumes contain over 600 pages of agents’ reports, inter departmental correspondence, circulars, copies of letters obtained by illegal interception and a wealth of other materials covering Burtsev’s activities during the period 1890 to 1897. Although copies of some of these documents are to be found in the Hoover’s Okhrana archive, many are not and, if the consultation sheets attached to the GARF files are to be believed, they have, until now, escaped the attention of Western scholars.117 Drawing on this and other Department of Police files held at GARF, it is possible to chart the difficult growth of the London Agency and to examine the methods employed by Rachkovsky in his continuing fight against Burtsev and the London ‘Nihilists’. Moreover, thanks to the recent discovery of a set of previously unpublished letters, the origins and extent of unofficial Anglo-Russian police collaboration during the period can be established for the first time. These documents highlight the effect of this collaboration on the public perception of political refugees and throw new light on the joint surveillance operations which were carried out at the most popular émigré haunts in London, such as the Reading Room of the British Museum. The latter, as will

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be shown, played a major role in the lives of the Russian political emigration in general and in the fate of Burtsev in particular. In Burtsev’s absence during his European peregrinations, Rachkovsky had succeeded, eventually, in consolidating his position and tightening his hold over the London emigration. Thanks to the involvement of Chief of Police Durnovo, he had obtained additional financing from St Petersburg; he had also established links with embassy and consular officials and his staff and operations in the British capital had expanded. Moreover, there were signs in mid-1894 that he was at last beginning to win the propaganda war against the revolutionaries. As Department of Police files show, however, the task had been far from easy. Despite Rachkovsky’s earlier boasts to Durnovo about his successful establishment of a London Agency and his claim that ‘all the émigrés in London were under his complete control’,118 it is clear from other reports of the period that he had underestimated considerably the difficulty of his assignment. As early as March 1891, he was begging Durnovo to contact the Minister of Foreign Affairs, de Giers, to arrange for him to enter into the same relationship with the London embassy as he enjoyed at that time with its Parisian counterpart: ‘Till now I have not seen the need to have dealings with our diplomats but no doubt in the very near future I will be obliged to do so. Such an arrangement might in extreme circumstances ease the great difficulty I will face in fulfilling the orders you have placed upon me.’119 Arrangements were duly put in place, though the exact nature of the ensuing relationship is blurred: it is unclear, for example, whether the Russian embassy in London provided office accommodation for Rachkovsky’s agents, as was the case in Paris. It is, however, known that the Russian Ministry of the Interior maintained a secret fund from which it regularly and directly reimbursed London (and other) consular staff for expenses incurred on ‘agency business’.120 The same source also provided Rachkovsky with funds for dépenses extraordinaires for his agency activities in London (to the tune of some 14,000 francs in 1892 alone).121 The financing of his new operation was, then, not likely to have been a concern for the Head of the Foreign Agency but, initially, the recruitment of suitable agents was. For, although Rachkovsky maintained that he had infiltrated an agent into the local emigration as early as October 1891, there is no archival evidence to back this claim up: his reports from the period contain little of substance and, indeed, it was not until the arrival of the Polish informer Bolesław Maliankewicz the following spring that matters appeared to take a turn for the better. Unfortunately, this latest recruit proved to be a bitter disappointment to his control and it is worth pausing at this point to examine the debacle in detail for, as well as offering a glimpse into the life of the political emigration in London, it again demonstrates the almost feverish desperation that seemed periodically to seize the highest ranks of the Russian Department of Police and led them blindly to trust anyone who happened to come along claiming they could help tackle the ‘great émigré threat’. Maliankewicz’s tragic story also serves as a brutal illustration of Rachkovsky’s coldhearted insensitivity to his fellow man. Born in Warsaw in 1867, Bolesław Maliankewicz joined the ranks of the revolutionary opposition in his youth and in April 1884 gained a certain notoriety when he threw a bomb at Cracow Police Headquarters. In his own account of the affair, however, he failed to mention that he had thrown the bomb at a window but

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missed, with the result that the device bounced back off a wall and blew up injuring no one but himself. As a result, the unfortunate bomber was immediately arrested.122 Much later, following his imprisonment, he left the country and settled in the heart of the radical emigration in London’s East End, where, in the early 1890s, he appears to have ‘lost the faith’. In the spring of 1892 he wrote to St Petersburg declaring that he had realized the error of his ways and now wished to offer up his services to prevent any future terrorist atrocity being committed.123 He had already approached a British police inspector (almost certainly Inspector William Melville of Scotland Yard) who fobbed him off, suggesting he contact the Russian embassy. There too he was snubbed, his letter to chargé dʹaffaires Butenev going without reply. Chief of police Durnovo, on the other hand, ignoring these earlier rebuffs, was most excited at the apparent riches the informant had to offer. Maliankewicz’s first two letters contained information on no fewer than 72 émigrés and the Department of Police immediately set about drawing up a list of the names mentioned, meticulously comparing them against files already held.124 Maliankewicz also provided detailed information on the various Russian and Polish émigré revolutionary groupings in London and Paris, pointing out, for example, that members of Free Russia met twice monthly at the Mendelssohns’ (where proceedings were conducted in French) and describing how, at a previous meeting, Kropotkin and ‘Mendelssohn in particular’ had affirmed that ‘only murders would produce the desired electrifying effect on the masses in Russia’. He recorded that only Stepniak had opposed them. In addition, he supplied the Russian police with a secret code and key used by the revolutionaries, in return for which he asked only that he be given a small pocket camera to help him in his endeavours and that he be contacted only under the pseudonym Wiktor Wierbicki. One can understand Durnovo’s excitement at the prospect of securing the services of such a rich source of inside information but in his enthusiasm the Chief of Police overlooked certain signs which indicated that Maliankewicz might only be as competent a spy as he was a bomb-thrower. Even in his first letters one can detect a lack of balance in some of Maliankewicz’s judgements: in his report of the Free Russia meeting, for example, he claimed that a particularly cruel stance was adopted by none other than the artist William Morris, whose rejection of the violence of anarchism was already widely known at the time. It is evident too, from his derogatory comments, that Maliankewicz was driven by an excessively bitter personal hatred of Stanislaw Mendelssohn: ‘mon mortel anatagonist’, as he called him. Then, in the letters that followed, a sense of panic and paranoid suspicion started to creep in. In July Maliankewicz imagined he sensed hesitation on the part of his Russian contact and wrote to ask if this was because of his past or because of ‘la recommendation de Mr Melvile [sic], avec lequel jʹai refusé nettement de colaborer. Avec la police Anglaise je ne peux pas, ils sont indiscrets et je les ai offencé’.125 Durnovo chose to turn a blind eye to these ravings and wrote to Rachkovsky urging him to make a trip to London at his earliest convenience to recruit the new informant. Although expressing his reservations on the matter, Rachkovsky succeeded in tracking the elusive Pole down a few weeks later and, somewhat reluctantly, recruited him into the London Agency at a starting salary of 200 francs a month.126 The honeymoon, however, was short-lived. A mere two weeks later, Rachkovsky reported that his

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new agent was ignoring orders and was ‘engaged in an enterprise which is bound to compromise us, especially if one takes into consideration his age, lack of self-control and desire to be different’.127 He ordered the new recruit to have no further dealings with people in whom the Agency was not interested. Shortly afterwards Durnovo was obliged to agree that, due to Maliankewicz’s ‘insolence and unscrupulousness in choice of resources’, his services would no longer be required, but that if Rachkovsky wished to transfer him to Paris, where he could be kept under closer control, then he had his consent, but he should be given much less money.128 Sadly, the Maliankewicz comedy was to end in tragedy. His Department of Police file shows that he was indeed transferred to Paris, where, for a number of years, he lived quietly and in considerably straitened circumstances under the pseudonym Victor Thiessen. Then, suddenly, in May 1897, possibly in an attempt to escape his crushing poverty, the unfortunate individual tried to offer his services as a spy again, this time in a letter to the Kiev Gendarmerie.129 Nothing came of this proposal, as is evidenced by the fact that shortly afterwards he was obliged to move into an asylum for the poor run by Polish nuns. Rachkovsky’s reaction to his ex-employee’s gambit is not recorded but the file does contain his response to a final query from St Petersburg in July of that year concerning the reported suicide of Maliankewicz who, it was rumoured, had confessed to the Paris émigrés that he had been in the employ of the Russian secret police and had then promptly shot himself. The Head of the Foreign Agency replied with a brusque telegram, coldly stating that the deceased had indeed worked for him for a time, that he was sacked because he was ‘useless’ (bezpoleznyi) and that he had committed suicide solely as a result of his critical financial embarrassment.130 Another example, if such were needed, of Rachkovsky’s callous indifference to the suffering of his fellow man, be he friend or foe.

Monsieur Richter finds a friend Added to the difficulties he was encountering in recruiting suitable ‘internal’ agents Rachkovsky was also having ‘perlustration problems’.131 Unlike Paris, where agents found it relatively easy to bribe a concierge to hand over an émigré’s post, the redoubtable landladies of London were proving to be another matter. One Russian ‘external’ agent operating in London at a later date bemoaned his lot complaining that without money or contacts all one can do here is report on who visited who and at what address. If you knock on the door and make up some story to try to obtain further information, 99 times out of 100 the door will be shut in your face and you will be reported to the tenants. Here, unlike Paris, there are no door-men whose souls can be bought for 100 sous.132

This report came from the pen of ‘the principal Russian agent in London’ at the turn of the century, Edgar Jean Farce, a French national employed first by Rachkovsky and then by his successors, Rataev and Garting.133 Unfortunately, judging from his copious and regular reports, the quality of information he was able to supply was every bit as poor as that provided by his predecessors.134

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Besides this irritation, Rachkovsky had many more concerns, which he listed in a later report. Describing how Stepniak’s attempts to unite with the Parisian émigrés had turned into a fiasco, with neither the young nor the old Populists wishing to join him, Rachkovsky issued a warning that the London émigrés had, as a result, turned their attention to Russia, to where ‘when it came time to act they would transfer the centre of their revolutionary weight for the practical implementation of their plans’.135 According to him, the London group at that time was composed of around a dozen individuals but he forecast an increase in numbers in the autumn with the release of the Paris bombers (Reinshtein, Kashintsev, Stepanov, Nakashidze and Teplov) and their expected expulsion to Britain.136 He warned too that the revolutionaries were now well-funded, and outlined their plans for a new journal that would be moderate enough to escape the attention of the Russian censor. The émigrés, he reported, were attracting favourable attention both in the press and amongst members of parliament who, to his evident disgust, ‘receive them as they would respected visitors and do all they can to encourage them in their criminal activities’.137 He then launched into an astonishing diatribe against the British: Bearing in mind the fact that, on the one hand, the British are a self-seeking and dishonest nation which recognizes no boundaries when it comes to achieving its ends and on the other, that the combined agitation of the British and our own revolutionaries has one sole objective – the violent overthrow of the Supreme Power – and that, in order to realise this plan, they are constantly trying to find recruits not only abroad, but also in Russia itself, it is essential, if I may be so bold as to suggest it, that, independent of any police action, we mount a strong propaganda campaign in the press both at home and abroad against the British and those Russian revolutionaries who have sold themselves to them. In such a country as England, where currently both governmental and public opinion are inflamed by hostile propaganda against us, where our professional evil-doers are not only not prevented from carrying out their criminal acts, but, on the contrary, are, completely openly and with the assistance of members of parliament, indulged and aided in their revolutionary intrigues, we cannot rely on our complaints or protests being satisfied through legal channels. We must attempt to, at least partially, paralyze this emerging movement and show the true extent of the vile provocations of the British. We must demean the émigrés in the eyes of the Russian intelligentsia and show how they have prostituted themselves to become nothing more than a weapon of vengeance in the hands of their protectors. And in this the press can perform a great service for us, all the more so since the Englishman cherishes the majesty of his homeland and fears European public opinion above all else. Thus, if we act persistently and systematically we will in the end give the British themselves cause to reflect.138

This outburst shows the importance that Rachkovsky accorded to the press and his anxiety that a propaganda front be opened up at the earliest opportunity. But by the end of the year no progress had been made. In his report to Durnovo of November

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1892 Rachkovsky’s growing cynicism was apparent, as he again bemoaned his lot and the failure of the British police to cooperate with him: It must be said that even if we were to discover in London (hope upon hope!) a bomb factory or a printing press of counterfeit currency it is unlikely we would be able to expose the revolutionaries and confront them with full proof of their crimes so long as the current general conditions remain unchanged (i.e. the fact of England’s moral and material support for our revolutionaries). The British authorities would make use of the information we gave them not to arrest these ‘political refugees’ but to warn the culprits that in future they should not allow themselves to be openly caught in a scandal which would oblige the authorities to do a service to the Russian government.139

Following his successes in Paris, where, with considerable ease, he had struck up excellent relationships not only with the heads of police but also with several senior politicians and cabinet ministers, this frosty reception from the British authorities must have come as a bitter disappointment. Moreover (and again in stark contrast to Paris, where he had developed an impressive portfolio of friendly newspapers), he was finding it impossible to make any inroads into Fleet Street.140 In this he was certainly hampered by his poor command of English; though, as the following story shows, even when he enlisted the help of a friendly translator, he fared no better. To date, no mention has been made, in any study of the Foreign Agency, of one of Rachkovsky’s key contacts in London, Leon Jolivard, editor of the French weekly Le Mémorial diplomatique, who had been resident in the British capital for some years and who clearly shared Rachkovsky’s views on Russian political renegades.141 Shortly after the London Agency had been set up, in the spring of 1891, Jolivard agreed to translate a piece, which Rachkovsky had penned, criticizing the London nihilists, and try to get it published in the British press. The results of this venture are detailed in a previously unpublished letter held in the State Archive of the Russian Federation which makes for fascinating reading.142 On 24 May 1891 Jolivard wrote to a ‘Monsieur Richter’ (Rachkovsky’s London pseudonym),143 echoing the views of the latter on the present hostility in Britain towards Russia. He had tried for some time to get his translation of Rachkovsky’s article published in various English newspapers but without success.144 One approach to the Globe newspaper resulted in what Jolivard described as a ‘disgusting’ reply from the editor who claimed that the article contained nothing new, that it was not written impartially and that some of the facts were exaggerated. Moreover, Jolivard had also received the following brief and brutal rebuff from the editor of the Evening News and Post: I beg to return your article on Nihilists written as if it had been sent from St Petersburg. This paper cannot adopt the pro-Russian policy and though we agree with this able article in the main, we are quite able to deal with this subject from our own point of view editorially as we have done from time to time.145

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Jolivard could not deny that he was totally discouraged, mentioning in passing: ‘jʹai dépensé plus de cent francs a tâcher de me rendre agréable a ces idiots!’ It is unknown whether he received any compensation from Rachkovsky for his efforts but he certainly deserved an enormous vote of thanks from him for the final service rendered, which he described in the last paragraph of his letter: If it is of any consolation, luck has given me the opportunity to be of great use to you in another way. I am now in a position where I can give you better information on the London Nihilists than you could ever get yourself. Ask me anything you like and I will be able to give you the most detailed answer. I have made the acquaintance of Inspector Melville of the political police …. He has offered me his services complaining that his superiors at Scotland Yard act too feebly with regard to the Nihilists. Do not pass up on this chance, my friend, it will not come your way again.146

Thus, for the first time, we can establish how and when contact between Rachkovsky and the future head of the British secret police came about.147 There can be no doubt that the former, for so long unable to establish a foothold in London, would have seized on Jolivard’s offer and would have arranged a meeting with Inspector Melville forthwith. Moreover, he would have found the police inspector an agreeable companion, all the more so since the latter, having recently spent some five years in France, had an excellent command of the language. It is easy to imagine the two in conversation: Rachkovsky perhaps lamenting his current powerlessness in face of a hostile English press; Melville, meanwhile, bemoaning the ‘feeble’ attitude of his superior, Chief Inspector John Littlechild, towards the anarchist menace and perhaps also offering to share his contacts in the London press with his new Russian acquaintance. The degree to which the two policemen collaborated at this early stage in their relationship is, however, open to question: there are no Scotland Yard files on the matter and the only correspondence between the two uncovered so far dates only from the last years of the century.148 It is, nevertheless, a matter of some interest to examine certain events which unfolded in Britain immediately after their first encounter and to speculate as to whether the hand of Petr Ivanovich Rachkovsky can be detected therein.

The Walsall anarchist affair: A copycat conspiracy Whether Rachkovsky and Melville discussed the 1890 Paris bomb affair and the role of the informer Landezen as agent-provocateur is unknown. It is, however, remarkable that an almost identical affair would shortly play itself out in the West Midlands, gripping the attention of the British press and having a marked effect on the public’s perception of the ‘Nihilists’ in their midst. Between 7 and 14 January 1892, ‘under instructions from the authorities in London’, Inspector Melville, assisted by members of the local police, apprehended six men associated with a socialist club in Walsall and charged them with possession of

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explosives under the 1883 Explosive Substances Act.149 The police had been shadowing the suspects since August of the previous year but had never managed to discover any explosives as such: in the end, the prosecution could come up with no more incriminating evidence than a sketch of a bomb, a ‘plaster model of an egg-shaped thing’, a brass bolt and a bottle of chloroform.150 No further exhibits were required, however, since two of the accused offered confessions. One of them, a clerk by the name of Frederick Charles, claimed he was told the bombs were intended for use in Russia and of course, at that time, ‘Russian despotism was thought to excuse or even justify almost any revolutionary means’.151 In any event, Charles believed, the affair was ‘a police-made plot’.152 Another of the accused also suspected the involvement of an agent-provocateur while yet another of the defendants, an Italian by the name of Battolla, admitted to being an anarchist ‘but not of the violent kind’ and insisted the group had been set up by August Coulon, a Frenchman and fellow member of the anarchist Autonomie Club in London, who had ordered all the bombs and who, à la Landezen, had then vanished from the scene. When Inspector Melville took the stand he admitted to having known the Frenchman for two years but when the Counsel for the defence quizzed him as to whether Coulon was his source of information or whether he had paid him in the course of the investigation Melville declined to answer and, moreover, was supported by the trial judge in his refusal to do so. It is now known that Coulon was in fact on the payroll of that police department from 1890 to 1904 and received extra payments at the time of the Walsall case in the spring of 1892.153 Unfortunately, the trial jury was unaware of this police complicity and, after a brief recess, returned to declare four of the six defendants guilty. The judge Mr Justice Hawkins handed down harsh sentences: three of ten years and one of five. Coulon, meanwhile, got off scot-free: he was never called as a witness, neither was a warrant for his arrest ever issued. In this he fared better than Landezen had done in Paris two years earlier, though in most other respects the two ‘conspiracies’ do bear striking similarities. That Coulon had acted as agent-provocateur at Melville’s behest is almost beyond doubt and it is tempting too to speculate that the latter’s new-found Russian friend, drawing on his past experience, had helped him concoct the whole business. Melville’s decisive strike at Walsall was widely reported (in both the British and European press) as his own personal triumph and it was namely this affair that launched him into the public eye and secured his rapid promotion to the rank of Chief Inspector of Special Branch.154 Thus, just as Rachkovsky had fabricated the Paris bomb plot to his immense and lasting benefit, so Melville, for some time to come, would obtain great satisfaction and advantage from his underhand dealings in the West Midlands. A few days after the trial, the English anarchist David Nicoll took to the press declaring, in the main anarchist journal the Commonweal, that the whole affair was a blatant act of police provocation and denouncing the three main culprits who, to his mind, were ‘Hangman Hawkins’, ‘the Jesuitical monster at the Home Office’ (i.e. Secretary of State Matthews) and ‘the spy Melville who sets his agents on to concoct the plots which he “discovers”’. ‘Are these men fit to live?’ he asked and, for daring to pose such a question, was arrested on a charge of incitement to murder, found guilty under Section 4 of the Offences Against the Person Act and sentenced to eighteen months’

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hard labour.155 Moreover, it was not long before the Commonweal itself was forced to close down. Following Walsall, a new harshness had crept into the British system of justice and, crucially, the British public did not appear to mind.

Russian memorandum redux Suddenly, Britain appeared to wake up to a new threat in its midst. There were lengthy debates in parliament on such topics as whether or not groups of dangerous individuals such as the so-called Freedom Group should be allowed to assemble in Trafalgar Square and perpetrate outrages such as the hanging of the Home Secretary in effigy.156 Meanwhile, articles critical of foreign anarchists began to appear in the press with a greater frequency. Perhaps the most famous of these was a rather odd, jointly authored article entitled ‘Anarchists: Their Methods and Organization’, which appeared in the January 1894 issue of the New Review.157 The first part, ‘Methods’, was an attack on all terrorists in London, irrespective of their nationality, and called for their immediate expulsion. The author, an Englishman who signed himself ‘Z’, rather unwisely drew attention to the anarchist Johann Most’s bomb-making instruction manual, ‘this noxious handbook which should be forthwith repressed’, and issued an ominous warning of the reaction which would follow the commitment of any foul deed: ‘after the first “revolutionary” act there would be such reprisals as none of these desperadoes have as yet the faintest idea’.158 The second part of the article, ‘Organization’, was signed ‘Ivanoff ’ and concerned itself with the Russian political émigré community in particular and their British supporters within the SFRF. Ivanoff named the most dangerous of them: Kropotkin, Chaikovsky, ‘the murderer of General Mezentseff ’ (i.e. Stepniak), Volkhovsky, Voinich, the Mendelssohns, Moses Harmidor (Baranov), Aleksandr Lavrenius (recently expelled by the French government, following his release from prison) and, of course, Vladimir Burtsev. It was, in fact, no more than a rewrite of the famous ‘memorandum’ which de Staal had delivered to Lord Salisbury two years earlier. From the detailed biographical content it was clear that the article could only have been penned by a Russian police agent and, indeed, there is documentary proof that it was written by the Head of the Foreign Agency himself.159 Moreover, it is almost certain that the ‘Ivanoff ’ article was an update of that same piece which Jolivard had unsuccessfully hawked around Fleet Street some three years previously. It has also been conjectured that ‘Z’ was none other than Rachkovsky’s ‘brother in arms’, Chief Inspector Melville.160 While the identity of ‘Z’ may have been unclear at the time, the émigrés had no doubt whatsoever as to the identity of his co-author. Stepniak, who had been the main target of Ivanoff ’s attack, countered with an article in the same review the following month,161 declaring that ‘it is clear at a glance that this article is fathered by the Russian police’.162 But this was all grist to the mill to Rachkovsky, for whom, thanks no doubt to Melville’s assistance, the doors of the British press were now wide open. He seized the opportunity, sending off further scurrilous articles on Stepniak and on the émigré community in general to newspapers such as the Daily Mail and Morning Advertiser.163 Rachkovsky now felt it necessary to restate his earlier views on the importance of the

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press to Durnovo’s successor at the Department of Police, Petrov, but this time in a more measured way: ‘At the present time when the counter-agitation we have undertaken in France has been of such indisputable service to us, I foresee the necessity of organizing something similar in London where the British press, in creating public opinion, also obliges the powers that be to take notice of it.’164 An indication of the success of his propaganda campaign can be shown by the critical reception to Stepniak’s next publication. In November 1894, the former darling of English liberalism issued a book under the same title as his New Review article, Nihilism as It Is.165 Collecting contributions by both Stepniak and by Volkhovsky and with an introduction by Robert Spence Watson of the SFRF, the book comprised a compendium of pamphlets whose main purpose, according to its anonymous reviewer in The Times, was ‘to satisfy English readers that the Nihilists are not so black as they are sometimes painted’. The reviewer then proceeded to dismiss it for being ‘vague, visionary and full of the inflated commonplaces of what is known as Social Democracy’. He reserved his real venom, however, for Stepniak and his call for the forceful overthrow of the Russian government. It is perhaps no surprise that this hostile reviewer succeeded in finding that very same infamous phrase of Stepniak’s which was quoted by de Staal in his ‘memorandum’ two years previously concerning ‘military plots, attacks upon the palace, bombs and dynamite’. The reviewer wondered how it was possible that such an important public figure as Spence Watson could lend his support to ‘this humane and high-souled apologist’ who sought to justify these ‘anti-human operations of the Nihilists’: We confess we find it difficult to understand how so feeble and flimsy an apology for dynamite can pass muster even with the so-called Friends of Russian Freedom in this country; and we certainly think it behoves Dr. Spence Watson to consider whether his public position as a prominent party leader is consistent with the patronage and countenance of Russian exiles who openly avow their implacable hostility to the government of a friendly power and their readiness to use dynamite against it.166

Now, then, it was not only the émigrés who were coming under attack but anyone who dared support them. During the period in question, public opinion was further inflamed thanks to a spate of terrorist murders and explosions in France and Spain that also reverberated, to a greater or lesser degree, on the streets of London. Some of these attentats received mass coverage in the British press – thanks again to the heroic involvement of Chief Inspector Melville. In one such incident, on the streets of the London borough of Poplar in October 1892, he had succeeded in dramatically capturing the French anarchist Jean-Pierre François, who was wanted for his involvement in an earlier explosion at a French café. Two years later, on the Farringdon Road, the Chief Inspector caught the anarchist François Polti, with bomb in hand, apparently on his way to blow up the Royal Exchange. There is evidence to suggest that Melville had formed the opinion that he now had the authority to use his own initiative and make arrests wherever he saw the need without reporting his actions to his superiors. Thus, for example, in a note of 19 April 1894 Home Secretary Herbert Asquith was barely

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able to conceal his fury when he learned of the arrest of an anarchist from a newspaper report and asked why he had not been informed earlier.167 The press and the public, however, were unconcerned. In their eyes the Chief Inspector could do no wrong. Nor, apparently, could Rachkovsky, whose star was now in the ascendancy and was set to rise still further as a result of another of his alarmist reports to the Fontanka. This is a fine example of his ability to strike terror into the heart of the Director of the Department of Police and, in so doing, consolidate his own position and ensure a steady stream of finance and support from St Petersburg to Paris.168 On this occasion he reported on certain rumours circulating amongst the London and Parisian émigrés concerning the imminent return of eight revolutionaries to Russia, possibly with the intention of making an attempt on the life of the hated K. P. Pobedonostsev, the Procurator of the Holy Synod, or even the Emperor himself! In an attempt to back this absurd claim up he attached one of Burtsev’s illegible letters to V. D. Perazich, a Russian émigré resident in Vienna, together with an equally illegible transcription. Decipherment revealed, however, that, like most of Burtsev’s letters, this contained little more than requests for bibliographic material.169 It is interesting to note that Rachkovsky found it appropriate to include a postscript pointing out that it was only the Populists who were involved in the plot and stressing that the Social Democrats had nothing to do with it. According to him, the latter did not even have the means to print their usual material and had scarcely enough to live on: Akselʹrod, Plekhanov and Zasulich, he said, were ‘on the point of starvation’.170 As a result of this alarmist report, a memorandum was sent to all border-crossings in Russia, warning of the imminent arrival of a group of dangerous revolutionaries including, of course, the infamous terrorist Vladimir Burtsev. But, as with so many of Rachkovsky’s predictions, this band of villains never did appear. The border-guards again awaited their arrival in vain.171 Undeterred, Rachkovsky dashed off another report giving further details about the plot but this time stretching his credibility to the limits. According to him, Burtsev had written to the London émigrés proposing that Pobedonostsev be assassinated and asking for money to assist him in the deed. Apparently, the émigrés refused but support was forthcoming from three liberals in Russia, among them Korolenko. Then Lazarev arrived and criticized Stepniak who in turn apologized to Burtsev for his refusal.172 Rachkovsky followed this nonsense up with another report warning that the group which was about to cross the border had now grown to some twenty strong.173 Again, Petrov appeared to accept this arrant twaddle without question, sending out yet another memo to the border-crossings.174 It is interesting to note that Rachkovsky’s contact with St Petersburg did not always take the form of official reports and that occasionally, he would even report some hard facts. The Department of Police archive at GARF contains a tantalizing excerpt from a private letter from the Head of the Foreign Agency to Petrov dating from this period and concerning the political situation in London. It shows the rather fawning attitude which Rachkovsky chose to adopt towards his superior: Your Excellency is correct to note the recent animation amongst the emigration which could take a dangerous turn. Thanks be to God, however, that I have

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Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia arranged it so that not one of the major figures can make any undertaking without our knowing of it. I hope I will be able to accomplish everything and show you I am worthy of your trust and your truly father-like concerns about my own personal fate. Let me say a few words about the state of affairs abroad. I will give you a full report on my London trip within a few days; in which the internal life of the London émigrés, their undertakings and future plans are described in exhaustive detail.175

Infuriatingly, there is no trace to be found in the archive of said report. One can only assume, therefore, that it found its way into the missing file on the setting up of an agency in London referred to earlier.176 Rachkovsky’s letter did, however, point to a marked improvement in his London intelligence. Referring to his ‘reliable sources within that group’ he reported on attempts to discover valuable information about the group’s links with Russia and on a meeting to be held in September after which Lazarev intended to return to Russia. Finally, he referred to another ‘combination’ which he had in mind but with which he was currently encountering difficulties. When he had overcome these, he promised, he would report on the outcome. The exchange of information was by no means one way. St Petersburg would regularly copy Paris into any materials it received and which it deemed relevant to the investigation in hand. An excellent example of this is a letter from Burtsev dated 29 January 1894 and postmarked Zurich which was intercepted in St Petersburg. Written in chemical inks, there is archival evidence to suggest that the Department of Police took over two months to produce a legible copy of the letter but the resulting information obtained was certainly worth the effort.177

The Shishakin letter In April 1894, Petrov contacted the Paris office with the news that the Department of Police had received ‘agenturnym putem’ (i.e. by perlustration), a copy of a thirteenpage letter from Burtsev in Zurich to a contact in St Petersburg for the attention of Evgeny Shishakin, a young student who, at that time, unbeknownst to Burtsev, had been taken into police custody.178 The very presence of this letter in the files of the Okhrana supports the view that Burtsev was up against a formidable opponent indeed. Petrov attached a copy for Rachkovsky’s information and added, ‘the personage to whom Burtsev sent the letter for transmission to Shishakin has informed Burtsev that Shishakin is unwell but has suggested that the correspondence should continue’.179 This provides yet another illustration of the apparent hopelessness of Burtsev’s position – it appeared that even those contacts back in Russia to whom he entrusted his mail were police informers. The letter itself, however, suggests that he and his comrades in emigration, far from being disheartened, were enthusiastically engaged in the struggle. Since escaping from exile, he had consistently advocated a much closer working relationship between the emigration and the revolutionary movement in Russia and was therefore delighted at the opportunity to initiate a dialogue with Shishakin, thanks to a recommendation from a mutual acquaintance whom he referred to throughout as ‘A’.180 He professed himself to be all the happier to deal with

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the unknown student as the latter was a representative of ‘young revolutionary Russia’. The letter again demonstrates Burtsev’s abiding interest and belief in the need to involve the youth of Russia in the revolutionary movement. As mentioned previously, A. I. Nelidov, the Russian ambassador to Paris, had warned of Burtsev’s ‘amazing gift for rousing the evil instincts of young revolutionaries and rapidly turning them into fanatics capable of frightful crimes’.181 And he did, indeed, seem to have the ability to inspire youngsters, a fact which had not escaped the attention of the Department of Police. As a colleague noted, Burtsev’s contacts were more or less known to the Agency which paid particular attention to his acquaintances among those youngsters arriving from Russia and who, upon their return to their homeland, were immediately placed under surveillance.182 Indeed, Burtsev’s life in emigration is peppered with references to his meetings with, and letters to and from, young students both in Russia and in emigration. Thus, on his European tour with Bullier he had meetings first in Montpellier with a young medical student named ‘Arenkoff ’,183 with whom he later frequently corresponded;184 then, in Zurich, as mentioned earlier, he spent time with the student Grankovsky and his friends. In her reminiscences of Burtsev, the academician S. N. Motovilova recalls visiting him in the summer of 1900 with a friend who, like so many other youngsters at the time, was in awe of Burtsev’s dedication to the cause and his purity, both moral and physical. (Obviously unaware of the Bullier affair, Motovilova repeated the belief held in some émigré circles that Burtsev had remained a virgin all his life.)185 His letter to Shishakin is certainly not short of exhortations, which might indeed have served to inspire had the intended recipient ever received it. But it is of a wider interest too, for it contains the clearest possible exposition of Burtsev’s political views at that time, including his unqualified support for acts of political terror: Let me say a few words about our political programme. Our motto is: To recreate the Party of the People’s Will of 1879 – both in its theoretical programme and in its practices of 1879 and 1880. In other words, To demand a constitution and strive towards that goal by means of propaganda and agitation amongst all ranks of society, relying on systematic terror. A constitution – now; socialism – as our end goal; political terror – as one of the most important weapons currently at our disposal in our struggle. That, in short, is our programme.186

He expanded further on the benefits of terror as a weapon of choice in the political struggle: ‘At a time of reaction, to use terror against reactionaries is a good thing and has an enlivening effect on youth, on society, and on the workers on the one hand, and on the government on the other, even if it is a matter of individual acts of terror and not a systematic programme.’187 On the question of organization, Burtsev recommended the introduction of small, local, independent groups which would be set up ad hoc and run by what he described as ‘dictators’, whose role as such would end the moment they had accomplished their allotted task. These organizations were to be serviced by a central ‘revolutionary office of information’ (spravochnoe revoliutsionnoe biuro), which would be set up abroad and whose role would be that of technical support – from the provision of printing services

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to the supply of bomb-making materials. (He felt it important to stress that bombs would not be manufactured abroad – that, in his view, would be unnecessary.) Much of this brings to mind the structure and modus operandi of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party’s Combat Organization, which would come into being only in 1901.188 Burtsev also had some useful advice to pass on to the young student concerning secret methods of communication that might be usefully employed. In so doing, he shed some light on the rather crude ‘trade craft’ practised by the revolutionaries of the day. He began by laying the foundations for a successful and secure means of correspondence and was, apparently, so confident that this, his introductory letter to the unknown student, would be delivered safely that he immediately launched into an explanation of how best to use chemical inks and how to conceal letters in books with uncut pages – ‘using this method you will be able to send me entire tracts’. He then proceeded to lay out, with breath-taking naivety, the cipher which he suggested Shishakin use, together with its key.189 One might wonder who needed the services of an informer such as Maliankewicz when the revolutionaries themselves acted with such lack of care. Finally, Burtsev passed on a ‘safe’ address in Zurich for correspondence. As one studies this letter, in the knowledge that it has already been meticulously deciphered and copied out in the offices of the Department of Police on the Fontanka, and then reads Burtsev’s confident assertion that ‘the above conditions are quite enough to enable us to correspond securely and will allow us to exchange letters on any serious matter we chose’, one cannot help but feel that this ‘professional’ revolutionary conspirator had yet again seriously underestimated his opponent’s abilities and that failure awaited just around the corner. Indeed, at one point in the letter Burtsev appeared to foretell his own fate. Urging caution, he wrote: ‘Only, be careful – I say this not for my own sake. It is all one to me. They can even accuse me of plotting regicide if they like, it will not add anything to the accusations which are already levelled against me.’190 Burtsev devoted the last part of this letter to a discussion of his and his comrades’ current and projected literary undertakings, with the request that Shishakin support them in their endeavours. His first objective was the production of a history of the Russian revolutionary movement, which, in his view, was ‘as necessary to the revolutionaries as bread’.191 He had already been working on the project for some three years and had amassed a huge quantity of material. Estimating that the entire book would cost somewhere in the region of 500 roubles, he asked for contributions from Shishakin and his comrades in St Petersburg of five, ten or, if possible, fifty roubles. He would also seek financial assistance from other revolutionary groups in Moscow and elsewhere. Amongst the other projects outlined was the republication of the major articles from Vestnik Narodnoi voli and the proclamations of the party’s Executive Committee, all heavily annotated and costing somewhere in the region of 75 francs per printed sheet. Whether Burtsev held out any serious hope of raising enough funds in this manner to reach his goal is unknown but, as it happened, such donations from Russia were not required. In his memoirs, the seasoned revolutionary Egorʹ Lazarev recalled arriving in London in the spring of 1894 to take up the position of secretary of the RFPF.192 He described how he had succeeded in obtaining funds from America to enable the

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publication of a new and enlarged version of the Kalendar ʹ Narodnoi voli (Calendar of the People’s Will) which had first appeared in Geneva in 1883, and how members of the Fund had then decided to approach Burtsev, in Switzerland, to ask him to come back to London to undertake the task. It would appear that Burtsev accepted the offer with relish and thereby brought his grand tour of Europe to an end. As mentioned above, Burtsev returned to London in mid-June 1894 and, within two weeks, this bookish man was already back in the sanctuary of his beloved British Museum, working studiously on his history of the revolutionary movement. In the famous Reading Room he was in the company of many like-minded revolutionaries and, as it would transpire, an equal (or even greater) number of Russian and British spies, stooges and provocateurs. Rachkovsky’s earlier alarmist reports had achieved the desired result in St Petersburg. He had asked for, and immediately received, a payment of 10,000 francs. This, he reported, was to enable him to employ another sixteen surveillance agents in Europe.193 How many of these he intended for service in London is unclear, although it is known that he considered the British capital to be the second most important centre of sedition after Paris and, at this time, considered his operations in London important enough to warrant the despatch of his trusted Milevsky across the Channel ‘to collaborate with the London police’.194 Evidently, Chief Inspector Melville’s unofficial assistance to his Russian colleague extended further than merely putting him in touch with his friends in the press – as we shall see, it would transpire that he was even prepared to offer up the services of his own staff at Scotland Yard.

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1894–1899: Return to London

At the Museum In his reminiscences, L. D. Trotsky described the British Museum Reading Room as a ‘sanctuary’ (sviatilishche).1 It had long been thus for those political refugees who, like Burtsev, had arrived before Lev Davidovich, and who had also fallen under its spell. It would therefore be useful at this point to make a brief detour into the halls and corridors of the Museum to explore in detail the role that this venerable institution had played – for some fifty years already – in the intellectual development of the Russian revolutionary movement. On 13 November 1852, a slim volume, published in Paris and entitled Du Développement des idées révolutionnaires en Russie, was presented as a gift to the British Museum. The volume bears а manuscript dedication on the title page: ‘To the british [sic] Museum – the author’.2 This is almost certainly in the hand of the father of Russian socialism, Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (Gertsen), who had only recently arrived in England, and the donation is a fitting one indeed. For, over the next half century and more, the British Museum was to play a major role in the development of these ideas and in the growth of the Russian revolutionary movement as a whole.3 Herzen was probably one of the first Russian exiles during the so-called dvorianskii etap (the nobility stage) of the emigration to settle in London and to avail himself of the collections of the British Museum Library.4 The attraction of Britain to Herzen, Ogarev, Bakunin and many other European political exiles of the day was self-evident: simply, it was that country’s willingness to offer refuge to those suffering political persecution at home, especially, in the decades of antagonism between the world’s two largest empires over the second half of the nineteenth century, if that home happened to be Russia. (It should be remembered that, at the time of Herzen’s arrival in London in 1852, Anglo-Russian relations were particularly strained, resulting two years later in the formation of an anti-Russian military alliance between Britain, France and Turkey and shortly thereafter, the invasion of the Crimea.) The British Museum authorities, in turn, were more than happy to spell out this same policy of support for refugees. As their rules of admission clearly stated: ‘The fact of a man’s being a political exile does not exclude him from the Reading-room of the British Museum’.5 Antonio Panizzi, Keeper of Printed Books and later Chief Librarian, was himself a political fugitive, having been forced to flee his native Italy during the

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unification struggles of the early 1820s. As such, he was sympathetic to their plight and made no secret of his distaste for the regime of Nicholas I – on one occasion describing the Imperial Public Library of St Petersburg as ‘a monument of the rapacity of the most odious government that can exist’.6 As well as extending a compassionate welcome to the refugee, the Museum also offered him (or her, although it was mostly ‘hims’) access to one of the best collections of scholarly books and journals in the world. Included amongst the Library’s riches was a most impressive collection of historical and contemporary foreign material (both by language and subject), including, without doubt, the best Russian collection outside Russia.7 Taking these factors into account, it is no surprise that the Museum’s fame spread both within Russia and within other centres of the Russian emigration in mainland Europe. From then on it seemed that following every repressive act of a European government a new cohort of refugees would arrive to register and then take up their seats under Sydney Smirke’s majestic dome. When Burtsev entered the Reading Room for the first time in March 1891, he found himself in good company. The admissions register of the British Museum does at times read like a roll call of the Russian revolutionary movement including not only the names of Kropotkin and Chaikovsky but also that of Vera Zasulich.8 The register also contains mention of other eminent political figures of the day with whom the latter was acquainted, such as Friedrich Engels, and a number of prominent English liberals, including the Avelings.9 Indeed, it was Edward Aveling, son-in-law of Karl Marx, who acted as Zasulich’s referee when she was first admitted to the Library under the pseudonym Vera Beldinsky, a name invented for her by Eleanor Marx.10 Zasulich, however, was not the first female Russian revolutionary to be admitted as a reader. That honour probably belongs to Sophie Kropotkin who received her ticket to the Reading Room on 2 December 1881. A few months earlier, following the assassination of Alexander II, Prince Petr Kropotkin and his young wife had been expelled from Switzerland and had made their way to England. Kropotkin was to become one of the Library’s most prolific users, returning his reader’s ticket only in 1907 – some twenty-six years after his first admission. Not only was he an enthusiastic and voracious reader, but throughout his stay he expressed his admiration for and gratitude to the Library by donating vast amounts of material: entire runs of émigré journals, socialist and anarchist books and pamphlets and, of course, many of his own works. Indeed, there is scarcely a Donations Register for the period that does not record at least one of his gifts. Over the next twenty years or so the round Reading Room came to resemble a veritable club of revolutionaries (with membership by no means restricted to those of East European origin). Stepniak had arrived in the Reading Room for the first time in 1884. It is recorded that he acted as referee for the revolutionaries Hesper Serebriakoff, Lev Deich and Vasily Petrovich Sidoratsky (the revolutionary Paris-based publisher), for the Russian anthropologist Efim Chepurkovsky and for a mysterious ‘Mr. Adolf Roubleff of Stoke Newington’ whose true identity remains unknown. ‘Roubleff/Rublev’ was one of Stepniak’s own pseudonyms, but this transference of ‘noms de plume’ and the adoption of specific names for specific purposes was not at all uncommon amongst the émigrés at the Museum, as we shall see.11

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There was, of course, a host of other radicals to be found in the Reading Room during the late 1880s and early 1890s – too many to enumerate here. A few, though, can be mentioned: in the volumes of Readers’ Signatures, one encounters the names of Feliks Volkhovsky and Mikhail Voinich of the RFPF, the journalist Jaakoff Prelooker, Georgy Plekhanov, Solomon Rappoport, Ivan Kashintsev, Evgeny Stepanov, Theodore Rothstein and Doris Weiss (whose testimonial was provided by the anarchist William Rossetti). Later came Lenin and his comrades from the board of Iskra (The Spark). The émigré community in London was, of course, aware of the presence in their midst of informers and other Okhrana agents and at one point even convinced that a member of the British Museum staff was supplying the Foreign Agency with their addresses. Olive Garnett, a close friend of the Stepniaks and their circle (and the daughter of Richard Garnett, the former superintendent of the Reading Room and Keeper of Printed Books) kept a diary. The entry for Saturday 9 February 1895 reads as follows: [I talked] to F. V.[olkhovsky] who told me a long story about a supposed spy in the B.M. reading room who supplied the Russian refugees’ names and addresses to people in Paris who sent circulars to them. This was discovered because two Russians had taken names for the B.M. only and they were addressed by these. I assured him that the B.M. existed only ‘to assist’ the public not to deliver them up to the police.12

Who these Russians were is unclear but the émigrés may not have been unduly concerned or surprised that some overzealous (or perhaps underpaid) member of the Museum staff could be recruited into the service of the Okhrana. One can be sure, however, that they would not have expected the Museum authorities or the British police to be involved, even though suspicions of some kind of police interference had been aroused a few months earlier. Garnett described a soirée at the Stepniaks in late 1894 and how: A Russian present described the emotions occasioned by a scrutiny of readers’ tickets at the B.M. and the arrest of a Russian, and his belief that it was occasioned by an order from Scotland Yard. I endeavoured to smooth away these erroneous impressions but he remained unconvinced. As I find from Papa, the stir was occasioned by an enforcement of an old regulation, the Russian had only a temporary permission and was released upon its production.13

The Museum archives contain no reference to this scrutiny of tickets, nor indeed to the alleged arrest. However, as the British Museum’s Confidential Papers show, such surveillance had been going on for almost a year in the full knowledge (and, it would appear, with the full support) of the institution’s Trustees. On 12 December 1893 the Principal Librarian had received the following letter from Scotland Yard: Sir, I respectfully ask that I may be supplied with a ticket or card of admission to the Reading Room of the British Museum. I do not require it for the ordinary

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purpose but as I understand that certain persons (who are certainly not above suspicion) frequent the rooms it would perhaps be of assistance to me. Under ordinary circumstances one cannot enter without disclosing his identity and worse still that of the suspect. Thanking you in anticipation. I remain, Your obedient servant, Francis Powell. PC. C. I. Dept.14

Police Constable Powell was duly admitted a week later. In his admission form, he listed his referee as William Collins, Inspector of Police, and gave his purpose for requiring admission as ‘reference’. If we leave aside for the moment issues of legality or morality, the question arises: who exactly were these ‘certain persons not above suspicion’ and why was it felt necessary to send a detective in plain clothes into a public building to spy on them? As already mentioned, the Library attracted political activists of all descriptions and nationalities. Rubbing shoulders with the Russians were radicals from every European country (including Ireland and the British mainland itself). But based on the sheer number of readers of East European origin one may be drawn to conclude that this was Scotland Yard’s target group. It is worth mentioning too that PC Powell appeared to be developing a special interest in the Russian emigration at this time: like his boss, Chief Inspector Melville, he too had apparently formed close links with Rachkovsky. Indeed, some years later, Powell, by this time Chief Inspector Powell, was himself recruited into the Okhrana as head of its operations in England.15 Scanning the lists of admissions prior to the date of Powell’s letter, one discovers that five days earlier Varlaam Nikolaevich Cherkezov, the Georgian nationalist and anarchist (and friend of Burtsev, Kropotkin and Stepniak), who was already well-known to the Special Branch, received his Reader’s ticket, but whether Scotland Yard were particularly interested in him or felt he deserved special treatment is impossible to say. In short, the reason why at this particular time the CID had decided it was necessary to have an undercover presence in the Reading Room remains obscure. Furthermore, this was no short-term, extraordinary measure that had been adopted for, a year later, the police presence had not only been maintained but increased with the admission of two further officers – Detective Sergeant Michael Thorpe and Police Constable Michael Flood.16 The former would soon write again to the Museum authorities requesting that his membership be renewed, for, as he explained, in his capacity of Detective Sergeant at New Scotland Yard, he found it ‘convenient at times to have a ticket for the reading room’.17 It is worth noting here that DS Thorpe actually preceded his associate, Powell, as the Okhrana’s contact in London and indeed, on his retirement, was awarded a handsome pension by the Russian Department of Police.18 It is likely that he too, by the time he entered the Reading Room, had already developed an interest in the Russian émigré community and was in regular contact with agent Milevsky in London and/or Rachkovsky in Paris. There is no archival evidence that this dubious practice of admitting undercover CID officers as readers was ever discussed by the Museum’s Board of Trustees, nor is there any mention of when (or indeed if) the practice ceased. It was almost certainly a new departure for the police and it is unlikely that the Museum authorities had been approached with such a request before.19 It was in such an atmosphere of heightened police and public awareness that another young Russian émigré arrived in London from the University of Zurich in September

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1894 and, styling himself a ‘candidat du philosophie’, applied for admission to the British Museum. He apparently raised not the slightest suspicion amongst police or Museum staff and, thanks to a reference from none other than former Superintendent of the Reading Room Richard Garnett, was admitted as a reader. This was Burtsev’s duplicitous young acquaintance from the previous year, Lev Dmitrievich Beitner, also known as Arkady Shiriaev. He was quick to renew his relationship with Burtsev and also to strike up friendships with those émigrés associated with Free Russia, such as Volkhovsky and Stepniak. Indeed, Beitner would later write a short biography of Stepniak and was happy to donate two signed copies of the work to the Museum Library.20 The young man continued to attend the Museum and to be involved at the very heart of the emigration for a number of years before it was revealed, in June 1908, that he had been recruited into the Okhrana as an informer some sixteen years earlier. It is difficult to put a figure on the number of Russian political émigrés deceived by Beitner in the course of his career, but Burtsev was perhaps the most famous. The nature of that betrayal and its tragic consequences will be examined below.

The rise of anti-alienism Scarcely had Burtsev arrived back in London from Switzerland when news was received of yet another anarchist assassination – this time the stabbing to death at Lyon of M. F. Sadi Carnot, the President of the Third Republic.21 The reaction of the French government to this outrage was to rush an anti-anarchist bill through parliament and to make a series of arrests. The pattern was repeated in several other European countries and in the United States, where numerous anarchists were also jailed or expelled.22 The effect was felt in Britain too, where public support for radicalism in general suffered a noticeable and immediate fall and where the police took advantage of the prevailing mood to take leading anarchists into custody. This developing anti-alien atmosphere in Britain was further encouraged by alarmist newspaper reports that for some time had proclaimed London the home of international anarchy and now claimed that the assassination of the French president had been planned on British soil. It was suggested by some that the time had come to review the country’s historic role as a sanctuary for political refugees.23 This growing anti-alienism would have a noticeable impact on the activities of Burtsev and others in the Russian political emigration and, together with other factors, both internal and external, would serve to weaken the revolutionary opposition considerably. By the summer of 1894 signs of a growing anti-anarchist mood in Britain were prevalent. A week after the assassination of the French president, the editor of the anarchist journal the Commonweal, Thomas Cantwell, and his associate, Charles Quinn, were arrested after distributing an anarchist pamphlet Why Vaillant Threw the Bomb and delivering an inflammatory speech to a crowd at Tower Hill in London. It was claimed they had ‘incited persons to murder the Royal family and others’ and were duly found guilty and sentenced to six months in prison by Mr Justice Lawrance, a notorious Conservative placeman, who would return a few years later to play a decisive role at Burtsev’s trial.

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The prison sentence effectively spelled the end of the Commonweal but that, apparently, was not enough to satisfy the British public. It was argued in the press that Cantwell and Quinn were proof enough that the anarchist infection had already spread to Britain and that the time had come to put a stop to it before it was too late. Opposition to East European immigration – primarily, but not wholly, on economic grounds – had been on the increase for a number of years, encouraged, on the one hand, by such anti-Semitic exclusionists as Arnold White24 and, on the other, by the Trade Union Congress itself, where, it was argued, labour was being devalued by the large number of Russian and Polish Jews who were prepared to take work at any price. Now, it appeared, these aliens were not only taking ‘British jobs’ but were threatening British lives to boot. In July 1894, the Marquess of Salisbury, that ‘cynical pessimist’, as one political historian has described him,25 was quick to jump on the exclusionist bandwagon and take over a Bill in preparation, whose primary aim had been to make provision for the expulsion of destitute aliens. Salisbury added a second, in his opinion, more important part, the intent of which was to empower the Secretary of State to prevent the immigration of dangerous aliens and to allow him to expel ‘any foreigner whose presence in this country is either dangerous to the public peace here, or is likely to promote the commission of crimes elsewhere’.26 Introducing his Aliens Bill to the House of Lords on 6 July 1894, the Leader of the Opposition proclaimed: ‘We know there are large clubs of persons in this country in which murderous plots have been hatched and brought to completion: so that now England is to a great extent the headquarters, the base from which the anarchist operations are conducted, the laboratory in which all their contrivances are perfected’.27 The recently appointed Liberal First Minister, Lord Rosebery, challenged him on this call to bring an end to Britain’s long-cherished law on the Right of Asylum and on the outrageous insinuation that Britain was a haven for European political criminals. Having sought the advice of the Home Office and police, he was able confidently to declare that ‘none of the conspiracies hatched against foreign states have been planned or plotted in these islands’.28 Announcing his opposition to the Bill, Lord Herschell, the Lord Chancellor, argued that the expulsion of an individual would clearly be far less likely to result in the prevention of a crime in preparation than if the plotter was kept under police surveillance here, and the police were in communication with foreign police.29 Despite such reasonable objections, the Bill received its second reading some days later and was passed with a comfortable majority of fifty-two.30 Salisbury, however, had been conscious of the fact that such a Bill had little chance of success in the House of Commons at this late stage of the parliamentary session – indeed, Sir William Harcourt, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House, emphatically stated that no time would be allocated for its consideration – and so, with a minimum of fuss, it was withdrawn. Salisbury was well aware of the prevailing mood of the British public on the subject and, to his mind, the fact that Rosebery had been obliged publicly to state his opposition to a measure which sought to deal with the growing problems of destitute and dangerous aliens was sufficient in itself. At the general election the following year, the Conservatives returned to power with a landslide victory and, according to one commentator, the different stance adopted

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by the main parties on this crucial issue was one of the key contributory factors to the transfer of votes and to the ‘radical rout’ in the East End of London.31 That Salisbury had raised the issue at this stage primarily as a political ploy is evinced by the fact that he did not immediately attempt to revive the Bill upon his return to power, despite being in possession of a more than comfortable majority in both houses. That is not to say, however, that émigré issues were ever far from his mind during this, his third and last term in office.

A ‘bookish’ man Burtsev, meanwhile, seemingly unaware of the public antipathy which was growing around him, had his head down in the British Museum. He had been commissioned by the RFPF to help in the compilation of a history of the Russian revolutionary movement that was to take the form of a new and enlarged version of the successful Kalendar ʹ Narodnoi voli. Before settling down to the task in hand, however, he occupied himself with a preliminary study of what would constitute a major source of information for that history – namely, the Museum’s unparalleled collection of Russian books, periodicals and newspapers. The result of his labours, an impressive, thirty-page article entitled Britanskii Muzei (The British Museum), appeared early in 1895 in the St Petersburg Istoricheskii vestnik (Historical Messenger) under the nom de plume ‘N. Viktorov’.32 The article, the first detailed description of the Museum Library’s Russian collections by a Russian, is a meticulous and comprehensive bibliographic and historical study, which, it is important to note, could not have been simply dashed off but must necessarily have involved weeks of dedicated and exhaustive research. It is, moreover, a scholarly work, in which it is almost impossible to detect the author’s radical political views. Indeed, the closest Burtsev came to an expression of a political opinion was when, singing the praises of the Library’s General Catalogue and bemoaning the lack of the same in the national library of Russia, he predicted that the situation would remain thus until such time as ‘the state lavishes as much attention on literature, national education, universities and libraries as it does currently on Krupp cannon’.33 Given the strict censorship of the day, one might argue that it was an act of some bravery on the part of the editor to allow even such a mild criticism of the Russian government’s fiscal policy to appear in print.34 In attempting to give an overall picture of the Museum’s Russian holdings, Burtsev the journalist, began with periodicals, ‘if for no other reason than that, in Russian literature, periodicals have always played and to this day continue to play a major role and, in importance, quite overshadow pamphlets and books’.35 While singing the praises of the collections he did point to some lacunae and strongly urged any Russian learned society to whose journal the Museum had been unable to subscribe, to donate that journal to the Library, where it ‘would be kept for eternity, at the service of all of those outside Russia who are interested in the subject’.36 Some years later, when asking for help in the compilation of a revised edition of his Za sto let (A Century of Political Life in Russia [1800–1896]), Burtsev

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again called on his compatriots to make donations to the Museum.37 And, indeed, as the Library’s archival records show, he himself made numerous personal gifts in the course of his future life.38 If the author’s high regard for the British Museum and his voracious appetite for reading are not adequately demonstrated by this eulogy to the institution, then further proof is available from another source: namely, a collection of his letters and a selection of British Museum book request slips, which were recently discovered amongst the papers of the German anarchist and historian Max Nettlau.39 The correspondence, which continued for almost twenty years, throws new light on Burtsev’s activities and the wide range of his contacts during the period. He had first contacted Nettlau in London regarding the latter’s work on Bakunin, expressing his regrets that the author had completely overlooked Russian material on the subject and offering his assistance in this respect. Whether he expected to be paid for his services is unknown but, from his correspondence, it is clear that the impoverished émigré regularly received support from Nettlau in the form of loans of a few shillings.40 Another source of income came from further journal contributions. A few months after his pseudonymous article on the British Museum appeared, Istoricheskii vestnik published a second contribution from the pen of N. Viktorov entitled ‘Kruzhok shestnadtsati’ (The Circle of Sixteen).41 This was a study of a much more political nature and of much more relevance to his projected history, dealing, as it did, with Lermontov’s liberal opposition group of that name whose existence had first been referred to in a book published by one of its former members, Ksawery Branicki, in 1879 but whose significance to the life and works of the poet had been overlooked.42 Throughout the remainder of his period of emigration in London, Burtsev continued to derive a small and irregular income from his journal contributions, the subject matter of which was by no means confined to nineteenth-century revolutionary movements. Istoricheskii vestnik published one more of his historico-bibliographical essays, this time on the works of the eighteenth-century historian and traveller William Coxe.43 The article, based on a thorough examination of the British Museum’s collection of Coxe’s books and manuscripts, highlighted the significance of his writings regarding the study of the Russia of Catherine II and drew attention to a rare sixth edition of his Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, the existence of which, Burtsev claimed, was previously unknown within Russia.44 The Russian archives supply evidence of another of his essays that dealt with Catherine’s Russia,45 while, in a letter to Stepniak, Burtsev referred to yet more of his submissions during this period on topics as diverse as Flaubert, Dickens and Russian literature in 1892.46 All of the above adds some weight to Burtsev’s own view of himself as a writer first and a revolutionary second. As he was later to declare: ‘I am a “desk-man”, a literary man. I am essentially a journalist and always have been, even during those periods when I was involved in my fight against agents provocateurs.’47 His journalism was unquestionably revolutionary, but Burtsev who claimed never to have joined any political grouping, who was neither Fundist nor Populist (nor, indeed, Social Democrat!), was always keen to stress in his writings his lack of political affiliation, which he regarded as divisive and, whenever possible, to encourage unification of the political opposition.

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A diet of stones and dreams Of course, this desire to unite the opposition under one flag was shared by many within Russia. V. G. Korolenko, for example, had drawn up plans to publish abroad a single, free journal of the opposition – a new Kolokol – and had begun to look for support amongst the various émigré communities.48 In 1893 he visited New York to advance his idea in discussions with the editors of the American edition of Free Russia, Egorʹ Lazarev and Lazarʹ Golʹdenberg. His proposal was then communicated to the leading émigrés in Europe, including Stepniak in London and Plekhanov in Geneva, but, unfortunately, the latter’s lukewarm response meant that this, like so many previous attempts at unification, was doomed to failure. Lazarev, however, had already begun canvassing for funds and had met with almost immediate success in the New York offices of the émigré bookseller and publisher Aleksandr Markovich Evalenko, who offered an initial contribution of 300 dollars towards the costs. The revolutionary seized the offer with gratitude unaware at the time that Evalenko had for some time been working as a paid employee of the tsarist police. (Indeed, as will be described later in this study, it was not until 1910 that Burtsev succeeded in exposing his double life.) It was, therefore, with Russian government funding that Lazarev, on his arrival in London in the spring of 1894, proposed the publication of a new edition of Zasulich’s successful Kalendarʹ as an alternative to Korolenko’s failed journal. He suggested the title be published under the Fund’s name and Evalenko, with the consent of his masters in St Petersburg, agreed to back this substitute. The search for an editor/compiler then began. Lazarev had been one of a number of émigrés previously approached by Burtsev in his search for funding for his long-cherished plan for a history of the Russian revolutionary movement and was, therefore, already aware of the huge quantity of materials which Burtsev had amassed over the years. This, together with the latter’s nepartiinost ʹ (non-partisanship) and scrupulous attention to detail, made him an ideal candidate for the job which, when offered, he accepted without hesitation. The plan was for Stepniak to assume overall editorial control of the project, with Burtsev acting as ‘compiler-in-chief ’, contributing the voluminous materials he had already collected and adding to them. To assist him in the task, he was assigned two co-workers, Adolʹf Rublev and Vasily Zhuk, who, thanks to Stepniak’s intercession, were admitted to the British Museum in January 1895. Work then began in earnest.49 As mentioned earlier, a few months after Burtsev’s departure from Zurich, that other tsarist informer, Lev Beitner, had scurried after his prey. Arriving in London in August 1894, he had immediately immersed himself in the life of the émigré community, ingratiated himself with a number of members of the Fund and, no doubt at Rachkovsky’s suggestion, had quickly gained admission to the Reading Room of the British Museum. With his agent in place, the Head of the Foreign Agency could now justifiably consider himself to be aware of all of the RFPF’s and Burtsev’s activities in London. Moreover, thanks to reports from the Fontanka headquarters, Rachkovsky was also in receipt of details of Burtsev’s letters to many of his comrades both in Russia and elsewhere. A particularly rich source of information was his correspondence with his old friend Ivan Kashintsev in Sofia. It becomes apparent

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from a study of Department of Police files that almost every letter Burtsev sent either to Bulgaria or Romania throughout his emigration was intercepted by the diligent Head of the Agency, Lieutenant-Colonel A. I. Budzilovich, who then sent transcripts to St Petersburg. The Department, in turn, forwarded anything it considered to be of relevance to Paris.50 At the same time, Burtsev’s personal file was methodically updated with any new details obtained concerning contacts, pseudonyms, addresses, etc. Based on such information, particular individuals could then be targeted and, if necessary, their post intercepted. A case in point is a copy of a letter held both in the Department of Police file at GARF and in the Hoover’s Okhrana archive. Dated 12 November 1894, it is addressed to the Dean of the Medical Faculty at the University of Kiev and signed by ‘Doctor V. Ermolov’ (one of Burtsev’s pseudonyms). In it Burtsev announced his move to London and his involvement in his old work at the library. Attached is another letter, signed simply ‘Vlad’, to an old friend from Kazanʹ, Nikolai Nikolaevich Mikhailov, which began: ‘It is a pity I cannot arrange for this letter to be delivered by hand, for then I would write something of interest. I know that our correspondence is being read by others and I have no wish to let them crawl into my personal life.’51 But then, inexplicably, Burtsev proceeded to list a whole range of his personal details, announcing how he could be contacted: either under the name ‘Livshits’, or ‘Care of Mr Liber’, at 27, Bouverie Rd, Stoke Newington. As for newspapers etc., he suggested they be sent straight to his address: 29, Francis Street, under the name ‘Roustieff ’.52 All of this new information was, as a matter of course, added to his personal police file. Such despatches, while serving as proof of Burtsev’s apparent awareness of the Okhrana’s surveillance operations demonstrate even more clearly, perhaps, the professionalism, determination (and omnipresence) of that department and the utter futility of the revolutionary’s attempts to evade its attentions. It would appear that surveillance over Burtsev had now reached saturation point. The Reading Room was now awash with undercover detectives from Scotland Yard and moreover, as mentioned previously, the émigré community had good reason to believe that a member of the Museum staff was also spying on them.53 It was under such intense and, arguably, excessive scrutiny that Burtsev and his co-workers set about their historical researches. His collaboration with the RFPF over the production of Za sto let has been examined in detail by T. L. Panteleeva of Moscow State University. From her study, based on exhaustive researches in a number of Russian archives and on the personal papers and reminiscences of the leading émigrés of the day, there emerges a vivid picture of the London Russian community and of Burtsev’s place within it.54 Golʹdenberg and Chaikovsky remembered him as a modest, even shy, man who constantly said he wanted nothing more than that his testament – his chronicle of the revolution – be published.55 For the first six months, the Fund provided Burtsev and his assistants with an allowance for each day worked at the Museum which, as Lazarev admitted, was miserly indeed. Burtsev, however, far from complaining, paid each of his co-workers three shillings a day and himself a mere two shillings and sixpence, despite the fact that he worked twice as many hours as they did.56 Moreover, he petitioned the Fund to pay Rublev and Zhuk extra because their need was greater. He, on the other hand, insisted that he required nothing more.57

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After the first six months, support from the Fund stopped but Burtsev continued to work on alone for the next year and a half, apparently feeding himself, in Lazarev’s colourful expression, ‘more on stones and dreams than anything else’.58 This disregard for money would remain with him in his later years. An associate later recalled how, following the exposure of Azef, Burtsev had been courted by the world’s press and offered huge sums of money for interviews and articles: ‘Millions passed through his hands – in the literal sense of the word. Money simply slipped through – nothing remained – he simply was not interested in money and failed completely to understand anything about its importance.’59 Such straitened circumstances evidently had an adverse effect on the author’s productivity. In October 1895, Rachkovsky reported to Director of Police Petrov that Burtsev was still having trouble finishing his chapter of the Kalendar ʹ.60 Indeed, Stepniak, his editor, was finding it so impossible to collate, or even understand, the chaotic pile of indecipherable notes he had received from his compiler that eventually he had to invite Burtsev to spend the day with him so that he could dictate from the notes he had made.61 In such a way, a final structure for the book was eventually devised and some progress made. However, a shocking setback was encountered on Christmas Eve 1895, when Stepniak inexplicably fell to his death under a train at a level crossing in north-west London. The loss to the revolutionary movement was enormous and the tragedy also had a devastating and weakening effect on both the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom and on the Russian Free Press Fund. Burtsev’s work on the Kalendar ʹ continued, nevertheless, but at a much slower pace, hampered too by his disagreements with some of his colleagues. Volkhovsky had attempted to fill Stepniak’s shoes but the lack of the latter’s steadying and unifying influence was soon felt, with differences of opinion starting to appear amongst members of the editorial board. In his letters to Kashintsev, Burtsev constantly complained about the attitude of his co-workers: ‘There are arguments about the introduction. I am not giving way to the Fundists. Neither to Golʹdenberg nor Chaikovsky.’62 Golʹdenberg later claimed the dispute over the introduction had arisen over Burtsev’s desire to include a statement of his terrorist principles.63 Of that period Burtsev later wrote: As before, I fought with those who placed party higher than country and could not see the chasm that we were being driven towards by the reaction on the one hand and those who preached social revolution on the other. As a result of this struggle I developed some difficult relations with certain well-known émigrés and downright hostile relations with others. But I also had many overt and covert friends and supporters.64

Teplov, too, was finding Burtsev impossible to work with, while his old colleague and co-editor, Debagory-Mokreevich, broke off relations a few years later, when, having offered some autobiographical notes for publication, he discovered that Burtsev wished to read them first: ‘So, our Burtsev would act as censor! That ephemeral terrorist would cross out all my attacks on his imaginary terrorism with his red crayon!’65 Burtsev’s relationship with Golʹdenberg appears to have been particularly hostile, as evinced by the fact that the latter received not a single mention by name

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in Burtsev’s autobiography. However, in the end, some form of compromise appears to have been reached, for the long-awaited Kalendar ʹ finally made its appearance in 1897 under the title Za sto let (1800–1896), with the participation of the late Stepniak duly acknowledged on the title page.66 In its final version, the collection consisted of two parts. The first, divided into thirty-six sections, contained various revolutionary documents, programmes, speeches and proclamations and, in its day at least, this selection certainly had its uses. As the Soviet historian Sh. M. Levin has pointed out, no less a figure than V. I. Lenin made heavy use of it in one of his articles.67 That first part has long since lost its relevance but the second – the Khronika i bibliografiia (Chronology and Bibliography) – despite being incomplete and containing not a few factual inaccuracies, still retains value and, as Levin has remarked, constituted a unique work of reference in the pre-revolutionary period.68 It contained, in chronological order, a mass of information on arrests, trials, exiles, escapes, peasant and worker uprisings, all manner of events of a social and political character, government directives, and so on. Also included for each year was a selection of both legally and illegally published sources of information – books, periodical and newspaper articles. This ‘essential work of reference for every Russian radical’69 achieved considerable popularity and not only amongst revolutionaries: no less a figure than S. E. Zvoliansky, the new Director of the Department of Police, showed he was a believer in the old maxim ‘know your enemy’ when he asked for ten copies to be sent to him and two months later placed an order for ten more.70

The tsar’s visit As Burtsev was finishing his revolutionary chronicle, an historic event took place, when, as part of his tour of Europe, Tsar Nicholas II paid a state visit to Britain. He stayed at Balmoral Castle from 23 September to 4 October 1896, with a large entourage including Count Pahlen (First Secretary of the Russian embassy) and de Staal, the Russian ambassador. The tsar received numerous visits from royals and functionaries, including First Minister Salisbury, who arrived on 26 September and stayed for a week. Press reports initially stressed the informal nature of this visit, implying that no official discussions were expected to take place. However, on the day of the royal party’s departure The Times reported in its leader: ‘It is no secret that the Emperor took the opportunity afforded him by Lord Salisbury’s presence at Balmoral to have several conversations with the Premier.’71 In his official report, Salisbury recorded only the first two of these ‘several conversations’, both of which centred around Turkey and, in particular, the Straits question. Nicholas expressed the opinion that ‘the Straits were the door to the room in which he lived and insisted he must have the key of that door. Russia did not want Constantinople or any of the Turkish territory on either side. She only wanted the door and the power of fortifying it’.72 Salisbury replied that the idea that control of the Straits should be given to Russia while the Sultan was still at Constantinople would be exceedingly unacceptable to the other powers and would be strongly resisted. Despite this disagreement, the two apparently remained on amicable terms.73

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It is known that, at this time, Salisbury was hoping to take advantage of the recent cooling in Russo-German relations to reach an understanding with the tsar’s government.74 However, whether he made use of the state visit to raise any other topics of mutual interest is unknown. As yet, no evidence has been found, for example, of any discussion between the tsar and the premier on the topic of terrorism, though that such conversations would have taken place is almost beyond doubt given that a mere two weeks prior to the tsar’s arrival the press had reported the discovery of a plot to assassinate him as he passed through Britain.75 The sensational story of the plot and the arrest of two desperate Fenians, Tynan and Bell, was still newsworthy even after the tsar’s departure. With the security of his royal personage being treated as a top priority, it is unthinkable that Salisbury would not have raised the issue as a matter of courtesy at least. There is no doubt that the same topic would have been eagerly discussed by others present at Balmoral. From newspaper reports and reminiscences it is known that amongst the large Russian police presence in the tsar’s retinue was none other than his Okhrana representative in Europe, Petr Ivanovich Rachkovsky. Also attending from Scotland Yard were Detective Inspectors Allen, Sweeney and Melville, the last of whom was reported to have made use of the opportunity ‘to develop his contacts with the Russian secret police’.76 It is also recorded that ‘Before leaving the castle the Emperor of Russia made some presents to Inspector Melville, who had previously received a gift from him.’77 Melville did not leave the tsar’s side throughout his stay and on the day of his departure for Paris accompanied him together ‘with colleagues English and Foreign’ on the royal train.78 And, as has recently been discovered, Tsar Nicholas was not the only one to distribute tokens of gratitude to those present. Proof that Queen Victoria was also satisfied with the visit is to be found in the London Gazette – the newspaper of record for the monarch and her government. There, in an entry for 30 October 1896, amongst the senior Russian diplomatic staff from the tsar’s entourage who had been named as recipients of the prestigious Royal Victorian Order – an order of chivalry only recently created to recognize distinguished personal service to the monarch – there appeared the name of ‘Mr. Pierre de Ratchkovsky, Officer for Special Missions of the Russian State Police Department’ who, the queen had decided, should become an Honorary Member of the Fourth Class. Moreover, it was also announced that an Honorary Membership of the Fifth Class should be bestowed on his faithful underling, ‘Mr. Arcadi Harting, Officer for Special Missions at the Russian State Police Department’.79 Had Her Royal Majesty been apprised of the exact nature of the ‘special missions’ which the recipients of these honours had carried out in her dominion over the previous five years – that is, the installation of an illegal Russian spy network – she may have considered a spell in the Tower of London to be a more fitting reward for their efforts. However that may be, it would appear that both monarchs regarded the visit as a great success and so it was reported in the press. Burtsev would, doubtless, have disagreed but no record exists of his reaction to this historic event. Throughout his life, the revolutionary made no secret of his loathing of the autocracy in general and of Tsar Nicholas II in particular. Indeed, certain commentators, such as S. N. Motovilova, considered this hatred excessive, while others felt it showed a blinkered attitude that

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paid no heed to Russia’s other social and political problems. As a contemporary recalled, ‘For a long time, Burtsev’s political programme could be summarized in a very short formula – kill the tsar and everything else will fall into place’.80 Whether it was the tsar’s visit which sparked the revolutionary into action is unknown but, within two weeks of Nicholas’s departure, Burtsev had drawn up a new radical political programme in which the desired fate of the autocrat was clearly spelled out.

The Narodovolets affair In mid-October 1896, Burtsev wrote to Kashintsev and Stepanov telling them of his plans to visit Switzerland and Paris to drum up support for a new revolutionary group, which, he proposed, would collectively edit and publish a new radical journal. He included a draft of his programme, claiming he already had the moral and monetary support of Lazarev and Chaikovsky and was hoping too for the active participation of Teplov, Rappoport, Zhitlovsky and Rusanov.81 In December of that year, Rachkovsky transmitted further details of Burtsev’s plans to St Petersburg, reporting first on a split which had arisen in the émigré community. Certain individuals believed the RFPF had been relying too heavily on those of a liberal persuasion and had formed a separate Populist group, the members of which, according to Rachkovsky, included Zhuk, Cherkezov and Burtsev. The Head of the Foreign Agency had detected a mood amongst the remnants of the Young People’s Will for a rebirth of the party and it was his opinion that Burtsev stood a real chance of success in his latest venture. Rachkovsky then reported on Burtsev’s intention to release a new monthly Populist publication by the name of Narodovolets (Member of the People’s Will) – the first issue of which was due to appear on 1 (13) January 1897. The journal would call for the resumption of revolutionary activities, including terrorist acts, within Russia and would roundly censure the Social Democrats for their lack of support, which, it was claimed, was responsible for the current lull in such activities. Burtsev was optimistic that Lavrov and other members of the Old People’s Will would join the group after they had seen the first few issues of the journal.82 In December, Burtsev duly set off for Switzerland, where he met up with someone he described as a ‘well-known Russian publisher’ and secured further funding for his proposed journal. The identity of this individual has yet to be established. There is evidence that, while in Switzerland, Burtsev, for reasons unknown, contacted V. A. Gringmut of the Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow Gazette) but there is not the remotest chance that this extreme conservative monarchist would have contributed a kopeck to such an undertaking. It is more likely (as the Department of Police suspected) that the publisher in question was the revolutionary V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, who was living in Switzerland at that time.83 Burtsev also wrote of having received money and a guarantee of future contributions towards the project from a certain ‘B’.84 In the anonymous reminiscences of an ‘Old Populist’ (possibly Teplov) the claim is made that part of the funding for the journal was, in fact, supplied by the Department of Police itself via their agent, Lev Beitner, although confirmation of this is yet to be found.85 However that may be, with funding and support apparently secured, Burtsev returned

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to London and set about his task. Having borrowed type from the RFPF and employed the services of an elderly Polish typesetter, Klement Wierzbicki, he worked for the next two months on his journal, assisted in the main by a small but loyal band of followers – namely, Zhuk, Teplov, Kashintsev and Alisov. Not all in the émigré community were as supportive or enthusiastic, however. In the atmosphere of tension and anxiety which still gripped Europe following the anarchist outrages of recent years, it was highly unlikely that any of the leading émigrés would be persuaded openly to declare support for terrorist acts, whether they be confined to Russian soil or not. Having received some sample pages from the first issue of the journal, both Volkhovsky and Chaikovsky implored Burtsev to moderate his revolutionary language, quoting the precedent of Johann Most, the London-based German anarchist, who, during the ‘Freiheit Trial’ in 1881, had been sentenced to sixteen months’ hard labour for publishing an article (in German) applauding the assassination of Alexander II and wishing the same fate on the Kaiser and the other crowned heads of Europe.86 This was the first time that Section 4 of the Offences against the Person Act had been successfully used in a prosecution of this kind and, as mentioned earlier, it was wheeled out again a decade later to silence Nicoll, editor of the Commonweal. In Chaikovsky’s prescient opinion, the same fate awaited Burtsev.87 The warning, however, fell on deaf ears. Narodovolets, no. 1 eventually appeared in April 1897 and created, perhaps, more of a stir than the editor had expected. The journal certainly pulled no punches. Its radical programme was clearly laid out in a twelve-page leader, which Burtsev had edited together from two pieces written by Kashintsev, and in a second article under Burtsev’s own name entitled ‘K voprosu chto delat ʹ?’ (On the question – What is to be done?). Calling for the revival of the Party of the People’s Will, the editors reminded their readers that, at the height of its influence, the old party had held terror as its central idea – its very soul. They then laid out the credo of their proposed new party: The fight for political freedom must be openly recognized as the first obligation of the party and brought forward as the basis of its theoretical and practical programme. Our first task is the destruction of the autocracy, the transfer of all state business out of the hands of the present bureaucracy into the hands of legally elected people’s representatives, the creation of a federal state, with regional and local self-government, with guaranteed rights for all freedoms: of speech, of the press, of the individual, of nationality, etc. In the field of economics we shall defend and uphold everything that will help us attain the final socialist ideal. To attain these ends we shall recognize all means which are realistic and effective in the struggle with the current Russian government – from the most moderate to the most extreme and revolutionary, depending on time and place. We may say, in the words of the late Stepniak: ‘We are revolutionists, not only to the extent of a direct rising of the people, but to the extent of military conspiracies, to the extent of nocturnal invasions of the Palace, to the extent of bombs and dynamite.’88

The editors made it clear, however, that the call to enter the fray was directed only at revolutionaries within Russia, whom they exhorted ‘boldly to follow in the footsteps

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Figure 3.1  Narodovolets no. 1, April 1897, 1. British Library P.P.3554.cc.1.

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of the Zheliabovs, the Perovskys, the Khalturins and their friends and to pay heed to the testament which they have bequeathed us. In their testament lies our programme’.89 Burtsev, in his article, was even more incendiary, summarizing the programme of the journal as ‘in one word – regicide and, if necessary, then a whole series of regicides and a programme of systematic terror’.90 Some twelve years later, in an interview for The New York Times, the author recalled how: Russian revolutionists were very taken up at that time with the working men’s movement, strikes, labour unions and street mass meetings. Most of them considered terrorism a worn-out weapon. I, on the contrary, decided to bring it again to the front and in the very first issue of the Narodovolets, I mentioned the subject frankly and openly discussed questions that the terrorists were accustomed to bring up only in their most secret meetings. I boldly asserted that regicide was a necessity in Russia.91

The outcry was immediate and not only from his enemies but from many former allies and from his ‘collective editorial board’ itself. Burtsev was particularly upset by what he termed the ‘Teplov incident’. In a letter to Kashintsev, he told of his co-editor’s decision no longer to participate in his kruzhok. Teplov and some of the Parisian émigrés had felt that the first issue had suffered as a result of Burtsev having assumed the role of sole editor. Concerned that too much power lay in his hands they asked that, in future, copies of all articles be sent to all members of the editorial board for comment before publication. In this way, they believed, collective responsibility would be ensured. Burtsev had tried to explain to Teplov that with such a scattered editorial board (members were based in Bulgaria, Switzerland, France and England) such a system was simply unworkable and asked Kashintsev and Stepanov for their backing.92 He no longer believed, as he had done five years previously, that his safety in England was assured and was fully aware of the risk he was taking by using such intemperate language in his ‘fighting organ’ (boevoi organ). As he warned Kashintsev, ‘here they are already threatening me with sixteen months in an English prison for Narodovolets’. But, rather than moderating his line, he responded with the warning that ‘the second issue will be no less hot than the first!’93 It was just such an intemperate and foolhardy attitude which his contemporaries feared would be adopted by this firebrand who, when threatened with imprisonment at a later date, romantically declared: ‘From prison I shall cry out. I shall speak about what I said earlier and what I say now. It is my right to do so and no one and no prison can ever take that right away from me!’94 Meanwhile, Volkhovsky and Golʹdenberg had voiced their displeasure at the tone of the journal and Burtsev, in turn, had announced his intention to sever relations with them.95 Lavrov was next to join the fray. On behalf of the Gruppa starykh narodovoltsev (Group of Members of the Old People’s Will), he publicly declared that no émigré he knew, who had played any kind of active role in Narodnaia volia during its most influential period (1879–1883), had anything to do with Narodovolets, despite the editor’s assertion to that effect.96 The attack was taken up by Chaikovsky, who claimed Stepniak had been misquoted and that he had actually written of his belief that terror had outlived its time and could never be brought back to life. Moreover, Chaikovsky

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added, Stepniak had been even more outspoken about any attempts to hatch terrorist plots abroad which, he said, were not welcomed by revolutionaries within Russia and were simply not to be tolerated.97 Again, the criticism fell on deaf ears: when the second issue appeared in July 1897,98 it was, indeed, just as ‘hot’ as the first. In an article entitled Pravda li, chto terror delaiut no o terrore ne govoriat? (Is it the case that it is alright to practise terror but not to talk about it?), Burtsev repeated the infamous Stepniak quote while trying to defend his stance and advance his argument: ‘We espouse terror now not because we enjoy it but because in our opinion there are currently no other means which would oblige the government to make concessions.’99 This, of course, was by no means the view he held when he first arrived in emigration. At that time, as he recalled in his autobiography: ‘In my plans for a free journal published abroad the ideas of political and factory terror were completely subsumed as were any plans for peasant or worker uprisings. The journal would make further opposition on the part of the reaction impossible – under such circumstances we would no longer require popular uprisings, nor political terror, nor regicide!’100 In issues 1, 2 and 3 of Narodovolets, by contrast, regicide and terror in general were placed very much to the fore. By the time the second issue appeared, Burtsev’s relations with Teplov, at least, had improved and the harassed editor expressed the glimmer of hope that another trip to the continent would be all that it would take to rally support again.101 Unfortunately, by this time, Golʹdenberg and his colleagues at the RFPF had, as expected, demanded the return of their typeface and so Burtsev was obliged to rush to complete work on the third number of his journal. It eventually came out in October 1897 and contained another particularly inflammatory article entitled ‘Za terror’ (For Terror) in which the author openly condemned the Social Democrats, and Plekhanov in particular, for their repudiation of extreme forms of revolutionary activity. Also included was a letter from P. F. Alisov which stated: The fearful mistake which the terrorist party made was that after their victory of 1 March they for a moment stopped systematic terrorism, for a moment put their sword in its sheath. If they had prepared everything beforehand and had stricken down Alexander III on the day of the funeral of Alexander II one of two things would have happened in Russia – either a revolution would have broken out or a liberal constitution would have been declared.102

From a twenty-first-century European perspective, it may be difficult to conceive of such acts of extreme violence being discussed and put forward as a valid means of political action but it should be borne in mind that, at this stage in the development of the Russian revolutionary movement, Burtsev and Alisov were by no means alone in their support for terror. According to Burtsev, for example, ‘generally speaking all the Parisian émigrés are thirsting for terror’.103 It was the end of 1897 too that saw the birth of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries whose programme was, firstly, to carry out mass propaganda and then, having won over the people, to embark on a mass campaign of terror. Here, then, was apparent common cause, but, although Burtsev would associate with the SRs in later years, never would he consider becoming

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a member, preferring to retain his unaffiliated stance. It has been suggested that the reason for Burtsev’s refusal to join the SRs was his disagreement with the order of that party’s priorities and the belief that they were not terroristic enough.104 The extreme sentiments expressed by the young editor on the pages of his journal would tend to support this view.

A plot is devised If the uproar against the journal from his colleagues was unexpected, the same, at least, could not be said of the hostile reaction of his enemies. As Burtsev later said in an interview: ‘Proof exists that much perturbation was felt on my account in high places: I have a collection of the daily reports of the Minister of the Interior to the Czar at this period, showing the close attention with which the publication of my review was followed.’105 The new Minister of the Interior, I. L. Goremykin, had succeeded Durnovo in 1895.106 An extremely conservative lawyer and politician, he saw the revolutionaries in emigration as a prime target and kept the tsar closely informed on all their activities, and those of Burtsev in particular. Shortly after the publication of Narodovolets, Zvoliansky, the Director of the Department of Police, was instructed to draw up a detailed plan that would ensure the troublesome editor could be brought to justice once and for all.107 He assigned his representative in Paris to the case and the latter set to work immediately by calling for the assistance of his old acquaintance at Scotland Yard. Even before the publication of the second issue of the journal, Rachkovsky had filed a report to St Petersburg telling of how he had approached Melville to ask whether, in his opinion, the editor could be brought to justice for his expression of such terroristic ideas.108 Melville explained that it would be necessary to name actual persons and cited the cases of Most and Nicoll, where both editors had been successfully prosecuted under the Offences against the Person Act. But the Chief Inspector was not content merely to cite precedents and went further, suggesting precisely the course of action that Rachkovsky and the Russian government should take: You can only initiate a successful legal action against Burtsev by acting according to the following plan: send to the Russian ambassador in London the journal referred to, marking in it the most extraordinary places, along with a letter in which you insist on the need to prosecute the editor. Ask your ambassador to bring this letter to the attention of our Foreign Secretary, who in his turn will forward it to the Home Secretary. The latter will not fail to send it along to me. As you can see, it is necessary to act via the diplomatic route.109

He was concerned too to warn Rachkovsky that he would be on leave in the first three weeks in August and that the latter should be careful to time his actions so that the report would be received personally by Melville and not fall into the hands of some other deputy. On a personal note, he stated, ‘As for myself, I will be glad to do you a service and grab these scoundrels’ and assured the Head of the Foreign Agency that he

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‘preserved the warmest memories of our times together’. Rachkovsky and his masters would follow the Chief Inspector’s counsel to the letter. The plan was put into action on 6 September 1897 when P. M. Lessar,110 the Russian chargé dʹaffaires in London, sent a memorandum to the Foreign Office enclosing two translated extracts from Narodovolets, in the second of which a direct call for the assassination of the tsar was made. Lessar wished to enquire confidentially, he said, on behalf of the Russian government, whether the editor could be prosecuted under English law for this incitement to regicide.111 Just as Melville had predicted, the case landed on his desk a few days later and, on 13 September, he duly submitted a five-page report on Burtsev’s history, occupation and associates, also mentioning that he had already obtained copies of issues Nos. 1 and 2 of the journal in question. An idea of the level of the Chief Inspector’s analytical abilities can be gained from the following illogical assertion concerning the émigré’s arrival in England in 1891: ‘That Bourtzeff had committed some crime previous to leaving Bulgaria was apparent by the fact that his arrival in London gave immense pleasure to the Nihilists here.’112 Claiming that Burtsev associated with ‘notorious anarchists’, he also made the curious allegation that the revolutionary’s prime reason for frequenting the British Museum was ‘to act as an agent for the Nihilist party in picking up any new Nihilist arrivals and obtaining lodgings etc. for them’.113 Having filed this somewhat unbalanced and misleading report, Melville considered his first task completed and sat back to await developments. The further progress of the case has been examined in detail by Alan Kimball, who, however, failed to accord sufficient importance to the role played by Melville.114 Some eight years after Kimball’s study, Donald Senese reported on his discovery of a document overlooked by Kimball that threw new light on the Chief Inspector’s covert collaboration with the Russian secret police.115 However, he too missed the full extent of Melville’s involvement in the case and his key role in bringing Burtsev to court. Events actually unfolded as follows. Upon receipt of Melville’s report, the Home Office suggested, firstly, that the Law Officers should be asked for an opinion as to whether proceedings against Burtsev could be justified and, if so, what the likelihood of prosecution was. The Director of Public Prosecutions himself, the Honourable Hamilton Cuffe, approached Melville to see whether publication of the journal in Britain could be proved and discovered, firstly, that the specimens in the latter’s possession had been obtained by agents of the police and, secondly, that they had come from a book-binder and not a publisher. Cuffe felt, therefore, that, on both these counts, it would be unsafe to use them in any prosecution. On 2 October the Law officers, accordingly, replied to the Home Office that there was insufficient proof to justify proceedings since ‘it would be improper to rely upon any publication which was obtained through the police, or by arrangement with the parties’.116 This was, indeed, a blow to Melville but he had by no means given up the chase. Following his meeting with Cuffe, the Chief Inspector decided on another course of action – entrapment. Melville ‘caused a letter to be written in Russian’ from a fictional ‘Lubinsky’ of 91, Edwin Street, Gravesend, to Burtsev in London asking the editor to send him all three issues of the journal and enclosing payment. When the journals arrived, Melville informed Cuffe of his ‘trial run’ – his ballon dʹessai as he termed it – and reassured the

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Public Prosecutor that ‘should you decide on a prosecution I have no doubt we can get ample evidence of authorship and publication’.117 Melville’s intervention at this stage proved to be crucial: without it, the case against Burtsev could not have progressed. Instead, the ball was set in motion once more. Cuffe requested a further opinion from the Law Officers and, on 29 October, they duly provided one in which, although expressing some reservations, they reversed their previous decision.118 Having been informed of the Law Officers’ opinion, Salisbury, who had shown a keen interest in the case from the beginning, summoned Russian ambassador de Staal to inform him that ‘a prosecution might properly be instituted if the Russian government desired it but he warned his Excellency that publication in England might be difficult to prove and that the prosecution would fail if there were among the jury one man who refused to recognize the prisoner’s guilt’.119 The British ambassador in St Petersburg Edward Goschen had, in turn, been summoned by Count M. N. Muravʹev, the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs, and had been told, in no uncertain terms ‘There was one very serious matter which led, on the Russian side, to a feeling of dislike and distrust towards England. This was that we harboured and gave hospitality to a group of men whose open and declared aim was the destruction of Law and Order in Russia.’120 Goschen was therefore relieved to receive news of Salisbury’s meeting with de Staal, which allowed him to offer Muravʹev proof of Britain’s goodwill and so extricate himself from his uncomfortable position. The Foreign Minister immediately expressed his gratitude and informed the ambassador that the Russian government was anxious for the prosecution to be commenced with as little delay as possible: His Excellency added that even if a conviction were not secured the mere fact of a prosecution having been undertaken would have an excellent effect on public opinion in Russia and would at the same time show the revolutionary refugees themselves that they could not incite to murder and rebellion with impunity and that a sharp eye would be kept on their doings in future.121

On 8 December 1897 the Director of Public Prosecutions was duly instructed to proceed in the matter and on 16 December a warrant for Burtsev’s arrest was placed in the hands of Detective Chief Inspector William Melville.122 The latter lost no time in carrying out his orders.

Arrest and trial123 Burtsev later described the events which unfolded on the afternoon of 16 December 1897: On coming out of the Reading Room of the British Museum I ran against a stranger in a frock coat and a high hat, in the hall, who said to me: ‘I believe this is Mr Burtsev, is it not?’ ‘It is’. ‘In that case I must beg for an interview: I have a very urgent matter to communicate to you’.

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I acceded to his demand, supposing him to be a frequenter of the British Museum in search of enlightenment on some obscure point or other in the history of the Russian people. But my deception did not last long, as he introduced himself at once as Melville, the Chief Inspector of the London police. Four other equally well-dressed gentlemen in high hats appeared from nobody knows where. We all got into cabs and drove to Bow Street. After a wait of an hour they took me before a magistrate’s court. Here I sat down on a prisoner’s bench and Melville told the judge that I was the editor of a journal in which I incited others to murder the Tsar and asked to have the case adjourned for a week in order that he might complete his investigations.124

The arrest of the ‘nihilist editor’ Burtsev was widely reported in both the British press and abroad.125 Volkhovsky and others on the ground in London had been expecting it but Burtsev’s comrades on the Continent were appalled. Teplov, from his base at the Free Russian Library in Whitechapel, appears to have served as the main news contact in London. From his home in Florence Alisov wrote to him expressing his horror and wondering if there was any truth in Italian newspaper reports that Burtsev’s papers had been seized and that, as a result, colleagues in Russia had been arrested.126 In fact, following the arrest, Melville had immediately taken Burtsev’s keys from him and, without his permission or the presence of his landlady, had illegally entered his flat, tied up a large quantity of his personal papers and belongings and carted them off to the police station. As soon as Burtsev’s colleagues heard this worrying news, Robert Spence Watson, President of the SFRF, telegraphed the Home Secretary Sir Matthew White Ridley demanding an assurance that no foreign government or their agents would be allowed sight of the papers.127 The Society then quickly proceeded to set up a Defence Fund for the prisoner, employing Mr Corrie Grant and Lord Coleridge to act as his solicitor and barrister, respectively.128 A letter of appeal for contributions sent to the press warned that this was ‘the first time that the English police have publicly undertaken to do the dirty work of the Russian government’. In an editorial comment, the anarchist journal Freedom drew to its readers’ attention the fact that the prosecution was to be led by the Attorney General himself, which pointed to the fact that this was ‘a positively political case’, and warned that ‘though at the moment only Russians are involved, tomorrow it may be another nationality. The danger at present’ it ended ominously ‘is the indifference of the British people’.129 Burtsev was first held at Holloway prison and then transferred to Newgate, by which time Wierzbicki, the unfortunate printer of the journal, had also been taken into custody.130 The Times carried a report of proceedings at the following hearing which took place at Bow Street on 22 December ‘in the Extradition Court’ and at which the Honourable Hamilton Cuffe, the Public Prosecutor himself, occupied a seat on the bench. The case was part-heard and on adjournment: ‘Mr Grant applied for bail for Bourtzeff, saying he was prepared with substantial bail, adding, amid some laughter, that there was not the least likelihood of his client running away, as England was the only country in which he was safe from arrest. Bail was refused for Bourtzeff but granted for Wierzbicki.’131 Unfortunately, Wierbicki would only enjoy his liberty for a few more days. When the hearing resumed on 31 December, both he and Burtsev

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were refused bail and committed for trial. The prisoners could, however, consider themselves lucky in that the trial judge decided, for whatever reason, to transfer the case from the Extradition Court to the Central Criminal Court.132 At the 10 January Sessions at the Old Bailey there was a further intriguing development when PC Thomas Clancy gave evidence to the effect that, two days prior to the arrest, on the instructions of Chief Inspector Melville, he had gone to Burtsev’s flat in plain clothes and asked to purchase two copies each of Nos. 1, 2 and 3 of Narodovolets. Burtsev asked him to write his name and address on a piece of paper which he duly gave as, ‘G. Johnson, care of Lubinsky, 91 Edwin St, Gravesend’. Crossexamined for Burtsev, Clancy admitted that his name was never G. Johnston, that he knew of no one named Lubinsky, and that he did not know if such a place as 91 Edwin St, Gravesend, existed. Crucially, he then continued: ‘I did not expect to be asked for my name and address and I invented this name and address on the spur of the moment’.133 As Burtsev’s case file shows, this was a falsehood: the fictitious ‘Lubinsky’ had not been conjured up on the spur of the moment by Clancy but had been invented by his superior some ten weeks earlier. Thus, PC Thomas Clancy of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard became the first witness to commit perjury in the trial of Regina v. Burtsev. He would not be the last police officer so to do. In the meantime, support for the prisoner grew. Even those who had fallen out with Burtsev over the direction of Narodovolets now rallied to his aid. Shortly after the arrest, Chaikovsky wrote to Lavrov: I have as much sympathy for him as you do but the question of his defence is vital – it creates a dangerous precedent because firstly; they are treating terrorists like simple murderers; secondly they are seizing our papers on behalf of the Russian government; and thirdly they are creating conditions which will enable the Russian political censorship to operate abroad.134

The case, then, was viewed as immensely important by all in the emigration. The Russian Free Press Fund were in no doubt that the prosecution had been commenced at the insistence of the Russian government and that ‘it was clearly a political issue and was of great and general significance as the first attempt to officially prosecute, on English soil, a Russian émigré in his struggle with tsarist despotism’.135 It was not only the émigrés who awaited the trial with some trepidation. Once Burtsev’s arrest had been effected, Rachkovsky’s anxiety with regard to his nemesis resurfaced. On 3 January 1898 he wrote to Melville asking nervously, ‘Don’t you think we might suffer a defeat as a result of the transfer of the case to the Court of Assizes?’136 In his next letter, dated 5 February, just a few days before the trial, his caution and apprehension showed itself again. Having thanked the Chief Inspector for the assistance he had given to a Russian official who had arrived for the trial, he wrote: I myself was tempted to make the trip to London but I preferred to abstain, not wishing to give a pretext for inopportune comments, which my presence in England would be bound to give rise to in various quarters. However, a game postponed is not a game lost and as soon as the case is resolved I shall take great

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pleasure in coming to thank you personally for the active devotion which you are always ready to demonstrate with such eagerness. I would be most obliged if, as soon as the affair is terminated, you could let me know the result by which ever means you consider most opportune.137

It would appear, therefore, that Burtsev’s later claim that Rachkovsky had arrived in London with a team of assistants to prepare for the trial was incorrect.138 Burtsev also claimed that the main intermediary between the Russian embassy and the British police in the preparation of his trial was Mme. Olʹga Novikova, agent of the Russian government and London correspondent of the Moskovskie vedomosti,139 who, in August 1897, had arrived back from a trip to Russia with specific instructions from Zvoliansky to the effect that the Russian agents were to deal not with the British police and Home Office, but with the Foreign Office.140 Unfortunately, it has not been possible to corroborate these allegations. However, Burtsev was certainly right to claim that for many months before his arrest, Beitner, Rachkovsky’s man on the ground, had worked closely with Melville, and had kept his superior and the Department of Police in St Petersburg well informed of the progress towards publication of Burtsev’s journal.141 Following yet another adjournment at the request of the prosecution ‘in order that certain evidence might be obtained from Russia’ the trial of Burtsev and Wierzbicki eventually got under way at the Central Criminal Court on Friday 11 February 1898 in front of an all-male jury and before Alderman John Pound and the Honourable Mr Justice Lawrance.142 It would be apposite here to provide a few background details on the trial judge. Mr John Compton Lawrance QC had served as Conservative Member of Parliament for South Lincolnshire for ten years until February 1890, when the then Conservative Lord Chancellor, Lord Halsbury, appointed him to the Queen’s Bench Division. Widely viewed as a purely partisan political appointment, many considered Lawrance quite unfit for the job. The Daily News considered him ‘unfit for the lowest judicial appointment’, while the Law Times protested that it ‘was a bad appointment, for, although a popular man and a thorough Englishman, Mr Lawrance has no reputation as a lawyer’. Lord Justice MacKinnon would later go so far as to describe him as, ‘a stupid man, a very ill-equipped lawyer, and a bad judge’.143 Indeed, Lawrance had barely taken up his new appointment when he showed his ineptitude in a most spectacular fashion, bringing down so much criticism on the judiciary from the London commercial community, as a result of a complete mishandling of a case in the High Court, that it had been felt necessary to establish a new Commercial Court. Lawrance escaped unscathed from this debacle and continued to sit in the High Court, although thereafter he preferred to preside over criminal rather than commercial cases. By the time the Burtsev trial came to court, Salisbury was, of course, back in power and had again appointed Halsbury as his Lord Chancellor. The choice of ‘Long John’ Lawrance as trial judge, therefore, came as no surprise.144 The prisoners were brought before Lawrance and the charge read out. They were indicted for, ‘unlawfully encouraging on 30 April 1897, certain persons whose names were unknown, to murder his Imperial Majesty Nicholas II, Emperor of the Russias; second count: endeavouring to persuade certain persons to commit that offence: other

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counts charging similar offences on other days’.145 Both entered pleas of Not Guilty and the prosecution began its case, concentrating, in particular, on the content and language of Narodovolets and reciting long extracts from the most incendiary articles from all three issues – including, of course, the by-now infamous Stepniak quote. Translations of the journal had been supplied by the Russian government but were not used as the Foreign Office had prepared its own.146 The chief witnesses for the prosecution were Scotland Yard detectives who had come armed with copies of Narodovolets which they had successfully bought, both from Burtsev at his flat, as we have seen, and from a news vendor in London’s East End. Thus, Melville hoped, authorship and publication of the incriminating passages would be proved beyond doubt. And indeed, by this point in the trial, they were. The Chief Inspector, having given his evidence proving that Burtsev had admitted to being the editor and author of the journal, was then cross-examined by Lord Coleridge. The prominent barrister proceeded in a most original way and, in a series of questions, succeeded in conveying to the jury the whole story of Burtsev’s unfortunate life: his imprisonment, exile, pursuit through Europe and so on. In the process he also obliged Melville to follow PC Clancy’s example and perjure himself on at least two occasions: firstly, in response to the question of whether he knew that, since his escape from Siberia, Burtsev had been pursued by agents of the Russian government he replied, ‘I do not know that’; and secondly, when, asked, ‘Have you heard that he has been the object of Russian spies in this country? Informers?’ the Chief Inspector again answered in the negative.147

Figure 3.2  Burtsev in British court, Penny Illustrated Paper 1 January 1898, 7. British Library MFM. M37700 (1898).

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Lord Coleridge went on to make a powerful speech in Burtsev’s defence, making much of the fact that the most incendiary language was someone else’s – and had been taken from a book by Stepniak that was freely ‘available in Mudie’s and every other large library in the kingdom. If this is such a dangerous statement why has nothing hitherto been said about this book and its author?’148 Burtsev, he argued, as any other free man in a civilized country, had the right to express an opinion. He also ridiculed the notion that the defendant was some kind of crazed dynamitard: Where are the bombs or the dynamite that are talked about so freely? He is nothing but a literary man, and the place of his apprehension bespeaks the literary man, because he is found in the greatest library in the world – the library of the British Museum. Here is this conspirator against the life of his Majesty the Tsar, doing what? He is in the British Museum engaged in writing a history of his country – an innocent history – a history that involves great labour and application: that is no doubt a labour of love.149

In his summing up, Mr Justice Lawrance did little more than repeat much of the prosecution’s case. Referring to Lord Coleridge’s support of Burtsev’s right as an individual to an expression of personal opinion, the judge ‘quite agreed that expression was free in this country, though it might be dangerous sometimes to express it’.150 At 3.46 pm the jury retired to consider this last little nugget and all the other arguments that had been put before them in the course of the day. They returned at 4.00 pm, after precisely fourteen minutes of debate, to pronounce both defendants guilty, though recommending Wierzbicki to mercy.151 In passing sentence on Burtsev, Mr Justice Lawrance commented that he had been found guilty ‘on what I should think is the very clearest evidence’ and that he had ‘no doubt what the natural tendency of the language used in the publication really was’. His sentence was, that he should be imprisoned and left to hard labour for eighteen calendar months. Having taken into account the jury’s recommendation, he sentenced Wierzbicki to two months.152 Thus it was that Burtsev became the first Russian revolutionary to be imprisoned in Britain. Clearly, much had changed in the country in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Whereas the fugitive Burtsev had been feted as a persecuted hero upon his arrival in London in 1891, there was no major public outcry at his trial a mere seven years later. On the contrary, The Times, making no mention of the lawfulness or otherwise of the proceedings, thundered out its own verdict on the outcome: The justification of the jury in finding him guilty and of the judge in sentencing him to eighteen months imprisonment is that no one is to be excused for publishing as to a foreign sovereign that which would be highly criminal in regard to a private person. The prisoner pleads for one law for all in his own country: this equality of treatment is meted out to him here.153

That is not to say, however, that Burtsev found himself completely without support. Freedom devoted its editorial to the case, commenting acidly that the trial and sentence was ‘to our mind one of the worst judicial scandals that has happened in many a

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year’.154 The Fundists were likewise convinced that it had been a purely political trial, directed by a biased and unreliable judge.155 It was Volkhovsky’s judgement that ‘The whole affair from beginning to end was not one of justice, nor was it even one of a necessity to enforce law, but merely a matter of political convenience of the moment. It was thought imperatively necessary to pay a visible compliment to one of “our neighbours” at the lowest possible cost.’156 Alan Kimball, on the other hand, concluded that ‘If “considerations of policy” played any determining role in the Burtsev case, they did so when the Conservative government of Salisbury – especially the Foreign Office – allowed the matter to come to trial.’157 Whereas all of the above opinions may have some truth in them, it is now clear that the case came to trial primarily due to the efforts of Chief Inspector Melville of Scotland Yard. But for his subversion of justice, Burtsev would have remained a free man. Such law-breaking by law-enforcers was, however, by no means uncommon, nor, according to some, was it necessarily ‘wrong’ or ‘immoral’ when it was a question of dealing with the new international terrorist threat of the late nineteenth century. As the head of the CID, Robert Anderson, himself acknowledged later that year: ‘I would say emphatically that in recent years the police have succeeded only by straining the law, or in plain English, by doing utterly unlawful things, at intervals, to check this conspiracy.’158 In Lord Salisbury’s opinion, the case had concluded successfully and he himself rushed to telegraph the news to his ambassador in St Petersburg.159 A few days later, he received a telegram in return from Goschen: ‘I am requested to express to H.M. government the Emperor of Russia’s satisfaction at the result of the Bourtzeff trial.’160 Melville, too, received his thanks in a letter from Rachkovsky dated (perhaps aptly, given their increasingly warm relations) 14 February 1898. It is worth quoting here in full: Dear Mister Melville I rush to express all my best wishes and my great satisfaction at the brilliant outcome of the affair. I am pleased in particular to note the most praiseworthy attitude of the jury who were able to make their judgment inspired solely by the principles of equity and without any political considerations. I am fully persuaded that this British method of considering questions by jury will be appreciated for its great and proper value amongst the most elevated circles in Russia and will help a great deal to silence those who regard with malevolence any manifestation of good relations between our two countries. I have no need to add that I am very happy that the success of this business has spared you any personal unpleasantness: I would have been distraught to see your goodwill so poorly rewarded. I am looking forward to the pleasure of shaking you by the hand at the beginning of March and would like again to pass on to you, M. Melville, my warmest thanks.161

Of interest here is the inference that Melville may have come in for some official criticism for the role he had played in the case. It is possible, indeed, that he had again acted without the knowledge or blessing of his superiors in his desire to be of service to the Russian tsar. But however that may be, his actions had secured Burtsev’s fate.

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Prisoner no. A442 From the courthouse, Burtsev was conveyed first to Pentonville Prison and then, a few months later, transferred to Wormwood Scrubs. His autobiography contains a powerful reminiscence of his time in detention and the appalling conditions he endured.162 It was the opinion of this man, already familiar with the rigours of prison life in Russia, that the British regime was by far the harsher of the two.163 He told, for example, of his transfer from Pentonville and how he and his fellow prisoners were handcuffed and chained together in groups of ten. This was, he said, the first time he had ever been shackled and ‘it happened in Free England! Neither at St Petersburg nor in Siberia had such an indignity been put upon me’.164 And there were worse, more enduring humiliations to be faced. Leaving aside the solitary confinement, the hard labour, the indignities of the slopping-out bucket, the bed of bare boards and the constant threat of further punishment, Burtsev recalled that it was the small black arrows which covered every piece of the convict’s clothing and his meagre possessions which caused him the greatest distress and which haunted him long after he left prison. To him, they were ‘a very nightmare symbol of the humiliations without number that men are capable of inflicting upon their kind’.165 Further information regarding his incarceration is contained in a Home Office response to a letter from Sir Charles Dilke concerning Burtsev’s well-being. It was reported that the prisoner had been furnished with a number of books and had been, permitted to write a letter on 14 February and again on 21 May and was entitled early in this month to receive a further letter, also that he received a visit on 10 May and will again be entitled to one early in August. The prisoner has never been put to the treadmill but has been employed in repairing socks and sorting wool.166

Dilke duly informed Fanny Stepniak, who thanked him for the interest he had shown in Burtsev’s case and hoped only that his health would not be impaired by the prison regime.167 As will be shown, this, unfortunately, would not prove to be the case. Burtsev later recalled the visit of 10 May when he had received his good friend the émigré Semen Kagan and his wife, accompanied by none other than Lev Beitner, who appeared particularly shocked and upset to see him. The reasons for his distress would become clear only at a later date but, that day, when he visited me in prison, Beitner would have been perfectly well aware that he was, to a large extent, the cause of my imprisonment and that he would have to compile a report on the visit for his superiors that very day. The circumstances of such a meeting could not fail to shock even such a traitor.168

The prisoner was allowed one twenty-minute visit every ten weeks or so and, during his term, received further visits from Volkhovsky, Stepanov and Teplov, who, by this time, had established his Russkaia besplatnaia biblioteka (Free Russian Library) in the heart of London’s East End and who, with some difficulty, managed to persuade the authorities to accept some Russian books for the prisoner.169 Teplov also did his

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best to keep everyone informed regarding his friend’s health and the conditions of his confinement and to rally support for his release.170 Another of those who succeeded in his application to visit the prisoner was the émigré journalist and later close associate of Lenin, Theodore Rothstein who, in December 1898, a month or so after Burtsev’s transfer to Wormwood Scrubs, was allowed to call on him.171 He had applied for a visit in November but had been turned down – apparently as a punishment to Burtsev for not having knitted enough pairs of socks (three pairs per week as opposed to the normal quota of six which he had shown himself incapable of doing). As well as recalling his humiliating transfer in handcuffs from Pentonville, the inmate described the appalling prison food (which, Rothstein commented, must have been dreadful indeed because Burtsev would normally eat anything). The guards had refused the prisoner salt for his porridge which he was given along with tea every morning at 6 am. At noon he was served soup, bread and potatoes and occasionally four ounces of poor-quality meat. Then, finally, at around eight in the evening – porridge again. In addition, he was given ‘so-called’ cocoa three times a week. As for exercise, he was allowed to take a daily walk in the yard for no longer than three quarters of an hour.172 Another, more extreme form of ‘exercise’ was described by Burtsev’s co-accused, Klement Wierbicki, when he was released earlier and went to spend some time recuperating with the Tolstoyan V. G. Chertkov at his house in Purleigh. He gave his account of the horrors of English prison life and, in direct contradiction to the Home Office’s assurances to Dilke, he described how: They put Burtsev into a treadmill which was set in motion by the force of the legs of the occupier and Burtsev was forced, like a hamster in a wheel, to revolve in it for several hours a day. They made the typesetter pick oakum and he showed us his fingers which, as a result of this forced labour, were covered in bloody scars.173

It would appear that the young Burtsev who, only a few years previously had boasted of his excellent health and how he never fell ill had met his match in a Victorian prison.174 Moreover, it was not only his physical well-being which was being put at risk. In his recollections, Burtsev recalled the mental suffering he endured and, in particular, one incident from his early days in confinement: To live such a life for eighteen months seemed to me as absurd a notion as if someone had suggested I swim the ocean, or jump over a mountain. All my thoughts led to the same conclusion – that such a life was unthinkable. An hour passed, then another, then another. The prison clock chimed every fifteen minutes. I did not even feel any drowsiness. I lay with my eyes wide open and looked into the darkness at the pale shaft of moonlight that slid into my cell through the high window. Then, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, everything became clear to me and I saw a glimmer of hope. I recalled a conversation I had had in a Siberian transit camp some ten or twelve years previously with one of the prisoners. It was something he had said which helped me clarify my thoughts. Indeed, it even surprised me that I had taken so long to realise that my situation was not at all hopeless. While talking

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about his prison experiences my Siberian friend explained to me the method some convicts had used to commit suicide. They would take a towel, soak it in water, and tie a particular kind of knot. According to him, death from such a noose was guaranteed. Recalling this story I picked my moment and, just after the warder had finished looking into my cell I jumped up, took my towel, soaked it, and covering myself with my blanket, diligently tied the noose as instructed. Then I tied the towel to the iron shelf, put my head in the noose and let go. I felt I was beginning to lose consciousness. I was filled with a feeling of unusual joy as if I had achieved something I had long dreamt of… I realised that another few seconds and that particular light which was already sparkling before my eyes would never go out and that nothing would be able to save me from that wet noose which, tentacle-like, was tightening around my neck. I was suffocating. One moment all was darkness, the next, sparks flashed before my eyes. At that instant I made an enormous effort, pressed my feet against the wall and raised myself up. I jumped up, untied the noose and quickly lay down under the blanket. My body shook from the excitement. During these few brief seconds I had felt I was the happiest man in the world. For some reason I recalled someone once saying; ‘There’s nothing you can do about us!’ Rephrasing it in my mind I repeated to myself: ‘There’s nothing you can do about me!’ All became clear: from now on, no matter what happened to me, no matter what I had to endure, – I had a sure means of escape.175

That phrase ‘There’s nothing you can do about me!’ served Burtsev as a kind of talisman for the rest of his life and, as the following chapters will demonstrate, over the next forty years he had numerous occasions to call on the magical powers of that talisman.

4

1899–1906: A Man with Few Enemies

An unlikely convert Having finally secured Burtsev’s prosecution, the tsarist police, upon his release from prison, far from resting on their laurels, increased their surveillance. At this time, according to the former Department of Police official Leonid Menʹshchikov, Burtsev was: ‘under crossfire’ from the agency: on the one hand there was Beitner in whom he had complete trust – and on the other, Pankratʹev, his long-time friend. Moreover, one cannot say with any certainty that there was not a third informer. It was not for nothing that Rachkovsky boastfully reported that, concerning the populists in Paris and London, measures had been taken to ‘ensure against any surprises’ and that he knew all of the activities of the populists ‘in minutest detail’.1

Of particular interest here is the reference to the involvement of Petr Emanuilovich Pankratʹev, for this ‘friend’ of Burtsev was an agent of the St Petersburg Okhrana – a fact of which Rachkovsky himself was quite unaware.2 This ‘belt and braces’ approach to Burtsev’s surveillance serves as another indication of the level of respect accorded to the revolutionary by the Director of Police, Zvoliansky.3 Moreover, thanks to the newfound infamy that his arrest and trial had brought him, Burtsev had now become the focus of attention of other national police agencies who, for the next six years, would relentlessly hound him throughout Europe. For the historian, this increased interest in, and recording of, his movements is of great value, especially given that Burtsev’s own account of this period of his life is, at best, sketchy.4 In this chapter we will begin by examining the new-found fame which awaited him on his release and the new friendships which he succeeded in forming as a result. Burtsev’s trial and sentence had been widely reported as a travesty of justice and consequently, as he wrote to Kashintsev, he suddenly found himself with far fewer political enemies both in Russia and abroad.5 Many who had previously disagreed with his open and unashamed espousal of violent political action nevertheless expressed their admiration and respect for the way he had suffered for the common cause. Burtsev, in turn, while still vehemently proclaiming his belief in the need for terror, now showed even more determination to unite the opposition and, to this end, made use of his new-found popularity to develop some new, unexpected (and

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hitherto unexamined) relationships. The chapter will also examine Burtsev’s return to historico-political journalism and to a series of renewed and even more vicious attacks on the autocracy, all set against a background of increasing international tension and escalating political violence. Finally, the chapter will chart the various mood-swings of the British public with regard to the political refugees in their midst and to ‘aliens’ in general, before moving on to give an account of Burtsev’s return to Russia in the winter of 1905. Prior to his trial, not all in the Russian émigré community had been sympathetic to Burtsev’s plight. Indeed, there were those who behaved in an openly antagonistic manner towards him. One such was Jaakoff Moiseevich Prelooker, editor of the successful London émigré monthly the Anglo-Russian. Like Burtsev, Prelooker had arrived in emigration in London in 1891 and his journal, like Narodovolets, had first appeared in 1897. He too felt it was his mission to attempt to effect a rapprochement between two opposing ‘factions’ within the émigré community, but there the similarities ended. A Russian-Jewish convert to Protestantism, Prelooker, by his own admission, had been ‘a humble schoolmaster, never inciting anyone to revolutionary actions against the government, even opposing, when opportunity presented itself, terrorist enterprises as useless, and harmful to the cause itself, preaching only a religious reformation to my people, disseminating ideas of reconciliation between creed and creed, class and class, man and man’.6 He stood, in other words, at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Burtsev and yet, the Russian authorities had made life ‘too hot’ even for him and he had chosen, therefore, to enter into self-imposed exile in London. There, through his journalism and a series of public lectures, he continued to preach his gospel and to ‘point out the dangers of all ill-calculated attempts at violent revolution’.7 It is not surprising, therefore, that in January 1898, as Burtsev awaited trial, far from coming out in support of him, Prelooker published a vicious attack: We have to oppose strongly the policy by which the party of Russians, represented by Mr Bourtzeff, believes to be able to attain the ends it has in view … Leaving ethics and speculative theories aside, we ask Mr Bourtzeff ’s sympathisers and supporters, what practical ends do they hope to attain by preaching a reign of terror in Russia and inciting to regicide? In our conviction the propaganda of terror does certainly only harm and no good whatever and is defeating its own ends.8

That said, the following month, Prelooker, at least, had the decency to publish an SFRF circular announcing the establishment of the Burtsev Defence Fund and to agree, grudgingly, that the accused deserved a fair trial.9 Then, suddenly, in the March issue of his journal, he changed tack completely. In a lengthy article, highly critical of the sentence passed on the accused, he thundered: Bourtzeff is no enemy of society but wants to see society controlled by equal laws of justice and humanity. He is himself guided by no murderous instincts, but on the contrary by the highest motives of humanity, by that spirit of self-abnegation which was bequeathed to the world on Golgotha. He is exposing himself to greatest personal danger that others may be raised from the terrible slavery and suffering.10

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It is doubtful whether Burtsev, still troubled by his childhood encounter with ‘the Crucifixion Nail’, would have welcomed the comparison to Christ but, be that as it may, he now found a new devoted follower in Prelooker. The latter felt Burtsev’s defence should have raised the case of Zasulich and wondered whether a British jury would now be asked to prosecute her on behalf of the tsar. He continued: ‘As the British government cannot or will not plead on behalf of the oppressed people of Russia, it ought not to interfere on behalf of the oppressors. We cannot help feeling that, under a Liberal government in England, Russian autocracy would not have ventured the experiment.’ This further conversion of the proselyte Prelooker to Burtsev’s cause serves as proof of the strength of support that the hapless refugee’s imprisonment had engendered amongst the émigré community. What, Prelooker wondered, would be the practical consequences of Burtsev’s eighteen months’ hard labour? If Siberia has not shaken his faith in the righteousness of his cause, an English prison will not do it, and on leaving it he will be only a still more determined and more skilful conspirator. Having been known to a few only before, he will now be admired by millions with hearts beating for oppressed and downtrodden humanity. The prosecution and punishment have not weakened, but decidedly strengthened, the cause both in Russia and even in England.11

Prelooker was correct in every respect, including his prediction of an increase in support from the British public. He returned to the case in the April issue but, this time, confined himself to publishing extracts from the March number of Free Russia, including the opinion of a Henry Simon of Manchester who believed that ‘it would be a sad day for liberty generally should England descend to the level of France and become a servant of the secret police of the tsar’.12 And Simon was by no means the only Englishman to come out in support of Burtsev and to berate the British Conservative government for its act of betrayal. A month after sentence had been passed, permission was granted for a demonstration to be held in Trafalgar Square at which the Social Democrat Harry Quelch and the anarchist David Nicoll were amongst those who made speeches calling for a complete amnesty for Burtsev, the Walsall anarchists and all ‘political prisoners’.13 A week later, at Clerkenwell Green, a follow-up meeting was held at which an extract from Stepniak’s ‘Nihilism as It Is’ was read. The speaker reminded the audience that, whereas Burtsev had been sentenced to eighteen months’ hard labour for simply quoting from this work, neither the author nor publisher of the book had ever been prosecuted. ‘If it is a crime for a poor man to quote from a certain book’, he continued, ‘it is difficult to understand why the authors and publishers were not proceeded against’. While all present were certainly in agreement with this sentiment, the newspaper reporter felt obliged to point out that public interest in the case was, however, ‘not of an overwhelming character’, as evidenced by the fact that a collection on the day could raise no more than a paltry fifteen shillings and tenpence haʹpenny.14 Few in number his supporters may have been, but they were, nonetheless, tenacious. As Burtsev recalled, his friends redoubled their efforts to get him out of prison and, ‘at their initiative, numerous interpellations were addressed to Lord Salisbury, the head of

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the Conservative government. Sir Charles Dilke and John Morley interceded personally with the ministers on my behalf both individually and in parliament but to no avail’.15 Undaunted, they persevered. A year into his sentence, a number of his supporters, including Robert Spence Watson, other members of the SFRF and such notables as C. P. Scott of The Manchester Guardian petitioned Home Secretary Sir Matthew White Ridley, pleading once more for the remainder of the prisoner’s sentence to be remitted. But again the Secretary of State rejected the plea out of hand.16 Tsar Nicholas, it would appear, had stipulated that Burtsev should serve his sentence to the last day.

Return to the Museum On 18 June 1899, even before the convict’s release, Rachkovsky had learned that Burtsev’s health had indeed deteriorated, as Fanny Stepniak had feared it would. The Head of the Foreign Agency had been informed that, on his discharge, Burtsev intended to visit Kashintsev in Sofia to recuperate.17 This plan, however, did not materialize. As Burtsev later recalled: I was set free at last in July 1899. A number of my friends were waiting for me on my release from prison and, an hour later we were all seated together in the apartment of one of them. In the course of our conversation I made a very unpleasant discovery: I noticed that I had to ask to have things repeated several times. To my great distress I found that my hearing was decidedly affected and that I did not always understand what was said to me. By evening I was in a state of great nervous irritation and anxiety, which increased still further the next day.18

His deeply concerned friends took the invalid off to an address on the outskirts of London but it soon became clear that a much better climate would be required for his recuperation.19 I could not endure the multitude of new impressions that my brain was called upon to receive and was obliged to leave London for some quiet place where I could be alone and out of the sound of the human voice which had grown to be a veritable torture to me. Little by little the habit of living came back to me at the seashore and the sensations of daily existence became slowly and gradually less painful.20

The seashore in question was that at Ramsgate, in north Kent, where Burtsev spent a few weeks before returning to London in October 1899.21 He soon discovered, however, that his recovery was far from complete: I began to realise how seriously prison life had told upon me and, while I could truly say that I had borne the hard labour comparatively well, the bitter knowledge was forced upon me that my constitution was completely undermined by the lack of food, air and exercise. I, who had never suffered from the slightest illness before, was now so weak that I felt the least cold.22

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Nevertheless, he was glad to be back in London and was looking forward to recommencing his studies at the British Museum.23 He was unaware, however, of the decision that had been taken by the Museum Trustees, shortly after his trial, to ban him from the Reading Room ‘and not to re-admit him should he at any future time apply for renewal of his ticket’.24 Learning of his exclusion, the ex-convict wrote despondently to Max Nettlau: My seat at the Library remains unoccupied because I have been denied entrance to the Museum. Just like the Russian government the British tell me ‘If you had edited the Social Democrat instead of Narodovolets you would still be at the British Museum and would never have ended up in prison!’ I, however, would rather edit Narodovolets (not the Social Democrat) so they can do as they please!25

Nettlau was furious at the Museum’s insensitivity. Having come into possession of Bakunin’s personal archive, it had been his intention to present it (and his own extensive collection) to the Museum Library. Now, in protest at the exclusion, Nettlau changed his mind.26 Whether he informed the Museum authorities of his decision and the reasons behind it are not documented, but the matter did not end there, for Burtsev had other means of bringing pressure to bear. At the next meeting of the Trustees, his case was again raised, the minutes recording that ‘In the hope that the Right Hon. John Morley would be present at the next meeting of the Standing Committee, the Trustees postponed consideration of an application by Mr. Vladimir Bourtzeff for renewed admission supported by a letter in his favour from the Right Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke.’27 Yet again, Dilke and Morley had come to the revolutionary’s service but the Trustees repeatedly postponed making a decision until, finally, at their meeting of 14 January 1900, having received a letter from Burtsev (via Morley and Dilke) they agreed to reverse their decision and to readmit him to the Reading Room.28 From Morley’s letters to Dilke it is clear that these two worthy MPs had conspired to overturn the Board’s decision and effect Burtsev’s readmission. In one of his letters, for example, Morley explained to Dilke, in some detail, how Burtsev should word his application for readmission, to enable him (Morley) to ‘carry’ it at the next Trustees’ meeting.29 And so, with the Museum having been obliged to perform this public volte-face, the revolutionary quickly resumed his seat under the Dome. Since his release from prison, Burtsev had kept up a steady correspondence with Max Nettlau. In the main, the exchange concerned Bakunin but it also contained much of interest on other aspects of this little-known period of Burtsev’s life. We learn, for example, of a week spent in Paris in November 1899.30 We discover too that he acted as translator and intermediary between Nettlau and the Russian scholar S. A. Vengerov in St Petersburg concerning the latter’s biography of, and Bakunin’s influence on, V. G. Belinsky.31 Further, we learn that, soon after his readmission to the Museum, he re-embarked on his literary endeavours, sending off articles to Vengerov – on Belinsky, Herzen and Saltykov-Shchedrin. The last piece was returned immediately with the comment that it was ‘quite unthinkable that it would be published in our press’. Vengerov did, however, submit at least one of the other articles to the Historical Messenger, though whether it was published is unrecorded.32

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Fortunately, Burtsev had more success with his writings for the émigré press. During this period, he had acquired another unlikely friend in the person of V. G. Chertkov, Tolstoy’s literary agent and disciple in Britain and head of the Svobodnoe slovo (Free Word) publishing house, whom Burtsev occasionally visited (first at his house in Purleigh, Essex, and later at Tuckton House, the Tolstoyan retreat at Christchurch near Bournemouth). Chertkov had written to Burtsev on 24 May 1900 asking permission to write his biography but by the end of the year nothing had come of the proposal. Indeed, relations between the two had taken a decided turn for the worse.33 The cause was the publication of the reminiscences of Liudmila Aleksandrovna Volʹkenshtein, a follower of the Party of the People’s Will who had received a lengthy prison sentence in the Shlisselburg Fortress for her incidental involvement in the 1879 assassination of the Governor of Kharʹkov, Prince D. N. Kropotkin.34 Chertkov had approached Burtsev telling him of his intention to publish the memoir and asking him to provide footnotes. This he willingly did and, in addition, supplied an appendix giving a chronological and biographical listing of all those ever incarcerated in the fortress. Chertkov, in his preface to the volume, praised Burtsev’s contribution and his exhaustive study of the revolutionary movement but also felt it necessary to append a note stating his own unequivocal opposition to revolutionary terrorism, believing it to be both ‘morally illegal’ and harmful to the national interests it was supposed to support. Burtsev became aware of this ‘parting shot’ from the editor only after printing of the book had commenced. He was astonished and felt sure the author of the book would share his amazement. In Burtsev’s view, it was not the editor’s opinions that were at issue here: his reactionary views on the revolutionary movement (like those of all Tolstoyans) were common knowledge. The issue was, rather, the lack of political tact shown by Chertkov in polemicizing with those unfortunate revolutionaries, ‘thereby weakening the impact of the exposure of these heinous crimes of the Russian government. The jailers and gendarmes who have suffocated and continue to suffocate our comrades will note with satisfaction and gratitude how the story of their crimes is accompanied by such comments’.35 With this broadside, the Burtsev of old would, doubtless, have terminated relations forthwith, but it was a different, quieter and more fragile man who had emerged from prison a year earlier. Chertkov wrote to him a few months later concerning their disagreement and, as a result, the two decided to let bygones be bygones. The ailing revolutionary soon renewed his visits to his new moderate associates at Christchurch.36 On one such visit he struck up another unlikely friendship, this time with the Social Democrat (and later Bolshevik) S. V. Andropov.37 S. N. Motovilova, a companion of the latter, left a lengthy reminiscence in which she described how the two had nothing in common other than their commitment to the overthrow of tsarism but, also, that Andropov was completely in awe of Burtsev.38 She, on the other hand, did not hold Burtsev in such high regard, blaming him for, amongst other things, Andropov’s subsequent arrest and imprisonment. According to her, Burtsev had persuaded Andropov to take some of his publications with him when he returned to Russia, where he was arrested almost immediately and sentenced to two years in prison followed by twenty years’ exile. Motovilova suspected it was Burtsev’s ‘terroristic’ books that were to blame for the harshness of the sentence, though other sources cast

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doubt on this interpretation.39 While describing herself as an anarchist, Motovilova stated that she never sympathized with terror: the fact that in Narodovolets Burtsev extolled the murder of Alexander II and termed it an ‘execution’ disgusted her.40 The ‘post-prison’ Burtsev may well have entered into the company of those of a decidedly more moderate persuasion, such as Chertkov, Prelooker and Andropov, but he had in no way modified his own political views. On the contrary, as his next literary endeavour would show, he was more fervent than ever in his calls for the autocracy to be overthrown ‘at any cost’.

‘What has been’41 Burtsev’s main reason for seeking readmission to the British Museum had been to enable him to begin where, in December 1897, he had been obliged to leave off. During the last few months of his imprisonment, he had drawn up plans for a new historical review, Byloe (The Past),42 the programme of which he outlined in a pre-publication note to Kashintsev. In this same note he stated his earnest belief that the study of history ‘constitutes the most essential task of our current political movement’ and went on: To our mind history is not the collecting of ‘stories’ about famous events but has an incomparably more important, immediate and practical meaning. To our mind history directs us in our current idealistic struggle. It exposes the reasons for our and our ancestors’ successes and failures and, at the same time, for the successes and failures of our enemies. It teaches how we can best struggle against the reaction which currently reigns in Russia and how we can rid our motherland of it as quickly as possible. Therefore, we must study the history of Russian revolutionary and social trends, primarily, in the interests of the coming battle. We shall adhere to this point of view concerning the study of history in our new historical journal Byloe, the programme of which will be similar to historical publications which appear within Russia but on its pages will be written all that it is impossible to say within Russia due to reasons of censorship.43

He saw the role of the journal as serving as an aid to this vital study, providing a repository for reprints of rare, early, populist documents, proclamations and reminiscences dating from the 1860s to the 1880s. While the main subject of the first six ‘London’ issues44 was the history of the Party of the People’s Will, the editor also included numerous commentaries on the documents and articles eulogizing the most famous ‘sons of the revolution’ such as Ignaty Grinevitsky, the assassin of Alexander II. Meanwhile, having obtained a proof copy of the journal, the Head of the Foreign Agency gave his superiors the accurate assessment that it was even more seditious than Narodovolets.45 Indeed, with the author openly and repeatedly advocating the use of political terror against the tsar and members of his circle, the journal, in Rachkovsky’s opinion, was every bit as inflammatory as any of his earlier works, if not more so. The main difference now, however, was that such opinions were gaining currency both at home and abroad.

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Burtsev later described how the political atmosphere had changed from 1897 when Narodovolets had first appeared and when the revolutionary movement had been dominated by Marxist Social Democrats. ‘It is quite a different story’, he wrote, ‘now that the Socialists-Revolutionaries – the party most sympathetic to our cause – has come to its senses’.46 Indeed, the radical views on terror promulgated by the SRs in their monthly journal Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia (Revolutionary Russia)47 and their theoretical organ Vestnik russkoi revoliutsii (Herald of the Russian Revolution)48 were not so dissimilar to those advanced earlier in Narodovolets. But perhaps the crucial difference from 1897 was that these views were now being acted upon in Russia. A case in point was alluded to in the second issue of The Past, which carried a letter from the student P. V. Karpovich who had recently achieved international fame with his fatal attack on N. P. Bogolepov, the hated Minister of National Enlightenment.49 Although he had carried out the assassination on his own initiative, his act, like that of Vera Zasulich back in 1878, sparked further, organized, acts of terror. The Socialists-Revolutionaries’ Boevaia Organizatsiia (Combat Organization) came into being shortly afterwards and began its campaign of violent direct action, the first victim of which was D. S. Sipiagin, the Minister of the Interior.50 Other high-profile assaults followed, including an attempt on the life of I. M. Obolensky, the Governor of Kharʹkov and, in 1903, the assassination of N. M. Bogdanovich, Governor of Ufa.51 Such impressive and daring attacks reminded many of the 1879–1881 exploits of the Party of the People’s Will itself, but Burtsev did not see it that way. While praising the arrival on the scene of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) (and its Combat Organization in particular) he nevertheless criticized the latter for directing its blows more widely than the Party of the People’s Will had done. Listing the victims of the People’s Will – Trepov, Kotliarevsky, Geiking, Mezentsev, Kropotkin and Drentel’n – he argued that all (with the exception of Alexander II himself) had been powerful senior figures who had a direct effect on the revolutionaries themselves. The attacks of the Combat Organization, on the other hand, were not so concentrated at the heart of power and, therefore, had to be regarded more as acts of propaganda rather than of terror. Burtsev did, however, sympathize with the difficult position the SRs found themselves in: on the one hand they faced the terror of police pursuit and, on the other, had to suffer the ‘systematic and malignant teeth-gnashing of the Iskraites!’52 Though Burtsev might befriend the odd individual Social Democrat, the party itself would remain an abomination to him.

Sick and dangerous: The clandestine movements of an invalid As Burtsev informed his friend Kashintsev in December 1900, he was happy with the reception of the first issue of Byloe and believed that the second would be even better. In the same letter he talked of his immediate travel plans and asked for a number of books to be sent to him care of Beitner in Paris, mentioning in passing that he felt in good health. On his return from his travels, he was obliged to write again following his discovery that ‘our incorrigible Lev’ (i.e. Beitner) had neglected to post his earlier letter. Obviously, still quite unaware of his friend’s betrayal, he reported that the second

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issue of Byloe was already with the printers in Switzerland and that he had now received sufficient funding from Russia to enable him to continue with his journalistic activities. He intended, over the coming weeks, to make further extended trips to Geneva, Berne, Zurich and Paris before returning to settle down to work in London.53 Based on this itinerary, it is unlikely he would have arrived back in London until late January or early February 1901 and would, therefore, have missed the beginnings of the national lamentations which accompanied the passing of Queen Victoria on 22 January. In any event, this avowed republican would have shed few tears, being more concerned to return to his main task of bringing about the speedy downfall of the Russian husband of Victoria’s granddaughter. He took up lodgings, convenient for the British Museum, at 52 Kenton St, St Pancras54 but, unfortunately, never made it back to his seat under the Dome. His extensive European travels had proved too much for his delicate post-prison constitution and he fell seriously ill with what appeared to be a form of tuberculosis. Within the month, he was despatched by his friends to Jersey, where he stayed for a time with the old revolutionary K. M. Turski before moving on again to Switzerland.55 Burtsev’s departure from London in early April 1901 had also been noted by agents of the French Sûreté, who informed Paris that he had left with a large sum of money received from the Russian Free Press Fund and had arrived in Lausanne, where he attended a conference of Russian socialists. French archival documents show that the Sûreté had, in fact, been shadowing Burtsev for some time.56 What concerned them, in particular, was a report of his correspondence with the political émigré Varvara Nikolaevna Dobreva in which he had asked for the address of a certain Safonov, a Russian student of chemistry, whom he wished to invite to London. According to the agent’s report, Dobreva had discussed the request with Plekhanov and the decision had been taken not to reply. It was on receipt of this information that the French police reached the conclusion that Burtsev’s request signalled his intention to construct a bomb and organize an attempt on the life of the tsar.57 The Sûreté was aware that plans were being made for a Russian state visit to France later that year, though whether this knowledge was commonplace at the time is unknown. They would, however, have been on full alert following the attempted assassination of the Shah of Persia in Paris the previous August. The tsar’s visit to France was eventually arranged for late September and, as that time drew near, Paris received reports of suspicious meetings of Russian revolutionaries, including Burtsev and Safonov, in London in August. Then, on 6 September, news was received from America of an anarchist’s assassination of President McKinley.58 In this atmosphere of heightened political tension, the French police decided to increase their surveillance over Burtsev going so far as to prepare 150 copies of his photograph for circulation.59 That same day, Paul Cambon, the French ambassador to London, communicated a secret and urgent memorandum to the Foreign Office. The ambassador reported, with some anxiety, that the Sûreté had lost all trace of ‘the dangerous Russian Nihilist, de Bourteff [sic]’ and wondered whether he had, perhaps, returned to Britain.60 The query was immediately transmitted to Acting Superintendent Quinn at Scotland Yard, who reported, initially, that the refugee had indeed returned from France to London,

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on 7 August, and was now staying with Volkhovsky at Christchurch. A few days later it was pointed out that Quinn’s report should have read ‘to France from London’ – not the reverse – and, also, that Burtsev had actually only arrived at Tuckton House in the first week of September, where his host was not Volkhovsky but Chertkov. Then, a week later, ‘following careful inquiries’, the Hampshire Constabulary reported that they had been unable to ascertain that Burtsev was, in fact, in the district and that, although a man answering to his description had been staying at Tuckton House recently, he had not been seen in the vicinity for some days. Quinn was not sure how this desperado could have travelled from France to England without being observed by his men, but guessed he may have returned by way of Jersey and Weymouth where, for some years past, there had been no port officers. The French police, meanwhile, were taking no chances and, in a registration book of anarchists under arrest or surveillance, noted the necessity to apprehend Burtsev immediately, should he set foot in France.61 The impression gained from Scotland Yard’s ‘investigation’ is one of alarming incompetence, which is in no way alleviated by their final submission of 22 October 1901.62 On this occasion in his report, Sergeant Thomas Earnshaw of the Metropolitan Police stated that he had made exhaustive enquiries but had failed to find out the whereabouts of ‘the suspect’, though rumour had it he was either in Christchurch, Hampshire, or Geneva, Switzerland. Burtsev’s letters were sent to ‘the suspect’ Teplov who alone knew his whereabouts but, since, ‘it is against their principles to speak about each other’s movements, I find it difficult to get any information respecting him. Should he ever get over his illness, Phthisis, which is very doubtful, and move about again, I shall know it at once and a report submitted [sic]’.63 Quinn was no more helpful, simply confirming that the secrecy of Burtsev’s comrades with regard to his whereabouts was observed on account of the state of his health ‘and that if known to police he might be annoyed and his recovery retarded’.64 In any event, by this time, the tsar’s visit to France was over and the French government could relax. Their London embassy had again been in touch with the Foreign Office with regard to Burtsev, but this time merely to pass on the information that, following up on a rumour he had gone to Rome, they had received the opinion of the Italian Police that he was now to be found in London.65 At the time of the tsar’s visit to France, the Russian Department of Police had also renewed their interest in Burtsev’s movements. St Petersburg had contacted Rachkovsky, passing on information from their embassy in Berne that there was to have been a meeting of Russian anarchists in Lausanne on 9 August, and that Burtsev was probably coming from London to attend. The police wished to know if he had, in fact, turned up.66 Whether Rachkovsky was aware of the revolutionary’s whereabouts is unknown. As mentioned above, Scotland Yard knew only that Burtsev had left London and arrived in France on 7 August and it is likely they would have informed Rachkovsky of his arch-enemy’s arrival, but he makes no mention of this in his reports of the period. It would appear that, despite the overbearing surveillance by British, French and Russian police officers, Burtsev had somehow managed to disappear from view. What is even more remarkable, as will be shown, is that he succeeded in remaining out of police sight for some considerable time to come.

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The revolutionary vanishes: The ‘black hole’ of 1902 Sergeant Earnshaw had been right with regard to Teplov’s knowledge of his friend’s whereabouts, for Burtsev was in the habit of notifying him of his every change of address. Indeed, from the Teplov archive at GARF the initial mystery of his disappearance can be cleared up, for it contains a postcard from Burtsev dated 10 August 1901, in which he gives his address as ‘Vl. Baranoff chez Zhitlovsky, 35/1 Ziegler Str. Berne, Suisse’.67 Moreover, the archive contains a further postcard dated 11 August 1901 from St Beatenberg in the Swiss Alps.68 But then, nothing more until November 1902 when Teplov received another missive, this time from Bougy-sur-Clarens.69 The most pursued refugee in the world had become invisible and would remain thus for a year. There is little in the British, French or Russian police archives to indicate that any of these professional detectives were aware of his movements during this period. The Sûreté mentions him briefly in a report dating from early 1902 concerning the main groups of Russian political refugees in London but the information contained therein is hardly current.70 What is even more remarkable is that, judging from the Teplov archive, Burtsev had also apparently severed communications with his closest associate. So, where was he? Sergeant Earnshaw had been right, also, in his estimation of the seriousness of Burtsev’s illness. In September 1903, the revolutionary wrote to a friend in exile in Yakutsk describing how in the spring of 1901 he had fallen ill with inflammation of the lungs, with ‘blood gushing from my throat’ and had been sent to Switzerland where he spent the year recuperating and, as a result, made a full recovery.71 Later, he would specify Montreux as his place of convalescence, though certain archival documents indicate the possibility that he was based in the Clarens region.72 Despite his confinement he managed, at least in the early months, to continue his publishing activities. The second issue of The Past, which had already been prepared, was published in late 1901, as was the pamphlet Doloi tsaria (Down with the Tsar), a compilation of all the articles for which he had been imprisoned, which came out in Geneva in a print run of 2,000 copies. Then, on 14 December a printed leaflet, ‘K chitateliam “Za sto let” i “Byloe”’ (To the Readers of Za sto let and Byloe) was circulated, stating that a second, revised edition of Burtsev’s chronicle was ready, together with a study of the revolutionary movement in the nineteenth century, but that, unfortunately, shortage of funds prevented their publication.73 For the same reason, it would be some time before the third issue of his historico-revolutionary journal would see the light of day. That the Russian police lost sight of Burtsev at this time was doubtless due, in part, to the disruption caused by a number of significant personnel changes within their ranks. In May 1902 a new Chief of Police, A. A. Lopukhin, was appointed and, a few months later, on instructions from Plehve, he had sacked Rachkovsky, the ‘fountainhead of police corruption’, as he termed him.74 Plehve had long wished to dispose of the services of his foreign chief, even addressing a complaint to the tsar in which he criticized him for various shortcomings, including the poor quality of his reports, his personal involvement in a number of underhand dealings and his overly

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close relations with French politicians and police.75 Leonid Aleksandrovich Rataev was appointed as Rachkovsky’s successor and, within the year, would prove himself the equal of his illustrious predecessor, at least, in the passion he invested in the pursuit of Vladimir Lʹvovich Burtsev.

Worse than an anarchist According to a French police report, Burtsev emerged back into the world ‘at the beginning of 1903’ when he arrived in Switzerland and there, having gathered his true friends around him and secured funding, continued his publishing activities.76 Having regained contact with the elusive refugee, the agents of the Sûreté made sure they would not lose sight of him again and filed regular reports to Paris on his activities. From these reports, and from other Russian archival materials, one learns that, over the course of 1903, Burtsev held a number of meetings with fellow revolutionaries, travelling regularly between London and various towns in Switzerland, such as Lausanne in April, Clarens in July and August and Geneva in October.77 During an earlier visit to Clarens he had had the good fortune to meet up with Egorʹ Lazarev, who again offered to fund his literary exploits. Lazarev, already aware of Burtsev’s great bibliographic experience and his invaluable collection of documents on the history of the revolutionary movement, recommended him to the PSR and arranged funding for the next three issues of Byloe.78 All three duly came out under the slogan, Izdanie Partiia sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov (Publication of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries) and were jointly edited by Burtsev and Leonid Shishko. Unfortunately, editorial disagreements between the two began almost immediately: firstly, over Shishko’s desire to tone down Burtsev’s polemical outbursts and turn the journal into a more academic, purely historical publication; and, secondly, due to Burtsev’s fears of losing his authorial rights.79 Bickering continued until it was decided in November that, following issue no. 5, the two, whilst maintaining personal contacts, would go their separate ways.80 Thus, having lost his funding but regained control of his journal, Burtsev immediately replaced the banner heading of the next issue (no. 6, February 1904) with the inspiring, ‘Izdanie gruppy narodovolʹtsev. Doloi tsaria! Da zdravstvuet narodnaia volia!’ (Publication of the Group of Members of the People’s Will. Down with the Tsar! Long Live the People’s Will!) Impressive though this might have sounded, no such group, in fact, existed and no further funding for his Byloe would, therefore, be forthcoming. In the meantime, quite independently from his dealings with the SocialistsRevolutionaries, Burtsev had found enough funds to enable him to produce a fourth issue of Narodovolets.81 Burtsev’s tone was every bit as strident as in the earlier London issues and just as critical of Nicholas II. In his editorial he cautioned against underestimating the role of the tsar, as some revolutionaries did, and warned that he should not be dismissed as a weak-minded individual, powerless in the company of his more astute ministers. The tsar had much to lose and would protect his wealth at all costs.82 The journal also contained further praise for the revolutionary martyrs, Karpovich and Balmashev and articles offering cautionary praise both for the

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Socialists-Revolutionaries and for Petr Struve’s journal Osvobozhdenie (Liberation), suggesting the editor call on his liberal readers to support all revolutionaries and not just the Social Democrats.83 Narodovolets had been available on the streets of Geneva for no more than a matter of weeks when the Swiss authorities were informed of the nature of Burtsev’s publishing activities. This came about as a result of the arrest of tsarist agent Henri Bint and his accomplice, the informer Georgy Rabinovich, who had been caught embezzling post addressed to Burtsev and other Russian revolutionaries.84 Rataev, the new Head of the Foreign Agency, hurried to Geneva from Paris to resolve the situation and, during meetings with the local police, described Burtsev’s sedition and his supposed plan to send a close friend and co-conspirator, the SR Pavel Aleksandrovich Krakov, to St Petersburg to make an assassination attempt on the Minister of Justice, N. V. Muravʹev.85 Rataev asked for the assistance of his Swiss colleagues in bringing the two to justice and they were happy to oblige. Burtsev later described the events which followed: As I was coming out of my hotel at Geneva one morning in October 1903, I was roughly seized by two police agents, who handcuffed me first and then told me I was wanted by the Commissary of Police. I was taken to the police station where I declared that I was the publisher of the Narodovolets, that I was responsible for its management and that, furthermore, all the leading articles were signed by me.86

According to the Swiss authorities, he had been arrested for the incitements to murder contained in his journal and in his pamphlet Doloi tsaria. They had also accused him, initially, of publishing another pamphlet entitled K oruzhiiu (To Arms), which called for the assassination of the tsar and contained an appendix with instructions on how to prepare explosives. Burtsev claimed that this was, in fact, the work of the SR Viktor Veinshtok and that he had nothing whatsoever to do with it.87 The accusation was later dropped from the charge sheet. From his cell in St Antoine Prison in Geneva, Burtsev wrote immediately to his old friend Aleksei Teplov at the Free Russian Library in London, asking him to make his arrest known, to put up placards, to write to The Times, and to inform his friends in America and in Paris. Judging from the tone of these letters, Burtsev, despite his predicament, seemed in a positive mood, saying that he expected he would soon be released and in no time would be back at work in the British Museum.88 That their detention had come about thanks to the intrigues of the Russian government was quite clear to all in the émigré community who were quick to show their solidarity. On 1 December, N. I. Kuliabko-Koretsky, the president of the local émigré association, published an appeal to the Swiss people, protesting about the arrest and stating unequivocally where the blame lay: It is impossible not to see the hand of the Russian government in the arrest of Burtsev and Krakov. It is not Switzerland that was menaced by Burtsev’s journal which was published in London for Russians and in the Russian language. Nor was it for the security of Switzerland that the spy Rabinovich attempted to corrupt postal

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workers and stole correspondence from letter boxes … This is why we are firmly convinced that Switzerland will know how to react in a dignified manner to the furtive scheming of the Russian government.89

Burtsev later recalled an amusing incident during his interrogation when the examining magistrate wrote the word ‘anarchist’ against his name. The revolutionary protested, pointing out that he was in favour of political freedom, a constitution and a republic; in other words, that he was for everything that anarchists were against. To which the magistrate replied: ‘Yes, you are right, you are not an anarchist – we are aware of that. You’, he sneered, after a short pause, ‘are worse than an anarchist!’90 He and Krakov were then held in custody for twenty days before being sentenced by the Swiss Federal Council in the person of Adolf Deucher, President of the Council and Head of its Political Department. The latter would dearly have liked to satisfy fully the request of the Russian government and to have imprisoned both Burtsev and his companion but, already facing such public opprobrium, he decided, instead, to take the easy way out and opted for administrative expulsion to France.91

Return to Paris Shortly before he was expelled, Burtsev had renewed contact with Prelooker, but what the exact subject of their correspondence was is unclear.92 Based on the contents of the February edition of the Anglo-Russian, however, one can assume that Burtsev had forwarded Prelooker some of his publications. They received the following brief review: ‘Down with the Tsar’, ‘From the Past’, and ‘The Will of the People’ are three collections of various articles by extreme Russian revolutionists, chiefly by Mr Vladimir Bourtzeff. What is the strength at present of this Russian Party numerically we do not know, but it is clear that Russian terrorists are quite active and form no very small section of the Russian opposition. Of this we can judge by the number of publications they are able to issue, and by the financial contributions to their funds published in these periodicals.93

The ‘party of terrorists’ was certainly gaining in popularity, helped in no small measure by the continuing successes of the Combat Organization. Burtsev was, as ever, critical of some SR policies but, nevertheless, continued to call on the opposition to unite. Prelooker, too, had published an appeal for unity and asked for comments from his fellow émigrés, which he duly received.94 In the March issue, amongst other responses published, was a letter from Burtsev, whose attitude was generally supportive, though critical of the author for putting the idea forward as if it had never been advocated before. The criticism was humbly accepted.95 But, as well as having opened up a public debate, the two had also been in private communication. Burtsev’s personal file at the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) contains a letter from Prelooker dated 14 February 1904, which is of interest in a number of respects.96

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With regard to an English publication of episodes from your life – escape from Siberia, attempted arrest in Constantinople, experiences in an English prison – I doubt you will find an English publisher thanks to your reputation as a dangerous man, and I am almost sure they would not give you an advance but I, personally, would very much like to give you the possibility of continuing your literary works in peace and here is what I propose: that you write a plain narrative of the above episodes without getting argumentative and defending terrorist methods; I will then translate them into English and try to get them published; if I do not succeed then I will publish them in my own paper. I will pay you £25 for an article and advance you £4 per month which will allow you to work quietly for six months in the country.

Having made this most generous offer, Prelooker then continued with the following intriguing observation: I agree that all possible forceful means should be used to deal with a strong enemy but I recommend you be practical and wise as a snake. I think Volkhovsky was right to try to defend you in the way he did: keeping quiet about certain undertakings. There will be time enough to talk about these when you are no longer amongst the living.97

What did Prelooker mean by these ‘certain undertakings’? It is tempting to conclude that he knew some dark secret of Burtsev’s. Was he, indeed, a practising rather than a merely theoretical terrorist, as the Russian police had always claimed? It was certainly Rataev’s belief that Burtsev was not only mixed up in terrorist plotting but was one of the key organizers of these conspiracies.98 This, of course, stands in stark contrast to the view of others such as Rita Kronenbitter who believed that, although he was ‘venerated by the younger generation of insurgents for his past achievements and his present propaganda services, Burtsev was considered too meek and gentle to mix into current terrorist plotting. He was never a member of any of the revolutionary committees nor admitted to the inner councils. He was, above all, not privy to the dead secrecy of assassination conspiracies’.99 Based on available archival documents it is impossible to say with certainty which of these two opinions is correct, although one can, of course, speculate. From the moment of Burtsev’s arrival in Paris, Foreign Agency chief Rataev and Ambassador Nelidov had been keen to impress on the French government that this was not just any revolutionary they were dealing with, but a terrorist of the most dangerous sort. Their main contact in Paris at that time, Maurice Paléologue, then Deputy Director of Political Affairs at the Foreign Ministry, recalled Rataev claiming that, in December 1901, Burtsev had actually been one of the founders of the Combat Organization, an allegation he would repeat at a later date. Bearing in mind that one of the other co-founders named was Evno Azef and that Rataev had inherited the services of the latter as an informer, one may, indeed, conclude that his assertion concerning Burtsev’s involvement might carry some weight.100 Moreover, as mentioned earlier, the revolutionary’s movements in the winter of 1901–1902 are far from clear. On the other hand, it is difficult to conceive of

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Burtsev as some kind of secret member of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, and, consequently, almost impossible to imagine him as a member of such a clandestine subgroup. Further, no reference is made to Burtsev’s membership of the Combat Organization in the writings of those who were most intimately associated with it such as Gershuni, Savinkov, Chernov and Nikolaevsky. Ambassador Nelidov, meanwhile, had reminded the French Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé that an order for the revolutionary’s expulsion was already in existence, having been prepared in December 1891, but never served due to his premature departure from Paris. Could that order now be served, he wondered? Towards the end of April, the Prefecture of Police obliged, informing Burtsev of the order for his deportation and warning him that he had three days to leave the country.101 Over a month later, however, Paléologue noted that the revolutionary was still in Paris ‘thanks to the all-powerful protection of Jaurès’.102 On being served the order, Burtsev had, with the help of the Paris-based SR, Ilʹia Rubanovich,103 succeeded in enlisting the support of the prominent French socialist who had warned President Émile Combes that the issue would be raised in the Council of Ministers if Burtsev was expelled.104 Nelidov was so incensed at Delcassé’s failure that the latter, apparently, felt obliged to raise the matter with the Cabinet and, after a heated discussion, a further order was placed for the revolutionary’s immediate expulsion.105 It was at this point that news was received from St Petersburg of the assassination of Minister of the Interior V. K. Plehve.106 Paléologue noted the murder in his diary and his subsequent meeting with Rataev at which the latter complained: ‘My life is one long worry. Under the direction of Burtsev the Combat Organization has become very formidable. The man’s audacity is astounding. I can assure you he has made good use of his time in Paris …’107 Now, according to the Foreign Agency head, Burtsev was not only a co-founder of this terrorist group, but its director! Still this supposed ‘master-criminal’ held out: two days later, Paléologue, having accepted Rataev’s allegations as truth, noted that ‘the terrorist Burtsev is still in Paris, quietly directing the operations of the Combat Organization and the sanguinary exploits of his comrades in Russia’.108 Finally, however, at the end of July, Burtsev was persuaded to leave Paris and move for a short time to the town of Annemasse, on the Swiss border. There, at that time, there was much discussion amongst the émigré community concerning Plehve’s murder and the appointment, in his place, of P. D. Sviatopolk-Mirsky, a choice applauded by many liberals.109 S. N. Motovilova, visiting her relatives in the region, was shocked to discover that Burtsev was one of those who welcomed the appointment: ‘All my friends were socialists – perhaps belonging to different parties but socialists nonetheless. This so-called terrifying terrorist revolutionary on the other hand was not a socialist in the slightest but the purest, most modest liberal imaginable who placed great hopes on … Sviatopolk-Mirsky!’110 But there was no time for further discussion, for it was at this point that the French government decided to take advantage of the parliamentary recess to arrest and expel the troublesome revolutionary. The elusive ‘Russian Pimpernel’, however, managed to avoid the clutches of the Sûreté once more and was soon back again in the safe refuge of London.111

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‘England for the English’ The Britain Burtsev found that summer may, initially, have appeared more welcoming than it had for some time past. Prelooker, for one, thought he detected a decrease in Russophobia from when he had first started publication of his journal in 1897, writing that ‘newspapers notorious hitherto for their strong anti-Russian sentiments now begin to explain that for the Russian people they cherish but the kindliest feelings and best wishes and their Russophobia is directed exclusively against the iniquitous system of Russian autocratic and bureaucratic government for which the people are not responsible in the least’.112 In the recent past, there had been no shortage of examples of the Russian government’s excesses for the British press to report on, for instance, the appalling massacres of Jews at Kishinev in April 1903.113 An interesting illustration of how far the tsarist regime had fallen out of favour with the British public was to be found in how the press chose to report the departure from public life of one of Nicholas’s most loyal British servants. News of the retirement of Chief Inspector William Melville, the ‘most celebrated detective of the day’, first appeared in The Times in November 1903.114 While mentioning Melville’s duties as bodyguard to visiting dignitaries such as the German emperor and the French president, the newspaper correspondent carefully avoided any reference to his past services to the tsars of Russia. Then, some six months later, in May 1904, Melville received a most impressive testimonial at City Hall Westminster.115 If press reports are to be believed, almost every foreign embassy in the land was either present at the ceremony or was a signatory to the address presented to him, again, with the notable exception of that of Russia.116 Whether, in fact, there was a Russian presence and the press simply chose not to report it in order to avoid any awkwardness for Melville is not recorded but two years later the Daily Express was not a bit concerned at the possibility of causing embarrassment when it reported ‘on Russian authority’ that the ex-Superintendent had joined the tsar’s police, following an approach from his old friend ‘Ratshkovsky’.117 This ‘scoop’ was retracted a few days later when they received Melville’s rebuttal in which he stated that he was still in London enjoying his retirement and was, ‘content to follow revolutionary movements through the medium of his daily paper. He found the assertion that he had entered the service of another government, which service might at any moment bring him into conflict with his own country, both unfair and offensive’.118 At this time the Express appeared to like nothing better than a good scandal involving underhand clandestine liaisons between international police forces. In early 1905, it had carried a detailed report of the strength of the Russian secret police in Paris and London based on an interview with Burtsev’s colleague I. A. Rubanovich who claimed that some 60 to 70 Russian agents were operating in London and, what was perhaps more surprising, many of them were British. The report continued: The British Police does not offer the same level of assistance to the Russian police as the French, seeing as the British government does not recognize the existence of any Russian police organization in London – England is, really and truly, a free country. Still, Scotland Yard has a special detective department to look after

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prominent socialists, Anarchists and foreign revolutionists. It has a sort of inborn prejudice against all kinds of revolutionists and there is no doubt that the Russian police in London frequently obtain discreet ‘indications’ from the Scotland Yard authorities.119

While one might query the number of spies alleged to be on the streets of London, the claim that these agents were receiving assistance from their British counterparts was certainly accurate. As mentioned earlier, Scotland Yard was aware of the activities of the French citizen Edgar Jean Farce, the ‘principal Russian agent in London’, who, assisted by a retired Special Branch officer, conducted surveillance operations from an address within a stone’s throw of the headquarters of the RFPF in Hammersmith.120 Farce himself in a later report outlined his relationship with Special Branch, explaining that, thanks to his ability to read and understand Yiddish, he was able to pass on important material from the local newspapers to Scotland Yard officers who in turn passed on information that would otherwise have been impossible for him to obtain. In the same report he also mentioned the ‘almost untenable position of Russian agents in London due to adverse public opinion’.121 Hostile though the British press may have been to the Russian tsar and his secret police, and sympathetic to those of his subjects who were forced into exile, this could not disguise the fact that xenophobia in general was on the increase in the country and that calls for immigration controls were now attracting more popular support than at any time. As early as 1900, the ‘rapidly recurring murders of kings and presidents’ on the continent had given rise to calls not only for further legislation to deal with the anarchist problem but for increased international police cooperation and surveillance.122 At the same time, interest had been renewed in proposals for an Aliens Bill. Following the return of Salisbury’s government to power in November 1900, Conservative MP for Stepney, Major W. E. Evans-Gordon, set up a Parliamentary Committee on Alien Immigration that, within the year, had reported on its fears of a rise in anti-Semitic feeling in the country and had contacted the prime minister with the recommendation that the reintroduction of his 1894 Bill would go a long way to checking the rise of such a movement.123 Evans-Gordon and his followers in the proto-fascist ‘British Brothers’ League’ (slogan – ‘England for the English’) playing on fears of unemployment, housing shortages and an increase in crime, attracted much support in London’s East End (and, indeed, elsewhere in the country) with their demands for the restriction of immigration of destitute foreigners and, in particular, East European Jews.124 Salisbury himself gave the proposal his backing but did not live to see the legislation come into force. In poor health, he resigned as prime minister in July 1902 and was succeeded by his nephew, Arthur James Balfour, who set about guiding his uncle’s Bill through parliament.125 The Bill, however, would not have a smooth passage. Amongst its opponents were, of course, the SFRF and Jaakoff Prelooker, editor of the Anglo-Russian. The May 1904 issue of that journal carried a letter calling for a protest to be drawn up, ‘signed by such men and women of England who love their country’ and suggesting that this would greatly strengthen the hand of Sir Charles Dilke and other members of the opposition. Prelooker gladly restated his journal’s

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opposition to the proposed Bill and his willingness to support such a protest.126 On this occasion, the Liberal opposition in parliament proved strong enough and the Bill was eventually talked out at Committee stage.127 The SFRF would later express the view that the success of such a Bill would constitute ‘a reversal of the old traditions of offering asylum to the victims of political or religious persecution which has been one of the chief glories of our country in times past’.128 In the summer of 1904, Burtsev, having again had cause to give thanks to Britain in its role as the sole European refuge for the politically oppressed, would, doubtless, have concurred. In August, Rubanovich contacted Burtsev from Paris advising him that, following the reopening of the French parliament, it was now safe for him to return.129 He duly said his farewells to his London comrades and set off back across the Channel. Shortly after his departure, Prelooker considered it appropriate to publish an appreciation of his good friend – a valedictory of sorts – for the benefit of his British readers. The November issue of the Anglo-Russian duly appeared carrying a photographic half-portrait of the revolutionary on its front page over the caption: ‘M. Vladimir Bourtzeff. The Nestor of the Russian Revolutionary Movement’ (see Figure I.1). A positively glowing biographical sketch of the man was contained within. Having described Burtsev’s great political and literary achievements, Prelooker ended with the following effusive tribute: Nothing can break his determination and devotion to the cause. Extremely gentle, humane, unassuming, and industrious in his private life, conscientious to a scrupulous degree, and sacrificing his whole life to the work for the amelioration of the condition of the Russian people, he is at the same time the most irreconcilable foe of Russian autocracy, for the destruction of which he believes all means are permissible. In the eyes of the Russian government he is one of the most dangerous Nihilists, in those of the revolutionists he is a saint and martyr for the national cause.130

Prelooker, however, had overestimated the degree of danger to the autocracy which his friend now posed.

Russia 1905: The return According to Rataev, the arrest of Krakov in St Petersburg in July 1904 had come as a terrible blow to Burtsev and his followers, many of whom had abandoned him.131 His journalistic activities had ceased owing to lack of funds and, by the end of the year, the Russian Department of Police had, apparently, all but lost interest in him as a serious terrorist threat. Indeed, from then until his return to Russia in October 1905, there is little of interest on Burtsev to be found in police files.132 The Sûreté, also, had ceased to file anything of importance concerning him but, for some time, their border police continued to produce half-hearted reports about some of his associates and their intentions to return to Russia.133 As for Scotland Yard, from available files, it would appear they had lost interest in this ‘dangerous Nihilist’ long before his departure from London in August 1904.

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The Okhrana had long since refocused its attentions on what it had identified as the real threat to the person of his majesty and his empire: namely, the emergence of a unified political opposition coupled with the growth in strength and popularity of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries and its Combat Organization. Following the assassination of Plehve, A. L. von Aehrenthal, the Austrian ambassador to St Petersburg, summarized the prevailing mood in the country thus: The most striking aspect of the present situation is the total indifference of society to an event which constituted a heavy blow to the principles of the government. I have found only totally indifferent people or people so cynical that they say no other outcome was to be expected. People are prepared to say that further catastrophes similar to Plehve’s murder will be necessary in order to bring about a change of mind on part of the highest authority.134

And further catastrophes there were. A major contributory factor to the growing cynicism in the country was the series of disastrous and embarrassing defeats inflicted on the Russian army and navy in the course of the war with Japan in 1904–1905. Popular discontent grew further following the events of Bloody Sunday in January 1905,135 while yet more pressure was brought to bear on the tsar the following month with the assassination of his uncle, Grand Duke Sergei.136 It is interesting to note that, when recording this murder in his diary, Paléologue, while condemning the Combat Organization, at the same time admitted the brutality of the Russian regime.137 Many, who had previously been firmly opposed to violent political action, were now in the process of re-evaluating their position. One such was Prelooker, who later wrote: ‘Who can wonder that as the Russian persecutors make a law unto themselves and slay their victims in their thousands, so also amongst the millions of persecuted Russians there will always be found groups or even individuals who, too, will take the law into their own hands and avenge their slaughtered brothers and sisters?’138 Internationally, too, support for these ‘avengers’ was on the increase and there was even some evidence that, in liberal circles in Britain, their violent actions were attracting more than merely vocal backing. When a bomb exploded in a St Petersburg hotel room in early 1905, killing the occupant, a passport was discovered on the body under the name of Arthur Henry McCullough, a well-known actor of Newcastle on Tyne.139 Following a British police investigation it was discovered that McCullough was, in fact, still very much alive, and that he, together with Henry Noel Brailsford, a journalist and Executive Committee member of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, had fraudulently procured three false English passports for a ‘Russian refugee’. The two were charged with conspiracy and found guilty but fined only £100 each.140 It was not suggested, of course, that the SFRF was itself involved in the conspiracy, although, following judgment, the Society did provide McCullough with £150 towards his expenses and issued an appeal to members for contributions towards the cost.141 It could be inferred from this that the situation in Russia had reached the point where even the peace-loving SFRF has come to accept the need for radical action, long since advocated by Burtsev and his colleagues.

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But for Burtsev, such radical action had always served only as a means to an end and had, therefore, to be abandoned the moment that end seemed within reach. Despite the lack of interest shown in him by the international security services, he still believed he had a vital, mediating role to play. As late as September 1905, he had written to Sergei Witte, the Russian prime minister, declaring that, if the latter felt his government might be prepared to give up its policy of ‘white terror’ and begin negotiations with the opposition, then he, Burtsev, would be prepared to go into print to announce that he himself was against political terror and call on revolutionaries to declare a ceasefire. He received no reply.142 Meanwhile, following the death of his enemy Plehve and the appointment of his patron D. F. Trepov to the Ministry of the Interior, P. I. Rachkovsky had re-entered the Department of Police as head of its Political Section. Under his direction, surveillance of the revolutionaries was increased and, as a result, a number of assassination attempts were foiled. The year progressed, however, with no let-up in strikes and popular disturbances and, eventually, the tsar was left with no choice but to sign Witte’s October Manifesto, which promised an increase in civil liberties and the election of a popular assembly. Then, four days later, on 21 October (3 November) came the announcement of a political amnesty.143 Burtsev greeted the news with joy and decided on an immediate return to St Petersburg. S. N. Motovilova recalled the postcard he sent her mother shortly before his departure from Switzerland on which he had written simply: ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! I’m going to Russia!’144 He was by no means the only exile eager to return and all those who chose to do so were received with warmth and enthusiasm on their arrival. The Anglo-Russian reported how, on 13 November in St Petersburg, Zasulich and Deutsch appeared, to a rapturous reception, on the platform at a meeting of the St Petersburg Soviet. Two pages later, however, an additional news item announced the arrest of a number of the returning exiles, Zasulich amongst them.145 The amnesty, it was reported, was not a general one – exception had been made in the case of those involved in acts of terrorism, who would have to make individual applications to the Minister of Interior. He would then personally decide who would be allowed to return.146 In August, Rachkovsky had reorganized the Foreign Agency, sacking his rival Rataev and replacing him in the Paris headquarters with his faithful agent Garting from the Berlin Agency. On 6 November, the latter sent an urgent report to his superiors stating that Burtsev had departed for St Petersburg the previous evening.147 Rachkovsky followed up a few days later issuing a secret circular to police departments throughout Russia alerting them to the return of political immigrants and taking pains, in particular, to warn them of the imminent return of his old adversary, Vladimir Lʹvovich.148 On this occasion, however, Garting’s intelligence was incorrect – already, in late October, Burtsev, not waiting to make an application for permission to return, had obtained a false passport and, by the time the border police received Rachkovsky’s circular, had already crossed back into Russia at the border station of Kybartai in modern-day Lithuania.149 Thus ended Burtsev’s first period of emigration. A few days after his arrival in the capital, the newly returned émigré attended a mass meeting of workers at a factory and there, on the shop floor amidst the machines, flywheels and transmission belts he heard

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an old friend, Bunakov-Fundaminsky,150 who had just been released from prison, open his speech to the assembled crowds with the words: ‘We, Socialists-Revolutionaries!’. Burtsev recalled the powerful effect which these simple words had on him: ‘I was totally overwhelmed, a lump came to my throat and I was involuntarily transported back to the early 1880s and our attempts to establish relations with the workers. In those days if, in some safe house or distant forest, we succeeded in attracting as many as twenty workers we would describe that as a “mass” meeting’.151 As we shall see, such freedoms as those and others which had been promised in the October Manifesto would be revoked all too soon and the reaction would set in again, forcing Burtsev and many like him to flee abroad once more. But still, at last, following almost twenty stormy years of near-constant surveillance and pursuit, he was home and, at least for the moment, he could rest.

‘Forward again with The Past’: The St Petersburg Byloe Despite the sense of freedom that had reigned during the weeks following the publication of the Tsar’s Manifesto and the political amnesty which had been declared a few days later, many were aware of the possibility of reaction, all the more so since Witte’s new government comprised such conservative die-hards as former head of Police, P. N. Durnovo, who had been appointed Minister of the Interior as Bulygin’s replacement. Moreover, as mentioned above, Rachkovsky had already reappeared on the scene, first as Special Commissioner in the Ministry of the Interior and then as Deputy Director of Police. Given this uncertainty in the political climate, Burtsev was anxious to formalize his status as quickly as possible. Within a few days he had checked into the Balabinskaia Hotel on Nevsky Prospect and let it be known that he was a newly arrived émigré without passport, placing a notice in the press in which he boldly announced his return and his new place of residence.152 He was quite aware at this point that the amnesty declaration of 21 October could easily be interpreted in such a way as to exclude him and so he waited, no doubt somewhat anxiously, to see what would transpire. To his surprise and great relief he was allowed to live on in the hotel, unmolested for the next month or so and, when the police did eventually arrive, it was not to arrest him, but to issue him with a new passport, which he duly received without the need even to supply supporting evidence. As he would later learn, the change in attitude in the Department of Police had arisen as a result of a direct order from Witte that the new arrival was not to be harmed. Whether this was as a result of Burtsev’s earlier correspondence with the senior statesman is not known. It appeared that times were indeed changing. Not only were there signs of new freedoms of movement and assembly and the promise of a new parliament with legislative powers, but November had also seen the introduction of new and seemingly more liberal laws on freedom of speech and the press.153 Burtsev had returned to Russia with the express intention of restarting his journalistic career for the first time in his homeland and was heartened that these changes might afford him the opportunity to do so. He immediately applied to have some of his earlier works reprinted but

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his request to transfer publication of his London historical collections, The Past, to St Petersburg was met with a categorical refusal from the newly formed Central Office for Press Affairs.154 Even had permission been granted, it is unlikely he would have found a publisher: those he approached still regarded him as too dangerous by far and believed it was only a matter of time before he was arrested. Some even tried to persuade him to leave the country while he still could, offering him money and false passports to that end.155 But, as ever, the new arrival was determined to find an alternative means to achieve his end and soon succeeded in finding those of a similar mind with whom he could collaborate. On his arrival in St Petersburg he had called into the editorial offices of the liberal newspaper Tovarishch (Comrade)156 and there had met the literary and social historian Pavel Eliseevich Shchegolev who had recently been conducting research into the Decembrist uprising and who, somewhat to his amazement, had been granted access to the archives of the Third Department to examine the files held there on the leaders of the failed uprising.157 Shchegolev was obviously keen to have his ground-breaking research published but, just as Burtsev had discovered, even under the relatively lax conditions now prevailing, publishers were still uneasy about handling such potentially risky material. He decided, therefore, to publish his work himself and, to that end, drew up plans for a new journal devoted exclusively to the history of the revolutionary movement. Shchegolev arranged a partnership agreement with Vasily Yakovlev-Bogucharsky,158 an old friend from the early 1890s, and a co-worker at Comrade. Burtsev, who was also well acquainted with the latter, agreed to join them on an equal footing, allowing them to adopt the name of his London historical collections for their new venture. The rapid birth of the new journal Byloe (The Past) was greatly assisted by N. E. Paramonov, a wealthy businessman sympathetic to the revolutionary cause and owner of the publishing company Donskaia Rechʹ (Language of the Don) who drew up an agreement with all three editors, guaranteeing to pay each 150 roubles per month and, as soon as the journal became profitable, to hand over 60 per cent of the profits.159 Official permission to publish was received on 20 December 1905 (2 January 1906) with the first issue of the journal appearing on 26 January (8 February) 1906. In order not to upset the censor unnecessarily, Burtsev agreed that his name should not be listed alongside Shchegolev and Bogucharsky as joint-editor. Instead, it was mentioned only that the journal was produced ‘with his close participation’.160 The new journal was welcomed as a long-overdue breath of fresh air. The three collaborators had managed to enlist the assistance of some of the most outstanding scholars of modern Russian history who contributed articles and documents the likes of which had never before been seen in Russia.161 For the first time in the pages of a legally published journal, the public was presented with a clear picture of the history of the revolutionary movement from an opposition viewpoint. The editors had also approached a number of well-known members of the Liberation movement, including some newly released Shlisselburg prisoners who were more than happy to contribute their reminiscences. The expression of such anti-tsarist sentiment was warmly welcomed by the public and, as a result, the journal quickly gained a mass following. Indeed, according to one commentator, the new journal produced an impression ‘akin

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to an exploding bomb’.162 A measure of its remarkable success can be gauged by the fact that three print runs of 10,000 per issue were required to meet the initial demand, a circulation never before achieved by a revolutionary journal.163 The public was attracted not only by the quality and freshness of the historical research, the documents and the revolutionary reminiscences, but also by the journal’s contemporary content. Firstly, each issue contained an excellent review section which by no means limited itself to the discussion of publications of a purely historical nature.164 Secondly, beginning with the February 1906 issue, there appeared an occasional ‘Contemporary Chronicle’ (sovremennaia letopisʹ) listing events pertaining to the Russian Liberation movement which had occurred that month: for example, the number of death sentences passed on political prisoners and reports of the numerous cases of persecution of newspapers and their editors still being practised by the Ministry of the Interior, which clearly pointed to the reality that little had changed despite the October Manifesto’s promises of the extension of civil liberties.165 Although straying from the strictly ‘historical’ remit of the journal, such information was evidently welcomed by readers. Many of the materials published had been obtained by Burtsev, who enthusiastically travelled around Russia visiting old narodniks, chivvying them to set their archives in order and to write up their reminiscences. As well as calling in on German Lopatin in Wilno and Vera Figner in Nizhny Novgorod, he also met up several times with former revolutionary-turned-loyal subject of the tsar Lev Tikhomirov and was struck by the latter’s piety and sanctimoniousness, recalling how, during meals, he would cross himself every time he stuffed a morsel of food into his mouth. In Burtsev’s words, Tikhomirov had not only ‘found religion’ but was now ‘more orthodox than all the metropolitans of Russia put together’.166

Starodvorsky: A reputation ruined Yet another revolutionary giant whom Burtsev had the chance to meet was the old Shlisselburg inmate N. P. Starodvorsky who, like Lopatin, had been released under the general October amnesty.167 Burtsev had a great admiration for this legendary figure and met him on several occasions to discuss the possibility of him contributing a reminiscence of the Sudeikin affair for The Past.168 Some documents relating to the affair, giving the exact location of Degaev’s flat where the execution had taken place, had appeared in the April 1906 number of the journal and Burtsev recalled that shortly thereafter he had accompanied Starodvorsky to ‘revisit the scene of the crime’. It transpired that Burtsev was not alone in his fascination for the subject, for on his way home he ran into the radical author V. G. Korolenko who, with a copy of The Past in hand, was also on his way to find the flat.169 Then, later that year, Burtsev received the shocking information that a former Shlisselburg inmate had entered into the pay of the Department of Police. He felt obliged to investigate this scandalous claim and obtained a listing of all possible suspects. It was an easy task to mark off the names of those he considered to be beyond reproach, such as Lopatin and Figner, but his bloodhound’s nose instinctively brought him back to one name in particular – that of Starodvorsky. Via one of his police contacts, Burtsev

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was able to examine internal documents relating to Shlisselburg inmates and therein found confirmation of his suspicions. Starodvorsky had, indeed, offered his services to the police on not one but three occasions.170 These damning revelations were later compounded by the testimony of two fellowinmates, from which it also became clear that Starodvorsky had not terminated his association with the police. In early 1907, shortly after coming into possession of this evidence, Burtsev invited the old revolutionary to the offices of The Past and, confronting him with his evidence, suggested he step down from political life and perhaps even consider emigrating. Initially, Starodvorsky attempted to raise objections but soon mellowed and, while still denying any wrongdoing, said that he was tired and in any event had already decided himself to retire from political life. A compromise of sorts had thereby been reached and that was how matters stood when, some two months later, Burtsev was once more obliged to flee Russia. Unfortunately, as will be described below, within the year he would receive further alarming news concerning Starodvorsky that would oblige him to adopt a different and more direct approach, one which would have fateful consequences for both men.

A trip abroad Alongside the mass of reminiscences and historical documents available for collection within Russia, Burtsev was also aware of the huge quantity of valuable materials on the history of the revolutionary movement scattered throughout the émigré communities of Europe, not least in his own archive which he had left behind in Paris. He therefore applied for a foreign passport to enable him to go in search of these documents. By this time his ‘guardian angel’ Witte was no longer in a position to act on his behalf: already, in May 1906, he had realized that his attempt to bring the country back onto an even keel had failed and he had resigned as Chairman of the Council of Ministers to be replaced by I. L. Goremykin. But, despite the ensuing tightening of civil control, Burtsev, by some miracle, received his passport promptly and, without further ado, left for Paris.171 The intention of this passport-carrying legal citizen of Russia was, firstly, to tie up his affairs in the French capital, which his rapid departure the previous year had prevented him from doing. Having successfully gathered his archive together he then made his way to Switzerland but, as the archive of the Foreign Agency shows, he was not alone in his travels. Followed every step of the way by a police spy, he checked into a hotel in Geneva and, the following morning, called into the post office to see if there was any poste-restante mail for him. By this time the Swiss authorities had been made aware of his presence and, on leaving the building, he was immediately accosted by an officer of the Geneva police and placed under arrest on the charge that he had previously been expelled from Switzerland and had no right to re-enter the country without obtaining specific permission.172 Burtsev calmly proposed that he leave forthwith for the French border, which was no more than a twenty-minute journey away, but the officer refused. It appeared from his questions that the policeman was trying to trap Burtsev into offering a bribe but as the latter did not rise to the bait the officer was left with no option but to take him into custody.

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It was thus that Burtsev found himself in that same St Antoine Prison in which he had been detained in 1903. On this occasion, however, his incarceration lasted for only ten days before he was brought up for trial. In court Burtsev declared he had been expelled from Switzerland at the insistence of the Russian government and for matters of a purely Russian nature, which had nothing to do with Switzerland and, moreover, that he was now living legally in Russia as a journalist and had entered Switzerland believing that the earlier case against him was no longer in force. The judge, in his summing up, stated that since, apparently, the Russian tsar himself had no objection to Burtsev living in Russia, he did not think it proper that he should be punished now for arriving in Switzerland without permission. The prisoner was duly released on 8 October with the proviso that he leave the country immediately and never re-enter without appropriate authorization.173 Within a fortnight Burtsev was back in Russia. The incident, however, served as a reminder that, irrespective of his new-found ‘legal’ status, there were members of the Russian police, whether resident in St Petersburg or Paris, who still bore a grudge and who would continue to harass him whenever and wherever the opportunity arose.

Corresponding with the enemy During his unexpected extended absence abroad, the ninth (September 1906) issue of The Past had appeared on the streets and had attracted the attention of many with the inclusion of an article by Mikhail Gots, co-founder of the Party of SocialistsRevolutionaries.174 It was a personal and highly critical reminiscence of Sergei Zubatov, whom the author had known as a revolutionary in the 1880s, long before the latter had betrayed his comrades, switched sides and risen to become Director of the Moscow Okhrana, Head of the Special Section of the Department of Police and creator of the socalled zubatovshchina.175 Burtsev had been following Zubatov’s career for some time. Ten years earlier, in the first issue of Narodovolets, he had mentioned him by name, breaking the news of his appointment as head of the Moscow Okhrana, and providing a biographical note in which he referred to Zubatov’s earlier notorious achievements as a provocateur.176 Imagine his surprise therefore when, on 22 November 1906, he received a letter from the ex-policeman, complaining about Gots’ article and wishing to correct some of the claims made. Burtsev immediately seized the opportunity to enter into correspondence with this infamous individual and, as a result, there ensued a long and interesting exchange of letters.177 Burtsev began by explaining to Zubatov how he ‘thirsted for the truth in the same way that a drunkard thirsts for vodka’, and urged him to write his memoirs and contribute materials to the journal.178 The journalist was, of course, aware that his letters would be intercepted and that Zubatov himself would be obliged to report the contact to his superiors, but it was his intention in so doing, to accustom the Department of Police to the fact that, as editor of The Past, involved in the study of the history of the revolutionary movement, he had every right to seek out all materials pertaining to his subject, including those held by ‘the enemy’. Even though Burtsev was completely open about his dealings with the police, some of his colleagues expressed concern, believing

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Zubatov might use the opportunity to feed him false information, while others were convinced the whole affair would simply end in Burtsev’s arrest. Nevertheless, he stubbornly continued, even offering to meet (an event which could never have taken place previously, but which he now felt might be possible thanks to the change in the political climate).179 Zubatov, perhaps somewhat to Burtsev’s surprise, agreed and suggested the journalist visit him in his retirement home in the town of Vladimir. Burtsev accepted the offer and proposed calling on him the following month; but by that time, Zubatov had reconsidered and had withdrawn his offer. Alarmed by the visit of a police agent who had been sent to interrogate him, the former policeman asked his irrepressible correspondent to stop writing to him before it ruined them both, expressing his concern at the possible consequences if they met up and happened to be photographed together.180 Burtsev reluctantly agreed, commenting, in passing, that he could not help but smile at the thought that their correspondence might have unpleasant consequences for this once powerful figure: ‘What a pretty pass we’ve come to that now it is Burtsev who might compromise Zubatov! How absurd life in Russia is at the moment!’181 Fortunately, not all police officers were so unwilling to meet the journalist. Indeed, no less a figure than former Chief of Police A. A. Lopukhin was, on several occasions, happy to be seen visiting the newspaper’s editorial offices, where he was assisting in the preparation of the memoirs of his relative, Prince Sergei Urusov, member of the Duma and vociferous critic of Trepov.182 Although at this time Lopukhin proved to be just as reluctant as Zubatov to provide Burtsev with information of any particular value, his attitude would change, with earth-shattering consequences, when they met up some two years later on the Cologne–Berlin train – an encounter which shall be described later in this study.

Closure of The Past Almost from its first issue, the journal had been a cause of some concern to the Central Office for Press Affairs, but it was not until the publication of the seventh (July 1906) issue, dedicated to the nihilist revolutionary S. G. Nechaev, that the alarm was raised. The censor had objected to the reproduction of some of Nechaev’s letters in which the latter had insulted the then reigning monarch. And it was for this bizarre ‘historical crime’ that the public prosecutor sentenced the unfortunate Shchegolev to two months’ imprisonment.183 From that point, pressure on Burtsev and his co-editors began to mount, and not only in relation to The Past. For some time Burtsev had been working on the compilation of a calendar of important dates in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement which, thanks again to the assistance of Paramonov, was scheduled to appear in the spring of 1907. Sadly, on the order of the Central Office for Press Affairs, almost the entire print run of this, the Historical-Revolutionary Almanac (Istoriko-revoliutsionnyi alʹmanakh izdatelʹstvo Shipovnik), was destroyed before publication.184 As for The Past, further cases continued to be brought against the editors, first in respect of the December 1906 issue, and then those of March and April 1907. The censor appeared to have been particularly riled by the March issue in which

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there had appeared a reminiscence of a sailor on board the Battleship Potemkin at the time of the uprising, a memoir which, the censor claimed, fomented revolution and sedition. The Central Office for Press Affairs duly placed a seizure order and passed a report onto the public prosecutor. Reprisals against the journal, however, did not stop there. In the early hours of 1 (14) April, the police initiated an unofficial search of the editorial offices and, although no incriminating material was found, numerous papers were confiscated. Such intimidation continued until the September issue which contained extracts from the diary of the academic V. P. Bezobrazov (1828–1829) who, during his illustrious career, had taught political economy to various Russian grand princes and whose diaries contained less-than-flattering comments about these and other members of the tsar’s family with whom he had come into contact. Minister of the Interior Stolypin himself had been warned in advance of the impending publication and had ordered the censor to ensure the diaries did not see the light of day. However, the editors somewhat rashly chose to ignore the order and rushed to print. Tsar Nicholas was said to be furious at the effrontery, exclaiming, ‘Now they have even dared to bring my family into it!’185 The Censor also found fault with another article in the September issue by the narodovolets N. S. Rusanov, which openly recommended the use of terror for the overthrow of the state. It was also noted that the article had used numerous quotes from a book entitled Revolutionary Journalism of the 70s, part of Paramonov’s Russian Historical Library series which, the censor claimed, had never been submitted for his approval. This was the final straw. On 29 October (11 November) the public prosecutor ordered that the journal be closed and issued a warrant for the arrest of the editors. The same day the Central Office for Press Affairs also asked for the October issue to be seized (a request later turned down by the public prosecutor) but this mattered little, for the Department of Police had already decided that to pursue the journal through the courts would be a lengthy process and had instead reverted to the tried and tested method of citing the Emergency Security Provisions.186 On 2 (15) November the Governor of St Petersburg, D. V. Drachevsky, ordered that the journal should cease publication and that Shchegolev be expelled from the city ‘for harmful political activities’.187 In total, Burtsev and his co-editors had succeeded in publishing twenty-two issues, comprising a total of some 7,000 pages of quality journalism.188 By the time the journal was finally closed down, Burtsev was already abroad and, given the gravity of the situation, had decided it would not be wise to return. As for his co-editors, Shchegolev was sentenced to two years in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress, while Bogucharsky was also arrested and imprisoned for one month before being sent into internal exile and then, in 1910, expelled from Russia.189 Paramonov fared only marginally better. His publishing house was forcibly closed down in 1907, while he himself was tried for contempt and for calling for the overthrow of the state.190 The editors and publisher, however, were not the only ones associated with The Past to be targeted by the police and to suffer harassment at their hands. One individual in particular was considered to pose a much greater threat than all of the above, and it was only some years later, during a secret meeting in a Frankfurt hotel, that Burtsev would discover a further and more compelling reason for the authorities’ vindictiveness towards The Past at that time.

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The Bakai factor On the night of 31 March (13 April) 1907 at the same time as the police were conducting their illegal search at the offices of The Past, another raid was being carried out at the flat of a young Russian by the name of Mikhail Efimovich Bakai. And it was no coincidence that the start of this individual’s active involvement in Burtsev’s journal some months earlier had been marked by a simultaneous increase in the levels of police harassment. His association with The Past dated back to the summer of 1906, when he first entered the editorial offices and asked for an interview with Vladimir Burtsev. Giving his name as Mikhailovsky, he explained that he was an officer in Special Operations in the Warsaw Okhrana and, declaring himself to be a Socialist-Revolutionary by inclination and thoroughly disillusioned with the Department of Police, he wished to offer Burtsev his services as an informant.191 He had joined the Okhrana in 1902 and, at first, had been relatively content with his work. In September 1905, however, with the appointment of a new superior, Pavel Pavlovich Zavarzin, the nature of his duties began to change. Over the following months, as the reaction was cranked up to deal with the growing civil unrest he witnessed an increase in the number of acts of cruelty by both the army and the police on the unfortunate protestors. He explained to Burtsev how the police had been given orders to snuff out all signs of protest and how his colleagues had seized the opportunity to take their revenge on those who, during the brief period of liberation, had made their lives difficult. He witnessed the police torturing some of those arrested and, indeed, had even heard tell of prisoners being murdered in their cells. His sympathy for the revolutionaries grew and, by the spring of April 1906, the young policeman had made up his mind to offer his services to the cause. As a first proof of his sincerity, Bakai offered up a list of names of individuals, all of whom he claimed were currently serving as police spies in Warsaw. Burtsev was initially suspicious of the young man’s motives but at the same time was intrigued by the offer of assistance. He therefore decided to put Bakai’s information to the test and passed the list on to the well-known Bundist, Rafael Abramovich.192 Burtsev later recalled the magnitude of his conversation with Abramovich and the horror he felt at the possibility that he might have made a huge mistake. He would later refer to that meeting as life-changing, for it signalled the precise moment he entered into the most terrifying period of his existence – for years to come, and on an almost daily basis, his life would be poisoned as a result. Burtsev attempted to describe the agony he endured when, having passed on information for verification, he then had to wait for the results to come back. At such times he would curse himself for getting involved in the pursuit of provocateurs. Indeed, on many occasions he fell into such a mood of depression that he felt a bullet in the head would be preferable to the torments he was enduring.193 Soon after that first fateful meeting, Abramovich had reported back confirming that the information supplied had, indeed, proved to be correct. Thereafter, as more and more of Bakai’s unbelievable revelations concerning police infiltration in the revolutionary ranks were found to have a basis in fact, Burtsev was obliged to accept his new informant’s sincerity and credibility and to attempt to come to terms with

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this new conjunction of two opposing worlds, each with its own morals, logic and interests.194 Over the next few months Bakai made numerous trips from Warsaw to St Petersburg for lengthy meetings with Burtsev, who willingly accepted all documents provided and who also encouraged the young policeman to write up his account of his Okhrana career. Bakai then applied for a reposting to the capital but was turned down and so, on 11 December 1906, on Burtsev’s suggestion, he resigned his post and entered the new year as a civilian on a pension of 1,000 roubles.195 As a result of the quality and quantity of the information received from his new source, Burtsev now began to focus less on the history of the Russian revolutionary movement and more on the unmasking of police spies and provocateurs operating within the ranks of that movement. The pages of The Past provided a convenient outlet for these startling revelations but, not surprisingly, they soon attracted the attention and concerns not only of the censor, but of the Department of Police. It is difficult to say exactly when Burtsev first started to publish the secret materials he had received from his informant, but one can state with some confidence that the information which appeared in the March 1907 issue under the title ‘From the Review of Highly Important Inquiries into Crimes against the State for 1901’ was obtained in this manner.196 The police were appalled to find the classified and confidential material contained therein laid open for public inspection and immediately launched an investigation.197 It was easy to trace the source of the leak back to the recently retired Bakai who was consequently arrested on the street on 31 March (13 April) at the same time as the police raid on the offices of The Past. On his person was found his manuscript reminiscence of his time in the Warsaw Okhrana and an article concerning the perlustration activities of the St Petersburg police’s ‘Black Cabinet’.198 Bakai was taken off to the Peter and Paul Fortress where he was detained for over six months. Eventually, rather than putting him on trial it was decided to sentence him, by ‘administrative order’, to three years’ exile in Eastern Siberia. Some commentators have expressed puzzlement at the sentence. But as would later become clear, the police were concerned that Bakai was in possession of yet further information which, were it to come out in open court, might cause a scandal and prove an even greater threat to the Russian state.199 In fact, important though the information which Bakai held was, it represented nothing more than a small piece in a huge jigsaw puzzle and it would take the analytical skills of Vladimir Burtsev to solve that conundrum.

