After the assassination of
Alexander II of Russia in 1881, the government moved against various
revolutionary factions operated by émigrées or hiding out in
Russia. Rachkovsky's principal mission was to compromise Russia's growing
revolutionary movement. The list of penetration agents hired by Rachkovsky included: •
Landesen (Abraham Hackelman), among the
Narodnaya Volya terrorists in
France and
Switzerland • Ignaty Kornfeld, among the
anarcho-communists • Prodeus, a well-known revolutionary, reporting on various revolutionary centers • Ilya Drezhner, among the
social democrats in
Germany, Switzerland and France • Boleslaw Malankiewicz, among the
Polish anarchists and terrorists in
London •
Casimir Pilenas, a spotter for
Scotland Yard recruited to work among the
Latvian terrorists • Zinaida Zhuchenko, among the
socialist revolutionaries and their terrorist
fighting unit • Aleksandr Evalenko, assigned to
New York City for work among the
Jewish Bundists and terrorists According to journalist
Brian Doherty: "Rachkovsky started as a possibly sincere, possibly duplicitous mover in
St. Petersburg's radical underground in the late 1870s, after having been dismissed (for leniency toward political exiles) from a job as a prosecutor for the
czar's government. He ended up running the show for the
Okhrana, the Russian
secret police, in Paris, where so many radicals considered dangerous to the czarist regime had immigrated. From 1885 until 1902, Rachkovsky was responsible for keeping
anarchists under surveillance and on the run—and also, in many cases, financed and supplied with ideas... "[P]rominent among his early initiatives were provocations designed to lure credulous émigrés into the most heinous crimes of which they may never have otherwise conceived". Rachkovsky's aim was to
entrap his targets into committing acts that would help ensure that his job seemed of vital importance to the czar. This guaranteed him a solid berth in
Paris that was lucrative both in salary and prestige [and] in opportunities for corrupt under-the-radar dealings with a
French government doing heavy business with Russia." By personally winning the goodwill and cooperation of the services of host countries, Rachkovsky indirectly assisted his agents and crowned their efforts. For instance, when a penetration agent in
Geneva had supplied the essential information about a gathering of terrorists there and external agents had located by surveillance their clandestine printshop and weapons store, Rachkovsky could call on Swiss security units to help destroy the underground and arrest the ringleaders. This happened in 1887; it was repeated in 1888, then again and again in other countries. His powers of persuasion were sufficient to recruit
Lev Tikhomirov, one of the leading terrorists, when he had been softened by contrived exposure, and get him to write an anti-revolutionary book. Rachkovsky's political action operations, often highly successful, were exclusively his personal effort. He devised some plans for using others, but in every major instance, he was the sole operator. He befriended a Danish journalist, Jules Hansen, during his first visit to Paris in 1884. Besides being one of the bright lights of his profession, Hansen was a counselor in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a friend of Minister
Théophile Delcassé. He became the principal channel for promoting a friendly press for Russia in western Europe, and he made contacts for Rachkovsky with leading ministers and politicians, including even President
Émile Loubet. On the other hand, Rachkovsky also cultivated important personages in the imperial government and at court. In these activities, he was, as revolutionary writers accused him of being, a manipulator behind the scenes preparing the ground for acceptance, both in Paris and at Saint Petersburg, of the
Franco-Russian Alliance signed in 1893. Rachkovsky devised and developed access to several other governments besides the French. The files contain copies of dispatches about an audience he had with
Pope Leo XIII and a proposed exchange of diplomats between Russia and the
Vatican with a particular view to the unrest in
Catholic Poland. Advisers to the Tsar in Saint Petersburg turned down the proposal, but the idea of combating the insurrectional campaign in Poland by using religious interests clearly illustrates Rachkovsky's high-level concept of political action. Rachkovsky's major provocation operation was primarily in support of political action. In 1890, Arcadiy Harting, having promoted among the revolutionaries in Paris an elaborate plot to kill the Tsar, arranged that after one underground meeting a large number of the terrorists would each have on their persons their weapons and written notes on the parts they were to play. The French police, tipped off through
cutouts by Rachkovsky, arrested the entire group, and that summer they were tried and sentenced, Landesen in absentia. Rachkovsky thus scored a victory not only over the enemies of the state but against those in Saint Petersburg who had opposed the Franco-Russian Alliance on the grounds that France was too soft on subversives. The stern police and court action proved to Saint Petersburg that France too had a strong government capable of dealing with internal enemies. Rachkovsky may have also played a role in amplifying the carnage of
World War I: "Rachkovsky's bosses in Russia and his hosts in Paris both feared the radicals, allowing the Russian agent to tighten the ties between the two nations. He succeeded so well that historian Alex Butterworth argues he was partly to blame for the Franco-Russian Alliance that helped make World War I such a bloody mess." ==Role in the creation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion==