1905: a congress of conspirators
Jewish disturbances
In the spring of 1905, Lenin returned to London but, although it is known that he again paid a visit to the British Museum and there copied out extracts from the works of Marx and Engels, there is no record of him meeting up with either of the Takhtarevs, either in the Reading Room or anywhere else during his stay. Their friendship, which had survived through thick and thin for almost a decade, had foundered on the tumultuous events of 1903, and neither Lenin nor Krupskaya had made any contact with either of the Takhtarevs since that time. Their old relationship, it would appear, was now well and truly over.
In the two years that had elapsed since Lenin’s previous visit, British attitudes to Russia had been in a state of flux. In April 1903, anti-Jewish pogroms had erupted in Kishinev, in what was then Bessarabia, resulting in some fifty deaths and hundreds more injured. Rumours abounded concerning a secret letter, which supposedly had been sent by Vyacheslav Plehve, the Minister of the Interior, to the Governor of Bessarabia ordering him not to use arms against rioters if they were ‘only’ pillaging and murdering Jews. In London the horrific events were reported by the national press and, by among others, the émigré journal, the Anglo-Russian which, in May, carried an article highly critical of England as a whole for its weak response to the atrocity.1 Whereas the massacres called forth a storm of indignation in France (so much so that the Franco-Russian alliance was being called into question) all that happened in England was ‘a timid inquiry in the House of Commons as to the effect of the Russian persecutions upon alien immigration to this country and a planned Hyde Park demonstration by the East End Jews’. Not all British newspapers, however, were as half-hearted in their condemnation of the Russian government: that same month, the Russia correspondent of The Times, Mr D. D. Braham was expelled from the country, ostensibly for his coverage of Kishinev and his mention of the Plehve letter.2
It may have been this state of heightened tension which, in an almost contradictory fashion, gave rise, the following year, to disturbances in the very heart of the Little Russian Island in London’s East End, during which the émigré Jewish population and their properties were viciously attacked. However, as subsequent events in the police courts would reveal, the perpetrators of these crimes turned out to be, somewhat remarkably, members of the local orthodox Jewish community themselves.
In the summer of 1904, Aleksei Teplov’s Free Russian Library had grown to such an extent that he had been obliged to quit Church Lane and find new premises. He entered into a part-share agreement with the owners of a terraced house at no. 16 Princelet Street, just off Brick Lane.3 The owners were the East London Jewish Branch of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) with some of whose members he was already acquainted. The SDF intended to turn their part of the building into a Dom Naroda or ‘House of the People’ (also often referred to as the ‘Maison du Bund’) and, indeed, the opening of this club was duly celebrated on 30 July 1904 with an International Socialist Banquet chaired by none other than the founder of the SDF himself, Henry Mayers Hyndman.4 This move of the library to its new address and its new formalized association with the SDF was roundly criticized by some of its founder members such as Nikolai Chaikovsky, who opposed the new relationship, saying it completely contradicted the non-party nature of the institution.5 Sadly, following this disagreement, relations between the two revolutionaries cooled considerably.
However, of more immediate concern to Teplov were his strained relations with his new neighbours which gradually deteriorated throughout that summer and which came to a head on Monday 19 September, on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. Directly opposite No. 16 Princelet Street was a synagogue whose orthodox (and mostly English) members vehemently objected to their new ‘alien’ neighbours’ refusal to observe the Day of Atonement. They would later claim that the new arrivals, ‘who were inclined to make much of their repudiation of the old faith, chose that day, a day of fasting for the orthodox, to drive a van full of provisions down some of the streets most frequented by Jews’.6 The end result was something akin to a riot, with the orthodox Jews setting about the freethinkers and smashing the windows of the Free Library. The disturbances reached such a level that over 100 extra police had to be called in to break up the crowds and protect houses and restaurants in the area. Two socialists were arrested and in the witness box stated that, indeed, they did not observe the Day of Atonement but denied they were in any way the aggressors. The magistrate agreed, saying it was abundantly clear who had begun the attack and hoped that, next year, the ‘orthodox’ would be the persons brought before him.7
Such incidents did little to dampen the growing anti-alien sentiments which were spreading steadily throughout the East End and, indeed, further afield, and the Russian émigré community could not help but sense a change in the attitude of the British public towards them. Over the next year, however, certain events helped redirect British hostility away from the unfortunate exiles in their midst and firmly towards the Russian government itself. The first of these was the tragic incident which played out in the North Sea in October 1904 and which almost resulted in Britain declaring war on Russia.