The enigmatic agent ‘Raskin’ It was during his first meeting with Burtsev that Bakai had mentioned the existence of a traitor, a ‘super-spy’ in the senior ranks of the SRs who was known to the police by the soubriquet of ‘Raskin’. At that time Burtsev was still unsure whether Bakai was to be trusted and had found it difficult to believe that infiltration at such a level could be possible.200 As mentioned previously, Burtsev’s first brief encounter with the young Evno Fishelʹevich Azef had occurred in 1893, in Zurich, to where the maligned revolutionary had retired to nurse his wounds following the drama of his Marseilles

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adventure with Charlotte Bullier. Azef had just begun his studies at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and had only recently started to receive a salary of fifty roubles a month from the Russian Department of Police for the supply of information on active Russian revolutionary student groups in southern Germany and Switzerland. It was doubtless for this reason that in the summer of 1893 Azef found himself in Zurich.201 All that Burtsev could recall of their first meeting was the unpleasant impression the man had made on him. Pointing to Azef, one of Burtsev’s friends had said – ‘What a powerful man – interesting, young, energetic, he’s one of us!’ To which another responded –‘He’s a filthy animal!’202 Indeed, such a reaction was not uncommon in those who encountered the man for the first time. Most were repelled by his appearance and manner. One revolutionary was struck by his ‘protruding, dark, and filmy eyes’ which ‘reflected as little of his mind as those of a fish’.203 A few years after their first meeting, the arch provocateur wrote to Burtsev in London with a rare favourable response to his call in the pages of Narodovolets for the assassination of the tsar. Moreover, he also offered to distribute the journal and to put him in touch with revolutionary groups in Russia. However, despite Burtsev’s desperate need for support at that time, his memories of that earlier, thoroughly unpleasant encounter were still so strong that he did not deign even to reply.204 Clearly, although the young Azef meant nothing to Burtsev at that time, the same did not apply in reverse. Azef was only too aware of the position of significance held by the young émigré in the eyes of the Department of Police. In 1903, by which time he had already established himself as one of the Department’s most important sources of information on the revolutionaries, in a report from Berne to his control L. A. Rataev in Paris, Azef gave an indication of how important Burtsev had become to the authorities. Describing the mood of the revolutionaries currently in residence there and reporting on the ‘serious intentions’ of one particularly dangerous revolutionary who was on the point of returning to Russia, he ended with the comment that ‘The overall impression here is that “the Burtsevs” are growing and growing’.205 It appeared that the mild-mannered journalist was now so feared by the police that his name had become synonymous with that of ‘dangerous terrorist’. There is, however, reason to suspect that Azef himself did not believe this. There is no doubt that Rataev, Azef ’s controller, harboured a particular obsession with Burtsev who, he repeatedly claimed, was not only one of the founders of the SRs’ Combat Organization but one of those most deeply involved in its terrorist activities.206 But whoever his source for these accusations was, it was not Azef. For, while the reports of the latter contained detailed information on every member of the Combat Organization and every other senior SR of note, on no occasion did he claim that Burtsev was one of them. Besides, as has already been pointed out, Burtsev ‘was considered too meek and gentle to mix into current terrorist plotting’, was never admitted to any inner revolutionary councils and indeed was never involved in any assassination conspiracies.207

A St Petersburg encounter While Burtsev still maintained a certain distance from the Socialists-Revolutionaries and did not participate directly in the planning or execution of their terrorist acts, he

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nevertheless – at least in the first years of the new century – espoused such actions. However, by the time of his next encounter with Azef, his position had changed. Shortly after his return to Russia in 1905 he had learned that the Combat Organization was planning further acts of terror, a political programme from which he had now distanced himself, believing that only by adopting a more cautious approach would the opposition have any chance of persuading the government to deliver on the promises of October and to build on these achievements. As 1905 was drawing to a close, the tension in St Petersburg was palpable. Burtsev recalled that ‘a strong smell of gunpowder hung in the revolutionary air’, while another described the period as living on a volcano and gradually being poisoned by its gases.208 Burtsev attempted as best he could to clear the air and lower the tension by dissuading his comrades from any rash act, advocating (yet again) the need for unification and an alliance between socialists and Kadets. He was particularly firm in his opposition to the Left’s boycott of the new Duma, believing that the tsar could, in time, be held to his promise to transform it from a deliberative to a legislative body. As an editor of The Past, he had been allowed entry to the meetings of the Duma and although he held out no great hopes for it achieving anything of a concrete nature, he was, nevertheless, excited by the idea of parliamentarianism and believed that, if nothing else, it could help further the political education of the masses. He also believed that, at that moment in time, Russia was not ready for social revolution, that revolutionaries on their own would be unable even to defend what they had gained so far, and that to achieve success, unity was essential. Then, all that was required was time and caution. Unfortunately, in revolutionary circles, this stance met with little sympathy. From the moment of its first meeting on 27 April (May 10) 1906 the Duma rushed into making up lost ground as it tabled a range of motions, some progressive, some radical: an amnesty for political prisoners; the need to find a rapid solution to the agrarian question; demands for political and personal freedoms; and the demand that the tsar’s ministers be answerable to the Duma. Members launched an enquiry into pogroms and provocations conducted by the Department of Police and, a month later, voted for the cancellation of the death penalty. This all proved too much for Goremykin’s government and, indeed, for the tsar. Consequently, the First Duma barely managed to survive two months before, on 8 July, an ustav was promulgated for its dissolution. With the retirement of Goremykin and the appointment of P. A. Stolypin as President of Council of Ministers, it was clear that, as Burtsev had feared, a new reaction was about to set in. Within days political clubs and progressive newspapers were closed down. A number of Duma members, led by the Kadet leader Paul Milyukov, had fled to Vyborg in Finland from where they attempted to rally support via a Manifesto in which they advocated a policy of passive resistance and called on the public to refuse to pay taxes and to avoid the draft. The action met with little success – the government reacted by seizing the presses on which the declaration was printed and arresting the signatories and banning them from participation in any future Duma. Meanwhile, uprisings in Sveaborg and in the Kronstadt naval base were crushed and, as the summer progressed, further reprisals were carried out against mutineers and anyone else who dared raise their voice in protest. Under this newly

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repressive regime, members of the Combat Organization, together with anyone else of a radical persuasion, were obliged either to leave the capital or else maintain a very low profile. It was therefore with some astonishment that, on one of those days during that tense summer of 1906, while walking along the English Embankment in the centre of the capital, Burtsev recognized none other than Azef coming towards him in an open carriage accompanied by his young wife.209 Although Burtsev had not as yet become personally acquainted with the terrorist, he did know his wife and was suddenly seized by a panic that she might recognize him and wave or call out, thereby attracting the attention of the police spies who had habitually been following the journalist wherever he went since his return.210 Fearing that this could end badly for Azef, he turned away and hurriedly passed by. Fortunately, nothing untoward occurred but the incident did strike Burtsev as particularly odd: if he could recognize Azef from such a distance then, surely, so could every police spy in St Petersburg. He could only surmise that Azef was not arrested immediately because the police already had an informant working in his close circle who was supplying them with all the information they needed. In other words, there might indeed be some truth in Bakai’s claim that the mysterious ‘Raskin’ was to be found amongst those in Azef ’s immediate circle.211 Earlier in the summer, Burtsev had asked Bakai to approach his police contacts to try to ascertain why certain terrorist operations were successful while others failed. Prior to the opening of the First Duma, the Combat Organization had set itself the task of carrying out a range of attacks on the likes of P. N. Durnovo, F. B. Dubasov, G. P. Chukhnin, N. K. Riman, G. A. Gapon and P. I. Rachkovsky but, one after the other, these attempts had met with failure.212 Bakai approached I. V. Dobroskok, the Head of the Political Section, who replied that such terrorist acts only ever met with success if their informant happened to be absent from St Petersburg when they were carried out. With this fresh information, Burtsev turned his attention to the other members of the Combat Organization to try to identify the whereabouts of each at the time of such attacks, but was unable to come up with one name that fitted the bill. It was at this moment, as he later recalled, that the thought almost involuntarily entered his head: what if ‘Raskin’ was, in fact, Azef himself? At this point, however, Burtsev, had no proof to offer. When Bakai had first mentioned the informant’s codename, he had been unable to give any other details as to his identity, other than the intriguing snippet that in Warsaw in 1904 a senior detective had told him that the informant in question had come to the city to have a meeting with an engineer by the name of Dushevsky but that the meeting, for whatever reason, had not gone as planned. Burtsev succeeded in tracking Dushevsky down and had arranged a meeting with him but, before any progress could be made, events overtook him and he was obliged, once more, to flee his country. For the time being, therefore, Burtsev would have to postpone his investigations, but it would not be long before the Sherlock Holmes of the Revolution would succeed in finally unmasking the mysterious agent ‘Raskin’, thereby uncovering a political scandal which would rock the Russian government and result in a remarkable blaze of international publicity.

Part II

The Sherlock Holmes of the Revolution

lui, le Sherlock Holmes de la révolution russe, lʹhomme qui démasqua Azeff1

5

1907–1914: The Second Emigration

A Finnish interlude Bakai’s arrest had spurred Burtsev into action and, taking advantage of his recently granted rights as an associate of The Past to move freely both within Russia and abroad, he applied for and received a foreign passport. The following day he managed to throw his police tails of his scent, board a train at the Warsaw Station and successfully cross the border, there to enter into what he termed his period of semi-emigration. Over the next few months he would spend time in Paris and also visit Switzerland and Italy before leaving again for Finland. There he checked into a hotel in Terijoki (now Zelenogorsk) near the Russian border. During his time in Finland, Burtsev would occasionally visit his friend and co-editor Yakovlev-Bogucharsky at the latter’s country residence nearby. An intriguing and revealing reminiscence dates from this time. The memoirist, on this occasion, was the writer and historical bibliographer Sergei Mintslov, who lived in the area and who, in his diary entry for 18 June 1907, described his encounter with Burtsev: Slightly above medium height and somewhat thin with a kind of pointed head covered in an unkempt mass of greying hair, this man is in a state of perpetual infancy: a trusting, naive idealist, he creates a somewhat strange impression on those he meets for the first time. I met him several times in the editorial offices of The Past. He is a sincere and straightforward man. This year he earned around 12,000 roubles and gave much of it to the cause of the revolution, but his friends took most of it away from him, because he simply does not know how to handle money. He always looks slovenly and has the air of the kind of person who hasn’t quite managed to wash properly; today he was enthusiastically engaged in fishing, and stood on the jetty in the sun without hat or coat, and with no collar and cuffs. He talked about his idea of setting up a Museum of the Revolution, and how a number of people were already actively collecting materials for it; to that end we both had a root around in my library.1

A week later Burtsev paid Mintslov a visit: He has become terribly interested in fishing, and stands for hours on the jetty hoping to catch some hapless perch. He couldn’t find any worms [at Yakovlev’s] and so he came to see if I had any, crawling around on his knees, in his faithful

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coat, picking around in a pile of manure with a stick, having refused the knife I had offered for the purpose on the grounds that it was not sufficiently poetic! He amused Yakovlev and I: while the latter, a passionate hunter, was tinkering with his gun Burtsev exclaimed – ‘I beg you, please take that thing away from me. As you know, as a dangerous terrorist, I am extremely afraid of such things!’ This pleasantry perfectly summed the man up. The more you found out about Burtsev the more convinced you became that he was no more than a genuine, if prematurely greying, child. Anyhow, as it turned out, he couldn’t find enough worms for his fishing and so set about sticking slices of smoked sausage on to his hook; I advised him that to be sure of success he should also fasten a little tot of vodka onto another hook; sadly, and much to his regret, none of the perch in our lake were foolish enough to take his bait that day.2

It is a curious fact that, at the same time as Burtsev was indulging in such light-hearted amusements on the Finnish Border, General-Major A. M. Eremin, Head of the Special Section of the Department of Police, was sending out an urgent, top-secret circular to the heads of all Okhrana departments and gendarmerie border posts in the empire warning them to be on the lookout for Burtsev and his dangerous terrorist group of more than twenty revolutionaries who were preparing to enter Russia to carry out an act of terror. Although the source of this information is not recorded, one may assume that it came from the offices of the Foreign Agency in Paris, who were also responsible for an equally alarming communication a few months later in which they warned that Burtsev was setting up his very own Combat Unit in the French capital. This report was taken at face value by one commentator, who believed that it was ‘consistent with his [Burtsev’s] long-standing objective of using a series of sensational terrorist acts to shake the Russian autocracy’.3 In fact, it is much more likely that the report in question was pulled out of thin air by Garting, like so many of the reports manufactured by his predecessors Rachkovsky and Rataev. Uninterested in the pursuit of wild game and apparently unable even to catch a fish, Burtsev would soon demonstrate where his real strength lay and it had nothing to do with preparing bomb outrages or setting up terrorist groups. Rather, it lay in the dogged pursuit and exposure of police spies and provocateurs, and Evno Fishelʹevich Azef, Head of the Combat Organization of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, was by any standards a ‘big fish’.

Clandestine meetings and unexpected encounters Although he was not involved directly in terrorist plotting, there is no question that Burtsev did associate with practitioners of the art. (Indeed, as we shall see below, it was even claimed that during his later Parisian emigration he renewed his interest in the science of bomb-making.)4 The Finnish border at this time was a hive of revolutionary activity and, although it would have been foolhardy for Burtsev himself to cross back into Russia, he was nevertheless able to receive numerous visitors, including

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Leonid Rakovsky, one of his St Petersburg police informers, and also Albert Trauberg (alias ‘Karl’), the head of the Combat Organization’s ‘Northern Flying Squad’. In his discussions with the latter over the failures of recent terrorist attempts, Burtsev had raised the subject of police infiltration and then, after swearing his visitor to secrecy, told him of his suspicions of Azef. Initially, Trauberg was unable to countenance the possibility but gradually, as the evidence was laid before him, he came round to Burtsev’s point of view. Unfortunately, in the event, Trauberg would be unable to provide assistance in the matter for he too would shortly fall victim to Azef ’s treachery. Acting on information supplied by the latter, the police arrested the young terrorist in November and he was executed the following May. Meanwhile, although the real identity of the traitor ‘Raskin’ was yet to be revealed to them, those editors of The Past who were still in St Petersburg had felt it important that Bakai’s information be passed on to the SRs, and so, in the early autumn of 1907, Shchegolev had travelled to Helsinki specifically to inform Boris Savinkov. Unfortunately, as Burtsev would later discover, the latter unwittingly passed the information on to none other than Azef himself. He, in turn, immediately contacted his superior A. V. Gerasimov in the St Petersburg Okhrana, with the demand that he find out the source of the information, close down the journal and deal with Burtsev and all those associated with it. It was for this reason, above any other, that the issue of The Past for 28 October 1907 had proved to be its last. It was in Terijoki that Burtsev learned that Bakai was shortly to be sent into exile for his association with the journal (and with him in particular) and felt it incumbent on himself to try to make amends. While Bakai was still being held in transit prison in St Petersburg, Burtsev managed to transmit a message laying out his rescue plan. Before his convoy entered too deeply into Siberia, Bakai was to feign illness, obliging his gendarme guards to leave him behind before continuing their journey with the other prisoners. Burtsev would then send a contact to assist him in his escape. In due course, news reached Terijoki that the ruse had succeeded and that Bakai was in Tyumenʹ, in western Siberia, awaiting assistance. Burtsev immediately contacted the SR leader Viktor Chernov to ask if his party might be able to provide funding for the venture. He gave no specific details as to the identity of the individual, but stressed the extreme importance and value of this exile to the revolutionary cause. Burtsev’s word was apparently enough for Chernov, who sent an advance and promised to bring the remainder himself to his hotel the following week. Anxious to set his escape plan in motion as quickly as possible, rather than waiting for these monies to arrive, Burtsev took out an interim loan, which he gave to Sofʹia Savinkova, younger sister of Boris the renowned terrorist, before sending her off to her Siberian rendezvous with Bakai.5 The following week, at the hour agreed with Chernov, there was a knock on Burtsev’s hotel room door. On opening it, he was aghast to find not Chernov standing there but Azef himself. The visitor appeared nervous in the extreme, perhaps expecting Burtsev to confront him immediately and declare him a traitor. Barely having time to think, Burtsev rushed up and greeted him warmly, declaring how pleased he was to meet him at last. Azef ’s fear and uncertainty subsided as the two entered into conversation. He explained that Chernov had told him of Burtsev’s plans and had asked him to deliver the monies.

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From his questions it appeared to Burtsev that his visitor not only knew about his police contact, Rakovsky, but might already have guessed the identity of the individual who was to be rescued in Siberia. In Burtsev’s view it was therefore almost beyond doubt that the game was up. There was nothing else for it but to attempt to keep up the pretence, and so he launched into a tale of woe, complaining about the lack of support he received from the Socialists-Revolutionaries; that he wasn’t understood by Chernov and his like, who were only interested in theoretical questions; and about how excellent it would be if he, Azef, a true ‘practical revolutionary’, would enter into a joint venture with him in his fight against the Department of Police. The double agent, thus suitably flattered and relieved that his cover had not in fact been blown, agreed to Burtsev’s proposal that they meet up again the following week to discuss further. He then took his leave. Having closed the door after his departing visitor, Burtsev was overwhelmed with feelings of impending doom, convinced not only that his arrest was now imminent but also that Bakai’s escape plan had been foiled and that his young rescuer too had doubtless been detained. It came, therefore, as an immense relief when, a few days later, Savinkova arrived at his hotel in Terijoki and proudly presented Bakai to him before relating the details of their Siberian adventure. Following her arrival in Tyumenʹ, Bakai had been temporarily released from prison to spend a few days at liberty in a flat with his ‘newly arrived wife’. Their meeting, however, was interrupted by the police who carried out a minute search of the flat, informing Bakai that a telegram had just been received from St Petersburg with orders that the convict was to continue his journey to his final place of exile without further delay and that he should therefore prepare for imminent departure. That very day, he and Savinkova separately fled Tyumenʹ under cover of darkness, before meeting up again and continuing their journey to freedom.6 Although Burtsev had not given Bakai’s name to Azef during their meeting, he was convinced the telegram had been sent at the latter’s insistence: it would have been a simple matter for him to make a few enquiries and find out the identity of the former policeman recently sent into exile. It is of interest to note that Burtsev declined at this point to voice his suspicions to Bakai or to mention Azef by name. Instead, he insisted he leave immediately for Paris, via Sweden, and it was only when he received news of Bakai’s safe arrival in Stockholm a few days later that Burtsev too managed to board a steamer in the Finnish port of Åbo (Turka) and embark on his second period of full emigration.

To Paris: The revolutionary detective agency takes root Within a few days of his arrival in Paris, Burtsev had found accommodation in the 14th arrondissement – an area popular with Russian émigrés – and had again begun to work intensively with Bakai.7 Despite the pair’s proven track record in unmasking provocateurs, many in the Parisian émigré community, while more than happy for these exposures to continue, disagreed with the means Burtsev used to achieve these ends. His open association with policemen, and with Bakai in particular, was frowned

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upon as unbecoming for a revolutionary. Many felt he was leaving himself open to traps and pleaded with him to drop Bakai, a request which Burtsev refused. During their brief meeting in Finland, Bakai, at Burtsev’s request, had drawn up a list of the names of fifty or so provocateurs. They now passed these names to the political parties concerned and awaited their response. Meanwhile, Burtsev picked out one of the names on the list – that of М. А. Kensinsky, an active member of the Maximalist Party and Secretary at their last conference – and publicly accused him of being a police spy. The accusation caused an uproar of protest (not least from Kensinsky himself) but, after his first interrogation when his guilt was proved beyond all doubt, he was obliged to go into hiding, leaving his former comrades at a complete loss as to what to do. Burtsev succeeded in tracking him down and invited him to a private meeting, where he offered him an escape route, saying that if he would agree to break with his Okhrana masters and provide information on their operations, then he would guarantee him an income for the next two years. Although Kensinsky hesitated, complaining of how difficult life was for the likes of him and how Burtsev simply didn’t understand the ‘emotions’ he suffered, a financial agreement was eventually reached. Unfortunately, at this time, none of the political parties thought the struggle against provocation was important enough to lend money for the purpose of paying off a police agent and so nothing came of it. The police spy then vanished from the scene. This exposure, carried out within a few weeks of Burtsev’s arrival in Paris, effectively marked the beginning of his new career as spy-buster. The new venture seemed to consume him entirely, with many of his colleagues wishing he would devote as much energy to his literary and journalistic activities, such as the promised renewal of his historical journal The Past. However, due to his financial difficulties, Burtsev was unable to undertake this task immediately, and, moreover, it appeared that, for the foreseeable future, no support would be forthcoming from Russia for this or similar projects.8 Besides which, he had enough to occupy himself. For, although the Kensinsky exposure had ruffled more than a few revolutionary feathers, it was nothing compared to the furore which greeted the next two Burtsev-inspired revelations. In April he and Bakai were the subject of an attack from Poland, where their earlier accusation against the renowned writer Stanisław Brzozowski had been neither forgotten nor forgiven. The renewed onslaught was mounted following the publication of an article in a journal which, without making any changes or giving any commentary, had simply reproduced in its entirety Bakai’s rough list of collaborators. The incident resulted not only in increased criticism of Burtsev from the Polish revolutionaries but, as would later become clear, it also irked Bakai, who felt his trust had been abused, despite Burtsev’s assurances that he had passed the list to the party strictly for information only and that he too had been let down.9 Even greater upset was caused in June of that year when, having been informed that the veteran revolutionary Starodvorsky had broken his earlier promise and had reentered political life, Burtsev decided to publish the damning four pleas for clemency he had in his possession. Such an attack on this revolutionary martyr brought forth cries of disbelief and anger from a wide spectrum of the emigration and, as will be discussed below, the repercussions of the act, justified though it may have been, would almost consume Burtsev and blight his reputation for years to come.

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Shortly after his arrival in Paris, Burtsev had gained the support and assistance of a group of ‘left SR’ émigrés, whose members included A. D. Gnatovsky, Y. L. Yudelevich and V. K. Agafonov, all of whom were convinced of infiltration in their party. In the months and years to come, as Burtsev became subject to more and more vicious attacks from his former revolutionary comrades, he would be grateful for their loyal support and assistance. It was also at that time that he renewed and strengthened other friendships. The first was with Boris Savinkov (despite the latter being one of Azef ’s firmest defenders); and another with the veteran radical German Lopatin whom Burtsev had known and admired from the very earliest days of his revolutionary career. It was thanks, in part, to the assistance, encouragement and endeavour of the latter that Burtsev was at last able to renew publication of The Past.

The Parisian Past Despite all the clamour and distraction surrounding his recent exposures, in July 1908 Burtsev was, nevertheless, able to restart publication of his beloved journal, The Past.10 The first edition was well received, as were the seven which followed. The first issue owed a great deal to its St Petersburg predecessor: it is clear that the editor had brought many of the journal’s documents and papers into emigration with him; indeed, some of the articles were direct continuations of the ones which had appeared first in St Petersburg.11 One commentator has pointed to the fact that in the Parisian journal the Social Democrats were scarcely mentioned and that, as far as the editor was concerned, it was as if that particular political party did not exist. That is not to say, however, that Social Democrats were banned from contributing: at least one such, Dmitry Sverchkov, not only contributed an article but was also employed for a time in the editorial offices at 50 Rue St Jacques. Sverchkov left a brief reminiscence of his time there, in which he alluded to Burtsev’s famed generosity, recalling that he was paid the substantial sum of five francs for no more than five or six hours work a day. But more intriguing were his other memories: Even now I recall the remarkable nonsense I had to type up for Burtsev (which caused much hilarity on the part of Yuly Martov and Fyodor Dan who had occasion to read some of it). It included both scientific articles on the construction of bombs and missiles, and also pornographic novels which would in no way meet even the most modest demands of the censor.12

This is a fascinating recollection, all the more so since, to date, no other reference to Burtsev’s apparent interest in pornography has been found. This rather odd claim is therefore difficult to corroborate. Similarly, there is no other contemporary reference to Burtsev renewing that interest in bomb-making, which he had shown in Paris almost twenty years earlier. Much more easily verifiable, on the other hand, is Sverchkov’s recollection of the enjoyment he obtained from copying out Department of Police reports to Nicholas II dating from the late 1890s, which were notable for their compilers’ complete lack of grammar. These reports, first described in issue number

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seven of The Past, would be published separately the following year under the title Tsarsky listok (The Tsar’s List/Newspaper) and were especially revealing since they bore the tsar’s own manuscript annotations, showing that he was not only aware of the somewhat lax regard to legality displayed by his police officers but also that he condoned the practice.13 The first issue of the Paris journal also contained an article in which Burtsev acquainted his public with the history of his meeting and early association with Bakai and a fascinating extract from the reminiscences of the latter on the Russian system of ‘Black Cabinets’ – that same article which had been found on Bakai’s person following his arrest on the streets of St Petersburg the previous spring.

Gathering evidence Serious though the misdemeanours of Kensinsky, Brzozowski and Starodvorsky undoubtedly were, Burtsev did not allow them to divert him from his main goal, and now that he was safely out of reach of the Okhrana, he could set about gathering incontrovertible proof of Azef ’s guilt and laying that proof before the SRs. One of his first tasks was to renew contact with the engineer Dushevsky following their interrupted meeting in St Petersburg, and question him in more detail on his encounter with ‘Raskin’. He managed to track Dushevsky down to Lausanne and there heard the full story of how Nikolai Rubakin (later a noted émigré librarian and bibliographer but active at that time in an illegal student circle) had sent a certain SR to meet him at his home but Dushevsky, mistrusting his appearance and taking him for a spy, had refused to have anything to do with him. As it so happened, Rubakin was also in Lausanne at that time and when Burtsev asked him the name of the SR he had sent to Warsaw he simply replied ‘Azef ’.14 Although such testimony might be regarded as a strong indication of guilt, Burtsev was aware it would hardly stand up in court as incontrovertible proof and so he filed the information away and continued to seek further evidence that would put the matter beyond doubt. Until now he had kept Bakai out of the loop regarding his suspicions of Raskin’s real identity. But now he confronted him by asking what the police in his time knew about the leaders of the SR Party and listed the names of Chernov, Natanson and others while also including the name of Azef. Bakai replied that he recognized all except the last, and when Burtsev expressed his surprise, assuring him that Azef was not only prominent in the party but was the head of its Combat Organization, his colleague responded in disbelief: ‘You must be joking, Vladimir Lʹvovich. For me not to know the name of the head of the Combat Organization would be like saying I didn’t know the name of the Director of the Department of Police!’15 But, as Burtsev began to lay before him the evidence so far accumulated, it became apparent to Bakai that the only reason the name Azef was never mentioned in police circles was because he was one of them. Now the two set about cementing their case. Burtsev dictated letters for Bakai to send to former police colleagues, seeking either to persuade them to send information on provocation or to come and join them to live the good life in Paris. This ruse

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produced a lengthy correspondence with I. V. Dobroskok of the Petersburg Okhrana (and through him, his superior Gerasimov).16 Burtsev, of course, believed not a word of the information they gave but used it instead in a counter-analytical manner: for example, asking if they knew the names in a specific list (all of which were fictitious except that of Azef). Dobroskok not only replied in the negative as expected but also attempted at the same time to smear two other prominent SRs whose names had not been mentioned. At Burtsev’s request Bakai also visited the former head of the Foreign Agency, Rataev, who was now living in retirement in Paris. Although the latter was happy to admit to knowing all about senior Socialists-Revolutionaries such as Natanson, Chernov and Gershuni, he too denied all knowledge of the name Azef.17 It was as if the man were a ghost.

Azef in London – the final affront It also emerged that accusations against Azef had already been brought to the attention of the Socialists-Revolutionaries themselves.18 For example, in August 1905 the Central Committee had received an anonymous letter in which two party members, Azef (under his party name Vinogradov) and a certain Tatarov, were named as police agents.19 The Central Committee, however, simply refused to give any credence to this (or indeed to several other accusations which surfaced around the same time) and took no action against their chief. But three years had passed since then and the SRs were now again obliged to entertain suspicions of police infiltration and question the failure of their recent operations in St Petersburg. As early as March 1908, therefore, they had set up a commission of enquiry whose initial investigations were conducted in the utmost secrecy, with the involvement of only a few trusted individuals (including V. M. Zenzinov and the inevitable Natanson). Burtsev was invited to give a full account of himself and he duly obliged.20 But, having made his accusations known to the commission, he did not then simply rest on his laurels; rather, he continued his pursuit of Azef with renewed vigour. The work of the commission was interrupted later that summer when the SRs crossed the Channel to hold a secret party conference in Notting Hill, London.21 Before the conference had ended, however, Burtsev received the astonishing news from a returning delegate, that one of those present had been none other than Azef himself. He could neither conceal his disbelief nor contain his anger at this revelation.22 Appalled at the news that, despite being under investigation accused of police collaboration, the party was still permitting Azef to participate at a senior level at this supposedly secret conference, Burtsev sent an express letter to his old SR acquaintance Aleksei Teplov in London, asking him to lodge a protest on his behalf. But not only did Chernov, Natanson and their colleagues in the SR Central Committee fail to provide an explanation; rather they turned their anger on Burtsev, accusing him of making baseless accusations and, moreover, broadcasting these suspicions to others (such as the unfortunate Trauberg) before bringing them to the attention of the party authorities. They persuaded Teplov not to raise the matter at the conference, saying that they intended shortly to call Burtsev before a tribunal of honour, where he would

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be obliged to defend himself on a charge of slander. On his return to Paris, Chernov attended various meetings of the Russian colony, where he reported on the Congress and, without naming names, spoke with disgust about the libellous rumours being spread by a ‘certain individual’ against a very prominent member of their party, and that, until recently, ‘that snake had been elusive but they would soon be able to catch it by the tail, and the accuser would then be exposed and nailed to the cross of shame’.23 The date of the tribunal had not yet been set but, although Burtsev had amassed a great deal of circumstantial evidence pointing to Azef ’s guilt, most worryingly for him, he had not yet managed to establish conclusive proof. Then suddenly, as if almost by a miracle, in September 1908, he had an encounter which, in retrospect, would prove to be one of the most important meetings of his life.

A meeting on the Cologne–Berlin train Another police contact cultivated by Burtsev and another of those who had travelled to Terijoki the previous year to pay him a visit was the former Chief of Police A. A. Lopukhin.24 The meeting had been somewhat rushed and unsatisfactory, but Lopukhin had agreed to meet again the next time he was abroad, mentioning that he often spent the summer in Germany in a small village near Cologne. Burtsev did not give it another thought and so it was that, quite out of the blue, in early September 1908, he received news from a mutual acquaintance, A. I. Braudo, librarian at the Imperial Public Library in St Petersburg, that Lopukhin was on the point of returning home to Russia from his summer retreat. (It would later transpire that the former Chief of Police had written earlier to Burtsev suggesting they meet but, due to the latter having recently moved to a new address in Paris, the letter had not arrived.) Burtsev dropped everything and set off to Cologne station where he kept watch for Lopukhin’s arrival. The latter duly appeared and boarded the Berlin train. Burtsev followed suit at a distance but did not approach him in his carriage until the train had left the station. The two now had before them a lengthy journey during which they might discuss matters of mutual interest without fear of interruption. Burtsev later summarized their discussion in an interview given in 1928, a few days after Lopukhin’s death.25 Although he believed the former Chief of Police knew Azef ’s identity, he did not think he was fully au courant with all of the latter’s murderous activities. He did not wish to place his companion in the awkward position of feeling obliged to disclose privileged information and so began slowly, detailing his work in Paris since his emigration and his continuing fight against police provocation. Then he declared that he already knew the identity of the most powerful provocateur currently working within the SR Party and was aware of all the names and pseudonyms (such as ‘Raskin’ and ‘Vinogradov’) that the latter used as his Okhrana cover. Even though he was sure Lopukhin knew the identity of the individual, Burtsev asked that he be allowed to relate what he knew before naming him. Then, quite simply, he would ask Lopukhin to say whether he was right or wrong. His companion raised no objections and listened attentively as the tale unfolded.

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When the narrator described the provocateur’s role in the assassination of Plehve it was clear from Lopukhin’s distressed reaction that he had been completely unaware of the fact. Similarly, the policeman had known nothing of the double agent’s involvement in the murder of Grand Duke Sergei, but when Burtsev finally announced that the provocateur had also taken part in preparations for an attempted tsaricide, Lopukhin was scarcely able to hide his disgust and moral outrage.26 It was at this point, according to Burtsev, that the Chief of Police uttered the words which would later become famous: ‘I know of no Raskin, but I did meet the engineer Evno Azef several times.’27 Even although Burtsev was already in no doubt as to Azef ’s provocation, this confirmation by the former Director of Police struck him like a thunderbolt. On their arrival in Berlin he quickly took his leave of Lopukhin and returned to Paris.

The court of honour The SRs seemed to be in no hurry to commence their promised trial and so Burtsev sent them a draft of a declaration in which he now openly accused Azef of provocation and which he threatened to publish unless proceedings began without further delay. This had the desired effect and soon afterwards, at the end of October 1908, the trial opened in the Lavrov Library at 50 Rue Lhomond in Paris’s 5th arrondissement.28 Burtsev readily agreed to the proposed composition of the tribunal which was to consist of Kropotkin, Lopatin and Vera Figner, the so-called ‘Joan of Arc of the revolution’.29 The SRs made it clear to the judges that their sole task was to decide, not on the guilt or innocence of Azef but on whether or not Burtsev had slandered a prominent party activist. Azef himself refused to attend the trial but was kept up to date with developments and also maintained direct contact with Savinkov, who, together with Chernov and Natanson, acted for the prosecution. It was Chernov who opened proceedings with a four-hour speech in which he praised Azef ’s qualities as a revolutionary giant and denied the seriousness of each of Burtsev’s charges against him. He also referred to the various previous attempts to slander the great man which the party had dismissed in short order. Burtsev responded to each of these points, advancing as evidence Bakai’s correspondence with Dobroskok and his meetings with Rataev and others. He then continued detailing his summer meetings in Lausanne with Dushevsky and Rubakin before refuting all of Chernov’s conclusions. Finally, Burtsev introduced his bombshell, declaring to the court that he was in possession of certain other information relating to Azef which he could deliver only if he received the word of honour of the SR representatives that they would never make use of that information without first obtaining the express consent of the court. Having duly received the agreement of all present he embarked on his account of his meeting with Lopukhin on the Cologne–Berlin train. His audience listened attentively and without interruption until he reached the part where Lopukhin specifically named Azef as a police informer. At this the court erupted, with everyone rising from their seats in horror. The prosecutors were thunderstruck by the damning revelation. Once the commotion had abated Burtsev continued his tale but already the damage had been

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done. Natanson attempted to recover his composure, claiming that when he related his story in the train Burtsev must have prompted Lopukhin to name Azef. Lopukhin, he surmised, had simply made use of the occasion to repeat an old slander against Azef and, after all, what else could one expect from a former Chief of Police.30 The court continued its deliberations for almost a month, cross-examining Burtsev and calling other witnesses. The SRs meanwhile continued to paint Azef in the most flattering of lights, never for a moment admitting to the possibility that Burtsev might have a case. The latter went on to describe how Azef was invariably mistrusted and taken for a spy by those who met him for the first time such as evidenced by Dushevsky. Finally, there was some discussion of ‘the dark side’ of Azef ’s life which his defenders strongly refuted. Later it was revealed that not only had there been much in the spy’s life that should have compromised him both as a revolutionary and as a private person but his fellow SRs had known all about this aspect of the man.31 In Burtsev’s view it was the ‘hypnosis of partiinostʹ’, to which Chernov and Natanson were always susceptible, which had obliged them to avert their eyes to all this and portray Azef in the manner that the purposes of their party required.32 Throughout the trial these two leading SRs were barely able to conceal their hatred of Burtsev and their desire to destroy him. Their loathing of Bakai, who had come voluntarily to the trial to give evidence, was no less marked. The prosecution quizzed him in depth about his escape from Siberia, implying that it had been effected so easily that the police must have been involved in some way, and demanded he tell them who had arranged his escape. When the witness explained that it was Burtsev’s plan and that he had sent an envoy to Tyumenʹ to help him, they demanded he reveal the envoy’s identity. Bakai said he would gladly do so if Burtsev gave him permission. At this point, and despite the gravity of the situation, Burtsev decided to have some fun with his colleague’s tormentors and refused to give his permission, promising the court that the envoy was fully trustworthy, known to all of them and that their identity was incidental to the current proceedings. This riled Natanson and Chernov, who sensed Burtsev had something to hide and pressed him all the more to allow Bakai to answer the question. For some considerable time Burtsev continued to prevaricate, until the tribunal ruled that the name be disclosed. Lopatin, in particular, recalled his great alarm, believing that the SRs might have found some chink in Burtsev’s armour, but when Bakai revealed that his Siberian saviour was none other than Sofʹia Savinkova, the veteran revolutionary could hardly contain his glee. Natanson and Chernov were obliged to withdraw quietly, more than a little crestfallen. Nevertheless, the two still refused to give up their attack, accusing Burtsev of having been duped by the Department of Police who, they claimed, had engineered the whole thing, setting up an entire conspiracy involving Bakai, Lopukhin, Dobroskok and so on. While not denying Burtsev’s earlier success in unmasking provocateurs, they attempted to imply that these too were simply sacrifices that the police had made in order to obtain their prize – the scalp of the great Azef. Burtsev attempted to show the irrationality of their argument, saying that they appeared to be clutching at straws – and again, all for the sake of their narrow party interests. Savinkov also had the opportunity to perform the role of prosecutor, which he successfully carried out with considerably more dignity than his associates. He spoke

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passionately and at length of Azef ’s unrivalled revolutionary career, of his personal involvement in a whole range of political assassinations and how, with such an apparently spotless reputation, the party had found it easy to dismiss out of hand the earlier accusations against him and to treat them as no more than clumsy attempts by the police to blacken his name. As he came to the end of his speech, Savinkov turned to Burtsev and asked if he, as a historian of the revolution, knew of any name in the history of the movement more dazzling than that of Azef. ‘No,’ Burtsev replied, In the whole of the Russian revolutionary movement I know of no more dazzling name than that of Azef. His name and his deeds are more dazzling than the names and deeds of Zheliabov, Sazonov, and Gershuni, but that would only be on one condition – if he were indeed a genuine revolutionary. Unfortunately, I am convinced that he is a provocateur, a police spy and the greatest scoundrel imaginable!33

Confirmation of guilt: Lopukhin reinterviewed Towards the end of October the SRs asked the court’s permission to postpone proceedings to allow them to make further enquiries relating to the case. Burtsev took advantage of the interruption to break free temporarily from his ongoing personal nightmare and rush off to visit his old friend Alexander Amfiteatrov on the Italian Riviera.34 The prosecutors meanwhile, in the hope they might find some fault in Lopukhin’s statement, sent their own man, Central Committee member Andrei Argunov, to St Petersburg to interview him and check on the veracity of Burtsev’s testimony. Soon, much to the chagrin of Chernov and Natanson, their emissary reported back, not only confirming the details of Burtsev’s meeting with Lopukhin but also asserting that the latter could not possibly be playing a ‘double-game’. Moreover, Lopukhin had revealed that he had been visited the previous week by none other than Azef himself and then by Chief of Police Gerasimov, both of whom pleaded with him to retract his statement. It was at this point that Lopukhin wrote to Stolypin naming Azef as a police agent, a letter which, as Burtsev declared, would take on immense political and social significance when a copy was obtained by the revolutionaries and later appeared in the foreign press. But it would appear that even this damning testimony was not enough to release Chernov from his party-induced hypnosis. Still grasping at straws and learning that Lopukhin was due to make a business trip to England in early December, he, Savinkov and Argunov crossed the Channel to meet him and it was only after a summit at the Waldorf Hotel in the West End of London that the revolutionaries returned to Paris, finally convinced of Azef ’s betrayal.35 Savinkov immediately relayed the news to Burtsev but, on behalf of the party, asked that he remain silent for a few days longer. Then, on 5 January, a delegation visited Azef to accuse him formally of being a traitor. Azef vehemently protested, demanding he be given time to martial a defence. The SRs, displaying a remarkable lack of foresight, agreed to return the following day to conclude business, thus leaving the accused alone and unguarded. That night he disappeared. Two days later the party issued a special

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proclamation entitled ‘Azef the Provocateur’, in which it was admitted that suspicions about him had been voiced as early as 1904, and described how finally, on 16 March 1908, when the collapse of the northern Flying Brigade of the Combat Organization had shown that provocation at the heart of the group did indeed exist, it was decided to set up the secret commission of enquiry.36 That commission had soon uncovered evidence indicating provocation on the part of Azef but it had been alarmed at the lengths to which Central Committee members were seemingly prepared to go to protect him. In the end, it had taken the colossal energy and personal sacrifice of V. L. Burtsev to break down their resistance. The commission concluded that it could not have been by mere chance that the provocation went undetected for so long and called for a wholesale reconstruction of the party and a full-scale enquiry to determine the extent of damage caused, and to find out what assistance Azef had received: it was clear that the Russian police would certainly have sought to employ further collaborators in the party as a backup should their agent ever be exposed. The Central Committee, in seeking to defend and protect Azef and allowing him to flee the country, was compromised and was to be forbidden from taking any part in any ensuing investigations. The commission further stated that the party had, in effect, been destroyed not only by Azef but by those who believed blindly in him. The SR Paris Group made a number of resolutions wholeheartedly endorsing the commission’s findings and criticizing in particular the behaviour of those members responsible for Azef ’s final interrogation, whose unpardonable and inexplicable behaviour, they said, had allowed him to escape and thereby avoid punishment. A ‘liquidating commission’ was to be set up, composed of trusted revolutionaries whose task was the full investigation of the affair. Meanwhile, all combative and conspiratorial party activity was to be suspended. Finally, almost as an afterthought, a resolution was appended in which it was acknowledged that the discovery of Azef ’s provocation was due above all to the energetic, persistent and fearless efforts of Comrade Vladimir Burtsev who devoted all his revolutionary ardour to the affair and, convinced of his rectitude, spared no effort, even to the extent of endangering his own life. The Socialist-Revolutionary Group of Paris is convinced that soon the entire SR Party will recognize Comrade Burtsev’s services in the exposure of this provocation and will openly express to him their gratitude similar to that which we express to him now.37

However, within the SR Party at large, reactions to the exposure were mixed. There were many who felt anything but gratitude to Burtsev for the services he had rendered and, indeed, believed that it was through his actions that a death blow had been dealt to the organization.38 For some the sense of despair was so great that suicide seemed to be the only solution. Such was the path chosen by the unfortunate Bella Lapin (Esfirʹ), a committed member of the Combat Organization who had shown particular devotion to Azef. Others gave up revolutionary activity all together, while the rage of yet others led them to accuse the party leadership of betrayal. Some months after the trial a tormented Kropotkin wrote to Burtsev wondering whether Chernov and Natanson

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may actually have known of Azef ’s police connections but had perhaps been deceived into believing he was acting as their spy in the opposition’s camp.39 Meanwhile, although the attacks and threats against Burtsev did diminish to a certain extent, there were still those who refused to relent. Indeed, some, such as Maxim Gorky, were convinced that attempts would be made on his life. The author wrote to Amfiteatrov from Capri earnestly pleading with him to do everything in his power to persuade Burtsev of his (i.e. Gorky’s) ‘deep-held conviction that surely and certainly attempts will be made to eliminate him’. Moreover, he wrote that he would not be surprised if these attempts ‘came from both directions’. ‘The value of V. L. is immense; you do realise this don’t you? Suggest to him that he come here. But, in any event, you must convince him of the need to take steps to protect himself.’ Amfiteatrov showed Burtsev the letter, but to no avail. As he reported to Gorky: ‘he is a fatalist – and just like some Turk or Tartar, he leaves everything to providence!’40 For Burtsev the year 1909 had started in a spectacular and exciting fashion and so, it seemed, it was set to continue. Meanwhile, in Russia, the fallout from the scandal looked set to rock the very foundations of the state. It was debated on numerous occasions in the Third Duma and forced Stolypin to make an appearance to explain the apparently illegal actions of his police force. Burtsev was thus able to savour being attacked by the Premier as he attempted to protect Azef, swearing that the latter was a faithful servant who had never betrayed his country. Since Burtsev was beyond its reach, the state resolved to avenge itself on Lopukhin, arresting him on an absurd charge based on article 102 of the Criminal Code – that is, that he had ‘joined a revolutionary association’. The three-day show trial, which began on 11 May 1909, was widely reported in the international press. Again, Azef was painted as the loyal servant of the state who was responsible for foiling numerous conspiracies (although the court was not allowed to hear of the twenty-eight terrorist plots which had proved successful despite the information provided by their agent).41 Although the main witnesses for the prosecution – Gerasimov, Rachkovsky and Rataev – did not deign to appear, the unfortunate defendant was sentenced to five years penal servitude and perpetual exile to Siberia.42 It is of interest to note that whereas Stolypin was obliged publicly to attack Burtsev while attempting to justify Azef ’s actions, Tsar Nicholas, apparently, felt no such compunction. On one occasion, while his Majesty was attending a war veterans’ reunion, the subject of Azef came up in discussion: ‘Azef?’ said the tsar, ‘Yes, he is very mean-spirited. But not Burtsev. He is an honest, unselfish man. If only I had one aide like Burtsev with his incorruptible honesty and his all-seeing eyes, then it would be easier for me to govern.’ And then, after a moment’s pause he added, ‘You know, it is all so difficult, all so terribly wearisome.’43

Unexpected praise, indeed, from such an elevated personage and, as would later transpire, the tsar’s wife was of an equally high opinion. In 1917, when news of Rasputin’s disappearance first reached the palace, amidst all the worry and turmoil, Empress Alexandra is reported to have suggested that Burtsev be put in charge of the investigation, believing that ‘he alone would be able to solve the mystery’.44 Unfortunately, these regal words of praise were never transmitted to the revolutionary detective himself.

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Burtsev ended the first volume of his autobiography thus: The exposure of Azef freed me from the nightmare I had been living under. My memories of that time are therefore sharply divided into two periods: ‘Before Azef ’ and ‘After Azef ’. Everything I did after his exposure I did under very different conditions. In my struggle for a free Russia there suddenly opened up before me a new, broad prospect.45

Indeed, it is difficult to exaggerate the impact of the outcome of the case on Burtsev’s fate. To gain some idea of the remarkable transformation which occurred, one need do no more than examine the events of that first year of his new life.

1909 – ‘After Azef ’: The Starodvorsky affair The divide between his pre- and post-Azef lives was not, however, as sharply drawn as Burtsev claimed. Even before the affair had come to a close, he had been summonsed to attend yet another tribunal to defend himself against further charges of slander, this time brought by an aggrieved Starodvorsky. The case had blown up as a result of Burtsev’s decision finally to make public his earlier discoveries concerning the veteran revolutionary’s pleas for clemency. He had felt morally obliged to do so, having received news from Russia that, contrary to their earlier agreement, Starodvorsky had re-entered political life and had attempted to attend an SR conference in Finland. Initially, Burtsev had intended to publish the copies of the incriminating letters in the pages of his newly released The Past but decided instead to publish them separately.46 Starodvorsky responded with an open letter in the Russian press, accusing him of rushing to print before checking the authenticity of the documents. He required the published copies to be withdrawn and consented to forgive Burtsev if he admitted his mistake. Burtsev refused but not, as he later explained, because of any personal grudge or enmity he held towards Starodvorsky. His fight in this and in other analogous cases, he stated, was always primarily against the Department of Police and, through them, the Ministry of the Interior and the government, in whose name and on whose orders all of those ‘little Starodvorskys’ operated.47 It had always been Burtsev’s firm belief that the foundation and the main strength of the Russian reaction lay in its political police and that it was this force which he saw as his primary enemy – this was the power above all that had to be destroyed.48 The composition of the tribunal was perhaps not as balanced or of the same quality as that which had heard evidence in the Azef affair. It was chaired by the Social Democrat Yuly Martov, while former head of the St Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies G. S. Nosarʹ-Khrustalev and the French lawyer Eugene Petit stood for Starodvorsky. Burtsev was initially represented by the Left SR A. Gnatovsky and the Ukrainian revolutionary S. P. Mazurenko.49 Although the defendant might have expected his vindication in the Azef case to have had an immediate and positive bearing on both the length and the outcome of the case, that did not transpire. Instead, proceedings dragged on into the summer of 1909.50

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Burtsev received the enthusiastic support of a number of old Shlisselburg inmates, including the ever-faithful Lopatin, but there was an even greater number of Starodvorsky’s former comrades who could not countenance the thought of him being involved in any wrongdoing or committing any such base act of betrayal. Quite apart from his opponent’s popularity, Burtsev also faced the technical problems that, firstly, he possessed only copies (not originals) of the documents in question and, secondly, he was unable to indicate how he came into possession of the documents without jeopardizing his contacts within the police. He attempted to explain to the court how the need for absolute secrecy was paramount in his line of work but was unable to convince them. Meanwhile, he was obliged to give his evidence in the knowledge that there was at least one police informer in the room. To say too much would be to run the risk of implicating and endangering those of his contacts still resident in Russia. At the final session he addressed Starodvorsky directly, reminding him of his promise to step down from public life, a promise which he had broken. He would, he said, have been willing to forgive him for writing these documents in a moment of weakness while in prison, but he could never forgive him for standing up in court and telling such blatant untruths. The court gave its decision in late June 1909 and it was one which satisfied neither party. Burtsev came in for much criticism. Not only did the court find that he had been unable to prove his accusations but also believed his publication of the documents in question deserved censure. The verdict reached was not that Burtsev’s accusations were false, but that they were unproven. Officially, his accusation against Starodvorsky had been merely that he had secretly filed petitions for clemency without telling his comrades, but it was obvious to most that the underlying accusation was that he had been, and still was, in the pay of the Okhrana. While the decision of the court may have favoured Starodvorsky on one narrow legal point, it became clear that the public at large did not share the court’s opinion of his innocence. The trial, or at least the public’s reaction to it, effectively forced Starodvorsky to stand down from public life, at least for a few years. But he was not the only one to suffer. Burtsev believed that the fact he personally was not formally vindicated blighted him too and interfered with some of his later attempts to uncover police malfeasance. When he received the official text of the judgment a week later, on 7 July, together with Nosarʹ’s independent opinion, he was furious at the careless manner in which the documents had been put together and feared that, as a result, the police would be able to identify the individuals who had been involved in obtaining and transcribing the letters. He wrote to Martov complaining about the court’s shoddy behaviour and describing the text of his judgment and Nosarʹ’s comments as resembling nothing less than a police report.51 Within a few years, Nosarʹ would receive further incriminating evidence against Starodvorsky and would write to Burtsev admitting his mistake and offering to reopen the case. Similarly, following the opening up of the tsarist police archives in 1917, Martov would confess to having returned the wrong verdict.52 Burtsev, at last, had been proved correct but the tardiness of his vindication had come at a cost. This, at least, was Burtsev’s claim although, in truth, despite the delay in his formal exoneration, the case actually had little impact on the growth of his revolutionary detective agency and its continuing successes. Initially, operations were controlled

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from his editorial offices in Montrouge, but as business expanded he rented further offices and also made use of the apartments of his two chief staff members: Bakai and Agafonov. While the former concerned himself with general external surveillance operations, the latter, as head of a special unit named the ‘Group of the Activist Minority’, concentrated his energies on the penetration of Okhrana operations. Burtsev’s agency continued its work, exposing the likes of Tatyana Zeitlin (Tsikhotskaia), Mikail Deev and many more spies too numerous to mention here. Indeed, Burtsev would later claim that by this time he had already unmasked over a hundred provocateurs and informants.53 His greatest triumph, however, still lay before him.

The Landezen-Garting affair The last echoes of the Azef storm had not yet passed when a new scandal broke out, exciting the whole of Europe once more, and again it was Burtsev who appeared in the role of prosecutor.54 The case this time involved none other than his old nemesis, A. M. Landezen-Garting, whose exposure would attract an even greater degree of press attention and lead, almost, to a full-blown international political incident. Following his return to service with the Department of Police in 1905 and his subsequent appointment as Head of its Political Section, Petr Rachkovsky had made short work of disposing of his old rival Rataev, replacing him as Head of the Foreign Agency in Paris with none other than General Arkady von Garting, who had previously run the Berlin Agency. It was reported that this favourite of Rachkovsky had already started to take over some of Rataev’s responsibilities before the latter had even been dismissed and, soon after his transfer to Paris, quickly set about assuming control of virtually all Russian police operations in Western Europe. The identity of the new arrival remained a mystery to the emigration for some time, although rumours abounded concerning his extremely suspicious nature and the ruthless methods he was known to employ.55 At the same time, this enigmatic new Head of the Foreign Agency was becoming increasingly concerned at the successes achieved by Burtsev and his associates and had even pleaded with his superiors in St Petersburg that they approach the French government to request the expulsion of these individuals due to ‘the very damaging effect that their criminal plans were having on the activities of the Foreign Agency’.56 Indeed, the revolutionary detective, having recently succeeded in recruiting one of Garting’s own senior French agents, Maurice Leroy, was set to wreak even more havoc on his enemy. For some time Burtsev had been trying to solve the riddle of the identity of the new head of the Agency but he had been unable to pin him down until early in 1909, when he received some of Garting’s letters (possibly from Leroy) and thought he recognized the hand.57 Then, in May, the riddle was suddenly resolved when a new spy-buster appeared on the scene. This, it would later be revealed, was Leonid Menʹshchikov, former staff officer in the Okhrana headquarters, who claimed that, like Bakai, he had become disillusioned with his employers and now wished to contact revolutionary representatives in order to pass on the information he held.58 At a meeting with Burtsev in Brussels he delivered the startling news that General

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Arkady Garting, the supreme chief of the Russian secret police in Paris, was that same ‘miserable little provocateur’ and fugitive Abraham Gekkelʹman-Landezen.59 The revelation shocked Burtsev to the core but also triggered a memory of a curious incident which had played out the previous year. One evening he had attended a performance of a play by a Russian company at the Théâtre du Châtelet – (a rare occurrence for, in general, Burtsev regarded the performing arts as a mere distraction from the serious business of political struggle). During the intermission in the corridor he happened to exchange glances with a man whose face seemed familiar. He later tried to seek the individual out in the crowd to get a better look, but he was nowhere to be seen. At that point Burtsev suddenly realized he was surrounded by a dense ring of very anxious-looking police agents. He drew his friends’ attention to this and, fearing he was about to be arrested, gave instructions on what to do in such an event. When the curtain came down at the end of the performance, he left the theatre with one of his comrades. The group of agents followed them down the stairway and out into the Place du Châtelet. Burtsev expected the arrest would take place there but, to his surprise, as he crossed the bridge back to the Left Bank he began to breathe more easily as, one by one, the agents slowly faded away. Now, thanks to Menʹshchikov, the riddle had at last been solved. That evening, after a gap of some twenty years, Burtsev had once more encountered Landezen, only now the latter went by the name of Garting and served as the official representative of the Russian police abroad. Whereas he had been dark-haired back then, he was now grey. But he had obviously recognized Burtsev and, assuming he had done the same, was expecting a confrontation. This explained the agitation of his police entourage. Stunned by Menʹshchikov’s revelation, Burtsev was aware that alongside such an exposure, that of Azef would pale into insignificance. He immediately informed his French political associates, who urged him to raise the matter officially and so, on Thursday 1 July 1909, he wrote to French Minister of Justice Briand as follows.60 I have the honour to inform you of the following. In 1890 a certain Landezen, real name Gekkelʹman, was sentenced in absentia by a French Court to five years in prison for his role as organizer of a dynamite plot. At that time I had been acquainted with Landezen for a year. I now wish to inform you that the individual calling himself Garting, aka Petrovsky, Beire etc. who is currently living in Paris, who is personally acquainted with M. Hamard, Head of the Sûreté, with M. Ruichard and with many other high-ranking officials, and who currently holds the post of Head of the Russian secret police in Paris is, in reality, none other than said Landezen, of which fact I can supply proof. I therefore ask that you issue an order for the arrest of the said Landezen-Garting–Petrovsky–Beire. I am at your service and willing and ready to supply evidence.61

The story broke for the first time on Tuesday 6 July on the front pages of LʹHumanité and Le Journal. The former ran with the headline ‘The Reign of Provocateurs. Azef no. 2. Garting-Landesen, Head of the Russian Police Abroad and Fugitive from Justice’. It carried a photograph of Burtsev alongside his statement which began: ‘When at last I succeeded in ripping the mask from the face of Azef, whom I called the greatest

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provocateur of the century, it seemed to me that such crimes and acts of treason could never again be equalled. It would seem, however, that when one is dealing with the Russian government one must be prepared for ever more shocking horrors and crimes.’ He then proceeded to outline Landezen’s earlier misdemeanours and some incidents from his past life. The French socialist leader Jean Jaurès also contributed a piece alongside. Le Journal, meanwhile, entitled their story ‘A New Russian Scandal’ and, in passing, described Burtsev as ‘le Sherlock Holmes de la revolution russe’ – a soubriquet which would stay with him for the rest of his life. The story and the alias were quickly seized on by other news outlets both in France and around the world. Le Matin of Monday 12 July carried a statement from Burtsev on its front page under the headline ‘Jʹaccuse’, alongside a rather poor attempt at a rebuttal by A. V. Nekliudov, chargé dʹaffaires at the Russian embassy. Burtsev levelled accusations of criminality at Landezen-Garting and his senior agent Henri Bint, describing how they operated from the Russian embassy on Rue de Grenelle, where, amongst other foul deeds, they photographed émigré correspondence stolen by concierges, whom they paid at a rate of five francs per letter and two francs per postcard. News of the scandal was also quick to reach Russia, where the story was reported in some detail and, it should be said, with a certain degree of balance.62 The same could hardly be said for the coverage in the London Times, which was content simply to parrot the views of former police chief Rataev, who attempted ‘to defend his Department from the charges with which the revolutionary writer Burtsev is daily filling the columns of the sensational press’. ‘Opinion’, according to The Times, ‘was inclined to consider that, whatever the antecedents of this mysterious personage may have been, he rendered good service in the office to which he was appointed by the police authorities’.63 Clearly, the British establishment was still keen to be of service to the Russian tsar. When news of the scandal first broke, Landezen-Garting happened to be in Brussels, preparing for the tsar’s state visit to France, and, therefore, once more succeeded in evading capture. The effects of his exposure, however, resonated throughout Europe. The incident dealt a virtual death blow to the Foreign Agency abroad. In France, the National Assembly voted unanimously to put an end to such criminal activities and to expel all foreign police, while in Britain the issue was raised in the House of Commons by Labour MP Will Thorne, who demanded that Asquith’s government expel all Russian agent-provocateurs and secret policemen and put an end to their unwholesome practices.64 In St Petersburg, meanwhile, the affair had given rise to great anxiety and confusion, with the Department of Police immobilized and unsure of what course of action to follow. Reports appeared in the international press of emissaries being sent to Paris for the purpose of murdering Burtsev; though, fortunately, nothing came of these rumours.65 Thanks to his recent triumph over Azef, Burtsev had already received wide acclaim, but that was nothing compared to the attention now directed towards him. Journals and newspapers of every nationality and description queued up to interview the revolutionary detective. His portrait adorned the front cover of the weekly Les Hommes du Jour, which carried an article by the anarchist Victor Méric extolling Burtsev’s many virtues and referring the reader for further information to a book recently published on the Azef and Garting scandals.66 The book in question, Les Dessous de la Police

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Russe, was jointly authored by Jean Longuet, grandson of Karl Marx and collaborator of Jaurès, and Georgy Silber, a Russian émigré and a close associate of Burtsev.67 Quite apart from its fascinating subject matter, the volume was of interest in that it carried a preface by Burtsev himself, dated 14 July 1909 – a mere week after the exposure of Garting was first reported in the press.

The Common Cause It was Le Journal, the same organ that broke the Azef scandal some months earlier, which won the rights to the serialization of Burtsev’s memoirs.68 These ran for over a month and provided Burtsev with a substantial income that, together with other fees and funds received from a range of individuals and political parties, enabled him to realize his long-held dream of founding a new journal, which he hoped would unite all anti-governmental movements – in particular, in his long-waged battle against provocation. In May he informed a comrade in Russia of his intention to issue a journal about current events which would be similar in tone to Osvobozhdenie (Liberation), writing: ‘I’ll cram so much Kadetism into the framework of the SRs that it’ll end up like the People’s Will. The SRs will be livid!’69 The first issue of his Obshchee delo (The Common Cause or La Cause commune, as it appeared on the masthead) appeared on 15 October 1909. As well as leading with Burtsev’s usual call for opposition parties to unite, it contained a number of articles which expanded on the Lopukhin trial and on the Azef and Garting affairs. He also ran a column entitled ‘The Black Book of the Russian Liberation Movement’, which would continue over the next two issues and which listed the names of a range of traitors, provocateurs and detectives such as A. O. Rozenburg, Tatyana Tseitlin, S. M. Veisman, O. T. Putsiata (sic), A. E. Serebryakova, Ya. K. Komisarov, A. E. Dontsov and Reshetnikov. The column ended with an editorial note explaining that this was a continuation of the lists he had already published elsewhere and that, over the past eighteen months, he had already unmasked over a hundred such traitors. This issue also contained a description of another famous case already reported in the press – that of Gerngross-Zhuchenko. In August 1909, the Central Committee of the SRs had turned to Burtsev, voicing their suspicions of one of the party’s senior members, Zinaida Zhuchenko, and asking him to investigate. To his surprise, when he visited her in Berlin, Zhuchenko made no attempt to deny her dual role but rather made a full confession, defiantly declaring she had become a provocateur for idealistic reasons. To the astonishment of many the Berlin police left her in peace until the outbreak of war, when she was arrested on charges of spying for Russia.70 Burtsev was now also in great demand internationally, with particular interest being shown in America. Over three weekends in late summer, The New York Times carried in its magazine section a heavily illustrated translation of Burtsev’s Le Journal memoirs which had been translated by his friend, the celebrated journalist and Jewish activist Herman Bernstein.71 The article also included references to yet another of Burtsev’s sensational revelations: namely, that since the beginning of his reign, Tsar Nicholas had been the recipient of a regular private report from the Department of Police

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detailing the political crimes lately committed in his dominion and the sometimes very questionable means used by the police to tackle these misdemeanours.72 Then, a few months later, excitement was rekindled in America when it was learned of the great detective’s intention to pay a personal visit. Some, such as Prince Kropotkin, advised strongly against the trip, warning that since he was no orator or ‘Gershuni’ he was unlikely to make any major impact on public opinion and, moreover, there would be little money to be made.73 Burtsev, however, would not to be dissuaded and, after a short trip to Bordeaux to meet yet another police contact, he eventually set off on 5 December.74 The progress of the trip of this new celebrity was followed with great interest by the international press and, not surprisingly, by the Russian police. As reported in The Times and in Russian Word, on his arrival in New York on 21 January 1910, Burtsev had been subject to strict questioning by members of the immigration bureau about the purpose of his visit, but, having assured officials of the peaceful nature of this ‘twomonth promotion undertaken in support of the Russian revolutionary movement’, he received permission to land.75 In fact, he had another compelling reason to make the trip: based on information only recently supplied to him by his Bordeaux contact, he had fixed yet another undercover tsarist agent in his sights. This time it was the turn of émigré bookseller and publisher A. M. Evalenko – the same individual who, as far back as 1894, had generously supplied funds to Egor ʹ Lazarev, funds which, as described previously, were eventually used to help Burtsev produce his A Century of Political Life in Russia (1800–1896). At that time no one had reason to doubt Evalenko’s credentials: he was, after all, a well-respected and long-established figure in American society, where he was well known for his hospitality. He was described by one revolutionary as a ‘good egg’ (dobryi durenʹ) who, despite being a terrible wastrel, for some reason never appeared to be without money.76 The source of these funds soon became known when Burtsev revealed that Evalenko had worked for the tsarist police since as far back as 1885 and, upon his arrival in New York, had re-entered their employ on a salary of 200 dollars per month.77 Evalenko, like many others finding themselves in a similar predicament, initially vehemently protested his innocence and went so far as to issue a $100,000 slander suit against his accuser. For over two years the maligned publisher valiantly attempted to keep the pressure up but eventually – realizing he had little chance of obtaining satisfaction, the more so since Burtsev was by this time virtually bankrupt – he was obliged to drop his case.78 The intended two-month trip slowly grew into one of almost five as Burtsev toured around North America giving lectures to a variety of audiences, some apparently more receptive than others.79 However, by the time he was due to leave, the American public had warmed to him, as shown by the rousing reception he received at a lecture he delivered at Cooper Union in New York.80 In between public engagements he also found time to take in some of North America’s famous sights. He would later talk of his desire to return to the United States in order to witness once more the majesty of the Niagara Falls, which ‘inspired in one feelings of power and energy’.81 А. А. Krasilʹnikov, who had only recently arrived in France as Garting’s successor, also kept a careful watch on Burtsev’s activities via his American agents. (Despite having been formally expelled from France the Russian Department of Police had

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Figure 5.1  V. L. Burtsev in New York, 1910. GARF f. 1721 op. 1, del. 114, l. 11.

brazenly ignored the censure and retained a presence, as Burtsev would later reveal.)82 In late April Krasilʹnikov reported to his superiors that the revolutionary was hoping to secure a sum of several hundred dollars from a rich Jew in New York before returning to Paris. He also reported, doubtless with some satisfaction, that such a sum would

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do little to alleviate the dreadful financial predicament in which Burtsev now found himself. His debts had apparently reached some 30,000 francs and, in addition, in his absence, the rent on his flat had not been paid; his co-workers were almost destitute and it appeared that his revolutionary police force was on the point of collapse. Moreover, there was no sign on the horizon of any further issues of The Past or of The Common Cause appearing.83 In fact, following his return to Paris in early May, Burtsev did manage to find enough resources to enable publication of two further issues of the former and one of the latter.84 Moreover, that year also saw the release of another of his works: a small collection of official documents on the Russo-Japanese War which again was highly critical of the tsar and showed the crucial personal role he had played in the disastrous campaign.85

Staff disagreements However, Burtsev’s complete inability to manage his financial affairs was once more causing him serious problems. Long before the press had taken an interest in his sensational revelations, Burtsev had been fortunate to be the recipient of funding from an unknown benefactor. For some time the Department of Police had tried without success to uncover the source but then, in late 1911, the identity of this mysterious individual was revealed. In a memo from the Foreign Agency it was claimed that Burtsev’s long-term benefactor had been Prince David Bebutov, a Moscow barrister, freemason and extremely wealthy man who, at an early stage, had been impressed by Burtsev’s detective skills and had been happy to fund his activities. However, according to the Foreign Agency, Bebutov had long since changed his mind, perhaps sensing that the suspicions of the police had been raised, and had withdrawn Burtsev’s funding.86 There is no question that Burtsev’s financial incompetence was one of the key factors which caused a fatal split within his revolutionary detective agency and it was a rupture which the French press appeared delighted to seize on. In the 13 September 1910 issue of Le Journal, a newspaper that until then had been a great advocate of Burtsev and his cause, there appeared an exclusive under the headline ‘A New Russian Scandal’, in which it was revealed that Burtsev had never been anything other than an intermediary and that credit for his great revelations should go elsewhere – namely to an unsung collaborator, Leonid Menʹshchikov of the Moscow Secret Police.87 The latter, a former revolutionary, had gone over to the other side at an early age but, like Bakai, had become extremely disillusioned with his employers and claimed that for over twenty years he had plotted their downfall. It was revealed that it was this ‘Azef in reverse’ who had met Burtsev in Brussels the previous year and who had denounced Garting. He it was too whom Burtsev had visited in Bordeaux before leaving for America and who had given him proof of Evalenko’s betrayal. In addition, he had furnished the information which brought about the downfall of Zhuchenko, Serebriakova and many more besides. Indeed, Menʹshchikov even went so far as to claim responsibility for Azef ’s scalp, declaring that he was the author of the famous letter received by the SR Party in 1905 which contained details of the latter’s betrayal. Now, Menʹshchikov announced his intention of leaving Russia for the West, where he

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personally, and without further need for a go-between such as Burtsev, would continue with his sensational exposures. At around the same time Bakai also jumped ship, writing to Le Journal on the subject of Garting, which, according to Burtsev, could be taken as nothing other than a personal attack. He then wrote to Burtsev on 2 October 1910 demanding to know who was spreading rumours about Menʹshchikov and himself. Bakai was clearly unhappy about the conditions of his employment but the extent of the bitterness which had been welling up in him was only fully revealed in a bilious diatribe published in New York some two years later, which bore virtually no relation to the short, measured autobiographical note he had written at the conclusion of the Azef affair.88 He believed he was being treated unfairly and was receiving almost no credit, financial or otherwise, for his vital contribution to the work of the agency. He objected bitterly to Burtsev’s claim made in the first issue of The Common Cause that ‘We’ had unmasked over 100 spies. In fact, according to Bakai, Burtsev had little to do with it: virtually all these agents had been uncovered by Menʹshchikov and/or himself. He complained of Burtsev’s poor memory, which constantly led to unnecessary mistakes being made, but he also appeared to be more concerned at Burtsev’s financial ineptitude, criticizing him for needlessly paying out huge sums of money to informers such as Leroy, who had received 5,000 francs for information supplied regarding Garting’s award of the Légion d'Honneur. Although Burtsev was undoubtedly someone who cared not a jot about money, to Bakai it seemed that ‘his simplicity was just as great a crime as theft’.89 In addition, he had been appalled and dismayed at the poor quality of Longuet and Silber’s book, Les Dessous de la Police Russe, which, in his view, contained nothing new and was little more than a compilation of stories about Azef that had already appeared in the Russian press. Neither was he impressed by the book’s commercialism, with its sensationalist cover depicting an exploding nail bomb. He neglected to mention, however, that on 13 March 1909 he himself had already published a short account of the machinations of the Russian Department of Police in a little booklet which bore the same name as that of Longuet and Silber. His Les Dessous de la Police Russe was issued by a French satirical weekly and was illustrated by Georges d’Ostoya with a cover which, coincidentally, bore a remarkable resemblance to the other with its depiction of just such an exploding bomb.90 But what appeared to rile Bakai more than anything about the book was the authors’ description of Burtsev as the ‘Sherlock Holmes of the Russian Revolution’. To Bakai the two – the revolutionary and the detective – were poles apart from both a social and a moral perspective. All he could think was ‘Poor Sherlock Holmes’, for Burtsev certainly did not merit such a comparison. Instead, Bakai felt it would be more fitting to call him ‘Doctor Cook’, this being the name of the American explorer much in the news at that time in relation to his claim of having reached the North Pole a year before Robert Peary, his fellow countryman – a claim which would later be overturned.91 To Bakai it was unfortunate that things had developed in such a way that people now regarded Burtsev as a great spy-buster and no longer paid any interest in his real contribution to the revolution: his detailed and dogged collection of historical revolutionary materials. They had, in fact, elevated him for a quality that he did not possess.

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As archival documents show, Burtsev was dismayed at this direct personal attack and once more experienced the familiar sense of betrayal.92 He could not believe that Bakai was responsible for this personal onslaught and was convinced that there were others in the émigré community who were behind the attacks: those who had been embarrassed by Burtsev’s exposures and now wanted revenge and were attempting to use Menʹshchikov and Bakai to that end. It was he, after all, who had arranged and introduced the serialization of Bakai’s writings in Le Matin and had even attempted, with Kropotkin’s help, to have his articles published in England. He objected to the accusation of serving as no more than an intermediary. It was obvious to everyone that Burtsev, as an émigré who had never in his life served in the Okhrana or any other section of the police, would never dream of claiming that he personally obtained the information he was publishing. He made no secret of the fact that he was of course reliant on sources within the Department of Police. Citing Bakai as an example, he pointed to the negative public opinion towards former policemen and to how important it was that such sources be protected by revolutionary detectives such as himself. On this latter point he was proved correct, for, although Menʹshchikov did indeed attain some initial fame, it proved fleeting. Soon, the public became more interested in the true identity and past history of this former policeman rather than in those he was proposing to unmask. Questions began to be asked concerning his lengthy police service and his links with the detested Zubatov; and why, during these twenty long years, was he content to sit back and witness the imprisonment and exile (and worse) of his fellow revolutionaries? Surely, opportunities must have arisen when he could have thwarted the arrest of at least some of his comrades? Burtsev, with his spotless revolutionary past, was unimpeachable. Could these police whistle-blowers ever attain such levels of trust? What exactly was their motivation? Both Menʹshchikov and Bakai, with their public support dwindling, were soon obliged to leave France for America where, for a time, they continued to attack Burtsev and proclaim their purity of motive, with Menʹshchikov insisting that he personally indulged in exposing provocation not for money but because he felt it to be his revolutionary duty. As a somewhat sneering aside, he also noted that Burtsev hadn’t exposed anyone of importance since he and Bakai had left him. Amfiteatrov rose to Burtsev’s defence, wondering whether that was because there were no spies left or whether it was, indeed, because the exposures were all the work of these two selfless individuals. However, if there were still spies in existence that these two ‘famous penitents’ knew about, then why weren’t they exposing them as their ‘civic duty’ demanded?93 Menʹshchikov’s aspiration to assume Burtsev’s mantle came to nothing, as did his hopes of finding a French publisher for his memoirs and further revelations. Nevertheless, he did find an American newspaper that was willing to listen to him and to print a letter which he said he intended to send to Russian Prime Minister Stolypin.94 In the letter he again described at length the tortures he had suffered during his twenty years as a ‘prisoner in the enemy’s camp’, before lambasting the Premier for the criminality of his security service whose agents on a daily basis committed the illegal and immoral acts they were employed to prevent. He ended by declaring his belief that Stolypin’s diseased system would ‘disappear as soon as a current of free pure air makes its way into Russian life’ and warned him that he would no longer be the Premier at that time and that ‘this stern moment is perhaps not so far away as you

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think!’. Whether or not Menʹshchikov should be admired for his prescience is unclear but it is ironic, at least, that a few months later Stolypin would be murdered by the anarchist Dmitry Bogrov, who, it would transpire, had been working for some years as one of the Premier’s own police informers.95

L’Avenir (The Future) Menʹshchikov was not Stolypin’s only correspondent at that time. Already in February of 1911 Burtsev had penned an open letter to the Premier in which he demanded that Azef be brought to trial. Kropotkin had come across a copy in the Russian press and wrote to Burtsev expressing his disapproval, feeling that it was a needless gesture and there was little to be gained by continuing to demand that the renegade be brought to justice, ‘Actually, my dear Vladimir Lʹvovich, by constantly chewing over the Azef case you run the risk of losing the prestige you have already won.’96 Kropotkin was not alone in hoping that Burtsev would be able to break out of this apparent ‘Azef-mania’ but, unfortunately, this appeared to be proving difficult for the revolutionary. He did, however, have other plans to keep him occupied, one of which was the launch of a new publishing venture. His close friend, German Lopatin, had already proved to be of enormous assistance to him in his earlier journalistic endeavours. Together with Lazar ʹ Rotshtein and L. B. Bernshtein, he was ever present at the offices of The Common Cause and, indeed, filled Burtsev’s editorial chair during the latter’s American sojourn.97 Moreover, he was always on the lookout for contributors and, when the idea of the journal had first been mooted, had approached Gorky, whom he had recently befriended, with the suggestion that he submit material. The author was of course familiar with Burtsev’s activities and had already written to congratulate him on his recent exposures. Like most revolutionaries he had been devastated on first hearing the news of Azef ’s betrayal and since then had been eagerly collecting materials for a book he planned on the subject under the title ‘Provocateur’. Although initially reacting enthusiastically to Lopatin’s proposal, he was later obliged to turn the offer down due to other work commitments.98 He also refused Burtsev’s offer to join him as a contributor to The Past but warmed to this journal as more issues were published. Eventually, however, when Lopatin approached the author on 30 April 1911 with the news that Burtsev intended to launch a new weekly newspaper under the title Budushchee (The Future) Gorky’s interest was rekindled and, although unwilling to join the editorial board, he did agree to contribute articles on an ad hoc basis.99 Burtsev had already, in the summer of 1910, laid out his plans for a new weekly to his friend, the Populist and historian Sergei Melʹgunov, and had told him of his need for finance. At that time, as the Department of Police had correctly reported, he was almost destitute and no one wanted to be associated with him. Not so Melʹgunov, however, who proved to be one of those for whom Burtsev held a certain magnetic fascination: as he later recalled, The man had a will of iron and an unyielding perseverance in achieving the goals he had set himself … But this acute observer, with his almost dazzling intuition and flair for so-called ‘revolutionary investigation’, sometimes also showed a childish

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naivety. And that, I often thought, summed up the man perfectly – a grown-up political child. Naive and gullible in the extreme. A pure, noble fantasist, believing in the realisation of his social utopias and fanatically ready to do anything to ensure their realisation.100

On his return to Russia, Melʹgunov somehow managed to raise a few thousand roubles for the project and, by various means, sent them to Paris. Thus it was that The Future was duly launched on 22 October 1911, with a total of forty-eight issues appearing over the next three years. The early numbers did indeed contain contributions from Gorky amongst others but even then Burtsev’s editorial dominance was apparent. As the months passed, the strict control he exercised proved too constrictive for many (including Gorky, whose submissions became less frequent).101 Amfiteatrov, meanwhile, believed that Burtsev had shown he was simply not cut out for newspaper work, writing to Gorky that although the first issue was bad, the second was even worse. He bemoaned the newspaper’s lack of an ideological programme and complained at Burtsev’s continued focus on provocateurs at the expense of all else, as he exclaimed – ‘You cannot live by provocateurs alone!’102 Unsurprisingly, neither was the newspaper received favourably in Russia, despite the editor’s frenetic endeavours to have it distributed as widely as possible, sending it to everyone he could think of, including the tsar, members of the royal family and government ministers.103 Towards the end of May 1912 Burtsev published an article entitled ‘To the Friends of The Future’ in which he reminded his readers of the earlier request he had made to the Russian government – that they invite him to appear as a key witness in the cases of Lopukhin and Azef. They had not taken up his offer and therefore he now intended to pull together as many pertinent documents as he could before autumn, when he would travel to St Petersburg. Upon his arrival, whether they imprisoned him or allowed him to remain at liberty, he intended to lodge a formal protest against all the criminality practised by the government over these past years and demand the arrest not only of the arch agent-provocateur but also of those who abetted him: namely, Senator M. I. Trusevich, General A. V. Gerasimov, Minister of Justice I. G. Shcheglovitov and Minister of the Interior A. A. Makarov. Reactions were mixed. The Russian official press was dismissive, suggesting that in addition to the two possible options he foresaw for himself on his return – freedom or prison – there was a third: the St Nicholas Lunatic Asylum.104 Gorky, meanwhile, had written to Burtsev saying he did not understand the purpose of his trip and that it seemed suicidal to him. He mentioned also that he felt he could no longer help him attain the goals he was pursuing in The Future. Although he admired his continuing campaign to ensure that justice was properly carried out in Russia, he felt he might be going about it in the wrong way.105 Kropotkin too urged him to reconsider what he felt would be an act of the greatest folly, advising him instead to shut down his newspaper completely and return quietly to exposing provocateurs: ‘If you can find any new ones that is, for the old ones are finished and used up already.’106 But this was far from the case for, as early as December 1911, unbeknownst to his comrades in emigration, Burtsev had not only discovered the whereabouts of Azef but had entered into correspondence with him. Even more sensationally, the retired agent-provocateur had agreed to meet.107

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The historic reunion took place on 15 August 1912 in the Grand Café ‘Bristol’ on Schillerplaz, Frankfurt-am-Main, and was first reported on the front page of Le Matin three days later. This latest ‘scoop’, however, did not bring Burtsev the acclaim or praise he expected.108 Even Lopatin was critical of the content and tone of the article, complaining to Burtsev that it contained nothing new and that ‘to the public you are a political activist (of sorts) – not an artist or an historian. The public expects to hear from you about Azef ’s machinations – it does not expect an autobiography or an artistic psychological analysis of the man!’109 Lopatin felt that such a task would be better carried out by someone like Gorky. Indeed, Burtsev’s latest encounter may well have been responsible for Gorky’s brief renewal of interest in him. Not only did he send him an article out of the blue for inclusion in The Future but went so far as to invite him to visit him and Lopatin on Capri. Burtsev duly arrived on the island on 9 November 1912 but, somewhat mysteriously, left the following day. It is unknown whether there had been a disagreement or whether the visit had any bearing on the future breakdown of relations between the two. Indeed, it is unclear exactly what they discussed, though in an earlier letter Gorky did mention a proposal he wished to put to Burtsev concerning the collection and preservation of documents relating to the revolutionary movement in the nineteenth century.110

After Bakai The loss of Menʹshchikov and Bakai did not appear to render Burtsev’s detective service any less popular amongst his revolutionary clientele. Although it had been Menʹshchikov who had first alerted Lenin’s Social Democrats to Okhrana infiltration in their senior ranks, it was to Burtsev that the party turned to ask for help in the ensuing investigation. The request came towards the end of 1913, in the form of a letter from Lenin himself. The bearer of the letter was one of his closest confidantes, Roman Malinovsky, member of the State Duma and of the Central Committee of the RSDLP, and the subject of the investigation was Jacob Zhitomirsky, also a close associate of Lenin. Although after investigation Burtsev confirmed the party’s suspicions, Lenin refused to believe his comrade’s guilt until some four years later when an inspection of the tsarist government’s archives revealed the true extent of police infiltration in the ranks of the opposition. The Bolshevik leader would react in a similar manner when suspicions fell also on Malinovsky, a subject to be touched upon later in this study.111 Nor did the depletion of Burtsev’s agency appear to have any lasting impact on his ability to continue to embarrass the tsarist authorities. In January 1914 he revealed in the press that the Okhrana had extended its perlustration activities to the Italian Riviera, where one of their agents, a certain Invernezzi, was based. In the town of Cavi de Lavagna, home to a large Russian émigré community, he had bribed the postmaster and his son to supply him with the mail of anyone of interest, copies of which he then sent to the Russian embassy in Paris. Following Burtsev’s accusations the Italian Post and Telegraph Inspector visited Cavi and found the claims to be true. The spy, Invernezzi, disappeared shortly thereafter.112 Later that year the revolutionary detective published another open letter to the Russian authorities, this time to Shcheglovitov,

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Minister of Justice, complaining that the Russian police still had an agency in Paris headed by Krasilʹnikov, who had as many as twenty-nine active agents under his command and all this despite the police having been expelled from France some years previously.113 He had informed Jaurès and other socialists in the Chamber of Deputies who intended to use the information as the basis for a fresh demonstration against the Franco-Russian Alliance. Alongside these new revelations, Burtsev still doggedly persisted in his campaign against his bête noire. He had written again to Shcheglovitov, demanding again that Azef be put on trial, claiming that he had taken part in over thirty acts of terror. For good measure, he also repeated his demand for the arrest of Azef ’s protector, the recently retired A. V. Gerasimov, and once more signalled his willingness to return to Russia to give evidence. But quite apart from his evident desire to see justice done, there were doubtless other considerations behind Burtsev’s wish to return to Russia. It was now around six years since he had been obliged to embark on his second period in emigration and, like many of his countrymen, his yearning to return to his homeland was growing stronger by the day. Some of his compatriots had already taken the plunge. The previous summer, his oldest and closest friend and associate, German Lopatin, who had long suffered poor health, had, after much thought, decided to abandon Burtsev and his editorial duties and return home. Some months later he had written to his friend describing how he sensed a change for the better in the Russian air. One result of this change, however, was that now no one was in the slightest interested in the émigré press and that, sadly, since his arrival, he had heard no mention of Burtsev’s name and seen no sign of The Future or of any of his other publications. The prospect of Burtsev receiving any form of material support from within Russia was, therefore, out of the question.114 This news must have come as a blow to Burtsev, all the more so since his financial position was again in a perilous state and he was being pursued by debtors. In addition, he was still being attacked in the press by many in the emigration, who criticized him for his lack of rigour and for failing to check his facts which, they claimed, had led to the murder or suicide of honest and honourable revolutionaries.115 There were also court cases being brought against him personally on charges of defamation. At the first, brought by a Mr Golʹdendakh in December 1913, he had been ordered to pay 150 francs to the plaintiff. This he was quite unable to do but appealed the decision and was waiting for a new hearing.116 A more serious charge of defamation had been brought by Leib Poznansky, another of those whom Burtsev had accused in print of police provocation. At the trial, which was not heard until October 1914, Burtsev’s lawyers demanded that members of the Russian State Duma be called as witnesses but in the event this was not necessary for, as confirmed by Russian police reports, at the outbreak of war with Germany the revolutionary had left Paris on his journey back to Russia, there to face his fate.117

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Russia expects On 14 September 1914 the noted émigré medievalist Paul Vinogradoff wrote at length to The Times to express his unqualified support for the war. Describing it as Russia’s ‘war of liberation’ (Befreiungskrieg), he explained how it had unified his country, how liberals and conservatives had joined ranks and how, even abroad, such radicals as Vladimir Burtsev had issued appeals to his comrades urging them to stand by their country in her hour of need.1 Indeed, immediately after Germany’s declaration of war on Russia on 1 August 1914, Burtsev had paid a visit to Gustav Hervé, editor of the socialist journal La Guerrre Sociale in Paris and offered an article for publication in which he called on all Russian political parties to support the war and, without abandoning their programmes, to attempt to meet the government halfway.2 He was joined in his appeal by such notables as Georgy Plekhanov and Petr Kropotkin, who, despite their obvious political differences, argued that, irrespective of their hatred of the Romanov regime, they were obliged to defend their country against blatant imperialist aggression – a stance which their opponents would soon term ‘defencism’ as opposed to their own ‘defeatism’.3 Burtsev’s article was published the next day and was not only cited in other European newspapers but also received sympathetic reviews in the Russian press.4 For the author, however, а simple call for unity was not enough. He planned on a much more direct means of showing his determination to defend his country against attack. Four days after the appearance of the Vinogradoff letter, The Times ran another story under the heading ‘Expectant Russia: A Revolutionary’s Views’, which contained a follow-up letter from Burtsev, together with news of his courageous (if not, some might say, foolhardy) decision to return immediately to Russia ‘without asking for any safe conduct from the authorities’.5 He was, he declared, returning to his homeland as a free citizen and would offer himself up to the government to do with him as they saw fit. However, he believed he was not alone in having noticed indications coming out of Russia suggesting that the tsar might, at this point, be prepared to ‘forgive’ some of his more troublesome subjects. There had already been developments concerning the nationalities question, this time enunciated by Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, grandson of Tsar Nicholas I and newly appointed Supreme Commander of the Russian armed forces. On 14 August the Grand Duke had published his ‘Manifesto to the Polish Nation’, which offered, in return for their support in the war, autonomy, reunification of the Polish lands and freedom of religion and language. Moreover, the Imperial

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Manifesto of 2 August contained the following: ‘In the dread hour of trial, let internal dissensions be forgotten that the union of the tsar and his people may be yet more firmly consolidated, and that Russia, rising as a single man, may repulse the insolent attack of the enemy.’6 Burtsev hoped the implication here was that the government intended to offer up a political amnesty which would allow him to return home to continue his journalistic endeavours and attempt to persuade the forces of the left to rally behind the tsar and the country for the duration of hostilities. German aeroplanes were already dropping bombs on Paris when, on 5 August 1914, Burtsev boarded what he claimed was one of the last trains to leave the beleaguered French capital on the first leg of his journey back to his homeland. The previous day, together, it seemed, with all of France, he had mourned the tragic murder of his old comrade Jean Jaurès, who had been assassinated in Paris on the eve of Germany’s declaration of war on Russia.7 Perhaps more than most Burtsev had reason to admire Jaurès, one of his staunchest defenders who had protected him against French and Russian harassment alike, and whose name, Burtsev believed, would in time carry more weight than that of Marx.8 Despite the breadth and warmth of the encouragement shown to Burtsev by the Parisians, the support had been of a moral rather than financial nature – he recalled that as he left France he had a mere forty-eight francs in his pocket. On his arrival in London he learned that the Russian embassy was prepared to provide tickets and financial assistance to those who wished to make the journey home, but he was firmly against seeking such official help and instead decided to approach the London correspondent of Russkoe Slovo (Russian Word), a Moscow newspaper which, over the years, had willingly published the articles and news items he had sent, without ever actually paying him for anything. However, when the newspaper heard of his planned return, they were glad to accept his offer of collaboration and, on this occasion, agreed to an advance of £100, which sum proved more than sufficient to cover his preparations for his upcoming journey and to sustain him during what would doubtless be a difficult first few months in Russia. Shortly after his arrival in London he received a letter from Kropotkin in Brighton, lending his support and encouragement and inviting him to spend a few days as his guest before his departure.9 Burtsev gladly took up the offer, later describing how he had found the venerable old anarchist to be truly inspirational, how he believed the prince should be the one returning to Russia and how, like Pushkin’s ‘Prophet’, he would surely ‘fire up the hearts of men with his words’.10 Not all of his colleagues were as encouraging. Most of those in London, while supporting the war, warned him of the folly of his venture, believing it to be an act of madness or even suicide, some cautioning that it might even be construed as an act of tacit support for the Russian government. Burtsev disagreed, pointing out that the Kaiser had declared war not against the Russian government but against the Russian people and that the Russian army together with the allied forces were defending democracy against German imperialism. German victory would herald an evil reaction not only in Russia but throughout Europe, whereas a German defeat would signify victory not for tsarism but for the people. A return to reaction thereafter would be impossible. The London colony, however, was not convinced and bade him farewell ‘as if burying a dear friend’.11

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Within a few days he had left London to embark on the next leg of his fateful journey, taking him first to Newcastle upon Tyne, where he boarded a steamer to Bergen in Norway and then travelled by rail to Oslo. There he gave a few interviews about the war to the local press before journeying on to Stockholm, where, on Kropotkin’s behalf, he delivered a letter to the Swedish press. This, the famous ‘Letter to Doctor Steffen’, although being rejected by many anarchists, was nonetheless a fiery defence of the Allied position and a damning attack on the Germans.12 In his letter (and in a later one to the French anarchist Jean Grave) Kropotkin made a strong case for the war, arguing that the existence of the German Empire had held back the cause of the anarchist movement throughout Europe and that victory for the Allies would result in the unification and radicalization of the Russian people, which, in turn, would inevitably lead to the overthrow of tsarism. Therefore, any attempt to end the war by means of pacifist or revolutionary action or general strikes should be resisted and the war pursued until Germany was defeated. In Stockholm, Burtsev met many more of his countrymen who were also making their way back to Russia (some of them having been expelled from Germany). The vast majority were of the same opinion as the London Russian colony concerning Burtsev’s plans, with one exception in the form of Professor N. A. Gredeskul, a staunch supporter of the war who, despite his contempt for the tsar and his government, did not believe that at this given moment and under these specific conditions they could possibly make the mistake of imprisoning Burtsev on his return.13 The latter demurred saying that, on the contrary, he was almost sure he would be arrested, but that his imprisonment would create such a stir throughout Europe that the tsar would eventually be obliged to give in. He made no secret of his intentions and while in Stockholm gave various interviews to the Swedish and Russian press on the topic. He also prepared numerous copies of a declaration which he distributed to the newspapers and friends in Europe, asking that it be published in the event of his arrest. It boldly declared: ‘From prison I shall cry out just as I did in the pages of The Future while in emigration. I shall again speak out and repeat what I said earlier. It is my right to do so and no man and no prison can ever take that right away from me!’14 On the 13 September 1914 Burtsev bought a ticket for the following day’s ferry to the Finnish port of Rauma and spent that evening walking the streets of Stockholm, immersed in his thoughts and preparing himself for what would be one of the most important steps he would ever take. He was, of course, aware of the risk that, as many of his friends had warned him, once inside a Russian prison he might never again see the light of day. At three o’clock in the afternoon of Monday 14 September 1914, the Rauma ferry cast off. Burtsev later recalled that as the steamship moved away from the pier ‘all at once I felt much calmer. It was as if a new and joyous life was just beginning for me’.15

The prodigal returns On board the ferry Burtsev made the acquaintance of yet more of his compatriots, many of whom recognized him and had already heard of his planned return. One of these fellow-travellers was a Russian businessman by the name of Max Koppelman,

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who, having managed to escape from detention in Germany, was now returning home to St Petersburg. He later recalled his first encounter with the renowned revolutionary whom he described as ‘a middle-aged man, with clever, albeit rather myopic eyes, a pince-nez on a long black ribbon clipped on the bridge of his nose’.16 Having only just learned of Burtsev’s plans from an article in a Russian newspaper he had bought that morning, Koppelman was keen to find out more and invited him for drinks in his cabin, which he shared with a young Jewish lawyer who was on his way back to Moscow.17 In the course of the conversation Burtsev’s interlocutors, while admiring his determination and fearlessness, repeated the warnings he had already received and tried to convince him of the certainty of his arrest immediately the ship docked. (As Koppelman pointed out, although Finland had its own police force, the Frontier Police was traditionally in the hands of the Russian Gendarmerie.) When all attempts to persuade him to turn back failed, they insisted that they at least check through his luggage to make sure there was nothing which might compromise him further. Unfortunately, there was. Lying on top of his clothes they found three copies of one of Kropotkin’s recently published works.18 Koppelman recalled that Burtsev was initially reluctant to give them up but eventually conceded. The three companions then went up on deck and ‘under a starry sky and full moon’ threw the incriminating publications into the Gulf of Bothnia. Earlier in the evening Burtsev had asked his companions if they would each agree to take a copy of his letter of protest and, if required, deliver it to the offices of Russian Word in Moscow and Speech in Petrograd.19 Although aware of the risk involved in smuggling these letters into Russia, the two agreed, feeling it was the least they could do for their brave, though foolhardy, companion. At around six o’clock on the morning of 15 September the ferry arrived in Rauma. Koppelman and his companion held back on board and watched as Burtsev approached Finnish customs control. They saw him being asked to step aside and then being led away by a group of Russian Gendarmes. This was the last Koppelman saw of him and this is where his account breaks off. Indeed, from this point on until the momentous days of February 1917, there is very little independent record of Burtsev’s existence to be found, other than some sketchy coverage in the Western press. To maintain the narrative it is, therefore, necessary to rely heavily on Burtsev’s own recollections of the period, as detailed in his article ‘My return to Russia in 1914’. However, since these reminiscences first appeared some 13–14 years after the events described, they inevitably contain a few factual inaccuracies and so should be treated with some caution.20 Burtsev was taken from customs control to the Gendarmerie post, where the order was given for him to be searched. Two Gendarmes grabbed him roughly while another two began the search. Over the preceding seven years, living abroad as a free man, the revolutionary had forgotten the ignominy of such tortures but now, as rough hands slid over his body, prodding and probing, he was reminded of his ordeal in the Peter and Paul Fortress some thirty years earlier and, just as then, there was nothing he could do now but clench his teeth. He was, nevertheless, amused when one of his tormentors, having failed to find anything incriminating in his luggage, in his pockets or under his clothes, asked if there was somewhere else he might be concealing a revolver! Burtsev attempted to

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explain the futility of the search to the officer in charge: after all he was not a child and knew he would be arrested and searched – a fact he had already publicized in the press before setting out. The search was terminated and after a short interview, Burtsev was placed under arrest and informed he was to be transported by train to Petrograd that day. He complained at the pointlessness of arresting him on the Finnish border when he himself was heading for Petrograd and asked the officer in charge to send a telegram to headquarters requesting permission for him to continue his journey alone and at his own expense: the authorities could then do with him as they pleased. A response was quickly received refusing the request and ordering that the prisoner be brought immediately under armed guard to the capital. While awaiting the departure of the train the arresting officer, who was obviously unable to comprehend why anyone would willingly take such a risk, quizzed Burtsev as to the real reasons for his return and wondered whether it was all some plot involving perhaps a Grand Prince or some major foreign power. Burtsev laughingly replied that not only were there no major powers involved but that he did not even belong to a political party and, holding up his pen, declared: ‘This is my only weapon!’21 The policeman’s incomprehension was explained, in part, at the end of the interview when he described his many years of service on the Russo-German border and how, whenever the Okhrana lost sight of Burtsev in Paris, the officer would receive a telegram warning him to be on the lookout in case this ‘most dangerous of terrorists’ should attempt to cross back into Russia. In Gendarme circles Burtsev had, over the years, attained the status of their most hated enemy: a cruel, bloodthirsty and heartless individual. Burtsev related the tale of one particular colonel of the Gendarmerie who, having exhausted his lexicon of vituperative curses in his attempt to describe the revolutionary, ended his tirade by saying: ‘The only thing you could say in Burtsev’s favour is that at least he’s not a yid!’ This was a view which was by no means exceptional, given the widespread anti-Semitism to be found within the ranks of the imperial Russian police – and indeed elsewhere within the empire.22 Further proof of the Russian government’s determination to detain Burtsev at any cost was demonstrated by their decision not to give advance warning of his detention to the Finnish authorities. On learning of the arrest, the Governor General of Finland, F. A. Zein, contacted N. A. Maklakov, the Russian Minister of the Interior, with the formal request that Burtsev be released since his arrest had been an illegal act.23 The Governor General received no reply.

