Chapter X: Father Gapon and Azeff

George Gapon began his public career by joining one of those amazing organisations which the bureaucracy in the last days of its decline created for its defence. It came of an application of the method of exorcising Beelzebub by Beelzebub. The principle and expediency of borrowing something from the democratic movements of the west to serve as a prop for the autocracy of the east had taken root in the fertile brain of Plehve, the organiser, and he set scores of agents working at various aspects of this fascinating problem. I met several of them. One of these was a certain Zubatoff, who organised the Moscow factory hands into a puissant association under the unavowed supervision and direction of the secret police and in opposition to the inchoate unions directed by the socialists. The project was audacious, for it included the getting up of economic strikes for higher wages and better conditions, which the authorities generally brought to an end by taking sides with the workmen against the employers. To such expedients was the autocracy reduced! I had met Gapon once or twice when calling on Bishop Antoninus, who played a part in the religious Philosophical Society, but I can hardly say that I was acquainted with or impressed by him. I distinctly remember, however, Witte's indignation at the immorality of Zubatoff's expedient, and at the harm it was inflicting on industry. From Moscow bitter complaints had been received from directors and owners of factories, and Witte, appealed to as Finance Minister, took their part unhesitatingly. "It is not for the secret police," he once said to me, "to organise strikes which are forbidden by law. If strikes are desirable, necessary, or permissible, they should be left to the men whose interests are furthered by them." Gapon at first worked under Zubatoff and later alone, and as he confessed to me {159} when I pressed the question, he had accepted money from the secret police, "but all the money advanced by the government," he argued, "came from the people. And besides, if I had scrupulously refused it, there would have been no great movement now against the regime." His plan and justification, as he explained to others and myself, consisted in his intention to get the factory hands into his power, select the most gifted and trustworthy among them, make them his agents for propaganda, and then when the auspicious hour should strike, to lead the compacted working class to victory over the autocracy. It was the scheme of a visionary who had no eye for realities, the dream of an ambitious and eloquent greenhorn.

The dismissal of four artisans from the Putiloff Works at St. Petersburg[1] was the occasion that led to the procession of Bloody Sunday. Gapon proposed that a demand should be made not only for the reinstatement of the men, but also for the punishment of the foreman who had sent them away, and for guarantees that the existing abnormal relations between employers and employed should be so reformed as to render such abuses as that complained of impossible in the future. If this reasonable request were not complied with, he would not, he said, answer for the maintenance of public tranquillity. The working men were as clay in his hands. His success whenever he addressed them had turned his head and clouded his judgment, for vanity was his besetting sin. In a few days his economic demands were reinforced by political pretensions, and he at last exhorted the men to follow him to the Winter Palace to see the Tsar and lay before him the needs of the entire Russian people. The idea was not his own. Who suggested it I do not know for certain, but I have some grounds for believing, but not enough for asserting, that it had travelled from the far end of the globe, whence money was also arriving.

I called on Gapon a few days before the historic Sunday[2] and being myself acquainted with most of the prominent {160} liberals not only in the capital but also in the provinces, I felt curious to ascertain more than I then knew about his aims, means, qualifications, and antecedents. The last-named subject was obviously distasteful to him. He reluctantly admitted as much as he saw that I knew about himself, but his answers generally, as well as the manner in which he gave them, left an unpleasant impression in my mind to which I gave utterance in my estimate of him published next day.[3] I felt that such a man was not fitted to lead the people in a country like Russia, where punishments for abortive revolutions was Draconian, and I never could rid myself of the conviction that he was not to be trusted.

On the eve of the great demonstration I spent the whole night in the company of Maxim Gorky, Kedrin, and a number of liberals, who were indirectly helping Gapon by endeavouring to get the government to keep the troops in barracks on the morrow and to induce the Tsar to receive, or send some one to receive, a delegation of the working men. Witte, who, although not in power, was eager to canalise the current and render it harmless, telephoned to the responsible minister, his friend and mine, Prince Sviatopolk Mirsky, and besought him to intercede with the monarch. To no purpose. Mirsky, who was a humane, straight, honourable man, did everything he could to have the request complied with, but without result. I well remember Witte's last words to Mirsky at the telephone an hour after midnight: "Are you really aware how serious the movement is, and how tragic the consequences of your refusal may be?" And the answer came: "I am alive to all that, but I can do nothing to prevent it. The matter is not in my hands." The delegation then withdrew. Nobody in authority could be discovered in the capital that night who would confess to having any voice in shaping the events of the morrow. Blind fate seemed to be standing at the wheel.

On the Sunday morning I went out to see the demonstration and was very nearly shot by the Cossacks who fired on a body of working men and women a few yards from Witte's {161} house after having hurriedly warned me to vacate the ground between them and the crowd. The people, who were unarmed and peaceful, but excited and wound up by Gapon, were fired upon without ruth.[4] It would have been possible for the Emperor or a grand duke to conciliate them, or for a few hundred policemen to disperse them with truncheons, but counsels of wisdom were rejected, possibly because Witte who tendered them was disliked by the Tsar.

Military specialists afterwards assured me that if the workmen, who reached the neighbourhood of the empty Winter Palace, had been led by a resolute chief they might have occupied it without the loss of a man and perhaps turned the riot into a revolution.[5] I do not share this view, which I record as interesting. For the demonstration was a mad freak. The working men were unarmed, their leader was self-seeking and pacific, the groups, scattered all over the city, could not be concentrated, and the attitude of the crowd was such that the soldiers were certain to disperse it without a serious effort. This was known to Gorky, Kedrin, and myself the night before. The priest failed to realise it.

The Cossacks stationed near the bridges and at other points fired upon the advancing groups and a massacre ensued. The number of victims as given by some English and foreign papers amounted to thousands; in reality the killed did not exceed seventy odd, nor the wounded 240.

Father Gapon in person led a numerous body of men from a part of the city far distant from the Winter Palace, and before they had made much progress they were stopped by the troops who opened fire. Gapon's life was in danger for a while, but he lay flat in the snow enveloped in his heavy fur coat during the firing. One of his friends fell dead by his side. Having escaped the same fate he was taken to a place of safety by a devoted friend, the engineer Ruthenberg, a member of a revolutionary society. It came about in this way.

After the third volley the silence was broken only by the {162} cries and moans of the wounded, who lay wriggling or wincing in the mottled snow. Ruthenberg raised his head cautiously, looked round at the prostrate bodies, and seeing beside him the burly figure of the cleric curled up in the snow, nudged him violently. From the capacious fur mantle Gapon's head was lifted slowly. "Are you alive, father?" "Yes." "Shall we get away from here?" "By all means." And they went. Hardly had they entered a courtyard hard by when Gapon theatrically exclaimed, "There's no longer a God, there's no longer a Tsar." And yet within a twelve-month he was secretly assuring the authorities that his veneration for the Tsar was and always had been profound--in fact it came immediately after his love for God.

The engineer, eager to save the priest's life as the most precious thing in that motley crowd, took away all the compromising documents in Gapon's possession and asked whether he might also relieve him of his long tell-tale hair. The priest assented. Ruthenberg then took out his clasp knife for the purpose. It was the knife that contained a pair of scissors and was to be employed once again on Gapon at the close of his career and his life and by the same engineer. Ruthenberg began the operation as though it were the ceremony of conferring upon a novice the dignity of monkhood. And the working men, who literally worshipped their leader, clustered round the pair and stretched forth their hands for the locks of the precious hair which they received reverently with bared and bowed heads as though an awe-inspiring sacrament were being administered. And as they took it, they muttered, "It is holy." Those locks of Gapon's hair were treasured up by the working men and their families as sacred relics[6]--for a twelvemonth and a day. From the moment Gapon rose from the ground he was another man in more than one sense of the term. Instead of the enthusiastic leader who had recoiled from no danger he was in mortal terror of being arrested and hanged. Of hanging he had a supernatural dread. It might have been a presentiment.

I saw him that same evening. He came disguised to the {163} Economic Society where a meeting was being held of the intelligentsia, and his unbridled vanity moved him to deliver an address, having first had himself introduced to the audience as a friend of Father Gapon's. He had nothing of interest to tell his audience, but if I remember right he asked that the workmen should be supplied with firearms in order to rebel with success. The historic procession imparted new vigour to the popular movement and the massacre of the unarmed citizens inflicted enormous damage on the cause of the autocracy.

The remainder of Gapon's history had best find a place here. His friend, the engineer Ruthenberg, who saved his life near the Narva Gates, stood by him helpfully with counsel, money, refuge, friends, until he had him safe in Geneva. There and in Paris Gapon's vanity was fed and fostered by the reverence with which the Russian colony received him. He formally joined the socialists, expecting to rise to still greater fame and break the record he had already attained. A lady who had been in Petersburg and on her return from Russia found Gapon still idle and fretting, cheered him up with the information that the workmen of his party in the capital literally adored him and were about to open a subscription to raise a monument to him during his life. These tidings completely upset his mental balance. He communicated them to every one he met, generally with the comment: "It is without parallel in history." His personal magnetism, which drew and captivated many of those who came under his influence, enabled him to live in idleness abroad, supported either by the party or by individuals, until he published the story of his life, for which he is said to have received a thousand pounds. A measure of his powers of suggestion was afforded by the ease with which he talked over a certain Russian with whom he became acquainted abroad into making him a present of fifty thousand francs[7] "to organise the workmen of {164} Petersburg." This money he is alleged to have spent entirely on himself, and as soon as the party to which he now belonged heard of what he had done and how he had accomplished it they asked him to resign. It is worth noting as a characteristic of the man that about that time, and before six months had elapsed since the events of Bloody Sunday, Gapon had again resumed secret relations with the Russian Department of Police.[8] When in Finland later on, a certain captain remarked to him, "Russia has had her Gapon, but now she needs a Napoleon." He rejoined, "How do you know that that Russian Napoleon is not standing before you now?"

I was once invited to dinner near London by a well-known Russian revolutionist who enjoys an enviable reputation in the higher walks of life. I accepted gratefully. Before the day had come, however, I received another letter informing me that Father Gapon would be the honoured guest of the evening, whereupon I begged to be excused, for I felt an inexplicable antipathy to the man. Later on when he had returned in secret to Russia[9] he sent a message to ask me whether I would meet him. He also apologised for troubling one with whom he could hardly say that he was acquainted, but my close relations with the Prime Minister warranted him, he thought, in taking this unwonted step. I declined to see Gapon on the ground that my intimacy with the Premier would not allow me to enter into relations with an enemy, real or alleged, of the government without first informing its chief and obtaining his assent. Gapon sent again to request me to tell Witte that he was back in St. Petersburg and had something of importance to say.

I brought the matter up that same night after dinner. Witte and I were talking about various people when I asked him his opinion of Gapon, and then inquired when he had last heard of him. "And where is he now?" I queried. "He is still abroad, I suppose." I remarked that to my knowledge he was in the Russian capital. At first the statesman {165} thought I was joking. When he saw that I could tell where the priest was to be found he requested me to give him Gapon's address. I did not possess it, nor would I have given it unconditionally if I had had it. I told him, however, how he could get into communication with him, but only after he had first promised me not to allow him to be arrested. Witte apprised me subsequently that he had met his colleague, Durnovo, Minister of the Interior, next day, and that Durnovo had casually mentioned Gapon's name to him. "Gapon is here," said Witte. "Are you certain?" "Quite certain." "Then I must have the scoundrel arrested." "No, no, you must promise not to touch him. I have given my word. I will see to it that he leaves the country." Durnovo reluctantly agreed to give Gapon twenty-four or forty-eight hours' grace, and Witte sent him the necessary money from his own purse to enable him to quit Russia.[10]

I did not know exactly when Gapon entered into relations with Ratchkoffsky, the head of the Political Police of all Russia, who, after having been dismissed for sending a true report about the shady antecedents of the Tsar's first favourite, the French table-rapper, Philippe, was reinstated as the cleverest, most resourceful, and most subtle organiser of anti-revolutionary counter-mines in the Tsardom. And judging by what he actually accomplished he deserved this reputation. I, who for years was Witte's most intimate friend, met him two or three times at the statesman's house and was surprised to note that he spoke Russian with a foreign accent and expressed himself slowly, hesitatingly, as though he were seeking for words. The minister, who was always outspoken to me when characterising the people he received and had warned me in advance to keep clear of several because he suspected them of being spies or blackmailers, expressed himself thus about Ratchkoffsky: "He is well worth knowing. He has an extraordinary, subtle mind. The way he gets round the anarchists is simply amazing." But I fought shy of Ratchkoffsky, and he of me. He probably remembered {166} my dossier. Anyhow, I have no clear-cut impression of anything but his exterior and his small talk and I found neither attractive.