The Dogger Bank tragedy
In the early years of the twentieth century, partly as a result of Russia’s desire to take ownership of Port Arthur, a warm-water port on the Pacific Ocean, and Japan’s consequent concerns of Russian encroachment elsewhere in Manchuria and Korea, relations between the two powers deteriorated and then collapsed completely. In 1904 Japan went on the attack and, to the surprise of much of the world, forced a series of embarrassing defeats on the mighty Russian armed forces in and around Port Arthur. A humiliated Tsar Nicholas gave the order for his Baltic fleet to set sail immediately for the east. The squadron of some forty warships entered the North Sea on the evening of 21 October 1904 heading south for the English Channel to begin its long journey eastwards. Just after midnight, as the fleet passed over the Dogger Bank, in a state of heightened tension and amid reports of sightings of enemy torpedo boats, the commander of the fleet received a report that one of his supply ships had come under attack and, sighting a group of unidentified vessels through the mist in the distance, he gave the order to open fire. These supposed enemy ships were, in fact, part of a fishing fleet from the English port of Hull. Despite the fishermen’s best efforts to alert the Russian navy to their mistake, the barrage continued for twenty minutes and resulted in two deaths and several injured. (Some years later the claim was made that the blame for the incident lay with a senior officer of the Okhrana, none other than the notorious General Landezen-Garting, who was accompanying the fleet and whose ‘policeman’s nose’ had sensed danger where there was none.8) However that may be, the Russian armada continued on its way without stopping, leaving the crippled fishing fleet to limp back to port. The British public was rightly appalled, with some so incensed by the outrage that they took matters into their own hands. A few days after the incident, The Times reported:
Count Benckendorff, the Russian Ambassador was greeted at Victoria station on his return from Germany by an angry crowd which surrounded his carriage and gave him a hostile reception. As the carriage was driven out of the station the crowd continued their demonstration. In the station yard the crowd was dispersed by a large body of police who clearly had anticipated the event, and the carriage drove off to the embassy at Chesham House.9
However, the demonstration did not end there for, as one young Russian diplomat recalled, an angry and vengeful crowd had gathered outside the Mayfair embassy and proceeded to throw bottles and stones. Unfortunately, having failed to identify the correct building, they mistakenly bombarded the building next door which was owned by an elderly English gentleman. The latter attempted to sue the embassy for the damage done but, as the young diplomat explained, ‘our answer was that no court could hold us responsible for the disorderly conduct of an English mob’. Unfortunately, the old gentleman died shortly thereafter leading the young diplomat to express his regrets and wonder whether his life may, indeed, have been shortened as a direct result of that stressful incident.10
It would appear that, now, British protests were being targeted, in the main, against symbols of the Russian state, rather than against individual members of the émigré community. And, within a few months, the hostility towards the tsar and his government rose further at the news of the horrific events of Bloody Sunday 9 (22) January 1905, when, in the centre of St Petersburg, troops fired into a peaceful demonstration killing hundreds (and by some accounts, thousands) of civilians. On this occasion, certain British political and humanitarian groups responded by organizing collections for the benefit of the families of the victims of the atrocity. To this end, James Ramsay MacDonald, future British Prime Minister, but at that time Secretary of the Labour Representation Committee (the forerunner of the Labour Party) held discussions with Nikolai Alekseev and Konstantin Takhtarev, both still resident in London, on the subject of the distribution of monies received amongst Russian Social Democratic organizations for the benefit of those who had suffered but also in support of the revolutionary movement in Russia.11 Although Takhtarev had long since disassociated himself from the RSDLP, in this instance, and for such a worthy cause, he was more than willing to offer his assistance. (These discussions, incidentally, were an early indication of Macdonald’s sympathetic attitude towards the Russian revolutionary movement in general and, as we shall see later, towards Lenin and his Social Democrats in particular.)
Meanwhile, within Russia, popular discontent with the government was growing and, as evidenced by the increase in political assassinations, direct terrorist action was again gaining support. There were also indications that, internationally, including within certain political circles in Britain, such 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.12 Following a British police investigation it was discovered that Mr McCullough was, in fact, still very much alive, and that he, together with Henry Noel Brailsford, a journalist and member of the Executive Committee 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, which leniency may point to a degree of sympathy for the defendants’ cause on the part of the judge. It was not suggested, of course, that the SFRF was itself involved in the conspiracy, although, following judgement, the society did provide McCullough with £150 towards his expenses and issued an appeal to members for contributions towards the cost.13 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 Vladimir Burtsev amongst others.
All of this was of growing concern to the authorities in St Petersburg who, in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, had felt it prudent to increase the number of its operatives in London. A week after the massacre, the London Evening News reported that a dozen or so Russian secret agents had arrived in the capital with the aim of ‘following the plans of diverse revolutionary committees’ – St Petersburg had apparently received intelligence that the Russian, Polish, and Finnish émigrés in the English capital might be on the point of joining forces. Such moves towards unification of the forces of the opposition had to be resisted at all costs.
When reports of such Russia-related events as the above appeared in the British press they were immediately translated into French and dutifully transmitted to the Foreign Agency in Paris by a gentleman described by Chief Inspector Melville of Scotland Yard as the Russians’ principal agent in London. To date, historians of the Russian political emigration have focused almost exclusively on the major revolutionary figures of the day or on those senior policemen and state functionaries such as Melville and Rachkovsky who opposed them. Rarely is any discussion to be found of the myriad ‘foot-soldiers’ on either side of the struggle, whose own personal stories are, in fact, every bit as historically valid and, in some instances, more poignant by far than those of their superiors. Such is the case of Russia’s man in London, Monsieur Jean Edgar Farce.
Born in France in 1860, Farce had been recruited by Rachkovsky at an early stage of his mission to Paris and had remained in the employ of the Russian Department of Police from that time.14 It is unclear when he first arrived in London, nor is it known whether he did so at the express request of the Russian police abroad. In official documents he is referred to as a journalist and it may have been in this capacity that he first attracted the attention of Rachkovsky who had already developed close contacts in the French press. Farce settled in West London where, at some point in the mid-1890s, he met Ada Louisa Searle, a young woman nine years his junior and the daughter of a stationer and bookseller in the Goldhawk Road, Shepherd’s Bush. The two married in September 1897 and moved into a terraced house at 11 Benbow Road, Hammersmith, in the very heart of another of those ‘little islands’ which made up London’s Russian archipelago. The Farces’ new house was located just round the corner from what was, in Russian revolutionary terms, a very important residence indeed: namely, no. 15 Augustus Road which, for a number of years, housed the offices and printing press of the Russian Free Press Fund whose members included Sergei Stepniak, Feliks Volkhovsky, Nikolai Chaikovsky. Leonid Shishko, Egor Lazarev, Wilfrid Voynich and Lazar′ Goldenberg.15 It was therefore hardly a coincidence that, at the dawn of the new century, Monsieur Farce of the Russian secret police should take up residence in the next road.
From that moment, Farce kept his Parisian control au courant with a regular series of reports on the comings and goings at Augustus Road and at the other haunts of the Russian émigrés, including both the British Museum Library and the Free Russian Library in the East End. Rachkovsky, in turn, showed his gratitude by paying a salary which afforded a fairly comfortable lifestyle to the agent and his family. (Ada had given birth to a daughter, Winifred Angele, shortly after their marriage but, sadly, that child died within the year. Happily, however, a second pregnancy five years later produced an heir whom they named Wilfred Jean.16) Another of Rachkovsky’s operatives in London at that time was the veteran Vladislav Milevsky who was nearing retirement and who, reportedly, was now in a poor state of health. It may well be as a result of a recommendation from Chief Inspector Melville that a suitable replacement for the ailing agent was found in the person of Sergeant Michael Thorpe, formerly of Scotland Yard, but recently retired. He was taken onto the Russian payroll on a seven-year contract and at an annual salary of £450.17 Thorpe’s partnership with Farce worked well enough for it to be left untouched when Rachkovsky, thanks to some political intriguing among senior statesmen, was recalled to St Petersburg in 1902 and was replaced in Paris by Leonid Rataev. The latter was described by Melville as ‘age about 45, height 5 ft. 9 in., complexion and hair dark, eyes brown, moustache dark, clean shaved, excitable manner’.18 Rataev, unfortunately, did not prove to be as sympathetic an employer as his predecessor, immediately reducing Farce’s salary and also, much to the agent’s displeasure, refusing to grant him any paid leave.
Despite the hardship this must have caused, Farce and his assistant diligently continued their work, keeping an eye on a wide range of political activists and faithfully despatching their reports back to their new master in Paris. The scale of Farce’s London operation was truly impressive as evidenced by the detail contained in his reports, which gave the impression that a blanket surveillance was maintained over all émigrés wherever they might be in London (and, indeed, in other parts of England). Of course, such an operation required the employment of supplementary fileurs, and it is something of a delight to discover that these additional tracking services were occasionally supplied by real-life equivalents of the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’ – that fictitious band of street urchins intermittently hired as intelligence agents by Conan Doyle’s supreme detective, Sherlock Holmes! Farce describes one instance when, in order to shadow a revolutionary who was particularly wary of tsarist spies and who was in the habit of constantly looking behind him as he walked, he was obliged to employ the services of a ‘gamin du rue’, who was able successfully to track said revolutionary to the location of his next clandestine meeting. Farce also occasionally called on the help of certain ‘young employees of Scotland Yard’, who were doubtless glad of the additional income such tracking services could generate.19
The Third Party Congress
On the whole, Farce found the postal service to the continent to be reliable and fast enough for the transmission of his day-to-day intelligence reports but occasionally events in London required that his Paris contact be alerted immediately. Such was the case on the afternoon of Saturday 22 April 1905 when the following hastily composed telegram was dispatched from London to ‘Monsieur Albert Kraft’, 79 rue de Grenelle, Paris, home of both the Russian embassy and of the Foreign Agency of the Russian Department of Police:
CONGRES ICI. AXELROD ET COMPAGNIE. TOUS DU CONTINENT20
Later that evening, Farce filed a fuller report in which he described how that morning, an unidentified stranger, newly arrived from the continent, had left the Hammersmith home of the émigré David Soskice and had been followed to the Angel Islington where he had been admitted to a nearby ‘débit de boissons’, the Crown and Woolpack at 394 St John Street, Clerkenwell.21 Standing at one of the entrances, which led directly to a private upstairs room, was an imposing figure whom Farce recognized as the veteran revolutionary Nikolai Chaikovsky. Together with the anarchist Varlaam Cherkezov, Chaikovsky had agreed to stand guard to ensure that no unwelcome guests were admitted to the room where a clandestine meeting of some twenty or so Russian revolutionaries was in progress.
What Farce had fallen upon was, in fact, the first secret meeting place of the Third Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, a gathering so shrouded in mystery and conducted in such secrecy that, to this day, almost nothing is known about it, save for what is contained in the official minutes. For the next three weeks the Russian police agent and his team would surreptitiously and doggedly follow the foreign delegates from venue to venue across London, recording their every move. And it is thanks to the meticulous reports produced by Farce over that period that substantial new information on the background to this gathering, including exact dates and locations, can now be revealed for the first time.