Imprisonment and trial When Burtsev’s train arrived in Petrograd his carriage was uncoupled and taken off into a siding. Away from public view he was then spirited off to the Peter and Paul Fortress, searched once more, dressed in prison clothes and locked in a cell in the notorious Trubetskoy Bastion – which had been home to generations of arrested revolutionaries. His interrogation followed shortly afterwards, during which he requested that when the officer in charge reported back to Maklakov, he should inform him that his arrest had been a great mistake and that the prisoner requested that he be

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released before the foreign press learned of it. But even had his request been passed on, it would have had little bearing on the outcome. In emigration Burtsev had relentlessly criticized Maklakov and, in particular, his Deputy V. F. Dzhunkovsky (who also served as commander of the Corps of Gendarmes). Both now relished the opportunity to settle old scores. Elsewhere in government circles, however, opinion was divided on the issue. After his arrest there had been two meetings of the Council of Ministers in which Foreign Minister S. D. Sazonov had not only insisted on Burtsev’s release but also advised the government to follow up on the detainee’s proposal. The European press was quick to pick up on these deliberations, reporting that the arrest had been effected under an old warrant and that the prisoner would offer no objection if it was decided to offer him bail.24 The prisoner himself, however, was slowly coming to the realization that his release was not imminent, and that he may, after all, have made a terrible mistake. Four long months passed with no decision taken and no news filtering through to the Trubetskoy from the outside. Burtsev spent the time as best he could by studying two of the early ‘greats’ of Russian literature, A. N. Radishchev and A. S. Griboedov.25 Then, one fateful day, he received a visit from a young defence lawyer and member of the State Duma by the name of Alexander Fedorovich Kerensky. Burtsev’s initial pleasure, however, soon turned to amazement and then dismay as his visitor launched into a condemnatory speech complaining about how difficult it would be to defend him and how they should be protesting against the war and not supporting it.26 It was clear to Burtsev that Kerensky spoke not only for himself but for a large number of those on the Left in Russia. The prisoner’s peace of mind was disturbed yet further when he was called to an interview with the examining magistrate and public prosecutor. He was anxious to find out how news of his arrest had been received within Russia but, almost in passing, the magistrate commented that no mention of him whatsoever had appeared in the press and that it was hardly surprising in the noise of war that his case had attracted no attention. These words stung Burtsev to the core. Had he, in fact, drawn a complete blank? Had his return journey and all his political calculations and plans been one dreadful mistake? He tried to convince himself that this could not be the case and that the magistrate was doubtless lying. In his state of anguish he could not face another encounter with Kerensky at that moment and so postponed the next visit of his defence lawyer. Fortunately, when the two did meet again, Kerensky had mellowed somewhat and grudgingly accepted his client’s uncompromising defencist stance. Burtsev’s disposition was also brightened by the receipt of a letter from German Lopatin, who, while chiding him for finding himself in a ‘hole of his own-digging’, assured him that numerous friends were anxious for his well-being and passed on their support. Meanwhile, in France, an attempt was made to bring news of his plight to public attention. While Burtsev was still in prison awaiting the continuation of his trial the Bund had issued an appeal protesting against the continued mistreatment of the Jews in Russia, declaring that the hopes of a liberal and reforming tendency on the part of the Russian government had proved baseless. Although the French censor allowed excerpts from this appeal to be published, the same favourable treatment was not extended to a leading article on the subject in the Guerre Sociale by Burtsev’s champion,

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the French socialist Gustave Hervé.27 The latter recalled that it was in his newspaper that the tsar’s liberating promises had first been welcomed and that Burtsev, ‘with a patriotism that was so ill-rewarded on his return to his country’, appealed for the union of all Russians against Prussian militarism. ‘How can we pretend with any decency that we are fighting for the liberation of oppressed peoples when one of our allies tolerates in her own territory such acts of savagery? Does the tsar know?’ Unfortunately, Hervé’s concerns never reached the Imperial Court for, perhaps fearing to incur the wrath of the Russian Emperor, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanded the article be suppressed. Burtsev’s defence team included not only Kerensky but also the noted barrister N. D. Sokolov, who, although also a vehement opponent of the war, proved to be of great assistance to his client, helping him communicate with the outside world and also keeping him up to date with the latest political developments. A third member of Burtsev’s defence was none other than V. A. Maklakov, a Kadet member of the Duma and brother of the Minister of the Interior. Their task was to mount a defence against the charge laid against him – not that he was a member of a forbidden political party or that he was participating in some revolutionary struggle or other but that he had published in his newspaper some ungracious comments about the tsar’s person, in other words, a charge of lèse-majesté, based on Article 103 of the Criminal Code.28 The trial took place in camera in the Petrograd Judiciary Chamber before Senator N. A. Krasheninnikov on 20 January (2 February) 1915.29 It involved a court official reading out incriminating passages from The Future and other of his publications. The presiding judge then asked the defendant whether he denied authorship of any of these passages. Burtsev defiantly replied that he took back nothing he had written earlier while abroad. The prosecution then outlined its case and demanded a sentence of hard labour. Burtsev was allowed to take the stand to state that he had returned to play his part in the defence of Russia, for he believed that at such a time it was necessary for the nation to unite behind the government. His defence counsel then objected to the indictment, believing it might be possible to sentence the prisoner not to penal servitude but to internal exile only. Although the defendant refused to repent for what he had written earlier, he nevertheless had returned with the most honest and noble of intentions. Maklakov referred back to the beginning of the war and to the passage in the Manifesto issued by the tsar calling for ‘internal dissensions to be forgotten’. This appeal he claimed was addressed to all of his subjects – including Burtsev. Maklakov was aware that although the Manifesto did not strictly constitute an amnesty, which would have allowed the defendant to be pardoned, he believed it meant the court could appeal to the tsar to suggest that, under these circumstances, the normal punishment would be inappropriate. In his own account of the trial Burtsev recalled his astonishment at the appearance at court of an unexpected visitor in the person of the former Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Empire, Count Sergey Yulˊevich Witte. Shortly before his first return to Russia some ten years previously, Burtsev had written to Witte, then Prime Minister, declaring that, if the latter felt his government might be prepared to give up its policy of ‘white terror’ and begin negotiations with the opposition, then he, Burtsev, would be prepared to go into print to personally renounce political terror

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and call on his fellow revolutionaries to declare a ceasefire. He received no reply.30 The same fate also befell some other letters he had sent at a later date. Since that time Witte had fallen into disfavour and had played a role of ever-decreasing political importance. Now in his final years, and despite increasing poor health, he had adopted a firm stance against war with Germany and, even after hostilities had begun, had urged diplomats to meet and negotiate a truce before it was too late, not only for Russia but for all of Europe. His presence at Burtsev’s trial was not recorded in his reminiscences (which only covered his life up to 1912) but, since he died of a brain tumour a mere six weeks later, this would doubtless have been one of his final appearances in public. Why then, in his state of obvious ill health, had the elder statesman decided to attend court? Was it that, given his uncompromising stance against the war, he wished simply to witness a fearless supporter of the conflict receive his just desserts? Burtsev himself did not think this likely. The two had never met previously and, although Witte had never replied to his letters, he did mention the correspondence in his memoirs referring to Burtsev as ‘one of the pillars of our revolutionary movement’.31 In Burtsev’s view, it was therefore simple curiosity that had driven Witte to make the effort to come to meet this longstanding ‘unacquainted acquaintance’, face to face for the first time.32 The trial ended with the defendant being found guilty as charged and sentenced to Siberian exile ‘in perpetuity’. This came as something of a shock, if not to Burtsev, then to many of his supporters both within Russia and abroad. Two days later, The Times expressed their surprise, reporting that Burtsev’s detention had initially been looked on as a formality, and that, since no special orders had been given to the police for his arrest, his liberation was considered certain.33 Mention was even made of this shameful act in the House of Commons.34 His case was taken up with particular vigour in France, where Hervé published his demand for an immediate amnesty. The sentiment was echoed by no lesser figures than President of the Republic Raymond Poincaré and Prime Minister René Viviani.35 The latter sent a telegram to Maurice Paléologue, his ambassador in Russia, telling him of the outrage of French socialists and asking him to try to secure a pardon for Burtsev. As he was up against Shcheglovitov, ‘the most rabid of all the reactionaries’, the task was not an easy one, but, nonetheless, Paléologue attempted to argue that Burtsev’s release could be interpreted as a gesture of national solidarity and might also help to bring the French Left on side.36 There were, however, some, particularly those from the defeatist camp, such as Chernov, who were glad to see Burtsev receiving what they considered to be his just desserts for his naivety in expecting to be able to enter into negotiations with the tsar and his reactionary government.37 Others entertained the hope that the sentence had been passed solely to enable the tsar to grant an immediate amnesty and, thereby, show his benevolent intentions towards those of his subjects who had strayed from the path. This, however, did not happen. Over the years, Burtsev had made dangerous enemies, not only in Minister of the Interior Maklakov and Minister of Justice Shcheglovitov but also, and perhaps more importantly, in the Emperor himself. Could Burtsev realistically have expected to be shown mercy by any of these men whom he had so deeply offended and so constantly insulted? Shortly after sentence had been handed down, Maklakov – no doubt with some relish – informed Burtsev that an appeal would not be countenanced and so,

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consequently, two weeks later the sentence was put into effect. Burtsev was conveyed to the transit prison and there half of his head was shaved and he was dressed in a convict’s uniform. If his reminiscence is to be believed, Burtsev declared that, at this stage, he was not downhearted by the outcome. He was sure his arrest and sentence would have the effect of exposing the Russian reaction to a wider audience and could serve as a useful tool in the hands of the growing number of the tsar’s subjects who were arguing for a change in government policy. His trial had gained the attention of the Russian and world press, and his desire for a successful outcome of the war was now widely recognized. In that sense, he had achieved victory both for himself and for all revolutionaries of a defencist persuasion.

Once more to Siberia – by stages It was with such a feeling of relative contentment and accomplishment that on 16 (29) March 1915 Burtsev set off to Siberian exile in his prison convoy – a journey he had undertaken some twenty-eight years earlier as a member of a large group of political prisoners. He recalled that although on that earlier occasion they had been particularly well guarded, they were nevertheless dealt with in a correct manner in conformity with prison regulations. Much had changed since then. Now political criminals were treated the same as all others and were crammed together so tightly into a third-class caged railway wagon reserved for general criminals that they were obliged to remain seated day and night. All, including Burtsev, were handcuffed – yet another example of the unnecessarily insulting and brutal treatment he was obliged to endure at the hands of his vengeful enemies.38 Moreover, he was treated in the most discourteous manner by the guards who assaulted, pushed and swore at him. His travelling companions were hardly any more pleasant. He recalled being obliged to spend much of the journey in the company of an ardent Bolshevik and having to enter into interminable arguments with him about the war. The Bolshevik and his fellow party members argued that it was necessary to use the war to overthrow the regime and went so far in their propaganda as to even declare that it was necessary to give active support to the Germans and to fight against Russian troops. Burtsev could do nothing to convince them of their folly. The first stage of their journey – to Krasnoyarsk, in eastern Siberia – lasted six or seven days. There the convoy spent the next two months in the transit prison waiting for the ice to melt on the Yenisei River. They would then be able to continue their journey by steamer northwards to their final destination of the village of Monastyrskoe, in the Turukhansk region, a place of exile reserved for those whom the authorities regarded as the most dangerous. The transit prison was a building of two floors with a few communal cells on each. Burtsev shared his cell with about nine politicals and about forty ordinary criminals – murderers, thieves and robbers – all dressed in identical prison clothes. Burtsev managed to smuggle out a letter to some friends which, much to his surprise, later appeared in Russian Word. In the letter he wrote that, despite having been sentenced to exile in perpetuity, he hoped he would be freed before the end of the year. When news of this reached Krasnoyarsk his fellow prisoners roundly

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criticized him and ridiculed his groundless optimism. Within a few months, however, he would be proved right. At the beginning of May the River Yenisei opened and Burtsev, together with some 200 fellow prisoners, was taken by the first available steamer to Yeniseisk. There, while waiting to be transported a further 2,000 kilometres downriver to his final place of exile in Turukhansk region, he was obliged to spend a week in the notorious Yeniseisk transit prison. The conditions there were considerably worse even than Krasnoyarsk. The prison was an old vaulted building with thick walls and double bars on the windows. Together with twenty politicals and another eighty common criminals of the most degenerate type, he was crammed into a cell designed to hold no more than twenty-five men. In these suffocating conditions the inmates were obliged to sleep head to toe, on top of and underneath the bunks. The filth was beyond description; food was brought to them in dirty buckets and smelled and tasted unimaginably vile. Burtsev would later recall the week as one of the most wearing experiences he had ever endured. Freed at last from the hell of the Yeniseisk transit prison, they were then packed into small, primitive and poorly maintained rowing boats. For every ten to fifteen prisoners there was one guard and a few local peasants who acted as oarsmen. Burtsev was, in addition, allocated a personal guard. Despite the journey being dreadfully slow and tedious, he nevertheless recalled finding it oddly pleasant, especially after his Yeniseisk experience. The journey was, however, not without its dangers, especially in stormy conditions. Indeed, on one occasion during a particularly violent storm, Burtsev’s boat was struck by a wave and capsized, throwing all the occupants and their baggage into the Yenisei. Despite such incidents, he managed to survive the remainder of the threeweek journey and at last reached his destination – the village of Monastyrskoe. His comrades were sent off to various other smaller villages in the neighbourhood but, since he was under supervision, Burtsev was kept back in the village. Monastyrskoe was the administrative centre of the region and comprised a telegraph station, church, hospital, prison, court and a few shops. There were around twenty-five exiles there including Sverdlov and Stalin, who were joined later by Kamenev and some other of his Social Democrat comrades. At that time none of these individuals entertained any hopes of revolution – they were still only making initial preparations and all to a man deeply resented Burtsev for accusing their leader, Lenin, of being a traitor and for calling on all revolutionaries to rally round the government during these difficult times. Burtsev was given freedom to roam within the settlement and found a place to live in a small peasant hut. He spent the days walking and fishing but could not get accustomed to the lifestyle. Life was made almost unbearable, especially for the newcomers, by the millions of mosquitoes and midges. Burtsev described how the inhabitants of the village were forced to walk around covered in thick netting, but no matter how well you wrapped yourself up, the insects would still manage to find a way in and bite and sting your face and hands mercilessly. It was particularly difficult to sleep. You had to create a mosquito net and then smoke out the insects before crawling in yourself, but even that hardly helped and so, sometimes, Burtsev would simply walk around until dawn.

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Figure 6.1  V. L. Burtsev in the village of Monastyrskoe, Siberia, 1915. BA, S. Svatikov Collection, V. L. Burtsev Papers, box 2, folder 8.

After a month of this he received the unexpected news that he was to be transferred to an even more remote part of Siberia. Apparently, some rather suspect information had been received that Burtsev’s comrades were planning a sea expedition across the Arctic Ocean in order to effect his rescue from Monastyrskoe. At this point, the police chief of the village of Boguchanskoe, a small settlement on the shores of the Angara River, stepped in to offer his services, giving his personal assurance that under his strict supervision the exile’s continued detention would be guaranteed.39 He would show Burtsev what real exile was! Before setting off on this further arduous and unnecessary journey, Burtsev managed to send a telegram to his comrades in Krasnoyarsk asking them to petition the powers that be in Petrograd to allow him to remain in Yeniseisk as he passed through on his way to the Angara or even to allow him to return to Monastyrskoe while it was still possible to do so by steamer rather than have to undergo the tortuous month-long journey by rowing boat, as he had done previously. With this slim hope, he set off under armed guard on board a passenger steamer for Yeniseisk. On his arrival, however, he found no news of his appeal and was therefore obliged to again board a rowing boat and set off to his final destination. Arriving in Boguchanskoe, the police chief gave orders that Burtsev was to be placed under constant supervision, even going so far as to station a night guard at the door of

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his cabin. The colony consisted of around twenty or so political exiles – most, but not all of whom, opposed the war – and so disputes and arguments were again commonplace. There were those of a decidedly pessimistic outlook who foresaw the tsarist reaction continuing for many a long year and who were not won over by Burtsev’s optimistic argument that the government could quickly fall if the opposition adopted a stance of defencism and forced the government to go along with them. Perhaps, remarkably, despite all these travails, the revolutionary never gave up hope, as a letter smuggled out to a compatriot in Italy demonstrated. An extract was published in the British press under the heading, ‘Bourtseff ’s Patriotism. A Striking Letter from Exile’, in which he wrote thus: If those who have pleaded my cause have understood my point of view and the object I had in coming to Russia, thank them in my name in the press. My coming enabled me to say what I wanted to say, which was that the Allies must win at any cost. Beside this, all other questions are secondary. We spoke earlier of the necessity for the revolutionary party to stand with the people in case of war with Germany. Even after having suffered exile, I retain this conviction, and can only repeat what I said when leaving for Russia.40

Burtsev’s faith was evidently unshakable and this confidence was soon rewarded, for, by the time his letter was published, he was once more a free man.

Amnesty That summer had seen considerable changes in the corridors of power in Petrograd. On 5 June 1915 Minister of the Interior Maklakov was sacked and a month later the same fate befell Minister of Justice Shcheglovitov. This news, Burtsev later commented, gave him even greater joy than the news of his pardon. To him, the discharge of these two ministers represented a death blow to old Russia and revived hope that, with these two evil spirits gone, the impending catastrophe could be averted.41 He learned of his amnesty from the pages of the Moscow newspaper Russian Word, whose Petrograd correspondent reported that under pressure of events the government had decided to make some concessions and had called an extraordinary session of the State Duma.42 In the corridors of the Duma the new Minister of the Interior Shcherbatov informed Milyukov that, as a first sign of the government’s change of direction, it had been decided to restore Burtsev’s rights and bring him back from exile and that a Supreme resolution had already been passed to that effect. With newspaper in hand, Burtsev rushed off to see the police chief. The latter, a typical Siberian administrative penpusher, had already heard the news but refused to release his captive and confirmed he would not do so until he had received written orders to that effect from his superior. The following day, in his remote Siberian village, Burtsev was called to see the police chief again but, rather than informing him of his release, the official triumphantly declared that he was to be transferred under armed guard back to Monastyrskoe. Initially, Burtsev could make no sense of this mindless order until he realized that it must have related to his earlier petition and that it was only now that his request to

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return to Monastyrskoe had been granted. Attempts to explain this to the police chief fell on deaf ears and so Burtsev gave up, hoping that, on passing through Yeniseisk, he might have the chance of encountering a more reasonable and less officious individual. News of his release caused excitement amongst some of his fellow exiles who wondered whether this might indeed herald a new ‘spring’. The majority, however, simply put it down to Burtsev’s foreign contacts and pessimistically continued to expect nothing other than the complete triumph of reaction, and a protracted stay in exile, especially in the event of an Allied victory. Burtsev then set off on his long return trip down the Angara, stopping at a village every twenty to twenty-five kilometres to change boats. Halfway into his journey, at the village of Rybnoe in Motyginsky District he was unexpectedly accosted by his former captor who had rushed from Boguchanskoe to catch up with him and whose attitude to him had suddenly changed. The police chief asked Burtsev not to think too badly of him, as he handed him his certificate of passage saying, ‘If only you knew the kind of orders I received concerning you!’ and, as if in justification, declared: ‘I am, after all, no more than an axe. They swing me and I cut.’ It was with a mixture of disgust and relief that Burtsev turned his back on this odious dogsbody – the product of a truly corrupt regime – and left the village of Rybnoe. He was a free man again. When Burtsev arrived in Yeniseisk, the authorities renewed his certificate of passage and asked him to choose a place of residence which could be any town other than Petrograd, a university town or anywhere near the theatre of war. He plumped for Vyborg but on his way to the Finnish border learned that permission to settle there had been refused and so, instead, he chose Tverʹ, which was conveniently located between Moscow and Petrograd. Before leaving Yeniseisk he had paid a visit to the post office to pick up some mail which had been sent to him poste restante. There he was party to a heartwarming event. He encountered a group of officials of the most extreme ‘Black-hundredist’ views who were looking through the latest edition of The Spark, a popular illustrated journal.43 It contained a portrait of Burtsev dressed in prison clothes alongside another illustration of his cottage in Monastyrskoe. The postal workers were talking loudly amongst themselves about Burtsev, expressing their full sympathy for him and their disgust at the government for having sent him into exile. At that point Burtsev walked up to the counter and introduced himself. In no time, the postal workers and members of the public had dropped what they were doing and were engaged in lengthy discussions with the exile. Burtsev recorded that this unexpected change in the public’s attitude towards him would be repeated time and again as he made his journey back from Siberia.44 And indeed, the news of his release was welcomed not only in the country at large but also in the capital. As The Times commented, the announcement of Burtsev’s pardon on 2 August 1915 had ‘created an excellent impression’ in Petrograd. On the same day the newspaper reported on the Duma’s renewed mood of determination, as exemplified in a recently adopted Order of the Day: expressing the country’s determination to fight with their allies until victory was achieved and promising not to enter into a separate peace, and moreover ‘recognizing that the nearest way to victory is the willing assistance of the whole population for the creation of fresh means of continuing the struggle, which demands the

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strengthening of internal peace and the forgetting of old political quarrels as well as the benevolent attention of the authorities in regard to the interests of all loyal citizens of Russia, without distinction of race, language, or religion’.45

On his two-week train journey back from Siberia the former exile had ample time finally to witness as a freeman what he described as the nightmarish quality of contemporary Russian life. Before him there passed a bewildering array of people of every class and every nationality: intellectuals, workers, soldiers, peasants, doctors, engineers, students and teachers. Free thought bubbled up everywhere and one could sense an enormous reservoir of raw energy. There was a feeling of an overwhelming power contained within that huge mass of people, as represented by the hundreds of different types that passed before his eyes. Everyone he talked to spoke of Russia’s vast forests, of her mines containing fabled riches of minerals and coal and of her enormous well-stocked fisheries: ‘And, as I passed through the unending granaries of Siberia unwittingly there sprang to mind those famous words from the very beginning of our history: “Our land is great and rich, but there is no order!”’46 His views on the war were now shared by almost everyone in Russia, irrespective of their political opinion or profession: these difficult times had bound them closer together and Burtsev now saw it as his duty in the interests of the survival of his country to assist in the establishment of such a new order. His hatred for the reaction was clear for all to see, as was his passionate desire to show his support for the Russian Army and the Allies. He encountered much sympathy for his views from the broad, non-party strata of Russian society, to whom, not so long ago, he was held up as some kind of bogeyman. Now these same people were sympathetic towards him, understood him and expected much from him. And it was not only the general public who felt that way – suddenly many of his old enemies, in the police and Gendarmerie, started to express sympathy with his position. In returning to Russia and combining the objectives of the liberation movement with the nationwide struggle brought about by the war, Burtsev had succeeded in transferring his fight against Nicholas II to an arena that the government found much more difficult to defend, and, in so doing, not only did he receive the support of his old friends but also succeeded in winning the backing of some of his most bitter enemies. He recalled that he had, in fact, witnessed this change in public opinion the moment he had crossed the border into Finland on his return. The Gendarme who had been obliged to enforce the order for his arrest realized full well that Burtsev’s place was not in a prison but in a newspaper editorial office where he could usefully contribute to the defence of the country. But, of course, within Russia Burtsev also found many who did not share his views, who firmly opposed the war and, thanks to the almost daily mistakes committed by the government, found it easy to defend their defeatist position.

Return to the capital – by stages (the ‘Holy Nail’ revisited) Burtsev had been ordered to go directly to Tverʹ, where he would be placed under police surveillance. However, on his way there he made a brief stop in Samara, where,

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as well as meeting a number of activists, he also gave interviews in which he thanked the State Duma and the Progressive Bloc, which was just forming at that time and which had been instrumental in securing his release and that of others imprisoned for political or religious crimes.47 His next stop was Moscow, where he met up again with Sergei Melʹgunov and some more of his old comrades. But his arrival in the former capital was important to Burtsev for quite another reason, for he was intent on fulfilling a promise he had made to himself many decades earlier: that was to pay another visit to the Uspensky Cathedral and once more seek out Christ’s crucifixion nail.48 The memory of his first visit was still so imprinted in his mind that he had no trouble in finding the chapel where the relic was kept. On his arrival he found a crowd of worshippers had already assembled outside the chapel and were awaiting their turn to be admitted. He joined the queue and, having paid his twenty kopeks, soon gained entry. There, in the exact same place and casket, he saw that very nail which had figuratively hammered itself into his conscience over forty years earlier and which had remained there ever since. Although everything was just as he remembered it, the experience triggered quite different emotions. A monk repeated the same scholarly words about the nail just as his predecessor had done many years earlier and then asked the crowd to pray, cross themselves and bow in veneration before the relic. Burtsev chose not to join in and, in order not to spoil the reverential mood of the worshippers, gently edged away and quietly withdrew. The emotions he felt on leaving the cathedral this time were quite unlike his previous visit. On that earlier occasion he had been overwhelmed by a sense of boundless joy and happiness, whereas now his feelings were simply of immense relief, as if he had at last awoken from a lifelong nightmare. Now he breathed more easily, reassured in the belief that future generations would no longer have to live through that spiritual tragedy which he had experienced as a boy, the cause of which was to be found in that very building. Arriving at last in Tverʹ it soon became apparent that surveillance over him had not been lifted.49 He was constantly shadowed by spies until eventually an agent arrived from Petrograd and moved into the same hotel as him. The Department of Police, however, was not alone in maintaining its interest in Burtsev. The mainstream press was also keen to solicit the views of the amnestied revolutionary on the conduct of the war, and in an interview with the Birzhevye vedomosti (Bourse Gazette), which was later reported at length in The Manchester Guardian, Burtsev repeated his conviction that victory could not be achieved without the unfettered support of the whole nation and expressed his relief at the recent ministerial changes. He also regretted that questions concerning the independence of Poland and the abolition of restrictions for the Jews had not been settled a year earlier, for ‘it might have saved millions of Russian lives and we might have advanced far beyond Galicia’. He was also very disappointed at the prorogation of the Duma for he believed the salvation of Russia depended on that body.50 But, nevertheless, he ended the interview on a note of optimism: ‘I do not doubt for a moment that Russia stands at last on its way to real social progress and will march on in close contact with the whole civilized world. I am also convinced that the triumph of all we have fought for is a thing of the almost immediate future.’51

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Tverʹ, however, was in no way suitable for Burtsev’s specific purposes and he immediately started to petition for permission to return to Petrograd, explaining that he needed to have access to the Public Library for his research work. Minister of the Interior Shcherbatov had recently been replaced by the right-winger, A. N. Khvostov, an outspoken opponent of the Germans who sincerely wished for a Russian victory but who was unpopular in society and who became even more so during the term of his short-lived ministry.52 Khvostov did, however, realize that some concessions would have to be granted to the opposition and, in one of his first reports to the tsar, raised the possibility of allowing Burtsev to return to Petrograd. Eventually, in November 1915, permission was granted.53 Thereafter, whenever Khvostov was accused of being a reactionary he would boast, ‘But it was I who allowed Burtsev to return to Petrograd!’ Later, when the two of them sat together in a Bolshevik prison, he explained that the sole reason he had permitted Burtsev’s return was because of the latter’s position on the greatest issue in Russian life at the time – the war – and he knew that for Burtsev, a Russian and Allied victory was more important than all else.54 And so, having first arrived in Petrograd from Rauma in September 1914, Burtsev finally managed to return there (via a lengthy Siberian detour) in the winter of 1915, but this time as a free man. He was thus, at last, able to restart his journalistic career and to carry out that propaganda work for which he had left France for Russia at the outbreak of war.

On the eve: A free man in Petrograd, 1916 In a detailed chronological description of police archival materials on Burtsev held in the Russian State Military Archive in Moscow there is only one entry for the year 1916 – a brief note stating simply that in that year the revolutionary adopted a socialpatriotic standpoint (as opposed to his previous position as a left SR).55 The lack of information on the revolutionary for this period was explained by K. I. Globachev, head of the Petrograd Okhrana at that time, who recalled Burtsev returning to the capital and moving into his favoured Balabinskaia Hotel: Initially, he was put under police supervision but, once it became clear that he represented no threat whatsoever, supervision was lifted. It had long been known that he was an old maniac obsessed with unmasking spies, at which activity he was none too successful. However, placing him under surveillance on his arrival had the effect of giving him a serious persecution complex. Imagining he was constantly being followed, he would rush up to completely innocent passers-by and demand they accompany him to the police station, or he would take down the numbers of cabbies he suspected of being spies. In general, he produced a very odd impression on those around him.56

There is no question that Burtsev was still obsessed with police provocation and general malpractice. Indeed, later that year he travelled to Moscow and called at the home of the former head of the Okhrana, Zubatov, hoping the latter might at last agree to the

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interview he had declined ten years earlier, but he was again met with a refusal. Sadly, another chance for the two to meet up would not present itself, for, at the first news of the revolution the following year, rather than fall into the hands of the revolutionaries, the former police chief shot himself.57 Burtsev’s spy-busting mania, however, was less pronounced than in previous years. He now had other interests, not least of which was his passion for literary research. The reason he had advanced in support of his return to the capital – the need to have access to the collections of the Public Library – was a genuine one, for he was eager to expand on the studies he had embarked on over a year earlier during his detention in the Trubetskoy Bastion. Soon he was immersed again in his researches into Griboedov’s renowned play Woe from Wit, which also required him to undertake additional trips to the Historical Library in Moscow.58 The same applied to the wide-ranging research leading to his contemporary rendering of Radishchev’s famous Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, which obliged him to spend a great deal of time poring over the author’s original manuscripts in the Petrograd State Archive.59 He would later be described by one who knew and greatly admired him as ‘that curious blend of revolutionary and scholar’, but there were those who believed that the two pursuits were incompatible and that such bibliographic indulgences were bound to hamper revolutionary activity.60 Burtsev would bat these criticisms aside at a later date when in emigration, but for now he was more interested in directing his energies and efforts towards supporting the war and relentlessly attacking the ‘defeatists’. The old revolutionary had started his defencist agitation immediately upon his return to Petrograd. In an interview given in December 1915 he again expressed his firm faith in the ultimate victory of the Allies and described the suggestion of Russia declaring a separate peace as criminal madness and a profound betrayal.61 One of his first acts the following year was to obtain Kropotkin’s permission to republish his two letters written at the outbreak of war. These appeared in the pamphlet P. A. Kropotkin o voine (P. A. Kropotkin on the War) together with an afterword in which Burtsev explained how the author’s pacifism could happily coexist with his strongly held belief that aggression must be met with aggression. Earlier, Kropotkin had been prevented from returning to Russia by governmental functionaries such as Maklakov and Shcheglovitov but now, sadly, the cause was ill health. Wishing him well, Burtsev declared that, at this perilous time in his country’s history, the place for such an inspirational figure was not in Brighton, England, but at home in Russia.62 The war, after all, was being waged not only against the German government but also against its supporters, be they within Germany or Russia, and there were plenty of the latter to be found, primarily within the ranks of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. On his return from exile Burtsev had been struck by the lack of enthusiasm within the senior ranks of government for the struggle against this dangerous Russian defeatism. The Petrograd he found was home to a politically divided Duma and a Council of Ministers, whose conduct of the war was rapidly losing it the nation’s trust. This was not helped by rumours concerning the growing influence of the tsarina’s ‘personal religious counsellor’, the illiterate, debauched, dangerous and much-hated Grigory Rasputin. In August 1915, against the advice of his Council of Ministers, the tsar had decided to take the place of Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich and

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assume command of the Russian Army and, in so doing, in effect, had handed even more power and influence to the Empress and her adviser. The consequences were disastrous, as the latter began to replace members of the government with incompetent favourites and placemen such as A. N. Khvostov, A. N. Volzhin and, most noticeably, the spectacularly incompetent and unpopular B. V. Stürmer.63 The latter’s appointment to the posts of Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Minister of the Interior and, shortly thereafter, Foreign Minister was greeted with general dismay and added to the public’s growing lack of trust in the government. Empress Alexandra’s German origins had already caused many to doubt her loyalty and it was not long before rumours surfaced that she, Rasputin, the suspiciously German-named Stürmer and his newly appointed Minister of the Interior, A. D. Protopopov, were secretly negotiating a separate peace with Germany. With the entire government now apparently compromised and with chaos reigning at court Burtsev found little enthusiasm for his espousal of the struggle against defeatism. As 1916 drew to a close and as the economy continued to collapse, while levels of mistrust, uncertainty and confusion within the country continued to rise, the Duma at last made a stand and, at their meeting of 1 November, launched a series of attacks on the government. Speeches were delivered by the likes of S. I. Shidlovsky, Chairman of the Progressive Bloc, A. F. Kerensky, leader of the Trudoviks and, most notably, P. N. Milyukov, leader of the Kadets, who was particularly outspoken in his criticism of Stürmer and the ruling clique that surrounded the Empress, suggesting that they were guilty either of ‘stupidity’ or of ‘treason’. But such open political attacks and the accompanying calls for insurrection were by no means welcomed by all. Burtsev was one of those who witnessed the rise in popular dissatisfaction with great concern, fearing its negative impact on the allimportant war effort.64 Protests, in the main, had been unplanned and sporadic and he believed that any such disorganized revolutionary movement would play into the hands of the Germans and might, in the end, benefit the cause of reaction. He was firmly of the view that a unified defencist strategy would not only help the Allies defeat German imperialism but, in the future, allow the opposition to attain a decisive victory against the reaction at home and set Russia on the path to healthy, liberal reform. His words, unfortunately, went unheeded yet again. Meanwhile, the tsar and his Council of Ministers appeared oblivious to the rise in the number of strikes, demonstrations and the general malaise within the population – a discontent which could not be satisfied, even with the murder of the hated Rasputin in mid-December – the latter, after all, was regarded more as a symbol of the problem rather than its cause. The Duma and other public leaders attempted to issue warnings about the imminent danger which the country now faced but to no avail. In his reminiscence of the period, Burtsev remarked on the curious fact that, despite such warnings, neither the government nor indeed the opposition appeared ready for the consequences when, on 23 February (8 March) 1917, a relatively insignificant disturbance in Petrograd concerning food shortages signalled the beginning of revolution and the end of the Russian monarchy.65 Within a few days, as yet more citizens took to the streets, neither police nor Cossacks were able to deal with the sheer force of numbers; instead, many of them took the decision to disobey orders

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and themselves join in the rebellion. Even so, and now with no hope of saving the situation, it was not until 2 (15) March that the tsar was persuaded, reluctantly, to renounce the throne in favour of his brother, the Grand Duke Mikhail. By this time, with the government now in total disarray, some members of the Duma, together with representatives of the Petrograd Soviet, had joined together to attempt to fill the gap and form a provisional administration. They quickly drew up a broad declaration which stated the democratic principles upon which the new body would govern and which promised a widening of civil rights and the rapid establishment of a constituent assembly with responsibility for deciding upon the future governance of the country. Some still hoped that Grand Duke Mikhail would be persuaded to assume the throne and that the new government might take the form of a constitutional monarchy but this was not to be. The following day the Grand Duke rejected his brother’s offer and, with that, brought the rule of the house of Romanov to an end. One might have imagined that Burtsev, before all others, would have greeted the passing of the Russian autocracy with the greatest of pleasure: after all, the main enemy in his lifelong fight for a free Russia, on whose orders he had been so cruelly insulted and abused, had at last been vanquished. However, as he noted in his reminiscence, his response was more subdued: ‘The revolution’, he stated simply, ‘had eliminated from Russian life that which had already been condemned by history’. And while acknowledging the sense of excitement and hope which reigned in Petrograd during these first few days, he was aware that power had in fact been seized by revolutionaries who were in many respects close tendentially to the Bolsheviks – the very defeatists against whom he had been struggling. Indeed, it would not be long before disillusionment with the new government would set in, and by far its worst crime, in Burtsev’s eyes, would be its failure, in this time of war, to prevent the Bolsheviks from making their preparations for the overthrow of power.66

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Commissioner Burtsev Although Burtsev may have claimed to have reacted with some composure and caution to news of the revolution and the collapse of the monarchy, this was not the recollection of Claude Anet, a journalist sent to Petrograd by the French daily Le Petit Parisien. In his diary entry for 24 March (6 April) 1917 Anet described an interview he had conducted earlier with Burtsev at the Balabinskaia Hotel: He is a small, thin, short-sighted man, with white hair and a sparse, pointed beard. When I meet him he is in seventh heaven and drowning in happiness. At last, he has obtained the Russia he has dreamed of for so long. But he is under no illusions with regard to the low morale of the Petrograd socialists. Like me, he sees deserters and disgruntled workers everywhere. But he is convinced – I would like to believe – that, at the front, the troops are in good shape and will sail to victory. ‘In Petrograd we must work hard for the war effort and also to maintain discipline’ he says, ‘but you will see, you will see, everything will work out!’1

Anet did, however, point out that Burtsev’s actions had only a limited effect due to his lack of party affiliation, but this isolation did not mean he was completely without influence. By the time of the interview Burtsev had already been catapulted once more to a position of prominence. One of the first acts of the Provisional Government had been to set up an Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry, under N. K. Muravʹev, whose task was to investigate illegal acts committed by former tsarist ministers and senior office holders. Five days later, the Ministry of Justice established a separate commission whose remit was the examination and settlement of those cases in the archives of the former Department of Police which were deemed to be of a political nature. Burtsev was invited to become the head of that commission and an indication of the revolutionary’s popularity at the time can be gained by the manner in which the appointment was greeted by the press.2 The liberal-patriotic weekly Petrograd Gazette, for example, splashed his portrait over a whole page under the banner headline: ‘Unmasker of Secret Police and Provocateurs’, with the following brief report: ‘V. L. Burtsev, the famous writer and political activist, is renowned for exposing the Azefovshchina so zealously cultivated by Stolypin. Currently, by order of the Provisional Government, Burtsev is systematizing the affairs of the secret police, the Gendarmerie, and the Department of the Police.’3

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And indeed, with every passing day, the Komissiia Burtseva (Burtsev Commission), as it became known, would emerge from its labours in the archives with the scalp of yet another traitorous revolutionary, student or journalist. But evidently, such successes did not find favour with Kerensky, the new Minister of Justice, who called Burtsev’s reliability into question believing he was simply not cut out for such systematic duties. Within three days of his appointment, Kerensky was already attempting to undermine the new commissioner, writing to Burtsev’s former co-editor Pavel Shchegolev and others, asking them to bypass Burtsev, examine the Department of Police documents themselves and report back directly to Kerensky. Indeed, according to Sergei Svatikov, both Kerensky and Shchegolev attempted to prevent Burtsev from gaining access to the police archives.4 The frostiness which had arisen during the first meeting between Kerensky and Burtsev in the Trubetskoy Bastion some two years earlier had evidently not thawed. The commission managed to limp on for another three months until mid-June, when Kerensky succeeded in having it replaced by another body under Shchegolev’s official chairmanship.5 By this time, however, Burtsev’s attentions had already turned from the police archives to those former representatives of the state security services who now found themselves languishing in prison. K. I. Globachev, former head of the Okhrana, was one such. His recollections of his internment include the following interesting, though far from flattering, description of Burtsev and his interrogation techniques:

Figure 7.1  Petrogradskaia Gazeta, no. 61, March 1917, Prilozh. no. 19, 5. Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka.

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We were visited by the old revolutionary V. L. Burtsev whose main aim was, through discussions with myself and other officers of the Gendarmerie, to try to uncover the names of those of our secret agents whose details had not yet been obtained from the files that had survived the destruction of our departments. … He struck me as a man of limited capabilities whose idée fixe was the exposure of those he chose to call ‘political provocateurs’. He himself did not belong to any political party but, as an old revolutionary who, according to the socialists, had suffered greatly under the tsarist regime and, as one who hated the monarchical structure with all the fibre of his being, he enjoyed great popularity and respect among the new government. … He often made mistakes when uncovering suspects, accusing totally innocent people and declaring as innocent real provocateurs. At heart he was a benevolent man, though gullible and somewhat slow-witted. Visiting us prisoners, he would try to issue words of comfort and, as someone who failed totally to understand that, with the fall of the monarchy, Russia was already lost, he attempted to reassure us that soon everything would be fine and that a veritable paradise awaited just around the corner.6

Burtsev, however, was not held in such low regard by other prisoners. The barrister Yakov Lisitsyn, for example, recalled receiving a visit from him while being held in a Moscow prison. Burtsev somehow managed to arrange for him to be released in order that he could conduct the interview in the comfort of his hotel room. What struck Lisitsyn was his interrogator’s singular integrity and originality, and, moreover, despite the two holding diametrically opposing views, Lisitsyn could not help but feel a great sympathy towards the man. He commented that whereas it was not difficult for someone to attract the sympathy and trust of those of a like-mind, Burtsev’s great triumph was that he could win over the hearts and minds even of those who disagreed with him.7 However, the practice of having certain favoured prisoners released under supervision was frowned upon by Burtsev’s superiors and, no doubt, gave them even more cause to liquidate his commission as quickly as possible. Two inmates to receive such special treatment were former police chiefs Gerasimov and Vissarionov, who, on Burtsev’s instructions, were freed from the Kresty prison, only to be locked up again within a few days when the revolutionary authorities got wind of it.8 This extreme, and some might say, misplaced, ‘benevolence’ of Burtsev was noted by Muravʹev’s Commission when he was called to give evidence on 1 (14) April.9 His interrogators suspected that his kind-heartedness might have prevented him from understanding the full import of the acts of some senior police officials: his naivety had even allowed him to believe that ‘predatory police hawk’, Gerasimov, when the latter had made the ridiculous claim of having personally participated in attempts to overthrow the monarchy.10 But Burtsev was not alone in wishing to show compassion towards his vanquished enemies. Minister of Justice Kerensky later described the criticism he had come under for the leniency he had shown towards those senior tsarist officials in his charge and attempted to defend his actions thus: I remain a firm adversary of every form of terror. I shall never renounce this ‘weakness’, this humaneness of our March Revolution. The real soul of the Russian

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people is one of mercy without hatred. This is the heritage of our Russian culture, … how could this Russian Revolution have begun with capital punishment, the characteristic habit of autocracy? … The strength of our Russian Revolution lay precisely in the fact that it triumphed over its enemies, not by terror and bloodshed, but by mercy, love and justice, even if only for one day, for one hour.11

While Burtsev, the former terrorist, might have agreed with such lenient treatment of the defeated rightist enemies of the revolution he would soon become one of Kerensky’s fiercest critics, thanks to the weakness and criminal negligence which the latter showed in his dealings with what Burtsev considered to be the real existential threat to the revolution – namely, Lenin and his Bolshevik Party – a threat which, as he rightly judged, would not be overcome by ‘mercy, love and justice’.

Lenin and the war: Onwards to defeat For Burtsev it was essential that the early gains of the revolution be protected. The Provisional Government therefore had to be defended and supported in its determination to fight the war to a successful conclusion. To that end, and in order to strengthen the defencist camp, he wrote to Kropotkin in April urging him to return home.12 A month later, on 30 May (12 June), he was rewarded when, after a period of over forty years in exile, the famous anarchist prince stepped off a train at the Finland Station in Petrograd to a tumultuous reception. The new arrival was met by an official welcoming party, including his old comrade in exile Nikolai Chaikovsky and the recently appointed Minister of War Kerensky, but the pro-war camp was not alone in receiving reinforcements, for Kropotkin was by no means the only revolutionary to arrive back in the capital at that time. Some six weeks earlier the Finland Station has seen the triumphant return of another leading radical who had quite a different attitude to the ongoing hostilities. Like most of his compatriots, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov-Lenin had been surprised by the unexpected turn of events in his homeland. As recently as January 1917, a mere month before revolution broke out, he had declared in a speech to an audience of young socialists in Zurich: ‘We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution.’13 But quickly disregarding his lack of foresight, he hurried to make arrangements for his return and arrived back on Russian soil on 3 (16) April after a remarkable journey which saw his thirty-two-strong group of exiles leave Switzerland and, with the permission of the German government, pass through enemy territory in a sealed train provided at the Kaiser’s expense, on their way home to Petrograd. As Burtsev would later point out, this was by no means the first time Lenin and his Bolsheviks had received assistance from the German government. He described the background to the Bolshevik leader’s decision in 1912 to relocate his revolutionary operations from Paris to Krakow, a move apparently suggested by Polish intermediaries, who had passed on guarantees from Germany that, as a Russian who was preparing to incite revolution in Russia, he would not be troubled.14 Lenin duly made the move and

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from there, right up to the outbreak of war, conducted his business with his comrades in Russia without interference either from the Russian Department of Police (who knew everything he was doing thanks to the reports of his close associate Malinovsky and other informants) or from the German authorities, who, for their part and with their war aims in mind, did not wish to trouble him at that stage. Burtsev pointed to the fact that, since that time, Lenin’s biographers had maintained a deathly silence on the background to the move and argued that if, two years before the outbreak of war, Germany had indeed allowed Lenin to come to them and from enemy territory help to weaken the Russian state machine for the purposes of the upcoming war, then, of course, this would provide incontrovertible proof of his betrayal of Russia. But Burtsev went further, claiming also to have received information that Lenin and the Bolsheviks had for years been the recipients of direct financial assistance from the Germans who, he noted, had also approached representatives of various other groups and nationalities within Russia but none other than Lenin had responded to their overtures.15 Burtsev, of course, was not the first to make such claims. Suspicions as to the source of the party’s funding had been voiced earlier by no less reputable an organ than The Times, which suspected that revolutionary agitation in Russia was in all probability engineered by German money and that ‘a pure Russia was not the first thing desired by the Labour Party and the Socialists’ – an opinion certainly shared by Lenin.16 Lenin had been a supporter of the anti-war resolution adopted at the Second International’s 1912 Basel conference: namely, that socialist parties should do all in their power to prevent their governments from waging war in Europe. However, just as he would later be caught unawares by the February Revolution, so too did he fail to predict the outbreak of hostilities in July 1914: indeed, the previous year he had written to Gorky expressing the view that the revolution would benefit greatly from war between Austria and Russia but that it was highly unlikely the respective heads of state would oblige.17 Now, confronted with the reality of war, Lenin chose to modify his stance and adopt a position not quite in keeping with the spirit of the Basel resolution. For, while still condemning the war as a bourgeois, imperialist conflict, he nevertheless felt that Russian Marxists should support any foreign power that might overthrow the tsarist regime.18 In other words, he was less concerned with the outcome of the war in the rest of Europe so long as the end result was of benefit to the working classes in Russia and that, in his view, could best be achieved by a German victory. This narrow, Russia-centred attitude to the conflict was at variance with that of others in the defeatist camp such as Martov, who, following his socialist principles to the letter, was not selective in his condemnation of imperialist aggressors and, moreover, opposed the war, not merely on political but also on moral grounds.19 It goes without saying that Lenin’s adoption of such a flagrantly unpatriotic stance also earned him the scorn of the pro-war lobby, and none proved more openly contemptuous of him than Vladimir Burtsev. Almost from the moment of Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station, Burtsev had realized the threat he posed to the already unstable ruling structure. The Bolshevik leader’s immediate refusal to consider any rapprochement with the Mensheviks showed that he had no intention of putting aside political differences for the sake of the country at this perilous time in its history. From the outset, his aim was clear: to

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attack relentlessly the Kadet-controlled ‘imperialist’ Provisional Government and all those Mensheviks and Socialists-Revolutionaries who supported it, and to advocate its replacement by a new revolutionary administration comprising the Soviets together with other truly socialist organizations. In Pravda and elsewhere he opened up a propaganda war, trying to win over popular support for his cause, calling for largescale nationalization and advocating the need for peace in Europe, while being careful to avoid promoting any openly insurrectionary or anti-war activity which might be construed as treacherous or unlawful. His propaganda efforts were helped immensely by the mounting difficulties which beset the Provisional Government. As the country’s economic conditions worsened and as an end to the war seemed ever more distant, the sense of growing national discontent became tangible amongst workers, peasants and, indeed, members of the armed forces. The government hardly improved its situation or popularity when, in late April, in an attempt to compromise, it introduced a number of socialists to its ranks. Rather, the latter quickly became identified with the failings of the government, thus, inadvertently, leaving the Bolsheviks as the only remaining serious party of opposition. Burtsev watched with concern as support grew for the newly energized party and for its leader as the latter positioned himself as the sole defender of the interests of these various disgruntled groups. But while so doing, Lenin was also obliged to give a public account of his longstanding close association with Roman Malinovsky, who, in a manner reminiscent of Azef, and apparently unsuspected by all around him, had managed to rise to the topmost ranks of the opposition – in this case as leader of the Bolshevik faction in the State Duma – before eventually being unmasked as a tsarist police agent and informer. On 26 May (8 June) Lenin was called before the Extraordinary Commission of Enquiry into the Malinovsky affair and there gave evidence to the fact that he was merely one of many whom the infiltrator and the Okhrana had fooled and that therefore no specific blame could be attached to him. A few days later, Burtsev was also called before the commission and explained how even he, the spy-buster par excellence, had been given no cause to suspect the traitor of wrongdoing. His evidence was, to all intents and purposes, unremarkable and hardly critical of Lenin or his party.20 However, having completed his formal depositions, Burtsev deemed it an opportune moment to put forward a radical proposal which showed the full extent of his mistrust of Lenin and his defeatist associates. He appealed to the Provisional Government that, rather than abolishing the Okhrana as they intended, the police force should be retained and reorganized, with the recruitment into its ranks of men of ‘revolutionary convictions’. In particular, he suggested they should follow the past successful practices of the Okhrana and seek to recruit informants from within the Bolshevik party. It was clear to Burtsev that the defence of the new Russia would require more than the simple reinforcement of the pro-war camp to repel the external adversary – sooner rather than later it would require its own secret police to fight the enemy within. It was reported that Kerensky, on hearing of the proposal, was aghast, exclaiming, ‘Burtsev has lost his head!’ To him, with his idealist outlook, the existence of such an unwholesome, corrupt and oppressive tsarist body was an affront to the new Russia and had to be destroyed immediately.

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Kerensky would soon come to regret his rash action and, realizing his mistake, would rush to open negotiations with former police officials in an attempt to recruit exmembers of the agency, but to no avail. One of those approached, former Director of the Department of Police, A. T. Vasilʹev, when recalling the affair at a later date, would wonder what the outcome might have been had Kerensky heeded Burtsev’s advice.21 Although the old revolutionary may have been alone in urging this drastic and possibly retrograde course of action, he was not the only one to sense the growing Bolshevik threat. Since his arrival at the Finland Station, Lenin had found himself coming under increasing attack from members of the press who questioned his suspicious return through enemy territory and the various rumours of his dubious financial links with Germany. This came to a critical head in the early days of July.

The July days Since the startling events of February the international press had taken an even livelier interest in developments within Russia. In Britain, throughout the spring and summer the newspapers carried daily updates on events as they unfolded, together with a range of related news stories and commentaries. One such item appeared in The Manchester Guardian on 7 July 1917. In a short report, one of Burtsev’s old acquaintances from the days of his London emigration, J. F. Green, Honorary Secretary of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, announced with pleasure that his society, which had suspended its anti-tsarist propaganda campaign at the outbreak of war in support of its ally, was now winding up its affairs completely, in ‘the happiness of seeing its object accomplished with the establishment of a free and constitutional government in Russia’. Green gave a brief summary of the society’s foundation and history referring in passing to its earlier support for Burtsev, who, he announced, was ‘at present engaged at Petrograd in the congenial task of investigating the archives of the secret police’.22 Indeed, Burtsev was making the most of his earlier work in the police archives. Thanks to the involvement once more of the publisher N. E. Paramonov, July saw the renewed publication of The Past.23 The journal’s declared aim was to continue from where it had left off in 1907 with the publication of relevant documents from the previous decade, including biographical information on ‘Tsar Nicholas and his ministers, time-servers, satraps, and marauders’. As Burtsev explained, the riches of the Department of Police and the Okhrana which had fallen into the hands of the revolutionaries would now allow him to begin to relate the full details of his long struggle against provocateurs and secret policemen. He began with the publication in that first issue of two letters from L. A. Rataev to the Director of the Department of Police N. P. Zuev dating from 1909, which, together with Burtsev’s commentary, added fresh information on some of his most famous exposures as well as revealing the identity of a suspected police spy in the State Council.24 Over the next few months the pages of The Past would see the appearance of several more pieces in a similar vein from Burtsev’s pen. But even at this early stage the focus of his attention was being drawn away from the past to the problems of the present. For some time leading up to the February events, as revealed by the detailed case notes submitted to their superiors by his

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Okhrana trackers, Burtsev had been making regular visits to the Duma in his capacity as a journalist.25 Now, following the collapse of the old order, he continued to make these visits and, in the course of the summer, bore witness to the gradual erosion of governmental authority: first, with the resignation of Milyukov followed by the appointment of Kerensky as Minister of War and the latter’s failed attempts to reorganize the army.26 In June, when Kerensky’s Galician offensive collapsed with enormous losses on the Russian side, anti-war feeling in the country reached a peak. Almost simultaneously, in the Duma, the Kadets resigned from their coalition with the Mensheviks and the SRs, which in turn led to a government crisis. On 3 July workers, soldiers and sailors took to the streets of Petrograd to voice their concerns, while similar demonstrations occurred in Moscow and elsewhere. The protests grew in size and, when troops were called in, turned into violent riots. Some of the Bolshevik leaders had sought to ensure the demonstrations were conducted in a peaceful manner but later, as levels of discontent rose, others within Lenin’s party actively encouraged rebellion.27 At this point Minister of Justice Pereverzev made the crucial decision to release information obtained by the government which supported the old claim that the Bolsheviks were in the pay of the Germans. The press leapt eagerly on the story, and almost immediately support for the Bolsheviks, and indeed the Soviets, started to decline.28 On 6 July, with disturbances having been successfully brought under control by loyal troops and with public opinion now swinging behind it, the government initiated a crackdown on the rebels, issuing warrants for the arrest of Lenin and other prominent Bolshevik leaders. Although Trotsky, Kamenev and Kollontai were among those detained, Lenin managed to go to ground and, a few days later, crossed the border to the relative safety of Finland. Burtsev was happy to join in the witch-hunt and, in launching a particularly vicious attack, thereby confirmed his place as one of the most strident leaders of the antiBolshevik campaign. In an article entitled ‘Either Us or the Germans and Those Who Support Them’ he referred to Bolshevism as the greatest evil in Russian life and named twelve of the most harmful of those ‘traitors’.29 Somewhat unexpectedly, alongside the names of Lenin, Trotsky, Zinovʹev and other prominent party members, there also appeared that of his erstwhile collaborator Maxim Gorky, which accusation sparked a series of sharp, indignant responses from the writer and his supporters.30 Burtsev could forgive much, but evidently, for someone Like Gorky to have even the remotest association with that bogus-revolutionary Lenin was too much for him to bear. With the Bolsheviks now at least temporarily subdued, Burtsev and his allies turned their attention to others of a defeatist persuasion such as those who had attended the Zimmerwald Conference and who had declared in favour of the earliest possible peace.31 These included Burtsev’s old adversary Viktor Chernov, now serving in the Provisional Government as Minister of Agriculture. In the course of July, rumours began to circulate that Burtsev was in possession of documents indicating that Chernov was one of those who, like Lenin, had travelled home through Germany. The accusation obliged the minister to step down from his post while the allegations were investigated. In the end nothing came of it – Burtsev simply denied any knowledge of such documents and the maligned Chernov quickly resumed his position in Kerensky’s

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cabinet.32 The incident, though minor in itself, showed the considerable weight that the opinions of this unaffiliated lone wolf still carried.

The Kornilov affair and the rebirth of The Common Cause Further evidence of Burtsev’s public esteem presented itself in the aftermath of the next major drama which played itself out in the late summer following the appointment of General L. G. Kornilov as Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.33 The general was no friend of the Bolsheviks nor indeed of the Petrograd Soviet, which he held responsible for the appalling disorganization of the army and, consequently, it was expected he would adopt a hard-line approach. In this he did not disappoint, rolling out his new policy of tverdyi vlastʹ (firm rule) – a policy with which Burtsev, for one, firmly agreed – in which the general announced his intention to reintroduce capital punishment to reinforce discipline for troops at the front and proclaimed that he would no longer tolerate any interference from the Soviet nor from the Provisional Government with regard to the appointment of senior officers. It appeared, initially, that Kerensky was willing to support this new firmer approach, however, even before Kornilov had officially taken up his position it became clear that, although he had the firm backing of the country’s industrialists, financiers and landowners, not all members of the government were willing to let him exercise such free control.34 He was warned by Savinkov, now Deputy Minister of War, to be wary in particular of Chernov, though events soon proved that his chief opponent would, in fact, turn out to be the new Premier himself. Like Burtsev, Kornilov made no secret of his low opinion of Kerensky, whom he believed to be ‘a man of weak character, easily influenced by outside opinion and unable to grasp the basic essentials of the task entrusted to him’.35 However, even though he was confident a new government could function just as well with or without Kerensky, he believed it essential, given the current state of affairs, that the Premier remain in post, at least for the time being. The month of August saw no improvement in the relations between the two men; nor was there any amelioration in Russia’s position on the various fronts. On 21 August (3 September) the disastrous news that Riga had fallen to the advancing German forces was soon followed by reports of social collapse throughout the country as anti-war and anti-government sentiment escalated and the Bolsheviks and the Soviet garnered yet further support for their cause. Next, rumours spread of the Bolsheviks’ intention to stage a coup in Petrograd within the week. The general and his staff at Stavka (General Headquarters in Mogilev) discussed the possibility that if the Petrograd Soviet came out against these plans, then government troops might be unable to deal with the resultant unrest. In agreement with Savinkov and other members of the government, Kornilov drew up plans to prepare his forces for such an eventuality and, if necessary, to surround Petrograd, to immediately publish new laws restricting civil liberties and to declare a state of martial law. All plans at this juncture seemed to be in place until 25 August (7 September). It was on that day that Kornilov held his fateful meeting with V. N. Lʹvov, a member of the Duma and former Procurator of the Holy Synod, who claimed to have been sent

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as an emissary from Kerensky in Petrograd. There has been much discussion over the substance of this meeting but, suffice it to say, Lʹvov appears to have misinterpreted the message which Kornilov gave him to pass on to Kerensky, to the extent that the latter believed he had been issued with an ultimatum and that failure to comply would result in Kornilov staging a coup and assuming power himself. Kerensky immediately ordered the general’s arrest and released a declaration to the press in which he directly accused Kornilov of rebellion and of attempting to betray the revolution. Shortly thereafter Kornilov gave himself up and was transferred with his staff away from the hotbed of GHQ to the quieter atmosphere of the town of Bykhov, where they were later joined by other ‘mutineers’ such as General A. I. Denikin, formerly Commanderin-Chief of the south-western front, and where a hastily established commission of enquiry could set about investigating the affair in relative peace. Throughout the affair (and indeed even before he had taken up his post) Kornilov had been wildly attacked and condemned by the Petrograd Soviet and the left-wing press, whose circulation had been steadily growing for some time, but, nevertheless, he did succeed in retaining some backing.36 One of the most powerful sources of that support was supplied by the ‘Republican Centre’, an anti-Bolshevik defencist grouping whose members included both army generals and senior figures from the worlds of banking and commerce. Somewhat late in the day, the centre realized the need for a voice in the press if they were to counter the Bolshevik onslaught, defend Kornilov and attract support for his programme of ‘firm rule’. They required someone versed in the art of political agitation and so they approached Burtsev, with an offer of financial assistance to the tune of some 160,000 roubles to enable him to set up his long-planned journal. Burtsev gladly accepted, and a few weeks later on the evening of 26 September (9 October) the first issue of the new Common Cause rolled off the press.37

Autumn almanac (or a diary of the fall) It was not only The Common Cause that was given a new lease of life but Burtsev himself. He set about his task with prodigious energy and an almost religious fervour and, in the space of just under a month, succeeded in producing twenty-three scintillating issues, demonstrating once more his remarkable aptitude for investigative journalism: that ability to produce ‘scoops’ seemingly at will.38 Later, in exile in Paris, he published two collections of selected articles from the newspaper which he referred to in an introduction as his ‘diary’ of the weeks leading up to the revolution; a period when the Bolshevik Party was gaining in strength and popularity, and when the Provisional Government seemed to be doing all in its power to make it easier for Lenin to achieve his ends.39 Burtsev entered the fray with relish. In their first leader, the editorial board of The Common Cause clearly spelled out the strongly defencist programme of the newspaper and demonstrated the highly critical line they intended to take with regard to both the Bolshevik threat and the weaknesses of the Kerensky government. Burtsev also felt it necessary to add his own personal editorial comment in which he thanked the Republican Centre for its support but again stressed his own non-party stance and his continuing belief in the need for

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unity in the fight against Germany and their agents within Russia.40 Elsewhere, while praising the gains of February he complained bitterly that, six months down the line, freedom of the press had still not been achieved, and so called on his fellow journalists to ignore all threats of censorship. Over the next month he personally showed how this was to be done. The front page of every issue of the newspaper carried a leading article under his name, either warning against the threat posed by the Bolsheviks and their sympathizers in the Soviet or in the Provisional Government (such as Abraham Gots and Irakli Tsereteli) or criticizing the multiple failures of the Kerensky administration. One example of the latter was the disastrous state of almost every aspect of the reformed judicial system, and, of course, a glaring case in point was the shameful tragedy, which was the Kornilov affair. During the last days of September and the first week of October, Burtsev launched an all-out assault on Kerensky and his associates, decrying the shabby and slanderous treatment the general had received at their hands. Once more proving his worth as an investigative journalist, Burtsev had managed to obtain several excerpts from Kornilov’s own ‘testimony’ written for the benefit of Shablovsky’s commission shortly after his arrest.41 These, he published in The Common Cause under the heading ‘Kornilov’s Explanatory Note’ and, over the next few days, supplemented them with copies of the telegraph exchange which had taken place between Kornilov and Kerensky and other documents of relevance. In so doing he provided the public for the first time with a different explanation of events, showing that the accused had, in fact, acted in full agreement with the government and arguing that there never had been a mutiny or a plot.42 Burtsev demanded that the Premier apologize in person and, judging by the thousands of signatures his newspaper collected in support of his stance, the case he made was a convincing one.43 At the same time, the journalist also took great pleasure in lambasting his old enemy, Chernov, for a slanderous proclamation the latter had distributed in the streets in the early days of the affair, in which the Minister for Agriculture had shamefully attempted to scare the peasants into believing that Kornilov aimed to deprive them of their land and liberty and had urged them to arrest him on sight and hand him over to the authorities. Burtsev reprinted the document in full and, with more than a little disgust, reminded his readers that this proclamation had been ‘written by a former Socialist-Revolutionary émigré – a former conspirator!’ and spoke of the shame he felt not for the much-maligned Kornilov but for Chernov and his other unworthy accusers.44 As well as the positive reaction these revelations attracted from the public, both at home and abroad, they also sparked a wave of complaints from Kerenskyites, who were angry at Burtsev’s nerve and impropriety in publishing such materials before the Investigating Commission itself had had the chance fully to consider the evidence.45 There is still a belief amongst some that it was as a result of the stir caused by the article that the authorities decided to close his newspaper down.46 This, however, is incorrect for, although Burtsev had riled the Premier with his uncomplimentary and embarrassing revelations, The Common Cause would still manage to survive for another few weeks until, eventually, the old journalist’s audacity tested Kerensky’s patience to breaking point. Meanwhile, support for Kornilov continued to grow. As the young American journalist John Reed recorded in his famous account of the period,

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the General was now being more openly defended in the bourgeois press, which now spoke of him as ‘the great Russian patriot’. Reed recalled meeting Burtsev around that time in the press gallery of the Council of the Republic: ‘a small, stooped figure with a wrinkled face, near-sighted eyes behind thick glasses, untidy hair and beard streaked with grey’. ‘Mark my words, young man!’ Burtsev had proclaimed. ‘What Russia needs is a Strong Man. We should get our minds off the Revolution now and concentrate on the Germans. Bunglers, bunglers, to defeat Kornilov; and back of the bunglers are the German agents. Kornilov should have won!’47

Reed, an avid supporter of the Bolsheviks, knew only too well whom he had in mind with his reference to ‘German agents’: it had been a mere two months since Burtsev had published his notorious list of twelve German spies with Lenin’s name firmly at the top. But, irritated though the Bolshevik leader may have been by this attack, which had certainly contributed to his party’s drop in popularity (albeit short-lived), he was, perhaps, now more annoyed at Burtsev’s latest interference and the rehabilitation of Kornilov in the public eye that his revelations seemed to be bringing about: until now the Bolsheviks had been content to sit back and watch almost in disbelief as one of their two major opponents mercilessly attacked the other, almost succeeding thereby in removing him completely from the scene. Now, the sight of Burtsev single-handedly bringing Kornilov back to life must have come as a source of great annoyance. But the veteran journalist was by no means finished: instead he was intent on continuing his attack and redirecting the public’s fury towards the real enemy within – the Bolsheviks – whom he regarded as no more than traitors to Russia. Within two weeks, any frustration or irritation that Lenin may have felt had vanished to be replaced by open fury at Burtsev’s latest publishing coup. He opened his assault on Saturday 14 (27) October when issue no. 17 of The Common Cause rolled off the press. On this occasion the front page carried not one but two leading articles by Burtsev. The first was a report of the proceedings of the fourth day of business in the so-called ‘Pre-parliament’, that is, the Provisional Council of the Russian Republic, which had been created the previous month during the ‘Democratic Conference’ but which had held its first session in the Mariinsky Palace only on 7 (20) October. Burtsev reported that he held out great hopes for the parliament and had been delighted when Trotsky and the other Bolsheviks had walked out on that first day. He reasoned (quite wrongly as events would soon show) that, ‘once they [the Bolsheviks] are clearly separated from all other parties, they will be unable to do any further damage and the damage they have already wrought will become apparent’.48 Although over the following few days his paper carried critical reports on proceedings in the council, that attitude changed noticeably in the issue of Saturday 14 October. Under the heading ‘Joyous Hopes and Fine Words’, Burtsev reported from the Mariinsky, somewhat excitedly, on signs that the fortunes of the Bolsheviks were now on the wane and that the voices of those who opposed them were at last making themselves heard.49 He hoped the words of those such as the experienced revolutionary Ekaterina Kuskova and the veteran Populist Nikolai Chaikovsky would be enough to

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drown out those he referred to as the ‘semi-Bolsheviks’, such as M. I. Liber, Y. O. Martov and I. G. Volkov. He reported on the rousing pro-war speeches in the Pre-parliament and, on this occasion, even had a good word for Kerensky, who, in a speech quite out of character, had condemned Bolshevik provocation. To Burtsev these fine words of the Premier had come as a pleasant surprise but it remained to be seen whether they would be transformed into actions. This leading article represented another fine example of Burtsev’s ever-optimistic rallying calls to the socialist and liberal opposition to rise up and fight as one against the Bolsheviks, but it was by no means as powerful as the accompanying article, ‘To the Pillory’ (K pozornomu stolbu), which, Burtsev noted, in passing, was based on materials ‘obtained from official sources’.50 Having welcomed Trotsky’s decision to boycott the Pre-parliament, and sensing that the Bolsheviks were now on the back foot, Burtsev was determined to drive them even further from any position of power or responsibility and to exclude them, if possible, from the Constituent Assembly, the delayed elections to which were now imminent. With this in mind he thought it appropriate to return to the theme of ‘Wilhelmism’ and to remind his readers of the events of April and of the means by which the traitor Lenin had returned to Russia. His article began thus: The elections to the Constituent Assembly are approaching and therefore, before it is too late, we consider it our duty to publish a list of those individuals who arrived in Russia in German railway carriages, so that every Russian citizen who considers this act to be a betrayal of the motherland, can take this fact into consideration, should the names of any of these individuals appear in the list of candidates. In any event, it is already high time that Russia knew the names of these ‘German Travellers’.51

He then proceeded to enumerate the occupants of the first of the three trains which had travelled unmolested through enemy territory and which had carried ‘Mister Lenin and a little group he had gathered around himself ’. The list gave not only the full name but also the date and place of birth of each of the twenty-nine travelling companions, which detailed information indicated that Burtsev’s source was indeed governmental.52 More was to follow in the next issue of the newspaper, which listed the 159 named travellers on the other two trains who, together with their wives and families, numbered 241 in total. In the accompanying article, entitled ‘Our Misfortune and Our Shame’, Burtsev described how difficult it was for him to publish this list of revolutionaries, many of them former comrades, who had now turned traitor. However, they had no excuse and had only themselves to blame: ‘Lenin and Company had fallen on their knees before Wilhelm asking permission to return home via Germany and one wonders with what Mephistophelian laughter the Kaiser had granted permission. Now, six months later, not only is he rubbing his hands in glee but is astonished at how the result has exceeded all his expectations.’53 It is difficult to say whether these renewed accusations had much of an impact either on the public or, indeed, on the Bolsheviks. They had perhaps come too late in the day. Indeed, one commentator claimed they were widely regarded as no more than baseless slanders and had the effect of actually

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raising Lenin in the public’s estimation.54 But while the Bolsheviks would later try to ridicule Burtsev and laugh off the attacks he mounted in the pages of The Common Cause, it would become clear, from the events of 25 October, that Trotsky, at least, had not dismissed the old revolutionary out of hand. While Burtsev continued to show his open contempt for the Social Democrats (whom he had never, in any event, regarded as ‘real’ revolutionaries), he again reserved special opprobrium for their ‘fellow-travellers’, those of whom he expected better – a case in point being the old Socialist-Revolutionary Mark Andreevich Natanson, an adversary since the days of his first Siberian exile who had been one of seventeen SRs to accompany Lenin through Germany on their return home. Unlike almost every other revolutionary of the old school Natanson had now adopted a defeatist position and allied himself with the likes of Chernov and, consequently, with Martov and Lenin. In particular, Burtsev had felt insulted by the audacity Natanson had shown the previous day when he dared pose for a newspaper photograph with members of the Sovet stareishikh (Council of Elders), which included such revolutionary luminaries as Chaikovsky and Kropotkin. Over the next few days Burtsev continued to keep up his attacks on these unworthy renegades and upstarts while, at the same time, delivering broadsides against the usual targets: Lenin, Kerensky and the Germans. For example, while issuing warnings against a demonstration which the Bolsheviks planned to hold on 20 September (3 October), and demanding that the government suppress any such uprising by force, he managed to include a renewed attack on Gorky (even though the writer had called on the Bolsheviks to withdraw their support from the protest). ‘It is not only the misguided masses who have been beguiled by the Bolsheviks’, wrote Burtsev, ‘but also such ideologues as Gorky who have become their camp-followers’. The latter, according to Burtsev, could not simply disassociate himself now from this bunch of murderers and thieves, having supported them for so long.55 As for the demonstration itself, Burtsev doubted it would come to much, given that the Bolsheviks were, in his view, a spent force and existed now only thanks to the cowardice and passivity of the current government, to the indulgence of Kerensky and his recently appointed Minister of War, General Verkhovsky, who, in Burtsev’s opinion, had been one of the main culprits in the Kornilov affair.56 The Common Cause also reported positively on the conduct of the Foreign Ministry and congratulated Minister M. I. Tereshchenko on his speech to the council before leaving for an Allied conference in Paris, in which he reaffirmed the government’s position on war to victory and ruled out any question of a separate peace.57 But by Saturday 21 October (3 November) the journalist had radically altered his opinion. In yet another passionate, leading article he raged about the terrible state of the army and, in particular, about the blatant Bolshevik sympathies to be found amongst the highest ranks, pointing the finger in particular at General V. A. Cheremisov.58 His newspaper had already warned about such bias but nothing had been done about it. In addition, it was now Burtsev’s view that the Council of the Republic had proved quite useless and that the dangerous influence of Martov and his Menshevik-Internationalist associates appeared to have grown considerably. Nevertheless, he ended with the defiant cry: ‘But we won’t let you win. Russia will not perish in spite of you!’ – lending

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the impression that he had not yet given up hope.59 Unfortunately, his desperation and exasperation were there for all to see in the accompanying article. Burtsev had long been waging a war against Minister of War Verkhovsky, whom he considered an incompetent coward. Only two days earlier he had reported on rumours ‘based on reliable sources’ that the minister was about to retire due to disagreements with other members of the Provisional Government. Now, in an article under the arresting headline: ‘Citizens! Save Russia!’ Burtsev claimed that the previous day at a joint meeting of the Committees of Defence and Foreign Affairs of the Council, Verkhovsky had proposed peace with Germany in secret from the Allies.60 Again, the old journalist raged with righteous indignation: This is a betrayal of Russia! Tereshchenko stated that Verkhovsky’s proposal was not even discussed in the Provisional Government. We are living, he said, in some sort of mad-house! … But, no! This is not a mad-house. This is worse than any mad-house! This is a direct betrayal of Russia! Kerensky, Tereshchenko and Nekrasov must immediately make a statement concerning Verkhovsky’s words. Citizens, all on your feet. They are betraying Russia! Save her!61

Verkhovsky vehemently denied the charge and started libel proceedings against Burtsev, attempting meanwhile to explain that what he really said was that the Allies must be pressed to offer peace because the Russian army simply could fight no longer.62 But, whatever the minister’s exact intention had been, he received no support from his colleagues in government. Instead he was despatched on two weeks’ leave ‘for reasons of ill-health’ while Kerensky took over his duties as Minister of War. This latest journalistic bombshell from Burtsev had a tremendous impact both in Russia and abroad but, sadly for the editor, it would be his last.63 This time he had overstepped the mark and Kerensky was compelled to take firm action for this flagrant breach of the laws governing war-time reporting. That same day he gave the order for the suspension of the newspaper which had carried the insult.64

That accursed day65 Kerensky’s closure of The Common Cause on 21 October (3 November) marked another first, for, as Burtsev pointed out, never before in Russian history had the government sequestrated a printing press.66 Following the closure, Kerensky and Minister of Justice P. N. Maliantovich had also considered placing the offending editor under arrest but, a few days later, they were saved the trouble of so doing by the Bolsheviks. The events of that momentous day, 25 October (7 November) 1917, and the ensuing months he spent in Bolshevik captivity as the first ‘political prisoner’ of the new regime, were described by Burtsev in a thirty-three-page memoir.67 An annotated copy of that document is held in the archives of Stanford’s Hoover Institution and provides a fresh and exciting new perspective on these oft-reported events. Extracts from the memoir are laid out over the next few pages, together with further details from Burtsev’s reminiscences of the period which appeared in print in Paris in 1933.68

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On that fateful Wednesday morning, Burtsev left his flat on the Liteiny Prospect with a strong sense of foreboding. As he walked to his office on the Nevsky Prospect he noticed that everywhere the walls and street-notice boards were covered in newly released Bolshevik proclamations demanding the overthrow of the government. Conversely, nowhere were there any proclamations from the Provisional Government to be seen. From this fact alone Burtsev concluded that what he had been fearing for some time had come to pass, and that Russia was finally paying for Kerensky’s criminal mistakes and lack of vision. Undaunted by his newspaper’s recent sequestration, Burtsev had quickly found a replacement printing press on Petrograd’s Vasilevsky Island and had set about preparing the first (and, as it would transpire, last) issue of a new newspaper entitled Our Common Cause (Nashe obshchee delo). As he made his way across to the island later with an assistant he noticed with concern that a gunship had just arrived from Kronstadt and realized the threat that this represented.69 Indeed, within a few hours the gunship, the cruiser Aurora, would make its presence felt and secure itself a place in history by firing the shot that signalled the beginning of the Bolshevik seizure of power. Burtsev and his assistant rushed to put the newspaper together interrupted by calls from various reporters passing on breaking news for inclusion in the paper’s ‘Chronicle of Events’ section. They also received calls from the editorial office on Nevsky relaying rumours that the Bolsheviks were already on their way to arrest them. On the front page of the proofed newspaper ran a large banner headline – the same as that which had appeared four days earlier in the final issue of The Common Cause – ‘Citizens, Save Russia!’ Burtsev’s signed leading article appeared below and began thus: What was bound to happen has happened. Only the blind could not have foreseen what was going to occur. We warned about this even before Common Cause was published and thereafter in every issue of our newspaper … Our motherland is at death’s door. Our enemy is at the gate. The Bolsheviks with their Lenins and Trotskys are opening wide the doors to our capital. These renegades and traitors to their country now stand with visors raised.

By four o’clock in the afternoon the newspaper had gone to press and an exhausted Burtsev left Vasilevsky Island to head back to the office with a copy of the proofs in his pocket. As a security measure he entrusted another set to a colleague and asked him to take another route back to the office, while he himself got into a sled and set off across Nikolaevsky Bridge. They were stopped almost immediately by a Bolshevik patrol but by some miracle were allowed to continue without even being asked for passports. He then took a tour around the capital to see what was going on. The Mariinsky Palace was already under lock and key and surrounded by Red Guards, who had erected barricades everywhere. Arriving back at the editorial offices he did not have long to wait till the first copies of his newspaper started to arrive, concealed by various co-workers and helpers under their clothes. Copies were immediately placed in the window of the shop below the office and, within a few minutes, a crowd had formed. Burtsev’s staff went down and started to distribute what copies they had and it was in this way that his newspaper, the only one that had managed to register a protest against the Bolshevik

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takeover that day, was transmitted around the capital. As time passed the crowds grew in size and then at around seven o’ clock in the evening large numbers of the newspaper arrived. These they started to sell openly on the street. Burtsev himself went down to help out and to catch a flavour of the mood in the crowds. He crossed the road to where lively debates were being held, both pro- and anti-Bolshevik, but someone recognized him and he was obliged quickly to withdraw. Then, in anticipation of an imminent visit from representatives of the new regime, he and his staff carried out another check of the premises to make sure there was nothing for which they could be arrested. It was at this point that Burtsev and his colleagues made their emotional farewells, realizing they might never meet again. On that momentous evening, each would remain alone, waiting to see what fate had in store for them. They urged Burtsev to go into hiding but he refused and instead, with two friends, set off back to his flat, where the three meticulously inspected the rooms, making sure that these too were ‘clean’. After his friends had left he sat down to await the arrival of his ‘guests’, as they used to be known under Tsar Nicholas. Soon he received a call from his office informing him that the Bolsheviks had arrived and had seized all that was left of the print run – a mere 150 copies or so – and that they had taken possession of the office and were now on their way to Burtsev’s flat. It is interesting to note that this seizure of Burtsev’s newspaper preceded Lenin’s ‘Decree on the Suppression of Hostile Newspapers’ – one of the new government’s first ominous acts of censorship – which described the bourgeois press as ‘no less dangerous than bombs and machine-guns’ and which was only published two days later, on 27 October (9 November).70 Once more Burtsev’s colleagues pleaded with him to escape but again he refused and so it was that, shortly thereafter, he heard agitated cries and footsteps on the stairs, followed by a loud knock on the door. The Bolshevik ‘guests’ had arrived. Ten sailors armed with rifles burst in, accompanied by a young fellow in a student’s uniform. ‘Are you Burtsev?’ the latter demanded. ‘Yes I am. I’ve been expecting you. I assume you have come to arrest me? Having fought against you for so long I knew you would have no choice’.

He was then shown a warrant for his arrest, written out on a pre-prepared form bearing the name of the new ‘Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet’. Burtsev could not help but be impressed by this thoroughness and efficiency which was, he mused, exactly as it had been under the tsars. He was taken under armed guard downstairs, but rather than finding any old military lorry waiting for him, there in the street stood a luxurious car. ‘This’, explained one of the sailors proudly, ‘used to belong to little Nicky!’ which news caused a wry smile to pass across the prisoner’s face: could the tsar ever have imagined that his arch-enemy would one day be taken by the Bolsheviks to prison in one of his own cars! However, by some ironic quirk of fate, the imperial conveyance stubbornly refused to complete its journey, breaking down instead on the Troitsky Bridge and thus obliging the party to proceed on foot to the Peter and Paul Fortress. Burtsev would never forget what he then had to endure. The air that day was full of incessant gun and cannon fire and there reigned a general sense of nervous agitation

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amongst his captors. To his great alarm, he overheard them mumbling amongst themselves, wondering whether they shouldn’t just throw him over the bridge there and then and be done with it. But suddenly their deliberations were interrupted by heavy machine-gun fire from behind. They dived to the ground holding on to their captive in case he tried to escape. After a while the shooting subsided and they stood up and hurried on their way dragging him along with them. As they approached their destination more gunfire forced them to stop again. This time they heard a man scream in the distance followed by further gunshots and then an eerie silence. Eventually, making it to the safety of the fortress, they took Burtsev straight to the Trubetskoy Bastion, a place he already knew well, having been incarcerated there under the rule of both Tsar Alexander III and his son Nicholas. Next he had to endure a further uneasy fifteen minutes in a room full of soldiers who soon learned his identity. Burtsev recalls his anxiety at that moment, not knowing whether they intended to lock him up or shoot him there and then. While some of the soldiers remained silent, the Bolsheviks among them cursed him roundly, reminding him that they knew only too well how in his worthless rag he had insulted ‘our Lenin and our Natanson’. To this allegation, Burtsev defiantly replied that he had not in fact insulted them, but had simply stated the fact that they had collaborated with the Germans and had betrayed Russia. Fortunately, his torment was short-lived, as more soldiers arrived to escort him from the room to a cell. There, in familiar surroundings – iron bed and chair attached to the wall below a small window covered in a triple iron mesh – he was left alone to the sound of increasing gun and cannon fire and excited, agitated shouts from outside. At this stage it was quite impossible to say who was winning but he felt deeply uneasy about being left to the mercy of a sworn enemy who, he expected, would arrive again at any moment to seek retribution. It was in such a state of high anxiety that Burtsev ended his first day in captivity, as the first political prisoner of the new Bolshevik regime. He would not, however, remain alone for long. In the early hours of the morning, quite unable to sleep, he heard a commotion in the corridor and realized that new prisoners were already being brought in.

In a Bolshevik prison At this early stage of their putsch the Bolsheviks were not prepared to take chances when determining who posed a threat to their cause. In the morning, Burtsev learned the names of some of those who had arrived in the night, and from the range of political persuasions of those detained, it appeared the new regime had been quite indiscriminate when making their arrests. The list included most of the members of Provisional Governments past and present, including M. V. Bernatsky, K. A. Gvozdev, A. V. Kartashev, N. M. Kishkin, A. I. Konovalov, P. N. Maliantovich, S. L. Maslov, S. A. Smirnov, M. I. Tereshchenko and S. N. Tretʹiakov. They would be joined later by P. M. Rutenberg and P. I. Palʹchinsky, although Kerensky himself had somehow managed to avoid capture.71 Over the next few days it was decided that the socialist ministers amongst the prisoners – Gvozdev, Maslov, Maliantovich and others – should be released and each, to a man, accepted his liberation without a second thought for

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those who remained behind – much to the disgust of some commentators who felt that a show of solidarity at this stage could have caused the Bolsheviks much more than simple embarrassment.72 It was not to be, however, and soon their places were filled by others – first came more Kerenskyites, such as former Minister of the Interior N. D. Avksentʹev, as well as A. I. Shingarev, F. F. Kokoshkin and Prince P. D. Dolgorukov, together with those senior army figures who had dared support him, such as General V. G. Boldyrev, commander of the 5th Army. Nor did General Cheremisov escape arrest despite his late switch of support to the Bolshevik cause.73 In due course, they would meet up with some older inmates: those tsarist functionaries who had been arrested earlier that year, such as V. M. Purishkevich, former Director of Police S. P. Beletsky, Minister of Justice Shcheglovitov, Minister of the Interior Khvostov and former Minister of War V. A. Sukhomlinov. This astonishingly varied cross-section of Russian civic and military leaders past and present suddenly found themselves confined together in one building with nothing in common other than the fact that they were regarded by the Bolsheviks as of equal danger to the revolution. But then, a few days later, an even stranger event occurred when, rather than keeping the prisoners apart, as had been the rule in tsarist times, the authorities allowed all of them out into the yard together to exercise and comingle – a notion that, as Burtsev pointed out, would have been quite inconceivable even under the Provisional Government. This event appeared to signal that changes were afoot and that the old tsarist strictures were already being abandoned. Indeed, not only were detainees now allowed to take exercise together for an hour a day, they were also permitted to wear their own clothes and have newspapers and food sent in from outside.74 However, it would soon transpire that many of these changes were temporary in nature and had come about as a result of the confusion caused by the dual power then reigning throughout Russia, with Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks still wrestling for overall control. Certainly, the improvements in the prisoners’ situation had little to do with the newly appointed fortress commandant, a particularly unpleasant Bolshevik by the name of Petrov, who went out of his way to make life difficult for the inmates. One of the first to suffer at his hands was A. V. Kartashev, former Minister of Religion in the Provisional Government, who, for no reason, found himself locked up in solitary confinement. This shameful action afforded the inmates an opportunity to demonstrate the power they still possessed by declaring a hunger strike, and, indeed, when word of this potentially scandalous protest reached the Bolshevik HQ at the Smolny Institute, the commandant was ordered to return his prisoner to a communal cell immediately. But this did little to solve the problem of their mistreatment by the Bolshevik guards who, although in a minority, let it be known they were quite prepared to take justice into their own hands. They held meetings in their barracks and passed resolutions demanding the execution of these counter-revolutionary enemies and had actually gone as far as assigning a specific day on which the executions would be carried out. Some of the more sympathetic guards, hearing of this plot, turned for assistance to the new government in the Smolny, but their plea fell on deaf ears. On the evening of the day in question, a band of angry, drunken armed soldiers did indeed turn up but, in the end, did nothing more than curse and swear at the inmates from the corridor before leaving.

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This was by no means the only danger encountered by Burtsev during his stay in the Peter and Paul. A few days after his arrival he had been paid a visit by a former acquaintance by the name of Modelʹ, who had risen to become a Bolshevik Commissar but who was now keen to be of assistance to Burtsev and show his gratitude for the help the old revolutionary had given him some years earlier – he had apparently helped Modelʹ disprove an accusation of provocation which had been made against him.75 Burtsev neither liked nor trusted this unpleasant individual but, nevertheless, it was he the prisoner had to thank, for passing on the warning that in a few days the Bolsheviks intended to ‘send him to Kronstadt’ (in other words – to be shot). Burtsev immediately sent word to his friends on the outside who, according to his account, approached Anatoly Lunacharsky and warned him that, if anything happened to their friend, certain individuals would pay for it.76 In his reminiscence Burtsev did not specify who these individuals were or what power they held over Lunacharsky but believed that this threat alone had been enough to save him, simply because at this time the Bolsheviks were still uncertain about their grasp of power. Commissar Modelʹ continued to visit Burtsev in the fortress and over the next few months regularly helped him and his friends in a number of less dramatic ways. Although there was much that divided this odd collection of prisoners, the common threat from the guards helped bring them together to some extent, but what served to unify them more than all else, according to Burtsev, was their distress at what had befallen their country. This was a popular topic of conversation during exercise breaks and was also much discussed during a meeting which the prisoners were allowed to hold over Christmas in the cell of the former Kadet minister N. M. Kishkin, who, from somewhere, had managed to procure a small Christmas tree which he had decorated with various little presents.77 Kishkin’s cell was also the location of their second and final meeting a week later, when the inmates learned they were to be split up and sent to different prisons. Earlier, through the good offices of the sympathetic prison doctor I. I. Manukhin, Burtsev had arranged to be transferred to the cell next to that of former Police Chief Beletsky in order that the two might continue the conversation they had started under different circumstances earlier that year. Now, to his dismay, Burtsev learned that due to illness, Beletsky was to be moved to the hospital in the Kresty prison on the Arsenal Embankment. Once more, he begged Manukhin to intervene and have him transferred to the same prison. The doctor not only was able to fulfil the request but even succeeded in having him transferred to the same hospital cell.78 Prior to his departure Burtsev heard of the transfer of other ailing prisoners, such as the Kadets Shingarev and Kokoshkin, whose friends had requested they be sent to the Mariinsky prison hospital. The cruel fate which befell these two ‘enemies of the people’ on the very night of their transfer was alluded to a year later by Henry Pearson, an Englishman resident in Russia for over twenty-five years, who also had the misfortune to be arrested by the Bolsheviks. In his memoir Pearson described the cell in the Trubetskoy Bastion, in which, quite by chance, he and some English journalists had been detained: [On the walls] we found many inscriptions written by well-known Russians who had been imprisoned by the Bolsheviki, among them Burtseff, the Revolutionist,

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who had suffered under the Tsardom, only to be denounced later by the Bolsheviki as a reactionary and counter-revolutionist. On the wall, just over the table, was a pathetic piece of writing, to this effect: ‘On (such a date, which I forget) Shingareff, one of the leaders of the Kadet Party, was taken away from here. I bade him goodbye, and have never seen him since. Alas, poor Russia!’ It will be remembered that Shingareff and another Kadet leader, Kokoshkin, were taken away from the fortress in January 1918, and conveyed to one of the hospitals, on the excuse of illness, where one night they were brutally murdered, by the order of the Bolsheviki.79

News of this murder soon reached Burtsev and his fellow prisoners in the fortress and it was therefore with some considerable anxiety that they too awaited their transfer to their new place of detention.