I have since learned that Gapon had become Ratchkoffsky's paid agent some time in the first half of February, 1906,[11] that he had written a letter of repentance and promise of amendment to the Home Secretary, Durnovo, and had undertaken to seduce and win over to the secret service his friend, the engineer Ruthenberg; and that was his undoing. Ratchkoffsky handled Gapon in a masterly way, flattering him to the top of his bent until the priest began to imagine that he was about to become one of Russia's greatest men. Gapon, on his part, retracted all his former opinions, brand-marked his action of Bloody Sunday, and announced his resolve to make amends for all his former wickedness. That was exactly what the Police Director wanted--to bedraggle the idol of the people with mud and to plunge him in the lowest depths of degradation. It was with this object and probably with the ulterior aim of sending the priest to his death that Ratchkoffsky set him the task of disaffecting Ruthenberg to the revolutionary movement and securing his services as a spy. Ratchkoffsky well knew from Azeff that the engineer had nothing new to reveal, and also that he would turn upon his tempter. Anyhow, it was the persistent effort to achieve that impossible and useless feat that ruined the fickle priest. There is something almost amusing in the _naïveté_ with which Gapon, when seeking to lure his friend and saviour, tells of the friendly turn he had done him in his talks with the head of the political police. "At first, you know, Ratchkoffsky did not trust you, but when I assured him that you were straight and honest, and that I would vouch for you, he was easy in mind!" A certificate of straightness and honesty from the traitor for the man whom he hopes to render disloyal comes to a westerner with an anarchist flavour.

{167}

Nothing is more characteristic of the degree of vice and corruption to which the autocracy, and not the autocracy only, had sunk at the beginning of the century than the cynicism with which assassination, cold-blooded treachery, shameless perjury, and all the abominations of applied Machiavellism pushed to its uttermost extremes, were discussed and employed by the State and also by its foes. All restraints and checks were gone. The Tsar's government employed unprincipled scoundrels who, like Azeff, cajoled young men into a secret society, set them to commit dastardly crimes, and then delivered them up to death, penal servitude, or exile, and on the other hand the revolutionary parties were served by the self-same ruffians who proscribed and murdered grand dukes, ministers, generals. And the imperial government, which knew that such murders as those of Plehve and of the Tsar's uncle, the Grand Duke Sergius, had been planned and organised by the well-paid State servant Azeff, not only allowed him to remain in its employ, but continued to pay him royally. These things enable one to gauge the depths to which moral gangrene had eaten into the organism before it finally collapsed. Tsarism was being developed to its extreme consequences.

What could be more artless or illuminating than the following entry made by the engineer Ruthenberg in his diary? "February, 1906. I found nobody in Petersburg. Having learned that Azeff was in Seyversk I repaired thither. I arrived by the first morning train, about 7 a.m. on the 11th or 12th February. I narrated everything to Azeff[12] (about Gapon's treason). I told him that as a member of the party I do not consider that I have the right to take any measures on my own initiative, so I await instructions from the Central Committee. Azeff was astonished and disgusted at what I had recounted. It was his opinion that Gapon should be done to death like a poisonous viper. In order to {168} accomplish this I must ask him to meet me, drive out with him in the evening, taking my own sleigh to the Krestoffsky Garden,[13] remain there to supper and stay late--in fact until everybody is gone--then drive in the same conveyance to the wood, plunge a knife into Gapon's back, and throw his body out of the sleigh. The same morning ... Subbotin arrived.... In essentials he shared Azeff's opinion that Gapon must be killed." ... Another council of four was held next day and opinions were divided, one member insisting on the murder of Azeff alone and the others advocating a meeting of Ruthenberg, Gapon, and Ratchkoffsky at which the engineer should also kill the other two.

Ruthenberg did not venture to assassinate Gapon, who was literally idolised by the working men, until he could get their assent. In order to obtain this it behoved him, in his own interest, first to prove the priest's guilt. With this object in view he took Gapon out in a sleigh, the driver of which was one of the factory hands disguised, who was told in advance to keep his ears pricked, listen to the conversation, and report it faithfully to his comrades. The talk consisted of Ruthenberg's various objections to Gapon's proposal that he should meet Ratchkoffsky and betray his party, and of Gapon's detailed answers and persuasive pleas. The priest had at first mentioned ten thousand pounds as the reward which the engineer might expect for his treason, but was afterwards obliged to confess that the head of the political police had refused to pay more than one quarter of this sum.

Naturally the talk was very open, the names of persons being clearly pronounced by Ruthenberg so that the driver heard enough to dispel his doubts. He and his comrades having subsequently talked the matter over, decided at the first opportunity to seize Gapon, disarm, try, and execute him. And for these purposes a wooden house was hired some ten or twelve miles outside the capital, on the way to the Finnish frontier, into which he was to be inveigled. It {169} was situated in a little village of wooden houses used as summer dwellings by the poorer middle class of the capital and left empty in winter. Gapon, however, at first refused to leave Petersburg under any circumstances, but finally accepted Ruthenberg's invitation and went without even taking the revolver which he had never before left behind. After some conversation with the engineer the pair approached the shanty, in which a number of workmen were secretly waiting to discharge the functions of judges and executioners.