The first striking aspect of this series of reports concerns the start date of the Congress itself. To date, every history of the 1905 Congress has been in agreement with the published protocols that the official opening took place on the afternoon of 25 April and was followed that evening by the first session. Farce, however, was quickly able to ascertain that the delegates had started to arrive in London a week earlier, from as far afield as Paris, Zurich and Geneva and had, in fact, held their first business meeting on 19 April. Nikolai Alekseev who had been charged with organizational responsibility had called into the Crown and Woolpack in advance and had hired the upstairs room for the first three days of business: namely, 19, 20 and 22 April. It was only on the last of these that Farce had, somewhat fortuitously, discovered their whereabouts.The next session, according to him, did not take place until a week later and this timeframe does seem to tie in neatly with the reminiscences of some of the participants, who recalled business being suspended for some days to await the arrival of further delegates. Why the official start date was recorded as the 25th is yet another of the many mysteries surrounding the Congress. But Farce, it must be said, was not always so accurate in his reporting of proceedings. For example, among the twenty or so foreign delegates he had seen leaving the pub on that first Saturday, he claimed to have recognized Pavel Axelrod and had mentioned that fact in his earlier rushed telegram to Paris. But Axelrod was most certainly not in attendance. Since the troubled Second Congress of 1903, relations between Lenin’s Bolsheviks and those Mensheviks such as Plekhanov and Axelrod had deteriorated significantly. Now, following the call for a new Congress, the latter had decided on a boycott and had instead arranged their own rival conference in Geneva. Lenin, far from being troubled by their decision, took full advantage of the absence of serious dissenting voices such as theirs and pressed ahead.
The Third Congress has been described by some, such as Lenin’s recent biographer Victor Sebestyen, as ‘probably the most pointless of all the various leftist conferences before 1917’, and it is doubtless for this reason that in his extensive work he devotes no more than two sentences to the gathering.22 But this is somewhat unfair and does not accord it the attention it undoubtedly deserves. Not only was this the first Bolshevik Congress but it was also unquestionably Lenin’s Congress, during which he took firm control of proceedings, assumed the role of Chairman at most of the twenty-six sessions and personally addressed the Congress on no less than 138 occasions. According to one delegate, he was ‘the very soul and the brains’ (dushom i mozgom) of the Congress and, by the end of proceedings, had succeeded in consolidating his position of power. Far from the Menshevik description of it as a mere talking shop which had been called simply to allow Lenin to work out a line to take on Bloody Sunday, the Congress adopted various resolutions which helped the Bolshevik leader strengthen his control over the Party’s organizational and tactical principles. Numerous other motions were, of course, debated and voted on over the next fifteen days, but rather than enumerate these here, I would direct those interested to the published editions of the official protocols, whilst also issuing a warning that these factual accounts are not what one would describe as a ‘gripping read’. A much more exciting snapshot of the proceedings, however, is available and originates from a most unexpected source.
The constable in the cupboard
In a summary report submitted at the end of the Congress, agent Farce explained that, as much as he would have liked to get one of his own men on the inside, he had been obliged to give way to Scotland Yard. Unfortunately, the Frenchman had been unable to call on the assistance of his main CID contact Chief Superintendent Patrick Quinn (Melville’s successor), who was out of the country at that time accompanying King Edward VII on a lengthy Mediterranean cruise and who only returned to London during the final days of the Congress. It may well have been Quinn’s absence that gave an ambitious, fresh-faced Detective-Constable the opportunity to prove his worth (and to show his daring).Herbert Fitch, a recent recruit to Special Branch, recounted how, having been alerted in advance to the Russians’ plans by the landlord of the Crown and Woolpack, he managed to secrete himself in a cupboard in the room where the meeting was to take place and, from there, to eavesdrop on the ‘blood-curdling speeches made by “Comrade Boroff”’ (i.e. Lenin) and others.23 There are, however, varying versions of this incident, in one of which it is claimed that ‘the conversation being conducted in the Russian language, of which the police detective was ignorant, left him no wiser’. A later variation gets over this problem by claiming that Fitch was not alone during his surveillance but was joined in his stuffy cupboard by an interpreter!24 It should be said, however, that the young policeman himself claimed to be proficient in four languages, including Russian.25
Delegates continued to arrive from the continent over the next few days with Farce reporting that on Monday 24 April at least seven had gathered for a meeting at Alekseev’s flat in Percy Circus.26 The Congress proper would not resume, however, until 29 April by which time their number had increased to twenty-eight. The venue for this and the following two meetings, which took place on Monday 1 and Tuesday 2 May, was identified by the tsarist spy as the Hare and Hounds public house, 181 Upper Street, Islington, and it is thrilling to discover that, like the Crown and Woolpack, this building still stands. Now occupied by a trendy Islington cocktail bar, the meeting place can, nevertheless, be easily identified by the frieze on the second floor facade depicting a beleaguered hare pursued by a pack of threatening hunting dogs. And it is difficult to imagine a more fitting location, when one recalls those ‘bloodhounds’ sent abroad some seventy years earlier by a Russian tsar intent in hunting down and destroying the new émigré revolutionary movement in its infancy! Now it was the turn of Jean Edgar Farce and the intrepid Detective Fitch to assume the role of bloodhound.