With Beletsky in Kresty: The tale of the lady with the diamond earrings These were perilous times indeed, but, as Burtsev later commented, in the first few months following their seizure of power, the Bolsheviks had not yet committed even one hundredth of the atrocities they would carry out later. Nevertheless, the brutality and lawlessness of the murder of Shingarev and Kokoshkin served as a portent of the Red Terror that lay ahead. It was the opinion of many of his fellow inmates, in particular the former ministers of the tsar, that such horrors would have been unthinkable under the old regime – a view shared by Burtsev. Indeed, he believed conditions under Kerensky had hardly been any better than those under the Bolsheviks. Earlier in the summer he had witnessed the unnecessary cruelty inflicted on former tsarist officials and, as a revolutionary, had been ashamed at the claim that all this was being done in the name of freedom and socialism. Fortunately, Burtsev’s transfer to Kresty passed without incident. On his arrival he was placed together with other political prisoners in the hospital wing with its six cells (each holding four to five prisoners). Amongst the tsarist inmates, other than Beletsky, were former Minister of Interior Khvostov, former Minister of Justice Shcheglovitov and, in due course, former Minister of War Sukhomlinov. Burtsev recalled that the last of these, in particular, was terribly anxious about how he would be received and, indeed, a number of inmates had initially refused even to talk to him but not so Burtsev, who welcomed him in a friendly manner. He had never thought of Sukhomlinov as anything more than a courtier and a rather poor minister and had never believed that as Minister of War he had ever consciously betrayed Russia to the Germans.80 Despite their past differences, he did not bear a grudge against Khvostov or Shcheglovitov; besides, the crimes he had accused them of now paled into insignificance alongside those of the Bolsheviks. In due course, many of the remaining inmates, former members of the Provisional Government and others, also decided to let bygones be bygones and a kind of fragile peace was declared in the cell block. On one occasion, at someone’s suggestion, there was even a ‘non-party’ dinner arranged with, on one

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side of the table, representatives of the ‘old guard’ – Beletsky, Khvostov, Sukhomlinov and Shcheglovitov – and on the other side, members of the Provisional Government – Tereshchenko, Konovalov, Avksentʹev and others. All agreed that only in Russia could such a disparate group of individuals find themselves together. But, as Burtsev pointed out, absurd as it might appear and although their political outlooks differed wildly, they did at least have their patriotism in common and the fact that, unlike their captors, not one of them had betrayed his country. During the day the cell doors remained unlocked, allowing prisoners to come and go as they pleased, and Burtsev, in his role as historian of the revolutionary movement, made full use of the opportunity, learning an immense amount in his discussions with these individuals, his former enemies. He gleaned some of the most fascinating material during his conversations with his cellmate Beletsky, as the two talked long into the night discussing their past battles with the reasonableness and dispassion of historical researchers.81 There were also occasions, as the following incident shows, when it was Beletsky who was given a glimpse into the famous spy-buster’s modus operandi. During one of their conversations Beletsky asked Burtsev if he might be able to throw light on a problem which had long tormented him.82 It concerned a letter which had come into the possession of the Foreign Agency in Paris in early 1913. It had been sent anonymously from St Petersburg and was addressed to Burtsev. The letter alerted him to the imminent arrival in the French capital of a certain lady who wished to pass on some documents containing information on police provocateurs which he would certainly find of great interest. No description of the lady in question was given other than that she could be recognized by her diamond earrings. It so happened that around that time the agency had discovered that a secret telegram from their St Petersburg headquarters had come into Burtsev’s possession and frantic attempts had been made to determine whether the source of the leak lay in Russia or France. Now, following this latest discovery, they were able to focus their attention on the former and began a series of interrogations of officers and functionaries in the Russian capital. The whole process caused immense disruption and confusion within the Department. No one was held to be above suspicion, as Beletsky left no stone unturned in his efforts to unmask the informer. At one point even General Gerasimov and his wife were suspected of being involved. Eventually, however, suspicion fell on a certain Sushkov, a well-known member of the political police whose work obliged him to travel regularly between St Petersburg and Paris and who was known to consort with various fashionable society ladies. The unfortunate man denied any involvement but was recalled to St Petersburg, where he was subjected to a bruising interrogation before being sacked from the force, all the while proclaiming his innocence. Beletsky himself had never been fully convinced of Sushkov’s guilt and wondered if Burtsev might now be able to put him out of his misery and reveal the identity of the author of the letter. ‘Why, of course’, laughed Burtsev. ‘It was me!’

And he then proceeded to relate the whole story. After the press had reported his famous encounter with Azef in Frankfurt in late 1912, he had been approached by

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a policeman called Petrishchev, a junior official in the Foreign Agency in Paris, who, like Bakai before him, had grown disillusioned with his work for the department and now wished to follow in his footsteps. He regularly passed on low-level information to Burtsev, including, finally, the contents of the telegram referred to by Beletsky. Naturally, his superior’s suspicions were aroused when it was discovered that the telegram had fallen into Burtsev’s hands. This caused Petrishchev to rush to Burtsev to tell him he feared he was about to be exposed and so, in order to deflect attention, Burtsev came up with a plan. He simply forged a letter addressed to himself, purporting to come from an anonymous member of the St Petersburg police and then, with Petrishchev’s help, arranged for it to ‘fall into the hands’ of the Foreign Agency. Evidently, this letter, with its description of the fictitious mysterious lady with diamond earrings, had been enough to convince Paris that the leak was elsewhere and so Burtsev’s informer escaped investigation. Now, discovering that his simple ruse had produced such unexpected results and had been the cause of such anguish and havoc to the tsar’s Department of Police, Burtsev was heartily amused. Meanwhile, having heard his account, the crestfallen former police chief could only exclaim, ‘Well, in the end that problem was easily solved!’ As entertaining and diverting as such discussions might have been, life in Kresty for political prisoners was no easier than it had been in the Peter and Paul. The Red Guards were still on the lookout for ways to settle scores and such opportunities did arise, for example, when inmates were being escorted back to prison after being called to give witness testimony at the revolutionary tribunals established by the Bolsheviks shortly after their seizure of power. Several reports had appeared in the newspapers concerning prisoners who, having attended court, on the return journey had apparently ‘attempted to escape’ and had been shot dead by their guards. Burtsev too was obliged to undergo the torment of such a journey after he was called to give evidence at the trial of a certain Shneur on a charge of provocation.83 Fortunately, the day in question proved memorable, not for any untoward occurrence on the return journey to prison Burtsev was delivered safely back to his cell – but for the spontaneous applause which rang out from the public gallery when he entered the court. The judge was quick to silence those responsible for the outburst.84 As the courtroom incident showed, Burtsev was still held in some regard by the public, with many believing his imprisonment to be quite unjustified. Indeed, he received support even from the most unlikely of quarters.85 Just a few weeks after his arrest, that same Maxim Gorky, whom Burtsev had so viciously attacked, published an article in which he argued against the needless acts of violence and repression which were being carried out by the new Bolshevik government. In particular, he complained about the needless restrictions on the freedom of the press and proclaimed there was nothing to be gained by locking up the likes of Burtsev just because he was enjoying himself perhaps too much in his role as ‘sanitizer of political parties’.86 In his time, the old revolutionary had dealt tsarism numerous powerful blows and, in Gorky’s opinion, democracy was not being served by locking him up. Whether it was thanks to such support, as claimed by certain commentators, that Burtsev was eventually freed is not clear. Sergei Svatikov believed that it was as a result of a complete misunderstanding, but Burtsev’s own account of events which follows is more convincing.87

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Liberation In the course of February 1918, as peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk faltered, rumours abounded about the Germans’ imminent capture of Petrograd. This led to a widespread sense of panic, with many in the government and in the courts going so far as to abandon the capital, and it was thanks namely to this confusion and turmoil that many political prisoners, including Burtsev, were eventually freed. Without the knowledge of the press, arrangements were made for inmates to be released on bail. For many former members of the Provisional Government, this ‘surety’ – which everyone knew was no more than a direct bribe for the commissar – could be anything between 100,000 and 200,000 roubles.88 Burtsev too was approached by Bolshevik intermediaries who tried to negotiate a price for his freedom. First the asking price was 300,000 roubles, but this quickly dropped to 50,000 and then 20,000. In the end, realizing that Burtsev himself would never agree to this cynical trade-off, they tried approaching his friends on the outside but they too failed to change the mind of this most headstrong of prisoners who was determined to have his day in court and who, apparently, would settle for nothing less. Eventually he was called before a commission of enquiry led by the former barrister A. I. Beklemyshev, a Left SR sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. The latter admitted he did not know what Burtsev stood accused of and, showing him his dossier, a thick file in a blue folder, said he had been unable to find anything incriminating therein. He had turned for advice to four separate commissions but no one was able to come up with any charges that could be brought against him. This came as no surprise to Burtsev, who pointed out that, during his four months in captivity, he had never been questioned by a single judge or magistrate and, in that time, had never been charged with any offence. All the commission could accuse him of was of diligently pursuing his calling as a journalist, and the only charge that could be brought against him would be the expression of anti-Bolshevik opinions which he voiced openly in the press. But, of course, the authorities would never allow him the opportunity to defend such views in open court. It was obvious he was being detained simply because the Bolsheviks feared that, once free, he would immediately go abroad and continue his campaign from there. Trotsky himself had admitted as much when he had said to Burtsev’s barrister, ‘Now we have him (Burtsev) we won’t give him the chance to utter another word!’89 This first interview with Beklemyshev ended, therefore, in stalemate, but a few days later he was called back in front of the commission and, on this occasion, encountered once more the sympathetic prison doctor Manukhin, who had already secured the release of a number of his patients and who now told him he had persuaded the authorities to release him under guarantee on the promise that he would remain in Russia. He showed Burtsev the declaration he had already signed to that effect but the latter suggested he destroy it immediately, saying he did not wish to cause the good doctor any trouble should he suddenly decide, for whatever reason, to go abroad. It was evident that Beklemyshev was anxious to release his tiresome prisoner but Burtsev, with his stubborn refusal to cooperate, was not making his task any easier. In the end, realizing the prisoner would never agree to his release on bail or on security, the commission was obliged to back down, instead asking only that he solemnly promise to

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reappear for trial when the case against him had been prepared. Burtsev had constantly pleaded for such a trial throughout his time in detention and was therefore more than happy to agree to this condition.90 On the face of it, such a positive outcome might be regarded as a relatively small victory against his Bolshevik enemies, but Manukhin, in his memoir, explained the real significance and scale of Burtsev’s achievement in securing his release on such favourable terms: Of all my prisoners in Kresty, only V. L. Burtsev refused flat out to be conditionally released on my bail. The bravery of this old revolutionary whom prison did not scare for one second, and his commitment to revolutionary activity to which he devoted his entire life, apparently shamed the new rulers to such an extent that I was able to achieve his full release without bail.91

So it was then, that after some five months in detention, with his release papers duly signed and having taken final leave of Beletsky, Khvostov, Shcheglovitov and the other unfortunates who remained behind, Burtsev left Kresty, once more a free man. It is uncertain whether there is any truth in the claim that he was the last prisoner to leave the prison on foot. However, the majority of those he left behind would indeed leave in coffins, having fallen victim to the Bolshevik Red Terror initiated officially in September that year.92 It was Dr Manukhin’s usual practice that winter, having secured his clients’ release, to accompany them over the ice-covered Neva and, on taking his leave, to implore them to leave the capital immediately.93 Burtsev, perhaps predictably, chose otherwise and, instead of heading to town, set off in the other direction. On this occasion he chose wisely, for, according to Svatikov’s account, he had hardly managed to turn the corner when the Liteiny Bridge was closed to traffic and the Bolsheviks started to seize anyone heading into the centre of town.94 Apparently oblivious to the danger, Burtsev decided to stay on in the capital for a few days. As he explained, he was curious to see for himself how the city was being run under the new regime. First of all, he paid a visit to the palace of Grand Prince Nikolai Nikolaevich, from where the Bolshevik courts were operating and where ‘one thief sits in judgement on another thief, and one robber exercises correction on another robber’.95 Then, no longer having his own flat, he spent the night with friends and the following day went to the Public Library, visited the train stations and even (somewhat out of character) went to see a show at a theatre. He also paid a final visit to his favourite old hotel, the Balabinskaia, which was now employee-run. The place had become filthy and soiled and resembled nothing less than a den of iniquity. Meanwhile, outside, the snow had not been cleared from the streets, making it difficult to walk. It seemed that during his five-month absence Petrograd had physically deteriorated and become worn out – and all this after only a few months of Bolshevik rule. Burtsev was sure that the worst was yet to come but for now he had seen enough. He no longer had the desire to stay around and so hurried to make best use of the time that remained to set his affairs in order. So it was that once more Burtsev was obliged to flee his homeland, just as he had done in 1888, under Alexander III, and again in 1907, under Nicholas II. On both

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these occasions he had fled in order to continue his struggle to free Russia and to fight against the injustices of the government of the day. Now he was embarking on the journey for the same reason, although, in truth, on this occasion he held the new regime in even greater disdain. His friends had approached a representative of that new order, a Bolshevik functionary who was responsible for foreign travel and who, for 200 roubles, had been happy to stamp Burtsev’s old passport with a visa for Finland.96 Far from showing gratitude for the favour, Burtsev instead spat out his contempt at this example of the new Soviet man, who was, in his opinion, a typical Bolshevik: the kind who couldn’t actually give a damn about the Bolsheviks, or about ‘Burtsev’, or about Russia, but who sought to take advantage of the collapse of the country which Lenin and Trotsky had orchestrated, and to fill his pockets. In the ranks of the Bolshevik Party there were many like him. And, throughout all the years of their rule that followed, they would continue to sell off Russia and all her institutions for their own personal gain.97

Since the authorities had been careful not to make public any details of Burtsev’s release from prison, it had not been reported in the press; nor was there any mention of the exact date of his departure from Russia, but one can assume, from his own sketchy reminiscence, that he probably crossed into Finland around the middle of March. There he remained, in a village not far from the border town of Beloostrov, for the next few weeks while he endeavoured to set up links with individuals in Petrograd whom he hoped to rely on for his propaganda and agitation work once he had settled abroad.

Red Finland Finland itself, however, would not be able to offer a safe base for operations. The country, which had only declared independence the previous December, was in a state of upheaval, as civil war between the government-backed Whites and the Red Guards raged on. At that time the latter were still in control of the capital Helsinki and the south of the country, and, due to the close ties which they had with their comrades in Russia, Burtsev was obliged to maintain a low profile. A few days after his arrival he received a visit from that same Bolshevik functionary who offered to get him securely and comfortably into Sweden for 1,000 roubles. Burtsev was to act as a kind of courier delivering an official package to the Bolsheviks in Stockholm. Accompanied by the functionary, he would travel first class to the port of Mantyluoto and there board a steamer. He would also be given as much bread for the journey as he wanted. (At that time bread was heavily rationed in Petrograd, but those fortunate enough to find themselves in the Smolny had as much as they could eat and were even in the habit of selling off their surplus. Such was the good life the Bolsheviks had engineered for themselves.) Initially, Burtsev had refused this tempting offer, but within a few weeks he was obliged to reconsider when he received word that the Bolsheviks were on his tracks. Fearing that the Finnish Reds might hand him over or simply dispose of him themselves, he and his friends set about making plans for the next stage of his escape.

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The railway system was still under the control of the Reds but Burtsev – perhaps thanks again to his Bolshevik contact – managed to obtain special permission to travel to Helsinki and set off immediately. The day he arrived in the capital he learned that the Germans had already landed in the port of Hanko in south-east Finland and on that same day, 3 April 1918, the British had blown up their submarines based in Finland to prevent them falling into enemy hands. In the midst of the ongoing war, the Red press was still insisting blindly that there were no Germans on Finnish territory and that there were only a couple of White government troops in Helsinki. But Burtsev, along with everyone else, was aware that the Reds were rapidly losing power and that within a day or two Helsinki would fall. Since by that time there was no means of getting to Sweden, he was faced with two choices – either to stay on in Helsinki and run the risk of falling into German hands and then at a later stage, if possible, try to find a way out or else quickly hurry back to Beloostrov or even to Petrograd and into the waiting arms of Lenin and Trotsky. He chose to remain in Helsinki. On 11 April, at one o’clock in the afternoon, Burtsev was sitting in a restaurant in central Helsinki when he heard the first bursts of machine-gun fire, a sound which over the next few days would never cease. At five in the afternoon some Red soldiers rushed past his hotel and warned everyone to move inside, since the Germans had arrived and street fighting was expected. Then German cannon fire was heard. From the windows of their hotel they could see shells exploding on houses, on the bridge linking the working area with the town and on other buildings held by the Reds. With great sadness Burtsev witnessed the Paasitorni (The Helsinki Workers’ Hall) being hit by shellfire, and soon there was little left of this building, so entwined with the history of the Finnish working class, other than some burned-out walls. He also saw factories and the Russian barracks go up in smoke. Then some bullets hit their hotel and everything went quiet. The hotel guests included a number of Russian officers and also some women and children who, when the firing started, rushed for cover to the basement. At eight in the evening a bugle was heard outside, signalling a German victory. Then came rapid bursts of gunfire followed by cries and groans. Blood was now flowing on the streets of Helsinki. It was already nightfall. At ten o’clock, panic broke out as someone rushed in crying that the Germans and Whites had arrived and any second were going to murder everybody. Then the doors burst open and in rushed a group of soldiers with guns and sabres at the ready. But there were no White Finns present. The Germans were in sole charge of everything and proceeded to lock all the residents in a couple of rooms on one of the top floors, one for the women and one for the men – the lower floors were now taken up by German troops. But, as Burtsev rightly deduced, there would probably be no safer place for them in Helsinki than in that hotel with its new German guests. And indeed, they were not troubled again. The Red resistance in Helsinki was soon overcome. In the days that followed they fired no more than a few gunshots, which only gave the Whites and the Germans the excuse to open fire at random, thus spreading further terror amongst the inhabitants. Within another couple of days, Burtsev and the other guests were allowed to leave the confines of their hotel and walk around outside. As Burtsev walked past the

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destroyed buildings he witnessed hundreds of Red prisoners with their hands aloft being marched off and placed in boats to be transported to the nearby island fortress of Sveaborg. He also passed the town cemetery and saw Red prisoners under White guard digging graves, first for the Germans and then for the White soldiers. He concluded his reminiscence of his Helsinki experiences as follows: In a word, and to misquote that famous historical expression, one could say that now ‘Order reigned in Helsinki’.98 But this order was founded on the tears, grief and fears for the future of an entire population. The German cannon had brought an end to the senselessly and criminally started civil war in Finland. Freedom had been buried and the foundations had been laid for enslavement by a foreign power. And that is doubtless what would have happened if Finland had not been rescued in the autumn of 1918 by the Allied victory which prevented the Germans from consolidating their victory over Red Helsinki earlier that year.

But while the war still raged, to remain in occupied Helsinki was unthinkable for someone in Burtsev’s position – someone who had fought so openly and for so long against the Germans. It would only be a matter of time before he was discovered and so, with the help of some sympathetic Finns, he managed to make his clandestine escape and headed for Sweden. There he published a booklet which he had prepared earlier in Russia entitled, ‘Cursed Be the Bolsheviks!’ His seemingly eternal fight for a free Russia was about to recommence.

Part III

A Russian Don Quixote

He is such an endearing man – better than any of us, frankly. What a remarkable Don Quixote figure he is – better than anything Shalyapin could do.1

8

1918–1921: White Paris

In Stockholm and London On his arrival in Stockholm, following his enforced five-month silence incarcerated in a Bolshevik prison, Burtsev was able to find his voice once more and burst into typically feverish activity. First, he despatched a telegram to the Swedish daily Morgenblad, in which he declared the Bolshevik government to be the ruin of Russia and a danger to the rest of the world. His country, he believed, could only be saved by the establishment of a new administration composed of democrats and Kadets headed by the likes of Pavel Milyukov or General Kornilov.1 Next came a particularly vitriolic pamphlet. Entitled Prokliatie vam, Bolʹsheviki (Cursed Be the Bolsheviks!), it was written in the form of an open letter to the new rulers of Russia and laid bare the author’s deep frustration and, frankly, his feelings of uncontained hatred towards the new Red tsars: ‘You are traitors to your country, you have sold her! You are liars! You are thieves, or concealers of thieves! You are murderers, or concealers of murderers.’2 The author was confident, however, that the day of reckoning was approaching and, providing a lengthy list of the chief offenders, he declared that every one of them would, one day, be brought to court and held to account for their transgressions.3 Meanwhile, in anticipation of that great day, he announced that he had already started his preparations and called on all Russians to send him details of Bolshevik crimes, which he intended to publish for the use of any future Commission of Enquiry. This letter then, intended primarily for his oppressed countrymen both at home and abroad, was also directed at that group of Bolsheviks whom he referred to as the duraks (idiots): those who had been foolish enough to allow themselves to be duped by the ‘Lenines, Trotzkys and Zinovievs.’ He was careful also to alert the rest of the world to the global threat posed by the Bolsheviks, who, he claimed, had already ‘sown their poisonous germs in France, in England, in Italy and America where they have already begun to bear fruit’.4 Around the same time he sent a letter to the French Le Matin in which he – ‘the famous Russian Revolutionary’ – appealed to the Allies to come to Russia’s aid. All of Russia, with the exception of the Bolsheviks, would welcome it, he declared. ‘We are on the edge of an abyss. Whether our Allies come via Vladivostok, Kola or Archangel, they will be hailed as comrades and faithful associates in the struggle against the common enemy.’5

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In Britain, his plea for intervention was reported by The Times and, almost immediately, raised in the House of Commons: the Welsh Liberal MP, Major David Davies, asked Lord Cecil, Assistant-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, whether his attention had been drawn to Burtsev’s appeal, and whether he could assure the House that the Allies were cooperating for this purpose. Cecil replied that he knew of Burtsev’s entreaty, that His Majesty’s government had given repeated assurances of their desire to assist Russia in her present difficult situation and that they were in constant consultation with the other Allied governments as to the most effective way of rendering such assistance. However, during that same session it became clear that the House was far from unanimous in its support for such a course of action. The Labour MP for Blackburn, Mr Philip Snowden (later Viscount Snowden), asked whether, given that the government recognized the importance of cooperating with Russia, it was now most important to take the step of recognizing the present government of Russia. Although Snowden’s opinions of the Bolsheviks would change at a later date, at that time he was by no means Lenin’s only British supporter. That such views existed in the West gave a clear indication of the difficulty of the task that lay ahead for Burtsev in his renewed struggle to free his country.6 Still, there were also many in Britain who were firmly in favour of intervention – not only anti-Bolsheviks but also those anxious to bring Russia back into the war and so re-establish an Eastern Front. One such (who fell into both camps) was the journalist Harold Williams, whom Burtsev had known from the time of the former’s 1905 posting to St Petersburg as Russian correspondent of The Manchester Guardian. Like Burtsev, Williams, together with his wife, the Russian liberal politician Ariadna Tyrkova, had recently been obliged to flee Russia and was now in London working for the Morning Chronicle. He had also been recruited to the pro-interventionist Committee on Russian Affairs, a British intelligence and propaganda unit whose members included the writers John Buchan and Hugh Walpole, and the historian and academic Bernard Pares. On 10 June, Williams sent a telegram to Burtsev in Stockholm telling him that it was ‘necessary’ for him to come to Britain for discussions and that, after considerable effort, Williams had succeeded in obtaining an entry permit for him.7 As it so happened, Burtsev had already decided to take his leave of his Social Democrat hosts in Stockholm to set up a new journalistic operational base in Paris.8 Following the Bolshevik coup, the French capital had already established itself as one of the centres of the Russian emigration, attracting numerous former members of the tsarist and Kerensky governments, alongside a whole host of other members of the opposition. In order to satisfy Williams’s request, Burtsev modified his travel plans and headed first for London, where he arrived around mid-June. How long he remained there is unclear: while in an autobiographical note Burtsev claimed he did not cross the Channel till mid-August, another report has him already settled in Paris by 11 July.9 There is also a haziness surrounding the outcome of his discussions with Williams. Indeed, nothing is known about any of his other activities during this period, other than a reported meeting with Kerensky, who had just escaped from Arkhangelʹsk and was now also en route to France.10 Apparently, relations between the two had not improved and, as evidenced by Burtsev’s later pronouncements, it is safe to say that their encounter produced nothing of a constructive nature. Fortunately, Burtsev’s

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Figure 8.1  Nashi Sharzhi (Our cartoons), Bich, Paris, December 1918, 6. BA, S. Svatikov Collection, V. L. Burtsev Papers, box 2, folder 8.

activities during the first period of his new life in the French capital are more minutely documented and show how the veteran journalist once more launched himself body and soul into the fray. On Tuesday 17 September 1918 issue no. 24 of Obshchee delo appeared on the streets of Paris, seamlessly picking up from where the final St Petersburg issue had left off almost a year earlier.

A Paris war diary: La Cause commune (September 1918–December 1921) The newspaper’s new bilingual heading – La Cause commune: Obshchee delo – signalled a change in its intended audience, and, indeed, for the first few months of its existence, its four pages contained articles in both French and Russian. For the first two years of its existence the newspaper appeared either on a fortnightly or weekly basis, but by October 1920, having built up a loyal following and obtained the necessary funding, Burtsev was able to publish on a daily basis.11 One reason for its popularity was the impressive array of literary figures, journalists and liberal and socialist political activists who eagerly signed up as contributors.12 So it was that the likes of Bunin, Kuprin, Aleksey Tolstoy, Milyukov and Nikolai Chaikovsky would regularly be seen in

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the newspaper’s offices at 49 Boulevard St Michel. Another visitor in those early days was the poet A. P. Shpolyansky – better known under the pseudonym Don-Aminado – who left a charming reminiscence of his first encounter with Burtsev sometime around 1919: Amidst the hubbub, noise and confusion of the newspaper office, the editor-inchief, a gentle, short-sighted old man cut a rather helpless figure. With his kind eyes, little goatee beard, index finger stained completely yellow from smoking, little jacket whose sleeves were too short, a pair of horrific trousers and boots that were enough to frighten the horses … They say that when he returned to Russia during the war, at the end of 1914, there were tears in his eyes. Then, after the October revolution the Bolsheviks branded him the ‘hireling of the entente’ and declared him public-enemy number one but, just in time, he managed to escape and make his way to Paris. Now the tears had gone from his eyes. They had been replaced by a stubbornness, a tenacity, and a singled-minded focus on one issue. These were the three rocks on which The Common Cause was founded.13

However admirable such a determined stance against the Bolsheviks may have appeared, there were those who believed that the editor-in-chief ’s critical faculties may have become somewhat dulled as a result and that perhaps he did not check his sources with the rigour one might have wished. The writer Aleksey Tolstoy described the exploits of another young émigré who had worked on the newspaper, which, if true, would give serious cause for concern. Tolstoy’s account is worth quoting at length. I used to know a young man. From 1915 he spent most of his time trying to avoid military conscription. He became everything a young man could become during the civil war: deserter, double-agent, journalist, speculator and cardsharp. He was cynical, but also talented and far from stupid. In 1919 he arrived at last in Paris with his troubled soul and there became a writer. He couldn’t give a damn about anything, speaking with respectful irony only about money – of which he had none. Out of boredom and disgust he created a little ‘personal amusement’ for himself: – sitting in the editorial offices of The Common Cause, he would make up the most dizzyingly unbelievable stories based on telegrams supposedly received from Russia. He would wipe whole provinces from the face of the earth, raise rebellions, burn towns to the ground and write obituaries – and Burtsev would print all of this nonsense. Then in the evenings the young man would visit friends and regale them with his exploits. Every day émigré Paris was shaken to its foundations by these monstrous fantasies of this merry young soul. The French reprinted these telegrams and, taking out their bundles of Russian war loans, would gaze lovingly at them. This is how the rumours started. And what rumours they were! Yet, for a while people believed them until, eventually, came the shattering disillusionment. And so it was that, surrounded by mirages in this Parisian desert, the Russian emigration slowly lost its mind.14

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Figure 8.2  V. L. Burtsev on the balcony of La Cause commune, Paris, c. 1922. Copyright Roger Viollet, no. 14568-3.

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In one of Tolstoy’s later works the cynical young Russian made another appearance, this time under the fictional name of Lisovsky. He again paid a visit to the offices of the Cause commune, which he described as being situated in a narrow little street in the old quarter of Paris, in a building blackened with soot and with dusty nets on the windows  …  Bundles of yellowing newspapers were scattered around on the floor while a few manuscript notices were pinned or nailed to the red plastered walls. On a door leading into a further room hung a notice which read: ‘Occupied’. This is where Burtsev sat with his back to the door. On entering one saw a slight figure with splayed elbows, rapidly writing away. Grey curls peaked out from under a straw hat which, in order to save time, he never bothered to take off. Walking around the desk, the visitor was confronted by Vladimir Lʹvovich’s thin, animated, ink-splashed face with its impressive hooked nose and tobacco-grey beard. Usually he took sole responsibility for filling his newspaper. On his desk was a heap of manuscript sheets, newspapers, cigaretteends and ash. The floor was covered with yet more manuscripts, cigarette-ends and piles of newspapers on which he slept. For reasons of frugality he lived in the office, managing somehow to get by without a washbasin.

Tolstoy also commented on the old journalist’s habit of speaking in the same stirring, bombastic language he used in his leading articles but noted that, while doing so, ‘the piercing pupils in the light blue eyes of this hunter of agent-provocateurs widened and dilated and, as they did so, they seemed to probe into every hidden wrinkle of Lisovsky’s soul’.15 According to Tolstoy the Cause commune, with its lack of any discernible economic programme, was not taken seriously by the French, who regarded it as ‘somehow more quaint and picturesque rather than serious or business-like’. Meanwhile: ‘For Denikin, Vladimir Lʹvovich came across as too colourful while, in Kolchak’s circles, generally speaking, they were getting ready to hang Burtsev along with a lot of other “liberals” once they had taken Moscow.’16 However, given that this appraisal of the newspaper’s reception was written long after Tolstoy’s departure from France to the USSR and his abandonment of all of his previous anti-Soviet beliefs, it would perhaps be unwise to take it as particularly reliable testimony. Tolstoy was correct, however, on one point: just as before, Burtsev, the newspaper’s self-styled ‘Directeur politique’, did start off by contributing the vast majority of articles to every issue and, just as he had referred to the run of twenty-three issues of his Petrograd Obshchee delo as his ‘Calendar of the October Revolution’, so one might, with equal justification, look on the three years of the Parisian Cause commune as his own ‘Diary of the Russian Civil War’.17 While the initial programme of the newspaper bore some similarities to that of its predecessor, with its call for a united front against the common enemies – namely, Germany and her Bolshevik ‘agents’ – after the armistice of 11 November, and as the civil war progressed, Burtsev turned his agitation towards the Allies, calling on them to intervene as a matter of urgency, show support for the anti-Bolshevik forces of Admiral Kolchak and Generals Denikin and Wrangel and, in so doing, honour the promise they

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had made to Russia.18 Alongside reprints of articles from his Petrograd newspaper and excerpts from his published political pamphlets, the Cause commune carried numerous reports from the Russkoe Telegrafnoe Agentstvo ‘Union’ – a press agency which Burtsev had established at the same address as his editorial office on the Boulevard St Michel, whose stated aim was simply ‘the communication of reliable information on Russian affairs and the transmission directly to Russia or via international agencies, of news of West European political life, particularly with regard to Russian affairs’.19 As well as covering the conduct of the war on the various fronts from a decidedly White perspective, the Cause commune described how the conflict was reported in various Western and, in particular, English newspapers. This brought into sharp relief the less than unified position of the Allies towards the opposing combatants. In March 1919, Burtsev drew attention to a long article which had appeared in the Morning Post under the heading ‘Britain Demands Intervention’, in which the well-known war reporter Colonel Charles Repington described how, after the proposed Prinkipo conference had failed to materialize, there had been talk once more in English political and journalistic circles about intervention and the need to increase aid to the Russian patriots.20 The reporter called on the West to recognize all national governments fighting against the Bolsheviks and proposed that more weapons and other military supplies should be sent, together with a volunteer army under the command of Marshall Foch.21 But, as Burtsev cautioned, not all English journalists were of the same opinion, picking out Phillip Price of The Guardian and Arthur Ransome of the Daily News for particular censure for their clearly pro-Soviet sympathies.22 Much more to his taste were the encouraging reports in The Times and the Morning Chronicle from the pen of his old colleague Harold Williams, who was with General Denikin in South Russia and who had filed numerous reports on his Dobrovolʹskaia armiia (Volunteer Army). In one such despatch, published on 10 July 1919, he described an improvement in the general situation, with the arrival of more volunteers and more real help from Britain in the form of both troops and tanks. Denikin, he reported, inspired real belief in his troops and wished to express his gratitude to the British government and her people.23 In the same issue of the newspaper there appeared an example of just such support which came in a speech to the British parliament by Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill, in which he argued against the War Cabinet’s recent decision to withdraw from Russia and called on Britain to give further aid to Denikin’s army in its fight against the ‘plague bacillus’ of Bolshevism, which had to be eradicated at all costs.24 Unfortunately, from a White point of view, Churchill’s uncompromising stance against the ‘foul baboonery of Bolshevism’ was not universally popular on the side of the Allies. Indeed, as the months passed, his own prime minister, David Lloyd George, seemed ever more keen to normalize relations with the new Soviet regime. With such discord prevalent not only in Britain but throughout the Allied ranks, Burtsev continued to do all in his power via the pages of his newspaper to argue against any call for the Western powers to recognize the Bolsheviks, which, in his opinion, would be tantamount to a betrayal of Russia. He complained bitterly about the Allies’ indecision over intervention, accusing their governments of having given in to the influence of extreme left-wingers and of having forgotten how much Russian blood had been

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spilled for the sake of the common cause.25 The journalist, moreover, was not content merely to sit behind his desk in the Boulevard St Michel. Instead, he set about making plans to conduct his propaganda war further afield and in a personal capacity.

The White emissary: 1920 – a year of travels At the end of September, Burtsev made a return trip to London, this time at the invitation of Sir Archibald Sinclair, Personal Military Secretary to Churchill. The Minister for War had heard of Burtsev’s stirring reportage and, unlike his Prime Minister, was ‘most anxious to assist these Russians who wished to place their anti-Bolshevik views before public opinion in this country from the democratic standpoint’.26 It is unclear whether during his visit Burtsev had any direct talks with the Secretary of State himself but topics covered in discussions with his staff included: the activities of a recently established Russian Financial Committee in Paris and the role played by tsarist Finance Minister Petr Bark, the Russian industrialist A. I. Putilov and others; the level of support for Kolchak amongst various émigrés in Paris; British support for Denikin; and the latter’s attempts to prevent further pogroms in the Ukraine.27 On his return to Paris, Burtsev again took up his attack on the ‘semi-Bolshevik’ Kerensky, accusing him of ‘working hand in hand with Lenin’. In his view, by branding Kolchak and Denikin as reactionaries and refusing to offer his support to the Whites, Kerensky was once more betraying Russia just as he had when in power, first with his personal intervention resulting in the early release of Bolshevik prisoners and then with his unjust treatment and imprisonment of that great Russian hero, now departed, Lavr Kornilov.28 It is possible that while in London, the proposal had been put to Burtsev that he might wish to follow in the footsteps of his colleague Harold Williams and, with Britain’s support, pay a visit to Denikin in Southern Russia, there to assist with political agitation amongst the troops.29 Whatever the truth of that may be, by the end of the year he had again set off on his travels, this time to Novorossiisk via Lausanne, Constantinople and the Black Sea.30 He remained there for three months and, on his return to Paris, reported on the low spirits of the White troops he had left behind. Unfortunately, the Volunteer Army had recently suffered another defeat at the hands of the Bolsheviks, which compounded the devastating blow to morale received a mere fortnight earlier when news had been received of Kolchak’s execution at Irkutsk in February 1920 by a Cheka firing squad.31 With their consequent forced evacuation from Novorossiisk the outlook at this stage of the campaign for the White Army and their new commandant-in-chief, General Wrangel, was bleak indeed. In an article entitled ‘Last Warning’, Burtsev cautioned that prospects would become even worse if it were proved true that the Allies were now stretching out the hand of friendship to the Bolsheviks in the hope of reaching an agreement.32 An additional cause for concern was the possibility that Poland too would consider an alliance with Moscow, and it is of interest to note that, at this point, it was to none other than Burtsev that Wrangel turned with the request that he act as his emissary in Warsaw.33 The veteran revolutionary was flattered by the offer and by

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the end of June was already in the Polish capital engaged in discussions with Chief of State Pilsudski, warning him of the dangers of entering into an agreement with the Bolsheviks, who were, he said, guaranteed to betray Poland just as they had betrayed the rest of the world and, in particular, Lloyd George.34 The summer of 1920, however, brought some tentative signs of an improvement in the fortunes of the White Army. Alongside encouraging reports of Wrangel’s engagements with the enemy there came news in August that his government had been recognized by France. Burtsev was quick to seize on this opportunity to sow discord in the Allied ranks, publishing a personal telegram to American President Wilson, in which he praised the French prime minister Alexandre Millerand and complained bitterly about the British government’s intentions to open talks with the Bolsheviks in London.35 With continuing reports of Wrangel’s successes in breaking out of the Crimea and news of Pilsudski’s remarkable rout of the Bolshevik armies on the Vistula, many, including Churchill and Burtsev, were confident that a conclusive victory over the Red Army was now within reach. In early September the latter went so far as to write an article under the hopeful title ‘The Beginning of the End for the Bolsheviks’.36 Following on from this, in mid-October, Burtsev announced another cause for celebration to his readers: namely, that he had at last fulfilled his dream and that his newspaper would now be published on a daily basis.37 Burtsev himself had just embarked on yet further travels, this time to the Crimea to visit Wrangel and his troops. It was then his intention to set off for America to continue his work drumming up support for the ‘rebirth of Russia’.38 His lengthy absence meant that The Common Cause was obliged to undergo some changes. While Burtsev’s name would still appear on the front page as publisher-editor, most of the editorial duties, including responsibility for leading articles, would be taken over by one of his oldest and closest collaborators, the Kadet Daniil Pasmanik.39 As a result of these changes to its frequency and editorial control, the newspaper was transformed almost overnight – it developed a more international flavour and no longer contained the same number of rousing and impassioned contributions from its founding editor. Unfortunately, just as Burtsev’s trip earlier in the year to visit Denikin had coincided with the rout of the White forces in Novorossiisk, so history repeated itself on this occasion. In his first report from Sevastopol, which appeared on 13 November, Burtsev wrote that he had already met Wrangel and that it was now his intention to visit other towns in the Crimea before heading to the front.40 Unfortunately, circumstances obliged him to alter his plans almost immediately, for, within a few days, the Whites suffered a severe setback. On 15 November the Cause commune carried reports of Wrangel’s catastrophic defeat at the hands of the Red Army and of the beginnings of a hurried evacuation of his troops from the peninsula.41 That same day the intrepid though unfortunate journalist arrived back in Constantinople on his way home to Paris with all plans for a grand propaganda and fund-raising tour of America now firmly shelved. Instead he stayed on in Constantinople for a few weeks and, in that short time, succeeded in publishing a hastily compiled pamphlet which as well as giving a chronology of events leading up to the White catastrophe, together with a few eyewitness accounts, also described the complete state of shock and disbelief of those arriving

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from Sevastopol, where, until a few days previously, an atmosphere of optimism had reigned.42 In truth, with the White forces outnumbered seven to one, defeat had been almost inevitable; but, nevertheless, Burtsev believed the West owed a debt to Wrangel, for, if not for his courageous actions, Europe would already have been infected by the Bolshevik plague. As November drew to a close Burtsev did not attempt to play down the tragedy but, in his usual optimistic fashion, tried nevertheless to rally the opposition by calling for the struggle against the Bolsheviks to continue to the end.43 Alongside these despatches from the Crimea, the Cause commune also carried worrying reports from London about the normalization of relations between Russia and Britain. More splits had appeared in the British cabinet on the question of opening trade talks, and indeed, Lloyd George had gone as far as to suggest that Bolshevism was at least better than anarchy, which is what Russia would be left with if the Bolsheviks were defeated.44 In response, various White representatives called again on the Russian emigration to stand together and speak as one in protest at such immoral and disgraceful moves by the Allies towards recognition of the illegal Bolshevik state. Following Denikin’s defeat in Southern Russia fresh proposals had been made for a Russian Congress abroad to be held with the aim of forming an All-Russian National Council or a so-called Komitet spaseniia Rossii (Committee for the Saviour of Russia).45 Now these appeals were being repeated ever more forcefully.

The Russian National Committee In his first lead article for Cause commune since returning to Paris, Burtsev echoed the increasingly strident calls being made by many of his compatriots for the creation of individual Russian National Committees throughout Europe and further afield, and for the formation of an overarching central Russkii natsionalʹnyi soiuz (Russian National Union) whose aim would be to represent the interests of the Russian emigration on the world stage.46 Discussions on the project continued in the pages of his newspaper and elsewhere throughout December, with proposals being advanced for the organization to adopt the broadest possible programme in order to attract all political persuasions including both republican and monarchist.47 However, discussions dragged on and it was not until June 1921, at a conference held in Paris, that the Russian National Union was founded. It comprised over seventy members, including Right Kadets such as former Duma member, Secretary to the Provisional Government and so-called ‘soul of the congress’, V. D. Nabokov.48 Also present were socialists such as Burtsev, who was held up by many as the inspiration behind, and chief organizer of, the conference.49 Their first task was the election of an executive and thus was born the Russkii natsionalʹnyi komitet (Russian National Committee/RNC). Chaired by the former minister in the Provisional Government and non-party centrist A. V. Kartashev, other office holders to be appointed included Yu. F. Semenov as secretary and Burtsev himself as one of the vice presidents (an office he would hold for most of the remainder of his life).50 The committee stood on a broad anti-Bolshevik platform and expressed an intransigent and implacable hostility towards the Third International.51 It was, however, equally resolute in its determination to remain above party politics, refusing

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Figure 8.3  Russian National Committee. c. 1921.

to be drawn at this stage into arguments between republicans and monarchists. Unfortunately, such a negative platform could hardly satisfy anyone and consequently drew much criticism from both right and left.52 From the outset it was clear that the committee would fail in its aim to create a truly united opposition bloc. The Left SRs, with their antipathy towards the monarchists and such alleged representatives of the bourgeoisie as Wrangel, could never agree to the proposal that individual National Committees should recognize and work with a government headed by the general. Indeed, Kerensky, Avksentʹev, Osip Minor and others had already been busy attempting to create their own Russian government in exile by reforming the Constituent Assembly that had been abolished by the Bolsheviks (fifty or so of its former members now found themselves abroad). Burtsev had ridiculed the idea and, in an article entitled ‘A New Danger Approaches Russia’, joked that the only individual they were now missing was ‘Comrade Chernov’. Then, in January 1921, as the Constituent Assembly was about to meet, he demanded that, at the very least, Kerensky should not be allowed to participate.53 In the end the project failed: presided over by Right SRs, the assembly was unable to overcome the deep-rooted partiinost ʹ (party affiliation) of its members, which ended in a split between the right-wing Kadets and the Left SRs.54 The Russian National Union and its executive initially fared marginally better. Two years after formation it proudly boasted that it had established branches in London, Serbia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Turkey and Greece. The RNC, meanwhile, claimed to have representatives in America, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland,

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Germany, the Baltic countries, Poland and Persia. A record of its activities is contained in its official organ, the Vestnik (Herald), which described the committee’s efforts in support of the representation of Russian refugees wherever they might find themselves and how, to that end, it sent representatives to various conferences of the League of Nations, to point out the dangers of the latter’s policy of refugee repatriation and to attempt to influence the West against renewing political relations with the Soviet government.55 The same approach was adopted in the economic arena, with the committee doing all in its power to influence international trade and industry policy against renewal of links with the East.56 The Herald also contained a few contributions from Burtsev himself and references to his work for the committee. One notable article appeared in February 1924, a month after the death of Lenin. The title of this obituary – ‘Death of the Traitor Lenin’– gave an indication of the tenor of the article: ‘Today Russia is destroyed, humiliated and robbed. All that was once dear to the Russian heart has been desecrated. Such were the achievements of this Lenin – this new Tamerlaine who has crucified Russia!’57 His hatred of the Soviet leader had evidently remained undiminished, as had his optimism that the Bolsheviks would eventually be overthrown. Even as late as 1926, when the final issue of the Herald was published, with dire warnings by Kartashev and others about the ‘Crisis in the White Movement’, Burtsev was still appealing for the formation of a coalition of anti-Bolsheviks and advising on the need for coordinated action, which he said ‘was important at the moment when we are still in emigration but which will be even more important when once more we approach Orel or even Petrograd!’58 To all intents and purposes the civil war had ended in victory for the Red Army some five years earlier, but Burtsev’s belief that he would once again see a free Russia remained as unshakable as ever. Sadly, however, it had been some time since the veteran journalist had been able to expound on these views at length. The Bolsheviksupporting LʹHumanité, for example, had long since severed relations and had switched their support to their SR confrères, Minor and Zenzinov, at the émigré journal Pour la Russie. As early as 1920 Burtsev had, with some anger and much regret, severed relations with Minor, one of his oldest revolutionary associates, following a slanderous lampoon that the latter had published in his journal before passing it on to LʹHumanité, where it was seized upon by André Pierre, a journalist particularly indisposed to Burtsev.59 According to LʹHumanité, Burtsev was no more than a maniacal murderer – a bombist, with whom no self-respecting revolutionary would have any dealings: a view based possibly on the old revolutionary’s support for guerrilla organizations such as Savinkov’s Warsaw-based Svoboda group.60 Moreover, whether due to the onerous nature of Burtsev’s RNC duties or for some other reason, in the course of 1921 his involvement with The Common Cause had dropped off considerably until, due to lack of funds, on the last day of the year the newspaper was obliged to close down. In a speech given just a few months earlier, Trotsky had made the following dismissive comments regarding Burtsev and his newspaper: The editor of Obshchee delo is Burtsev and those of us who spent long years in emigration know that Burtsev has always had the firm reputation of being a persistent and indefatigable – how shall I put it – unwise man. All of us always

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knew that Burtsev not only would not invent gunpowder but was, by the very form of his thinking, the exact opposite of one of those people who invent not only gunpowder but also more modest things than that. If Burtsev has become almost the leader of the most frenzied wing of militant Russian nationalism, that is in the order of things.61

Despite his condescending tone, Trotsky would have welcomed news of the failure of the Cause commune – ‘the newspaper that hates us the most’.62 Burtsev’s ‘Diary of the Civil War’ ended up, therefore, as another casualty of that war which, by the end of 1921, had already destroyed the hopes of many in the White movement. However, the ‘Russian Don Quixote’, as he had frequently been called, remained stubbornly true to his ideals. He, for one, did not intend to give up the fight.

9

1922–1934: Fight the GPU!

London literary diversions Hardly had the Cause commune printing presses ground to a halt when Burtsev announced the rebirth of another of his titles, LʹAvenir (The Future), which, he hoped, would take over from where the Cause commune had left off. The first issue of this ‘collection of articles on contemporary topics’ appeared in early 1922 and advanced the same statist program as its predecessor, again stressing the need, at this crucial time in Russia’s history, for the country and not the party to take centre stage.1 As well as charting the demise of the SRs and their final split between the Avksentʹev group and the followers of Chernov, the volume contained articles on the history of the RNC and the increasing difficulties it faced in its attempts to prevent the Western powers resuming their dealings with the Soviet government. Neither the RNC nor the National Union had so far been able to find sufficient support to stand in the way of the gradual and seemingly inevitable process of East-West normalization, a policy which had the backing of British Prime Minister Lloyd George amongst others. Having already signed a trade agreement with Moscow in March 1921, the latter had now called for a conference to be held in April 1922 in Genoa, where the renewal of relations with Soviet Russia and Germany was to be discussed – a move not received favourably by the London-based Russian Refugees Relief Association, whose chairman, Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, contacted Burtsev asking him to help them set up a journal to join battle with Lloyd George and promote their anti-Soviet stance. Burtsev accepted the offer readily and by June had set foot once more on British soil.2 Little is known of the nature or extent of Burtsev’s political or journalistic activities during this trip. Indeed, from available evidence, it would appear that he was now preoccupied mainly with literary matters. This was by no means a new departure: even during his short stay in London at Churchill’s invitation a few years earlier, he had found the time to return to his beloved British Museum in order to donate two editions of his recently published reworking of Griboedov’s classic of Russian drama, Woe from Wit.3 This work was the result of meticulous researches which he had carried out while still in Russia, which had led him to the conclusion that a new version was required – one unrestrained by considerations of censorship and, therefore, closer to Griboedov’s original vision. His study met with criticism on two fronts: some believed he had no right to interfere with such classics of Russian literature, while others argued

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that now was not the time to undertake such bibliographical tasks when Russia was living through the horrors of Bolshevism and in Europe an international commission was deliberating on questions of world peace.4 Burtsev’s riposte to the latter reproach was that it was not only perfectly possible to carry out such work while not neglecting active political struggle – he had, after all, demonstrated as much by being able to work on his study while imprisoned by both Tsar Nicholas and by the Bolsheviks – but also, at this specific moment in history, it was necessary to engage in such activities. If in Russia more respect had been shown towards Griboedov and to literature in general, he argued, then modern life would not be so full of the outrages and horrors perpetrated by such traitors as the Bolsheviks and Germans! As to the first criticism, not only did he reject it out of hand but announced he had embarked on similar treatments of works by Gogolʹ, Lermontov, Pushkin and many more besides. All the published editions of the classical works of these authors, in his opinion, were in need of serious reworking, as the adulterated forms in which they had originally been released to the public were simply unacceptable.5 Burtsev, moreover, was an admirer not only of the Russian classics but of all great literature. He had long been passionate about Shakespeare and was keen to visit as many places associated with the Bard as possible. Consequently, not long after his arrival in Britain in the summer of 1922, he made the pilgrimage to Stratford-upon-Avon.6 Later, it would emerge, much to the horror of traditional English Shakespearists, that, while holding the Bard in great esteem, Burtsev felt that certain of his works might benefit from the same ‘friendly editorial intervention’ that he had accorded to the Russian classics mentioned above. More details on his involvement in Shakespearian affairs (and, indeed, on his littlepublicized researches into early Anglo-Russian relations) were supplied by Count Georgy Pavlovich Bennigsen, who joined Burtsev’s band of camp followers in the mid-1920s and, for a number of years, supplied him with numerous valuable services.7 Bennigsen’s extensive correspondence with the veteran revolutionary is held in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University, but he also provided a useful summary of their working relationship in a lengthy newspaper article published shortly before his death.8 Since this period of Burtsev’s life has not been particularly well documented, it is worth quoting from this reminiscence at length.

The Bennigsen memoir9 I first made the acquaintance of V. L. Burtsev in 1924 when a mutual acquaintance, I. V. Shklovsky (Dioneo) put us in touch with each other. He came across as an awfully pleasant and cultured man. Both of us were members of the Russkoe kolonizatsionnoe obshchestvo (Russian Colonization Society) which was founded in London to study possible regions of settlement for Russian refugees from the Balkan countries, the Baltic states, Germany and France. The Society’s activities were wholly devoted to discussions of Dioneo’s compilation of beautiful descriptions of SouthAmerican countries but progressed no further than that due to lack of funds. I was

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immediately charmed by Burtsev. Everything concerning his life was already wellknown to the Russian public. I personally had always thought of him as a terrifying revolutionary, an irreconcilable foe of the ‘old class’, but instead I found a small, smiling, slightly short-sighted individual with the polite manners of a well-educated gentleman. From our first meeting we became friends. He was looking for someone to translate his articles and get them published in the English journals and who would be willing to carry out various literary and historical tasks on his behalf. Knowing that I was available and that I was short of work in the Russian Consulate, he offered me the job and I eagerly accepted. So began our cooperation in England. At that time, as well as studying the Russian classics, Vladimir Lʹvovich was also obsessed by Shakespeare – a genius who belonged to all of humanity. Everything about Shakespeare was of interest to him – who exactly was the individual responsible for creating such great works? An actor from Stratford, or Lord Southampton, or someone else? Burtsev was also interested in finding out where Shakespeare lived and worked in London, what of his writings had been preserved, his authentic signatures, the London of the time of Queen Elizabeth, and how that London was reflected in his writings, etc. He even wrote an article on how Shakespeare should be published, applying principles to the English poet which were more suited to Russian conditions. Naturally, there was never a chance that any such article would ever find its way into an English journal: the English are a jealous nation and the traditional Shakespearians would have no truck with such innovations offered by foreigners who dared think they had something to teach them on the subject. Vladimir Lʹvovich asked me to seek out Sir Sidney Lee, the president of the League of British Shakespearists, and sent me a draft of what I should write to him. Later, he even suggested that I myself become a member of the League.10 I managed to carry out these tasks with relative ease since I had some English friends who were members of the League. Sidney Lee turned out to be a sweet and kind person but, as I had feared, kind words were all I received from him – they knew better than us! With his usual modesty Burtsev regarded himself simply as a pioneer, preparing the way for other Russian researchers. Of the foreigners who had written in Russia in past times he was particularly interested in the brothers Samuel and Jeremy Bentham. The first was an army man who had visited the court of Empress Catherine II and left considerable correspondence describing not only his personal involvement in the war with Turkey and Russian life of the period, but also those he encountered. Jeremy Bentham had visited Russia on his brother’s advice. He was particularly interested in Catherine’s court system and the conditions of the prisons and on that subject had several discussions with important functionaries and with Catherine herself. Burtsev wrote a brief essay on the Benthams which my wife and I translated and which was warmly received when published in an English journal.11 Another English traveller and writer whose archive was held in the Museum’s Department of Manuscripts was Archdeacon Willian Coxe, who also served as the subject of one of Burtsev’s essays. At the end of the 18th century Coxe travelled through Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Poland and Russia and left detailed descriptions of all these lands which attracted much attention. In Russia he made

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the acquaintance of Catherine II, Potemkin and Princess Dashkova. His numerous diaries contain much of interest obtained from these individuals and, as such, represent a rich source on the history, geography, industry and the general condition of Russia of the period. Burtsev also made observations on the documents of Sir Robert Wilson who, in 1812, served as Britain’s Military Attaché at the court of Alexander I.12 Thus, having written essays on the Benthams, Coxe, Wilson and Princess Dashkova, Burtsev asked me to write up a summary of everything else of relevance to Russia which could be found in the Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum. There, and also in the National Archives, I found valuable materials concerning not only the early history of Anglo-Russian relations but also Russian internal affairs. I laboured for quite some time in the Department of Manuscripts because the handwriting of the period of Queen Elizabeth was of a particular, Gothic nature, resembling that script used in pre-Petrine Russia. It took quite some time to decipher and, as I worked, I would send completed sections off to Burtsev who was very happy with the results.13 I translated all this material into English and, with the help of Professor Pares, Director of the Institute of Slavonic Studies at London University and Director of the Slavonic Review, it was published as a brochure under the heading ‘Russian Documents in the British Museum’, under the authorship of Vladimir Burtsev. It met with great success and our work was handsomely rewarded. Pares printed an article in the next issue of the journal and, at the request of the Museum, made many special off-prints which were sent out to libraries and universities.14 During his later visits to England, Vladimir Lʹvovich and I would go on trips around London – he was still very interested in Shakespeare and asked me to start collecting materials for a Russian guide to all the areas of the capital associated in one way or another with the great writer. This was a much easier task than the one I had carried out in the Department of Manuscripts because such guidebooks already existed in English and so all I had to do was pick out what to me appeared to be the most significant parts. Being more familiar with London than Burtsev, I was able to point out some of his mistakes; for instance he believed that Shakespeare had lived for quite some time in Silver Street in a house which still existed, whereas the actual house had burned down during the great fire of London. I soon completed the guidebook, but I believe Burtsev was unable to publish it in Prague or Paris before his death. During our walks through Shakespeare’s London Burtsev would also take me to the so-called ‘Museum of London’. Here was gathered everything relating to old London, including beautiful panoramas of the town, paintings, clothing, and mannequins dressed in police uniforms both historic and more contemporary. We also came across a very realistic model of a prison cell with a prisoner lying on a wooden bunk. Alongside hung a notice describing the various punishments which could be meted out and from this we learned that, as recently as the 1830s, women were still being hung for sheep-stealing and fifteen-year-old boys for stealing a bottle of wine. These executions were carried out in public in order to instil respect for private property. The public apparently loved such spectacles and from early in the morning would gather at the place of execution. (In passing, I should mention that

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after the Museum had moved on to a new home on the edge of St James’ Park, I was no longer able to find the model of the prison cell, nor the notice concerning punishments of women and children – evidently the organizers of the new museum had decided that such shameful exhibits painted an unattractive picture of 19th century London and so had hidden them away.) On display was also a heavy, iron bound cell-door which Burtsev studied with particular interest while muttering something to himself. ‘What’s the matter, Vladimir Lʹvovich?’ I asked. ‘Ah, you see, these are very similar bars to the ones I was put behind when they first arrested me!’ It was a cell door from Newgate prison as described by Dickens in Oliver Twist: the most awful prison where those who had been sentenced to death were locked up alongside common criminals and insolvent debtors. It turned out that, according to Burtsev, he had ended up in Newgate Prison as a result of some speech against the tsar which he had delivered at some public meeting or other. The Russian Embassy demanded he be handed over and the English judge, deciding that he had insulted the monarch of a neighbouring state, agreed to give him up. As an aficionado, so to speak, of prisons, Burtsev told me that in no other country could one find prisons which were as awful as those in England! With that damning indictment of the Victorian penal system, Bennigsen’s testimony tails off somewhat. According to him, towards the end of 1927 Burtsev’s work again became more political in nature and, as a consequence, their joint historical researches dropped off. In truth, the revolutionary had never ceased to be involved in politics but now the focus of his work shifted from broad anti-Bolshevik agitation back to his earlier area of personal expertise: namely, the pursuit of provocateurs in the ranks of the emigration. Indeed, even after all these years, Burtsev was still remembered, both in emigration and in Russia, as the ‘Sherlock Holmes of the revolution’. The previous year in Moscow, Aleksey Tolstoy had written and published a play entitled Azef: Heads or Tails, based on Burtsev’s greatest triumph, in which the revolutionary detective himself featured prominently.15 However, whereas under the tsars Burtsev had consistently achieved remarkable results in exposing the likes of Azef, Garting and so on, he would soon discover that the new breed of Soviet provocateur he was up against was an opponent of quite a different stature. Similarly, the new directors of these undercover operatives, the GPU (or OGPU), were considerably more professional and appeared to be more determined in their outlook than their pre-revolutionary equivalents.16 As Burtsev described it, these new adversaries were ‘not simply Azefs, but “Superazefs” – they were not merely Zubatovs and Plehves, but “Superzubatovs” – “Superplehves”’.17

Fight the GPU Throughout the civil war and in the years that followed, Burtsev, as well as having supported the White armies on the various fronts, had also given his backing to such disparate anti-Soviet organizations as Savinkov’s Svoboda group on the one hand and later, in 1924, to Wrangel’s Russian All-Military Union, usually referred

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to in its abbreviated form as ROVS (Russkii obshche-voinskii soiuz), which sought to bring together White Army veterans and other opposition groups for purposes of anti-Soviet action.18 Naturally, both organizations attracted the attentions of the Russian State Political Directorate and, in particular, its sub-body which dealt with counter-intelligence operations abroad. This branch, the KRO (Counter Intelligence Department/Kontr-razvedyvatelʹnoe otdelenie), was similar in some respects to the tsarist Department of Police’s zagranichnoe agentstvo, but operated under much stricter control from its director in Moscow, the founder of the Cheka, Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, and, of course, with the full knowledge and blessing of the party’s Central Committee. Boris Savinkov, now regarded by many as having assumed Burtsev’s mantle as ‘Enemy Number One’ of the Soviet state, had long been in the sights of Artur Khristianovich Arbuzov, head of the KRO, and his assistant, S. V. Puzitsky, who were responsible for setting up an operation, code-named ‘Syndicate-2’, the aim of which was to lure the famous revolutionary back to Russia.19 Burtsev would later describe how the manoeuvre worked.20 Throughout the early 1920s the GPU had sent a constant stream of agent-provocateurs to Savinkov and, through them, had led the revolutionary to believe that his organization was expanding in Russia and attracting many new members. Then, in 1923, a member of Savinkov’s organization, a General Pavlovsky, was arrested in Russia and, after undergoing torture, was persuaded to write to Savinkov stating that work was progressing well, that his organization was thriving in Russia and was now ready to launch a major terrorist operation against the Bolsheviks but that it was essential that Savinkov himself come to lead them. At the dictation of the GPU, Pavlovsky informed Savinkov that he had sent two of his trusted comrades to Paris to discuss matters further and to make arrangements for his trip. Savinkov, having complete confidence in the word of his subordinate, resolved to undertake the journey, and it was at this point, towards the end of July 1924, that he paid a visit to Burtsev, his trusted friend, to tell him of his plans – or, as Burtsev would later have it, ‘to confess’.21 Sensing that something was amiss, Burtsev did his best to dissuade his old friend from the enterprise, arguing that, in his view, the organization was suspect and must certainly be known to the GPU. However, it was to no avail: Savinkov had made his mind up and, shortly afterwards, in August 1924, set off for Russia with his two new confidantes. Burtsev’s suspicions were proved right when, shortly after crossing the border, Savinkov’s travelling companions revealed themselves to be GPU operatives and placed him under arrest.22 The provocation, however, did not stop there. The revolutionary was taken to Moscow but, while under arrest, was given to understand by his captors that the Soviet leadership was bitterly divided, that communism had outlived its use and that the cooperation of democrats such as himself was needed to ensure that an effective change in the country could be brought about. They assured him that if he publicly recognized the Soviets he could avoid the death penalty and, moreover, after a short stay in prison, would be freed in order to join the opposition in their fight ‘to free the country from doctrinaires and scoundrels like Trotsky and Zinovyev’.23 It is impossible to say whether Savinkov believed these fine words – it may be that he simply saw no other option open to him – but, however that may be, he agreed terms and made a full and public

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declaration of his support for the Soviet government and a renunciation of his former beliefs. Although he did receive a prison sentence, he was released and amnestied soon afterwards, just as the GPU had promised, but by then they had achieved their goal of rendering him harmless. This most principled and honourable of revolutionaries soon realized the extent of his captors’ deceit, as a result of which he had been publicly disgraced and humiliated both in Russia and abroad and, unable to bear the shame, he committed suicide by throwing himself from his prison window.24 Burtsev, who had been unable to save his comrade, vowed now to do all in his power to alert the emigration to the dangers of the sophisticated provocation to which Savinkov had fallen victim. Once more he took up his journalism with renewed energy. First, together with Kartashev and Melʹgunov, he assumed the editorship of a new weekly, The Struggle for Russia, the journal of an organization of the same name which was closely linked to the RNC.25 Burtsev remained on its board for two years until August 1928, when, following various disagreements with his co-editors and having at last found the necessary funding, he announced he was stepping down to recommence publication of the Cause commune, this time in the French language.26 During this period, he also produced a series of ferociously anti-Soviet articles and pamphlets such as ‘Police Provocation in Russia’ and The Jubilee of Traitors and Murderers. 1917–1927.27 A common theme in all his writings at this time, and indeed later, was the existential threat posed to all opponents of the Soviet regime by its ruthless security services and the need for the emigration to wake up to that danger and to challenge it directly. Specifically, he called for the creation of a counter-intelligence organization: an ‘Anti-GPU’ as he termed it, which would take the battle to the enemy and fight them on their own terms.28 Burtsev could no longer turn for assistance to that wide network of collaborators that had previously formed the core of his renowned revolutionary detective agency in pre-war Paris, but his reputation remained such that a number of defectors from the Soviet intelligence services and others disaffected with the new Stalinist bureaucracy still managed to find their way to his newspaper offices in Paris. It was thus that, as one former colleague described it, ‘a kind of cult of devoted former provocateurs and traitors formed around him’.29 And, of course, quite apart from the talents of this assorted band of followers, Burtsev felt he could always rely on his own proven aptitude for sniffing out conspiracies at a distance. Sadly, it would later transpire that these instincts were not as sharp as they had once been. However that may be, in 1926 this ‘amiable bloodhound’, as he had once been christened, was able to pick up the distinctive scent of provocation emanating from an underground organization operating within Russia which went by the name of the ‘Trust’ (Trest).30 His suspicions had been aroused when he was informed of a supposedly secret trip to Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev arranged by members of this organization for the former Duma member and now well-known émigré writer Vasily Shulʹgin.31 Members of the Trust had convinced the latter of their anti-Bolshevik credentials and of the growing support within Russia for their cause and had guaranteed his safety during the trip. On his return Shulʹgin had produced a draft account of his travels, which the Trust had asked to see before publication ‘to check that it contained no revelations which might get them into trouble’. Their revisions were duly noted and incorporated before the book appeared in print as Three Capitals: A Journey through Red

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Russia. Soon afterwards, in the pages of the popular Parisian émigré journal Illustrated Russia, Burtsev made a full exposure of the Trust as an elaborate front organization of the GPU, and criticized Shulʹgin for allowing himself to be taken in so easily by the Kremlin. Although voicing an initial protest, Shulʹgin was eventually obliged to admit his naivety. Burtsev not only viewed the incident as further proof of the power of the Soviet intelligence apparatus but also offered it up as a wider warning to all, for, as he explained, ‘If a man of Shulgin’s standing and intelligence could be misled in his own country to take members of the GPU for genuine counter-revolutionaries, is it to be wondered at that numerous foreign delegations visiting Russia without any knowledge of Russia and its language are hood-winked and repeat all their hosts want them to say?’32 Indeed, the Trust and the GPU would continue to wreak havoc amongst the ranks of the emigration with its agents abroad successfully infiltrating almost every émigré organization of note and, in the case of the Russian ‘Eurasian Movement’, taking it over wholesale and turning it into one of the most vocal advocates of rapprochement with Moscow.33 A notable early GPU scalp was that of the British secret agent Sidney Reilly, who, like Savinkov, had rashly taken up an offer from the Trust to return to Russia in September 1925 and crossed the border never to be heard of again. He and Burtsev had been associates for a number of years, meeting on several occasions and corresponding regularly, and it was thanks to Burtsev, in a report compiled for British Intelligence, that light was eventually thrown onto his associate’s fate.34 The key facts, as summarized in the British press at a later date, were as follows: In September 1925, aged 51, he [Reilly] was lured back to Russia by members of the Trust, supposedly a secret White Russian opposition group, but in fact a creation of the GPU. The Bolsheviks subsequently announced that he had been killed near the border but the truth was recorded in a report for MI6 by Vladimir Burtsev, an émigré with good contacts inside the GPU. The Trust took Reilly across the Finnish frontier and on to Moscow, Burtsev said. After a few days, he was arrested. The GPU officers organising the Trust wanted him released, thinking that his arrest would blow their cover ‘but Stalin energetically protested’. Reilly was taken to the Lubyanka and repeatedly interrogated, which included being taken out ‘ostensibly to be shot’, Burtsev said. ‘The Bolsheviks wished to conceal his arrest, but the English found it out, and the Bolsheviks, in order to escape the possible demands by the English of his release, murdered him.’ Four GPU officers took him to woods north-east of Moscow on the evening of 5 November 1925. On their way they stopped, claiming that the car had broken down. All four GPU officers, together with Reilly, got out of the car to stretch their legs. One of the GPU officers, named only as Ibrahim, lagged behind the party and then, ‘put several bullets into Reilly’. He fell but was still alive and another officer fired the shot that killed him.35

It is unclear how many such reports were supplied by Burtsev to British Intelligence. The exact nature of that relationship is unknown but the veteran revolutionary with his unparalleled knowledge of Russian secret service operations was certainly regarded as

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a valuable contact by MI6. In May that year they had invited him to London to discuss the possibility of purchasing his extensive archive but Burtsev had refused, commenting that he was already in negotiations regarding its sale to the Russian Foreign Historical Archive in Prague. That archive had been founded in 1923 for the acquisition and preservation of materials pertaining primarily to the Russian emigration but also with a wider remit to cover all aspects of Russian revolutionary history.36 It is noteworthy that, during this period, interest in Burtsev and his writings was not limited only to institutions in the West. This new development was evidenced by the unexpected publication in Moscow in 1928 of an edition of his autobiography under the title In Pursuit of Provocateurs.37 Even though it was heavily edited to remove any critical reference to Lenin or any of those Bolsheviks currently holding sway in the Kremlin, its appearance nevertheless indicated that, following Trotsky’s expulsion from the Bolshevik Party in October 1927, the new Russian rulers were perhaps now beginning to view Burtsev in a different, more respectful light. News of the continuing leadership infighting in Moscow had been welcomed by Burtsev, who claimed such discord was inevitable in any regime which relied on such corrupt organizations as the GPU for its survival. According to him: The policy of betrayal, spying and provocation has so deeply permeated the whole government machine that now the U.S.S.R. leaders themselves begin to feel uneasy. It is apparent that the Communist Party has split into two hostile camps – the Stalin party and the Opposition. The Government party would gladly clear out the followers of Trotsky, but finds it very difficult, as no-one can be trusted. Each leader is in constant anxiety that he may be betrayed by his own men, and can never be sure that his seemingly most devoted followers are not plotting against him. It is all such a maze that we are left bewildered. Perhaps it is not too fantastic to surmise that the present rulers of Russia may awaken one day to the fact that the GPU and other important departments, and the Army itself, are in the hands of counter-revolutionaries.38

Unfortunately for Burtsev and the anti-Bolshevik opposition abroad, Stalin would prove that, even though there was a price to pay, such leadership disagreements within the Kremlin could be overcome. The same, meanwhile, could not be said of the divisions within the White emigration, and Burtsev himself, despite all his repeated calls for unity, did little to assist in any potential coming-together.

The Kutepov affair and the fragmentation of opposition Burtsev, ‘amiable bloodhound’ though he may have been, was also an experienced and hard-nosed journalist, and, in the tight-knit world of the Parisian émigré press, where a handful of titles found themselves fighting for control over a very limited market, he did not hold back in his efforts to outdo his rivals. Cause commune had two main competitors: firstly, Milyukov’s Poslednye novosti (Latest News) and, a few years later, P. Struve’s Vozrozhdenie (Renaissance). Milyukov recalled that in the early days

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when his newspaper had just started up in competition with Cause commune, Burtsev pulled no punches in his fight to maximize circulation, going so far as attempting to persuade the French newspaper vendors on the streets not to sell Latest News, and even bribing workers in the printing press not to publish Milyukov’s title.39 But quite apart from such underhand tricks the mild-mannered Burtsev could, on occasion, be surprisingly abrasive in his dealings with his fellow journalists. Sometimes, this was due to purely political disagreements, such as when he demanded of Struve that his name be removed from the list of Renaissance contributors because he disagreed with its monarchist line.40 There were, however, other occasions when he adopted an aggressive and divisive approach such as in the very first issue of the revived Cause commune when, ostensibly due to a disagreement over the trustworthiness of the underground counterrevolutionary organization Bratstvo russkoi pravdy (Brotherhood of Russian Truth), he rounded on Melʹgunov, his old friend and co-editor in Struggle for Russia, from which journal he had barely resigned. This attack, in which he almost went so far as to accuse the unfortunate Melʹgunov of Bolshevik sympathies, deservedly attracted criticism from some in the emigration who felt that he had overstepped the mark. Such open disagreements, they warned, could only be of benefit to Moscow.41 Unfortunately, with the Bolsheviks having already celebrated a decade in power and now rumoured to be infiltrating the White emigration at all levels, Burtsev was not alone in exhibiting signs of frustration and perhaps even paranoia. It was in this febrile atmosphere that the GPU carried out one of its most daring and indeed most successful operations. Burtsev was quite aware that the Soviet security services were not only capable of great sophistication but, if the occasion required, could also adopt more heavyhanded tactics. As early as March 1924, he himself had been physically set upon by two unknown individuals whom he assumed were Soviet agents. He reported that prior to the attack he had been aware he was under surveillance, but neglected to mention whether he suffered any serious injury as a result of this assault.42 In this respect, as his faithful assistant Rotshtein had earlier attested, the elderly journalist seemed to lead a charmed life: ‘It must be said that Burtsev was a desperately brave and fearless man. I know of instances when, aware that preparations were being made to attack him, he nevertheless set off unarmed and unaccompanied. And more than once his calmness so unsettled his assailants that they decided not to carry out their plan after all.’43 But not all of the GPU’s targets were as fortunate. On 26 January 1930, one of their most formidable opponents, General Aleksandr Pavlovich Kutepov, who, since the death of Wrangel in 1928, had successfully led ROVS in its anti-Soviet activities, was ambushed in broad daylight in the centre of Paris and kidnapped. The general was never seen again, and, although responsibility was not claimed at the time, no one was in any doubt as to the involvement of the GPU in the affair. A KGB official later claimed that, while resisting his colleagues’ attack, the victim had suffered a heart attack and died and had subsequently been buried in the outskirts of Paris. (In another version, to which Burtsev and others subscribed, it was claimed that the general’s demise had been hastened by the use of chloroform.)44 This audacious show of strength by the Soviet political police outwith their borders and in a foreign country such as France, which had previously been regarded as the

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Figure 9.1  Lazarʹ Rotshtein, trusted friend of Burtsev, Paris, c. 1922.

safest of havens, shocked the White community (and, indeed, the wider European public) and it was not long before the uncertainty and mystery surrounding the incident gave rise to a series of paranoid accusations of provocation and betrayal within the general’s immediate entourage. Unfortunately, as the indictments flew, the émigré press was obliged to take sides and, as a result, Burtsev found himself coming into bitter conflict with some of his former colleagues and with Kutepov’s successor at ROVS, General Evgeny Karlovich Miller, who believed that the enquiry into the general’s disappearance was a matter for the French police and that Burtsev’s investigative skills were not required.45 The veteran journalist, however, had already voiced his suspicions concerning the Bolshevik links of certain members of the émigré ‘Eurasian’ movement and made it clear that he suspected them of involvement in the kidnapping.46 At the same time, Renaissance adopted another approach. Now under the editorial control of Burtsev’s former RNC associate, the monarchist Yu. F. Semenov, the newspaper accused one of Burtsev’s close friends, General P. P. Dʹiakonov (who had long been suspected in émigré circles of working for the GPU), of orchestrating the disappearance and of being assisted by other undercover Soviet agents, named colonels Popov and de Roberti.47 Burtsev immediately leapt to their defence, placing the blame instead on a member of Kutepov’s immediate staff, Colonel A. A. Zaitsev, and accusing Semenov of defamation.48 Eventually a Parisian court found in favour of Dʹiakonov and obliged Semenov to issue a formal apology. At around the same time Burtsev had accused

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another member of staff at Renaissance, N. N. Alekseev, of pro-Bolshevik sympathies and of passing information onto the GPU via one of his employees, the writer and former counter-intelligence agent A. I. Sipelʹgas.49 Angry words and threats were once more bandied about, with Burtsev eventually demanding that the case be settled before an émigré tribunal of honour. Semenov refused to back down and responded in the pages of Renaissance with a series of heated and somewhat unnecessarily personal attacks on his erstwhile colleague. In one article, entitled ‘A Dangerous Madman’, he commented that Burtsev had no business interfering in a case which was of no concern to him and then continued: All of these vain and nasty activities of Burtsev whereby he manages to confuse provocateurs with ordinary people and truth with lies while yelling to everybody that somehow he is the one who has been offended and insulted – all of this only serves to produce an impression of some kind of madness which can only be explained by the total abnormality of this poor old man. It is not a tribunal he needs but a psychiatrist.50

Such desperate, unfounded ad hominem attacks demonstrated that this was by no means the finest hour of the Russian émigré press, and sadly, such criticism of Burtsev’s conduct and of his age – he was now almost seventy – was not confined to the press. Referring to the Sipelʹgas/Alekseev affair in a letter to Burtsev’s old friend Amfiteatrov, the famous Russian writer Zinaida Gippius wrote: ‘It happens that with age a good hunting dog completely loses its sense of smell. That is what has happened with Burtsev. Worst of all, he himself does not know it: he goes off hunting and does himself much harm in the process. Now he has got himself entangled in such a messy story that I’m almost ashamed to bring it up.’51 And so, as the Russian émigré press continued to tear itself apart, the Soviet security services doubtless looked on and congratulated themselves on the Kutepov affair, the outcome of which had far exceeded their expectations. Indeed, just how satisfied they were with the operation would be described by Burtsev some years later when he again turned his attention to the case following an almost identical repeat kidnapping on the streets of Paris – this time the unfortunate victim was none other than Kutepov’s successor and Burtsev’s former critic, General Miller.52

Celebrations and reconciliations As the arguments over the GPU’s involvement in Kutepov’s kidnapping rolled on, it is difficult to say whether Burtsev was more disheartened by the ubiquity and seeming invincibility of his Soviet opponents or by the animosity shown towards him personally by some of his fellow countrymen. Throughout his long life the revolutionary warrior had endured many similar insults and criticisms of his actions and one might have expected him simply to shrug off the latest barrage directed against him by the Renaissance camp and others.53 However, Burtsev was no longer the young and endlessly energetic man he had been: on 17 November 1932 he would mark his

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seventieth birthday or, as he preferred to describe it, his fiftieth year of active political struggle, and perhaps some battle-weariness was now beginning to set in. Although the thought of standing down from political life would never have crossed his mind, it seemed that now he was readying himself to devote more time to literary pursuits and, by recommencing publication of The Past, to reprise his role as the ‘Nestor of the Russian revolutionary movement’. His heart must therefore have been gladdened, firstly, by the news that his colleagues at the Russian National Committee had arranged a celebration birthday dinner in his honour and, secondly, by the remarkable outpourings of love and affection from friends and colleagues, past and present, which the event generated. If one were in any doubt as to the level of esteem in which Vladimir Lʹvovich Burtsev was held by the community at large, then one need look no further than the Bakhmeteff Archive and its extensive collection of congratulatory newspaper articles and correspondence that the veteran revolutionary received to mark the event. To give a flavour of the immense goodwill expressed in these letters – here follow a few selected extracts. From General Anton Ivanovich Denikin: My Dear Vladimir Lʹvovich, For many years you have passionately, persistently and selflessly sought the truth in the darkest recesses of Russian life. May fate continue to cast light on your journey through life.54 From Monsieur Maurice Paléologue, Ambassadeur de France: I have not forgotten the noble role which you so valiantly assumed in 1914 and for your 70th birthday I send you my sympathetic felicitations.55 From Dmitry Filosofov: I consider it my spiritual duty to thank you from the depths of my soul for that great gift which you bring to all in the emigration, regardless of their political direction or party. You represent for us the living incarnation of unconditional love for the motherland, a living symbol of our unity and our COMMON CAUSE. Bitter is the bread of exile and heavy is the consciousness of our dispersal but when our thoughts turn to you our soul is comforted.56 From Boris Nikolaevsky: My congratulations would have been much warmer if you were celebrating not your 70th but your 25th or 30th birthday. Of course, the papers would not have carried such lengthy adulatory articles, but then it would have made it easier to bear the hopeless boredom of these monotonous grey days. As you know, there is much on which we don’t see eye to eye – we have argued a lot and will continue to do so … But then, there is that other Burtsev – the pioneer of our revolutionary

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historiography and founder of The Past whom I have always valued highly and respected greatly. And now, in the midst of our émigré wanderings, I have come to value you as a man. All the more sincerely, therefore, I hope you will long hence preserve your courage and strength and your eternal good-humoured energy. I am sure that you will succeed in starting up The Past again and that, with this old friend, your life will again become more bearable.57

Within the year Burtsev had indeed succeeded in reintroducing his ‘old friend’ to the public, the first volume of the new series of Byloe appeared in 1933, followed, later that year, by a second and, sadly, final volume.58 As ever, the subject matter of both concerned the history of the revolutionary movement and, more specifically, Burtsev’s own reminiscences of events in Russia, during the period 1914–1918.59 The occasion of Burtsev’s seventieth birthday then had been used by Nikolaevsky and others, who had not always ‘seen eye to eye’ with the sometimes irascible journalist, to mend bridges. A year previously, Burtsev had used the same approach, contacting his estranged comrade, Osip Minor, to congratulate him on reaching the grand old age of seventy and proposing that they let bygones be bygones. The ensuing exchange was both poignant and instructive with regard to their differing approaches to the political struggle. Burtsev praised Minor for his idealism and steadfastness even though they had gone their separate ways, explaining that what he had always fought for was Russia, first and foremost, and not for any particular party. This was why he felt it was perfectly acceptable to enter into an alliance with anyone who had Russia’s interests at heart, even if they did not hold his and Minor’s core beliefs in democracy and socialism.60 Minor responded in an equally conciliatory manner, recalling their first meeting in Moscow as young followers of the People’s Will some fifty years earlier. Although they had gone their separate ways, their differences, he believed, were tactical rather than ideological, but, he explained, he could never subscribe to what he viewed as Burtsev’s narrow Russian nationalism: for him the ‘people’ (narod) was composed of all the nationalities within Russia and he, personally, had never regarded himself as specifically ‘Russian’ or ‘Orthodox’ or ‘Jewish’. But, it was on another point that the two differed markedly. Minor could never suppress his hatred for monarchism: that ideology which kept the people in ignorance and which had in fact led them to Bolshevism, with all its ugly denial of basic freedoms and human rights. In his view, tsarism had led to the reign of Tsar Stalin and it was this despotism which had to be overthrown. Did Burtsev believe that his new monarchist allies would agree to that? Minor believed that to link up with such people was to betray the fight for true freedom and, for that reason, he could never subscribe to Burtsev’s call for a union of all parties irrespective of political programme so long as they were opposed to the Bolsheviks. The chances of success of such a union he believed were nil. The old and infirm Minor surmised that this correspondence might be their last ‘meeting’ and so he ended by wishing his old comrade well, joking that they were both ending their lives as they had lived them in abject poverty but at the same time they were both rich in so far as they had lived exclusively striving for the ideal of a free Russia. He personally would not have wanted it any other way.61 Burtsev was moved to respond, insisting that he had never abandoned his beliefs in democracy, socialism and the republic, but that he had always been convinced that

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if one truly loved Russia (and by that he too meant all the peoples of Russia), then, on occasion, one had to compromise. Like Minor, if he had to live his life again he would not change a single thing and he remained convinced that there would come a time when they would do battle with the Bolsheviks again and this time they would win.62 Sadly, Minor died in September the following year and so did not have the opportunity to return the compliment to Burtsev on the occasion of the latter’s seventieth birthday celebration.63 The failure of The Past preceded the closure of his Common Cause by only a few months and, as a consequence, the poor state of Burtsev’s finances, referred to by Minor, reached a new low. His occasional literary contributions to other publications, such as his entry on Georgy Gapon for a 1932 edition of an English encyclopaedia, did not bring in enough money to survive; nor did he meet with much success via the various ‘requests for funding’ (i.e. begging letters) that he sent out.64 By the end of 1931 he had been obliged to move out of his hotel for non-payment of rent, but in the nick of time another compatriot lent a hand and he was able to take up residence again in the 5th arrondissement, this time in what was described by a friend as ‘not just a poor but a beggarly, and utterly squalid, miniscule flat’ on the first floor at 13 Rue des Feuillantines. The ageing Burtsev would somehow manage to survive at this address, living hand to mouth for the most part, for the next seven years.65 Fortunately, during these final years there were occasions when the Russian Sherlock Holmes was able to escape Paris and his life of encroaching destitution and prove, not only to Gippius and those of a similarly cynical disposition but to the world at large, that his investigative faculties were still very active and that he was still very much a force to be reckoned with.

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The Protocols of the Elders of Zion Burtsev would later recall receiving the news which set him off on his European peregrinations: In early 1934 I learned that in Switzerland there was going to be a trial concerning the Protocols. I was informed that it was likely I would be asked to supply information and that I may also be called as a witness. From then on I redoubled my efforts to find out as much as I could about the Protocols – on this occasion I was particularly keen to learn what former employees of the Okhrana and police knew about the subject and, in order to carry out interviews, I made trips to the South of France, Brussels and elsewhere.1

Burtsev was already something of an expert on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious and long since discredited forgery, purporting to represent the minutes of a meeting of a cabal of Jewish leaders in the late nineteenth century in which plans for Jewish/Masonic world domination were laid out. The Protocols first appeared in print in serialized form in 1903, in the short-lived ultra-nationalist Russian newspaper Znamia (The Banner), and then in book form in 1905 under the title, The Great within the Small and the Antichrist, an Imminent Political Possibility. Notes of an Orthodox Believer. The book’s author, a Russian mystic by the name of Sergei Nilus, claimed it was a translation from a French original.2 Despite their authenticity being comprehensively disproved on several occasions, the Protocols nevertheless continued to resurface as a genuine text. The text was used by various anti-Semites for propaganda purposes until 1933, when, in Berne, a German anti-Semite, Theodor Fritsch, and four others associated with the Hitlerite Swiss National Front were taken to court by local Jewish associations on the accusation that they had offered for sale to the public an edition of the Protocols, which act, they claimed, contravened a local law forbidding distribution of ‘immoral, obscene or brutalizing’ texts.3 At its first sitting, on 16 November 1933, the Swiss court ruled, firstly, on the need to determine the authenticity or otherwise of the text and therefore ordered the appointment of specialists to examine the case and report on their findings within the year. The second sitting of the court took place over four days, between 29 October and 1 November 1934, and seized the attention of

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the international press which, with Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, was aware of the much wider relevance and implications of the court’s eventual ruling. As well as the court-appointed specialists, the prosecution and defence were also granted the right to invite their own witnesses and so it was that requests went out to Burtsev and a few other experts to give evidence on behalf of the plaintiffs.4 Burtsev had been aware of the existence of the Protocols since 1906. By that time they had already been dismissed as a blatant fabrication and he had consequently paid them no special attention. But much later, in the early years of the Russian Civil War, he personally witnessed their pernicious nature and saw how they were being used within the White camp to justify a series of appalling anti-Semitic atrocities. Not only were the Protocols regaining popularity in southern Russia but they were also now being republished in a variety of countries and languages. Burtsev was therefore delighted and relieved when, in August 1921, the London Times published what most thought would be conclusive proof that the Protocols were no more than a shoddy fabrication. The Times’ Constantinople correspondent, Philip Graves, had received proof from a Russian émigré that the Protocols were no more than a plagiarism based on a book published in Geneva in 1864.5 This work, entitled Dialogue aux enfers, was the creation of a French writer, Maurice Joly, and an initial comparison of the two texts did indeed point to a blatant case of plagiarism. At around the same time, claims were made that the fabrication had been the work of the Russian Department of Police. According to one version, the work had been carried out in Paris around 1901 or 1902 by two Russian police agents, Matvei Golovinsky and Ivan Manasevich-Manuilov, under the direction of that same Petr Ivanovich Rachkovsky. It was argued that the latter had contrived the whole affair as ‘a move in the game to discredit a Lyons Mystic, Philippe, of whose power over the Tsar the Grand Duchess Elizabeth disapproved. Knowing that Nilus was designed as Philippe’s supplanter, Rachkovsky, it is thought, wished to secure his good graces by providing him with a valuable weapon against Russian Liberalism.’6 Not surprisingly, such claims seized the attention of the Sherlock Holmes of the Russian Revolution, who, over the next ten years or so, carried out intermittent enquiries into the matter via his old contacts in the Department of Police. For those he could not quiz personally he compiled a questionnaire which he either sent out by post or passed on to a go-between who could conduct the interview on his behalf. Thus, even before he was called to give evidence at the second Berne trial, Burtsev had already compiled an impressive dossier on the subject which, as mentioned above, he further augmented in the course of 1934 through interviews with various members of Russian émigré communities in Paris, Brussels and the South of France.

Two versions of Russian anti-Semitism: Kolyshko and Vinberg Burtsev did not confine himself only to what former policemen knew of the history of the Protocols but also took into account the views of others who had been close to the seat of power in St Petersburg. Consequently, he quizzed old conservatives and rightwing journalists such as I. I. Kolyshko, who was now a resident of Nice on the French

1934–1942: Don Quixote’s Last Stand

Figure 10.1  V. L. Burtsev outside St Mark’s Basilica, Venice, 1930s. Vladimir Lʹvovich Burtsev papers, Envelope A, Hoover Institution Archives.

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Riviera.7 The latter’s response, while containing no factual proof of police involvement and therefore not meriting inclusion in Burtsev’s testimony in Berne, is, nevertheless, worthy of mention here for the fascinating insight it provides into the reception of the notorious text by Russian conservative intellectuals in the first decades of the twentieth century.8 Recalling his life in pre-revolutionary Russia, Kolyshko admitted not only to holding extreme right-wing views but also to being ‘more sympathetic to those individuals who were inclined towards anti-Semitism than to those who fought against it’. He made no secret of the fact that the first appearance of the Protocols had a stunning effect on him. Initially, he and others in his circle had placed a blind, unconditional faith in their authenticity and it was only gradually, as the left opposition advanced their counterarguments, that doubts began to creep into his mind and he felt the foundations on which the Protocols stood slowly start to crumble. He recalled this beginning around the time of the 1905 Revolution. Then, during the reaction of 1908–1910 the Protocols regained popularity before vanishing almost completely as war approached and remaining thus until after the February Revolution. Although Kolyshko was unable to pinpoint exact dates or events, he could chart the fragmented evolution of social opinion and attitudes towards this phenomenon which so excited and troubled antiSemitic circles in old Russia: We regarded the Protocols as no more nor less than a devilish plot against the very way of life of Russia, both as a state and as a Christian society; against our very cornerstones of Autocracy. Orthodoxy and Nationality – indeed, against the whole Aryan race. Furthermore, this was no literary construct: this was no Wellsian ‘Martian invasion’, nor something out of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but a plot by an entire tribe, on the success or failure of which depended the fate of Western civilization and the fate of Christianity itself.9

Kolyshko recalled too that, when incontrovertible evidence of the fabrication of the Protocols emerged, it did little to change the views of some of his anti-Semitic associates. ‘So, let the Protocols be “apocryphal”’, they said, ‘Because, in any event, they have certainly hit on the truth about the Jews! If the Elders of Zion do not exist now, then one day they might – In fact, they most certainly will!’ But for Kolyshko at least, the issue had been decided once and for all and he had no reason to suppose that the Protocols would ever re-emerge to trouble mankind. Unfortunately, others on the Russian right, such as the monarchist F. V. Vinberg, were of a more extreme persuasion.10 Everywhere the latter looked he saw signs of a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy and, with the Bolshevik victory, he believed, quite simply, that Russia had fallen completely under the ‘Jewish yoke’.11 Arrested in December 1917, he had encountered Burtsev in the Kresty prison and had taken an immediate dislike to him. Later, in his book, In Captivity under the Monkeys (V plenu u obezʹian, Kiev, 1918), Vinberg angrily described the utter contempt he felt both for the revolutionary personally and for all he represented. After settling in Berlin he repeated his attack on Burtsev in the May 1920 issue of his anti-Semitic journal Luch sveta (Ray of Light), but that particular issue is more often remembered for the appearance within its pages of yet

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another version of Nilus’s The Great and the Small.12 Moreover, it has been claimed that it was either Vinberg or his co-editor Shabelsky-Bork who had earlier been responsible for passing the text of the Protocols to a local publisher and who, therefore, had made possible the appearance in print in January 1920 of the first German translation of the infamous document. The Ray of Light editors, therefore, may have played no small part in the revival and popularization within Europe of that notorious, forged text – later described by one historian as a ‘Warrant for Genocide’ – which would, in due course, lead to a Berne courtroom.13

Testimony at Berne Burtsev was called to testify on the second day of the trial and, by most accounts, gave not only a convincing but a barnstorming performance. As one of those present reported, his ‘exceptional knowledge of the methods and agents employed by the Okhrana gave additional importance to his evidence’.14 He produced a particularly strong impression on the court with his report of the interviews conducted (via an intermediary) with the former head of the St Petersburg Okhrana, K. I. Globachev, in which the latter had confirmed that he and his colleagues knew the Protocols to be a forgery and that they had been created by individuals in the Russian Department of Police. Moreover, Globachev had revealed that Nicolas II – by no means a supporter of Zion – on learning of the history of their fabrication, forbade their use for propaganda purposes, apparently declaring that ‘One cannot fight a clean cause by dirty means’.15 As well as the mass of prosecution evidence thus provided by Burtsev and the other expert witnesses, the court also received, amongst other documents, a sworn statement from the Times journalist Philip Graves confirming that the content of his 1921 exposé entitled ‘The Truth about the “Protocols” – A Literary Forgery’ was true. By contrast, the arguments provided by the defence were weak and unconvincing and it therefore came as no great surprise when the court reconvened in April the following year and, after hearing closing arguments, finally delivered its verdict, finding in favour of the plaintiffs that ‘the Protocols fell under the cantonal law on seditious literature as liable to excite hatred against a part of the population and lead to agitation and violence’. As publisher, Fritsch was fined fifty francs, while another of the defendants was fined twenty francs for distribution.16 Unfortunately, Burtsev, the star witness, was not able to rest on his laurels: within a fortnight he found himself the accused party in another court case in Berne brought by a violinist (and apparent Nazi sympathizer) by the name of Sylvio Schnell. What the exact charge was is unclear but, in any event, the case was thrown out the following day and Burtsev was awarded a much-needed 250 francs. His solicitor informed him of the happy outcome, expressing the hope that the Nazis would bring a similar charge against him every week and thus guarantee him a future free of financial worry!17 Unfortunately, Burtsev would be unable to free himself from the consequences of the case for some time. An indication of the level of stress he was under may be inferred by his decision, that year, to draw up a last will and testament in which he named his trusted friend Lazarʹ Rotshtein as his executor and bequeathed all his worldly goods

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to ‘any Russian political organization which pursues the same aims and ideals that are dear to me’.18 His anxiety was not misplaced: the following spring, in what was almost certainly a revenge attack, the Paris offices of the Cause commune were burned to the ground.19 And the pressure continued. Some two years after the verdict, the defendants lodged an appeal at a higher court and, although acquitted on a technicality, the judge refused to award costs and instead reaffirmed the court’s earlier finding that the Protocols were a forgery. Burtsev, on hearing that the Nazis were, nevertheless, now claiming that the appeal court’s decision had confirmed the Protocols’ authenticity, decided once and for all to lay the facts before the public and set about writing his own account of the trial and the history behind the affair. His book was published in Paris in early 1938 under a typically cumbersome title: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Proved Forgery (Rachkovsky Fabricated the Protocols and Hitler Gave Them World Renown).20 In general, the work received favourable reviews, although not from such as Ulrich Fleischhauer, the key expert witness for the defence at the Berne trial. As Burtsev would explain: Mr Fleischhauer writes indignantly about my book in which I not only declare the Protocols to be a fake but also that the current German ‘god’, Hitler makes use of them knowing them to be a fake and that therefore, on that basis, I call Hitler a conscious liar and, indeed an utter butcher. It is therefore perfectly understandable that, currently in Germany, because of my fight against Hitler they have started an intensive campaign against me personally.21

The fact that the authenticity or otherwise of the Protocols appeared to matter not a jot to Hitler and others like him might lead one to question whether, in the end, the efforts of Burtsev were worthwhile. Indeed, perhaps it is more important to tackle the question originally formulated in 1951 by Hannah Arendt: that the point is not ‘to prove for the hundredth time what the whole world already knows, i.e. that we are dealing with a forgery, the whole point is to explain why such a blatant forgery is still, to this very day, believed by so many’.22

A fresh approach to Pushkin and other distractions At first glance it may appear that the Berne trial and the events surrounding it had consumed Burtsev totally and that he had been obliged to put his life on hold for its duration, but this was far from the case. For example, in the course of 1934, in between his trips to the south of France, Belgium and, indeed, Switzerland, he found time to produce a sixty-page study on Pushkin, an individual he loved, according to one colleague, ‘not merely as a poetic genius – as a Pushkinist would love him – but as a man: he worshipped the whole person – with all his sins included’.23 The brochure was published, again under a somewhat unwieldy title: How Pushkin wanted to publish ‘Eugene Onegin’ and how it was published. A few pages from Pushkin’s biography.24 In his preface, the author declared it was the émigrés’ national duty to publish a new edition

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of the collected works of the poet or at least individual editions of his major works, for ‘only abroad was it possible to publish without fear of Bolshevik censorship, as is required for any objective study’. He had already briefly outlined his proposal in Cause commune in an article entitled ‘Study Pushkin!’25 Two years later, in 1937, he brought out a more substantial book on the subject, again with a rather cumbersome title – A. S. Pushkin: the eighth, ninth and tenth cantos of the novel ‘Evgeny Onegin’: the story of a mutilated novel.26 Shortly thereafter, for the benefit of English readers, and to mark the centenary of Pushkin’s death, he summarized his argument in an article for the Slavonic and East European Review. Here he laid out his justification for interfering with the ‘sacred text’ that was Onegin explaining that, due to the strict censorship under which the poet was obliged to live and work, his masterpiece had been published ‘not as Pushkin wished’ but ‘as Nicholas I wished’.27 For example, he had been forced to omit all the references to the Decembrists that he had included in the 8th canto and which he had planned to develop in an unpublished 10th canto. It was, therefore, incumbent on the émigré community to ‘revise’ Onegin accordingly. Unfortunately, not everyone was convinced by his argument. Indeed, Burtsev placed his loyal companion Amfiteatrov in a somewhat delicate position when he asked him to review his oeuvre. The latter confided in a colleague that he simply did not like the book and so, not wishing to offend his old friend, wondered whether someone else might undertake the task. A review duly appeared, although its title – ‘Should we regret that “Eugene Onegin” remained unfinished?’ – rather indicated that the critic was of a similar mind to Amfiteatrov.28 Despite his love of Pushkin and his hero Onegin, it is unlikely Burtsev ever attended any performances of Tchaikovsky’s operatic rendition of the work, for he rarely went to the theatre and was anything but an ‘opera buff ’. In the mid-1920s in Paris he had been persuaded to accompany two friends to a performance of Carmen and confessed that he had not set foot in a theatre in twenty years and had never before heard the work. Some way into the performance he was forced to admit that for him, listening to opera was far too light-hearted an occupation and with regret asked to be excused. It was only when his companions threatened to leave with him that he grudgingly agreed to remain and, in the event, seemed to quite enjoy the rest of the show.29 Burtsev’s only link to the world of opera had been through his acquaintance with the world-renowned Russian bass, Fyodor Shalyapin, to whom he had been introduced by their mutual friends Alexander Amfiteatrov (himself a former baritone opera singer) and his wife Illariia.30 They first met at the Amfiteatrov’s house on the Italian Riviera in February 1909, shortly after the conclusion of the Azef affair.31 Apparently, the great singer, a notoriously boisterous egoist of a man, was unusually quiet and attentive during their meeting, quizzing Burtsev at length and carefully examining his every move and gesture.32 Many years later, after the demise of his dear friend Amfiteatrov, Burtsev wrote to commiserate with his widow and happened to mention his early encounter with the great singer who had also recently passed away. Illariia Vladimirovna remembered the visit very well: I can see it now – how all traces of arrogance and narcissism left his face and he sat there like a good boy and listened – for once Shalyapin actually listened! – not to himself, but to all of those interesting guests who were there. You write

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that someone who was present told you later that Shalyapin had quizzed you about Azef because at that time he was preparing for his role as Don Quixote. My dear friend, why would he be interested in Azef for his Don Quixote? It was you, precisely you that he needed for the role! That is why he quizzed you.33

Massenet had composed his five-act opera Don Quichotte with Shalyapin specifically in mind. It premiered in Monte Carlo in February 1910, to great acclaim, with the Russian singer performing in the lead role.34 Burtsev had evidently served as the perfect model, for, quite apart from possessing all of the moral qualities of Cervantes’ ‘Knight of the Sad Countenance’, he also bore a striking physical resemblance: as one colleague commented, no make-up was required – all you needed to do was remove the glasses from the face of this ‘old goat’ (staraia koza).35 Apparently, performer and model got on well together, and it is interesting to note that despite Shalyapin having been abandoned by many of his former acquaintances shortly after the revolution due to his strike-breaking and apparent support for the Soviet government, Burtsev was still in friendly correspondence with him until as late as 1937.36 But in general, although he was passionate about literature, Burtsev had no time for the performing arts, being of the belief that they were inconsequential and got in the way of the far more important task of fighting Bolsheviks, anti-Semites or Nazis. He usually, therefore, had to be dragged away from his desk to attend any cultural performance. One exception to this rule was Roman Gul’s 1937 stage adaptation of his novel Azef (General BO), which he had written in memory of Boris Savinkov. Gul recalled an earlier meeting he had with Burtsev, in Berlin in 1932, at which the latter began by complimenting him on his novel and on the exactness of the detail. Then, however, he pointed out that the author had made one mistake when describing Burtsev’s teeth as protruding and being ‘those of an inveterate smoker’. They may well protrude, said Burtsev, but, he assured him, he had never smoked a cigarette in his life.37 Gul’s play, Azef, was staged by a small Russian theatre company in Paris before an audience composed of almost every émigré of note. The playwright recalled his first-night nerves, sitting at the back of the hall through the first act and then, during the interval, meeting Burtsev in the corridor: ‘He was ecstatic and it soon became clear why – “Lord, where did you manage to dig up such an Azef? Goodness, he is his spitting image – a real live Azef and, you know, I could tell you a thing or two about the real one!” ’ Indeed, the actor performing the role in question was reportedly so perfect that he too could have ‘played the part without make-up’. Despite the production receiving some positive reviews, Gul was disappointed with the end result but was, nevertheless, glad that it had at least given so much pleasure to old Vladimir Lʹvovich – proof of which was evident by the fact that the latter attended each of the four performances given. As the old revolutionary sat there transfixed in the front row, Gul supposed the experience must have roused his ‘dormant passions and past glories’.38 Interestingly, the play was cancelled after this short run, not because it was making a loss – it played to a full house on each occasion – but because one of the company directors, the famous SR and former Minister of the Interior in Kerensky’s government Nikolai Avksentʹev,

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decided that, with the increasing number of instances of Jewish persecution in Germany, it would be ‘inappropriate’ (unzeitgemàss) to perform a play whose eponymous Jewish anti-hero reflected so badly on the faith. Whether or not one agrees with the decision, there is no question that in Germany acts of anti-Semitic violence were indeed on the increase. Burtsev’s hopes that the Berne trial would have destroyed the myth of the Protocols once and for all had apparently come to nothing.