"Is there anybody in the house?" asked Gapon as they drew near to the dismal-looking, frail, wooden structure in the deserted snow-covered village. "Nobody," replied his friend. "Bravo!" rejoined the priest, "you always manage to get a place where even a dog would not scent your presence." The members of the improvised areopagus were meanwhile waiting in a little backroom on the upper story, and by way of disarming suspicion the door had been shut and a padlock hung outside as though it had remained locked ever since the end of summer when all these shabby "villas" are vacated. The plan was for Ruthenberg and Gapon to enter this particular room where the priest would be disarmed, bound, and tried. But Gapon, arriving first, went into the larger room, took off his fur coat, flopped heavily down on the sofa, and began to chatter away more cynically than ever before, fancying that no one but his friend could hear him, whereas his every word was audible to the men next door. "Why ever won't you come to terms?" he began; "25,000 roubles is a respectable sum." "Yes, yes, but in Moscow you told me that Ratchkoffsky had offered 100,000." And so more and more compromising answers were elicited by the engineer's tricky questions. For example, the latter objected that if he betrayed his comrades they would be hanged and he therefore recoiled from the act. Gapon urged that once the money was paid by the authorities, the two could then warn their comrades to escape and thus save the lambs and feed the wolves. His friend then insisted that this was not feasible because they would be {170} "shadowed" by Ratchkoffsky's detectives and all of them hanged. "Oh, well, we will arrange their escape somehow," remarked the ex-priest. "Perhaps part might get away," said Ruthenberg, "but they'll surely catch and hang the rest." "That would be a pity," observed Gapon. And so the fateful dialogue ran on.

In this way the wretched man was tempted and played with for the space of about half an hour, until he had laid bare all his crimes against the men who had followed him and braved death under his leadership and had denied God and the Tsar at his bidding a little over a year before. Towards the close of this oblique cross-examination the engineer struck out a new line in order to reach a climax. "What would become of you if the workmen, say only those of your own section, got wind of your relations with Ratchkoffsky?" "They know nothing about that, and if they heard anything I would make them believe that I was doing it for their own good." "Yes, but suppose they were to discover all that I know about you? ... that you betrayed me and even undertook to seduce me and enlist me among the provocateurs and through me to betray the militant organisation, and that you sent a letter of repentance to Durnovo? What then?" "Nobody knows those things, nobody can ever find them out." "But suppose I myself were to publish them?" "Oh, of course you would never do such a thing...." Then having meditated a while, "And if you did I would write to the papers and say you had gone mad and that I knew nothing of those things. Besides, you possess no documents, no witnesses to bear them out. There isn't the shadow of a doubt that it is I whom they would believe."[14]

After this they moved out of the room. Behind a door Gapon came upon an ear witness, was terrified, and wanted to kill him on the spot. Thereupon Ruthenberg went to the door of the little room, pushed it open, and turning to the priest exclaimed, "Look! there are my witnesses!" Gapon, turning his gaze upon the man whom he had been {171} talking to as his second self, fell on his knees, and exclaimed, "Martin,[15] Martin!" "There's no Martin here for you!" exclaimed a voice. The workmen, who had with difficulty repressed their fury during Gapon's unwitting self-accusation, threw themselves fiercely upon him now and pinned him to the floor. Then they dragged him into the adjoining room. Ruthenberg covered his face with his hands and went out. The first impulse of the men was to shoot the traitor. But he tore himself from their clutches in the strength of his despair and adjured them to have mercy. "Brothers, brothers!" he implored them. "We are not your brothers. Ratchkoffsky is your brother." "Brothers, I swear to you that I did it for the sake of an idea..." "Yes, we have just heard your ideas. We know them now." "Comrades, in the name of the past, forgive me ... in the name of the past." But the men went on tying his hands and feet in silence. "Brothers! Spare me. Remember the links that bind us to each other." "That's exactly why you deserve to die," one of the men exclaimed. "You sold our blood to the secret police and you merit death." ... And congruously with an unspoken accord they threw the noose over his head on to his neck and pulled him over to an iron hook which had been driven into the clothes-rack.

Gapon, already choking and gasping, croaked out, "Brothers ... darlings ... stop! ... Let me say a last word!" "String him up!" commanded one of the men who had walked with Gapon in the procession of Bloody Sunday. But another comrade interposed, saying, "Let him have his last word as he asks for it. Perhaps we may learn something important." ... The pressure of the cord round his neck was eased and Gapon spoke, "Brothers! ... Have mercy ... Dear ones ... Forgive me ... For the sake of bygone times." ... But the workmen jerked the cord and Gapon hung powerless. A few minutes later he was dead. The shadows of evening were falling. {172}

The workmen, gloomy and stern, went out of the room one after the other on to the terrace where Ruthenberg stood, He was trembling all over from an attack of nerves. "Is it finished?" he asked. All were silent. "You should search him now," he said. And they all went back to the room again where Gapon's corpse was hanging. They searched him and found various papers in his pockets.... Ruthenberg said, "You ought to cover his face. Cut the cord and cover up his face." He took from his own pocket and handed me a clasp knife--writes a workman--which contained a pair of small, collapsible scissors. "It was with these very scissors," he remarked, "that I cut his hair on that day ... the 22nd January ... and now it is with the same scissors that" ... but he did not complete the sentence and went out of the dismal room.[16]

In this dramatic manner poetic justice was done and the idol of the people was covered with infamy.

Azeff, the paid spy of the government and unmatched organiser of revolutionary murders, was a party to this execution. A word from him would have stopped or retarded it. That he informed his chief Ratchkoffsky of what was planned is most probable. For Gapon, after his meeting with Ruthenberg at the fatal village of Ozerky, was to have returned and given Ratchkoffsky an account of what took place. And as he did not return the conclusion that he had been put to death was almost unavoidable. Yet Gapon's body was allowed to lie for weeks in the empty house where it had fallen, probably because Ratchkoffsky was anxious that the crime should be discovered as late as possible. From the outset the Police Director knew that Gapon had nothing of importance to reveal and was perfectly useless as a spy, because the revolutionists had long ceased to trust him. What he wanted, therefore, was first to discredit the popular hero of Bloody Sunday--which he had already done--and then to get the revolutionists to give him a receipt for the work by putting their ex-hero to death ignominiously. Conception and execution were worthy of the greatest of Russia's {173} secret police organisers. They were also characteristic of the government, the regime, and the epoch.

