Pyotr Rachkovsky, The Invention of Pseudo-History, And The Old Spy Game of Fomenting Terror

Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, Chief of Okhrana, may have originated the infamous anti-Semitic tract, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

The Okhrana used many seemingly unorthodox methods in the pursuit of its mission to defend the Tsarist monarchy; indeed, some of the Okhrana’s activities even contributed to the wave of domestic unrest and revolutionary terror that they were intended to quell. Perhaps most paradoxical of all was the Okhrana’s collaboration with revolutionary organizations. Early Okhrana agents to work alongside revolutionaries included Lieutenant-Colonel Georgy Sudeykin of the Saint Petersburg Special Section, who, in 1882, set up an illegal printing operation to publish the revolutionary People’s Will literature with Okhrana funds. Sudeykin and his colleague, a revolutionary-turned-police-informant named Sergey Degayev, passed drafts of the publication through Okhrana censors before printing. This episode marked the beginning of the Okhrana’s efforts to surreptitiously observe, but also influence and undermine, revolutionary movements. This focus on infiltrating and influencing revolutionary groups, rather than merely identifying and arresting their members, intensified with the innovations of one Okhrana bureau chief, Sergey Zubatov. While P. I. Rachkovsky, as head of the Okhrana’s Foreign Agency, had long ordered Okhrana agents to infiltrate and influence revolutionary movements abroad, Zubatov brought these tactics to a new level by setting up Okhrana-controlled trade unions, the foundation of police socialism. Perhaps recognizing the same discontent among factory workers that the Bolsheviks sought to exploit to start a revolution, Zubatov hoped the unions would mollify factory workers with improvements in working conditions and thus prevent workers from joining revolutionary movements that threatened the monarchy. To this end, Zubatov set up the Moscow Mechanical Production Workers’ Mutual Aid Society in May 1901. After Zubatov became head of the Special Section in 1902, he expanded his trade unions from Moscow to St. Petersburg and to Southern Russia. 

Zubatovite trade unions achieved moderate success at channeling workers’ political agitations away from revolutionary movements and toward labor improvements, especially in the cities of Minsk and Odessa, with one high-ranking official noting that many revolutionaries and workers were joining the unions.[18] However, Zubatov, if not police socialism, became discredited in the summer of 1903 after the Okhrana officer in charge of the Odessa union allowed a strike to get out of hand, causing a mass movement which paralyzed the region.[19] Although the police-run unions continued to operate after Zubatov’s ousting, without Okhrana funding, they proved more a liability than an asset. The Assembly of Working Men, a police-run union with about 6,000–8,000 members, formed by the alleged Okhrana agent Father Georgy Gapon, sparked the Bloody Sunday massacre of January 1905, a milestone in the Revolution of 1905 when union members marched peacefully on the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg and were fired upon by Imperial soldiers.[20] The Okhrana complemented police socialism and other projects to prevent the conditions in which revolutionary movements could take hold by pursuing initiatives to curtail the activities of existing organizations. Yevno Azef, the notorious Okhrana provocateur who became the head of the Socialist Revolutionary Fighting Organization (SRFO), epitomized the Okhrana’s inscrutable practice of revolutionary-group infiltration. While the Okhrana managed to embed many of its agents in revolutionary organizations, the police preferred to slowly gather intelligence and to attempt to interfere with revolutionary work surreptitiously rather than to arrest known revolutionaries immediately. This policy led to numerous dubious acts on the part of police spies, who needed to participate in revolutionary activities to avoid suspicion, as when Yevno Azef, as head of the SRFO, ordered the assassination of V. K. Plehve on July 15, 1904.

The freshest and most relevant parts of the book are Butterworth’s tales of cops and spies at war with anarchist radicals. The most valuable player in this battle against the international anarchist terror conspiracy—which didn’t actually exist, in the sense of one organization centrally planning attacks across national lines—was the Russians’ man in Paris, Peter Rachkovsky.

Rachkovsky started as a possibly sincere, possibly duplicitous mover in St. Petersburg’s radical underground in the late 1870s, after having been dismissed (for leniency toward political exiles) from a job as a prosecutor for the czar’s government. He ended up running the show for the Okhrana, the Russian secret police, in Paris, where so many radicals considered dangerous to the czarist regime had immigrated.

From 1885 until 1902, Rachkovsky was responsible for keeping anarchists under surveillance and on the run—and also, in many cases, financed and supplied with ideas. Butterworth notes that “prominent among his early initiatives were provocations designed to lure credulous émigrés into the most heinous crimes of which they may never have otherwise conceived.” Rachkovsky’s aim was to entrap his targets into committing acts that would help ensure that his job seemed of vital importance to the czar. This guaranteed him a solid berth in Paris that was lucrative both in salary and prestige—and, Butterworth’s research leads him to strongly suspect, in opportunities for corrupt under-the-radar dealings with a French government doing heavy business with Russia.