A second celebration before the storm Perhaps surprisingly, later that year, Avksentʹev was one of those present at another celebration held in Burtsev’s honour: this time to mark his seventy-fifth birthday. The event was held in Paris on 5 December 1937 and was organized on this occasion by his colleagues at the journal Illustrated Russia.39 Burtsev was both surprised and overwhelmed by the impressive turnout and in his speech made special mention of his pleasure to see such revered members of the Left as Avksentʹev and Zenzinov in attendance.40 The occasion had thus provided another opportunity for the aged revolutionaries to mend fences, and Burtsev made the most of it, reassuring those present of his unwavering belief in socialist principles: People often ask – who is Burtsev? Is he on the left? The right? Is he a moderate? And so on. I can give you a definitive answer to that question – left, left, left and only left! I have always been a confirmed democrat, socialist and republican and, nearly always, a revolutionary. For example, I was not a revolutionary at the time of the State Duma nor, of course, during the war, nor under the Provisional Government, that is, whenever I believed it would be possible for me to carry out my activities within the law.41

He then referred back to the disagreements he had had with some former colleagues who had objected to his support for the likes of Kornilov and Denikin. Burtsev’s response was simply that ‘it would have been of more benefit to our fight against the Bolsheviks if, during these months when they were preparing their coup, Kornilov and Denikin had not been sitting in prison but had instead been on the streets of Petersburg and Moscow. As they later showed they were true patriots and resolute enemies of Bolshevism.’ The Bolsheviks had, of course, long been Burtsev’s main enemy, and even now, as he attacked the new evil that was Hitlerism, he still found time to round on his old adversaries. At that time in Stalin’s Russia the military purges were in full swing. In Moscow, on 2 June 1937 the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR had sentenced a number of senior commanders to death, which news was warmly welcomed by Burtsev: ‘The news of the execution of these Bolsheviks was greeted with genuine boundless joy. Everyone was delighted that finally these butchers had been executed and that, in the squares and at meetings, people could now openly curse those who had been punished and about whom they had been forced to remain silent.’42

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Meanwhile, he tempered his feelings of contempt and loathing for the Soviet leader by noting the following: ‘In Stalin’s defence we can at least say that during the Trotskyite, Bukharinite and Zinovievite trials he did not show any particular brutality – at least no more than the accused themselves had shown to their non-Bolshevik enemies ever since the day they took power in 1917.’43 And to commemorate their twenty-year reign he issued a collection of old newspaper articles under the title The Crimes and Punishment of the Bolsheviks. On the Occasion of the Traitors’ and Murderers’ Twentieth Anniversary.44 He followed this with the publication in 1939 of a slim volume in which he attacked the operations of the Soviet secret police in Paris.45 This had been inspired by the latest outrageous kidnapping by ‘Bolshevik gangsters’ of Kutepov’s successor at ROVS, General Miller. By this stage, however, much greater alarm was being caused in the international arena by the rise of the new enemy, Germany. Following Hitler’s seizure of the Sudetenland in 1938 and the German invasion of the remaining Czech lands in March 1939, the governments of Europe could no longer be in any doubt as to the Führer’s expansionist plans. On 24 March 1939, in a letter to a friend in America, Burtsev described his own concerns: You are living there under normal human circumstances, whereas here we feel like minnows who have been thrown into a pan and are now in the process of being fried. Never for a moment over recent years did I believe in the possibility of war but now, for the first time, I do think the Germans might invade France. Of course, I shall not leave Paris – for the past twenty-five years I have fought as best I could against the Germans for giving us the Bolsheviks and for the fact that they are and have always been Hitlerites – even before Hitler himself appeared on the scene: he is, in fact, a typical German. If war does break out then it will be a violent one even if not a prolonged one. The democracies of all countries must prevail not only over Hitler but over the spirit of Hitler.46

Quite apart from the looming menace of Germany, Burtsev had other, more personal worries to contend with. Towards the end of 1938 he had been called before a tribunal of his peers to defend accusations he had made against one V. P. Krymov, a Russian émigré businessman and writer. According to Burtsev, Krymov while resident in Berlin had traded with the Bolsheviks and in Paris had also consorted with the Bolshevik ‘traitor’ Aleksey Tolstoy. On 6 January 1939 the tribunal found Burtsev’s accusations unproven and Krymov rushed to publish the verdict of this ‘court of honour’. Burtsev’s abrupt response was that, since he had proved that Krymov was a Bolshevik, honour did not come into it. Further to this, he wrote to his adversary a month later, declaring he had always thought badly of him but now held him in even greater contempt than before.47 Unfortunately, there exists little reliable documentation covering the final years of Burtsev’s life. The reports on him held by the French Sûreté, for example, are full of contradictions, being often based directly on information provided by Bolshevik provocateurs such as P. P. Savin, whom Burtsev would later expose in his book as one of the very same ‘Bolshevik gangsters’ involved in the Miller kidnapping. Hence, according to the Sûreté, the old revolutionary was suspected of working for the GPU,

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whereas elsewhere in their files it was claimed he was actually employed by French intelligence as an informer and was being paid a salary of 700 francs a month. In November 1939 it was reported that he was penniless and that the previous month he had left rue des Feuillantines and moved in with his old friend and fellow witness for the prosecution in Berne, Sergei Svatikov, who lived a few streets away in Rue Foustel de Coulanges. Burtsev, the report continued, was apparently uncertain what to do with his archive and, indeed, there may at least be some truth in this assertion.48 In a letter to an unidentified correspondent of February 1940, written in Russian and accompanied by a Dutch translation, Burtsev appeared to be offering for sale a quantity of documents concerning the mysterious underground counter-revolutionary organization the ‘Brotherhood of Russian Truth’ (Bratstvo russkoi pravdy), including letters from their leader, S. A. Sokolov-Krechetov, and from his own friend Amfiteatrov, who had been closely involved with the organization. It is possible he obtained the collection in question from Amfiteatrov’s widow but whether the sale went ahead is unknown.49 What is of interest in the letter is not so much Burtsev’s assertion that he had spoken out against the Brotherhood but his blatantly false claim (made for reasons unknown) that he had never been associated with them.50 Finally, in their report on Burtsev for the year 1940, the Sûreté recorded another change of address, to 161 bis, rue de la Convention in the 15th arrondissement, although it is not known whether he was still resident there on 14 June, when the first German tanks rolled into Paris.51 By this time, the vast majority of the Russian émigré population had fled the city but Burtsev, true to his word, stayed on and was left mostly to fend for himself. Sadly, very little is known about the two long years he had to endure under the Nazis. According to one source he was left unharmed and even asked that his friends in New York be told that ‘everything was as before and that nothing much had changed’.52 Elsewhere the claim was made that the occupying forces called him in for questioning on several occasions and confiscated part of his archive. Another memoirist described how, following Hitler’s invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941, Burtsev was to be found, endlessly wandering around the deserted, frightened streets of the city, with flecks of foam at his mouth, angrily proclaiming that Russia would triumph in the end – that it was impossible for it to be otherwise!53 One can almost be certain that, had the possibility arisen, then the old revolutionary would have repeated his selfless act of 1914 and, despite his hatred of the regime in power, would have rushed back to defend his country once more. Unfortunately, that chance would never present itself.

At the Hotel-Dieu Vladimir Lʹvovich Burtsev died at 9.00 am on 3 September 1942 in the St Martine Ward of the Hotel-Dieu Hospital on the Ile de la Cité in central Paris.54 He was in his eightieth year. Medical records gave his cause of death as paraplegia stemming from an untreated gangrenous infection in the foot. Before his admission, as patient no. 1222, on 8 August 1942, he had been living at 6 Rue Victor Cousin, Paris 5e. He was listed as unmarried and without profession. On 8 September he received a quiet burial at the Russian cemetery at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois in the southern suburbs of Paris.

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Figure 10.2  Death certificate, 3 September 1942. AAP-HP, Hôpital Hôtel-Dieu, Registre des Entrées, Hôpital Hôtel-Dieu, Registre des Entrées du 1 juillet au 31 décembre 1942, no. 9450.

Funeral arrangements were carried out by a Monsieur Ragatskii of 42 Rue dʹUlm, Paris 5e. The extent of Burtsev’s isolation by this time was shown by the fact that it was not until some two months later that news of his passing was first reported in the Western press.55 In an article marking the tenth anniversary of Burtsev’s death the Russian émigré N. Alʹbus provided some additional information about the final days of this ‘last of the Don Quixotes’. According to his account, the death had, somewhat remarkably, been brought about by a wound to the foot caused by a nail which had been used to repair a leaky sole on his shoe. As ever, Burtsev, never caring about himself, had ignored both the wound and the pain in his foot until it was too late and gangrene had set in. It would appear then that, ironically and indeed tragically, it was a nail, such as that used to crucify Christ, which had so exalted and tormented him as a child, that had returned to serve as the cause of the pain and anguish experienced by the old revolutionary during his final days.56 His devoted friend Lazar ʹ Rotshtein reported that, towards the end, Burtsev fell into delirium and the hospital director ordered boards to be fastened around his bed and that the patient be tied down. Apparently, the dying man had persistently attempted to get up and run away and on one occasion had made it to the door of the ward before collapsing from exhaustion. His concerned friends surrounded him, asking, ‘Where do you want to go to?’ to which he answered simply, ‘Home’.

Postscript Alʹbus ended his account of the Russian Don Quixote’s final days on a somewhat sentimental note, again borrowing from Cervantes: Burtsev’s ‘home’ was there where he believed he would find his Dulcinea of Toboso, his queen and his lady, and where he would again take up his unfinished business

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of liberating his people from the oppressor. And so he hurried to that place where his people continued to suffer and from where he could clearly hear their neverending lament, their eternal cries of unspeakable anguish.57

Sadly, Vladimir Lʹvovich was unable to make his final journey home from France to Russia. Twenty-three years after the interment, Boris Nikolaevsky, then resident in America, received a letter from Paris from a Mrs M. Gordanskaia containing a cheque for thirty dollars as a contribution towards a cross and nameplate for Burtsev’s grave. It is uncertain how many more contributions were received or when exactly the memorial was erected, but a traditional wooden cross adorned with a simple metal plaque commemorating the revolutionary’s life was indeed still standing over the grave when I made my first pilgrimage to the cemetery in 1994. I had never before visited Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois and was unsure even if I would be able to find the grave. On arrival I was, therefore, dismayed to discover a cemetery covering a huge area and containing over five thousand graves. I began, somewhat downheartedly, to trudge down the endless rows of crosses and tombstones but then, by some miracle, before even two minutes had passed, I had stumbled upon Burtsev’s grave. (It was only much later that I would discover that the date on which I had chosen to make my visit was, by another remarkable coincidence, 8 September – the exact anniversary of his burial.) The plot was somewhat overgrown but the wooden cross and metal name plaque still looked relatively fresh and clean. Congratulating myself on my good fortune, I set about pulling out some of the weeds and taking photographs of the grave. Then, pausing for a moment, I reflected on what I knew of Burtsev’s life, of his various triumphs, his crippling defeats and his soul-destroying betrayals. He had helped free his country from the tsars only to lose it again within the year and so had entered the fray once more, battling on for a further twenty-five long years, never once wavering in his belief that one day he would make his triumphant return to a liberated Russia. That, unfortunately, was not to be. His life, like that of many in the emigration, had sadly ended ‘surrounded by mirages in this Parisian desert’. As I left the cemetery, passing by the onion-domed Eglise de la Dormition de la Mère de Dieu, I consoled myself with the fact that Burtsev the warrior had at least found a distinctly Russian corner of a foreign field for his final place of rest. (At that moment, I confess, I even entertained the whimsical notion that one day, given sufficient support for the cause, his bones might be transferred back to his homeland.) However, as I was to discover on my next visit to the necropolis (in October 2007), even that fanciful idea had been crushed. On approaching the plot I saw, to my dismay, not only that a large marble plinth now covered the grave but that on the cross, below Burtsev’s nameplate, there had appeared another which read: Vera Goubsky 30.09.1899–26.3.1995

This was not the name of any relative or friend that I recognized. Moreover, I was shocked at the realization that no more than seven months had elapsed since my

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earlier visit when the grave must have been opened to admit the interment of this unknown individual. The full tragic train of events became apparent only later when I contacted the graveyard administration.58 It would appear that in September 1942

Figure 10.3  Grave of V. L. Burtsev, St Geneviève des Bois, Essonne, France. Photograph taken September 1994.

Figure 10.4  Grave of V. L. Burtsev, St Geneviève des Bois, Essonne, France. Photograph taken October 2007.

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Burtsev’s colleagues had purchased the maximum fifty-year concession for his burial plot. The graveyard regulations stipulate that following the expiration of a concession, the option to purchase a renewal is offered first to the family or friends of the deceased but, in the event that the offer is not taken up, then the plot is cleared for resale; that is, the remains are exhumed and the bones transferred to the municipal ossuary, where they lie for one year before being cremated. It is likely, therefore, that around 1995 or 1996 this is what befell the mortal remains of Vladimir Lʹvovich Burtsev. The brass nameplate which bears his name is, therefore, on a cross which marks someone else’s grave: it signifies little and tells nothing of Burtsev’s life or his eventual pitiful fate. It is my hope therefore that this book, by presenting a fuller account of that life, will serve as a more appropriate and lasting obituary, one which the man surely deserves.

Notes Introduction 1 The Times, 17 December 1897, 11. 2 Golʹdenberg, L. ‘Vospominaniia’, Katorga i ssylka, no. 6 (1924), 124. Also Herman Bernstein in The New York Times, 23 January 1910, SM5; ‘Bourtseff – Leader of the Foes of the Czar’. 3 See Incorporated Council of Law Reporting (ICLR): King’s/Queen’s Bench Division/2007/Regina v. Abu Hamza – (2007) QB 659. On 7 February 2006, the defendant had been jailed for seven years for inciting murder and race hatred. One of the grounds for appeal was the argument that section 4 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861 (under which both Burtsev and Abu Hamza were charged) did not cover incitement to the murder abroad of a foreign national by another foreign national. The appeal failed, in part, because the 1977 Criminal Law Act had amended the relevant section of the 1861 Act. 4 Paléologue, G. M. The Turning Point. Three Critical Years, 1904–1906. London: Hutchinson and Co, 1935, 61. 5 The New York Times, 29 August 1909, SM1; ‘The Man Who Unmasked the Spies of the Czar’. 6 It is difficult, for example, to be sure of the exact movements of Burtsev’s papers after his death. For perhaps the fullest account, see Grimsted, P. K. The Odyssey of the Turgenev Library from Paris, 1940–2002. Books as Victims and Trophies of War. Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History, 2003, 23–25. 7 A biographical study of Burtsev was undertaken in 1988 by Bianca Pelchat, resulting in an unpublished MA thesis. The work is based mainly on secondary sources and contains certain factual inaccuracies but despite this, it does provide a useful overview of his life. See Pelchat, B. D. ‘Vladimir Burtsev: Wilful Warrior in Dubious Battle’, Carleton University (Ottawa) MA Dissertation, 1988. Mention must also be made here of another work, also unpublished – namely, a 1998 postgraduate dissertation which is based on a thorough examination of Russian archival documents. See Panteleeva, T. L. ‘Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia i izdatelʹskaia deiatelʹnostʹ V. L. Burtseva, 1882–1907 gg.’, Moscow State University, Kandidat Dissertation, 1998. 8 Burtsev, V. L. Borʹba za svobodnuiu rossiiu: moi vospominaniia (1882–1922 gg.), tom 1. Berlin: Gamaiun, 1923. 9 See, for example, his reminiscence. ‘Iz moikh vospominaniia’, in Svobodnaia Rossiia (no. 1 February 1889), 48–56. 10 See Kimball, A. ‘The Harassment of Russian Revolutionaries Abroad: The London Trial of Vladimir Burtsev in 1898’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, New Series, vol. 6 (1973), 48–65. Senese, D. J. ‘“Le vil Melville”: Evidence from the Okhrana file on the Trial of Vladimir Burtsev’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, New Series, vol. 14 (1981), 147–153. Saunders, D. ‘Vladimir Burtsev and the Russian Revolutionary Emigration (1888– 1905)’, European Studies Review, vol. 13, no. 1 (January 1983), 39–62.

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11 Akhmerova, F. D. Vladimir Lʹvovich Burtsev (1862–1942). Ufa: UNTS RAN, 1997. 12 Kronenbitter, R. T. ‘The Sherlock Holmes of the Revolution’, Studies in Intelligence, Washington (1965), 83–100; Schleifman, N. Undercover Agents in the Russian Revolutionary Movement. The SR Party, 1902–1914. Basingstoke: Macmillan in association with St Antony’s College, Oxford, 1988; Zuckerman, F. S. ‘Vladimir Burtsev and the Tsarist Political Police in Conflict, 1907–1914’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 12 (1977), 193–219; Nikolaevskii, B. I. Istoriia odnogo predatelia: Terroristy i politicheskaia politsiia. Berlin: Petropolis, 1932; Elwood, R. C. Roman Malinovsky, a Life without a Cause. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1977; Geifman, A. Entangled in Terror: the Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000; Praisman, L. G. Terroristy i revoliutsionery, okhranniki i provokatory. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001. Some useful, more recent work has been undertaken by O. V. Budnitskii, an expert on the Russian emigration amongst other topics. See, for example, his ‘Knizhnaia vesna’. Radio Svoboda radio broadcast 6 April 2008. http://www.svoboda.org/content/ transcript/442804.html [accessed 8 June 2016]. And also his earlier Terrorizm v rossiiskom osvoboditelʹnom dvizhenii: ideologiia, etika, psikhologiia. Vtoraia polovina XIX – nachalo XX v. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000. 13 Soviet Studies, vol. 28, no. 3 (July 1976), 479–480. 14 Review in Letuchie listki, no. 41 (1898). 15 See, for example, Anton Mukhin, ‘Bez vniatnoi i krasivoi legendy nikakoi podlinnosti bytʹ ne mozhet’. Gorod 812 Online, 13 September 2013, http://www.online812​ .ru/2013/09/13/010/pda.html [accessed 12 December 2016]. 16 Trotsky, L. How the Revolution Armed. London: New Park Publications, 1981, 303. 17 Hagemeister, Michael. ‘Russian émigrés in the Berne trial of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (1933–1935)’, Cahiers Parisiens, vol. 5, 2009, 375–391. See also Burtsev’s own account: Protokoly sionskikh mudretsov’ dokazannyi podlog. Rachkovskii sfabrikoval “Protokoly sionskikh mudretsov” i Gitler pridal im mirovuiu izvestnost ʹ. Paris: O. Zeluk, 1938. 18 Panteleeva, T. L. (comp.) Borʹba za svobodnuiu rossiiu: moi vospominaniia (1882–1922 gg.), tom 1. Sankt-Peterburg: N. I. Novikova, 2012. 19 Burtsev, Borʹba. The original Russian dedication reads ‘Posviashchaetsia tem, kto pridet na smenu nam’.

Part I 1

HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A (Folder 2). On the pursuit of Burtsev. Charlotte Bullier to P. I. Rachkovsky, 10 (16?) December 1892.

Chapter 1 1 2 3

Vladimir Lʹvovich was born on 17 (29) November 1862. Now Fort Shevchenko, Kazakhstan. GARF R. 5802, op. 2, ed. khr. 1. ll. 1–6. ‘Avtobiografiia’. Burtsev wrote these autobiographical notes at the request of his defence counsel in preparation for his trial in London in 1898.

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4 Akhmerova, Burtsev, 9. 5 See entry in Vilenskii-Sibiriakov, V. (ed.) Deiateli revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v Rossii: Biobibliograficheskii slovar ʹ. Ot predshestvennikov dekabristov do padeniia tsarizma. Moscow: Izdatelʹstvo Vsesoiuznogo obshchestva politicheskikh katorzhan i ssylʹnoposelentsev, 1927–1934, vol. 3, no. 1. Yakov Rombro (1858–1922) left Russia during the pogroms in 1881 and settled in London, where, under the name Philip Kranz, he became editor of the radical Jewish newspaper Arbeter Fraint (Worker’s Friend). See Fishman, W. J. East End Jewish Radicals, 1875–1914. Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2004, 152. 6 Burtsev, Borʹba, 9. 7 The relic first arrived in Russia in 1625 as a gift to His Holiness Patriarch Filaret from Shah Abbas the Great of Persia. After the 1917 October Revolution it was seized by the state. In 2008, it was handed over to the Russian Orthodox Church from the vaults of the Moscow Kremlin Museums and is currently housed in the Church of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. 8 Pisarev’s article ‘Bazarov’ first appeared in Russkoe slovo (Russian Word) in 1862. In History of the Conflict between Religion and Science the target of Draper’s criticism was primarily the Roman Catholic Church. His argument that ‘the history of Science is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other’, ensured that the work was placed on the Vatican’s ‘Index Expurgatorius’. 9 GARF R. 5802, op. 2, ed. khr. 1. ll. 1–6. ‘Avtobiografiia’. 10 Burtsev, Borʹba, 14. 11 Troitskii, N. A. Politicheskie protsessy v Rossii 1871–1887 gg. Saratov: Izdatelʹstvo Saratovskogo universiteta, 2003, 175. 12 Ibid., 38–39. Even though the court had found 90 of the defendants innocent, the tsar used his prerogative to send 80 of those into administrative exile. Meanwhile, those found guilty received sentences from the court of up to ten years in exile, prison or penal servitude. Amongst those exiled were F. V. Volkhovsky, later to become an influential émigré in London and a close friend of Burtsev. 13 I. N. Myshkin in his speech for the defence. Cited in Troitskii, Politicheskie protsessy, 36. 14 The Times, 22 December 1877, 8: ‘The Winter Season in St Petersburg’. 15 Two months after Zasulich’s trial, Captain G. E. Geiking of the Kiev Corps of Gendarmes was murdered. This was followed in August 1878 by the murder of the Head of the Third Section, N. V. Mezentsev, by Sergei Mikhailovich Kravchinsky (Stepniak). It has been argued that, initially at least, members of the Black Partition were also not totally opposed to the use of terroristic tactics and the Zasulich attempt is cited in support of their argument. (See, for example, Geifman, A. Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917. Princeton, NJ/Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1993, 84–85.) However, although this is often regarded as the first act of political terror of the period, it is clear that terror was not on Zasulich’s mind at the time. As she herself wrote, she carried out the act simply to avenge the maltreatment of one of her imprisoned comrades. 16 Ruud C. A. and Stepanov, S. A. Fontanka 16: The Tsarʹs Secret Police. Stroud: Sutton, 1999, 44–45. 17 Given the level of Russophobia in the country at the time, the lack of British sympathy is perhaps not surprising. There was a continuing belief that Russia still

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posed a threat to Britain’s interests in India and jingoism against Russia was still rife following the diplomatic crisis over the Near East of the previous year, even though relations had improved following the Congress of Berlin. 18 The Times, 30 April 1879, 9; and 2 May 1879, 8. The answer received was, as expected, unsatisfactory: Sir Stafford Northcote, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, replying that no communication on the subject of the prosecutions being carried on in Russia had been received and that, in any event, it would not be consistent with the government’s duty to interfere with the internal affairs of another country. 19 A few months later the party would publish a more moderate version of its programme in the third number of its journal Narodnaia volia (The People’s Will). See ‘Programma Ispolnitelʹnogo Komiteta’, Narodnaia volia: sotsialʹno-revoliutsionnoe obozrenie, no. 3 (January 1880), 1. 20 Cited in The Times, 14 March 1881, 10: ‘Alexander II’. 21 In November 1879, a group of terrorists set off a series of dynamite explosions under what they believed was the tsar’s train. In early February 1880, Stepan Khalturin set off a huge explosion immediately below the dining room in the Winter Palace where the tsar was expected to be. It caused a number of deaths and injuries but again Alexander was not amongst the casualties. 22 Golʹdenberg was arrested in November 1879 in connection with the plot to blow up the tsar’s train. In prison he was persuaded to inform on his colleagues but later, realizing what he had done, he hanged himself by tying a towel around his neck and suspending it from the washbasin in his cell. Some ten years later in an English prison Burtsev himself would experiment with just such a method of suicide. Okladsky, on the other hand, experienced no such remorse, remaining in the employ of the police right up until the February Revolution of 1917. 23 The Russo-Turkish peace treaty signed at San Stefano on 3 March 1878 expanded the boundaries of Bulgaria to include much of Macedonia and gave Russia the right of occupation for two years, thus handing her the balance of power in the Aegean. The Treaty of Berlin, which was ratified by all the major powers a mere five months later, revised or eliminated most of the articles of San Stefano, including those concerned with the creation of a Greater Bulgaria. Back in Russia news of these concessions led to a strengthening of feelings of resentment towards ‘honest broker’ Bismarck’s Germany and the jingoistic Britain of Disraeli and Salisbury. 24 Volk, S. S. Narodnaia volia 1879–1882. Moscow: Nauka, 1966, 106. 25 Burtsev, Borʹba, 41–42. 26 Daly, J. W. Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1866–1905. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998, 6. 27 Pipes, R. The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003, 20. 28 Cited in Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, 14. 29 Morley, J. ‘Home and Foreign Affairs’, The Fortnightly Review, vol. 29, no. 173 (1881), 669–670. 30 For a detailed description of international reaction to this and other political trials of the period see Troitskii, Politicheskie protsessy, 166–176. 31 Narodovolets (plural, Narodovoltsy) – members or supporters of Narodnaia volia: (Partiia narodnoi voli). 32 Tsentralʹnyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Respubliki Tatarstana (TSGA RT) f. 977, op. l./d/d. 30803. f. 3 (ob). Cited in Akhmerova, Burtsev, 12, 56, footnote 17. 33 Burtsev, Borʹba, 21.

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34 For an investigation into the possible identities of these revolutionaries, see Panteleeva, T. L. ‘V. L. Burtsev v narodovol’cheskom dvizhenii 80-kh godov XIX v’. Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, Series 8, no. 1 (1998), 74–77. 35 Zhukhrai, V. Tainy tsarskoi okhranki: avantiuristy i provokatory. Moscow: Izdatelʹstvo politicheskoi literatury, 1991, 3. 36 Burtsev, Borʹba, 26. 37 Pipes, Degaev, 37. 38 Vyacheslav Konstantinovich Plehve (1846–1904), appointed Director of Police in 1881. In 1902, following the assassination of D. S. Sipiagin by the SR’s Combat Organization, he was appointed Minister of the Interior. On 15 (28) July 1904 he too fell victim to an assassination attempt. 39 Volʹnoe slovo, no. 41 (Geneva, 15 July 1882) 3. Cited in Pipes, Degaev, 39. 40 Burtsev, Borʹba, 26. 41 His co-assassins were V. P. Konashevich and N. P. Starodvorsky. The latter, as we shall see, would play a significant role in Burtsev’s later life. For a detailed account of the affair, see Pipes, Degaev. Also ‘Degaevshchina. (Materialy i dokumenty)’, Byloe, April 1906, no. 4, 18–38. 42 Burtsev, Borʹba, 30. 43 Svobodnaia Rossiia, no. 1 (1889), ‘Iz moikh vospominaniia’, 48–56. 44 Ulam, A. B. Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia. London: Transaction Publishers, 1998, 390. 45 TSGA RT. f. 977, op. l./d/d. 30803. l. 3 (ob). Cited in Akhmerova, Burtsev, 12, 56, footnote 18. 46 Ulam, Prophets, 392. 47 Daly, Autocracy under Siege, 47. 48 TSGA RT. f. 199., op. 2. d. 14. ll. 134–135. Obzor vazhneishikh doznanii proizvodivshikhsia v zhandarmskom Upravlenii Imperii po delam o gosudarstvennykh prestupleniiakh za vremia s 1–go ianvaria 1885 goda po 1-e ianvaria 1888 goda. Cited in Akhmerova, Burtsev, 12, 56, 57, footnote 18. Burtsev’s version of events is to be found in Burtsev, Borʹba, 33–35. 49 According to a later newspaper account, Lopatin had tried to swallow the piece of paper but the arresting officers had prevented him from so doing by means of semistrangulation. Another account had Lopatin first attempting to stab himself and then trying to use poison before being throttled by the police. See Birmingham Daily Post, 10 January 1891, 7: ‘Russian Police and Their Quarry: A Strange Story’. Also, The Times, 9 July 1887, 17: ‘The Nihilists in Russia’. 50 According to Burtsev’s revolutionary chronology, the arrest took place on 20 February (4 March) 1885. See Burtsev, V. L. Za sto let 1800–1896. Sbornik po istorii politicheskikh i obshchestvennykh dvizhenii v Rossii. London: Russian Free Press Fund, 1897. II, 124. 51 Burtsev, Borʹba, 35. 52 Akhmerova, Burtsev, 12. 53 D. P. Z. i.e. Dom predvaritelʹnogo zakliucheniia. 54 Burtsev, Borʹba, 36. 55 Ibid., 37. 56 Burtsev, ‘Iz moikh vospominaniia’, 55. 57 He did, however, leave a brief description of his journey into exile in an autobiographical note ‘Iz Sibirskoi zhizni’, Svobodnaia Rossiia, no. 3 (1889), 18–20.

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58 Burtsev, Za sto let, 132. Though daring, his escape was by no means uncommon. According to Russian government statistics, over the period 1866–1886, as many as 24 per cent of those exiled managed to escape. See The Times, 19 November 1886, 6: ‘Siberia as a Penal Colony’. 59 Burtsev, Borʹba, 39. See also GARF R. 5802. op. 1, del. 2, ‘Avtobiografiia’ i anketa, 1930. 60 Figner (Flerovsky), O. N. (1865–1919) Youngest sister of Vera Figner. 61 Samoupravlenie. Organ sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov, no. 3 (1889), 3–13; ‘Tiuremnaia zhiznʹ russkikh revoliutsionerov’, and no. 4 (1889), 13–18; ‘Poslednee zaiavlenie russkikh liberalov’. 62 Samoupravlenie. Organ sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov, no. 4 (1889), 18–19. 63 Svobodnaia Rossiia, nos. 1–3 (February–May 1889). 64 Burtsev, Borʹba, 83–84. 65 Konstantinov, A. D. (ed.) Zhurnalistskoe rassledovanie. Istoriia metoda i sovremennnaia praktika. Saint Petersburg, Moscow: ‘Izdatelʹskii dom “Neva”’; Izdvo ‘OLMA-Press’, 2003, 86–101. See also, for example, Anton Mukhin http://www​ .online812.ru/2013/09/13/010/pda.html [accessed 12 December 2016]. 66 Svobodnaia Rossiia, no. 3 (May 1889), 15–20. 67 RGASPI f. 328, op. 1, ed. khr. 13. ‘Do vas, veroiatno, doshli slukhi ob uzhasnoi istorii, kotoraia razygralasʹ, u nas v Iakutske 22go Marta 1889 goda.’ 68 For a full account of the events in question, see Stepniak, S. King Stork and King Log. A Study of Modern Russia. London: Downey and Company, 1895, II, 48–93. 69 The Times, 16 December 1889, 5: ‘Reported slaughter of Siberian Prisoners’; and 26 December 1889, 7: ‘Editorial’. 70 Burtsev, Borʹba, 82–83. Indeed, the story was to travel even further afield. In February 1890, for example, The New York Times ran a story, based on evidence supplied by George Kennan, entitled ‘Men Shot Down Like Dogs; The True Story of the Yakutsk Massacre’. See The New York Times, 8 February 1890, 5. 71 The Times, 11 February 1890, 4: ‘Flogging and Suicide of Female Political Prisoners in Siberia’. 72 Some reports suggest that Sigida, weakened by a previous hunger strike, simply died of her wounds, while others believe she too had committed suicide by taking poison. 73 Burtsev, Za sto let, 231–232. 74 The Times, 10 March 1890, 6: ‘Treatment of Russian Prisoners’. Also, 25 February 1890, 3: ‘The Agitation against the Russian Atrocities’. Burtsev’s attendance is referred to in a later report from Scotland Yard. See TNA, PRO HO 144/272/A59222/1a f. 3. ‘Nihilist Literature’. 75 Swinburne, A. ‘Russia: An Ode’, The Fortnightly Review, no. 284 (1890), 165–167. It may be mentioned that the Burtsev archive at RGASPI contains an anonymous, undated translation of this ode ‘dedicated to V. Burtsev, tireless toiler for national happiness’. See RGASPI f. 328, op. 1, ed. khr. 200. For a fuller study of the British reaction to the tragedies see Henderson, R. ‘The Hyde Park Rally of 9 March 1890: A British Workers’ Response to Russian Atrocities.’ In Laqua, D. and Alston, C. (eds.) Transnational Solidarities and the Politics of the Left, 1890–1990, European Review of History, vol. 21, no. 4, August 2014, 451–466. 76 TNA, PRO HO 45/9473/A60556: ‘Instructions of Secretary of State as to course to be taken in event of application by Foreign Minister to Home Office re Russian Refugees.’ Salisbury to Cross 10 October 1878, ff. 3–6. 77 Petr Ivanovich Rachkovsky (1853–1910). Head of the Foreign Agency and later Deputy Director of Police.

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78 Daily News, 1 November 1879, 5: ‘New Organ of the Revolutionary Party’. 79 HIA Okhrana archive 10/IIIA/7. Rachkovsky to Fragnon, 1885. Cited in Johnson, R. J. ‘The Okhrana Abroad, 1887–1917: A Study in International Police Cooperation’, University of Columbia PhD Thesis, 1970, 28. 80 Following the assassination of Alexander II, a group of monarchists, including P. P. Shuvalov, I. M. Vorontsov-Dashkov and S. A. Panchulidze, had set up the Holy Brotherhood in an attempt to combat the revolutionary movement. It had attracted over 700 members by the time it was banned in November 1882, having become superfluous, thanks largely to Sudeikin’s successes in dealing with the People’s Will. See Daly, Autocracy under Siege, 32–33. 81 Vakhrushev, I. S. ‘Russkie revolutsionery i zagranichnaia agentura tsarizma v 70–80 gg. XIX v’. Osvoboditelʹnoe dvizhenie v Rossii, no. 8 (1978), 53–70. 82 Burtsev, Borʹba, 91. 83 Ruud and Stepanov, Fontanka 16, 82. 84 Burtsev, Borʹba, 90. 85 Taratuta, E. A. S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii: revoliutsioner i pisatelʹ. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1973, 383. 86 GARF f. 102, del. 3. 1887. d. 69. ll. 15–16. Also cited in Shcherbakova, S. I. Politicheskaia politsiia i politicheskii terrorizm v Rossii (vtoraia polovina XIX – nachalo XX vv.): sbornik dokumentov. Moscow: AIRO-XX, 2001, 115. 87 Tikhomirov, L. Pourquoi je ne suis plus révolutionnaire. Paris: Albert Savine, 1888. For full details on Rachkovsky’s handling of Tikhomirov see Ganelin, ‘Bitva’, 214–217. Also Vakhrushchev, ‘Russkie revoliutsionery’, 68–70. 88 See Poberowski, S. ‘Nikolay Vasiliev: The Ripper from Russia’, Ripperologist, no. 50 (November 2003). Online version, http://www.casebook.org/suspects/vassily.html [accessed 12 December 2016]. 89 For a detailed discussion of Stepniak’s activities during this period see Senese, D. J. S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, the London Years. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1987, 23–26. 90 Kennan’s articles appeared in book form in December 1891 under the title Siberia and the Exile System (London/New York, 1891). The first Russian translations of his work had already been published by Burtsev two years earlier in his Svobodnaia Rossiia, with another collection, translated by his colleague I. N. Kashintsev, appearing in Paris and London in 1890. 91 Senese, Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 57. 92 Roberts, A. Salisbury: Victorian Titan. London: Phoenix, 2000, 71. Roberts does not give his source but Salisbury’s letter was almost certainly written in response to Morier’s despatch no. 11 of 21 January 1891 in which he reports the suspension of the enforced return of Jewish artisans into the Pale and voices his opinion that this was due in large part to the outcry from abroad. See TNA, PRO FO 65/1397 ff. 116–119 and 143–143a. 93 Daily News, 20 March 1890, 5: ‘Russian Exiles: Tragical Occurrences in Siberia’. Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism, vol. 4, no. 41 (April 1890), 15. 94 For more on this affair see Cahm, C. Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism, 1872–1886. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 185–205. Also The Times, 22 December 1882, 3. 95 Daudet, E. Souvenirs et révélations. Histoire diplomatique de lʹalliance franco-russe, 1873–1893. Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1894, 291–292. For more on Franco-Russian relations of the period, see Packard, L. B. ‘Russia and the Dual Alliance’, American Historical Review, vol. 25, no. 3 (April 1920), 391–410.

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Daudet, E. L’Avant-dernier Romanoff, Alexandre III. Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1920, 133–143. Burtsev puts the figure of those initially arrested at 78. See Burtsev, Bor ʹba, 103. 97 Burtsev, Bor ʹba, 88. Such an Assembly had first been called for in the 1860s by the revolutionaries Nechaev and Zheliabov. Then, in 1881, the ultra-conservative Minister of Internal Affairs, Count N. P. Ignatʹev, proposed the convocation of an Assembly bearing the same name and fulfilling much the same role. See Naimark, N. M. Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement under Alexander III. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1983, 21. 98 AN, F/7/12521/1: Suisse (1882–1909)] Order of Expulsion, 7 May 1889. 99 Burtsev, Bor ʹba, 94. 100 Ibid., 98. 101 There is another version: namely, that it was Landezen himself who had set up the group. See L. B. ‘Franko-russkoe shpionstvo i franko-russkii soiuz’, Byloe, no. 8 (1908), 58–64. Cited in Brachev, V. S. ‘Master politicheskogo syska, P. I. Rachkovskii’, Angliiskaia Naberezhnaia, no. 4 (1997), 297, 321 (note 45). 102 Those imprisoned were B. Reinshtein, A. Lavrenius, A. L. Teplov, M. Nakachidze, I. N. Kashintsev and E. D. Stepanov. 103 Laporte, Maurice. Histoire de l’Okhrana. La Police secrète des tsars. 1880–1917. Paris: Payot, 1935, 190. For a description of the trial of 1890 see ‘Le procès des nihilistes russes’, a four-page supplement to L’Éclair, 5 July 1890 (cited in Saunders, ‘Vladimir Burtsev’, 58). 104 Elpidin, M. K. Bibliograficheskii katalog. Profili redaktorov i sotrudnikov. CarougeGenève: M. Elpidine, 1906, 22. 105 Ibid., 24. 106 See Senn, A. E. ‘M. K. Elpidin: Revolutionary Publisher’, Russian Review, 41 (January 1982), 11–23. 107 Burtsev, Borʹba, 140–141. 108 For further background on the Balkan Agency, see Vishniakov, Ia. ‘“Unichtozhitʹ vsiu kovarnuiu Evropy”. Avantiuristy i terroristy na Balkanakh v nachale XX veka’, Rodina, no. 1 (2007), 39–43. Also, Peregudova, Z. I. Politicheskii sysk Rossii 1880–1917. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000, 144–145. Peregudova mistakenly names the agency chief as Aleksandr Moiseevich Veisman. Based primarily in Sofia, the latter was, in fact, simply an agent whose main occupation was the perlustration of the correspondence of the Russian émigré community. 109 GARF f. 102, d. 3, op. 88 (1890 g.) del 569: Po rozysku Burtseva, T. 3. (133 ll.) This volume of Burtsev’s police dossier contains, amongst other documents, a series of telegrams and daily reports from the Russian Consulates in Galaţi and Constantinople to St Petersburg and also a copy of Budzilovich’s final report on the affair to Durnovo, dated 26 December 1890 (7 January 1891) (ll. 113–117.) 110 Burtsev, Bor ʹba, 99, 106. 111 GARF f. 102, d. 3, op. 88 (1890 g.) del 569: Po rozysku Burtseva, T. 3. l. 113. Telegram of 17 (29) November 1890 by agent ‘Miku’ in Ploieşti, Romania confirming Burtsev’s presence in the town. 112 GARF f. 102, d. 3, op. 88 (1890 g.) del 569, T. 3. ll. 9–11. 113 Ibid., ll. 14–16. 114 Ibid., ll. 6–7. Durnovo to Zinov ʹev 20 November (2 December) 1890. Ivan Alekseevich Zinov ʹev (1835–1917) Head of the Asiatic Department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 96

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115 Varlaam Nikolaevich Cherkezov (1846–1925). Former member of Nechaev’s circle, later collaborated with P. L. Lavrov. It is of interest to note that Burtsev makes no reference to him in his autobiography. 116 The Times, 9 December 1890, 11; and 12 December 1890, 9. ‘Latest Shipping Intelligence. Wrecks and Casualties.’ The Ashlands had only recently been launched in Hartlepool and, earlier in that same voyage, had already run aground above Galaţi. Despite these various misfortunes she survived until 5 July 1900 when she was wrecked off Port Elizabeth. See Northern Echo, Monday 25 August 1890, 4: ‘Shipping News’. Also, Birmingham Daily Post, 9 July 1900, 4: ‘News of the Day’. 117 GARF f. 102, d. 3, op. 88 (1890 g.) del 569, T. 3. ll. 113–117. Ahmed Pasha seconded two of his agents to work closely with the Russian police and, acting on information that Burtsev might try to come ashore before he reached Constantinople, had stationed agents at all possible landing places along the Bosphorus. 118 Ibid., l. 60. 119 Ibid., l. 115. 120 The Constantinople incident is confirmed as taking place on 20 December 1890 by Foreign Office documents. See TNA, PRO FO 65/1409 f. 6: ‘British S.S. Ashlands’. 121 GARF f. 102, d. 3, op. 88 (1890 g.) del 569, T. 3. l. 117. 122 The Times, 20 January 1891, 13: ‘Arrest of Russian Refugees in Turkey’. 123 TNA, PRO FO 65/1409 f. 3 ‘Russian Refugee Bourtzev’ and FO 65/1409 f. 4: ‘British S.S. Ashlands’. 124 Burtsev, Bor ʹba, 108–109. 125 The Times, 7 January 1891, 4: ‘Latest Shipping Intelligence’. In his letter to the Foreign Office Spence Watson mentioned that he had received information that Burtsev was due to arrive in England that same day. See TNA, PRO FO 65/1409 f. 11: ‘Refugee Bourtzev’. 126 Burtsev, Bor ʹba, 109.

Chapter 2 1 Burtsev, Borʹba, 110. 2 There are a few poorly referenced mentions of the foundation of an agency in London in Taratuta, E. A. Etelʹ Lilian Voinich. Sudʹba pisatelia i sudʹba knigi. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1964, 102–103. It is likely that Taratuta’s information came from a file previously held at GARF, namely, f. 102. d. 3. op. 89. (1891) del. 3. ‘Ob ustroistve agentury v Londone’. Unfortunately, during a trip to GARF in April 2007 I was informed the file no longer exists. 3 Ivanova, N. V. ‘Russkaia revoliutsionnaia emigratsiia i razvitie russko-angliiskikh obshchestvennykh sviazei v 80–90 gody XIX veka’, Uchenye zapiski Kurskogo pedagogicheskogo instituta, no. 43. part 1 (1967), 96–98. 4 See, for example, Birmingham Daily Post, 10 January 1891, 7: ‘Russian Police and Their Quarry: A Strange Story’. Also, Reynolds’s Newspaper, 18 January 1891, 8: ‘Refusal to surrender a refuger [sic]’. 5 The Times, 13 January 1891, 3: ‘English Sympathy for Russian Refugees’. 6 Ibid., 19 January 1891, 7: ‘Tribute to Captain Rees, of the Steamship Ashlands’. 7 Ivan Nikolaevich Durnovo (1834–1903), Minister of the Interior 1889–1895. (Not to be confused with Director of the Department of Police P. N. Durnovo: see below, note 9.)

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TsGIA RF, f. 533, op. 1, d. 353. ll. 417–418. Cited in Akhmerova, Burtsev, 14 and 58 (note 23). 9 Petr Nikolaevich Durnovo (1843–1915). Director of the Department of Police 1884–1893. 10 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A (Folder 2). Rachkovsky to Durnovo, Department of Police 31 January (12 February) 1891. Report no. 12. 11 In fact, Burtsev had yet to meet Stepniak, who, at the time of the arrival of the former, was still touring America. Ivan Kelchevsky was the pseudonym of Wilfred Michael Voinich (1865–1930), a Polish nationalist who had escaped from Siberian exile and had arrived in London shortly before Burtsev. 12 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A (Folder 2). Burtsev to Gurovich, 9 January 1891, copy. 13 Ibid., Burtsev to Gurovich. Sofia, undated, copy; and Burtsev to Gurovich. Sofia, 27 September 1890, copy. 14 See Agafonov, V. K. Parizhskie tainy tsarskoi okhranki. Moscow: Rusʹ, 2004, 335–336. Also, Praisman, Terroristy i revoliutsionery, okhranniki i provokatory, 95, 271. Gurovich succeeded in establishing links with the St Petersburg Social Democrats and became editor of the first legal SD journal Nachalo (The Beginning). He was exposed in 1902 and the following year was appointed head of the Galician and Romanian branch of the Foreign Agency. He then returned to St Petersburg, where he worked closely with Rachkovsky. He retired in 1906. 15 Stanislaw Padlewski, the pseudonym of Otto Hauser Dyzek (1857–1891). The murder was reported in The Times, 22 November 1890, 11. 16 Immediately after the trial of the bombers, Mohrenheim was gushing in his praise of Lozé. The Préfet also received a costly work of art from the tsar, as a mark of the latter’s gratitude. Letter in the Journal Officiel de la Republique Française, quoted in The Times, 11 October 1897, 5. 17 The Times, 27 December 1890, 8: ‘Mr Mendelssohn and the Franco-Russian Police’. 18 Ibid. 19 The Minister of the Interior wrote his ‘confidential note’ of 13 July 1903 for the attention of Nicholas II in an attempt to have Rachkovsky dismissed from the service. The full list of his accusations against Rachkovsky are detailed in ‘Karʹera P. N. Rachkovskogo’, Byloe, no. 2 (30) (February 1918), 79–87. It has been argued that the Head of the Foreign Agency had ordered the assassination, believing that his position was threatened by the general’s visit. See Brachev, ‘Master’, 298. 20 Leonid Emmanuilovoch Shishko (1852–1910): convicted in the ‘trial of the 193’; fled abroad in 1890. Nikolai Sergeevich Rusanov (1859–1939): journalist and poet. 21 Taratuta, Etelʹ Lilian Voinich, 102. Apparently, all Rachkovsky could do to Lavrov was ‘cause him endless petty unpleasantnesses’ – no doubt, similar to those he had used successfully some years earlier against Tikhomirov. 22 The Times, 3 January 1891, 5: ‘Russia’. 23 Johnson, ‘The Okhrana Abroad’, 25; Lauchlan, I. Russian Hide-and-Seek: The Tsarist Secret Police in St Petersburg, 1906–1914. Helsinki: SKS-FLS, 2002, 103. 24 Report by M. E. Broetsky, Head of the Osobyi otdel, September–October 1913. Cited in Peregudova, Politicheskii sysk, 154. 25 TNA, PRO FO 65/1397 (Sir R. Morier. Diplomatic. Dispatches. 1–113. v. 1) ff. 323– 324. Morier to Lord Salisbury (Secret), 15 April 1891 ‘Assassination of M. Belchew at Sofia’. 8

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26 GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 89. (1891). del. 4. ‘Svedeniia po Londonu’. Rachkovsky to Durnovo. Report no. 26. 19 (31) March 1891. ll. 45–46. Rachkovsky had first mentioned his intention to visit London in a report dated 27 December 1890 (8 January 1891). See Taratuta, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 426. 27 GARF. f. 102, d. 3. op. 89. (1891). del. 4. ‘Svedeniia po Londonu’, Vypiski iz pisʹma Direktora ot 21 Aprelia iz Nitsy’. ll. 47–49. He listed the members of the kruzhok as: Volkhovsky, Burtsev, Kelchevsky, Rybakov, Rombro, Baranov (Garmidor), Kravchinsky and ‘Gallon’ (as yet unidentified). 28 Fredric Zuckerman has advanced the opinion that the agent was ‘undoubtedly the ubiquitous Henri Bint’ but offers no evidence for this assertion. See Zuckerman, F. S. The Tsarist Secret Police Abroad: Policing Europe in a Modernising World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 141. 29 Taratuta, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 427–428. Durnovo to St Petersburg, 21 April 1891. 30 GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 89. (1891). del. 4. ‘Svedeniia po Londonu’. ll. 98–99. Rachkovsky to Durnovo. Report of 21 September (3 October) 1891. 31 Agafonov, Parizhskie tainy, 65. 32 TNA, PRO HO 45/9473/A60556: ‘Instructions of Secretary of State as to course to be taken in event of application by Foreign Minister to Home Office re Russian Refugees.’ Salisbury to Cross 10 October 1878, ff. 3–6. 33 Ibid., FO 65/1397 f. 143. Sir R. Morier. Diplomatic. Despatches. no. 20. Morier to Salisbury, 28 January 1891. ‘Nihilists employed by Bulgarian Gov’t’. 34 Ibid., FO 65/1429 f. 94–96. E. Barrington to Sir E. Bradford, 5 March 1892. ‘Russian Anarchists in England’. 35 Ivanova, ‘Russkaia revoliutsionnaia emigratsiia’, 96–97; and Senese, StepniakKravchinskii, 95–96. 36 Ivanova’s source is Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii (AVPR). f. Kantseliariia, 1892 g. op. 470, d. 58. Senese, as well as citing Ivanova, also refers to FO 65/1430. Sir E. Bradford to E. Barrington, 26 March 1892. 37 GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 89. (1891). del. 4. ‘Svedeniia po Londonu’, ll. 52–63. The document has blue ink corrections in Durnovo’s hand with the instruction that two copies should be provided. It carries a date of February 1892 (also in blue ink). 38 TNA, PRO FO 65/1429 ff. 87–92. Memo communicated by M. de Staal, 5 March 1892: ‘Russian Anarchists in England’. 39 The latter would soon return to Paris to become the Fund’s representative there. 40 The Russian Literary Fund was soon renamed the Russian Free Press Fund (Fond volʹnoi russkoi pressy). 41 Stepniak, S. Chego nam nuzhno i nachalo kontsa. London: Izd. Fonda russkoi volʹnoi pressy, 1892. 42 TNA, PRO FO 65/1429 ff. 90–91. Underlined in the original. 43 Ibid., f. 92. 44 Ibid., f. 95. E. Barrington to Sir E. Bradford, 5 March 1892: ‘Russian Anarchists in England’. 45 Ibid., FO 65/1430. Sir E. Bradford to E. Barrington, 26 March 1892: ‘Remarks on memo communicated by M. de Staal, 5 March 1892’. 46 Ivanova, ‘Russkaia revoliutsionnaia emigratsiia’, 96–97. 47 The full Stepniak quote reads: ‘My revoliutsionery ne tolʹko do priamogo narodnogo vostaniia, no do voennykh zagovorov, vtorzhenii vo dvorets, do bomb i dinamita’. Cited by Burtsev in his Editor’s introduction to Narodovolets no. 1, April 1897, 11.

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48 AVP RF, f. Kantseliariia, 1892 g. op. 470, d. 58. l. 259. Cited in Ivanova, ‘Russkaia revoliutsionnaia emigratsiia’, 96. 49 TNA, PRO FO 65/1429 ff. 124–125: ‘Russian Nihilist Dembski.’ Foreign Office to de Staal, 8 June 1892. The Home Office letter referred to is as yet unidentified. 50 Ibid., HO 144/587/B2840C f. 15. ‘Foreign Anarchists coming to the UK.’ Report of 16 January 1893. 51 Ibid., FO 65/1400 ff. 29–31. Foreign Office Draft Telegram to Howard. no. 30, 18 September 1891. 52 Ibid., FO 65/1399 ff. 67–69. Howard to Salisbury, 19 September 1891: ‘Reported Nihilist plot’. 53 A draft treaty with Washington, in which attempts at murder of the head of state or of members of the Imperial family were classed as ‘ordinary crimes’, was signed in March and put up for ratification by the Senate in May 1887. It resulted in a number of protest meetings. Stepniak was one of those to send messages of support to the protestors. See The Times, 21 May 1887, 9. The full treaty did not come into force until mid-1893. 54 See, for example, TNA, PRO FO 65/1429 ff. 322–325. De Staal to Foreign Office, 26 April 1892 and 6 May 1892: requests for the extradition of two Russian subjects under the terms of the Convention. 55 The tsar showed his displeasure at the failure of the ‘Russian memorandum’ to achieve a more satisfactory outcome, noting on de Staal’s report ‘This is not a very comforting result’ (Eto malouteshitelʹnyi rezulʹtat). Cited in Ivanova, ‘Russkaia revoliutsionnaia emigratsiia’, 98. 56 BMA, Volumes of Readers’ Signatures, 6 March 1891, no. A42912. 57 There is documentary proof that he also carried out research in the Reading Room on behalf of others. The German anarchist and historian Max Nettlau was one for whom Burtsev ordered up materials and made notes. See, for example, IISH, Max Nettlau Archive, Collection 2177. 58 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A. Spravka. no. 19. ‘Burtsev, Vladimir Lʹvov’, 1. 59 Ibid., Rachkovsky to Durnovo, Dept. of Police 10 (22) February 1892. Report no. 30. This was in response to Durnovo’s telegram of 3 (15) February: GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 90. (1892). del. 1 T. 1. l. 38. 60 Gogolʹ, D. ‘Sharlotta Biulʹe’, in Na voliu!: Padenie samoderzhaviia. Osvobozhdenie iz tsarskikh tiurem i katorgi. Leningrad: Priboi, 1927, 210–211. 61 It is possible that Bullier was, in fact, the hotel-landlady mentioned by Rachkovsky. 62 Gogolʹ, ‘Sharlotta Biulʹe’, 209–217. 63 Davydov, Iu. V. Bestseller. Moscow: Vagrius, 2001, 52–54. Frustratingly, the author does not supply full references. The dossier in question is apparently called ‘Circular 3124’ and is held in GARF. Davydov also makes the (unsubstantiated) claim that Bullier was the cousin of none other than Henri Bint, one of the Foreign Agency’s longest-serving employees, inferring that it may have been he who assisted her entry into the world of espionage and who introduced her to his superior. 64 GARF f. 102. d. 3. (1892g.) del. 749. ‘Po zaiavleniiu Sharlota Biulʹe’, ll. 14–15, Burtsev to Bullier, London, 9 April 1892. Also HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A (Folder 2). Cited in Saunders, ‘Vladimir Burtsev’, 40 and 57 (note 14). 65 Gogolʹ, ‘Sharlotta Biulʹe’, 210. 66 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A (Folder 2). Bullier to Rachkovsky, Paris, 6 June 1892. Bullier addressed most of her letters to Rachkovsky to a ‘Madame Joly, 36 Boulevard Arago’, a flat rented by the Foreign Agency since at least 1886. See

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Agafonov, Parizhkie tainy, 41. Bullier would also send the occasional missive direct to a Monsieur Melzer, one of Rachkovsky’s assistants in the Russian embassy at 79, Rue de Grenelle. 67 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A (Folder 2). Bullier to Rachkovsky, 4 July 1892. 68 Gogolʹ, ‘Sharlotta Biulʹe’, 210. 69 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A (Folder 2). Durnovo to Rachkovsky Doc. no. 70 (Reference no. 54), 17 (29) September 1892. 70 Ibid., Rachkovsky to Durnovo, Report no. 82, 8 October 1892; and Durnovo to Rachkovsky, Doc. no. 83 (Reference no. 66), 13 (25) October 1892. 71 Ibid., Bullier to Rachkovsky, 10 December 1892. 72 Aleksandr Lʹvovich Teplov (1850–1922) was the last of those accused in the Paris bomb factory affair to be released from Angers prison. Of the others, Lavrenius had been released early on grounds of ill health, while Nakashidze, Stepanov, Reinshtein and Kashintsev were freed in late 1892. See The Times, 8 October 1892, 5. For more on Teplov, see Henderson, R. ‘“For the Cause of Education.” A History of the Free Russian Library in Whitechapel, 1898–1917.’ In Beasley, R. and Bullock, P. (eds.) Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From Melodrama to Modernism, Oxford: OUP, 2013, 71–86. 73 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A (Folder 2). Bullier to Rachkovsky, 21 January 1893. 74 Ibid., Burtsev to Bullier, 17 February 1893. 75 Ibid., Spravka. no. 19. ‘Burtsev, Vladimir Lʹvov’, 3. Although this document was compiled in 1906 Burtsev’s physical description dates from 1899. 76 GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 88 (1890 g.) Del. 569. Po rozysku Burtseva. Tom. 4. Petrov to Rachkovsky. 20 February (4 March) 1893. l. 2. Nikolai Ivanovich Petrov (1841–1905) had just taken over as Director of Police from the unsuccessful Durnovo. 77 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XV/IIIe (Folder 3), ff. 664–666. Bullier to Rachkovsky: Nice, 10 April 1893. 78 Budnitskii, O. V. Terrorizm v rossiiskom osvoboditelʹnom dvizhenii: ideologiia, etika, psikhologiia. Vtoraia polovina XIX – nachalo XX v. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000, 92–94. 79 Alisov, P. F. Terror. Pisʹmo k tovarishchu. Geneva: Imprimerie russe nouvelle, 1893. 80 Burtsev himself admitted as much some thirty years later. See Budnitskii, Terrorizm, 94. 81 Alisov, Terror, 2–3. 82 The Yakutsk and Kara tragedies were the subject of a long article in the first number of Free Russia in June 1890, while the first two pamphlets published by the Society that same year were entitled The Slaughter of Political Prisoners in Siberia and The Flogging of Political Exiles in Russia. See, Hollingsworth, B. ‘The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom: English Liberals and Russian Socialists, 1890–1917’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, New Series, vol. 3 (1970), 45–64, 55. 83 Budnitskii, Terrorizm, 105–107. 84 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XV/IIIe (Folder 3): Bullier to Rachkovsky, Genoa 12 April 1893. 85 GARF f. 102. d. 3. (1892g.) del. 749. ‘Po zaiavleniiu Sharlota Biulʹe’, l. 60, Rachkovsky to Bullier, 14 April 1893. Milevsky had served as a police agent since 1873. 86 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XV/IIIe (Folder 3), f. 670: Bullier to Meltzer, Milan 17 April 1893. 87 Ibid., (Folder 2): Director of the Department of Police (i.e. Petrov) to Rachkovsky, Doc. no. 35 (Reference no. 19), 6 (18) April 1893.

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GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 88 (1890 g.) Del. 569. Po rozysku Burtseva. Tom 3–4. Ibid., Durnovo to Gubastov. 1 (13) July 1892. Tom 3. l. 131. Ibid., Gubastov to Durnovo. 8 (20) July 1892. Tom 3. ll. 132–133. Ibid., tom 4. Rachkovsky to Petrov. 8 (20) January–16 (28) April 1893. ll. 1, 6, 10, 29–31. 92 Ibid., tom 4. Petrov to Gubastov. 19 (31) March 1893. l. 8. 93 Nikolai Pavlovich Shishkin (1827–1902) Minister of Foreign Affairs, 1896–1897. 94 GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 88 (1890 g.) Del. 569, tom 4. I. N. Durnovo to N. P. Shishkin. 6 (18) April 1893. l. 15. 95 Ibid., N. I. Petrov to D. V. Kazarinov. 3 (15) April 1893. ll. 18–21. According to the police chief it was thanks to the assistance of the German authorities that Burtsev’s companion Yuly Rappoport had been successfully captured as he attempted to cross the border some three years earlier. 96 Ibid., D. V. Kazarinov to N. I. Petrov. 10 (22) April 1893. l. 27. 97 Ibid., Rachkovsky to Petrov. 19 April (1 May) 1893. f. 29. 98 Gogolʹ, ‘Sharlotta Biulʹe’, 213. 99 Burtsev, Borʹba, 117. 100 GARF f. 102, D. 3. op. 88 (1890 g.) Del. 569. Po rozysku Burtseva. Tom 4. I. N. Durnovo to N. P. Myshkin. 3 (15) May 1893. ll. 36–37. 101 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A (Folder 2): Burtsev to Bullier, London, 19 May 1893. 102 Ibid., Bullier to Rachkovsky, Paris, 20 May 1893. 103 Ibid., Bullier to Director of Police Petrov, Paris, 10 June 1893 (copy). 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid., Director of Department of Police Petrov to Rachkovsky, no. 64. Alt. ref. no. 36, 5 (17) June 1893. 106 Gogolʹ, ‘Sharlotta Biulʹe’, 214. 107 According to one source, the steamship was unable to make the journey due to prolonged bad weather. See Praisman, Terroristy, 267. 108 Gogolʹ, ‘Sharlotta Biulʹe’, 215. 109 Ibid., 216. 110 In the course of the affair 7,000 francs were paid to Bullier and her associates in Marseilles. Rachkovsky claimed and received 1,000 francs for his troubles, while his two agents Milevsky and Bint put in an additional expenses claim of 900 francs. See GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 90. (1892) del. 4. 1. 34: Raschet izderzhannykh deneg po delu Burtseva-Biulʹe, 5 July 1893. 111 Gogolʹ, ‘Sharlotta Biulʹe’, 216. 112 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A. Director of Department of Police (Petrov) to Rachkovsky, no. 3657. Alt. ref. no. 69, 1 (13) June 1894. 113 Davydov, Bestseller, 72–73, 310. 114 Burtsev would later publish an amusing aside concerning the cover note on Azef ’s police agent dossier which read ‘The Agent from the Saucepan’ (‘Sotrudnik iz Kastriuli’) – seemingly the result of an illiterate police clerk’s inability to decipher the Cyrillic transcription of Azef ’s place of residence in Germany: ‘Karlsruhe’. See, P., ‘Departament politsii v 1892–1908gg.: (Iz vospominanii chinovnika)’, in Byloe, 1917, nos. 5–6 (27–28), 17–24. 115 Burtsev, Borʹba, 125–126. HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A. Spravka. no. 19. ‘Burtsev, Vladimir Lʹvov’, 2. See also GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 88 (1890 g.) Del. 569. Po rozysku Burtseva. Tom. 4. ll. 59–73. 88 89 90 91

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116 GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 88 (1890). del. 569. Po rozysku Burtseva. T. 4. Rachkovsky to Petrov. Report no. 70, 31 May (12 June) 1894. l. 148. 117 Certain archives require the researcher to complete a form for each file consulted, indicating which pages have been read and what sort of notes have been made. Unfortunately, not every researcher obliges, especially when microfilms are being consulted. 118 GARF f. 102, d. 3., op. 89. (1891). del. 4. ‘Svedeniia po Londonu’. ff. 98–99. Rachkovsky to Durnovo. Report of 21 September (3 October) 1891. 119 Ibid., ff. 45–46. Rachkovsky to Durnovo. Report no. 26, 19 (31) March 1891. 120 Ibid., op. 91. (1893). del. 369. Chastʹ 4. ‘Ob otpuske deneg na agenturnye nadobnosti Rossiiskomu Generalʹnomu Konsulu v Londone’. ll. 1–9. Unlike the annual claims for 2,000 francs made by his Parisian counterpart, those made by A. A. Falʹbort, Russian General Consul in London, were never so extravagant, an example being his claim of 8 August 1893 for the princely sum of three shillings: the cost of two Fundist publications purchased at the request of the Chief of Police (six pence), plus the two shillings and six pence expended travelling around London trying to find them! The Department showed its largesse by despatching a cheque to him for two pounds. Ibid., ll. 6–7. 121 GARF f. 102, d. 3., op. 90. (1892). del. 41. ‘Ob otpuske deneg na soderzhanie agentury v Parizhe, Londone i Shveitsarii’. ll. 6–7, 9–10, 14–15. 122 See The Times, 23 April 1884, 7. 123 GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 90. (1892). del. 318. ‘Po zaiavleniiu prozhivaiushchego v Londone Boleslava Maliankevich’. ll. 4–5, 15 April 1892; and ll. 10–15, undated (received St Petersburg, 2 May 1892). 124 Ibid., ll. 17–28. It is interesting to note that Burtsev’s name does not appear in Maliankewicz’s list. 125 Ibid., ll. 42, 49. 126 Ibid., l. 45. and del. 1 T. 1. ‘Po soobshcheniiam zavedyvaiushchego Parizhskoiu Agenturoiu i perepiska s nim’. l. 55. Telegram Rachkovsky to Durnovo, 2 August 1892. 127 Ibid., ll. 59–60. Rachkovsky to Durnovo. Report no. 67, 26 August (7 September) 1892, and l. 66. Rachkovsky to Durnovo. Report no. 73, 8 (20) September 1892. Reading between the lines the enterprise in question may have been the forging of Russian bank notes. 128 Ibid., l. 69. 129 Ibid., l. 75. Journal de débats, 13 August 1897. ‘Entre Polonais’; and l. 76. Kiev Gendarmerie to Department of Police, 30 May 1897. 130 Ibid., l. 74. Rachkovsky to Department of Police. Telegram, 5 August 1897. 131 As other historians of the period have claimed, no West European country presented the Okhrana with greater problems in getting its hands on the mail that interested it than Great Britain. See, for example, Confino, M. ‘Pierre Kropotkine et les agents de lʹOhrana: Étude suivie de treize lettres inédites de P. Kropotkine à M. Goldsmith et à un groupe anarchiste russe’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, vol. 24 (1983), nos. 1–2, 98–99. 132 HIA Okhrana archive. 54/VI/k/23 c. Report from Agent Farce to Foreign Agency, 25 April 1906. 133 TNA, PRO KV 6/47, 8 December 1904 (274/B). Farce (and his English wife) took up residence near the headquarters of the Russian Free Press Fund in Hammersmith and was assisted over the years by former Detective Sergeant at New Scotland Yard, Michael Thorpe, who transferred his services to the Russian Department of

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Police around 1900 on a salary of £450 per annum and who retired several years later on a comfortable pension from the Russian government. 134 HIA Okhrana archive 54/VI/k/23c. On average, Farce filed a weekly five-to-sixpage report which often contained no more than descriptions of the daily comings and goings of RFPF members, announcements of political meetings, or direct translations of stories from the British press. 135 GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 90 (1892). del. 1. T. 2. ‘Po soobshcheniiam zaved. Parizhskoi i Londonskoi agenturoiu i perepiska s nim’. Rachkovsky to Durnovo. Report no. 34, 17 (29) March 1892. ll. 61–65. 136 In this instance Rachkovsky’s prediction was correct. The Department of Police files at GARF list a total of twenty émigrés who were under investigation by the London Agency in 1891. The following year that number had increased to thirty. See GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 89. (1891). del. 4. ‘Svedeniia po Londonu’, ll. 2–22; and ibid., op. 90. (1892), T. 2: ‘Po soobshcheniiam zaved. Parizhskoi i Londonskoi agenturoiu i perepiska s nim’, ll. 1–23. 137 Ibid., op. 90. (1892). del. 1. T. 2. l. 62. 138 Ibid., ll. 62–63. Emphasis as in original. 139 Ibid., op. 90. (1892). del. 1. T. 2. Rachkovsky to Durnovo. Report no. 92, 22 October (3 November) 1892. ll. 114–116. Emphasis as in original. 140 The editor of the Parisian LʹÉclair, for example, had been granted a Russian Imperial order for his coverage of the 1890 Russian anarchist trial. See Johnson, ‘The Okhrana Abroad’, 33–34. 141 Jolivard appears in the 1881 British Census, wherein his age is given as 42 and his address as 62, Godolphin Road, London. In fact, he had been resident in Britain and expressing pro-tsarist sentiments as early as August 1877. See The Times, 11 August 1877, 10: ‘Russian Atrocities’. Jolivard was later to become attaché to the Imperial Ottoman embassy in London and to receive the title of Chevalier. He died in London on 12 April 1912 aged 73. See The Times, 13 April 1912, 1. 142 GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 89. (1891). del. 4. ‘Svedeniia po Londonu’. ll. 80:1–80:5, 17 May 1891–24 May 1891. 143 On the original letter, one can only just make out the faint words ‘moi psevdonim’ pencilled in Rachkovsky’s hand immediately after the salutation ‘Cher Monsieur Richter’. This is not visible on the microfilm copy and may explain why the importance of this document has been overlooked. The same file contains a brief note that Richter was the name to be used when contacting Rachkovsky concerning London operations. GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 89. (1891). del. 4. ‘Svedeniia po Londonu’. l. 1. It is a strange coincidence (but no more than that) that Richter was also the chosen pseudonym of V. I. Ulʹianov (Lenin) when he arrived in London for the first time in 1902. 144 GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 89. (1891). del. 4. ‘Svedeniia po Londonu’. ll. 80: 1–2, 24 May 1891. 145 Ibid., ll. 80: 3–4, 19 May 1891. 146 Ibid., ll. 80: 1–2, 24 May 1891. Emphasis as in original. 147 A year after Jolivard’s letter, a French Sûreté agent in London briefly mentioned that Melville had been willing to assist the Russian government ‘particularly in the matter of Russian refugees’ but had been prevented in so doing by his superiors. See AN B/A 1508, Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Paris., Typed, unattributed report. London, 3 May 1892. ‘Anarchistes en Angleterre jusquʹen 1893’. Cited in Cook, A. M: MI5’s First Spymaster. Stroud: Tempus, 2004, 99.

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148 HIA Okhrana archive 35/V/c/ Folders 1–4 ‘Relations with Scotland Yard’. The earliest letter in the file is one from Rachkovsky to Melville dated 3 January 1897. 149 The Times, 9 January 1892, 7: ‘Alleged Anarchical Conspiracy’. 150 Ibid., 31 March 1892, 8: ‘Trial of the Alleged Anarchists’. 151 Porter, B. The Origins of the Vigilant State. The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch before the First World War. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987, 127. 152 The Times, 5 April 1892, 8: ‘Trial of the Walsall Anarchists’. Charles compared it to a plot described ‘in “Souvenir dʹun Préfet de Police” published in 1891 in Paris, [where there appeared] a statement by the author that he had personally arranged some explosions at St Germain’. The reference is to an edition of Andrieux, Souvenirs. See also ibid., 1 April 1892, 8: ‘Trial of the Alleged Anarchists’. 153 See Clutterbuck, L. ‘An Accident of History? The Evolution of Counter Terrorism Methodology in the Metropolitan Police from 1829 to 1901, with Particular Reference to the Influence of Extreme Irish Nationalist Activity’, University of Portsmouth PhD Thesis, 2002, 173 et seq. Quoted in Cook, MI5’s First Spymaster, 93. 154 Ibid., 141. Melville took over from Littlechild on 20 March 1893. 155 The Commonweal, 9 April 1892, 57. 156 See, for example, the report of the House of Commons debate in The Times, 15 November 1893, 6: ‘Anarchists in Trafalgar-Square’. The previous weekend there had been a mass rally held to commemorate the death of the ‘Haymarket Martyrs’, labour activists who had been hanged in Chicago on ‘Bloody Sunday’ 1887, for a murder they did not commit. 157 ‘Anarchists: Their Methods and Organization’, The New Review, no. 56 (January 1894), 1–16 158 Ibid., 8. 159 Rachkovsky admitted his authorship in his report (no. 12) of 16 January 1894, where he mentions he succeeded in placing the article ‘with the help of one of his collaborators’. See Taratuta, Etelʹ Lilian Voinich, 109–110. 160 Senese, Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 106, note 43. Senese assumes Melville’s authorship because ‘the article bears the hallmarks of his fustian style and professional preoccupations’. If true, it would not have been the first time a senior British police officer had used his influence in the media for partisan ends. In 1910, a former head of CID, Robert Anderson, confessed that he had been the anonymous author of articles in The Times implicating the Irish national leader Parnell in the Phoenix Park murders in 1882. See Porter, B. Plots and Paranoia. A History of Political Espionage in Britain, 1790–1988. London: Unwin, 1989, 111–113. 161 New Review, no. 57 (February 1894), 215–222: ‘Nihilism as it is: a Reply’. 162 Ibid., 216. 163 A letter in the Morning Advertiser of 20 February 1894 headed ‘Prisons and Prisoners in Russia’ and signed ‘A Loyal Russian’ was, according to E. A. Taratuta, the work of Rachkovsky. As well as attacking Stepniak, the author also cited ‘a Russian document of official source entitled “Russian Memorandum” (November 1892) which contains charges of the gravest description against some of the Nihilist refugees in London’. See Taratuta, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 474. 164 Rachkovsky to Petrov. Report no. 30, 26 February (10 March) 1894. Cited in Taratuta, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 473–474. 165 ‘Nihilism as it is’. Being Stepniak’s Pamphlets, translated by E. L. Voynich, and F. Volkhovsky’s ‘Claims of the Russian Liberals’. With an introduction by Dr. R. Spence Watson. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894.

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166 The Times, 29 November 1894, 4: ‘Books of the Week’. 167 TNA, PRO HO 144/545/A55176/2. f. 26. Report of 19 April 1894. The arrest was almost certainly that of Polti. 168 GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 88 (1890). del. 569. Po rozysku Burtseva. T. 4., Rachkovsky to Petrov. Report no. 37, 26 March (7 April) 1894. l. 77. 169 Ibid., l. 78. Rachkovsky seems to have decided that, while he was at it, he might as well take another pop at his ‘untouchable’ enemy, Lavrov, reporting that the latter was also involved in the plot and strongly urging that his Paris flat be searched. 170 Burtsev later claimed that from the early 1890s the Russian government and its Department of Police pursued a deliberate policy of leniency towards the Social Democrats, believing they did not represent any great danger but rather could act as a counterbalance to the real threat – the Populists. See Burtsev, Borʹba, 147–151. 171 GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 88 (1890). del. 569. Po rozysku Burtseva. T. 4, Department of Police memorandum, 7 (19) April 1894, l. 85. 172 Rachkovsky to Petrov. Report no. 30, 26 February (10 March) 1894. Cited in Taratuta, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 472. Taratuta also gives further examples of the unreliability of information in many of Rachkovsky’s reports and his habit of plucking terrorist plots out of thin air. 173 GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 88 (1890). del. 569. T. 4. Rachkovsky to Petrov, 8 (20) June 1894. l. 154. 174 Ibid., l. 156. 175 GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 88 (1890). del. 569. Po rozysku Burtseva. T. 4. 10 (22) June 1894. Excerpt from a private letter from Rachkovsky to Petrov. l. 161. 176 See Taratuta, Etelʹ Lilian Voinich, 102–103. It is likely that the information referred to here came from a file previously held at GARF, namely, f. 102. d. 3. op. 89. (1891) del. 3. ‘Ob ustroistve agentury v Londone’. Unfortunately, during a trip to the archive in April 2007 I was informed the file was no longer in existence. 177 GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 88 (1890). del. 569. T. 4. St Petersburg to Rachkovsky, 11 April 1894. ll. 86 and 94–110. Burtsev’s original letter is at ibid., ll. 61–72. 178 Ibid., l. 60. 179 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A. Petrov to Rachkovsky. Doc. no. 2544 (alt. ref. no. 19). St Petersburg, 16 (28) April 1894. 180 The identity of ‘comrade A’ has not yet been established, though it is possible that it was Petr Alisov (or indeed Evno Azef). 181 Paléologue, The Turning Point, 60. 182 Agafonov, Parizhskie tainy, 50. 183 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A contains an undated scrap of paper listing a handful of names written in a bold Russian hand, the second of which is ‘Iakov Arenkov, Student Meditsin, Montpellier, 11 rue Petit St Jean.’ 184 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XV/IIIe (Folder 3): Bullier to Rachkovsky, Genoa, 12 April 1893. 185 RGASPI f. 328, op. 1, ed. khr. 206. l. 1. 186 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A. ‘Kopiia pisʹma Vladimira Burtseva k studentu Shishakinu i drugim litsam’, f. 3. Undated attachment to: Director of the Department of Police to Rachkovsky. Doc. no. 2544 (alt. ref. no. 19). St Petersburg, 16 (28) April 1894. Emphasis as in original. 187 Ibid., f. 4. 188 For a detailed study of the Combat Organization see Gorodnitskii, R. A. Boevaia organizatsiia partii sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov v 1901–1911 gg. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998.

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189 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A. ‘Kopiia pisʹma Vladimira Burtseva k student Shishakinu i drugim litsam’, ff. 1–2. The code was a simple one which used an issue of Severnyi vestnik (Northern Messenger) as its key and employed a system whereby every letter was represented by a fraction: the numerator referring to the line number and the denominator to the position of the letter on that line with each letter appearing separately on an ascending even-numbered page starting from page twenty. 190 Ibid., f. 6. 191 Ibid., f. 8. 192 Lazarev, E. E. Moia zhiznʹ. Vospominaniia, statʹi, pisʹma, materialy. Prague: Tipografiia Legiografiia, 1935, 25. 193 GARF f. 102, d. 3. op. 88 (1890). del. 569. Po rozysku Burtseva. T. 4. Rachkovsky to Petrov. Report no. 37, 26 March 1894. l. 77. 194 Burtsev, V pogone za provokatorami.‘Protokoly sionskikh mudretsov’ – dokazannyi podlog. Moscow: Slovo, 1991. 5. Also, Taratuta, Etelʹ Lilian Voinich, 110.

Chapter 3 1 2 3 4

5 6 7

8 9 10 11

Trotskii, L. Moia zhiznʹ. Opyt avtobiografii. Berlin: Izdatelʹstvo ‘Granit’, 1930, t. 1, 170. Gertsen, A. I. Du développment [sic] des idées révolutionnaires en Russie. Par A. scander. Paris: Nice printed, 1851. For further details see Henderson, R. ‘Russian Political Émigrés and the British Museum Library’, Library History, vol. 9, nos. 1–2 (1991), 59–68; and Henderson, R. ‘Lenin and the British Museum Library’, Solanus, New Series, vol. 4 (1990), 3–15. Herzen arrived in London on 25 August 1852 and although the BM Archives contain no record of his admission a member of staff recalls him as a regular visitor. See N. Viktorov (pseud. V. L. Burtsev), ‘Britanskii muzei’, Istoricheskii vestnik, vol. 59 (St Petersburg, January 1895), 285. Nichols, Thomas. A Handbook for Readers at the British Museum. London: British Museum, 1866, 4. Cited in Pockney, B. P. ‘Russian Books in the British Museum’, Anglo-Soviet Journal, vol. 31, no. 3 (May 1971), 7. For more on Watts and the growth of the Russian collections see Christine Thomas and Bob Henderson, ‘Watts, Panizzi and Asher: The Development of the Russian Collections, 1837–1869’, British Library Journal, vol. 23, no. 2 (Autumn 1997), 154–175. It is known that the Library was frequented during this period by a number of other émigrés, such as P. L. Lavrov, though as yet no reference to his admission has been uncovered. Deich, L. (ed.) Gruppa osvobozhdenie truda. Moscow: Gosizdat, 1923–1926, vol. 4, 289. Details of these and later admissions referred to can be found at BMA, Registers of Admissions to the Reading Room; Volumes of Readers’ Signatures; and Readers’ Admissions Correspondence (CE 80–83). The practice may or may not have helped to throw the tsarist police off their track, but it certainly makes positive identification of individuals more difficult for the historian. As will be shown later, Rublev assisted Burtsev in his compilation of Za sto let. See Burtsev, Za sto let 1800–1896. Sbornik po istorii politicheskikh i

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obshchestvennykh dvizhenii v Rossii. (Sostavil V. Burtsev pri redaktsionnom uchastii S. M. Kravchinskogo.) London: Russian Free Press Fund, 1897, introduction, ii. 12 Johnson, B. C. (ed.) Olive & Stepniak: The Bloomsbury Diary of Olive Garnett 1893–1895. Birmingham: Bartletts, 1993, 151. 13 Ibid., 129. Entry for 10 November 1894. 14 BMA, Confidential papers. 12 December 1893. 15 HIA Okhrana archive 35/Vc/folder 1: Report no. 552, 24 April (7 May) 1912, A. A. Krasilʹnikov, Head of Foreign Agency to S. P. Beletsky, Director of Police, ff. 1–2. 16 BMA, Confidential Papers. 20 December 1894. 17 Ibid., 29 April 1895. 18 HIA Okhrana archive 35/Vc/folder 1: Report no. 552, 24 April (7 May) 1912, A. A. Krasilʹnikov, Head of Foreign Agency to S. P. Beletsky, Director of Police, ff. 1–2. 19 There is, though, at least one earlier instance of a Metropolitan Police detective being admitted to the Reading Room. On 5 June 1862, Mr Daniel Howie, Superintendent of Police ‘K’ (Stepney) Division, was given a ticket by order of Panizzi. It is, however, impossible to say whether he sought admission for professional reasons or merely for purposes of self-improvement. See BMA, Volumes of Readers’ Signatures for 1862. 20 Shiriaev, A. Sergius Michajlowitsch Stepniak-Krawtschinski. Zurich: Verlag der ‘Russischen Zustände’, 1896. The Museum’s ‘Book of Presents’ records the author’s address at the time of his second donation in 1899 as 15, Augustus Road Hammersmith – the address of Free Russia. 21 The murder was perpetrated by the Italian anarchist Sante Geronimo Caserio on 24 June 1894, as the president travelled in his carriage from a banquet to the theatre. 22 In Italy anti-anarchist legislation was introduced as early as July 1894. In August an anti-anarchist bill was passed by the Senate in Washington, while in Vienna two editors of an anarchist newspaper were arrested. In Germany a number of antirevolutionary bills were first laid before the Federal Council in November 1894 but, after much debate, were rejected in May 1895. 23 See, for example, the Western Mail, 15 February 1894, 5: ‘The International Centre of Anarchy’. 24 For a flavour of this individual’s extreme anti-Semitism see White, A. (ed.). The Destitute Alien in Great Britain. A Series of Papers. London: Sonnenschein and Co, 1892. 25 The Rt. Hon. Roy Jenkins, cited in Pearce, E. ‘The Scum of Europe’, History Today, vol. 50, no. 11 (November 2000), 16. 26 Parliamentary Debates, 4th Series, 1894, vol. 27, col. 137. 27 Ibid. 28 The Times, 18 July 1894, 6: ‘Aliens Bill’. 29 Ibid. According to another report, there was already in existence a ‘pretty constant interchange of notes respecting anarchists between the police of the various continental countries’. See Reynolds’s Newspaper, 1 July 1894, 5: ‘Assassination of President Carnot’. 30 The Times, 18 July 1894, 6: ‘Aliens Bill’. The exact numbers were: Contents – 89. Not Contents – 37. 31 Ibid., 20 July 1895, 16: ‘The Radical Rout in the East-End’. 32 Viktorov, ‘Britanskii Muzei’, 256–286. 33 Ibid., 276. 34 For a detailed study of the censorship of the journal, see Ushchipovskii, S. N. ‘Osnovnye napravleniia tsenzurnogo redaktirovaniia tekstov v zhurnale “Istoricheskii

276

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Vestnik”’, Vestnik Sankt-Peterburgskogo Universiteta, Seriia 2, issue 2, no. 9 (April 1992), http://vivovoco.astronet.ru/VV/THEME/STOP/VESTNIK.HTM [accessed 12 December 2016]. 35 Viktorov, ‘Britanskii Muzei’, 258. 36 Ibid., 260. 37 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A. Director of Dept. of Police to Rachkovsky. no. 2395 (24 December 1899) ‘Zapiska V. Burtseva’ f. 4. 38 The Museum’s ‘Books of Presents’ contain numerous donations under his name, including a limited edition of Aleksandr Sergeevich Griboedov’s Gore ot uma (Gore Umu) (Pervoe deistvie) Paris: Union, which he sent from Paris in November 1919. 39 IISH, Nettlau Collection, 275: ‘Burcev, Vladimir’. 1890–1908. Also 2177: ‘Library request forms relating to research by Vladimir Bourtzeff for Nettlau in the British Museum, London. c. 1889 [sic]–1894’. 40 See, for example, IISH, Nettlau Collection, 275: ‘Burcev, Vladimir’, Burtsev to Nettlau, 27 August 1892. By July 1895 Burtsev’s debt amounted to eleven shillings and a request for a further loan was, on this occasion, refused. See ibid., Burtsev to Nettlau, 5 July 1895, with the latter’s annotation dated 6 July 1895. 41 Viktorov, N. ‘Kruzhok shestnadtsati’, Istoricheskii Vestnik (St Petersburg, October 1895.) Tom 62, 174–182. 42 Branicki, K. Les nationalités slaves: lettres au révérend P. Gagarin. Paris: E. Dentu, 1879. The Polish count Ksawery Korczak-Branicki (1812–1879) joined Lermontov’s group in 1839 and was tried with other members of the group the following year. In 1848 he left Russia for Paris. For more on the ‘Circle’ and the significance of Burtsev’s article, see Gershtein, E. G. ‘Kruzhok shestnadtsati’, Lermontovskaia entsiklopediia. Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1981, 234–235. 43 Viktorov, N. ‘Sochineniia Vilʹiam Koksa’, Istoricheskii vestnik (Sankt-Petersburg, 1898.) Tom 74, 778–787. William Coxe (1747–1828), English memoirist who travelled extensively in Europe. A year earlier Burtsev, again under the pseudonym Viktorov had written an introduction to a memoir of Bakunin for the same journal. See, ‘M. A. Bakunin v Italii v 1864 godu (Iz vospominanii L. I. Mechnikova)’, Istoricheskii Vestnik, Tom. 67 (March 1897), 807–834. 44 Coxe, William, Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark. Interspersed with Historical Relations and Political Inquiries. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1803. 45 RGASPI f. 328, op. 1, ed. khr. 7. F. Dillon Woon to Burtsev, 13 November 1896, concerning publication of the latter’s article on Samuel Bentham (1757–1831), brother of Jeremy and traveller in Russia. 46 Panteleeva, ‘Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia i izdatelʹskaia deiatelʹnostʹ V. L. Burtseva’, 161. 47 Burtsev, Borʹba, 6. 48 For a detailed examination of the events surrounding this attempt to found a journal of the opposition, see Shirokova, ‘Iz istorii sviazei russkikh revolutsionerov s emigrantami’. Kolokol (The Bell) was the name of the famous political émigré journal published by Herzen between 1857 and 1867. 49 BMA, Letters of Admission to the Reading Room, CE 83/A53263, CE 83/A53347, CE 83/53962. Little is known of Rublev other than his entry in Za sto let, which states that he was tried at Odessa on 26 March 1880 and received a nineteen-year sentence. Burtsev, Za sto let, 104. Zhuk was the pseudonym of Vasily Pavlovich Maslov-Stokoz (1876–1949), an adherent of Narodnaia volia. 50 Numerous examples are contained in: GARF f. 102, del. 3, op. 88 (1890), d. 569. Tom. 4.