As soon as I received tidings of Gapon's death[17] I asked Witte whether it was true. He seemed greatly perturbed and only said, "I cannot credit it. But I will find out at once and let you know." The next morning as he and I went in to lunch together he said, "I am sorry to say that Gapon has been put to death. Your information was correct. Please say nothing about it to any one. What a strange man he was!" He then told me the whole story of Gapon as far as he knew it and I wrote it down to his dictation.

Thus the system of government at the outset of the twentieth century was essentially what Ivan the Terrible had made it in the sixteenth--an agency independent of the nation, with interests and aims of its own which often ran counter to those of the people, an organism which had the strongest motives for keeping the bulk of Russians in intellectual darkness, political subjection, and in the plague-polluted gloom of moral degradation. And now that the girders and joists of the State structure were bending and giving way under the battering shocks of terrorists who lived and died for abstractions, the props by which the fabric was being supported were supplied by Ratchkoffsky, Gapon, Azeff, Tennenbaum, and such-like beings whose very breath shed poison and from whose infamous deeds some of the worst criminals of the west would have recoiled. By the year of the abortive revolution, which foreboded the fall of the autocracy, the soul of the ruling class in the Tsardom was encrusted round with foul leprous stains and the moral atmosphere of the nation permeated with corrosive vapour. Brother could no longer confide in brother nor parents in their sons, so impregnated had the air become with suspicion and mistrust.

Take as a typical example the case of the notorious Azeff. A great clumsy, brawny fellow with a big Marat-like head, an uncommonly low forehead, eyes that seemed starting from {174} their sockets, thick lips, very high cheek bones, and a coarse, sensual look, he was early taken in hand by the Department of the Political Police and introduced into the holy of holies of the revolutionary party, there to weave plots that made men shudder, to enlist intrepid, clever young men--the pick of Russia's youth--to assign to them parts in political murders, and to have them arrested on the eve of their realisation and sent to the gallows, Siberia, or a horrible prison. The police alone being unable to cope with the multitude of patriotic lads who, stirred by the spectacle of their country's woes, and inspired by the vision of its future bliss, rose up against the accursed system, created the rôle of the agent provocateur. Ratchkoffsky raised it to the dignity of an art. The number of provocateurs was great, but the king of them all was Yevno Azeff, known also as the "Fat One." The story of the exploits of this miscreant would fill a large volume. The names of his victims would suffice for a national martyrology. The authority he enjoyed with the militant revolutionists on the one hand, and with the Tsar's bureaucratic defenders on the other hand, constitutes a psychological wonder. For although the man had no such charm of person or magic of language as Gapon possessed, and was physically repellent over and above, he was so highly esteemed and trusted by both sides that for years the central committee of the revolutionists refused to entertain the growing suspicions of certain of his colleagues, or to take notice of the downright denunciations that came from the Department of the Political Police itself, while the Tsar's government, even after it had been proven that Azeff was the double-dyed scoundrel who had organised the successful plot against Plehve and the Grand Duke Sergius, not only refused to bring him to trial or otherwise punish him, but continued to pay him largely and to keep him in their employment. Azeff was a Janus, and each of his two faces possessed the power of fascinating the beholder.

Azeff accepted two influential posts in the revolutionary camp: he was a member of the central committee of the Social Revolutionary Party, and he was also head of the {175} militant organisation, so that practically everything was thought out, organised, and its execution supervised by him. For seven or eight consecutive years all the threads of the revolutionary movement passed through his blood-stained hands; he knew personally every leading conspirator in the province, and shaped every great collective terrorist act. It is self-evident that the revolutionists, whose watchfulness and shrewdness need no eulogium, would not have maintained him in this position of trust if they had not had absolute confidence in his zeal for the cause and his resourcefulness. It is no less clear that he must have justified this confidence by concrete acts. These two conclusions are borne out by well-established facts. Of these evidences of Azeff's devotion one of the most resonant and fruitful was the death of Plehve, of which I by chance was a witness. This versatile ruffian carefully laid his plans for the murder of the minister in whom the brightest hopes of the autocracy were then centred and who was paying him for protection against terrorist plots. It is worth noting by the way that Plehve was one of the highest types of the champions of Tsarism and a statesman of no mean order. True, the material in which he worked and the conditions which he was forced to accept made it not only impossible for him to achieve great palpable results, but obliged him either to abandon the task or to have recourse to the most infamous devices ever employed by a civilised ruler of men. And yet ethically Plehve was neither worse nor better than the common run of his class. Intellectually indeed he was far and away their superior. But the system which he had to bolster up was already so putrid that it could be upheld only by communicating its rottenness to the forces that were preparing to attack it. Any powerful shock would, it seemed to him and to many of his fellow-workers, overthrow the dynasty, the regime, and the entire ordering of the political community. The diversion which he had striven to create by the Manchurian campaign was harming in lieu of helping the autocracy. For the first time all Russia was combining against the Tsarist State, and any day a far-resonant {176} crime of the terrorists might prove the precipitating event that would lead to its overthrow. To hinder this the surest way, as it seemed to Plehve, would be to contaminate the terrorists with the canker from which the State was suffering. In this way the system assimilated its servants and stamped them with the hall-mark of its own ethical quality.

Plehve was blown to pieces in my presence, and forthwith Azeff became a demi-god in the eyes of his comrades and a future saviour in the eyes of the government. Unable to satisfy both masters at once, he soon afterwards plotted the death of the Tsar's uncle and had him too blown to pieces. It is not surprising, therefore, that when in the latter half of the year 1905 he was anonymously denounced to one of the terrorists as an agent of the political police the revolutionary committee dismissed the charge with supreme contempt. And yet the denunciation had come in the shape of a letter sent[18] by an unnamed official of the Department of the Secret Police[19] in Petersburg. Moreover, it consisted not merely in an accusation uttered without evidence; it made two definite statements of interest to the terrorists, which on inquiry turned out to be true, and ought therefore to have stimulated curiosity about the third. It alleged that among the members of the committee were two agents provocateurs, of whom one was T., who had recently returned from Siberia, where he had lived in banishment, and that the other was commonly known by either of his two nicknames, "the Fat One" or "Ivan Nikolayevitch." The indictment actually specified some of the denunciations which each of the two men had made against his comrades, and it also described certain details by which they might be identified. It asserted, for example, that "the Fat One" had recently spent a fortnight in Moscow under the false name of Vilenkin. This last allegation was both true and disquieting.