Rachkovsky wasn’t the first cop to use agents provocateurs among the French radicals. Louis Andrieux, the French prefect of police during the early 1880s, had been frustrated that all his spying on the anarchists failed to uncover a crime worthy of his time and attention, so he decided that “it was necessary that the act was accomplished for repression to be possible.”

Rachkovsky’s bosses in Russia and his hosts in Paris both feared the radicals, allowing the Russian agent to tighten the ties between the two nations. He succeeded so well that Butterworth argues he was partly to blame for the Russo-French alliance that helped make World War I such a bloody mess.

The British government, by contrast, initially resisted czarist efforts to capture Russia’s radical émigrés. In 1890 Vladimir Burtsev, wanted by the czarist police, boarded a British boat bound from Constantinople to London. When the ship found itself surrounded by Turkish police vessels with Russians on board, the captain refused their demand to hand over the fugitive, announcing: “This is English territory. And I am a gentleman!” But soon even Britain’s Special Branch ended up playing the spy and provocateur game.

Although Butterworth warns today’s governments and spymasters that future historians will “have access to the material necessary to hold those leaders to account for any deceptions they may have practiced,” his own research into the century-old fight indicates that that won’t necessarily be so. The current keepers of the Special Branch’s archives, which could shed light on the history of police behavior toward the radicals of the time, keep access to the relevant records “tenaciously guarded” even now.

It would be comforting to assume that one of the reasons the radical anarchists were able to gin up more consistent bombing action in the West than radical Islam does today was because their ideals—storming the bastions of illegitimate power, winning a better deal for the working man, crafting a future without any coercive authority—were more inherently inspiring than Shariah or a new Caliphate. These anarcho-radical movements were huge in the late 19th century. Star anarchist figures such as Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta could get tens of thousands, sometimes more than 100,000, fans to show up whenever they arrived in town. The number of people who subscribed to the anarchist movement’s many publications was in the tens of thousands in France alone. But the active participants in anarchist congresses numbered less than 1,000, and while many of those activists and intellectuals excused the violence, others opposed it. The number of people actively involved in planning and executing terror plots seems to be no more than a few dozen.

Terror then and terror now both hoped to inspire popular insurrection; both failed. Although anarchists referred to their violent actions as “propaganda by deed,” acts such as blowing up cafés or opera houses were really far more successful propaganda against anarchism than for it. Similarly, there is scant evidence that even the spectacularly destructive strike of 9/11 did much to help Al Qaeda recruit smart, useful, self-destructive folk willing to wage constant war on the decadent West. Suicide attacks in the name of jihad are only about 30 years old; they arose from modern circumstances and could disappear as those circumstances change.

To the powers of the time, the anarchist threat was not to be downplayed or doubted. After the anarchist-linked Leon Czolgosz assassinated U.S. President William McKinley, McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, issued a pronouncement that presaged George W. Bush’s rhetoric about the post-9/11 threat of radical Islam: “When compared with the suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance.” Collaborations of national secret police agencies created an ad hoc global force to fight the nonexistent global anarchist conspiracy, and the very advocacy of anarchist ideas was outlawed in most of the West. 

As history has shown, Roosevelt was wrong about the significance of the anarchist threat. So was George W. Bush when he used the jihadist threat as an excuse for policies that may have done far more to damage America and elsewhere than they did to prevent attacks.

The legacy of the secret police war against anarchists is ongoing and ugly. Both the CIA and the KGB learned from the techniques of the Okhrana, and the authorities today still cling to the notion that policing terror sometimes means encouraging it. Many of the alleged terrorists captured over the past several years were influenced, and in some cases provided materials by, police informants, including the Miami Seven, the accused Rockford, Illinois, shopping mall bomber Derrick Shareef, and Sami Samir Hassoun, who was charged with conspiring to bomb a nightclub near a Dave Matthews concert in Chicago.

Likewise, Butterworth concludes from his scattered documentary record that provocateurs were close to the planning and/or financing of many headline-making anarchist bomb plots, and that the staff of the British radical magazine Commonweal may have consisted entirely of informants, unbeknownst to each other. (Even today, with unprecedented access to police files, Butterworth is often unsure who was reporting back to the cops.) The French grande dame of anarchy, Louise Michel, once joked, “We love to have [agents provocateurs] in the party, because they always propose the most revolutionary motions.” In his fanciful 1908 novel The Man Who Was Thursday, inspired by the milieu of anarcho-skullduggery that Butterworth chronicles, G.K. Chesterton describes a convocation of anarchist conspirators in which all of the plotters turn out to be cops sent to infiltrate the group.

Anarchists may have been relatively effective at decapitating power, but they were not a mortal threat to Western civilization, and neither are the Islamists. They do not warrant the suppression of civil liberties or the huge cost, in lives and money, of the wars waged by Bush and Barack Obama.