The Hare and Hounds was without question, that ‘other Islington pub’ referred to by the Scotland Yard detective as the scene of his next, May Day encounter with the revolutionaries. On this occasion, he claimed to have disguised himself as a waiter and served drinks to the delegates present, while also succeeding in purloining a copy of the agenda and minutes of the meeting, though whether these documents still exist, preserved and gathering dust in some police archive or other is unknown.27
Agent Farce reported that the Congress reconvened the following day, this time at the Lord Nelson, 18 Upper Charlton Street, Fitzroy Square, W1. Happily, this building too is still in existence in the renamed Hanson Street where, although still retaining the outward appearance of the original pub, it is home now to a private business. It was, doubtless, in this establishment (if we are to believe Fitch’s account) that the remarkably resourceful and talented young policeman once more gained access to the revolutionaries’ inner circle, this time by shaving off his moustache and donning a heavy disguise. Having thus easily fooled these naturally suspicious, professional Russian conspirators, Fitch was able to report back that a ‘vote on revolution’ had been taken and had been carried by twenty one votes to seven.28
The following day, 4 May, the delegates swapped venues and were again successfully tracked by Farce, this time to Finsbury Park in the north of London and to the Hope Coffee House at 112 Fonthill Road. (This non-descript three-storey building also still stands but is now home to a women’s fashion boutique.) At close of business, the party of conspirators headed south again and the following morning returned to the Lord Nelson to resume their deliberations. They had hoped to extend their booking to the following day but the room was already taken and so they were obliged once more to change venue. Their last four meetings took place from 6 to 10 May just to the west of Euston Station at the Crown and Sceptre, 47 Edward Street (now Varndell Street), Hampstead Road, NW1. Unfortunately, this is the only Congress location not to have survived to the present day, the entire area having been demolished to make way for a number of Council housing blocks. According to Farce, these final sessions were particularly well attended thanks to the arrival of a number of other nationalities: Poles, Finns, Lithuanians and even some Germans. And this would, indeed, confirm the intelligence received in St Petersburg earlier that year concerning rumours of imminent unification of opposition forces. In his summary report the agent declared that the primary aim of the Congress had been to agree a ‘Provisional Convention for Russia’ but noted (like D. C. Fitch) that there had been some dissenting voices. He also pointed out that, throughout, everything had been conducted in the greatest secrecy. The delegates had been kept well away from the usual haunts of the revolutionaries in the East End, with only the principal London émigrés such as Chaikovsky and Cherkezov being privy to discussions.
In Farce’s reports of the period, quite apart from those relating to the Congress, there are several references to the Takhtarevs – for example, their regular visits to the Free Russian Library and to the British Museum. It is almost certain that the two were aware the Congress was taking place: after all, they were now living at an address in Holford Square, just around the corner from where many of the Bolshevik delegates (including Lenin) had been found temporary accommodation. But despite this, there is no record of the Takhtarevs being approached or of having played any part in proceedings. Indeed, Farce makes reference to an event which may lead one to believe that the couple were, in fact, deliberately shunned. He reported that on Sunday 30 April, as part of the general May Day celebrations, ‘Mrs Tar’ had presented a magic lantern show ‘representing rebellions and repressions in Russia’ at the Black Lion Club in Whitechapel to an audience of about seventy of the local Russian Social Democrats. However, there is no mention of this event in the reminiscences of any of those present in London as delegates to the Third Congress, and nor is there any evidence that the inhabitants of the Little Russian Island in the East End were even remotely aware of the presence in their midst of Lenin’s Bolsheviks during this period.
The Russian ambassador in London, on the other hand, was perfectly cognizant of the revolutionaries’ movements and, indeed, had demanded the British authorities take action to expel them. Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, did eventually reply, explaining that English tradition could not block political refugees and that such an action would result in questions in the Houses of Parliament. But, in the end, it was all a matter of no importance for, by the time his response was received in Chatham House on 12 May, the Congress was over and, on that very day, as we shall see, the last delegates were leaving for the continent.29
Farce, in common with all other Okhrana agents, was in possession of a standard-issue identification album containing mugshots of a wide range of émigré revolutionaries but, despite this, he failed to find a match for any of the delegates, assuming correctly – if rather lamely – that ‘the names used were probably invented: such as Linevitch, Lenivotsky, Aritsky, Zoulokoff, Zekaloff, Kraft, Victorov, etc.’30 Linevitch was the name used by the individual whom Farce had misidentified as Axelrod when he checked into his lodgings at 46 Regent Square, while Kraft and Victorov were the pseudonyms used by two delegates who had been put up at 8 Owen’s Row, just round the corner from the Crown and Woolpack. Other addresses in the immediate area which had been arranged for delegates included, 26 and 64 Acton St, 73 Harrison Street, and 4 Middleton Square, while yet others had crammed into Alekseev’s two rooms at 23 Percy Circus (the same address of that second, ‘Iskra Commune’ shared by Zasulich and Martov two years earlier). According to Farce, it had been Alekseev again, together with an unidentified ‘David Stanislawski’, who had made all of these accommodation arrangements.
It is, however, more than surprising to discover that, amongst all this wealth of detail, Jean Edgar Farce, the Okhrana’s top man in London, completely failed to make any reference to the two individuals who lived for the duration of the Congress at no. 16 Percy Circus. Indeed, in all of his meticulous documentation, the spy never once made mention of either Lenin or Krupskaya (the two occupants at that address) under any of their known pseudonyms. This fact begs the following intriguing question: had Lenin, as a result of his much vaunted expertise in the art of konspiratsiia, succeeded in completely outwitting the formidable Foreign Agency of the Russian secret police? Or, alternatively, were other forces at play?