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51 Ibid., l. 188. 52 It would appear that Mikhailov did not receive the message in question, for in a follow-up letter to another contact Burtsev asks for Mikhailov’s address signing himself V. Rodstein and giving his address this time as 87, Byron Street, Leeds. See GARF f. 102, del. 3, op. 88 (1890), d. 569. Tom. 4, ll. 206–207: Burtsev to Anastasiia Klepachevskaia in Kiev, 2 December 1895. 53 Johnson, Olive & Stepniak, 151. The British Museum Archives also contain proof that, on at least one occasion, the authorities reported to Scotland Yard on material read by a Russian ‘suspect’ in the Reading Room. See BMA, Confidential Papers. Scotland Yard to British Museum, 28 February 1923: ‘Re. Material read by Professor Barthold’. 54 Panteleeva, ‘Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia i izdatelʹskaia deiatelʹnostʹ V.L. Burtseva’, chapter 3.1: ‘Plany istoriko-revoliutsionnykh rabot i sbornik “Za sto let”’, 155–179. 55 Ibid., 166. 56 Ibid., 165–166. 57 During this period, he did, however, complain of his poverty in a letter to Kashintsev in Sofia. See GARF f. 102, del. 3, op. 88 (1890), d. 569. Tom. 4. Report of Budzilovich, 6 March 1895, l. 200. 58 ‘Pitaiasʹ bolʹshe kamniami i snovideniiami’: GARF f. 5824, op. 2, d. 114, l. 32. Cited in Panteleeva, ‘Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia i izdatelʹskaia deiatelʹnostʹ V. L. Burtseva’, 168. 59 Zenzinov, V. M. ‘V. L. Burtsev’, Novyi zhurnal, no. 4 (1943), 362. 60 GARF f. 102, del. 3, op. 88 (1890), d. 569. Tom. 4: Report no. 86, 18 (30) October 1895, Rachkovsky to Director of Department of Police. l. 205. 61 Quoted in Panteleeva, ‘Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia i izdatelʹskaia deiatelʹnostʹ V. L. Burtseva’, 168. 62 GARF f. 102, del. 3, op. 88 (1890), d. 569. Tom. 4: Burtsev to Kashintsev, 12 July 1897, ll. 265–268. 63 Golʹdenberg, ‘Vospominaniia’, 124. 64 Burtsev, Borʹba, 112–113. 65 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A (Pt. 2.) 15 April 1900, Debagory-Mokrievich to Kashintsev. My thanks to David Saunders for drawing this quote to my attention. 66 Za sto let (1800–1896). Sbornik po istorii politicheskikh i obshchestvennykh dvizhenii v Rossii. Sostavil V. Burtsev pri redaktsionnom uchastii S. M. Kravchinskogo. 2 chast. London: Russian Free Press Fund, 1897. A variant English title A Century of Political Life in Russia (1800–1896) appears at the top of the title page. 67 Levin, Sh. M. Ocherki po istorii russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli vtoroi poloviny XIX veka. Leningrad: Nauka, 1974, 59. The Lenin article, ‘Goniteli zemstva i Annibaly liberalizma’, appeared in Zaria nos. 2, 3 (December 1901). 68 Burtsev himself admitted to the numerous omissions and errors which he blamed on the fact that it was the work of only a very few London-based émigrés. See HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A (part 2): Director of Dept. of Police to Rachkovsky, no. 2395, 24 December 1899. ‘Zapiska V. Burtseva’ f. 2. 69 Review in Letuchie listki, no. 41 (1898). 70 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A (part 2): Director of Department of Police to Rachkovsky, 20 January and 10 March 1898. Sergei Erastovich Zvoliansky (1855– 1912) served as Director of Police from August 1897 to May 1902. 71 The Times, 5 October 1896, 9. 72 TNA, PRO CAB 37/42/35: ‘Report by Lord Salisbury on his conversation with the Tsar’, dated 27 September 1896.

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73 Some months later the tsar dropped the idea, possibly being persuaded that the Russian fleet could be locked in the Black Sea if the British Navy succeeded in taking control of the Dardanelles. See ‘Proekt zakhvata Bosfora v 1896 g.’, Krasnyi arkhiv, vol. 47–48 (1931), 50–70. 74 See, for example, Palmer, A. W. ‘Salisbury’s Approach to Russia, 1898’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, vol. 6 (1955), 102–114. 75 The story received world-wide coverage. See, for example, The New York Times, 15 September 1896, 1–2: ‘The Czar in Danger; A Scheme to Assassinate the Ruler of Russia. Discovered by the Police’. 76 Sweeney, At Scotland Yard: Being the Experiences during Twenty–Seven Years' Service of J. Sweeney. London: Grant Richards, 1904, 80–84. 77 The Times, 5 October 1896, 10: ‘The Emperor of Russia’. 78 Ibid. 79 The London Gazette, 3 November 1896, 6006. 80 Posse, V. A. Vospominaniia. 1905–1917gg. Petrograd: Myslʹ, 1923, 120. See also RGASPI f. 328, op. 1, ed. khr. 206. l. 1. 81 GARF f. 102, del. 3, op. 88 (1890), d. 569. Tom. 4: Burtsev to Kashintsev, 14 October 1896, l. 223. Khaim Osipovich Zhitlovsky (1865–1943) and Nikolai Sergeevich Rusanov (1859–1939) were leading Socialists-Revolutionaries. 82 GARF f. 102, del. 3, op. 88 (1890), d. 569: Tom. 4. Rachkovsky to Petrov 4 (12) December 1896, ll. 212–213. 83 Ibid., Burtsev to Gringmut, 21 December 1896. l. 218. 84 Ibid., ll. 226–227. 85 Panteleeva, ‘Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia i izdatelʹskaia deiatelʹnostʹ V. L. Burtseva’, 121–122. Further information on the funding of the journal may be contained in Beitner’s own police file at GARF f. 102, del. 3, op. 91 (1893), d. 85: ‘O syne nadvornogo sovetnika Lʹve Dmitrieve [sic] Beitnere’. 86 Burtsev, Borʹba, 123. 87 In its original form, Section 4 of the 1861 Offences against the Person Act provided as follows: All persons who shall conspire, confederate, and agree to murder any person, whether he be a subject of Her Majesty or not, and whether he be within the Queen’s dominions or not, and whosoever shall solicit, encourage, persuade, or endeavour to persuade, or shall propose to any person, to murder any other person, whether he be a subject of Her Majesty or not, and whether he be within the Queen’s dominions or not, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof shall be liable, at the discretion of the court, to be kept in penal servitude for any term not more than ten and not less than three years, or to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour. Offences against the Person Act 1861 (24 and 25 Vict. c 100), s. 4. 88 Narodovolets, no. 1 (April 1897), 11. 89 Ibid., 12. A. I. Zheliabov (1851–1881) and S. L. Perovskaia (1853–1881) were founder members of the Executive Committee of the People’s Will. Sentenced to death for their role in the assassination of Alexander II. S. N. Khalturin (1856–1882) was responsible for the earlier attempt on the tsar’s life in the Winter Palace. He too received a death sentence the following year for the murder of procurator V. S. Strelʹnikov. 90 Ibid., 14–15.

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The New York Times, 5 September 1909, SM3: ‘The Man Who Unmasked the Spies of the Czar’. 92 GARF f. 102, del. 3, op. 88 (1890), d. 569: Tom. 4. Burtsev to Kashintsev, 22 May 1897, ll. 232, 263–264. 93 Ibid., l. 264. 94 GARF f. 1721, op. 1, ed. khr. 35: Letters from Burtsev to Teplov ll. 56–59. Copy dated Stockholm 23 October 1914 of a typewritten letter to ‘The Editor’ which he asks to be published in the event of his arrest on his return to Russia. 95 Ibid. The poor state of the journal’s finances at this point is evinced by Burtsev’s request to Kashintsev for ten or twelve pounds to buy new type in the eventuality that the Fundists asked for theirs to be returned. 96 ‘Zaiavlenie’, Letuchie listki no. 39 (20 May 1897), 6. In fact, Lavrov was mistaken: he was unaware that the leader had been written by Kashintsev who had indeed been an active member of the Party. 97 ‘Terror bez terroristy’, Letuchie listki no. 40 (28 June 1897), 1. (Signed. ‘N.Ch.’) 98 No. 2 bears an incorrect date of publication: May 1897. 99 Narodovolets, no. 2 (May 1897), 51. 100 Burtsev, Borʹba, 62. 101 GARF f. 102, del. 3, op. 88 (1890), d. 569: Tom. 4 (Burtsev to Kashintsev, 12 July 1897), ll. 265–268. He would eventually set off for his second trip to Switzerland after the publication of issue no. 3. 102 Narodovolets, no. 3 (October 1897), 117. 103 GARF f. 102, del. 3, op. 88 (1890), d. 569: Tom. 4 (Burtsev to Kashintsev, 15 April 1897), l. 238. 104 Saunders, ‘Vladimir Burtsev’, 53. 105 The New York Times, 5 September 1909, SM3: ‘The Man Who Unmasked the Spies of the Czar’. Burtsev published the reports in question that year in his Tsarskii listok. Doklady Ministra vnutrennikh del Nikolaiu II za 1897 god, vyp. 1. Paris: Izd. Redaktsii zhurnala ‘Byloe’, 1909. 106 Ivan Logginovitch Goremykin (1839–1917), served as Minister of the Interior October 1895–1899. 107 Burtsev, Borʹba, 133. 108 It is evident from the contents of a letter from Melville, which Rachkovsky translated in his report of 10 July 1897, that the Inspector had written in response to an earlier communication from the Head of the Foreign Agency. See HIA Okhrana archive 35/ Vc/folder 2. Cited in Senese, ‘Le Vil Melville’, 151. 109 Ibid. 110 Lessar, Pavel Mikhailovich (1851–1905). 111 TNA, PRO HO 144/272/A59222/1 ‘V. Bourtzeff: Editor of “Narodovoletz”’. 112 Ibid., HO 144/272/A59222/1a f. 3. ‘Nihilist Literature’. 113 Ibid., f. 4. 114 Kimball, ‘Harassment’. 115 Senese, ‘Le Vil Melville’. 116 TNA, PRO HO 144/272/A59222/4: ‘re. Bourtzeff: Opinion of the Law Officers of the Crown’ (2 October 1897). 117 Ibid., HO 144/272/A59222/5 Melville to Cuffe (16 October 1897). 118 Ibid., HO 144/272/A59222/6 ‘Opinion’ (29 October 1897), signed R. B. Finley, Law Officers Department. 119 Ibid., HO 144/272/A59222/7 Foreign Office to Under Secretary of State, Home Office (8 December 1897), f. 3. 91

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120 Goschen to Salisbury (10 November 1897): Salisbury Papers. A/129/30 (cited in Porter, Origins, 111 and 222, footnote 77.) 121 TNA, PRO HO 144/272/A59222/7 Goschen to Salisbury (2 December 1897), ff. 7–8. 122 Ibid., DPP 4/32 ‘Records of the Director of Public Prosecutions. Bourtzeff and another. Offence: Incitement to murder. Wm. Melville Sworn and Examined by Mr. Matthews’, f. 169. 123 The full legal reference for the Burtsev case is: Regina v. Bourtzeff (1898) 127 CCC Sess. Pap. 284. 124 The New York Times, 5 September 1909, SM3: ‘The Man Who Unmasked the Spies of the Czar’. On arrival at Bow Street Melville had conducted a search of the prisoner and had found some copies of Narodovolets and Za sto let in his briefcase, packed and ready to be posted. One package was addressed to ‘M. Baitner 6, Rue Condolle, Génève’. It would appear, therefore, that, just as Landezen had vanished from Paris in 1890, so this latest police informer had made himself scarce before the arrest was made. See TNA, PRO DPP 4/32 f. 30. 125 The arrest was reported throughout the British and European press and also in America. See, for example, The New York Times, 23 December 1897, 9: ‘Nihilist Editors in London. They are Remanded for Inciting the Assassination of the Czar’. 126 GARF f. 1721, op. 1, ed. khr. 38: Letter to Teplov (18 January 1898), l. 18. 127 ‘Delo Burtseva’, Letuchie Listki, no. 42 (23 March 1898), 4–7. 128 Corrie Grant K. C. (1850–1924). Called to the bar 1874. Radical Liberal MP for Rugby 1900–1910. Bernard John Seymour Coleridge, 2nd Baron Coleridge (1851–1927). Liberal politician, called to the bar 1892. High Court judge 1907–1923. The Burtsev Defence Fund raised an impressive £166. See Hollingsworth, ‘The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom’, 10. 129 Freedom, February 1898, 7. Others were equally certain that the charge had been lodged ‘at the request of the Russian police’. See Reynolds’s Newspaper, 26 December 1897, 8: ‘Alleged Plot to Murder the Czar’. 130 Burtsev, Doloi tsaria, 44–45. 131 The Times, 23 December 1897, 9: ‘Police’. 132 Why the case was transferred is not recorded in Burtsev’s file at the PRO, though the decision is referred to in a letter to the press from the SFRF. See Daily News, 31 December 1897, 3: ‘Letters to the Editor’. 133 TNA, PRO DPP 1/32 ‘Central Criminal Court 10 January Sessions 1898. Bourtzeff and Wierzbicki. Brief for the Prosecution’. f. 34. 134 GARF f. 1762, op. 4, d. 168, l. 84. Cited in Panteleeva, ‘Obshchestvennopoliticheskaia i izdatelʹskaia deiatelʹnostʹ V. L. Burtseva’, 132. 135 ‘Delo Burtseva’, Letuchie Listki, no. 42 (23 March 1898), 6. 136 HIA Okhrana archive 35/Vc/folder 3: Rachkovsky to Melville (3 January 1897 [sic] – i.e. 1898). He also added a postscript concerning a token of his appreciation for the Inspector’s assistance: ‘Could you also let me know if you received my little crate and my letter from the Ministry of the Interior which I sent to you through our embassy in London?’ 137 HIA Okhrana archive 35/Vc/folder 3: Rachkovsky to Melville (5 February 1898). 138 Burtsev, Bor ʹba, 143. 139 ‘Dva slova ob izdanii “Narodovoltsa”’, Byloe, no. 1 (1900), 62–63. 140 Burtsev, Doloi tsaria, 44–56: ‘Delo Burtseva po povodu izdaniia “Narodovoltsa”’. As we have seen, this is, of course, the advice proffered earlier by Melville. 141 Burtsev, Borʹba, 143.

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142 TNA, PRO CRIM 6/19: Court Books, Old Court, July 1894–May 1898. Entry for 11 February 1898. Sir John Pound, a wealthy London businessman, would later go on to serve as Lord Mayor of London (1904–1905). It was not until the passing of the 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act that women were allowed to sit on juries. 143 Veeder, V. V. ‘Mr Justice Lawrance: The “True Begetter” of the English Commercial Court’, Law Quarterly Review, no. 110 (April 1994), 292–306. 144 Ibid., 294. He was, apparently, the tallest man on the bench. The nickname was used to differentiate him from a shorter namesake. 145 TNA, PRO DPP 4/32 ‘The Queen v Vladimir Bourtzeff and Klement Wierzbicki’, f. 123. 146 Translation taken from ibid., FO 881/6985 Russia: Memo. Russian Publication in M. Lessar’s Note verbale of 6 September 1897. (Mr V. Bourtzeff ’s ‘Narodovoletz’. no. 1, April 1897.) 147 TNA, PRO DPP 4/32 ff. 175, 176. 148 Ibid., ff. 191–192 149 Ibid., f. 192. 150 The Times, 12 February 1898, 14: ‘Central Criminal Court’. 151 TNA, PRO DPP 4/32 f. 218. 152 Ibid., ff. 218–219. 153 The Times, 14 February 1898, 7. 154 Freedom, March 1898, 12: ‘A Condemnation for Opinion: The Case of Vladimir Bourtzev’. 155 ‘Delo Burtseva’, Letuchie Listki no. 42 (23 March 1898), 7. 156 Quoted in The Anglo-Russian, vol. 1, no. 10 (April 1898), 112: ‘Bourtzeff ’s Case Again’. 157 Kimball, ‘Harassment’, 65. 158 TNA, PRO HO 45/10254/X36450: Anderson memorandum of 13 December 1898. 159 Ibid., FO 181/746: ‘Copy of telegram “en Clair” from F.O.’, 12 February 1898, no. 40. 160 Ibid., HO 144/272/A59222/8: By cipher Sir N. O’Conor, 15 February 1898. 161 HIA Okhrana archive 35/Vc/folder 3: Rachkovsky to Melville, 14 February 1898. 162 Burtsev, Borʹba, 134–143. 163 And also far more severe than the French regime, as described by Evgeny Stepanov, one of those incarcerated in the Maison de la Santé in Paris following the Bomb Plot of 1890. There, prisoners could smoke, take walks together several times a day and were even allowed spirit stoves in their cells on which they could cook and make tea. See Stepanov, ‘Iz zagranichnykh vospominanii’, 123–144. 164 The New York Times, 5 September 1909, SM4: ‘The Man Who Unmasked the Spies of the Czar’. 165 Ibid. 166 GARF f. 1721, op. 1, ed. khr. 84: Under Secretary of State, K. E. Digby to C. W. Dilke, 16 June 1898, ll. 8–9. 167 Ibid., Fanny Stepniak to C. W. Dilke, 29 June 1898, l. 24. 168 Burtsev, Borʹba, 142–143. Indeed, one can almost sense Beitner’s contrition when, prior to Teplov’s visit to see the prisoner, he wrote from Geneva asking that he ‘shake him firmly by the hand and thank him for that fact that he is suffering now for our common revolutionary cause’. GARF f. 1721, op. 1, ed. khr. 40, l. 4, 22 February 1898. 169 TNA, PRO HO 144/272/A59222B/21: Teplov to the Home Office, 22 November 1898. For further details of the Free Library and its role in the émigré community,

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see Armfelt, E. ‘Russia in East London.’ In Living London, vol. 1. London: Cassell and Company, 1902. 24–28. 170 The Teplov archive in GARF contains some correspondence concerning Burtsev’s arrest. See, GARF f. 1721, op. 1, ed. khr. 38: Letters from various to Teplov re. Burtsev’s sentence etc. 1896–1899. (70 listy), also ed. khr. 40 (18 listy) and ed. khr. 84 (300 listy). 171 Fedor Aronovich Rotshtein (Rothstein) (1871–1953), Social Democrat, Bolshevik. Later served as Soviet Ambassador to Iran. 172 Free Russia, February 1899, 14–15: ‘Russian Impressions of a British Prison’ by Th. R. 173 Abrikosov, Kh. N. Dvenadtsatʹ let okolo Tolstogo: (Vospominaniia). Moscow: Gos. lit. muzei, 1948. vol. II, 389. 174 GARF f. 102. d. 3. (1892g.) del. 749. ‘Po zaiavleniiu Sharlota Biulʹe’, ll. 24–25, Burtsev to Bullier, London 7 August 1892. 175 Burtsev, Borʹba, 138–139.

Chapter 4 1 Menʹshchikov, L. P. (ed.) Russkii politicheskii sysk za granitsei. Chast’ 1 (Sekretnye doneseniia departamentu politsii Rachkovskago, Rataeva, i Gartinga, zavedyvaiushchikh rozysknoi agenturoi). Paris: L. Menstschikoff, 1914, 203. 2 Ibid., 207. Burtsev had entrusted Pankratʹev with the smuggling of his Narodovolets into Russia. It was not until 1901 that he was unmasked as a police informer. 3 The police had also deemed it necessary to place Burtsev’s mother under constant secret surveillance in her remote Siberian village with post in and out being subject to perliustratsiia. This surveillance continued up to her death in 1902. See Akhmerova, Burtsev, 16, 58 (note 26). 4 He devotes no more than twenty pages of his autobiography to these years (Burtsev, Borʹba, 144–163) and makes only a brief reference to them in his interview with The New York Times, 5 September 1909, SM3: ‘The Man Who Unmasked the Spies of the Czar’. 5 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A (Pt. 2.) Report no. 3120, 22 December 1900. Dept. of Police to Rachkovsky. ‘Copy of a letter from the émigré Vladimir Burtsev to Ivan Kashintsev in Sofia’ (Undated), ff. 5–6. 6 Prelooker, J. Under the Czar and Queen Victoria. London: Nisbet, 1895, 160. 7 The Anglo-Russian, vol. I, no. 7 (January 1898), 78. 8 Ibid., 79–80: ‘Foolish Schemes of Russian Revolutionists’. 9 Ibid., vol. 1, no. 8 (February 1898), 86: ‘For Justice and Liberty’. 10 Ibid., vol. 1, no. 9 (March 1898), 99–100: ‘Tsar and Man: Russian v. English Juries’. 11 Ibid. 12 The Anglo-Russian, vol. 1. no. 10 (April 1898), 112: ‘Bourtzeff ’s Case Again’. 13 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 27 March 1898, 1: ‘Socialism’. 14 Ibid., also 3, 10 April 1898, 1: ‘Socialism’. 15 The New York Times, 5 September 1909, SM4: ‘The Man Who Unmasked the Spies of the Czar’. 16 TNA, PRO HO 144/A59222B/23: R. S. Watson to M. White Ridley, 27 January 1899. 17 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A (Pt. 2.): Report no. 34, Director of the Department of Police to Rachkovsky, 18 June 1899.

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The New York Times, 5 September 1909, SM3: ‘The Man Who Unmasked the Spies of the Czar’. 19 On release from Wormwood Scrubs he lived at 7 Colville Road, Leytonstone, Essex. See TNA, PRO HO/144/272/A59222B33: Burtsev to Home Office, 17 August 1899. 20 The New York Times, 5 September 1909, SM3: ‘The Man Who Unmasked the Spies of the Czar’. 21 IISH Nettlau Collection, 275: Burtsev to Nettlau, 5 October 1899. 22 The New York Times, 5 September 1909, SM3: ‘The Man Who Unmasked the Spies of the Czar’. 23 IISH Nettlau Collection, 275: Burtsev to Nettlau, 21 August 1899. 24 BMA, Minutes of the Trustees Meetings CE1, March 1898. 25 IISH Nettlau Collection, 275: Burtsev to Nettlau, 23 October 1899. Burtsev went on to describe how he had been obliged to make alternative study arrangements at the Free Public Library on Holborn near the British Museum, and at the Guildhall Library in Cheapside. 26 Ibid., Nettlau Collection, 1005: Correspondence with Elisée Reclus, 28 November, 1 December 1899. It should be added that Nettlau made his decision, also, in protest at the Boer War – ‘that infamous war in Africa’ as he described it. See Kloosterman, Jap, ‘Les papiers de Michel Bakounine à Amsterdam’, 12, http://www.iisg.nl/archives/ docs/bakarch.pdf [accessed 8 June 2016]. Both the Bakunin and Nettlau archives eventually found a home at the IISH in 1935. 27 BMA, Minutes of the Trustees Meetings CE1, 14 October 1899. 28 Ibid., 14 January 1900. 29 BL Add. Ms. 43895 (Dilke Papers, vol. 22), ff. 212–229. Unfortunately, Dilke’s letters to Morley on the subject have not yet been traced. 30 IISH Nettlau Collection, 275: Burtsev to Nettlau, 23 October, and 13, 23 November 1899. Some further details on his Paris trip can be gleaned from the A. L. Teplov archive at GARF which contains a postcard from Burtsev dated November 1899 giving his address as ‘Chez Vl. Baranoff, Schenzis, 42 rue Echiquier, Paris’. See GARF f. 1721. op. 1, ed. khr. 35. l. 5. This, according to a Foreign Agency report, was the home of Sofia Sheintsis (Scheinziss), one of the thirteen Russian ‘bombers’ expelled from Switzerland in 1889 as a result of the Peterstobel affair. See AN F/7/12521/1: Suisse (1882–1909) Order of Expulsion, 7 May 1889. Also Menʹshchikov, Russkii politicheskii sysk, 62. 31 IISH Nettlau Collection, 275: Burtsev to Nettlau, 23 November 1899, f. 2. 32 Ibid., Burtsev to Nettlau, 21 May 1900, enclosing letter from S. A. Vengerov to ‘Baranov’, 14 April 1900, f. 1. 33 RGASPI f. 328, op. 1, ed. khr. 19: Chertkov to Burtsev, 24 May 1900, ll. 1–5. 34 Volʹkenshtein, L. A. 13 let v Shlisselʹburgskoi Kreposti … S primechaniiami V. L. Burtseva. Maldon, Essex: A. Tchertkoff, 1900. 35 Byloe, no. 1, London: 1900, 61. Burtsev mentioned in his note that he would return to review Volʹkenshtein’s reminiscence properly in a forthcoming issue of his journal when he would also comment on the editor’s note. This he did not, in fact, do. 36 RGASPI f. 328, op. 1, ed. khr. 19: Chertkov to Burtsev, 29 October 1900, ll. 6–9. 37 Andropov, Sergei Vasilʹevich (1873–1955) Social-Democrat, editor of Rabochaia znamia and Iskra agent. According to a Foreign Agency report, Burtsev lived with Andropov and another of his Social Democrat colleagues, V. P. Novoselov, at Christchurch from 21 April to 10 May 1901. See Menʹshchikov, Russkii politicheskii sysk, 148. 18

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38 RGASPI f. 328, op. 1, ed. khr. 206, l. 1. 39 Sinelʹnikov, A. V. Shifry i revoliutsionery Rossii, http://www.hrono.info/libris/lib_s/ shifr19.html [accessed 8 June 2016]. The author makes no mention of Burtsev or his publications but, rather, states that Andropov was smuggling illegal literature into Russia on behalf of Lenin’s Iskra group when he was arrested in Kazanʹ in August 1901. 40 RGASPI f. 328, op. 1, ed. khr. 206, l. 1. 41 Such was the English banner heading on the title page of the first issue of Byloe (The Past), Burtsev’s next journal. 42 Burtsev recalled that the elaboration of his plans for the journal was ‘a much more absorbing and exhausting piece of work for me than my “hard labour”’. See, The New York Times, 5 September 1909, SM3–4: ‘The Man Who Unmasked the Spies of the Czar’. 43 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A (Pt. 2.): no. 2395, Director of Department of Police to Rachkovsky, ‘Zapiska V. Burtseva’, 24 December 1899. ff. 5–6. 44 Byloe. Istoriko-revoliutsionnyi sbornik. nos. 1–6. London, 1900–1904. Although all the editions indicated that they were published in London, some were, in fact, published in Geneva. For a full history of the journal, see Lurʹe, F. M. Khraniteli proshlogo: zhurnal ‘Byloe’: istoriia, redaktory, izdateli. Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1990. 45 Rachkovsky’s report of 30 May/12 June 1900, cited in Menʹshchikov, Russkii politicheskii sysk, 61. 46 Narodovolets, no. 4 (1903), Geneva, 1–2. 47 Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia, nos. 1–77, 1900–1901 November 1905, St Petersburg. 48 Vestnik russkoi revoliutsii: sotsialʹno-politicheskoe obozrenie, Paris, Geneva, 1901–1905. 4 nos. 49 Bogolepov, Nikolai Pavlovich (1846–1901), who was shot in the neck by Petr Vladimirovich Karpovich (1874–1917) on 14 (27) February 1901 and died shortly afterwards. 50 Dmitry Sergeevich Sipiagin (1853–1902), Minister of the Interior (1900–1902), assassinated by the SR Stepan Balmashev (1881/2–1902) in the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, on 2 (15) April 1902. 51 These last three acts had been organized by Grigory Andreevich Gershuni (1870– 1908), one of the founders of the PSR and director of its Combat Organization. Following Gershuni’s arrest in 1903, direction of the Organization was taken over by Evno Azef and Boris Savinkov. 52 Narodovolets, no. 4 (1903), 22. 53 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A (Pt. 2.): no. 3120, Director of the Department of Police to Rachkovsky, 22 December 1900 (4 January 1901), ff. 2–5. Byloe no. 2 was printed in Geneva and issued in March 1901. 54 TNA, PRO RG 13/139 f. 130, 92: Census for England and Wales (taken on 31 March 1901) in which ‘Vladimir Bourtzeff ’, journalist and author, aged 36, is listed as lodger in the household of a Richard C. Peden, brick merchant’s book-keeper. 55 Kaspar-Mikhail Turski – formerly a close associate of Tkachev and proponent of terrorism. 56 French police reports on Burtsev are contained in the Archive de la Direction de la Sûreté Publique which was formerly held at the Russkii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv (Russian State Military Archive), Moscow, and then, in 1997, ‘repatriated’ to the Archives nationales at Fontainebleau near Paris. A detailed description of these and other archival materials pertaining to Burtsev is available in an archival

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note compiled in 1989 and later published as: Popova, S. S., ‘“Ia levyi iz levykh … demokrat, sotsialist”: Arkhivnaia spravka na V. L. Burtseva’, Istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 1 (2002), 116–144; no. 2 (2002), 42–80. 57 Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, I, 120. 58 The President was shot and fatally wounded on the afternoon of 6 September 1901 at the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz. 59 Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, I, 120–121. 60 TNA, PRO HO 144/272/A59222B/34a: T. A. Sanderson, Foreign Office to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 6 September 1901. Cambon, Paul, 1843–1924, French Ambassador to London, 1898–1920. 61 Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, I, 120. 62 TNA, PRO HO 144/272/A59222B/35a: CID New Scotland Yard to Home Office ‘re. the suspect Bourtzeff ’, 22 October 1901, f. 1. This report, incidentally, contains the last reference to Burtsev I have been able to find in British government and police archives of the period. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., f. 2. 65 Ibid., HO 144/272/A59222B/35: Geoffray, French embassy to Marquis of Lansdowne, Foreign Office, 4 October 1901. Geoffray, Léon (1852–1927), First Secretary at the London embassy, 1898–1920. 66 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A (Pt. 2) Department of Police to Rachkovsky, 25 September (8 October) 1901. 67 GARF f. 1721, op. 1, ed. khr. 35. l. 11. 68 Ibid., l. 12. 69 Ibid., l. 14. 70 AN F/7/12521/2. Angleterre. Reports for 21 January, 28 February and 15 March 1902. The groups were identified as the Whitechapel group, the Hammersmith group (of which Burtsev was, allegedly, a principal member) and Chertkov’s colony in Christchurch (which, it was said, Burtsev visited frequently for health reasons). 71 HIA Okhrana archive 197/XVIId/1A (Pt. 2.): Burtsev to A. I. Khavskaia, 25 September 1903. By the end of the year he was able to boast that he could climb up a mountain to the height of 2,500 metres without a rest. See GARF f. 102, OO, 1906, d.702, t.1, l. 248. Cited in Panteleeva, ‘Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia i izdatelʹskaia deiatelʹnostʹ V. L. Burtseva’, 185. 72 Burtsev’s personal archive in RGASPI contains several letters and postcards dated around 1903 addressed to him at ‘Pension Colline, Chailly-sur-Clarens’. See, for example, RGASPI f. 328, op. 1, ed. khr. 17: Volkhovsky to Burtsev, 15 November 1903, l. 2. 73 GARF f. 1721, op. 1, ed. khr. 35: Burtsev to Teplov, Lausanne 19 April 1903, l. 9; and Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, I, 121. 74 Quoted in Lauchlan, Russian Hide-and-Seek, 101. Aleksei Aleksandrovich Lopukhin (1864–1928) took over from Zvoliansky on 9 May 1902 and headed the Department till 4 March 1905. He later collaborated with Burtsev and, indirectly, helped him expose Azef. Rachkovsky’s employment was terminated on 15 October 1902. 75 Brachev, ‘Master’, 306–307. 76 Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, I, 121. 77 GARF f. 1721, op. 1, ed. khr. 35, l. 13. 78 Issues 3–5 appeared, respectively, in February and May 1903 and January 1904.

286 79

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There is archival evidence to suggest that relations between the two had been poor even before they began their joint undertaking. See RGASPI f. 328, op. 1, ed. khr. 18: Chaikovsky to Burtsev, 11 May 1900. 80 Panteleeva, ‘Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia i izdatelʹskaia deiatelʹnostʹ V. L. Burtseva’, 191–192. For a full listing of the contents of Byloe during this period see Lurʹe, Khraniteli proshlogo, 170–174. 81 How he obtained the monies for this undertaking is unclear, though, in a much earlier report to St Petersburg, Rachkovsky mentioned that an unidentified émigré friend of Turski had come into a large inheritance in Russia and intended to give Burtsev, Teplov and Kashintsev 25,000 roubles to allow them to renew publication of their journal. See report of 20 July (2 August) 1901. Cited in Menʹshchikov, Russkii politicheskii sysk, 128. 82 Narodovolets, no. 4, 2–9: ‘Nikolai II i poslednii, Obmanov’ (Nicholas II and last, Deceiver). 83 Petr Berngardovich Struve (1870–1944), former member of the Emancipation of Labour Group, editor/publisher of the liberal Osvobozhdenie, Stuttgart, Paris, 1902. 84 Bint was expelled but not pursued, so as not to upset the good relations which existed between the Swiss and Russian police. See Dictionnaire Historique de la Suisse, http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/f/F28359.php [accessed 12 December 2016]. 85 This information was doubtless obtained from Beitner who visited Burtsev and Krakov regularly at this time. See Rataev’s Report no. 96, of 18 (31) August 1903. Cited in Menʹshchikov, Russkii politicheskii sysk, 163–164. Krakov would later be arrested on his return to Russia in July 1904 as a result of Beitner’s provocation. He had set off on his assassination attempt with a Browning pistol and money supplied by the informer. See ibid., 215–216. Muravʹev, Nikolai Valerianovich (1850–1908) Minister of Justice, 1894–1905. 86 The New York Times, 5 September 1909, SM3: ‘The Man Who Unmasked the Spies of the Czar’. The arrest was also described in the anarchist journal Khleb i volia (Bread and Freedom) no. 5 (1904). Burtsev later gave 19 November as the date of his arrest, which was again incorrect. See Byloe, no. 6 (February 1904) 63–64. The New York Times, meanwhile, reported correctly that the arrest had taken place on 21 November. See The New York Times, 22 November 1903, 2: ‘Raid on Anarchists’. 87 Burtsev, Borʹba, 152. 88 GARF f. 1721, op. 1, ed. khr. 35: Burtsev to Teplov, 1 December 1903, ll. 15–16. 89 Ibid., ‘Les expulsions Bourtzeff et Crakoff ’, ll. 125, 126. Kuliabko-Koretsky, N. I. (1855–1924) criminal lawyer, politically close to the Populists, later, correspondent of Russkie vedomosti. The association in question was the Assemblée plénière des colonies russe, polonaise, arménienne et géorgienne, which numbered around 300. 90 Burtsev, Borʹba, 152–153. 91 Byloe, no. 6 (February 1904) 63–64. Statement dated Berne, 5 December 1903. 92 RGASPI f. 328, op. 1, ed. khr. 58: Prelooker to Burtsev c/o P. Akselrod, 13 January 1904. 93 The Anglo-Russian, vol. 7, no. 8 (February 1904), 796. 94 Ibid., 793–795. ‘There is a need for an anti-governmental government and a nonparty party: Russians, Poles, Jews, Finns, Armenians, Latvians, Lithuanians and others, unite!’ 95 The Anglo-Russian, vol. VII, no. 9 (March), 806–807. 96 RGASPI f. 328, op. 1, ed. khr. 59.

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97 Ibid., emphasis added. 98 Paléologue, The Turning Point, 102. 99 Kronenbitter, ‘Sherlock Holmes’, 47. 100 Paléologue, The Turning Point, 60–61. 101 Ibid., 65–66. Diary entry for 26 April 1904. 102 Jean Jaurès (1859–1914), French Socialist leader and founder/editor of LʹHumanité. 103 Ilʹia Adolʹfovich Rubanovich (1859–1922), senior SR, representative to the Second International. In 1904 set up La Tribune Russe to Counter Plehve’s La Revue Russe. 104 Burtsev, Borʹba, 153–154. 105 Paléologue, The Turning Point, 86. Diary entry for 1 June 1904. 106 Plehve was assassinated by the SR E. Sozonov who threw a bomb into his carriage on 15 (28) July 1904. The plot was orchestrated by the then head of the Combat Organization Evno Azef. 107 Paléologue, The Turning Point, 100–101. Diary entry for 28 July 1904. 108 Ibid., 102. Diary entry for 30 July 1904. It is of interest to note that, however negative Paléologue’s opinion of Burtsev may have been at that time, it did not prevent him petitioning for the revolutionary’s release from prison following his return to Russia in 1914. 109 Petr Dmitrievich Sviatopolk-Mirsky (1857–1914). Initially welcomed by the Liberals he was later held responsible for the events of 9 (22) January 1905 (Bloody Sunday) and replaced by A. G. Bulygin. 110 RGASPI f. 328, op. 1, ed. khr. 206, l. 4. 111 The exact date of Burtsev’s arrival in London is uncertain. Whereas Paléologue still has him in Paris as late as 30 July, a Sûreté agent in Switzerland reported that Burtsev and Krakov arrived in London on 4 June. See AN F7/12521/1. Suisse. 4 June 1904. ‘Bellegarde, Bourtzeff and Krakoff, S.R. expelled from Geneva and from Paris arrive in London’. Cited in, Lesure, M. Les sources de lʹhistoire d Russie aux Archives Nationales. Paris: Mouton, 1970, 305–313. 112 The Anglo-Russian, vol. 7, no. 12 (June–July 1904), 844–845: ‘Our Seventh Anniversary’. 113 For a detailed examination of the events, see Judge, E. H. Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom. New York: New York University Press, 1992. 114 The Times, 10 November 1903, 9: ‘Retirement of Superintendent Melville’. For a description of Melville’s later role as the founding father of MI5, see Cook, MI5’s First Spymaster. 115 An Executive Committee set up to organize his testimonial included amongst its members Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. See The Times, 1 January 1904, 5: ‘Testimonial to Superintendent Melville’. (Whether the creator of Sherlock Holmes was acquainted with the Inspector or whether, indeed, the latter might have served as a role model for his Chief of Police Lestrade is unknown.) 116 The Times, 18 May 1904, 5. 117 The Daily Express, 28 February 1906, 2: ‘To Spy on Russia’s Enemies – Ex-Superintendent Melville Joins the Czar’s Police Force’. 118 The Daily Express, 2 March 1906, 5: ‘Superintendent Melville’. 119 The Daily Express, 16 February 1905, 4: ‘Russian Spies in Europe – How the Czar’s Police Is Organised in Paris and London’. 120 TNA, PRO KV 6/47, 8 December 1904 (274/B). 121 HIA Okhrana archive, 54/VI/k/23 c. Report from Agent E. Farce to Foreign Agency, 25 April 1906, ff. 4–5.

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122 See, for example, The Birmingham Daily Post, 7 August 1900, 5. Attempts had already been made on the lives of, amongst others, the Prince of Wales in Belgium in April and on the Shah of Persia in Paris in August, while in July, Italian anarchists had succeeded in murdering King Umberto I. 123 The Times, 28 August 1901, 5: ‘Alien Immigration’. 124 The day after the bill was finally introduced, the Manchester Evening Chronicle carried an editorial in which it triumphantly declared: ‘The dirty, destitute, diseased, verminous and criminal foreigner who dumps himself on our soil and rates simultaneously, shall be firmly forbidden to land!’ The Manchester Evening Chronicle, 19 April 1905, 2: ‘The Unwanted, the Unfed, and the Unemployed’. 125 Salisbury died a year after his resignation, on 22 August 1903. 126 The Anglo-Russian, vol. 7, no. 11 (May 1904), 834. 127 The Times, 12 July 1904, 6: ‘House of Commons. Monday, July 11’. So many amendments were being tabled that the Bill was estimated to be making progress at the rate of half a line a day. 128 The Anglo-Russian, vol. 9, no. 5 (June 1905), 946. 129 RGASPI f. 328, op. 1, ed. khr. 66: I. Rubanovich to Burtsev c/o Teplov, 12 August 1904, l. 2. 130 The Anglo-Russian, vol. 8, no. 11 (November 1904), 859 and 863. 131 GARF f. 102, op. 316, 1905, d.1, t. 3. l. 235. Cited in Panteleeva, ‘Obshchestvennopoliticheskaia i izdatelʹskaia deiatelʹnostʹ V. L. Burtseva’, 149–150. 132 Ibid. 133 See, for example, Report of 11 March 1905 from Annemasse stating that three SRs who were ‘en relation’ with Burtsev, are set to leave Switzerland for France and then Russia. AN F7/12521/1. Suisse. Cited in Lesure, ‘Les mouvements révolutionnaires russes’, 300. 134 Quoted in Ascher, A. The Revolution of 1905: Russia in Disarray. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988, 54. 135 9 (22) January 1905, when troops fired into a peaceful demonstration killing hundreds (and by some accounts, thousands) of civilians. 136 Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich (1857–1905), killed on 4 (17) February by the SR Ivan Kaliaev who threw a bomb at him while he attended a service in the Kremlin. The assassination, like that of Plehve had been organized by Evno Azef. 137 Paléologue, The Turning Point, 191. Diary entry for 19 February 1905. He expanded on this theme in his entry for 30 March 1905, in which he also repeated his belief that Burtsev was one of the leaders of the Combat Organization. Ibid., 213–214. 138 Prelooker, J. Under the Russian and British Flags. A Story of True Experience. London: Spriggs Publishing Agency, 1912, 147–148. 139 The Times first reported the explosion as occurring on 11 March but later trial reports gave it as 25 February. The Times, 13 March 1905, 6: ‘Bomb Explosion in St Petersburg’ and, ibid., 24 May 1905, 13: ‘Alleged Conspiracy to Obtain a Passport’. 140 The leniency of the fines might point to a degree of sympathy for the defendants’ cause on the part of the judge. 141 Hollingsworth, ‘The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom’, 61–62. 142 Burtsev, Borʹba, 158–159. 143 Florinsky, M. ‘Twilight of Absolutism: 1905’, Russian Review, vol. 8, no. 4 (October 1949), 331. The Manifesto itself was signed on 17 (30) October. For a detailed examination of the period, see Ascher, The Revolution of 1905. 144 RGASPI f. 328, op. 1, ed. khr. 206, l. 4.

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145 According to the historian Jay Bergman, Zasulich’s brief detention did not take place till January 1906. See Bergman, J. Vera Zasulich: A Biography. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983, 203–204. 146 The Anglo-Russian, vol. 9, no. 6 (December 1905), 974, 976. 147 HIA Okhrana archive 198/XVIId/3B. My thanks to David Saunders for bringing this information to my attention. 148 Akhmerova, Burtsev, 17–18, 60 (note 29). Circular dated 10 (23) November 1905. 149 Formally known as Verzhbolovo (or Virbalis). 150 Ilʹia Isidorovich Fondaminsky (1880–1942) (literary pseudonym Bunakov) SocialistRevolutionary. In emigration in Paris from 1907. At the outbreak of the First World War took up a Defensist position and with Plekhanov co-edited the journal Prizyv (Call). Later turned to Christianity. 151 Burtsev, Borʹba, 163. 152 Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, I, 125–126. He stayed at the same hotel till his departure for Paris in September 1906. See also Sherikh, Nevskii bez sekretov: Byli i nebylitsy. Moscow: Tsentroploigraf, 2006, 144–146. He placed his note in Son of the Fatherland (Syn Otechestva), a recently founded daily newspaper with Socialist-Revolutionary leanings which survived only until 2 (15) December 1905. His return was also announced in Moscow’s Vecherniaia pochta (Evening Post) on 16 (29) November 1905 shortly before it too was closed down. 153 The interim laws on freedom of association (meeting) were promulgated on 12 (25) October, while those on freedom of the press came into force on 24 November (7 December). Although the latter abolished censorship, they did little to ameliorate the position of the press since authorities still had the power to suppress publications and there was still a ban on the reporting of key sociopolitical events (such as strikes). See Burtsev, V. Istoriko-revoliutsіonnyi alʹmanakh izdatelʹstva ‘Shipovnik’. Sanktpeterburg, 1907, 312, 353. 154 TSGIA, f. 776, op. 8, d 2160, l. 3. Cited in Lurʹe, Khraniteli, 164, note 9. 155 Burtsev noted that a rare exception was P. B. Struve who congratulated him on his decision to return. See Burtsev, Borʹba, 165. 156 This short-lived journal had been founded in 1904 as Nasha Zhiznʹ (Our Life) under the editorship of E. D. Kuskova, co-founder, together with Struve and Bogucharsky, of the liberal Soiuz Osvobozhdenia (Union of Liberation). 157 Pavel Eliseevich (1877–1931) Shchegolev, literary historian and social activist. 158 Vasily Yakovlevich (real name Yakovlev) Boguchаrsky (1860–1915), journalist, historian. Arrested in 1884 (like Burtsev his address had been found on Lopatin when he was arrested). Exiled to Siberia where he met George Kennan. Released in 1890. Populist, legal Marxist. Associated with Struve’s journal Osvobozhdenie. 159 Nikolai Ellidiforovich Paramonov (1876–1951), businessman, publisher. 160 Shchegolev later gave the start date as 28 January and the date of the last issue as 29 October 1907. See ‘Iz Istorii “Bylogo”’, Byloe, no. 1 (23) July 1917, Petrograd, 5. 161 For a thorough and detailed description of the journal and its contributors during this phase of its existence, see Lurʹe, Khraniteli, 48–79. 162 Lurʹe, Khraniteli, 52. 163 Indeed, all subsequent issues achieved similar sales. See ‘Iz Istorii “Bylogo”’, Byloe, no. 1 (23) July 1917, Petrograd, 5. 164 For example, the ‘Historical Bibliography’ section of the April 1907 issue dealt predominantly with newly published writings on the recently dissolved State Duma. 165 How little in fact had changed was evidenced by such events as the passing of the death sentence in February 1906 on the editors of a Buryat newspaper for publishing

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anti-tsarist articles (a sentence later commuted to exile for life) and, two months later, by the sentence of eight years’ exile given to the editor of another journal. See Burtsev, Alʹmanakh, 104, 157. 166 Kozʹmin, B. P. S. V. Zubatov i ego korrespondenty. Moscow: Gosizdat, 1928, 79–80. 167 Nikolai Petrovich Starodvorsky (1863–1918). Member of Narodnaia Volia. One of those imprisoned for his role in the murder of Sudeikin. 168 Burtsev, Borʹba, 300. 169 Burtsev, Borʹba, 358. The exact location of the flat (near what is now Ploshchadʹ Vosstaniya) was described in ‘Degaevshchina. (Materialy i dokumenty)’, Byloe, no. 4, April 1906, 33. 170 In fact, Starodvorsky had also made a fourth and final secret plea for clemency but this was only brought to Burtsev’s attention in 1908, long after he had left Russia. 171 Burtsev, Borʹba, 174. 172 HIA Okhrana archive 198/XVIId, Vladimir Lʹvovich Burtsev, Folder 3a, Agent’s report, Geneva, 30 September 1906. Also Burtsev, Borʹba, 175. 173 On his release he headed first to Annemas and then Evian to visit colleagues before on 13 October returning to Paris. He arrived back in St Petersburg on 6 (19) October. See HIA Okhrana archive 198/XVIId, Vladimir Lʹvovich Burtsev, Folder 2, Spravka no. 19, 1906, l. 3. 174 Mikhail Rafailovich Gots (1866–1906) from 1900 in emigration in Paris, Berlin and Geneva. Member of the Combat Organization. Considered by the Russian Police to be one of the most dangerous Socialists-Revolutionaries. 175 His system of pro-government trade unions, also known as police socialism. 176 Narodovolets, no 1, April 1897, 39. 177 Gots, M. R. ‘S. V. Zubatov (Stranichka iz perezhitogo)’, in Byloe, no. 9 (September 1906), 63–68. Three of Zubatov’s letters were later published by Burtsev in Paris. (See Byloe, no. 14, 1912, 74–80.) These letters and later correspondence between the two, which lasted till February 1916, is reproduced in Kozʹmin, Zubatov, 50–102. 178 Kozʹmin, Zubatov, 59. 179 Ibid., 68. 180 Ibid., 77. 181 Ibid., 80. 182 Longuet, J. and Silber, G. Les Dessous de la Police russe. Terroristes et Policiers. Azev, Harting et Cie. Étude historique et critique. Paris: Juven, 1909, 68. Urusov, Sergei Dmitrevich (1862–1937) leading Mason and later Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of the Provisional Government. 183 Lurʹe, Khraniteli, 69. Shchegolev was charged not under article 128 – for ‘expressing insolent contempt for the reigning Supreme authority’, but under article 107 of the criminal code: for ‘insulting the late grandfather or parent of the reigning monarch’. 184 A copy of this rare edition is held by the British Library. It is a handsome volume with delightful illustrations for each month by Bilibin and others, and also a number of portraits. Burtsev himself is mentioned only once (in the entry for 4 December 1897, the date of his arrest in London). The almanac contains contributions from Burtsev as well as from his co-editors and a number of his co-contributors to The Past, such as Yu. Steklov, V. Vodovozov, E. Chirikov, E. Kuskova and S. Prokopovich. A ‘second edition’ appeared in 1917 under a different name. See Burtsev, V. L. (ed.) Kalendar ʹ russkoi revoliutsii. Izdatelʹstvo ‘Shipovnik’. Petrograd: Shipovnik, 1917. 185 BA, Sergei Svatikov Papers – Manuscripts, Svatikov, S. G. ‘Vladimir Lʹvovich Burtsev. On the occasion of his 75th birthday’, 21.

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186 The polozhenie o chrezvychainoi okhrana (Law on Extraordinary Measures of Security) was introduced shortly after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 as a ‘temporary measure’ but was only repealed in 1917. 187 Bogucharsky was fortunate to have left the country a few days earlier and so avoided arrest. The same Drachevsky had already been governor of Rostov on Don and there had already taken pleasure in the persecution of Paramonov. 188 In place of the eleventh and twelfth issues subscribers received instead the first issue of an historical collection Our Country (Nasha strana). See Lurʹe, Khraniteli, 195. 189 He was arrested on 29 November 1909 for the crime of corresponding with Burtsev in Paris. Following his expulsion he lived in Bulgaria until 1913, when he was allowed to return home. See Lurʹe, Khraniteli, 111. 190 Although Paramonov received a sentence of three years for this crime, his lawyers succeeded in delaying proceedings relating to a subsequent charge until such a time that he was released thanks to the general amnesty of 1913 which had been declared to commemorate the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty. See http://www​ .serafimovich.org/paramonov-n-e.html [accessed 12 December 2016]. 191 Burtsev dates the meeting to May 1906 (Burtsev, Borʹba, 183), whereas Bakai gives it variously as July (Bakai, M. O razoblachiteliakh i razoblachitelʹstve (Pisʹmo k V. Burtsevu). New York, 1912, 9) or 20 May (Kantor, R. M. ‘Kratkaia avtobiografiia M. E. Bakaia’. In Russkoe proshloe, Petrograd: Tipografiia L. Ia. Ganzburg, 1923. Kn. 5, 155.) 192 One name in the list which greatly surprised Burtsev was that of the famous Polish philosopher and writer Stanisław Brzozowski (1878–1911). Disputes over Burtsev’s accusation of the latter would continue into the 1930s. 193 Burtsev. Borʹba, 192. 194 Ibid., 185. 195 Bakai, O razoblachiteliakh, 26. 196 ‘Iz obzora vazhneishikh doznanii o gosudarstvennykh prestupleniiakh za 1901. Polozhenie emigratsii v 1901g’., no. 3/15 March 1907, 239–256. Another item identified by F. M. Lurʹe as being supplied by Bakai was ‘Iz obzora vazhneishikh doznanii o gosudarstvennykh prestupleniiakh za 1894’, no. 5/17 May 1907, 228–252. Lurʹe also claims he was the source for an article on the ‘Okhrana Brotherhood’, ‘Iz politseiskikh rassledovanii 1882…’ no. 4 April 1906, 304–316, but since that predates his meeting with Burtsev this is unlikely. See Lurʹe, Khraniteli, bib. nos. 184, 441, 492. 197 Lurʹe, Khraniteli, 79, 178 198 The article would appear in 1908, in the first Paris edition of Byloe. 199 Lurʹe, Khraniteli, 82. 200 Bakai, O razoblachiteliakh, 24. 201 Nikolaevskii, B. ‘Konets Azefa. Berlin: Izdatelʹstvo ‘Petropolis’, 1931, 70, 77. 202 Burtsev, Borʹba, 125–126. 203 D. S., ‘The Russian Spy System: The Azeff Scandals in Russia’, The English Review, vol. 1 (March 1909), 816–832. 204 Burtsev, Borʹba, 124–125. Nikolaevsky, Aseff, 38. 205 Pavlov, D. B. and Peregudova, Z. I. (eds.) Pisʹma Azefa: 1893–1917. Moscow: Terra, 1994, 93. Azef to Rataev, 2 October 1903. 206 Rataev also succeeded in convincing the Director of the Russian Department of the French Foreign Office, Maurice Paléologue, of Burtsev’s central role in the Combat Organization. See Paléologue, G. M. La Russie des Tsars pendant la Grande Guerre. 3 vols. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1922 vol. I (Du 20 juillet 1914 au 2 juin 1915), 294.

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207 Kronenbitter, ‘Sherlock Holmes’, 47. 208 Burtsev, Borʹba, 168. Mintslov, S. R. Peterburg v 1903–1910 godakh. Riga: Izdatelelʹstvo ‘Kniga dlia vsekh’, 1931, 5. 209 Burtsev. Borʹba, 195. 210 Since his return to Russia, Burtsev was aware that he was constantly being followed by police spies but treated such surveillance as nothing more than a minor annoyance. 211 Burtsev. Borʹba, 196. 212 Gapon was, in fact, murdered in April that year.

Part II 1

Le Journal, 6 July 1909, 1: ‘Un Nouveau Scandale Russe’.

Chapter 5 1 Mintslov, Peterburg, 224–225. 2 The diary entry was for 25 June (8 July) 1907. 3 Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, 198, 335 (note 115). 4 See reminiscence of D. Sverchkov below. 5 Burtsev, Borʹba, 205. 6 Ibid., 203. 7 According to Police reports, by May he was resident at 11 rue de Lunain, Montrouge, in the 14th arrondissement, a flat which he shared with a Russian journalist by the name of Franco. This is confirmed by Longuet and Silber, who stated that he had been living in a comfortable, modest apartment in Montrouge for the two years preceding his exposure of Garting. See Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, I, 126, and Longuet and Silber, Terroristes, 23. 8 He had also discussed the possibility of a second edition of his Za sto let, and the publication of a new émigré newspaper whose slogan would be ‘Neither Lenin, nor Chernov, nor the reaction!’ Burtsev, Borʹba, 215. 9 The article appeared in the journal Red Banner (Czerwony standar). According to Bakai, Burtsev claimed he had been let down by a Polish Social Democrat, ‘T’, who had failed to keep his promise to keep the list secret. See Bakai, O razoblachiteliakh, 31. 10 Burtsev would also be grateful for the financial and other support supplied by his faithful assistant Lazarʹ Rotshtein (pseud. ‘Valerian’), who had married into a wealthy and politically sympathetic family. See HIA Okhrana archive 198/XVIId/. Agent’s report, 15/18 1912 re Rotshtein’s marriage to E. B. Mamulova. 11 Lurʹe, Khraniteli, 18. 12 Sverchkov, D. Na zare revoliutsii. 3-e izdanie. Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1925, 255–256. 13 Tsarskii listok. Sverchkov claimed they had been stolen from the Okhrana archive and sold to Burtsev for 100 roubles each. 14 Burtsev, Borʹba, 190, 237–238. 15 Ibid., 233–234.

Notes 16

293

Ibid., 225–226, 237. There was a similar exchange of letters with the Wilno Okhrana, which resulted in a meeting between Bakai and a certain Dontsov in Berlin in August 1908. This too resulted in further self-incrimination on the part of the police when they admitted to knowing the names of most members of the Central Committee of the PSR but denied ever having heard of the name Azef. 17 Burtsev, Borʹba, 233. 18 Ibid., 239. 19 Savinkov, Boris. Vospominaniia terrorista. Konʹ blednyi. Konʹ voronoi. Moscow: Zakaharov, 2002, 351, 338–340. 20 Burtsev, Borʹba, 239. 21 Ibid., 243. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 244. 24 Burtsev, Borʹba, 245–246. 25 Vozrozhdenie, 5 March 1928: ‘Beseda s V. L. Burtsevym’. 26 For details of Azef ’s involvement in the planning of the failed assassination attempt which was scheduled to take place on board the Russian cruiser Rurik when the tsar reviewed the vessel in October 1908 see Spence, R. B. Boris Savinkov: Renegade on the Left. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, 69–72. 27 According to another, contemporaneous version, Lopukhin’s words were, ‘I know of no Raskin or Vinogradov but I do know the engineer Evno Azef whom I met on two occasions.’ See Longuet and Silber, Terroristes, 69. This was also the recollection of one of those present at the tribunal. See Savinkov,Vospominaniia, 352. 28 According to Burtsev it opened in Rubanovich’s flat. See Burtsev, Borʹba, 259. It would later move to the flat of Boris Savinkov at 32, rue La Fontaine. See Savinkov, Vospominaniia, 353. 29 Quote from Anatole France, in Longuet and Silber, Terroristes, 64. 30 Burtsev, Borʹba, 261. 31 Ibid., 266–267. 32 Ibid., 266. 33 Ibid., 273. 34 Alexander Valentinovich Amfiteatrov (1862–1938) – journalist, and literary and theatre critic – wrote to Maxim Gorky thus: ‘Burtsev is flying around the area currently – he’s like a meteor – you can never know what day or hour or minute he’ll suddenly drop in from the clouds.’ See Gorky, Maksim, Gorʹkii i russkaia zhurnalistika nachala XX veka. Neizdannaia perepiska. (Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 95.) Moscow: Nauka, 1988, 119, 29 October 1908. 35 Lurʹe, Khraniteli, 93. See also Longuet and Silber, Terroristes, 82. 36 The ‘Statement of the Paris Group of SRs’ Revolutionaries’, no. 1, was published in their newspaper Revolutionary Thought, on 7 January 1909. 37 France, Archives nationales (AN) F/7/12521/3: Le mouvement révolutionnaire en Russie (1901–1909) ‘Le Provocateur Azeff ’ (French translation) 15 January 1908. 38 The debate still continues, with some holding the view that the shock caused by the exposure had not dissipated by 1917 and, indeed, was partly to blame for the fragmentation of the party in the run-up to the October Revolution, which, in turn, contributed to the success of the Bolshevik takeover. See, for example, L. Praisman, ‘Fenomen Azefa’, http://www.memo.ru/history/terror/preisman.htm [accessed 8 June 2016].

294

Notes

39 Kropotkin to Burtsev, 6 May 1909. Na chuzhoi storone, 1924, no. 6, 129–130. In the same letter Kropotkin mentioned that Vera Figner now not only refused to discuss the affair but might even be on the point of resigning from the party. 40 Gorky, Gorʹkii i russkaia zhurnalistika, 138, 140, February 1909. 41 The New York Times, 29 August 1909, ‘The Man Who Unmasked the Spies of the Czar’. 42 Darkest Russia, 21 January 1912, 2: ‘The Lopukhin Case’. 43 GARF R. 5802. op.1. d. 2163. Reminiscence of White immigrant V. Sakharov, 12 December 1919. 44 Alʹbus, N. ‘Poslednii iz don kikhotov: k desiatiletiiu konchiny V. L. Burtsev’, Vozrozhdenie: literaturno-politicheskiia tetradi, Paris, Tetradʹ 24 (November– December 1952), 152. 45 Burtsev, Borʹba, 368. 46 Ibid., 321. 47 Ibid., 323. 48 Ibid., 181. 49 Ibid., 325. 50 The outcome of the Azef affair and its findings that Bakai was not a police plant did, however, have an impact on the case of Brzozowski, which was heard in Krakow in early 1909. 51 Burtsev, Borʹba, 346. Fortunately, the next few anxious months passed without any tragedy befalling his contacts in Russia. 52 Ibid., 365. Martov, Y. O. Zapiski sotsial-demokrata. Kniga pervaia … Berlin: Izdatelʹstvo Z. I. Grzhebina, 1922, 37. 53 Claim made by Burtsev in his preface to Longuet and Silber, Terroristes, x. For what little is known of the structure and operations of Burtsev’s agency see Kronenbitter, ‘Sherlock Holmes’, 52–56. 54 Longuet and Silber, Terroristes, 216. 55 Fischer, B. (ed.) Okhrana: The Paris Operations of the Russian Imperial Police. Washington: History Staff of the Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 1997, 27. 56 HIA Okhrana archive 198/XVIId/. Garting to Trusevich, 30 October (12 November) 1908. 57 Leroy also passed on the intriguing snippet that his former superior had been the proud recipient of a Légion d’Honneur from a grateful French government. This award doubtless held pride of place in his collection, alongside the Royal Victorian Order received some ten years earlier from the British monarch. 58 Bakai, O razoblachiteliakh, 46. 59 Kronenbitter, ‘The Sherlock Holmes of the Revolution’, 51. 60 See Le Journal, 6 July 1909, 2. 61 Longuet and Silber, Terroristes, 237–238. 62 See, for example, Novoe vremia, 9 July (26 June o.s.), 1909, ‘Novye razoblacheniia Burtseva’. 63 The Times, 14 July 1909, 5: ‘The Russian Secret Police’. Rataev’s claims had appeared in Le Matin the previous day. 64 Longuet and Silber, Terroristes, 244. 65 The New York Times, 25 July 1909: ‘Dogged by Assassins. Jaurès says Russians Seek Life of Bourtzeff ’. 66 Les Hommes du Jour, 25 September 1909.

Notes

295

67 Longuet and Silber, Terroristes. Silber’s name appeared alongside that of Burtsev on the nameplate on the door of the Obshchee delo editorial offices at 50 rue St Jacques. See Polesʹe, 9 March 1911: ‘Kak zhivet Burtsev’. 68 Le Journal, 17 July 1909, ‘Bourtzeff commence ces Mémoires’. The series ran until 19 August. 69 HIA Okhrana archive 198/XVIId, Vladimir Lʹvovich Burtsev, 13 May 1909, intercepted letter to A. Khavskaia. His initial plan had been to issue two parts per month but for financial reasons he was unable to do so. (See Byloe, no. 11/12, 1909.) 70 Burtsev later described their meeting for the Russian press under the pen name Volkov. See Russkie vedomosti, 22 December 1910, 19. See also Agafonov, Zagranichnaia okhranka, 343–348. 71 The New York Times, 29 August, 5, 12 September 1909: ‘The Man Who Unmasked the Spies of the Czar’. 72 Tsarskii listok. 73 Na chuzhoi storone, 1924, no. 6, 137–138. 74 Gorky, Gorʹkii i russkaia zhurnalistika, 792. 75 Russkoe Slovo, 22 January 1910: ‘V. L. Burtsev v Amerike’. 76 GARF f. 824, op. 2, d. 114, l. 29. Golʹdenberg to Chaikovsky, May 1894. Cited in Panteleeva, ‘Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia i izdatelʹskaia deiatelʹnostʹ V. L. Burtseva’, 164. 77 GARF f. 102, del. 3. 1891, d. 688, T. 1 and 2. ‘Po soobshcheniiam agenta Sergeeva v Nʹiu Iorke.’ l. 1 ob. 43, 47-a. Cited in Panteleeva, ‘Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia i izdatelʹskaia deiatelʹnostʹ V. L. Burtseva’, 164. 78 The story was covered in detail in the press and was followed with great interest by the American public. See, for example, The New York Times, 27 February 1910: ‘Denies He’s a Spy for Czar Nicholas’, 26 April 1910: ‘Bourtzeff Is Sued by Man He Accused’ and 8 November 1912: ‘Evalenko Abandons Suit for Slander’. 79 It was reported that at one lecture shortly after his arrival he was roundly booed by an audience of Jewish workers who disagreed with the theory he was attempting to expound: Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, I, 128, and footnote 95. 80 The New York Times, 26 April 1910. Later that year he would publish this lecture as Otvetstvennostʹ tsaria, and in French translation as La responsabilité du tsar. Paris, 1910. 81 Russkoe Slovo, 10 September 1912: ‘Beseda s Burtsevym’. 82 Darkest Russia, 8 October 1913, 164: ‘Okhrana in France’. 83 HIA Okhrana archive 198/XVIId, Vladimir Lʹvovich Burtsev, Report no. 383, 9/22 April 1910. 84 To the six issues of The Past which appeared before his departure (nos. 7–12) he added two more (no. 13, 1910; and no. 14, 1912). One final issue, no. 15, was not published. As for The Common Cause, only four issues in total saw the light of day: no. 1. October 1909, no. 2. November 1909, no. 3. January 1910 and no. 4. August 1910. 85 Burtsev, V. L. Tsarʹ i vneshnaia politika. Vinovniki Russko-iaponskoi voiny. Po tainym dokumentam: Zapiske Gr. Lamsdorfa i Malinovoi knige. Berlin: Eberhard Frowein Verlag, 1910. 86 HIA Okhrana archive 198/XVIId, Vladimir Lʹvovich Burtsev, Report no. 1383, 24 October (6 November) 1911. 87 See, for example, Le Journal 13, 16 September 1910, 1.

296

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88 Bakai, O razoblachiteliakh. He offered his earlier short autobiography, dated February 1909, to the Rechʹ newspaper but it was declined. It was eventually published some fourteen years later. See Kantor, ‘Kratkaia avtobiografiia M. E. Bakaia’. 89 Bakai, O razoblachiteliakh, 61. 90 Bakai, M. Les Dessous de la Police Russe (Series: LʹAssiette au Beurre, no. 415). Paris: 1909. 91 Frederick Albert Cook (1865–1940) was the American explorer who claimed to have reached the North Pole in April 1908 – a year earlier than Peary. In December 1909, having reviewed the case, a commission of the University of Copenhagen ruled that Cook had not, in fact, reached the Pole. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_ Cook [accessed 8 June 2016]. 92 HIA, B. I. Nicolaevsky Collection. Series 95, Menʹshchikov. Burtsev, V. L. ‘Vystuplenie Menʹshchikova protiv menia pod pokrovitelʹstvom nekotorykh emigrantov. 1910–1911’. 93 Amfiteatrov, A. V. Na vsiakii zvuk: zametki. St Petersburg: Energiia, 1913, 145. 94 The New York Times, 28 May 1911: ‘Former Russian Police Chief Tells Amazing Secrets’. 95 Dmitry Grigorʹevich Bogrov (1887–1911) shot Stolypin in Kiev Opera House on 14 September 1911. The Premier died from his wounds four days later. Bogrov was sentenced to death by hanging. 96 GARF R. 5802, op. 2, ed. khr. 666, l. 62–63, Kropotkin to Burtsev 28 February 1911. http://www.oldcancer.narod.ru/Nonfiction/PAK-Letters91.htm#110228 [accessed 8 June 2016]. 97 Koliada, E. G. ‘O Gorʹkom i Lopatine (Po pisʹmam Lopatina k V. L. Burtsevu 1908– 1914)’ in Gorʹkii i russkaia zhurnalistika, 847. Others regularly to be found at the offices at 50 Rue St Jacques included Bakai, Georges Silber, a certain pseudonymous ‘Nikolʹ’ and the housekeeper Natalia Maklakova. See Polesʹe, 9 March 1911, ‘Kak zhivet Burtsev.’ 98 Gorky to Burtsev, 22 August 1910 quoted in Koliada, ‘O Gorʹkom i Lopatine’, 849. 99 Ibid., 853. 100 Melʹgunov, S. P. Vospominaniia i dnevniki. Moscow: Indrik, 2003, 189. 101 Gorky to Burtsev, 22 August 1910 quoted in Koliada, ‘O Gorʹkom i Lopatine’, 855. 102 Gorky, Gorʹkii i russkaia zhurnalistika, Amfiteatrov to Gorky, 1 November 1911, 363. 103 Melʹgunov, Vospominaniia, 190. 104 See also Novoe Vremya, 28 May (10 June) 1912 and Rechʹ of same date: ‘Plan V. L. Burtseva’. 105 HIA, B. I. Nicolaevsky Collection, Series 95, box 4 (31) Gorky to Burtsev, undated. 106 Na chuzhoi storone, 1924. no. 6, 147–149, Kropotkin to Burtsev, 10 June 1912. http:// www.oldcancer.narod.ru/Nonfiction/PAK-Letters91.htm#110228 [accessed 8 June 2016]. 107 See Pavlov, Pisʹma Azefa, 181–188. Azef ’s five letters to Burtsev date from 7 December 1911 to 27 October 1912. From the first it appears that Burtsev had discovered his Berlin address due to the negligence of the person in Paris whom he’d asked to send a copy of Budushchee. 108 Le Matin, 18 August 1912, 1: ‘Un rendez-vous sensationnel’. 109 Lopatin to Burtsev 5 September 1912 quoted in Koliada, ‘O Gorʹkom i Lopatine’, 844. One of the inconsequential snippets in Burtsev’s account of their meeting was his discovery that Azef was a vegetarian.

Notes

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110 Gorky, Gorʹkii i russkaia zhurnalistika, 798. See also HIA, B. I. Nicolaevsky Collection, Series 95, Gorky to Burtsev, 4 September 1912. 111 See Burtsev’s Testimony to the Provisional Government’s Extraordinary Commission of Investigation of 1 June 1917, reproduced in Kaptelov, B. I. (comp.) et al. Delo provokatora Malinovskogo. Moscow: Izdatelʹstvo ‘Respublika’, 1992, 58–59. For a comprehensive study of Malinovsky see Elwood, Roman Malinovsky. 112 Darkest Russia, 21 January 1914, 12: ‘Intercepted letters’. Burtsev claimed that the embassy spent around one and a half million francs annually on this activity. 113 The Times, 10 July 1914, 5: ‘Russian Secret Police’. See also Darkest Russia, 15 July 1914, 110: ‘The Okhrana Abroad’. 114 Lopatin to Burtsev, 30 December 1913 (12 January 1914) and 5 (18) May 1914. Quoted in Koliada, ‘O Gorʹkom i Lopatine’, 857. 115 Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, I, 130. 116 HIA Okhrana archive 198/XVIId/. Agent’s report, 16 (29) December 1913. 117 Ibid., 10 (23) September 1914. Agency report, Bordeaux, describing Burtsev’s secret departure from Paris a month earlier.

Chapter 6 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16

The Times, 14 September 1914, 10: ‘Russia and the War’. ‘Idti navstrechu s’ – to meet halfway/to reach a compromise. In Russian oboronchestvo and porazhenstvo. Burtsev, V. L. ‘Moi priezd v Rossiiu v 1914 g. Iz vospominanii’, Byloe, nos. I, II, Novaia seriia (Paris, 1933), I, 9. The Times, 18 September 1914, 9, ‘Expectant Russia: A Revolutionary’s Views’. The document in question is commonly referred to as the Imperial Manifesto of 2 August although it is signed and dated 20 July (1 August) 1914. Italics added. See full text online at: http://doc.histrf.ru/20/manifest-ot-20-iyulya-1-avgusta-1914-goda/ [accessed 8 June 2016]. Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, I, 14. Jaurès, who was a vociferous anti-militarist, was assassinated by a pro-war French nationalist on 31 July 1914 and buried on 4 August. La Victoire, 16 August 1917. Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk, Moscow (ARAN), f. 646. op. 1, ed. khr. 600. Kropotkin to Burtsev, 8 September 1914. Reproduced online at: http://www​ .oldcancer.narod.ru/Nonfiction/PAK-Letters91.htm#140908 [accessed 8 June 2016]. ‘Glagolem zhechʹ serdtsa liudei’. Alexander Pushkin, ‘The Prophet’. Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, I, 18. The letter appeared in Daggens Nyheter on 23 September. A copy was also published in the English Anarchist journal Freedom vol. 28, no. 30, October 1914. The Russian original is dated Brighton 23 August (5 September) 1914. Nikolai Andreevich Gredeskul (1863–1930 [?]) was a professor of law, member of the first State Duma and founding member of the Constitutional Democratic Party. After the 1917 Bolshevik takeover he argued that Russian intellectuals should come to terms with the new government and himself joined the Communist Party. GARF f. 1721. op. 1, ed. khr. 35. l. 55, ‘Letter to the “Editor”’. Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, I, 22. Koppelman, ‘Burtsev’s Return’, 83.

298

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17 Ibid., 85. 18 The title of the work was given as History of Anarchism. It is more likely, however, to have been one of Kropotkin’s ‘Freedom pamphlets’ published around that time: namely, Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles (London, 1913) or Wars and Capitalism (London, 1914), either of which would have fallen foul of the Russian law which forbade the spread of revolutionary literature. 19 The name of the Russian capital Sankt-Peterburg, with its Germanic-sounding elements (it was actually Dutch) ‘Sankt’ and ‘burg’, had been ‘Russified’ to become ‘Petrograd’ on 18 (31) August 1914. 20 Burtsev, V. L. ‘Moi priezd v Rossiiu v 1914 g. Iz vospominanii’, Byloe, no. 1, Novaia seriia (Paris, 1933). These reminiscences first appeared in serialized form as ‘Memuary V. Burtseva’ in the newspaper Nasha Rechʹ, October–November 1929. 21 Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, I, 27. 22 Ibid., 28. The revolutionary was particularly reviled by the ultra-conservative monarchist V. M. Purishkevich, who is purported once to have exclaimed, ‘Wherever they arrest Burtsev is where they should hang him!’ Ibid., 27. 23 Franz-Albert Aleksandrovich Zein (1862–1918) was the Governor General of Finland from 1909 to 1917. He was briefly imprisoned following the February 1917 revolution and was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. 24 The Times, 1 October 1914, 6: ‘Bourtseff Arrested’, and 2 October 1914, 8: ‘M. Bourtseff ’s Arrest’. 25 Aleksander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749–1802); Aleksander Sergeevich Griboedov (1795–1829). 26 Burtsev continued to question Kerensky’s relationship with foreign defeatists from 1914 to 1916 and in early 1917, with such Zimmerwaldists as Chernov and Natanson, pointing out that, as head of the 4th Duma, he was actually their representative. See GARF. R. 5802. op. 1, del. 40, ll. 9–14. ‘Delo o Kerenskom’ (undated but later than 1918). 27 Extracts from Hervé’s article appeared in The Manchester Guardian, 1 February 1915, 9: ‘The Jews in Russia. A Protest against Their Treatment’. 28 The Times, 27 November 1914, 7: ‘M. Bourtseff Indicted’. In detailing the charge, the newspaper explained that Article 103 was ‘excluded from the operation of the recent amnesty’, though which amnesty they were referring to is unclear. The text of the code read as follows: ‘Any person guilty of insult to the reigning emperor, to the Empress or to the Heir-Apparent, or of threat against their persons, or of abuse through expressions perpetrated directly or even in their absence, with the object of arousing disrespect of their persons, or of the dissemination, or the public exhibition with the same object, of compositions or representations insulting to their dignity, may be punished by penal servitude not exceeding eight years.’ 29 Burtsev mistakenly records the date of the trial as 20 February. See Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, I, 39. 30 Burtsev, Borʹba, 158–159. 31 Witte, S. Iu. Vospominaniia: tsartstvovanie Nikolaia II (Tom 1). Berlin: Slovo, 1922, 369. 32 Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, I, 49. (In Russian: ‘neznakomyi znakomets’.) 33 The Times, 4 February 1915, 7, ‘M. Bourtseff ’s Trial. Sentence of Deportation to Siberia’. 34 The Manchester Guardian, 5 February 1915, 4: ‘House of Commons’. ‘Mr J. King drew the attention of the House to the report that Mr Burtsev a distinguished Russian scholar had been sentenced in Russia to deportation to Siberia.’

Notes

299

35 Jean Raphaël Adrien René Viviani (1863–1925) was the Prime Minister from June 1914 to October 1915, and Raymond Poincaré (1860–1934) the President (1913–1920). 36 Paléologue, La Russie des Tsars, I, 292–299. In his diary entry for 13 February 1915 the Ambassador erroneously recorded that his argument had won the day and that Burtsev had been amnestied. 37 Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, I, 45. 38 In 1917, in the archives of the Petrograd Prisons Inspectorate, Burtsev would discover proof that the head of his prisoner convoy had deliberately disobeyed the court’s ruling that he was not to be handcuffed. See Obshchee delo, 7 October 1917, 2, 3; ‘Tozhe na starom puti’. 39 Burtsev mistakenly located the village on the shores of the Tungusk, a tributary of the Yenisei some miles to the north. 40 The Manchester Guardian, 18 August 1915, 8: ‘Bourtseff ’s Patriotism. A Striking Letter from Exile’. 41 Ibid., 12 October 1915, 6: ‘An Interview with M. Bourtzev’. 42 He was pardoned on 20 July (2 August) 1915. See The Times, 4 August 1915, 6: ‘Pardon of M. Bourtzeff ’. 43 Iskra was one of Russia’s most popular illustrated weeklies issued by the Russian Word newspaper. 44 Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, I, 61. 45 The Times, 4 August 1915, 5: ‘Russian War Policy’. 46 Quotation from the Primary Chronicle or Tale of Bygone Years – A history of Kievan Rus, thought to date from around the beginning of the twelfth century. The quotation continues: ‘Come and reign over us.’ 47 The Progressive Bloc was the name given to a political alliance in the reformed Duma of a range of liberal defencist parties and individuals which was formed to support Russia’s continued participation in the war and, at the same time, to push for a range of liberal reforms (such as political amnesty). 48 Burtsev, Borʹba, 16–18. 49 On his way to Tver ʹ, he had made one final unscheduled secret trip to Petrograd, where he met up with Kerensky and an old friend, the historian V. I. Semevsky. 50 The prorogation (from September 3 (16) to November 5 (18)) was warned against by its president, M. V. Rodzianko, who informed Premier Goremykin that it would be unpopular and would arouse dissatisfaction amongst not only members of the Duma but also the people. Indeed, the immediate reaction to the announcement was the calling of a two-day strike by Petrograd workers. See The Times, 18 September 1915: 6, ‘Acute Tension in Russia’. The term of prorogation was later shortened and it reconvened on 8 (21) October. 51 The Manchester Guardian, 12 October 1915, 6: ‘An Interview with M. Bourtzev. Hopes of a New Russia’. 52 He succeeded N. B. Shcherbatov, who had taken over from the dismissed Maklakov in June but who remained in post only till 26 September. 53 Khvostov later claimed that Burtsev had been given the choice of five years’ internal surveillance in a town of his choice or exile abroad and that he had chosen the former. See Shchegolev, P. E. (ed.) Padenie tsarskogo rezhima. Stenograficheskie otchety doprosov i pokazanii, dannykh v 1917 g. v Chrezvychainoi Sledstvennoi Komissii Vremennogo Pravitelʹstva. Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelʹstvo, 1924–1927, t. 5, 453–454.

300

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54 Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, I, 65. 55 Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, I, 130. 56 Globachev, K. I. Pravda o russkoi revoliutsii: vospominaniia byvshego nachalʹnika Petrogradskogo okhrannogo otdeleniia. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009, 149–150. 57 Burtsev, Borʹba, 179. 58 Note in Burtsev’s preface. See Griboedov, Gore ot Uma, 9. 59 BA, Sergei Svatikov Papers – Manuscripts, Svatikov, S. G. ‘Vladimir Lʹvovich Burtsev. On the occasion of his 75th birthday’, 23. Burtsev would eventually succeed in publishing his work on Radishchev in Paris in 1921. 60 Pares, Bernard, My Russian Memoirs. London: J. Cape, 1931, 577. 61 The Times, 28 December 1915, 6: ‘Russian Home Politics’. 62 Kropotkin, P. A. P. A. Kropotkin o voine. Moscow: Tipografiia T-va Riabushinskikh, 1916, 26–29. 63 Boris Vladimirovich Stürmer (1848–1917) was a lawyer. In 1916 he occupied the posts of Prime Minister, Minister of Internal Affairs and Foreign Minister. 64 Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, I, 65–67. 65 Ibid., 66. 66 Ibid., 67.

Chapter 7 Petit Parisien, 13 June 1917, 1–2: ‘La Revolution Russe au jour le jour’. It was perhaps at the recommendation of Surevich, the Prefect of the Petrograd police, that Burtsev was invited to join the commission. See Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, II, 42, 57, note 1. 3 Petrogradskaia Gazeta, politicheskaia i literaturnaia, no. 61, March 1917, Prilozh. no. 19, 5. The commission was established on 10 (23) March 1917. 4 Lurʹe, Khraniteli, 112. See also BA, Sergei Svatikov Papers – Manuscripts, Svatikov, S. G. ‘Vladimir L’vovich Burtsev. On the occasion of his 75th birthday’, 23. 5 Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, II, 57, note 1. 6 Globachev, Pravda, 149–150. 7 BA, Burtsev Papers. Anniversary Celebration. Lisitsyn to Burtsev, 10 November 1932. 8 Globachev, Pravda, 149–150. See also Gerasimov, A. V. Na lezvii s terroristami. Moscow: Tovarishchestvo russkikh khudozhnikov, 1991, 189. 9 The stenographic report of Burtsev’s first testimony before the commission is reproduced in Shchegolev, Padenie, vol. I, 293–328. 10 Ibid., intro, XXX. 11 Kerensky, A. F. The Catastrophe. Kerensky’s Own Story of the Russian Revolution. New York, London: Appleton and Company, 1927, 41. 12 Nedelia (The Week) Vienna, 23 April (6 May) 1917. 13 Krupskaia, N. Vospominaniia o Lenine. Moscow: Partiinoe izdatelʹstvo, 1932, 258. 14 Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, II, 67–69. 15 In fact both Ukrainian and Lithuanian organizations had accepted aid. 16 The Times, 6 October 1915, 6: ‘Russia at the Cross Roads’, Stephen Graham. 17 Lenin, Polnoe sobranie, vol. 26, 6. Quoted in Service, Robert. Lenin. A Biography. London: Macmillan, 2000, 228. 18 Service, Lenin, 169. 1 2

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19 Ibid., 228. 20 Kaptelov, Delo provokatora Malinovskogo, 49–54 and 58–59. 21 Laporte, Histoire de lʹOkhrana, 244–245, and Vasilʹev, A. T. The Ochrana, the Russian Secret Police. London: G. G. Harrap and Co, 1930, 286. 22 The Manchester Guardian, 7 July 1917, 31: ‘Friends of Russian Freedom’ (By J. F. Green, Honorary Secretary of the Society). 23 For the next four months Burtsev served as the journal’s co-editor alongside his old associate P. E. Shchegolev, the political writer V. V. Vodovozov and the historian E. V. Tarle. See Lurʹe, Khraniteli, 21. 24 Byloe, no. 1 (23) July 1917, 143–148. The spy in question was N. A. Zverev. 25 GARF f. 111, op. 1, del. 458a, Burtsev V. L. Klichka ‘Kashinskii’, ll. 1–79. 26 Milyukov had been obliged to step down following angry and widespread protests at his declaration to the Allies that Russia would continue to wage war for as long as was necessary and would expect territorial gains (notably the Turkish Straits) upon victory. This flew in the face of the Petrograd Soviet’s espousal of a peace ‘without annexations or indemnities’ that the Provisional Government had (reluctantly) accepted in late March. 27 For a detailed discussion of the events of the July Days see Rabinowitch, Alexander. Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968, 135–205. 28 On 5 July, for example, General Alekseev, in the newspaper Living Word (Zhivoe slovo), had directly accused Lenin of being a German spy. 29 ‘Ili my, ili nemtsy i te kto s nimi’, Russkaia volia, no. 159, 7 July 1917. The article also appeared in Burtsev’s Future (of which a total of three issues were published) and later, in the second edition of his V Borʹbe s bolʹshevikami i nemtsami. 30 Burtsev’s full list of traitors was: V. I. Lenin, L. D. Trotsky, L. B. Kamenev, G. E. Zinovʹev, A. M. Kollontai, Yu. M. Steklov, D. B. Ryazanov, M. Yu. Kozlovsky, A. V. Lunacharsky, S. G. Roshalʹ, Kh. G. Rakovsky and M. Gorky. Ivanov-Razumnik was one of those who objected to Burtsev’s ‘disgusting outburst’. See Gorkʹii I russkaia zhurnalistika, 723–724 (letter of 9 July). Burtsev followed up his attack with his article ‘Do Not Defend M. Gorky’. (Ne zashchishchaite M. Gorʹkogo.) Russkaia volia, no. 161, 9 July 1917. 31 An international socialist conference was held in early September 1915 in the village of Zimmerwald near Berne, Switzerland. The conference declared the war to be imperialist in nature and called on the workers of all nations to renew the class struggle in order to bring pressure to bear on their respective governments to end hostilities. 32 Chernov, V. M. The Great Russian Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936, 246–247. 33 Lavr Georgievich Kornilov (1870–1918) was formerly in command of the Petrograd Military District. He was virtually the only individual amongst the senior ranks of the armed forces to emerge from the disastrous June offensive with any credit. He replaced Brusilov as Commander-in-Chief in mid-July, shortly after Kerensky had assumed the mantle of Premier (while still retaining his post as Minister of War). For one of the better examinations of this complex affair see White, J. D. ‘The Kornilov Affair – A Study in Counter Revolution’, Soviet Studies, vol. 20, no. 2 (1968), 187–205. 34 Katkov, Russia 1917. The Kornilov Affair. London, New York: Longman, 1980, 169. 35 Ibid., 175. 36 White, ‘Kornilov Affair’, 198.

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37 Browder, R. P. and Kerensky, A. F. (eds.) The Russian Provisional Government 1917. Documents. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961, 1539. 38 The final Petrograd issue was published on 21 October, at which point it was closed down by Kerensky’s government. 39 Burtsev, V. V borʹbe s bolʹshevikami i nemtsami. Statʹi iz gazety ‘Obshchee Delo’ 1917 g. Paris: Imprimerie ‘Union’, 1919, and V borʹbe s bolʹshevikami i nemtsami. Statʹi iz ‘Budushchee’ iʹObshchee Delo’ 1917 g. 2-e izd. Paris: 1919. 40 Obshchee delo, 26 September 1917, no. 1, 1: ‘Na starom puti’. 41 There is reason to believe that the source of the leak was R. R. Raupakh, one of the members of the Commission and a Kornilov sympathizer. See Sevostianov, G. N. (ed.) Delo generala L. G. Kornilova. Materialy Chrezvychainoi kommissii po rasledovaniiu dela o byvshem Verkhovnom glavnokomanduiushchem generale L. G. Kornilove i ego souchastnikakh. Avgust 1917 g. – iiunʹ 1918 g. (v 2-kh tomakh). Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi Fond ‘Demokratiia’, 2003, t. 2, 552. 42 Obshchee delo, 30 September 1917, no. 5, 2: ‘Ni miatezha, ni zagovora ne bylo!’, and 2 October, no. 6, 2–3. ‘Rossiia dolzhna znatʹ vsiu pravdu o “zagovore” Kornilova’. 43 Chernov, The Great Russian Revolution, 379. 44 Burtsev, V borʹbe s bolʹshevikami, 21–23. Burtsev went so far as to reproduce Chernov’s proclamation. See Obshchee delo, 28 September 1917, no. 3, 3: ‘Pust ʹ budet stydno selianskomu ministru V. M. Chernovu’. 45 The international press gave extensive coverage to Burtsev’s publication of Kornilov’s ‘explanatory memorandum’. See, for example, The Times, 19 October 1917, 8: ‘More Disclosures by Gen. Korniloff ’. 46 See, for example, Sevostianov, Delo Kornilova, t. 2, 552, and Katkov, Kornilov, 118. 47 Reed, John. Ten Days That Shook the World. New York: Boni and Liberlight, 1919, 26–27. 48 Obshchee delo, 8 October, no. 12, 1: ‘Da zdravstvuet Vremennyi Sovet Respubliki!’ 49 Ibid., 14 October, no. 17, 1: ‘Radostnye nadezhdy i khoroshie slova’. 50 Ibid., 1: ‘K pozornomu stolbu!’ 51 Ibid. 52 Two of the original thirty-two revolutionaries who had boarded the train did not complete the journey – Karl Radek, future leader of the Communist International, remained in Stockholm, while Fritz Platten the Swiss Communist, who was primarily responsible for organizing the trip, was not permitted to cross the Russian border. See Merridale, Catherine, Lenin on the Train. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2016. 53 Obshchee delo, 16 October, no. 18, 1: ‘Nashe neschastie i nash pozor’. 54 Posse, Vospominaniia, 124. 55 Obshchee delo, 19 October no. 21, 1: ‘Gorʹkii v Kanosse’. As a rebuttal Gorky thought it sufficient to respond: ‘You are a pitiful man! Yes pitiful, even though you are a very sincere, selfless and unquestionably genuine man you are, nevertheless, a pitiful individual!’ See Posse, Vospominaniia, 124–125. 56 Obshchee delo, 18 October 1917, no. 20, 1: ‘Bolʹsheviki groziat sovershitʹ novyia prestupleniia’. 57 Ibid., 17 October 1917, no. 19, 1: ‘Nam nuzhno min-vo inostr. del – chestnoe, energichnoe, ponimaiushchee svoi zadachi’. 58 Ibid., 21 October 1917, no. 23, 1: ‘Gen. Cheremisov, kak odin iz mnogikh zashchitnikov I pokrovitelei bolʹshevikov’. 59 Ibid. 60 Obshchee delo, 21 October 1917, no. 23, 1. ‘Grazhdane! Spasaite Rossiiu!’ See also Browder and Kerensky, Russian Provisional Government, 1743–1744.

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61 Nikolai Vissarionovich Nekrasov (1879–1940) was a leading Left Kadet and the deputy prime minister in Kerensky’s government. 62 Reed, Ten Days, 44. Whereas Reed had neglected to mention Burtsev’s earlier attacks on Lenin and the ‘German travellers’, he was happy to translate this particular article in its entirety. 63 See, for example, The Times, 6 November 1917, 5: ‘Russian War Minister and Separate Peace’. 64 It should be pointed out that the Provisional Government’s concerns about the dangers posed by the press did not stop with The Common Cause. Two days later Kerensky attempted, somewhat belatedly, to close down Rabochii putʹ (The Workers’ Path), which was the latest name the Bolsheviks had given to their underground newspaper. It had previously been published as Listok pravdy (The Newssheet of Truth), Proletarii (Proletariat) and Rabochii (Worker). 65 HIA, B. I. Nicolaevsky Collection, Series 95, box 4, ‘Prokliatyi Denʹ’ (Wednesday 25 October/7 November 1917). This was Burtsev’s annotated memoir, written five years after the event. 66 Burtsev, ‘Prokliatyi Denʹ’, 1. 67 Burtsev would later confess to being more proud of this honour than had he been awarded the Cross of St George. See GARF R. 5802. op. 1. 2156, l. 27. 68 Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd v Rossiiu v 1914 g’. in Byloe, II, Paris, 1933, 5–39. 69 The assistant in question was Dmitry Ivanovich Brazulʹ, who was also an occasional contributor to Obshchee delo. 70 For an English translation of the Decree see Daniels, Robert V. (comp.) Documentary History of Communism. London: I. B. Tauris and Co Ltd, 1985, I, 82–83. 71 HIA, B. I. Nicolaevsky Collection, Series 95, box 4. ‘Prokliatyi Denʹ’ (Wednesday 25 October/7 November 1917), 31. As reported by Trotsky, others arrested at that time included S. N. Prokopovich, S. S. Salazkin, A. M. Nikitin and D. N. Verderevsky. See, Trotsky, ‘Doklad na ekstrennom zasedanii petrogradskogo soveta’, in Sochineniia. Tom 3, chastʹ 2. Moscow-Leningrad, 1925. 72 See, for example, Claude Anet’s report for 2 (15) November, which appeared in Petit Parisien, on 26 December 1917. Also Anet, Claude. La Revolution Russe. Paris: Libraririe Payot, 1917–1919, vol. 2, 263. 73 The order for the release of the SR and Menshevik ministers was announced by Trotsky on 26 October (8 November), the day after the Bolshevik seizure of power. See Reed, Ten Days, 135. 74 Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, II, 5. 75 Ibid., 21–25. The first name and patronymic of the commissar are unrecorded but there are mentions of an I. Modelʹ serving as the President of the Soviet of the Trubetskoy Bastion on various anti-Jewish websites such as: http://dokumentika.org/ klassoviy/bolsheviki-v-imenach/pdf [accessed 8 June 2016]. 76 Lunacharsky, Anatoly Vasilʹevich (1875–1933) was Commissar for Education and later ambassador to Spain. 77 Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, II, 9. 78 The new arrangement at Kresty was infinitely superior to the set-up in the Trubetskoy, where the two had been obliged to communicate, like other prisoners, by tapping in code through the cell walls. See Manukhin, I. I. ‘Vospominaniia o 1917–18 g. 2. “October”’, Novyi zhurnal, 54 (1958), 106. 79 Pearson, Henry, ‘The Bolshevik and His Prisoners: Some Impressions in the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul’, The Nineteenth Century and After, no. DIII (January 1919),

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60–69. In fact the murderers had taken it upon themselves and had not been acting in accordance with orders from ‘on high’. 80 Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, II, 13–14. Vladimir Aleksandrovich Sukhomlinov (1848–1926) was a general and Minister for War. Blamed for Russia’s poor start to the war he was removed from post in June 1915. In the ensuing investigations he was linked to various individuals accused of espionage and was himself found guilty of treason and imprisoned. 81 Ibid., 13. See also, Manukhin, ‘Vospominaniia’, 106. 82 Burtsev, ‘Moia borʹba s provokatorami’, Segodnia, 4 November 1929. 83 Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, II, 19–21. 84 Shneur had been in the Bolshevik delegation that held talks with the Germans prior to Brest-Litovsk and had participated in the murder of the commander-in-chief of the Russian Army, N. N. Dukhonin at Mogilev in late November 1917. Burtsev testified that the accused had visited him in Paris in 1909 and had offered his services which he refused, regarding him as an adventurist. It transpired that he had been working for the police. At his trial he was sentenced to prison but was quickly amnestied by the Bolsheviks. 85 The same courtroom incident was also mentioned in a reminiscence by one of Burtsev’s adversaries, F. V. Vinberg. See R. V. (i.e. Vinberg, F.) ‘Berlinskie pisʹma’, Luch sveta, kn. III, 1920, 8–70, 50. 86 Revoliutsiia i kulʹtura. Statʹi za 1917 g. Berlin: Izdanie T-va I. P. Ladyzhnikova [1918], 63. (Reprint of an article first published 12 November 1917.) 87 Posse, Vospominaniia, 125. In a reliable reminiscence of the period, Burtsev is not mentioned as one of the numerous prisoners released thanks to Gorky’s direct representation to Lenin. See Manukhin, ‘Vospominaniia’, 111–115. BA, Sergei Svatikov Papers, Manuscripts. ‘V. L. Burtsev: ko dniu ego semidesiatipiatiletie’, 25. 88 Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, II, 29. 89 Ibid., 27. 90 Some fifteen years later, recalling his release, Burtsev stated that he was still ready to return and with pleasure would stand trial and explain why it was that he had been obliged to emigrate under the regime of Lenin and Trotsky, just as he had earlier been forced to emigrate under Alexander III and Nicholas II. Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, II, 29. 91 Manukhin, ‘Vospominaniia’, 110. 92 The Council of People’s Commissars’ decree on Red Terror (Postanovlenie SNK RSFSR o Krasnom terrore) was dated 5 September 1918. BA, Sergei Svatikov Papers – Manuscripts. ‘V. L. Burtsev: ko dniu ego semidesiatipiatiletie’, 25–26. 93 Manukhin, ‘Vospominaniia’, 110. 94 BA, Sergei Svatikov Papers – Manuscripts. ‘V. L. Burtsev: ko dniu ego semidesiatipiatiletie’, 25–26. 95 Burtsev, V. Cursed Be the Bolsheviks! Paris: Imprimerie ‘Union’, 1919, 8. 96 According to a usually reliable source it was Burtsev’s old associate Manuilov who had helped him escape, for which act of gallantry he was shot. See Pares, My Russian Memoirs, 500. 97 Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, II, 31. 98 ‘La tranquillité règne à Varsovie’ – a comment made in 1831 by French Foreign Minister Sebastiani criticizing his government for refusing to offer assistance to Poland at the time of the Russian suppression of the Polish uprising of November 1830.