The member of the committee who had received this letter showed it at once to Azeff, who grew pale and excited, {177} and exclaimed, "T. is Tataroff, and A. is, of course, myself, Azeff." He decided to repair to Moscow without delay, where he opened his mind to another member of the party, who comforted him by expressing his implicit trust in his loyalty and zeal. It was obvious, this comforter said, that Ratchkoffsky and the government were burning to deprive the revolutionists of the soul of their organisation, of the man who had removed first Plehve and then the Grand Duke Sergius, and given an irresistible impetus to things political which would carry Russia far towards her goal. Another member of the party, however, brooded over the accusation, and was deeply impressed by the fact that Azeff's false name was known to the police--for that could only mean either that somebody had informed against him--and then why did the police not arrest him?--or else that he himself had informed the police, and then he was their agent. Other explanation there could be none. And yet... The second thing that struck this comrade was that the inquiry opened into the case against Tataroff showed that the anonymous writer had told the truth, for the accusation was proved and the traitor was duly put to death by the organisation. Now if one of the two denounced members was guilty, was not the presumption grounded that the other was equally so? But the committee scouted the notion as an insult. Had not Azeff planned the murder of Plehve and the grand duke? And if so, what more need be said? No government would keep an active terrorist like him in its employ.

In the spring of 1906 in revolutionary circles the rumour was rife that an attempt would shortly be made on the life of Admiral Dubassoff, with whom I was then and afterwards on friendly terms. A fortnight before the date fixed, a female member of the revolutionary party from Moscow sought out the mistrustful member of the organisation[20] and narrated a curious incident. She told him that the {178} conspirators were at their posts the day before when they were suddenly encircled by spies, so that it needed all their presence of mind and energy to make good their escape. Consequently the police knew all about the conspiracy, and the conspirators were in its power. The man to whom this fact was communicated ascribed the laying of the spy trap to Azeff, who intended to make use of the plot against Dubassoff's life for the ruin of a large number of the hardiest terrorists. He was therefore in favour of an inquiry. But the terrorists preferred to wait and see. Azeff was now on his mettle, and eight or ten days later the attempt on the admiral's life did take place; he was wounded and deprived of his hearing, and his aide-de-camp, Count Konovnitzin, was killed outright. Azeff, who was hard by during the bomb-throwing, was arrested by the police, but he showed them his passe-partout and they set him at liberty at once. It is difficult to realise that such infamies as these were tolerated, nay, deliberately practised, by civilised Christian men as methods of educating their 180,000,000 wards.

In the autumn of 1906 Azeff took offence at some remarks made by a comrade, and laying down his functions for a time went abroad. During his absence the terrorists improved the occasion and killed more men of note in the administration in one month than they had slain in six months of his tenure of office. And this difference was duly noted by two suspicious comrades, who drew their own conclusions. As soon as Azeff returned[21] he resumed his functions, reorganised the central board, went to Finland, and left instructions that every young member coming from the provinces for advice or work from him should repair thither. These instructions, which aroused surprise, were carried out. There the workers were cordially received and told what was expected of them, and when they returned they were arrested on the Finnish frontier by the Russian police and handed over to the gaoler or the hangman. A large number of young men were caught in this way and immobilised by imprisonment or death. After a time the {179} provincial terrorist chiefs refused to repair to Finland, even when Azeff himself sent for them. Some of his mistrustful colleagues now felt surer of their ground.

But it was not until February, 1908, that the eyes of the committee men began to be opened to the true nature of Azeff's activity. It came about in this way. A young man in a provincial town learned from an intimate friend who was in the service of the secret police that there was an agent provocateur in the committee whose name was Azeff. The youth at once set out for Finland and apprised the committee of what he had heard. But he was sharply bidden to return whence he had come and to mind his own business in future. A few days later a large number of arrests were made by the government, which was impolitic enough to announce that they had received detailed information compromising all those who had been apprehended. Who had given the information? was the question that naturally presented itself to those who were most nearly concerned. "It must have been Azeff," said one who knew him, but he honestly admitted that he was merely guessing. The others refused to entertain the thought. Then said the first, "As our young men are all falling into the hands of the government, why does not Azeff at least suspend the reign of terror until the danger is past?" For Azeff was known to be opposed to any such suspension. He had said, "The terror must be continued. The honour of Russia demands it." And it was continued.

His mistrustful comrades, and Burtzeff in particular, brooded over these things and resolved to bide their time and watch for their opportunity. As an agent provocateur one of Azeff's functions was to hatch grandiose plots from time to time which required the services of numerous conspirators, to assign to each one his part, and to allow the preparations to be completed and generally the day to dawn on which the execution was to take place. This was an essential condition. Then, and not before, the secret police were to swoop down on the conspirators, seize the ringleaders red-handed, track the others to the houses of their {180} friends, and make an enormous haul. In this way during the first four years that followed the abortive revolution of 1905 the executioner was kept continually busy. Thousands of young men, enterprising, fearless, and easily led, were gathered together in groups and flung to the hangman. Azeff would explain these mishaps to his comrades as consequences of the clumsiness of one or other of the conspirators, of their neglect to carry out his instructions, of their consequent imprudence in deed or word. It was always they who were to blame, and it was his part to feel grieved to death at their foolishness. His judgments on his victims were invariably harsh. They themselves were always at fault. His conduct towards the others was equally callous and cruel. In the intervals between these frequent harvests of death, a number of young terrorists, eager for something to do, would be informed that their services were not required for the time being and that they must wait and lie low until they received further instructions. These instructions, however, would either not be issued at all or not for a long period, during which these unemployed young men, who had no means of subsistence, were left literally to starve. For many of them had no profession, no trade, no training, and very often no passports, so that even if employment were offered them they could not profit by it. The funds of the revolutionary organisation were enormous--to my knowledge one donation amounted to over a million roubles, and the cabinet of the day intended to have the donor tried and executed, when they learned that he had committed suicide. But Azeff had the disposal of all moneys, and it was he who tightened the purse strings when solicited to contribute to the support of the starving executors of his sanguinary behests. So wide-spread and intense were the hardships to which these wretched men were exposed that special kitchens were opened in Finland, at which they could obtain a meal gratuitously. In these ways Azeff, the revolutionary genius, played the game of the government most successfully and spread demoralisation whithersoever he went. And the {181} system of which he discharged but one of the functions, hardened, narrowed, and brutalised the thinking public throughout the Tsardom.