This latter view was certainly that held by Vladimir Burtsev, the renowned spy-buster and one of Lenin’s most committed opponents who, in 1927, laid out his argument at length in an often-overlooked serialized newspaper article entitled ‘Lenin under the patronage of the Department of Police and of the Germans’.31
Lenin: Master conspirator or police patsy
As the title of his article suggested, Burtsev was convinced that, from the moment of Lenin’s arrest and exile in the mid-1890s, he had played the role of unwitting stooge in a divide-and-rule plan devised by Sergei Zubatov, then head of the Moscow Okhrana, the ultimate aim of which was the total suppression and pacification of radical, political opposition within Russia. At that time, the Okhrana, and Zubatov in particular, divided the revolutionaries into two camps: on the one hand the narodovoltsy (Populists) and Socialists-Revolutionaries, and on the other, the Social Democrats and Legal Marxists. Zubatov hoped to disarm the former (the ‘politicals’) by encouraging the latter and allowing them to run about amongst the workers, distributing what he regarded as their harmless propaganda. The relatively soft sentences handed down to Lenin and his Social Democrat comrades from 1895/6 onwards served to demonstrate to members of both groups the difference in treatment each could expect.
While in Siberian exile, Lenin and his colleagues had sent articles to publications, both legal and illegal, at home and abroad, clearly detailing their plans for future revolutionary activity. The authorities knew of these writings and were well aware of the seditious content but, despite this, they neither called for their authors’ sentences to be extended nor, indeed, stood in the way of their release in 1900. When Lenin left his place of exile and arrived in Moscow on his way to Pskov, his first port of call had been to the flat of the provocateur Zinaida Serebriakova and so the police were again kept au courant with his plans: they knew of the Social Democrats’ intention to send Lenin, Martov and Potresov abroad to set up their revolutionary journal and, again, were in no doubt that these three constituted a ‘threat to the existing structure’. So, when Lenin and Martov travelled illegally to St Petersburg in May 1900 and were arrested, the Okhrana would have been entirely justified had they decided there and then to send the two revolutionaries straight back to Siberia. But that did not happen; instead, the two were released after only a few weeks. It was Burtsev’s firm belief this was wholly due to Zubatov’s personal intervention.
For Zubatov, Lenin and his followers were impractical dreamers who represented no serious threat to the state – indeed, he considered they might even prove useful to him in helping to destroy the Socialists-Revolutionaries whom he rightly regarded as the most dangerous opposition at that time. It was for this reason that no action was taken against Lenin when he made another illegal trip later in the summer – this time to visit Krupskaya in Ufa – and for that same reason that the Iskra editors – first Potresov, then Lenin and later Martov – were all issued with legal passports and allowed to go abroad, even though it was known that their clear intention was to set up an illegal publication.As mentioned earlier, they were followed by Krupskaya who, on completion of her exile, had also applied for a passport. In order to grant her permission to leave, the authorities required her to produce a statement from her husband confirming she was going to live with him. To that end, Lenin made a special visit to the Russian embassy in Prague and handed the statement over in person. In due course, Krupskaya was granted permission to leave, despite the fact that the illegal revolutionary journal Iskra was already in publication and that the authorities again were perfectly well aware of Lenin’s role in it. In short, it was Burtsev’s view that none of the above revolutionaries should be honoured with the term ‘political exile’, for none of them had been ‘forced’ into leaving. Rather, they were all legal émigrés travelling on official passports issued on Zubatov’s express authorization.
Burtsev is also dismissive of the Iskraites’ boast that it was thanks to their mastery of the art of conspiracy that, for over a year, they succeeded in publishing their newspaper under the very noses of the German police and that it was only in March 1902 that they had been obliged to leave after they sensed they were being watched. In fact, the ‘Revolutionary Detective’ claimed to have seen Russian police documents which testified to the fact that, from the very outset, Zubatov was aware of the place of publication of both Zarya and Iskra and had simply chosen not to share his plan to use Lenin as a weapon in his fight against the terrorists. Others in the Okhrana had been deliberately left in the dark, including Garting, then head of the Foreign Agency’s Berlin office. If the Russian Department of Police had requested it, their German colleagues would have been only too happy to arrest the revolutionaries, whom they had been openly shadowing for a considerable time. It was not due to some great conspiratorial work on the part of the Iskraites that they managed to escape Germany or to the fact that the police did not react in time before they left the country but, quite simply, because the Russian police did not require them to be detained. It may or may not be of relevance to point out here that, in those identification albums which the Russian Department of Police issued to their agents, nowhere is there an image of Lenin to be found, despite his photograph having been taken when he was first arrested in December 1895 (see Plate 12).
Zubatov had held out great hopes for Lenin and one of these hopes was realized fairly quickly as the Social Democrats started to gain support both within Russia and abroad, all at the expense of the Socialists-Revolutionaries. Even though Zubatov had been unable to prevent that series of terrorist assassinations which the SR Combat Organization carried out in the period 1901–1904, the Social Democrats, under the guidance of Lenin, Zubatov’s ‘puppet’, did, nevertheless, succeed in attracting support away from the Socialists-Revolutionaries, thus weakening the revolutionary movement as a whole.
However, as Burtsev pointed out, Zubatov’s plan would have unforeseen and disastrous consequences. With Lenin gaining control of the Party from Plekhanov, the movement took on a conspiratorial aspect, with the Bolsheviks blocking all attempts to end underground activity, to unite the movement and to establish a legal workers’ party, which could openly challenge the government for basic political freedoms. Lenin’s opposition to calls for the establishment of such a legal democratic framework turned out to have the most pernicious and corrupting influence on the whole revolutionary movement, which emerged first in the years 1905–1906 and which would play out in full in 1917. This, according to Burtsev, was perhaps the most wicked act committed by the Bolsheviks prior to their seizure of power. In his view, the catastrophe which erupted in 1917 had already been in preparation from as far back as 1900 thanks, in large part, to the support they had received from the Okhrana.