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Part III 1

Gorʹkii i Russkaia zhurnalistika, Amfiteatrov to Gorky, 26 April 1914, 451.

Chapter 8 1 The Times, 6 May 1918, 7: ‘Russia’s Need’. 2 Burtsev, Cursed Be the Bolsheviks!, 5. The original fourteen-page letter was dated Stockholm, May 1918. It was later republished in French, English, Swedish and German and in numerous Russian editions. 3 Burtsev, Cursed Be the Bolsheviks!, 13. 4 Ibid., 14. 5 The Times, 13 May 1918, 9: ‘Mr Burtseff ’s Appeal to the Allies’. 6 Ibid., 29 May 1918, 9: ‘The Allies and Russia’. In 1924, Snowden became Labour’s first Chancellor of the Exchequer. However, by 1931 his socialist beliefs had mellowed somewhat and he was expelled from the Labour Party, whose policies he had decried as ‘Bolshevism run mad’. See Jeffreys, Kevin. Leading Labour: From Keir Hardie to Tony Blair. London: I. B. Tauris, 1999, 33. 7 GARF R. 5802. op. 1. d. 721. Williams to Burtsev, 10 June 1918. For more on Williams see Alston, Charlotte. Russia’s Greatest Enemy? Harold Williams and the Russian Revolutions. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007. 8 Among those who had welcomed him on his arrival in Stockholm were his old acquaintance, the leader of the Swedish SDs Karl H Branting, who was well-known for his anti-Leninist sentiments, and Per Albin Hansson, who had recently taken over editorship of Social Demokraten from Branting. 9 GARF R. 5802. op. 1. d. 2. ‘Avtobiografiia i anketa V. Burtseva’ l. 18. Also The Times, 11 July 1918, 6: ‘The Real Mirbach’. 10 Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, II, 42. For more on Kerensky’s visit to London see Smele, Jonathan D. ‘“Mania Grandiosa” and “The Turning Point in World History”: Kerensky in London in 1918’, Revolutionary Russia, vol. 20, no. 1 (2007), 1–34. 11 As well as monies received from subscriptions and advertising revenues, it would appear that Burtsev again had his old acquaintance, the publisher Paramonov, to thank for at least some of the funding of his venture. See Margulies, M. S. God interventsii. Berlin: Izdatelʹstvo Z. I. Grzhebina, 1923, I, 292, where it is stated that following a request from General Denikin for more political agitation in the army, Paramonov (who reportedly had ‘25 million to play with’) had contacted Burtsev to ask for his assistance. Elsewhere it was claimed that funding was supplied, in the main, by former leader of the Provisional Government Prince Lʹvov, who was now leader of Zemgor. See Tolstoy, A. N. Emigranty, in Povesti i rasskazy. Moscow: Pravda, 1982. Other editions: Moscow: Sovetskii pisatelʹ, 1940. First edition published Moscow, 1932 under title: Chernoe zoloto., 36. 12 The forty-two contributors listed in a letter accompanying issue no. 92 of 15 October 1920 (the first time the newspaper appeared as a daily) were: G. A. Aleksinsky, L. N. Andreev, N. I. Astrov, L. B. Bernstein, M. A. Boguslavsky, I. A. Bunin, V. L. Burtsev, V. V. Viktorov-Toporov, Prof. I. M. Goldʹshtein, Prof. P. P. Gronsky, G. D. Grigorʹkov (Helsinki), I. P. Demidov, A. A. Derentalʹ, Dioneo, I. V. Dussan, V. D. Kuzʹmin-Karavaev, A. I. Kuprin, S. I. Levin (Berlin), A. V. Makletsov (Belgrade),

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Mad, P. N. Milyukov, A. M. Mikhelʹson, S. K. Markotun, V. D. Nabokov, A. I. Nazarov (Constantinople), Countess S. V. Panina, D. S. Pasmanik, M. K. Pervukhin, V. A. Obolensky, E. V. Ratner, G. Rimsky, A. P. Rogozhin, F. I. Rodichev, P. Ia. Ryss, B. V. Savinkov, A. V. Tyrkova, A. N. Tolstoy, V. A. Kharlamov, N. V. Chaikovsky, B. V. Sytovich, S. F. Shtern, A. A. Iablonovsky. 13 Don-Aminado, Nasha malenʹkaia zhiznʹ. Stikhotvoreniia. Politicheskii pamphlet. Proza. Vospominaniia. Moscow: TERRA, 1994, 648–649. The author adds the amusing snippet that Burtsev’s newspaper was known in the early émigré jargon as ‘the Commune’s Goat’ – a play on the literal Russian meaning of the French title ‘Kozʹia kommuna’. 14 Tolstoi, A. ‘O Parizhe’, in Polʹnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 13. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelʹstvo khudozhestvenoi literatury, 1949–1958, 19–20. 15 Tolstoi, Emigranty, 34–35. 16 Ibid., 35–36. 17 The first run of the Paris Cause commune appeared between 17 September 1918 (no. 24) and 31 December 1921 (no. 530). The second run began on 10 November 1928. It was followed by another ten issues which appeared intermittently until 1934. 18 Kolchak served as the Supreme Ruler and commander-in-chief of the White forces from 1918 until his capture and execution in February 1920. Denikin had assumed control of the Volunteer Army in April 1918 following the death in action of General Kornilov. (The latter, together with General Alekseev, had been responsible for the foundation of the army in the months immediately following the Bolshevik seizure of power.) Denikin then, in January 1919, served as commander-in chief of the combined forces of the ASFR (Armed Forces of South Russia) until his defeat in the Crimea in April 1920, when he passed his command to Wrangel. 19 Cause commune, no. 31, 1 January 1919, 4. 20 Burtsev had railed against the notion of any negotiations with the Bolsheviks when it had first been proposed that a conference between the Allies and the various Russian factions be held at Prinkipo, near Constantinople. See Ibid., no. 32, 28 January 1919, 1: ‘Jamais!’ and also (in the same issue) L. B. Bernstein’s ‘La Conférence de la Paix et le Problème Russe’. 21 Cause commune, no. 38, 10 March 1919, 4: ‘V Anglii trebuiut interventsiiu’. 22 Ibid., no. 46, 20 May 1919, 4: Morgan Philips Price (1885–1973) author of War and Revolution in Asiatic Russia, London, 1918. The book was based chiefly on his experiences in Tiflis. 23 Cause commune, no. 51, 10 July 1919, 3: ‘Gen. Denikin i anglichane’. 24 Ibid., 4: ‘Na pomoshchʹ Rossii’. 25 Ibid., no. 53, 12 August 1919, 3: ‘Sud nad Bolʹshevikami i nemtsami’. 26 Churchill Archives Centre (CAC), Chartwell Papers, CHAR 16/40, 22, 17 September 1919. 27 Ibid., 84–85, 105–106. 28 Cause commune no. 62, 10 December 1919. Some months earlier the newspaper had belatedly reported the tragic news of Kornilov’s death in action in April 1918 near Ekaterinodar. See Cause commune, no. 34, 12 February 1919. 29 Elsewhere it was claimed that the trip was undertaken at the suggestion of the leaders of the White emigration in Paris. See Tolstoy, Emigranty, 236. 30 Cause commune, no. 64, 24 January 1920 and no. 65, 19 February 1920. 31 Ibid., no. 66, 23 March 1920. Kolchak was executed by the Bolsheviks on 7 February but the death was not reported till a month later.

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32 Ibid., no. 67, 8 April 1920. Wrangel had assumed control of the White forces in Crimea following Denikin’s resignation on 20 March 1920. Lloyd George had raised the prospect of dropping the blockade of Russia as early as January 1920. 33 In the pro-Bolshevik press Burtsev was referred to rather unkindly as ‘Wrangel’s wirepuller in Warsaw’. The Manchester Guardian, 4 October 1920, 6: ‘An Emissary from General Wrangel’. 34 Cause commune, no. 82, 6 August 1920. 35 Ibid., no. 83, 13 August 1920. 36 Ibid., no. 86, 3 September 1920, 1: ‘Nachalo kontsa bolʹshevikov’. 37 Ibid., no. 92, 15 October 1920, 1: ‘K nashim chitateliam’. 38 Ibid., no. 121, 13 November 1920, 1: ‘Vse – na pomoshchʹ Vrangeliu’. 39 Daniil Samoilovich Pasmanik (1869–1930) first made Burtsev’s acquaintance in Zurich in the late 1880s. See Burtsev, Borʹba, 49. 40 Cause commune, no. 121, 13 November 1920, 1: ‘Vse – na pomoshchʹ Vrangeliu’. (Burtsev’s report was dated 14 October). 41 Ibid., no. 123, 15 November 1920, 1: ‘Tragediia iuzhno-russkoi armii’. 42 Burtsev, Poslednye dni Kryma. Burtsev returned to Paris on 4 December. See Cause commune, no. 143, 5 December 1920, 1: ‘Vozvrashchenie V. L. Burtseva’. 43 Cause commune, no. 134–137, 26–29 November 1920. 44 Ibid., no. 121, 13 November 1920, 1: ‘Lloid Dzhordzh i bolʹsheviki’. 45 Ibid., no. 69, 20 April 1920, 1: ‘Russkii sʹʹezd zagranitsei’. 46 Ibid., no. 147, 9 December 1920, 1: ‘Grazhdane! Spasaite Rossiiu!’. 47 Ibid., no. 153, 15 December 1920, 1: ‘Nam, prezhde vsego, nuzhno sokhranitʹ russkuiu gosudarstvennostʹ’. 48 Nazarov, Mikhail, Missiia russkoi emigratsii. Stavropolʹ: Kavkazkii krai, 1991, 41. Vladimir Dmitrevich Nabokov (1870–1922) was assassinated in Berlin in March 1922 by the extreme-right Russian monarchist activist P. Shabelsky-Bork. 49 Nazarov, Missiia, 41. Others in attendance included P. B. Struve, I. V. Gessen and writers such as Ivan Bunin and Alexander Kuprin. See also Rosenberg, William G. Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917–1921. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974, 445–458. 50 Yury Federovich Semenov (1873–1947), monarchist and later editor of the major émigré journal Renaissance (Vozrozhdenie). On the title page of his 1938 work on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Burtsev still described himself as vice president of the RNC. 51 Vestnik Russkago natsionalʹnago komiteta. no. 1, March 1923, 6. The Third International was the organization founded in Moscow in 1919, which sought to unite and guide communist organizations around the globe. 52 The Russian National Union adopted the ideology of ‘non-predetermination’ (nepredreshenchestvo) – the belief that the political orientation of Russia should not be predetermined by émigrés living outside of its borders and that such a decision should be deferred until the re-election in a free Russia of a constituent assembly. 53 Cause commune, no. 150, 12 December 1920 and no. 169, 31 December 1920. 54 Nazarov, Missiia, 41. 55 Vestnik Russkago natsionalʹnago komiteta, no. 7, December 1923, 41–45. The Vestnik was published between 1923 and 1926. 56 Ibid., 47–56. 57 Burtsev, V. ‘Smertʹ predatelia Lenina’, Vestnik russkago natsionalʹnago komiteta, no. 8 (1 February 1924).

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58 Burtsev, V. ‘Russkii Nationalʹnyi Komitet i ego prizyv k koalitsii’, Vestnik russkago natsionalʹnago komiteta, no. 11 (15 August 1926), 39–46. 59 HIA, B. I. Nicolaevsky Collection, Series 95, box 4. Burtsev to Minor 30 April 1920, ll. I–4. 60 Sh. Rappaport, writing in LʹHumanité, 11 December 1921. Cited in Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, II, 47. Burtsev, together with Chaikovsky, had visited Savinkov in Warsaw at an early stage, to discuss matters concerning his organization – The People’s Union for the Defence of the Motherland and Liberty (Narodnyi Soiuz Zashchity Rodiny i Svobody). See Margulies, God interventsii, III, 160, entry for 3 February 1920. 61 Trotsky, L. Kak vooruzhalasʹ revoliutsiia: Vysshii voennyi redaktsionnyi sovet, 1923–25, vol. 3 part 1, 217. ‘On nikogda ne vydumaet porokha’, literally: ‘He will never invent gunpowder’, which translates as ‘He will never set the Thames on fire’. See Oxford Russian Dictionary, 4th edition, 2007. 62 Trotsky, L. ‘The Tasks of the Red Army’, Military Writings, vol. 4. Available online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1921/military/ch07.htm [accessed 8 June 2016].

Chapter 9 Budushchee: sbornik statei na zlobu dnia, no. 1 (Paris, 1922). Unfortunately, as it turned out, LʹAvenir had no future: this was the only issue to be published. 2 BM Ad Mss 54440 ff. 128, 147, 157. Burtsev to Tyrkova-Williams, May 1922. 3 Griboedov, Gore ot Uma. The second edition which includes a lengthy introductory note by the editor is printed on Japanese paper and numbered 85 of 300. The title page verso bears the following inscription, in Russian, in Burtsev’s hand: To the British Museum, V. L. Burtsev, 10.10.1919, London. 4 Griboedov, Gore ot Uma, 49–50. Burtsev had already completed work on all four acts of the play in Petrograd in the course of 1917–1918 and was set to publish them when, in the chaos of the events of the day, his manuscripts were destroyed. On taking up the task again in Paris he had encountered enormous difficulties since he no longer had the original materials to hand, nor even copies of some of the earlier versions of the play. 5 He had already published similar reworkings of Krylov’s Fables and Radishchev’s Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow. Krylov, I. A. Basni. Paris: Librairie Russe et Française L. Rodstein, 1921. Radishchev, A. N. Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu … na iazyke nashego vremeni. Paris, 1921. 6 HIA, V. L. Burtsev Collection, Photographs 1:3, Picture postcard of Stratford-onAvon, Burtsev to L. B. Bernstein, 9 June 1922. 7 Count Georgy Pavlovich Bennigsen (alt. sp. Benningsen) (1879–1963) volunteered for the British Army in 1918. He later settled in London, where he worked intermittently for the Russian Consulate and became the Secretary of the Russian Refugees Aid Society. 8 Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library. ‘Georgii Pavlovich Benningsen Papers’ (Call no. BA#0039). 9 Bennigsen, Georgii. ‘Vstrechi s Vl. Burtseva – iz vospominanii’. Russkaia Myslʹ, no. 1715, 1 August 1961, 2–3. Copy held in HIA, B. I. Nicolaevsky Collection, Series 95, box 615, File 5, ‘Burtsev biographical file’. 1

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10 Sir Sidney Lee (1859–1926), biographer, critic and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. 11 For more details on this and Burtsev’s other literary works referred to here see supra, ‘A bookish man’, chapter 3. 12 Sir Robert Thomas Wilson (1777–1849) was a politician and a general in the Russian Army. He later became the Governor of Gibraltar. 13 Burtsev himself carried out some of the research on Dashkova and Catherine in the British Museum during a 1925 visit. See BA, Sergei Svatikov Papers – Manuscripts, Catalogued Correspondence, Burtsev to Svatikov, 21 April 1925, l. 1. 14 ‘Russian Documents in the British Museum’, Slavonic Review, vol. 4, no. 12 (March 1926), 669–685. 15 Tolstoi, A. N. and Shchegolev, P. E. Azef: orel ili reshka: pʹesa v 5 deistviiakh, 12 kartinakh. Moscow: Artelʹ pisatelei ‘Krug’, 1926. The author had produced the play in collaboration with Burtsev’s old colleague from the St Petersburg The Past, Pavel Shchegolev. 16 The GPU (Glavnoe politicheskoe upravlenie) succeeded the Cheka – Extraordinary Committee (Chrezvychainyi Komitet) and, following the foundation of the USSR in December 1922, was rechristened OGPU (the Joint State Political Directorate) although it was common to refer to it by its earlier name. This was Burtsev’s usual practice and, to simplify matters, this will be the term commonly used in the present study. Similarly, the operatives of this organization remained known as ‘Chekists’ and so they will be referred to here. 17 Burtsev, V. ‘Ne Azefy a Sverkhazefy!’, Illiustrirovannaia Rossiia, no. 47 (340) (14 November 1931), 1–2. 18 There has also been considerable discussion on Burtsev’s links with the Bratstvo russkoi pravdy (The Brotherhood of Russian Truth), a somewhat mysterious underground counter-revolutionary organization which operated throughout the 1920s and claimed various military successes against Bolshevik targets mainly within Russia. Burtsev would later assert that he had no connection to the organization and actually spoke out against it – a claim disputed by some. See RGASPI f. 328s. del. 97. l. 1, 2. Letter from Burtsev to unidentified, 7 February 1940. For a comprehensive study of the Brotherhood see Budnitskii, O. V. ‘Bratstvo russkoi pravdy: poslednii literaturnyi proekt S. A. Sokolova Krechetova’, NLO. Nezavisimyi filologicheskii zhurnal, no. 64, 2003. See also Robinson, Paul. The White Russian Army in Exile, 1920–1941. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. 19 BA, Burtsev Collection, Printed Material. Leon Treich‘s Savinkov obituary in LʹÉclair (undated). 20 Burtsev, ‘Ne Azefy a Sverkhazefy!’,1–2. See also ‘Pechalʹnyi konets B. V. Savinkova’, in Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, II, 40–55 and his ‘Police Provocation in Russia: I. Azev the Tsarist Spy. II. The Bolshevist Spy System’, Slavonic Review, vol. 6, no. 17 (December 1927), 247–267, 247–267. 21 Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd’, II, 40. 22 Burtsev, ‘Police Provocation in Russia’, 265. For a detailed account of this affair see Spence, Boris Savinkov. 23 Burtsev, ‘Police Provocation in Russia’, 265. 24 According to another version he did not take his own life but was forcibly defenestrated by his captors. Spence, Boris Savinkov, 367–372. 25 Borʹba za Rossіiu. La Lutte pour la Russie. Journal hebdomadaire. The journal ran for 240 issues from 1926 to 1931.

310

Notes

26 Ibid., no. 92, 25 August 1928, 1. The first issue of the new Cause commune appeared on 10 November 1928. It was followed by another ten issues which appeared intermittently until 1934. 27 Burtsev, V. L. Iubilei predatelei i ubiits. 1917–1927. Paris: Rapid-Imprimerie, 12, Rue Royet-Collard, 1927. 28 He had long advocated the creation of such a fighting organization in the pages of La Cause commune. He repeated the call in his brochure Boritesʹ s GPU! (Paris: Izdanie Obshchago dela, 1932) and continued to do so until as late as 1937. See BA, Cheremshanskii Papers: 1. Burtsev to Cheremshansky, 1937. 29 Rumanov, A. V. ‘Shtrikhi k portretam’, Vremia i my, Tel Aviv (1987), no. 95, 226–227. One such acolyte was E. V. Dumbadze (1900–1939), who was a Red Army volunteer and Chekist. In 1928 he defected from the Soviet Union to Paris, where he made contact with Burtsev. His reminiscences Na sluzhbe Cheka i Kominterna. Lichnyia vospominanіia were published by Mishenʹ, Paris, 1930 with an introduction by Burtsev. See Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, II, 73. 30 Posse, Vospominaniia, 119. 31 Vasily Vitalʹevich Shulʹgin (1878–1976), journalist, monarchist, former member of 2nd, 3rd and 4th Dumas. His account of the trip was published in Berlin in 1927 as Tri stolitsy: Puteshestvie v Krasnuiu Rossiiu. 32 Burtsev, ‘Police Provocation in Russia’, 263. No doubt the author had in mind such visits as those by the British Labour delegations in 1920, 1924 and of the British Women’s TUC delegation a year later. 33 A political movement which arose in the years after Russian Revolution. Its leaders such as P. N. Savitsky and P. P. Suvchinsky, borrowing from Slavophilism, believed that Russian civilization should not be characterized as purely and narrowly European. 34 GARF R. 5802. op. 1. 507, Letters from S. Reilly to V. L. Burtsev, ll. 1–39. (Dating from 9 September 1919 to September 1925.) It is curious to note that in a reminiscence published in 1933, Burtsev claimed to have met Reilly only once in London ‘but never ever had any dealings with him’. See Burtsev, Byloe, II, 49. For more on the enigmatic Reilly see, for example, Spence, R. B. Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly. Los Angeles, CA: Feral House, 2003. See also his ‘The Terrorist and the Master Spy: The Political “Partnership” of Boris Savinkov and Sidney Reilly, 1918–25’, Revolutionary Russia, vol. 4, no. 1 (1991), 111–131. 35 Daily Telegraph, 9 May 2002: ‘Stalin Had Britain’s Ace of Spies Killed’. The story is based on Burtsev’s report contained in TNA, PRO KV 2/827, ‘Security Service file on Sidney George Reilly’. 36 Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, II, 50. Two years later he described the work of the Prague archive (commonly referred to as the RZIA, its abbreviated Russian title) and his role as one of its directors. See Burtsev, V. L. ‘The Russian Archives in Prague’, Slavonic Review, vol. 5, no. 15 (March 1927), 687–692. 37 Burtsev, V. L. V pogone za provokatorami. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1928. 38 Burtsev, ‘Police Provocation in Russia’, 267. 39 Budnitskii,‘Knizhnaia vesna’. 40 Struve, G. P. ‘Stranitsa iz istorii zarubezhnoi pechati. Nachalo gazety “Vozrozhdenie”’, Mosty, vol. 3 (1959), 384–385. V. L. Burtsev to P. B. Struve, 3 June 1925. 41 La Cause commune, 10 November 1928, 2–3: ‘Moi otvet S. P. Melʹgunova’. See also BA, Burtsev Collection. Correspondence box 1, 17 November 1928, It is an unsigned, typed two-page letter.

Notes

311

42 Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, II, 50. 43 Lavda, Mikhail. Veselye nekrologi: s prilozheniem statʹi ‘Deiatelʹnostʹ V. L. Burtseva i nenavistʹ k nemu bolʹshevikov’. [n. p.]: [n. d.], 14. 44 RGASPI f. 328s. op. 1. del. 133. Burtsev, V. L. ‘“The essence of the Kutepov affair established” together with an interview with him on that subject (1931)’. For an alternative contemporary description of the kidnapping and the initial investigation which followed see Bazhanov, B. and Alekseev, N. (eds.) Pokhishchenie Generala A. P. Kutepova Bolʹshevikami. Sledstvennye i politicheskie materialy. Paris: Imp. ‘Pascal’, 1930. 45 Vozrozhdenie, 14 August 1930, 1, 2: ‘Perepiska V. L. Burtseva s gen. E. K. Millerom’. 46 Illiustrirovannaia Rossiia, 13 February 1932. The polemic which resulted from the affair ran for a number of months in the pages of Poslednye novosti, Vozrozhdenie and La Cause commune. Burtsev later published a selection of letters and articles on the subject in his pamphlets V zashchitu pravdy (1931) and Boritesʹs GPU! (1932). 47 Yury Fedorovich Semenov was the editor of Vozrozhdenie from August 1927 to June 1940. 48 The various affairs were described in some detail by Burtsev in La Cause commune and later published in his pamphlet, V zashchitu pravdy. 49 A. I. Sipelʹgas (1885–1937) was a journalist, writer (pseud. Olʹshansky) and former agent of the Soviet and Finnish intelligence services. 50 Vozrozhdenie, 21 September 1932, ‘Vrednyi bezumets’. Semenov repeated the article on 11 June 1933 under the same title and using similarly insulting language. 51 Gippius to Amfiteatrov, 18 August 1932, Novyi zhurnal, kn. 187 (1992), 303. Cited in Fleishman, Lazarʹ et al. Russkaia pechatʹ v Rige: iz istorii gazety ‘Segodnia’ 1930-kh godov. Stanford: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stanford University, 1997, II, 428. 52 Burtsev, V. L. Bolshevitskie gangstery v Parizhe; Pokhishchenie Generala Millera i Generala Kutepova. Paris, 1939. Miller was kidnapped by agents of the NKVD (the OGPU’s successor) on 22 September 1937 and taken to Moscow. He was executed on 11 May 1939. 53 Apparently some five years later Burtsev was still very much the bête noire at Vozrozhdenie, where, according to Amfiteatrov, ‘they don’t like him – in fact they almost hate him!’ Amfiteatrov to Milʹrud, 15 February 1937 in Fleishman, Russkaia pechatʹ, V, 20. 54 BA, Burtsev Collection. Correspondence box 1, A. I. Denikin, 1 December 1932. 55 Ibid., M. Paléologue, 29 November 1932. 56 Ibid., D. Filosofov, 28 November 1932. Dmitry Vladimirovich Filosofov (1872–1940), an essayist and newspaper editor, was involved with Savinkov in the reorganization of the White Army in Poland. 57 Ibid., Boris Nikolaevsky, 27 November 1932. 58 Byloe, Novaia seriia. Nos. 1–2 (Paris, 1933). 59 Burtsev, ‘Moi priezd v Rossiiu v 1914 g. Iz vospominanii’. 60 HIA, B. I. Nicolaevsky Collection, Series 95, box 4. Burtsev to Minor (undated but earlier than 7 December 1931). 61 Ibid., Minor to Burtsev, 7 December 1931. 62 Ibid., Burtsev to Minor, 21 December 1931. 63 Minor died on 24 September 1932 in Suresnes, Paris (although other sources mistakenly give his date of death as 1934). http://www.jta.org/1932/10/31/archive/ memorial-service-held-in-paris-for-osip-minor [accessed 8 June 2016].

312

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64 ‘Gapon, Georgiy Appolonovich’. In Seligman, E. R. A. and Johnson, A. S. (eds.) Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 6. London: Macmillan Publishers, 1932, 568–569. One such appeal for financial support was made to Lady Lydia Pavlovna Deterding, the Russian-born wife of the noted oil-baron, but was politely refused. See BA, Burtsev Collection. Correspondence. Deterding to Burtsev, 20 February 1929. 65 On this occasion his benefactor was the Russian businessman V. P. BogovutKolomiitsev. See also Gulʹ, Roman. Ia unes Rossiiu: Apologiia russkoi emigratsii, vol. 2. Moscow: B.S.G. Press, 2001, 159, and Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, II, 52, 75 note 154.

Chapter 10 1 Burtsev, V pogone za provokatorami.‘Protokoly sionskikh mudretsov’ – dokazannyi podlog, 289. 2 Nilus, Sergei, Velikoe v Malom i Antikhrist. kak blizkaia politicheskaia vozmozhnostʹ. Zapiski Pravoslavnago. Tsarskoe Selo, 1905. 3 The edition in question was entitled Die Zionistischen Protokolle. Das Programm der internationalen Geheim-regierung. Mit einem Vor – und Nachwort von Theodor Fritsch. Leipzig: Hammer Verlag, 1933. 4 Others to appear for the prosecution included B. I. Nikolaevsky, G. B. Sliozberg, S. G. Svatikov and P. N. Milyukov. For a summary of all witness statements see Burtsev, V pogone za provokatorami, 304–314. 5 The émigré was later identified as the poet and monarchist M. S. Mikhailov-Raslovlev (1892–1987). See The Times, 17 February 1978: ‘Russian in “Elders of Zion” exposé identified’. Graves’ exposé ran from 16–18 August 1921. 6 The Times, 20 August 1921, 7: ‘Forged Protocols. Complicity of Russian Police’. Letter from Israel Zangwill (d. 1926), former Zionist, founder of the Jewish Territorialist Organization, whose aim was the creation of a Jewish homeland in wherever a place could be found for them, not limiting themselves to Palestine only. 7 Iosif Iosifovich Kolyshko (1861–1938), pseudonym ‘Bayan’, was a Russian writer and journalist. 8 HIA, B. I. Nicolaevsky Collection, Series 95, box 149–6, Kolyshko to Burtsev, 7 September 1934, ff. 1–4. 9 Ibid., f. 3. 10 Fedor Viktorovich Vinberg (1868–1927) was a former officer in the Russian Imperial Guard, ultra-right-wing monarchist, publisher and journalist. 11 R. V. ‘Berlinskie pisʹma’, Luch sveta, kn. III, 1920, 53. The passage in question in literal translation reads: ‘Russia had fallen completely under the Jewish yoke and had meekly placed her neck under the triumphant slipper of that enemy with the long sideburns!’ (pod torzhestvuiushchei ‘pantoflei’ svoego peisatago vraga!) 12 Nilus, S. A., ‘Velikoe v malom’, Luch sveta, kn. III, 1920, 167–341. 13 Cohn, Norman, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967. 14 The Times, 1 November 1934, 13: ‘The “Protocols of Zion”’. 15 ‘Nelʹzia chistoe delo delatʹ griaznymi sposobami’. See Burtsev, V pogone za provokatorami, 292. 16 The Times, 15 May 1935, 13: ‘The Protocols of Zion. Judgment for Plaintiffs in Swiss case’. The verdict had been delivered the previous day.

Notes

313

17 GARF. R. 5802. op. 1. del. 2254. Also del. 2268, l. 39, B. Livschitz to Burtsev, 24 May 1935. 18 BA, Sergei Svatikov Papers – Manuscripts, box 7, Burtsev, 2 June 1935. This document superseded an earlier version dated 23 December 1919, in which he left everything to A. I. Konovalov, former minister in the Provisional Government, who at that time was residing in the Russian Embassy at 79 Rue de Grenelle. See HIA, V. L. Burtsev Collection, box 1: 29. 19 Vozrozhdenie, 13 March 1936. 20 Burtsev, Protokoly sionskikh mudretsov – dokazannyi podlog, 1938. 21 HIA, B. I. Nicolaevsky Collection, Series 95, box 149–6, Burtsev to Globachev, 21 June 1939. 22 Arendt, Hannah. Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, Munich and Zurich: Piper, 1991, 30. Quoted in Hagemeister, ‘Russian émigrés’, 391. 23 Rumanov, ‘Shtrikhi’, 226–227. 24 Burtsev, V. L. Kak Pushkin khotel izdatʹ ‘Evgenii Onegin’ i kak izdal. Neskolʹko stranits iz biografii Pushkina. Paris: Oreste Zeluk, 1934. 25 Burtsev, V. L. ‘Izuchaite Pushkina!’, La Cause commune, 1933, no. 10. A twenty-twopage pamphlet of the same title would be published in Paris in 1941. This would be Burtsev’s last publication. 26 Vosʹmaia, deviataia i desiataia glavy romana ‘Evgenii Onegin’; k istorii iskaliechennago romana. S vvedeniem, primechaniiami i statei V. L. Burtseva “Sudʹby ‘Evgeniia Onegina’.” Paris: Izd. zhurnala Illiustrirovannaia Rossiia, 1937. He followed this up the following year with the short brochure, An Open Letter to Pushkinists and Lovers of Pushkin (Otkrytoe pisʹmo Pushkinistam i liubiteliam Pushkina). Paris: Oreste Zeluk, 1938. Apparently, taking pity on Burtsev’s impecunious state, the publisher agreed to produce the brochure at his own expense. See Zenzinov, ‘V. L. Burtsev’, 363. 27 Burtsev, V. L. ‘On New Translations of Pushkin. (How Should Pushkin Be Translated?)’, Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 15, no. 44 (January 1937), 306. 28 Amfiteatrov to M. S. Milʹrud, 15 February 1937, quoted in Fleishman, Russkaia pechatʹ, 19, 20. The book review appeared in Milʹrud’s Segodnia, no. 68, 9 March 1937, 3, as ‘Nado li zhaletʹ chto “Evgenii Onegin” ostalsia nezakonchennym?’ 29 Zenzinov, ‘V. L. Burtsev’, 363. 30 Illariya Vladimirovna Amfiteatrova (née Sokolova) (1873–1949) was Amfiteatrov’s second wife. 31 Gorʹkii i russkaia zhurnalistika, Amfiteatrov letter to Gorky, 3 February 1909, 140. 32 Alʹbus, N. ‘Poslednii iz don kikhotov: k desiatiletiiu konchiny V. L. Burtseva’, Vozrozhdenie: literaturno-politicheskiia tetradi, Paris, Tetradʹ 24 (November– December 1952), 155. 33 HIA, B. I. Nicolaevsky Collection, Series 95, box 151, I. Amfiteatrova to Burtsev, 15 January 1939. 34 Gorky, Gorʹkii i russkaia zhurnalistika, 200. 35 Zenzinov, ‘V. L. Burtsev’, 363. See also S. N. Motovilova’s reminiscence, RGASPI f. 328, op. 1, ed. khr. 206, l. 1, 2. 36 GARF R. 5802. op. 1. 645, Shalyapin to Burtsev, 2 July 1937. See also Manukhin, ‘Vospominaniia’, 109. 37 Gulʹ, Ia unes Rossiiu, vol. 2, 158. Burtsev’s assertion rather contradicts the recollections of Don Amino and Alexey Tolstoy described earlier. 38 Gulʹ, Ia unes Rossiiu, vol. 2, 102–105.

314

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39 ‘75–letie V. L. Burtseva. Na chestvovanii, ustroennom redaktsiei “Illiustrirovannoi Rossii”’, no. 52 (Paris, 1937), 7–8. The invitation gave the location as 18 Bd. Flandrin, Paris 18th arr. See BA, Burtsev Collection, Printed Materials. 40 GARF R. 5802. op. 1. 2156, ll. 20–26. 41 Ibid., l. 21. 42 Quoted in Gribanov, Stanislav. ‘Poliubil Rossiiu…’ Moscow, 2001. Available online at: http://www.rus-sky.com/history/library/gribanov.htm#_Toc18229112 [accessed 8 June 2016]. Among those executed was Marshal M. N. Tukhachevsky. 43 Ibid. 44 Burtsev, V. L. Prestupleniia i nakazanie Bolʹshevikov. Po povodu 20-letniago iubileia predatelei i ubiits. Paris: Dom knigi, 1938. 45 Burtsev, Bolshevitskie gangstery v Parizhe. 46 BA, Burtsev Collection, Correspondence box 1. Burtsev to unidentified correspondent, 24 March 1939. (Although referring to him as a ‘typical German’, Burtsev was doubtless aware of Hitler’s Austrian roots.) 47 GARF R. 5802. op. 1. d. 2157, also 2158, l. 19. Letter from Burtsev to Krymov, 9 February 1939. 48 Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, II, 55. The report also commented that within the émigré community Burtsev had the reputation of being ‘an old fogey’ (rendered by Popova as ‘staryi ramoli’). 49 HIA, B. I. Nicolaevsky Collection, Series 95, box 151. I. Amfiteatrova to Burtsev, 15 January 1939. 50 RGASPI f. 328s. del. 97. l. 1, 2. Letter from Burtsev to unidentified, 7 February 1940. See also Budnitskii, ‘Bratstvo russkoi pravdy’. 51 Popova, ‘Ia levyi’, II, 55, 80. 52 Zenzinov, ‘V. L. Burtsev’, 364. 53 Sedykh, Ia. M. Dalekie i blizkie. New York: Izd. ‘Novogo russkogo slova’, 1962, 100. ‘Operation Barbarossa’, the German invasion of Russia, had been launched on 22 June 1941. 54 Archives de lʹAssistance publique-Hopitaux de Paris. (AAP-HP) Hôpital Hôtel-Dieu, Registre des Entrées du 1 juillet au 31 décembre 1942, no. 9450. The metal plaque on the simple wooden cross marking his grave gives his date of death, using the Julian Calendar, as 21 August 1942. 55 The New York Times, 30 October 1942, 19: ‘Bourtzeff, 80, Dies: Russian Historian.’ 56 Alʹbus, ‘Poslednyi’, 153–154. While there may be some truth in this account of Burtsev’s fate it should be pointed out that another of his trusted colleagues, Sergei Melʹgunov, claimed never to have heard this version of events, even though he had visited Burtsev in hospital on several occasions leading up to his death. See Melʹgunov’s footnote to that effect. Ibid., 154. 57 Alʹbus, ‘Poslednyi’, 154. 58 Mairie de Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois website: http://www.sgdb91.com/vie-pratique/ affaires-generales/cimetieres-communaux.html [accessed 8 June 2016].

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Index Abramovich, Rafael 128 Abu Hamza, trial 1, 256 n.3 Aehrenthal, A. L. von 119 Agafonov, Valerian K. 140, 151 Ahmed Pasha 31, 264 n.117 Akselʹrod, Pavel B. 19, 65 Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. See Edward VII, King Alʹbus, N. 252, 314 n.56 Alekseev, General Mikhail V. 306 n.18, 310 n.28 Alekseev, Nikolai N. 237 Aleksinsky, Grigory A. 305 n.12 Alexander I, Tsar 229 Alexander II, Tsar 10–11 assassination 3, 12, 23, 25, 71, 84, 106, 262 n.80, 278 n.89, 291 n.186 funeral 87 Grinevitsky, assassin of 12, 106 Alexander III, Tsar Alisov on 87 B’s opposition to 207–8 British attitude towards 26, 41 Decree of Executive Committee of the People’s Will (1879) 12, 24 Durnovo’s report on B 34 final years of reign 32 French attitude towards 27 Kálnoky’s ambassadorship 49 Lopatin’s imprisonment under 17 political opposition to 13 Swinburne on 22 Alexandra Fedorovna, Empress 148, 181 Alisov, Petr F. 47–8, 84, 87, 91 Allen (Detective Inspector, CID) 82 All-Russian National Council 222 Amfiteatrov, Aleksander I. 293 n.34, 311 n.53 on B’s editorial dominance 161 B’s visit 146 on B’s ‘Eugene Onegin’ 247

defends B 159 involvement with ‘Brotherhood of Russian Truth’ 251 Amfiteatrova, Illariia V. 247–8, 313 n.30 Ananʹev, I. N. See Kashintsev, Ivan N. Anderson, Sir Robert (Head of CID) 96, 272 n.160 Andreev, Leonid N. 305 n.12 Andropov, Sergei V. 105–6, 284 n.39 Anet, Claude 183, 303 n.72 Arbuzov, Artur Kh. 231 Arendt, Hannah 246 Arenkov (Arenkoff), Yakov (medical student) 273 n.183 Argunov, Andrei А. 146 Ashlands (steamship) 30–1, 33, 54, 264 n.116 Asquith, Herbert H. 64, 153 Assange, Julian 5, 21 Astrov, Nikolai I. 305 n.12 Aurora (battleship) 198 Aveling, Edward 71 Aveling, Eleanor 71 Avksen’tev, Nikolai D. 201, 204, 223, 226, 248–9 Azef, Evno Fishelevich in A. Tolstoy’s play 230 B’s encounters with 55, 129–32, 136–8, 161–2, 204 B’s exposure of 141–2, 144–9, 151–4 in B’s L’Avenir 160–2 Bakai on 141–2, 158 Le Journal on 154 in London 142–4 in R. Gul’s play 248 SR defenders 140 Bakai, Mikhail E. 205, 291 n.196, 292 n.9, 296 n.88, 296 n.97 approaches Dobroskok 132 arrest and exile 129

Index on Azef 141–2 escape from Siberia 129, 137–8, 145 first meeting with B 128–9 involvement in surveillance operations 151 Le Journal article 158 meets B in Finland 139 terminates relationship with B 159, 162 Bakh, Aleksei N. 24 Bakunin, Mikhail A. 70, 104, 276 n.43 Balabinskaia Hotel, St Petersburg 121, 179, 183, 207 Balfour, Arthur James 117 Balmashev, Stepan V. 111 Baranov, Mikhail F. 39, 63 Baranov (Baranoff), Vl. (pseud.). See Burtsev, Vladimir Lʹvovich Bark, Petr Lʹvovich 220 Bartolomei, Mikhail F. 38, 41 Battolla/Battola, Jean (anarchist) 62 Bebutov, Prince David 157 Beire (pseud.). See Garting, Arkady Beitner, Lev Dmitrievich 100, 107, 281 n.168, 286 n.85 admission to British Museum 74, 78 B’s first encounter with 50 biography of Stepniak 74 exposed as Okhrana informer 74 funds publication of Narodovolets 83 as London agent 37, 48, 93 responsibility for Krakov’s arrest 286 n.85 visits B in prison 97 Beklemyshev, A. I. (Left SR barrister) 206 Beldinsky, Vera (pseud.). See Zasulich, Vera I. Beletsky, Stepan P. 201–5, 207 Belinsky, Vissarion G. 104 Bell, Edward 82 Belorusov, A. S. (journalist) 19 Bennigsen (Benningsen), Count Georgy P. 227–30, 308 n.7 Bentham, Jeremy 228, 229 Bentham, Samuel 228, 229, 276 n.45 Bernatsky, Mikhail V. 200 Berne, Switzerland (‘Protocols’ trial) 5, 242, 246, 249 Bernstein, Herman 154 Bernstein (Bernshtein), L. B. 160, 305 n.12, 306 n.20, 308 n.6

339

Bezobrazov, Vladimir P. 127 Bint, Henri 153, 266 n.28, 267 n.63, 269 n.110, 286 n.84 arrest in Switzerland 112 employed by Russian police 24 employed by Sûreté 23 onboard Ashlands (steamship) 32 recruits Elpidin as informer 29 Bloody Sunday (1905) 119, 272 n.156 Boevaia Organizatsiia. See Combat Organization Bogdanovich, Nikolai M. 107 Bogolepov, Nikolai P. 107, 284 n.49 Bogovut-Kolomiitsev, V. P. 312 n.65 Bogrov, Dmitry G. 160, 296 n.95 Boguchanskoe, Krasnoyarsk Region, Siberia 174, 176 Bogucharsky, Vasily Ya. 122, 127, 135, 291 n.187 Boguslavsky, Mikhail A. 305 n.12 Boldyrev, General Vasily G. 201 Bolsheviks 5, 303 n.64, 304 n.84, 306 n.20 B as Bolshevik courier 208 B on the horrors of 227 B’s arrest by 199–202 B’s opposition to 5, 182, 196, 213–14, 234 British attitude towards 219, 221–2 closure of The Common Cause 197 Constituent Assembly, abolition 223 courts 207 enemies of 249–50 German assistance 186–7, 190 infiltration of White emigration 235 Kornilov and 191–4 L’Humanité, support for 224 as opposition to Provisional Government 188 Reilly’s arrest by 233 seizure of power 198, 203, 205 ‘semi-Bolsheviks’, 195, 220 terrorist operation against 231 Volunteer Army’s defeat by 220 Bonch-Bruevich, Vladimir D. 83 Bor´ba za Rossіiu (Struggle for Russia/La Lutte pour la Russie) 232, 309 n.25 Botho zu Eulenburg. See Eulenburg, Count Botho zu Bow Street Police Station, London 1 Bradford, Sir Edward 39–40

340

Index

Brailsford, Henry Noel 119 Branicki, Ksawery 77 Branting, Karl Hjalmar 305 n.8 Bratstvo Russkoi Pravdy. See Brotherhood of Russian Truth Braudo, Aleksander I. 143 Brazulʹ, Dmitry I. 303 n.69 Brezhko-Brezhkovskaia, Ekaterina K. 26 Briand, Aristide 152 Brinshtein. See Dembo, I. V. Bristol, The (Grand Café, Frankfurt-amMain) 162 British Brothers League 117 British intelligence 214, 233 British Museum Reading Room 42, 55, 69, 72, 78, 95, 104 B’s arrest in 90–1 B seeks readmission to 106 B’s return to 226 Trotsky on 70 Brotherhood of Russian Truth 235, 251, 309 n.18 Brusilov, General Aleksei A. 301 n.33 Brzozowski, Stanisław 139, 141, 291 n.192, 294 n.50 Buchan, John 214 Budushchee (The Future) 160–3 Budzilovich, General A. I. 29–31, 79, 263 n.109 Bukharin, Nikolai I. 250 Bullier, Charlotte 43–54, 67, 130 B’s affection for 43 correspondence with Alexander III 49 European tour with B 67 Marseilles adventure with B 129–30 relationship with P. Rachkovsky 43–9, 51, 53–4 Bulygin, Aleksander G. 121 Bunakov-Fundaminsky, I. See Fondaminsky, Ilʹia, I. Bunin, Ivan A. 215, 305 n.12, 307 n.49 Burtsev, Aleksander Lʹvovich (B’s brother) 9 Burtsev, Lev Aleksandrovich (B’s father) 9 Burtsev, Sofʹia Aleksandrovna (née Alatortseva) (B’s mother) 9 Burtsev, Vera Lʹvovna (B’s sister) 9 Burtsev, Vladimir Lʹvovich (Bourtseff/ Bourtzeff) accused of militant nationalism 5, 225, 239

accuses Azef of provocation 136, 144–7, 152–3 in America 68–9, 108, 112, 154–5, 157, 159, 213, 221, 223, 250, 253 appearance and dress 1–2, 5–6, 40, 135–6 arrest/imprisonment 2–3, 17, 26–8, 86, 94–5, 106, 168–72, 193, 199, 205; in Geneva 18–19; in Kazanʹ 14, 16–18, 79; in London 33–41, 54–8, 70–99, 142–3, 213–22, 226–7; in Paris 17–18, 113–15, 118, 124–5, 138–40, 157, 168, 180, 184, 192, 200, 214–22, 232–4, 240, 242, 249–50; in Petrograd 167–8, 170, 174–6, 178–83, 186, 189–92, 199, 206–9, 218–19, 224; in Rauma, Finland 166–7, 179; in St Petersburg 15–17, 24, 29–30, 33–4, 36–7, 43–6, 49–51, 55–60, 83, 88, 109, 112, 115, 118–22, 130–2, 214–15, 242, 245 association with Bakai 129, 132, 137–8, 141–2, 145, 151, 158–9, 162 association with French intelligence 23, 108, 110–11, 115, 118, 152, 250–1 association with SR Combat Organization 114–15, 130 attitude to arts 42–3, 51, 152, 248 attitude to Stalinist purges 232–4 on Bolsheviks 5, 182, 188, 196–7, 199–208, 213–14, 223, 227, 234, 249–50 at the British Museum 1, 42, 55, 69, 70–2, 74, 76–8, 89–91, 95, 104, 106, 108, 112, 226 burial 251–2 ‘Burtsev Commission’ in Petrograd 184 on Capri with Gorky 148, 162 cause of death 171, 251–2 childhood 9–10 Don Quixote, model for 241–55 early life 4, 9–10 education 9–10, 14, 18 exile 3, 11, 13, 16, 18–19, 21–2, 25–6, 66, 81, 94, 101, 105, 171–7, 196 exposes A. M. Garting 151–5, 157–8, 230 financial difficulties 80, 139, 240, 251, 277 n.57, 279 n.95

Index founds detective agency in Paris 138–40 handwriting 3, 16 health 97–8, 103, 107–9, 171 historical writings 4, 76–7, 79, 81, 110 on history 106 investigative journalism 4–5, 18–22, 192 Lenin obituary 224 love of literature 76–7, 169, 226–7, 245, 248 meets Lopukhin on the Cologne–Berlin train 126, 143–5 obituaries 216 opposition to Alexander III 207–8 outdoor pursuits 135–6 in Poland 39, 77, 139, 178, 220–1, 224, 228 political beliefs 5, 10, 67, 83, 226 Protocols of the Elders of Zion Berne trial, involvement in 241–2, 246 pseudonyms 30, 34, 42, 54, 55, 76, 79, 110, 295 n.70, 301 n.25 referred to as Sherlock Holmes of the Revolution 153, 158, 230, 240, 242 relationship with Amfiteatrov 148, 159, 161 relationship with Charlotte Bullier 43, 51, 67, 130 relationship with Maxim Gorky 148, 160–2, 187, 190, 196, 205 return to Russia (1905) 118–21 return to Russia (1914) 135–63 Russian police surveillance of 177–9 Siberian exile (1886) 18 Siberian exile (1915) 172–5 in Switzerland 18–21, 44, 50, 69, 83, 111–13, 125 terrorism, espousal of 84, 87–8, 100, 105–6 visits Uspensky Cathedral, Moscow 10, 178 Burtsev, Yuliia Lʹvovna (B’s sister) 9 Butenev, Apollinary K. 37, 57 Butyrka Transit Prison, Moscow 18 Byloe (The Past) 4, 106–8, 110–11, 121–2, 239, 290 n.177 Cambon, Paul 108 Cantwell, Thomas 74–5

341

Capri 148, 162 Carmen (Bizet) 247 Caserio, Sante Geronimo 275 n.21 Catherine II, Empress 77, 228–9 Cavi de Lavagna, Italy 162 Cecil, Viscount Robert 214 Cervantes, Miguel de 248, 252 Chaikovsky, Nikolai V. 25, 38–9, 63, 71, 80, 83, 92, 194, 196, 215, 308 n.60 on B 79 on B’s revolutionary language 84 exile 186 on Stepniak 86–7 Charles, Frederick 62, 272 n.152 Châtelet Theatre, Paris 152 Cheka/Chekists 220, 231, 309 n.16. See also GPU Chepurkovsky, Efim M. 71 Cheremisov, Vladimir A. 196, 201 Cherkezov, Varlaam N. 30, 73, 83, 264 n.115 Chernov, Viktor M. 115, 137–8, 171, 223, 226, accuses B of slander 142 acts for prosecution against B 144–6 defeatism of 196, 298 n.26 as Minister in Provisional Government 190–1, 193 Chertkov, Vladimir G. 98, 105–6, 109, 283 n.33, 283 n.36, 285 n.70 Chukhnin, Grigory P. 132 Churchill, Sir Winston S. 219–21, 226 Clancy, Thomas (PC) 92, 94 Coleridge, Baron Bernard John Seymour 91, 94–5, 280 n.128 Collins, William (Superintendent, CID) 73 Combat Organization 68, 107, 136, 147, 260 n.38, 284 n.51, 287 n.106, 288 n.137, 290 n.174, 291 n.206 Azef as head 136, 141 B suspected of membership 114–15, 130 B on structure and modus operandi 68 B’s criticism of 113 campaign of violent direct action 107, 131 collapse of the Northern Flying Brigade 147 growth and strength 119 popular support for 12

342

Index

under Stolypin 131 Trauberg as head of Northern Flying Brigade 137 Combes, Émile, President 115 Committee for the Saviour of Russia 222 Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur 287 n.115 Constans, Ernest 27 Constantinople 27–32, 52–3, 81, 114, 220–1, 242, 264 n.117, 264 n.120 Constituent Assembly 182, 195, 223, 307 n.52 Cook, Dr Frederick A. 158, 296 n.91 Cooper Union, New York 155 Coulon, August 62 Council of the Republic 194, 196 Coxe, Archdeacon William 77, 228–9, 276 n.43 crucifixion nail 10, 102, 178, 252 Czolgosz, Leon 285 n.58 Dashkova, Princess Ekaterina Vorontsova 229, 309 n.13 Davies, Major David (MP) 214 Debagory-Mokrievich, Vladimir K. 19, 21, 80, 277 n.65 Decembrist uprising 9, 122 Deev, Mikhail 151 defeatism 5, 164, 171, 177, 180–2, 187–8, 190, 196, 298 n.261 defencism 5, 164, 169, 172,175, 180, 181, 186, 192, 299 n.47 Degaev, Sergei P. 15, 18, 23, 123 de Giers, Nikolai K. 38, 41, 56 Deich (Deutsch), Lev G. 71, 120 Delcassé, Théophile 115 Dembo, Isaac V. 21, 27 Dembski, Aleksandr I. 39, 40 Demidov, Igorʹ P. 305 n.12 Democratic Conference 194 Denikin, General Anton I. 192, 218–21, 238, 249, 305 n.11, 306 n.18, 307 n.32 Derentalʹ, Aleksandr A. 305 n.12 de Roberti, Colonel Nikolai A. 236 de Staal, Baron Egorʹ E. 38–40, 63–4, 81, 90, 267 nn.54–5 Deterding, Lady Lydia Pavlovna 312 n.64 Deucher, Adolf 113 Deutsch. See Deich, Lev G. Dʹiakonov, Pavel P. 236

Dickens, Charles 77, 230 Dikgof-Derentalʹ A. See Derentalʹ, Aleksandr A. Dilke, Sir Charles 97–8, 103–4, 117 Dioneo (pseud.). See Shklovsky, Isaak V. Dobreva, Varvara N. 108 Dobroskok, Ivan V. 132, 143, 144, 145 Dobrovolsky, Ivan I. 19 Dolgorukov, Prince Pavel D. 201 Don-Aminado (pseudonym of A. P. Shpolyansky) 216, 306 n.13 Don Quixote (Massenet opera) 3, 5, 225, 241–55 Drachevsky, Daniil V. 127, 291 n.187 Dragomanov, Mikhailo P. 19, 21 Drentelʹn, General Aleksandr R. 11, 107 Drizo, Mikail A. See Mad Dubasov, Fedor B. 132 Dukhonin, Nikolai N. 304 n.84 Duma, First State (1906) 131–2, 297 n.13 Durnovo, Ivan N. 34, 49–50, 88, 264 n.7 Durnovo, Petr N. 34, 37, 42, 44–5, 49, 56–9, 64, 121, 132, 265 n.9 Dushevsky (engineer) 132, 141, 144–5 Dussan, Ivan V. 305 n.12 Dzerzhinsky, Felix E. 231 Dzhunkovsky, Vladimir F. 169 Earl Hardinge Giffard. See Halsbury, Lord Earnshaw, Thomas (PC) 109, 110 Edward VII, King 258 n.7 Elpidin, Mikhail K. 28–9 Engels, Friedrich 71 Eniseisk Transit Prison, Siberia 173 Eremin, General 136 Ermolov, Dr V. (pseud.). See Burtsev, Vladimir Lʹvovich Esfirʹ. See Lapin, Bella Eulenburg, Count Botho zu 50 Eurasian movement 233, 236 Evalenko, Aleksander M. 78, 155, 157, 295 n.78 Evans-Gordon, Major W. E. 117 Falʹbort, A. A. (Russian General Consul in London) 270 n.120 Farce, Edgar Jean 37, 58, 117, 270 n.133, 271 n.134 February Revolution (1917) 187, 244, 259 n.22

Index Fergusson, Sir James 32 Figner, Olʹga N. 13, 15, 18, 19, 123, 144 Figner, Vera N. 261 n.60, 261 n.60, 294 n.39 Filosofov, Dmitry V. 238, 311 n.56, 311 n.56 Flaubert, Gustave 77 Fleischhauer, Ulrich 246 Flood, Michael (PC) 73 Foch, Ferdinand Marshal 219 Fondaminsky, Ilʹia I. 289 n.150 Foreign Agency. See Russia, Department of Police, Foreign Agency Fort Alexandrovsky (Fort Shevchenko) 9 Franco (Russian journalist) 292 n.7 François, Jean-Pierre 64 Free Russia (journal of Society of Friends of Russian Freedom) 26, 39 Free Russian Library, Whitechapel 91 Fritsch, Theodor 241, 245 Gapon, Georgy A. 132, 240 Garmidor, Moisei E. See Baranov, M. F. Garnett, Olive 72 Garnett, Richard 72, 74 Garting, Arkady M. 4, 136, 151–4 B’s exposure of 230 Bakai on 158 employment of Farce 58 as Foreign Agency head 120 Krasilʹnikov as successor to 155 Menʹshchikov’s denunciation of 157 recruited by Rachkovsky 24 Geiking, Captain Gustav E. 14, 107, 258 n.15 Gekkelʹman, A. M. See Garting, Arkady Geneva 18–19, 24, 36, 69, 78, 108–12, 124, 242 Russian emigration 27–8 Geoffray, Léon 285 n.65 Gerasimov, Aleksander V. 137, 142, 146, 148, 161, 163, 185, 204 Gerngross-Zhuchenko, Zinaida F. 154 Gershuni, Grigory A. 115, 142, 146, 155, 284 n.51 Gertsen, Aleksander Ivanovich. See Herzen, Aleksander Ivanovich Gessen, Iosif V. 307 n.49 Gippius, Zinaida N. 237, 240 Globachev, Konstantin I. 179, 184, 245

343

Gnatovsky, Anton D. 140, 149 Gogolʹ, Nikolai V. 227, 267 Golʹdenberg, Grigory D. 11, 12, 259 n.22 Golʹdenberg, Lazarʹ B. 78, 80, 86, 87 Golʹdendakh, court case against B 163 Golʹdshtein, Iosif M. 305–6 n.12 Golovinsky, Matvei V. 242 Gordanskaya, M. 253 Goremykin, Ivan L. 88, 124, 131, 299 n.50 Gorky, Maxim 293 n.34, 302 n.55, 304 n.87 attempts to protect B 148 B’s criticism of 190, 196 contributes to L’Avenir 160–1 supports release of B 205 visited by B on Capri 162 Goschen, Edward 90, 96, 280 n.120 Gots, Avram R. 125, 193 Gots, Mikhail R. 290 n.174 GPU/OGPU 226–40, 250, 309 n.16 Grankovsky, Konstantin 50, 67 Grant, Corrie 91 Grave, Jean 166 Graves, Philip Perceval 242, 245 Gredeskul, Nikolai A. 166, 297 n.13 Green, Joseph F. 189 Griboedov, Aleksandr S. 169, 180, 226–7, 276 n.38 Grigorʹkov, G. D. 305 n.12 Grinevitsky, Ignaty I. 12, 106 Gringmut, Vladimir A. 83 Gronsky, Pavel P. 305 n.12 Gubastov, Konstantin A. 49 Gul, Roman 248 Gurovich, Mikhail I. (Moisei Davidovich Gurevich) 34, 265 n.14 Gvozdev, Kuzʹma A. 200 Halsbury, Lord 93 Hamard, Octave 152 Hamilton Cuffe, John A. 89, 91 Hansson, Per Albin 305 n.8 Harmidor, Moses. See Baranov, M. F. Harting, Arcady. See Garting, Arkady Hawkins, Sir Henry 62 Helsinki, Finland 137, 208–10 Herschell, Baron Farrer 75 Hervé, Gustave 164, 170, 171 Herzen, Aleksander Ivanovich 21, 70, 104, 274 n.4 Hirsch, Baron Maurice de 41

344

Index

Hitler, Adolf 241–2, 246, 249–51 Hjalmar Branting. See Branting, Karl Hjalmar Holloway Prison, London 91 Holy Brotherhood 24, 262 n.80 Howie, Daniel (Police Superintendent) 275 n.19 L’Humanité 152, 224 Hyde Park rally (1890) 261 n.75 Iablonovsky, Aleksandr A. 306 n.12 Ibrahim (GPU officer) 233 Ignatʹev, Count Nikolai P. 26 Illiustrirovannaia Rossiia (Illustrated Russia) 233, 249, 309 n.17, 311 n.46, 313 n.26 International Working Men’s Association 26–7 Invernezzi (Okhrana spy) 162 Iskra (The Spark), illustrated weekly 299 n.43 Iskra (The Spark), newspaper of the RSDLP 72, 162, 283 n.87, 284 n.39 Ivanoff (pseud.). See Rachkovsky, Petr Ivanovich Ivanov-Razumnik, Razumnik V. 301 n.30 Jaurès, Jean 287 n.102 assassination 165, 297 n.7 exposes Garting in L’Humanité 153 protests against Franco-Russian Alliance 163 supports B 115 Jolivard, Léon 60–1, 63, 271 n.141, 271 n.147 Joly, Maurice 242, 267 n.66 July Days (1917) 189–91 Kadets. See Party of Constitutional Democrats Kagan, Semen 97 Kaliaev, Ivan 288 n.136 Kálnoky, Count Gustav 48–9 Kamenev, Lev B. 173, 190 Kara penal colony, Siberia 261 n.58 Karl (pseud.). See Trauberg, Albert Karlsruhe Institute of Technology 130 Karpovich, Petr V. 107, 111 Kartashev, Anton V. 200, 201, 222, 224, 232

Kashinsky (pseud.). See Burtsev, Vladimir Lʹvovich Kashintsev (Ananʹev), Ivan N. at British Museum 72 on Byloe 106–7 contributes to Narodovolets 47, 84, 86, 279 n.96 correspondence with B 78, 80, 83–4, 100, 106, 277 n.62 expulsion to Britain 59 Paris bomb plot 27, 263 n.102, 268 n.72 as translator 262 n.90 Kazanʹ 14, 16, 17, 18, 79, 284 n.39 Kazarinov, Dmitry V. 50, 269 n.95 Kelchevsky, Ivan (pseud.). See Voinich, Wilfred M. Kennan, George 19, 25–6, 261 n.70, 262 n.90, 289 n.158 Kensinsky, M. A. 139, 141 Kerensky, Aleksandr F. attitude to defeatism 298 n.26 as B’s defence lawyer 169–70 closes Obshchee delo 193, 197, 302 n.38, 303 n.64 in exile 223 Kornilov affair 191–3 meets B in London 214 prison conditions under 203 role in Provisional Government 184–90, 301 n.33 visited by B in Petrograd 299 n.49 KGB 235. See also GPU; KRO Khalturin, Stepan N. 86, 259 n.21 Kharlamov, Vasily A. 306 n.12 Khrustalev, G. S. See Nosarʹ-Khrustalev, Georgy S. Khvostov, Aleksei N. 179, 181, 201, 203–4, 207, 299 n.53 Kishkin, Nikolai M. 200, 202 Kokoshkin, Fedor F. 201–3 Kolchak, Admiral Aleksandr V. 218, 220, 306 n.18, 306 n.31 Kollontai, Aleksandra M. 190, 301 n.30 Kolyshko, Iosif, I. 242–5 Komisarov, Ya. K. 154 Konashevich, V. P. 260 n.41 Konovalov, Aleksandr I. 200, 204, 313 n.18 Koppelman, Max 166–7 Kornilov, General Lavr G. 191–3, 249, 301 n.33

Index B’s support in Common Cause 193–4, 302 n.41, 302 n.45 B’s support in Morgenblad 213 death 220, 306 n.28 role in Civil War 306 n.18 Korolenko, Vladimir G. 65, 78, 123 Korolʹev, Vl. (pseud.). See Burtsev, Vladimir Lʹvovich Korvin-Krukovsky, Petr V. 23 Kotliarevsky, Mikhail M. 107 Kozlovsky, Mechislav Yu. 301 n.30 Krakov, Pavel A. 112–13, 118, 286 n.85, 287 n.111 Kranz, Philip. See Rombro,Yakov Krasheninnikov, Nikolai A. 170 Krasilʹnikov, Aleksander A. 156, 163, 275 n.15, 275 n.18 Kravchinsky, S. M. See Stepniak, Sergei Kresty Prison, Moscow 185, 202, 244 KRO (Counter Intelligence Department of the Russian State Political Directorate) 231. See also KGB Kropotkin, Prince Dmitry N., assassination 11, 105, 107 Kropotkin, Prince Petr A. accused of revolutionary terrorism 38, 71 attitude of British to 25, 32, 63 attitude of French to 26, 262 n.94 correspondence with B 147–8, 155, 160, 161 Foreign Agency reports 36–7, 57 friendship with Cherkezov 73 letter to Dr Steffen 166 member of revolutionary tribunal 144 member of Sovet stareishikh (Council of Elders) 196 returns to Russia 180 supports pro-war (defencist) camp 164, 186 visited by B in Brighton 165 Kropotkin, Sophie 71 Krylov, Ivan A. 308 n.5 Krymov, Vladimir P. 250 Kuliabko-Koretsky, Nikolai I. 112, 286 n.89 Kuprin, Aleksandr I. 215 Kuskova, Ekaterina D. 194, 289 n.156 Kutepov, General Aleksandr P. 234–7, 250

345

Kuzʹmin-Karavaev, Vladimir D. 305 n.12 Kvaskov (pseud.). See Burtsev, Vladimir Lʹvovich Land and Freedom 10, 11 Landezen-Garting, Arkady M. See Garting, Arkady Lapin, Bella 147 Lavrenius, Aleksandr 27, 39, 63, 268 n.72 Lavrov, Pavel L. 35, 37, 83, 86, 92, 144, 264 n.115, 265 n.21, 273 n.169 Lawrance, Sir John Compton 93 Lazarev, Egorʹ E. arrives in London 68, 78 editor of Free Russia, American edition 78 Foreign Agency report on 65 funds A Century of Political Life in Russia (1800–1896) 79–80, 155 invites B to collaborate with RFPF 55 monetary support for Byloe 111 plans to return to Russia 66 supports Narodovolets 83 League of Nations 224 Lee, Sir Sidney 228 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich B’s obituary of 224 B as opponent of 5, 173, 180, 187, 190, 194–6, 213, 220 British attitude to 214 critical references in B’s autobiography removed 234 death 224 defeatism of 5, 186 praises B’s Century of Political Life in Russia 4, 81 return to Russia (1917) 186–7 seeks B’s assistance re Okhrana infiltration 162 Leonard (pseud.). See Rachkovsky, Petr Ivanovich Lermontov, Mikhail Yu. 77, 227, 276 n.42 Leroy, Maurice 151, 158, 294 n.57 Lessar, Pavel M. 89 Levin, S. I. 305 n.12 Levintis (pseud.). See Burtsev, Vladimir Lʹvovich Liber, Mikhail I. 195 Lisitsyn, Yakov 185 Littlechild, John (Chief Inspector, CID) 61

346

Index

Livschits (Livshits) (pseud.). See Burtsev, Vladimir Lʹvovich Lloyd George, David 219, 221–2, 226, 307 n.32 London Azef in 142–3 B’s association with (1891–1894) 33–69 B’s association with(1894–1899) 70–99 B’s association with (1918–1921) 213–25 B’s literary diversions in (1922-1934) 226–40 Russian emigration 32, 285 n.70 Longuet, Jean 154, 158, 229 n.7 Lopatin, German А. 16, 17, 18, 123, 140, 144–5, 150, 160, 162, 163, 169, 260 n.49, 296 n.109 Lopukhin, Aleksei A. 110, 293 n.27 B offers to attend trial as witness 161 meeting with B on the Cologne–Berlin train 126, 143–5 reinterviewed by SRs 146–9 trial 148, 154 visited by Azef and Gerasimov 146 Loris-Melikhov, Count Mikhail T. 12 Lozé, Henri-Auguste 35, 37, 42, 265 n.16 Lunacharsky, Anatoly V. 202, 303 n.76 Lʹvov, Prince Georgy E. 305 n.11 Lʹvov, Vladimir N. 191 McCullough, Arthur Henry 119 McKinley, President William 108 Mad (pseudonym of Drizo, Mikhail A.) 306 n.12 Makarov, Aleksandr A. 161 Maklakov, Vasily A. 170, 171, 175, 180 Maklakov, Nikolai A. 168, 169 Maklakova, Natalʹia 296 n.97 Makletsov, Aleksandr V. 305 n.12 Maliankewicz, Bolesław 37, 56–8, 68 Maliantovich, Pavel N. 200 Malinovsky, Roman 4, 162, 187–8 Malyshevskoe, Irkutsk province, Siberia 18 Mamulova, E. B. (wife of Rotshtein) 292 n.10 Manasevich-Manuilov, Ivan F. 242, 304 n.96 Manukhin, Dr Ivan I. 202, 206, 207 Markotun/Morkotun, Sergei K. 306 n.12 Martov, Yuly O. 140, 149–50, 187, 195–6 Marx, Karl 71, 154, 165 Marx-Aveling, E. See Aveling, Eleanor

Maslov, Semen L. 200 Maslov-Stokoz, Vasily P. See Zhuk, Vasily P. Massenet, Jules 248 Matthews, Viscount Henry 62, 282 n.122 Maximalists 139 Mazurenko, Semen P. 149 Melʹgunov, Sergei P. 160–1, 232, 235, 314 n.56 Melville, William (Chief Inspector of Police) arrests B 1, 91–4 association with Rachkovsky and Russian police 2, 57, 60–64, 69, 73, 82, 88–93, 96, 271 n.147 commits perjury 94 retirement 116 Walsall anarchist conspiracy 61–3 witness at B’s trial 94, 96 Melzer/Meltzer (Foreign Agency employee) 268 n.66, 268 n.86 Mendelssohn, Maria 35 Mendelssohn, Stanislaw 39, 40, 57, 63 Menʹshchikov, Leonid P. 100, 151–2, 157–60, 162, 286 n.85 Mensheviks 187–8, 190 Méric, Viktor 153 Mezentsev, General Dmitry F. 34, 38, 107 Mikhail Alexandrovich, Grand Duke 182 Mikhailov, Nikolai N. 79 Mikhailov-Raslovlev, Mikhail S. 312 n.5 Mikhailovsky (pseud.). See Bakai, Mikhail E. Mikhelʹson, A. M. 306 n.12 Miku (secret agent) 30 Milevsky, Vladislav 37, 48, 53, 69, 73, 269 n.110 Miller, General Evgeny K. 236, 237, 250, 311 n.52 Millerand, Alexandre 28, 221 Milyukov, Paul N. 301 n.26, 306 n.12 contributor to La Cause Commune 215 informed of tsar’s pardon of B 175 Kadet leadership 131, 181, 213 Poslednye novosti (Latest News) 234–5 resigns from Provisional Government 190 Minor, Osip S. 223, 224, 311 n.63 correspondence with B 239 death 240 Mintslov, Sergei R. 135 MI6 233–4. See also British intelligence

Index Modelʹ, I. (Bolshevik commissar) 202 Moisei Davidovich Gurevich. See Gurovich, Mikhail I. Molodaia partiia ‘Narodnoi voli’. See Young Party of the People’s Will monarchists 83, 222–3, 235, 236, 239, 244, 262 n.80, 298 n.22, 310 n.31 Monastyrskoe, Turukhansk region, Siberia 172–6 Morenheim, Baron Artur P. 35 Morier, Sir Robert 26, 36, 38, 262 n.92 Morley, Viscount John 13, 32, 103, 104 Morris, William 57 Most, Johann 63, 84, 88 Motovilova, Sof  ʹia N 67, 82, 105–6, 115, 120 Muravʹev, Count Mikhail N. 90 Muravʹev, Nikolai K. 183 Muravʹev, Nikolai V. 112, 286 n.85 Museum of London 229 Nabokov, Vladimir D. 222, 306 n.12, 307 n.48 Nakachidze, M. 263 n.102 Narodovolets (Member of the People’s Will) journal 14, 22, 83–94, 111, 112 Nashe obshchee delo (Our Common Cause) 198, 238 Natanson, Mark A. acts for prosecution against B 144–6 B’s criticism of 18 defeatism of 196, 298 n.26 as SR leader 141, 142 supports Bolsheviks 200 Nazarov, A. I. 306 n.12 Nazim Bei 31 Nazis/Nazism 245–6, 248, 251 Nechaev, Sergei G. 126, 263 n.97 Nekliudov, Anatoly V. 153 Nekrasov, Nikolai V. 10, 197, 303 n.61 Nelidov, Aleksandr I. 30, 67, 114, 115 Nettlau, Max 77, 104, 267 n.57, 283 nn.25–6, 283 n.30 Newgate Prison, London 230 Niagara Falls 155 Nicholas II, Tsar 1–2, 93, 103, 127, 180–1, 265 n.19, 304 n.90 abdication 181–2 B’s opposition to 177, 207–8 Narodovolets editorial on 111

347

opinion of B 148 pardons B 175 state visit to Britain 81–3 Tsarskii listok 140–1, 154 Nicoll, David 62, 84, 88, 102 Nikitin, Aleksei M. 303 n.71 Nikolaevsky (Nikolaevskii), Boris I. 4, 115, 198, 238–9, 253 Nikolai Nikolaevich, Grand Duke 79, 164, 207 Nilus, Sergei A. 241–2, 245 Nosarʹ-Khrustalev, Georgy S. 149–50 Novikova, Olʹga A. 93 Novoselov, Vladimir P. 283 n.37 Obolensky, Ivan M. 107 Obolensky, Vladimir A. 306 n.12 Obshchee delo (The Common Cause/La Cause commune) 154, 198, 215, 218, 224, 295 n.67, 302 n.38 October Manifesto (1905) 120–1, 123 October Revolution (1917) 216, 218, 258 n.7, 293 n.38 Odessa 18, 276 n.49 Okhrana. See Russia, Department of Police Okladsky, Ivan F. 12, 259 n.22 Old Bailey, London 1, 92 Paasitorni (Helsinki Workers’ Hall) 209 Padlewski, Stanislaw 34–5, 265 n.15 Pahlen, Count (First Secretary of the Russian Embassy, London) 81 Palʹchinsky, Petr I. 200 Paléologue, Maurice 114–15, 119, 171, 238 Panina, Countess Sof ʹia V. 306 n.12 Panizzi, Antonio 70, 275 n.19 Pankratʹev, Petr E. 100 Paramonov, Nikolai E. 189, 289 n.159, 291 n.187, 291 n.190 Russian Historical Library series 127 supports B 122, 126, 305 n.11 Pares, Bernard 214, 229 Paris Allied conference 196 B in 113–15, 118, 124–5, 138–41, 157, 168, 192, 214–22, 232–4, 240, 242, 246, 249–50 B attends theatrical performances in 147–8

348 B’s encounter with Garting in 152 Foreign Agency in 24, 73, 120, 130, 136, 151, 204–5 Hotel-Dieu Hospital 251 Kutepov kidnapping 235, 237 Miller kidnapping 237 Nazi occupation 245–6 Russian Embassy in 23, 44, 153, 162, 268 n.66, 313 n.18 Russian emigration 17, 21–2, 34–5, 51, 58–62, 65–6, 87, 113–18, 136, 138–40, 146, 147, 216, 251 Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois cemetery 54, 251–5 Party of Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) 131, 154, 188, 190, 202–3, 213, 222–3, 297 n.13, 303 n.61 Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) 87, 107, 111, 115, 119, 121, 125, 128, 188, 193, 289 n.152 Pasmanik, Daniil S. 221 Pavlovsky, General Sergei E. 231 Pearson, Henry 202 Peary, Robert 158, 296 n.91 Pease, Edward Robert 25 Peden, Richard C. 284 n.54 Peel, Sir Robert 11 Pentonville Prison, London 97 People’s Will (Party of) 11–16, 22–4, 27, 47, 67, 83–4, 86, 105–7, 111, 154, 239 Perazich, V. D. (pseudonym of Liudvig Eksner) 65 Pereverzev, Ivan F. 190 Permʹ 18 Perovskaia, Sof ʹia L. 12, 13, 278 Perovsky, Aleksei A. 86 Persia, Shah of 108, 224, 258 n.7 Pervukhin, Mikhail K. 306 n.12 Peter and Paul Fortress, St Petersburg 17, 127, 129, 167–8, 199 Trubetskoy Bastion 17, 168, 200 Petit, Eugene 149 Petrishchev (Burtsev police informer) 205 Petrograd Soviet 120, 149, 182, 188, 191–2, 193, 199, 301 n.26 Petrov, Nikolai P. 46, 48–51, 53–4, 64–6, 80, 201, 269 n.95, 273 n.172 Petrovsky (pseud.). See Garting, Arkady Philippe (Lyons mystic) 242

Index Pierre, André 224 Pilsudski, Jozef 221 Platten, Fritz 302 n.52 Plehve, Viacheslav K. 14, 35, 287 n.106, 288 n.136 assassination 115, 119, 120, 144 B’s description of 230 founds Foreign Agency in Paris 23 sacks Rachkovsky 110 Plekhanov, Georgy V. 10, 19, 65, 72, 78, 87, 108, 164 Ploieşti, Romania 30 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin P. 26, 65 Poincaré, Raymond 171 Poliakov, S. (speculator) 14 Polti, François 64, 273 n.167 Ponosova, Yuliia 16–17 Popov, Colonel A. N. 236 Potemkin (battleship) 127, 229 Pound, John 93 Powell, Francis (PC) 73 Poznansky, Leib 163 Prelooker, Jaakoff 72, 101–2, 106, 113–14, 116–19 defends B 102 political views 106 on political violence 119 review of B’s publications 113 on Russophobia 116 Pre-parliament (Predparlament) 194–5 Price, Phillip 219 Prinkipo conference 219 Progressive Bloc 178, 181, 299 n.47 Prokopovich, Sergei N. 290 n.184, 303 n.71 Protocols of the Elders of Zion 5, 241, 246, 257 n.17, 307 n.50, 312 n.13 Protopopov, Aleksandr D. 181 Provisional Council of the Russian Republic. See Pre-parliament Provisional Government appointment of senior officers 191 B’s appointment as Commissioner 183–5 B’s criticism of 192–3, 198 Chernov, as Minister of Agriculture 190 conduct of war 186 Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry 183 former members as Bolshevik prisoners 200–4, 206

Index former members found Russian National Union 222 Kerensky’s role in 184–90, 301 n.33 Lenin directs propaganda efforts against 188 Verkhovsky’s retirement from 197 Purishkevich, Vladimir M. 201, 298 n.22 Pushkin, Aleksandr S. 165, 227, 246–7 Putilov, Aleksei I. 220 Putsiata, O. T. 154 Puzitsky, Sergei V. 231 Quinn, Charles (Superintendent, CID) 74–5, 108–9 Rabinovich, Georgy 112 Rachkovsky, Petr Ivanovich 261 n.77 appoints Garting as head of Foreign Agency 120, 136, 151 awarded Royal Victorian Order 82 B’s arrest 43, 92 Bullier and 44–51, 53 callous nature 24–5, 58 early career 15, 23 fabrication of Protocols of the Elders of Zion 242, 246 as head of Foreign Agency 2, 23, 26 as head of Political Section of Department of Police 120, 121, 151 infiltration of émigré communities 25 links with Melville 60–1, 73, 82, 92–3 London operations 34, 37, 55–6, 61, 65–6, 73, 78, 80 murder of Seliverstov 35 on Narodovolets 83 Paris bomb affair 61–2 pseudonyms 50, 60, 63 recruitment of agents 24, 58–9 replaced by Rataev as head of Foreign Agency 58, 110–12 on The Past 106 Radek, Karl 302 n.52 Radishchev, Aleksandr N. 169, 180 Ragatskii, Monsieur 252 Rakovsky, Khristian G. 301 n.30 Rakovsky, Leonid 137–8 Ransome, Arthur 219 Rappoport, Solomon 72, 83 Rappoport, Yury 18, 28, 269 n.95

349

Raskin (pseud.). See Azef, Evno Fishelevich Rasputin, Grigory E. 148, 180–1 Rataev, Leonid A. attempts to defend Garting 153 Azef as agent of 130 on B 114–15, 136, 291 n.206 Bakai’s meeting with 142, 144 Beitner as agent of 286 n.85 official correspondence published in The Past 189 replaced by Garting 120, 136, 151 retirement 142 succeeds Rachkovsky 58, 110–12 Ratner, E. V. 306 n.12 Rauma, Finland 166–7, 179 Raupakh, Roman R. 302 n.41 Red Terror 203, 207, 304 n.92 Reed, John 193–4, 303 n.62 Rees (Captain) 30, 31, 32, 33 Reilly, Sidney George 233, 310 n.34 Reinshtein, Boris I. 27–8, 59 Repington, Colonel Charles à Court 219 Republican Centre 192 Reshetnikov, Leonid P. 154 Richter (pseud.). See Rachkovsky, Petr Ivanovich Ridley, Sir Matthew White 91, 103 Riman, Nikolai K. 132 Rimsky, G. 306 n.12 Rodichev, Fedor I. 306 n.12 Rodshtein, Lazarʹ. See Rotshtein, Lazarʹ Rodzianko, Mikhail V. 299 n.50 Rogozhin, A. P. 306 n.12 Rombro, Yakov 9, 258 n.5 Rosebery, Lord 75 Roshalʹ, Semen G. 301 n.30 Rossetti, William 72 Rotshtein, Lazarʹ 160, 235, 245, 252 Rotshtein (Rothstein), Fedor A. 72, 98, 282 n.171 Roustieff (pseud.). See Burtsev, Vladimir Lʹvovich Royal Victorian Order 82, 294 n.57 Rozenburg, A. O. 154 Rubakin, Nikolai A. 141, 144 Rubanovich, Ilʹia A. 115, 116, 118 Rublev (Roubleff), Adolʹf 71, 78, 79, 274 n.11, 276 n.49 Rurik/Riurik (cruiser) 293 n.26 Rusanov, Nikolai S. 35, 83, 127, 265 n.20

350

Index

Russia British attitudes towards 25–6, 33–5, 37–41, 43–69 Department of Police 2, 23, 33, 36, 43, 56, 73, 109, 118, 130, 155-6, 158, 187, 242, 245: Foreign Agency 2, 23–6, 28, 33–7, 41–4, 47, 53, 56, 58, 60, 63, 65, 72, 78, 83, 88, 103, 106, 112, 114–15, 120, 124, 136, 143, 151, 153, 157, 204–5, 261 n.77, 265 n.14, 265 n.19, 267–8 n.66, 275 n.18, 283 n.30, 283 n.37 embassy in London 37, 40, 56–7, 81, 93, 109, 165, 230 embassy in Paris 23, 35, 44, 50, 153, 162 émigré communities 1, 3, 19, 33–4, 63, 72–3, 78–9, 83–4, 101–2, 112, 115, 138, 159, 162, 247 literature 76–7, 169, 226–7 press 149, 158, 160, 164, 166 relationship with France 26–9, 70, 74–6, 109, 111, 114–18 war with Japan (1904–5) 119, 157 Russian All-Military Union (ROVS) 230–1, 235, 236, 250 Russian Colonization Society 227 Russian Foreign Historical Archive (RZIA) 234, 310 n.36 Russian Free Press Fund (RFPF) 26, 34, 80, 92, 108, 270 n.133, 277 n.66 Russian Memorandum 33, 37–41, 63–9, 267 n.55, 272 n.163 Russian National Committee (RNC) 222–5, 238 Russian National Union 222, 223, 307 n.52 Russian Refugees Aid Society 308 n.7 Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) 65, 83, 87, 107, 112, 140, 162, 173, 196, 265 n.14, 273 n.170 Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) 119, 157 Rutenberg, Petr (Pinkhas) M. 200 Ryazanov, David B. 301 n.30 Rybakov (Revolutionary émigré in London) 266 n.27 Rysakov, Nikolai I. 12 Ryss, Petr Ya. 306 n.12 Sadi Carnot, Marie-François 74 Safonov (chemistry student) 108

St Antoine Prison, Geneva 112, 125 Salazkin, Sergei S. 303 n.71 Salisbury, Lord 259 n.23, 288 n.125 Aliens Bill 75–6, 117 on B’s imprisonment 2 immigration policy 75 involvement in arrest and trial of B 90, 93, 96, 102–3 meeting with Nicholas II at Balmoral 81–2 reaction to de Staal’s memorandum 39–40, 63 relationship with Russia 26, 36, 38 surveillance of foreign radicals 41 Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail E. 104 Samoupravlenie (self-government) 19 San Stefano, Treaty of 12, 259 n.23 Saratov 18 Savin, P. P. 250 Savinkov, Boris 284 n .51, 293 n.19, 293 n.26, 293 n.28, 210 n.34 defence of Azef 144–6 Deputy Minister of War in Provisional Government 191 enemy of Soviet state 231–3 friendship with B 140 in Gul’s novel 248 return to Russia 231–2 Svoboda group 224, 230 visited by Shchegolev in Helsinki 137 Savinkova, Sof ʹia 137–8, 145 Savitsky, Petr N. 310 n.33 Sazonov(Sozonov), Egorʹ S. 146, 169, 287 n.106 Sazonov, Sergei D. 169 Scheinziss, Sof ʹia. See Sheintsis, Sof ʹia Schnell, Sylvio 245 Scotland Yard 61, 108, 270 n.133, 272 n.148, 277 n.53, 285 n.62 correspondence with British Museum authorities 72–3, 79 reports on B’s movements 109, 118 surveillance of foreign radicals 41, 116–17 Sebastiani, Horace 304 n.98 Seliverstov, General Nikolai D. 34–5 Semenov, Yury F. 222, 236–7, 307 n.50, 311 n.50 Semevsky, Vasily I. 299 n.49 Serebriakov, Esper (Hesper) A. 24, 39

Index Serebriakova, Zinaida E. 157 Sergei Alexandrovich, Grand Duke 119, 144, 288 n.136 Shabelsky-Bork, Petr N. 245 Shablovsky, Iosif S. 193 Shakespeare, William 227–9 Shalyapin, Fyodor I. 211, 247–8 Shaw, George Bernard 25 Shcheglovitov, Ivan G. 161–3, 171, 175, 180, 201, 203–4, 207 Shchegolev, Pavel E. 122, 126–7, 137, 184, 290 n.183 Shcherbatov, Nikolai B. 175, 179, 299 n.52 Sheintsis (Scheinziss), Sof ʹia 283 n.30 Shidlovsky, Sergei I. 181 Shingarev, Andrei I. 201, 202, 203 Shishakin, Evgeny 66–9 Shishkin, Nikolai P. 49 Shishko, Leonid E. 35, 39, 111 Shklovsky, Isaak V. 227. See also Dioneo Shlisselburg Fortress 17, 105, 122, 123, 124, 150 Shneur, Vladimir K. 205, 304 n.84 Shpolyansky, A. P. See Don-Aminado Shtern, Sergei F. 306 n.12 Shulʹgin, Vasily V. 232–3, 310 n.31 Sidoratsky, Vasily P. 71 Sigida, Nadia 22, 47, 261 n.72 Silber, Georgy 154, 158, 292 n.7, 295 n.67 Sinclair, Sir Archibald 220 Sipelʹgas-Olʹshansky, Aleksandr I. 237, 311 n.49 Sipiagin, Dmitry S. 107, 260 n.38 Sliozberg, Genrikh B. 312 n.4 Smirke, Sidney 71 Smirnov, Sergei A. 200 Smith (pseud.). See Burtsev, Vladimir Lʹvovich Snowden, Viscount Philip 214, 305 n.6 Socialists-Revolutionaries (SRs). See Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) Society of Friends of Russian Freedom (SFRF) 26, 33, 39, 80, 119, 189 Sokolov, Nikolai D. 170 Sokolov-Krechetov, Sergei A. 251, 309 n.18 Solovʹev, Aleksandr K. 11 Sozonov, E. S. See Sazonov, Egorʹ S. Spence-Watson, Robert 26, 32, 64, 91, 103, 264 n.125 Stalin, Joseph V. 177, 233–4

351

in exile 173 military purges 249–50 Reilly’s arrest 233 split of Communist Party 234 tsarism, comparison with 239 Starodvorsky, Nikolai P. 123–4, 139, 141, 149–51, 290 n.170 Steklov, Yury M. 290 n.184, 301 n.30 Stepanov, Evgeny D. 72, 236, 281 n.163 Stepniak, Fanny 97, 103, 281 n.167 Stepniak, Sergei 19, 25–6, 34, 37, 57, 59, 74, 265 n.11, 267 n.53 at British Museum 71 Chaikovsky on 86–7 collaboration with B on A Century of Political Life in Russia 78–81 death 80 de Staal’s indictment of 39–40 identified as murderer of General Mezentseff 38–9, 63, 258 n.15 publications 25–6, 63–4, 95 publicizes B’s article on Yakutsk tragedy 21 quote used by prosecution at B’s trial 40, 84, 94, 266 n.47 Rachkovsky on 59, 65 Stolypin, Petr A. 127, 131, 146, 148, 159–60, 183, 296 n.95 Strelʹnikov, Vasily S. 278 n.89 Struve, Petr B. 112, 234–5, 286 n.83 Stürmer, Boris V. 181, 300 n.63 Sudeikin, Georgy P. 13–15, 18, 123, 262 n.80, 290 n.167 Sukhomlinov, Vladimir A. 201, 203–4, 304 n.80 Surevich (Prefect of the Petrograd police) 300 n.2 Suvchinsky, Petr P. 310 n.33 Svatikov, Sergei G. 184, 205, 207, 251 Sverchkov, Dmitry F. 140, 292 n.13 Sverdlov, Yakov M. 173 Sviashchennaia druzhina. See Holy Brotherhood Sviatopolk-Mirsky, Prince Petr D. 115, 287 n.109 Svoboda group 224, 230 Svobodnaia Rossiia (Free Russia) journal 15, 19, 21, 27, 262 n.90 Sweeney, John (Detective Inspector, CID) 82, 278 n.76

352

Index

Swinburne, Algernon 22, 261 n.75 Syndicate-2 231 Sytovich, B. V. 306 n.12 Taaffe, Count Eduard 49 Tarle, Evgeny V. 301 n.23 Tatarov, Nikolai Yu. 142 Teplov, Aleksei L. B’s relationship with 46, 80, 87, 109–12 expulsion to Britain 59 London contacts 91, 142 Narodovolets affair 83–4, 86 Paris bomb factory affair 263 n.102, 268 n.72 visits B in prison 97–8 Tereshchenko, Mikhail I. 196, 197, 200, 204 Terijoki, Finland 135, 137–8, 143 Third International 222, 307 n.51 Thorne, Will (MP) 153 Thorpe, Michael (Detective Sergeant, CID) 73, 270 n.133 Tikhomirov, Lev A. 24–5, 123, 262 n.87, 265 n.21 Tolstoy, Aleksey N. 215, 216, 218, 230, 250, 305 n.11 Tolstoy, Dmitry A. 24 Toporov, Vladimir V. 305 n.12 Trauberg, Albert 137, 142 Trepov, Dmitry F. 107, 120, 126 Trepov, Fedor F. 11 Tretʹiakov, Sergei N. 200 Trotsky, Lev Davidovich 304 n.90 arrests B 3 to B’s barrister 206, 208–9 on B’s militant Russian nationalism 5, 70 Bolshevism 190, 194–6, 198 criticism of B and Obshchee delo 224–5 expulsion from Bolshevik party 234 Trubetskoy Bastion. See Peter and Paul Fortress Trusevich, Maksimilian I. 161 Trust (Trest) 232 Tsereteli, Irakli G. 193 Tsikhotskaya (pseud.). See Zeitlin/Tseitlin, Tatyana Tukhachevsky, Marshal Mikhail N. 314 n.42 Turgenev, Ivan S. 10, 21 Turski, Kaspar M. 108, 286 n.81

Tverʹ 176, 177–9, 299 n.49 Twain, Mark 19, 22 Tynan, Patrick J. 82 Tyrkova, Ariadna V. 214, 305 n.12–13 Ufa 9, 107 Umberto I, King 288 n.122 ‘Union’ (Russian Telegraph Agency) 219 Union of Socialist-RevolutionaryMaximalists. See Maximalists Urusov, Prince Sergei 126, 290 n.182 Uspensky Cathedral, Moscow 10, 178 Valerian (pseud.). See Rotshtein, Lazarʹ Vasilʹev, Aleksei T. 189, 283 n.37 Veinshtok, Viktor A. 112 Veisman, Aleksandr M. 263 n.108 Veisman, Simon M. 154 Vengerov, Semen A. 104 Verderevsky, Dmitry N. 303 n.71 Verkhovsky, General Aleksandr I. 196–7 Victoria, Queen 82, 108 Viktorov, N. (pseud.). See Burtsev, Vladimir Lʹvovich Viktorov-Toporov, V. V. (pseud.). See Toporov, Vladimir, V. Vinberg, Fedor V. 242, 244–5, 312 n.10 Vinogradov, Paul 142–3, 293 n.27 Vinogradov (pseud.). See Azef, Evno Fishelevich Vissarionov, Sergei E. 185, 303 n.61 Viviani, René 171, 299 n.35 Vodovozov, Vasily V. 290 n.184, 301 n.23 Voinich, Wilfred M. 37, 39, 63, 72, 265 n.11 Volʹkenshtein, Liudmila A. 105, 283 n.35 Volkhovsky, Feliks V. 64, on arrest of B 91, 96–7, 114 Beitner’s friendship with 74 at British Museum 72 criticizes B for use of revolutionary language 84, 86 exile to Siberia 26, 258 n.12 meets B on his arrival in London 33 mentioned in de Staal’s report 39, 63 mentioned in Foreign Agency report 37, 266 n.27 Russian Free Press Fund, member of 34 Volkov (pseud.). See Burtsev, Vladimir Lʹvovich

Index Volkov, I. G. 195 Volunteer Army 219, 220, 306 n.18 Volzhin, Aleksandr N. 181 Walpole, Hugh 214 Walsall anarchist affair 61–3, 102 Weiss, Doris 72 White Army 220, 221, 231, 311.n 56 White, Arnold 75 Wierbicki, Klement 57, 91, 98 Wierbicki, Wiktor (pseud.). See Maliankewicz, Bolesław Wilhelm II, Kaiser 165, 186, 195 Williams, Harold 214, 219, 220 Wilson, President Thomas Woodrow 221 Wilson, Sir Robert Thomas 229, 309 n.12 Witte, Count Sergei Yu. B’s letter to 120, 170–1 as B’s ‘guardian angel’ 121, 124 forms new administration, 1905 121 Wormwood Scrubs Prison, London 97–8, 283 n.19 Wrangel, General Petr N. 218, 220–3, 230–1, 235, 306 n.18, 307 n.32 Yakovlev-Bogucharsky. See Bogucharsky, Vasily Ya. Yakubovich, Petr F. 15 Yakutsk 21, 26, 47, 110

353

Young Party of the People’s Will 15, 83 Yudelevich, Yu. L. 140 ‘Z’ (pseud.). See Melville, William Zagranichnaia agentura. See Russia, Department of Police, Foreign Agency Zaitsev, Colonel A. A. 236 Zasulich, Vera I. 11, 19, 25, 65, 71, 78, 102, 107, 120, 258 n.15 Zavarzin, Pavel P. 128 Zein, Franz-Alʹbert A. 168 Zeitlin/Tseitlin, Tatyana 151, 154 Zenzinov, Vladimir M. 142, 224, 249 Zheliabov, Andrei I. 86, 146, 263 n.97, 278 n.89 Zhitlovsky, Khaim O. 83, 278 n.81 Zhitomirsky, Jacob A. 162 Zhuchenko, Z. See Gerngross-Zhuchenko, Zinaida F. Zhuk, Vasily P. 47, 78, 79, 83, 84 Zimmerwald (international socialist conference, 1915) 190, 298 n.26, 301 n.31 Zinovʹev, Ivan A. 30, 263 n.114 Zinovʹev, Grigory E. 204, 213, 231, 250, 301 n.30 Zubatov, Sergei V. 125–6, 159, 179–80 Zuev, Nil P. 189 Zvoliansky, Sergei E. 81, 88, 93, 100