The Emperor has been held responsible for that system. And in a sense he accepted the responsibility. He was aware of the infamous nature of the services which Azeff rendered and was paid for. Burtzeff had publicly accused Ratchkoffsky and Gerassimoff, who were Azeff's superiors, of connivance at these abominable crimes and of scattering social solvents broadcast for no object worth having. In Paris, London, and New York he had published these accusations. The Duma had taken the subject up and discussed it. The ministers had read and answered questions about Azeff and his victims. I myself had spoken of him to Stolypin, Witte, Durnovo, Schwanebach, Kurloff, and several of their colleagues. They must, therefore, have known and did know exactly for what kind of services he was being paid, and also how he stood with the two hostile parties. Yet they made no protest. The truth is that the atmosphere was impregnated with mephitic gases to which most people had grown accustomed. Neither Stolypin nor any other average minister could alter the state of things. The circumstance required downright fierce resistance or whole-hearted adherence. And they chose the latter.

The fact is that the whole system was essentially immoral. The bureaucracy was an organism outside the nation, living upon it parasitically, interested in obscuring its views, in clouding its judgment, in impairing or even destroying its self-reliance, in a word it resembled in fundamentals the opritchina of Ivan the Terrible. The main structural differences between the Muscovy of those early times and the Russia of the last two Romanoffs[22] consisted in the insurmountable obstacle to centralisation which had been raised by the emancipation of the serfs, coupled with the {182} refusal of the government to allow part of the work of administration to devolve upon the zemstvos, the changes necessitated by Witte's efforts at industrialisation, and the increase in the number of "intellectuals" from whom the bureaucracy and the revolutionary party were recruited. Of one section of the intelligentsia the principal occupation in the Empire was to spread foreign theories, to sow new and dissolvent ideas, to seduce officials, soldiers, sailors, to hatch conspiracies, and prepare a revolution. Another momentous difference was supplied by the changed atmosphere of Europe which had become much more favourable to the diffusion of democratic ideas. But the spirit of the ruling class had undergone no modification. The bureaucracy--now supreme and irresponsible--was solicitous about its own interests which were taken to stand for those of the entire community, and as opposition to these interests was intenser than ever before, the old traditional methods were no longer efficacious. The last vestiges of moral barriers had, therefore, been pulled down and the agents of the State went to work with marvellous thoroughness and absolute unscrupulousness.

The most perfect types of these latter-day defenders of the autocracy were Plehve, and his agents Ratchkoffsky, Zubatoff, Gapon, and among the consequences of the system were the meeting of the two extremes, the effacement of the line of demarcation between the reaction and the revolution, the employment of the same agents for crimes devised for the support of the autocracy and for its overthrow, the identification of heinous deeds and praiseworthy exploits, the confusion of evil and good. Thus the State authorities shrank from nothing. In the provinces and sometimes, it is said, in Moscow and Petersburg, torture was resorted to methodically to extort confessions. Several cases which occurred in the provinces came under my cognisance at the time, one of which made a deep impression on me because the central authorities, to whose notice I brought the matter, could only assure me that they were not directly responsible for the "hasty deeds of provincial agents working under {183} constant fear of death." The chief of the district of Novominsk was killed[23] and four men were arrested on suspicion. They denied all participation in the crime. Then it was decided to put them to the torture. Unable to hold out they made confessions which were used against them and were put to death. It afterwards turned out that they were not guilty of the deed. The real murderer was discovered. He confessed and was executed. The ministers to whose notice I brought these facts, which they could not deny, regretted them, but found them explicable and excusable in the circumstances.

During the first days after Bloody Sunday the government intensified the measures of repression. In particular it was strictly forbidden to collect money for the surviving victims of the massacre. Harmless literary men, professors, and journalists were imprisoned, and 500 cells were got ready in the fortress. General Trepoff was appointed to be a sort of dictator with his residence in the Winter Palace, and everybody expected a reign of terror. Gapon, who had received a false passport, succeeded in escaping. But with true Russian suddenness, Trepoff reversed the machine and did exactly what everybody thought he would never think of doing. In a jiffy he became more liberal than the liberals, set free the men of letters, journalists, professors, and others who were interned in the fortress, and left the 500 newly prepared cells empty. Nay, more, he persuaded the Tsar himself to open a subscription in aid of the widows and orphans of the slain with a donation of fifty thousand roubles. People thought he had gone mad. He was only moved by one of the hidden springs that play such a large part in Russian psychology, which knows not finality and recks not of coherency.

Public feeling against the Tsar and his advisers now ran high. The Zemsky Assembly of Kharkoff in an address plainly told him that the violation of the nation's elementary rights was unchaining a tempest of bloody civil war which would subvert his throne. "Do not trust, sire, to negligent {184} and wily servants, but repose confidence in the elected representatives of the nation." From all corners of the Empire came petitions, addresses, resolutions in the same sense. In the meanwhile, the secret revolutionary committee condemned General Trepoff and the Grand Duke Sergius to death, and published the sentence in leaflets, one of which I received.

Police, gendarmes, detectives, and spies were unavailing to save the grand duke, who, perhaps because he anticipated their powerlessness, took the wise precaution of driving and walking without his consort. He knew he was doomed to die by violence, and he faced his doom like a man. He had been for years the embodiment of the vital principle of the autocracy. Therefore he was first on the list of the proscribed. He had misruled Moscow with a rod of iron; he had persecuted the Jews with a degree of hatred akin to mania. Nothing that he said or did seemed inspired by ethical motives or shaped by considerations of justice. He despised soft-heartedness, ignored scruples, and went straight to the goal regardless of consequences.