A new broom in Paris
The London Congress had officially been brought to a close at 13.00 on Wednesday 10 May, but Farce’s work was not yet done. He had ‘counted them all in’, so to speak, and now, over the next few days, as the delegates left Charing Cross station bound for the continent he would ‘count them all out’, supplying detailed, written descriptions of as many as he could to his Russian masters. But then, on Friday 12 May, as well as posting off his usual report, Farce felt it necessary to send another telegram advising that:
PLUSIERS EXPEDIES MATIN PARIS VIA BOULOGNE
It is unclear what had prompted this urgency but it may have been one particular party of three men and two women he had seen boarding a coast-bound train that morning, whom he described as follows:
1. 35-year-old man, average height, dark complexion, strong build, black hair and beard, black suit, soft felt hat.
2. 35-year-old man, rather small, yellowish complexion, freckles, brown hair, little blonde beard, black suit, black felt hat.
3. 38-year-old man, quite tall, black hair and little beard, glasses.
4. 30-year-old woman, petite, brunette, dressed in black, pince-nez.
5. 32-year-old woman, tall, brown hair, blinks her eyes, walks with a slight stoop, dressed in dark grey.
From the reminiscences of two of those present, we can be fairly certain that one of the men Farce had identified was the Caucasian delegate Mikhail Georgievich Tskhakaya, while the small woman with the pince-nez was almost certainly Rozaliya Samoilovna Zemlyachka. We can be equally certain (even if Farce himself may have been unaware of the fact) that the blinking and stooping woman in grey was none other than Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, while the small man with yellowish complexion, freckles and brown hair was her husband, the future leader of the Soviet state – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
In her memoirs, Zemlyachka recalled not one, but two Channel-crossings she had made in Lenin’s company and described, with considerable warmth of feeling, the bravery the latter had demonstrated during one particularly stormy passage and the compassion he had shown towards Krupskaya and herself, both of whom had been struck down by seasickness.32 Tskhakaya, meanwhile, described in some detail that Channel-crossing of 12 May 1905 which he had made with the above-mentioned travelling companions (although he failed to identify that ‘third man’ spotted by Farce in London). According to Tskhakaya, the safekeeping of the protocols of the Congress had been entrusted to their party and they were particularly alarmed, therefore, when, on their arrival at Boulogne, they were approached and stopped by the French police ‘in the presence of a Russian provocateur’. It is possible, though by no means certain, that the French authorities had been alerted to the arrival of their group by the Foreign Agency acting on Farce’s earlier telegram but, however that may be, on the pretext of searching for illicit tobacco, the police demanded they offer up their bags for inspection. Tskhakaya recalled that Lenin steadfastly refused to allow the package containing the protocols to be unwrapped, declaring that it was merely a manuscript and that there was no tobacco inside. Moreover, he protested, none of them smoked nor was any of them a salesman. Eventually, somewhat grudgingly and muttering under their breath, the police and the provocateur let them go on their way.33
With Lenin gone and the Congress over, Farce and his band of helpers could set about resuming their usual daily business, but it would not be long before new pressures were brought to bear on the Okhrana’s London out-station. Back in St Petersburg, the revolutionary year of 1905 had seen a series of political upheavals, one of which had allowed Petr Rachkovsky to return to a position of influence in the senior ranks of the police. One of his first acts was to exact his revenge by sacking Rataev from the Paris office and replacing him with the head of German operations, his old favourite, Arkady Landezen alias Garting. This posting did not bode well for Farce and his team, as the incumbent soon proved. Within a very short space of time, Garting showed himself to be an immeasurably more demanding task-master than even his predecessor. First, the new regime in Paris was slow to honour expenses-claims emanating from London, and then Garting began to impose impossible time-constraints on the delivery of reports. Farce did his utmost to meet these demands but slowly the pressure started to show.
With the publication of the tsar’s October Manifesto and the subsequent declaration of an amnesty for certain political refugees, many in the Russian East End smelled the scent of victory in the air. In one of his last reports of that fateful year, Farce described how ‘for some days now red and black flags have been flying from the windows of the Russian Library’.34
In their excitement, a huge number of émigrés made plans for an immediate return to their homeland. Agent Farce, meanwhile, watched their departure with interest, but also with a growing sense of unease. The cause of his anxiety was his uncertainty as to how his new boss in Paris would react to this exodus.
A letter to Paris
Sometime around mid to late October, Lenin left Geneva for Stockholm and finally, in early November 1905, returned to Russia. He was not alone – over this period, many of the inhabitants of the ‘little Russian islands’ throughout Europe and beyond packed their bags and set off homewards. And most of the castaways in the London archipelago were of the same mind. Farce did his best to maintain his reports, following the movements of the few exiles, such as Teplov, who had chosen to remain behind, and translating any reports in the English press which had the slightest relevance to Russia (on one occasion he even resorted to translating a story which itself had been taken from a French newspaper report of a few days earlier). But Garting’s patience was now running out. In April 1906 he sent an ultimatum in which he offered, not only Farce but also Thorpe, the two stark options of a reduction in salary or termination of employment. On 25 April 1906, Jean Edgar put pen to paper and, with a hand trembling with emotion and barely suppressed anger, wrote the following ten-page letter in response:
Monsieur
I have the honour to inform you that neither I nor Thorpe can give you our response today with regard to the choice you have given us of either accepting a reduction in our salaries (most of which will doubtless have to be borne by myself) or of tendering our resignations. We are both too upset and, indeed, annoyed at having to deal with such a question yet again.
Even Monsieur Rataev could understand that, especially following the assassination of Plehve, it was unthinkable that our salaries should be reduced. I have spent the best years of my life in the service of the Russian government and had not planned on retiring so soon. My incidental expenses for this service are really essential to me. My heart is close to breaking when I come home in the evening and realise how much money I have had to spend which would have been so useful for my little household.
I always counted on receiving compensation someday. Such expenses are inevitable if I am to keep up to date with what’s going on. Despite its size and its power, even Scotland Yard with its army of informers does not always produce brilliant results. It is hardly surprising therefore that the efforts of just the two of us are sometimes not adequate for the task in hand. Everything is different here to the continent. For example, almost everyone here supports the Russian revolutionaries. Very few of my reports contain information which was not extremely difficult to acquire and which simply could not have been obtained using methods common on the continent. That information, therefore, always has a cost. And the large distances we have to travel also have costs that people in Paris simply would not believe. Moreover, it is common knowledge that here, money has much less value than on the continent. For example, a shilling won’t go nearly as far here as a franc will in Paris.
Thanks to my ability to read and understand Yiddish I am able to pass on important information from the local newspapers to certain Scotland Yard agents who, in turn, pass on information that would otherwise be impossible for myself or Thorpe to obtain. And, so long as we have such an arrangement in place, they are happy to turn a blind eye to the fact that Thorpe no longer works for them – which has been useful in the past, bearing in mind that to imitate a police officer here is a great offence. It is essential, therefore, that we maintain a harmonious relationship with Scotland Yard, otherwise, with public opinion being as it is, our position here would be untenable. I have been able to maintain good relations with them for a number of years and I count some special friends among their ranks, but these friendships have to be paid for, one way or another.
As regards intercepting letters, we have done the impossible many times, either individually or together, and sometimes at great personal risk. But I have already explained all this to you. Thorpe already has his pension of 3000 francs a year and, naturally, does not want to take any chances and risk losing it. Here in London, everyone knows what time their post should arrive – a simple complaint to the central post office generally results in them dispatching one or several lettres-trappes and notifying the postal detectives... Besides, when I first started here, Monsieur Rachkovsky himself told me it was quite impossible to carry out such work in London.
As for the Russian revolutionaries, really, you would not say that they were few on the ground here if you were a witness to their meetings – some as many as 5000 – all sworn enemies of the Russian government who conduct themselves as if possessed, openly seeking to buy arms for revolutionaries in Russia and appealing for money to that end in their newspapers. And they don’t always confine themselves to spoken propaganda, despite what they say. If these individuals are not kept under surveillance, how can we respond to questions which we are asked from time to time about one or other of them? The work the two of us are carrying out under such difficult circumstances should be considered more than satisfactory, especially if you take into account the numerous other inconveniences we have to constantly overcome.
In most jobs one’s salary is increased in line with the number of years’ service completed. Why should that be different for me who has given the best of myself and who now has to provide, not just for myself, but for my family? From the days of Monsieur Rataev we have never had a holiday and it is generally considered that those who work in London should take a holiday of at least one month a year. Even the servants here get holidays of ten to fifteen days. I have never complained, hoping always for better times, but now I am faced with such an unexpected dilemma which I simply do not know how to resolve.
To summarize, without money or contacts all one can do here is report on who visited whom 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 in Paris, there are no door-men whose souls can be bought for 100 sous.
Sir, please accord my letter your attention and I hope you will see that it would be very unjust to value my work here at the same price as that of your other employees.
Your humble subordinate
E. Farce.
It would appear that the anxious agent’s heart-felt plea served only to delay the inevitable. It is known that, as 1906 drew to a close, he was still in the employ of the Foreign Agency but then, in late December, he was summoned to Paris. The content of his discussions with his superiors during that meeting at the rue de Grenelle is unknown, but shortly after his return to London Jean Edgar fell gravely ill.
It was not until some months later that further news surfaced of the agent’s fate. On 20 May 1907, his wife Ada wrote a letter to his Paris contact in which she mentioned, almost in passing, that her husband was being admitted to hospital the following day. Elsewhere, she thanked the Agency for the gifts she had received – a bracelet for herself and a watch for Mr Thorpe – and then volunteered her willingness to translate orders to Mr Thorpe from French to English (‘Thorpe does not speak French!!’) and, if necessary, get Mr Thorpe’s reports translated into French by a trustworthy friend. She also enclosed a report which, she said, her husband had asked Thorpe to write. From the tone of the letter it was clear she wished to play down her husband’s current incapacity and reassure Paris that it was ‘business as usual’, as far as they were concerned.35
On 21 May, the Okhrana’s principal London agent was indeed admitted to Charing Cross Hospital. Unfortunately, his illness was of a serious nature – carcinoma of the stomach which had been diagnosed four months earlier. There was no hope of his recovery. One week later, on 28 May, having contracted peritonitis from a perforation, the 47-year-old Jean Edgar Farce passed away. What became of his widow and their three-year-old son Wilfred is unknown, although it is unlikely Arkady Garting would have given them much thought. At that time, he was preoccupied with other, more pressing matters in London.