One of his last acts was to give currency to the statement that Japanese gold had bribed the Russian people to cease work, hamper the government, and co-operate with the public enemy. The accusation was badly worded. The gold was but a help, not a stimulant. His adjutant, Djunkoffsky, took the telegram containing that terrible accusation to a newspaper office in Moscow, strove hard to have it accepted, and finally caused it to be circulated in St. Petersburg, where, although not printed, it was used to envenom public feeling against him. That the Japanese had money distributed among Russian revolutionists of a certain grade and that considerable sums were laid out in this way is, I am bound to say, certain, just as German money has been circulating among them ever since August, 1914. I know the names of some of those who distributed it.

The degree of responsibility that weighs upon the Tsar personally has often been debated, and the consensus of opinion, Russian and foreign, was that he was kept in {185} ignorance of what was being done in his name and was not only weak-willed but feeble of intellect as well. Against this view my articles in the years 1904-7 were directed. For I knew personally many of the persons who unfolded to him in great detail the condition of the country and the changing moods of the people during most of the crises that marked his reign. I also read and copied hundreds of the annotations which he himself scribbled on the State papers laid before him for cognisance or signature. I had seen and described the manuscript journal which was diligently prepared for him every day and which contained adequate accounts of the various political and other movements of the time. And I had the corroborative testimony of a number of his ministers. From these and other sources I drew the conclusion that Nicholas II., who was nowise devoid of intelligence but only of social sympathy, was profoundly convinced that he was the vicar of God upon earth, and the spiritual leader, not merely of the Russian people, but of the civilised races of mankind to whom he had given light and leading at The Hague. Flatterers at home and abroad, along with a rare faculty for self-hypnotisation, confirmed him in that belief.

Much of his time he spent in his cabinet at what he termed work, which consisted in signing replies to addresses of loyalty elicited by his own agents and penning comments on the various reports presented by ministers, governors, and other officials. His courtiers encouraged him to believe that all these replies and desultory remarks were words of wisdom to be preserved for future ages, and he had some grounds for believing them, seeing that even such trivial remarks as, "I am very glad," "God grant it may be so," were, when possible, published in large type in the newspapers, artistically glazed over in the manuscript, and carefully preserved in the archives like the relics of a saint. But the most interesting were never published; and to these there was no end. Here is one. During the Manchurian campaign a report of the negotiations respecting the warship _Manchur_ was laid before him by Count Lamsdorff. The tenor of it was that the Chinese authorities had summoned {186} the _Manchur_ to quit the neutral harbour of Shanghai at the repeated and urgent request of the Japanese consul there. On the margin of that report his Majesty penned the words, "The Japanese consul is a scoundrel."

When I was with Witte at Portsmouth (U.S.A.), the statesman sent a telegram to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count Lamsdorff, suggesting that Japan's claim to retain half of the island of Sakhalien and to receive a certain money compensation for the other half should be seriously considered. This telegram was laid before the Emperor, who, as I afterwards learned, wrote upon it: "Neither a rood of land nor a rouble shall Japan receive. From this position nothing will ever make me recede."

I possess a large collection of these childish remarks as well as copies of many of his letters to ministers and others on public affairs, and it was partly from these, coupled with his public acts, that I drew my estimate of his character. Some of his comments on the course of public justice when it was being systematically deflected from its right course by the obsequiousness of court flunkeys bear out the charge of a-morality and callousness which I ventured to reproduce at the outset. One of these glosses, taken in connection with the correspondence that preceded it, is an act of protection extended to deliberate assassination, perpetrated for the purpose of removing real or supposed adversaries of the autocracy. I fear it is not possible to acquit the monarch of this damaging charge. Into this amazing action of the Tsar I inquired all the more fully because, as already stated, the third assassination--two men had been successfully murdered, of whom one was an old friend and the other an old acquaintance of mine--would have sent me also to the shades had it been carried out.

All that need be said here is that the Emperor intervened personally in writing--I possess his exact words among my documents--to ward off the sword of justice from the criminals-in-chief.

[1] In December, 1904.

[2] The procession took place on 22nd January, 1905.

[3] In the _Daily Telegraph_.

[4] I described the events of these days in telegrams of many columns in length which appeared in the _Daily Telegraph_.

[5] The _Novoye Vremya_ also put forward this thesis.

[6] Cf. _Byloye_ (in Russian), Nos. 11-12, p. 35.

[7] The man who gave the money was Sokoff. There were other wealthy Russians who, belonging to no revolutionary party, replenished the funds of the social democrats or social revolutionists, and at least one of these gave as much as a hundred thousand pounds.

[8] Cf. _Byloye_ Nos. 11-12, p. 44.

[9] I have forgotten the date and my diaries are inaccessible owing to the war.

[10] This would go to show that Gapon's relations with the police had not yet been regulated, or else were not known to the minister.

[11] Gapon and Ratchkoffsky had met in January once or twice, and also in early February, 1906. Whether the Minister Durnovo was aware of this I am unable to say.

[12] Azeff was the notorious revolutionary organiser and at the same time the great police spy--a living synthesis of contradictions. What Ruthenberg told Azeff were the suspicious admissions made to him by Gapon who had already begun the work of seduction.

[13] A place of amusement on one of the islands, where officers and _bons vivants_ used to sup, listen to gypsy songs, and spend most of the night.

[14] Cf. _Byloye_, Nos. 11-12, p. 89.

[15] Martin was Ruthenberg's adopted pseudonym in the revolutionary society. The story of Gapon's last moments I have told in the exact words of Ruthenberg himself and of one of the workmen who executed the priest.

[16] Cf. _Byloye_, Nos. 11-13, p. 119.

[17] As my diaries are no longer accessible, I am unable to determine the exact date.

[18] In August, 1905.

[19] Okhranka.

[20] I am quoting from his own account, cf. _Byloye_, 9-10, p. 191, also from a pamphlet entitled "The Responsibility of the Tsar," by Vlad. Burtzeff (in Russian), 1910, pp. 11 fol.

[21] In the beginning of 1907.

[22] The house of the Romanoffs became extinct after the death of the Tsaritsa Elizabeth I. The house that reigned since them is that of Holstein-Gotthorp. Elizabeth's nephew, Peter III., was the first sovereign of this dynasty.

[23] In 1906. Trustworthy evidence of torture for political purposes in Petersburg I had none.

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