Chapter 40: A Tree with Rotten Roots (2)

The revolutionary organizations still remaining inside Russia were, quite literally, smashed to pieces.

In particular, the result was that the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s hardliners, who until now had been difficult to round up for want of solid evidence, were swept away en masse.

As it happened, the great majority of them were the very men who had been shouting that M was a fraud, and that listening to M would only delay the revolution.

“Freeze! Okhrana!”

“Dammit! How the hell did these bastards even know about this place….”

Seven in Moscow, four in Odessa, five in Baku, and six in Kiev.

On the basis of the contact lists and safe house registers seized from Savinkov’s belongings, a sweep operation was launched nationwide, and the SR Combat Organization’s strongholds in Russia’s major cities were exposed one after another, until the organization had effectively collapsed.

Attempted assassination of the Tsar.

Once that charge was attached, evidence or anything else was beside the point.

For those implicated and confirmed, there was only summary arrest and summary judgment.

“Kill the swine who wanted to kill His Majesty!”

“Hang every last one of the commie bastards!”

The hunt was able to gather this much momentum thanks, of course, to the active cooperation of ordinary citizens.

Before, the citizens might not have approved of revolutionaries who opposed the government, but neither had they gone out of their way to denounce them.

But when the men being caught were the filth who had tried to kill the Tsar who was making their lives better, what was there to hesitate over?

“Officers, over there, over there, the house next door is suspicious. People seem to be going in and out every night before dawn, but there’s never a sound out of the place.”

“Is that so? Thank you for the valuable information.”

However thorough a revolutionary might be, no man could hide from the eyes of every citizen in Russia.

The radicals, having literally collapsed, were reduced to a state from which recovery was all but impossible.

“Savinkov and Chernov, taken at the same time?”

“Then that means the Combat Organization has been wiped out!”

“Setting foot in Russia is suicide. Do not move, not for anything, for the time being!”

Even the revolutionaries’ networks of communication were paralyzed with fear.

And as the fear subsided, anger came shouldering up through the gaps.

“Look at this! What did M say? Didn’t he tell us the timing was bad, that we should hold back and build our strength from within?”

“They wouldn’t listen to M, they had to go strutting about, and now look at the state of us!”

“I hear Savinkov was caught making a show of handing over a bribe at Rasputin’s house? Is that any way for a revolutionary to behave?”

“No, from what people are saying there were orgies going on there every single night. Don’t tell me those bastards were shouting about revolution with their mouths while in fact they were just carrying on with women?”

Had Savinkov actually heard it, the slander would have made him spit blood at the injustice of it, but what could be done?

A man in a cell cannot answer back, and the speed of a spreading rumor is the speed of a lightning flash.

Those who had sneered at M’s predictions were, in practical terms, all but annihilated.

Before so clean a result, M’s word established itself as effectively absolute authority.

Lev Trotsky was no freer of this current than anyone else.

With the chant of ‘Kill the commies!’ ringing through the streets of Petersburg, Trotsky covered his face with his coat and clenched his teeth.

If he had not obeyed when M told him to stand back and watch, he too might have been swept up in that madness.

Had he thrown himself about like Savinkov, by now he would have been taken by the Okhrana and lying face down in a freezing cell.

But M’s being in the spotlight as he was now was not in the least a bad thing for Trotsky.

Who was it that M, with that great gift of foresight, had named as the standard-bearer of the revolution?

None other than himself.

-You are a far greater revolutionary than Lenin.

Those words, passed to him through Gapon, struck the strings of his heart again almost daily and set his ambition boiling.

Now that Savinkov and Chernov, who had denounced M as a fraud, were both gone.

How many men were there who could take up the crushing burden of gathering up the revolutionaries, sunk in despair and confusion, and leading them into the future?

Lenin? The man was incapable of it.

“So there really is no one but me….”

Trotsky nodded as he looked over the newspaper, like an apostle who had received a revelation.

Then an article caught his eye, reporting that upheaval was under way not only among the revolutionaries but inside the Orthodox Church as well.

It had all begun when Bishop Feofan, the very man who had recommended Rasputin to the imperial household, handed over every last file on corruption within the Orthodox Church to the Emperor and the Okhrana.

[Skimming Monastery Land Revenues Merely the Beginning? Priests Took Bribes from Nobles and Granted Them Favors!]

[Seminary Funds Embezzled, Evidence of Clerical Corruption Surfacing Everywhere!]

Articles tearing into the Orthodox Church poured out in enormous numbers from the very newspapers ordinary people read every day.

It was only to be expected, since the material Bishop Feofan had gathered privately over several years while holding a post in the Church’s internal audit filled three boxes to the brim by sheer volume alone.

Because if he had not handed it over, Bishop Feofan himself would have been the first to be finished, for the crime of recommending Rasputin.

The shockwave this whistleblowing set off was truly enormous.

Under the Tsar’s sanction, an official audit of the Orthodox Church was begun.

“The Tsar’s would-be assassin infiltrated the palace by trading on the name of the Orthodox Church, and the corruption of the Orthodox Church made it possible.”

There was not a soul who could so much as breathe a word of opposition.

To turn a blade on religion was ordinarily unthinkable, but when that religion had recommended the Emperor’s assassin to the imperial household, what excuse could be offered?

Submitting to the investigation and praying that no corruption turned up was the best strategy available to them.

“Well… the Okhrana isn’t much of an organization in size anyway, is it?”

“Could that lot really shake us out by the roots? They’ll have their hands full just locking up revolutionaries.”

“If we keep our heads down for a while, it will all be over.”

Nor was the Church entirely without grounds for such confidence.

However much the Okhrana’s power had grown, the fact remained that it was already shouldering both the crackdown on revolutionaries and the counterintelligence work of checking foreign spies.

On top of that, the Grand Dukes’ breach of military discipline, which had blown up not long before, had created a need to investigate the military, and now the Rasputin affair meant investigating the Orthodox Church as well.

There are limits to manpower, so how could so small a number of men possibly handle so much work?

And so.

“It is not our authority alone that must be expanded. The size of the organization itself must be increased.”

“Now that those who plot Your Majesty’s assassination have reached even inside the Orthodox Church, it will not do to keep watch on the commies alone. But our manpower cannot support any widening of scope beyond what we already carry.”

That the argument for expanding the Okhrana should arise was no accident but an inevitability.

Meaning that it needed to be reborn not simply as a body for revolutionaries, but as a vast organization capable of encompassing the whole of Russia.

The purpose was one, and one only.

“For the peace of Russia and the safety of the imperial house.”

No one could raise the slightest objection.

* * *

The growth of the Okhrana’s authority had not been the work of a single morning.

The first step had been the affair of the cover-up of the persecution of the Jews.

After catching evidence that elements under the Ministry of Internal Affairs were attempting to conceal the massacre of Jews, I had used it as a pretext to detach the Okhrana from the Ministry and successfully reorganize it directly under the Tsar.

Next had come the exposure of the Japanese spy and the purge of the Grand Dukes.

In the course of digging into Vladimir Alexandrovich’s insubordination and breach of military discipline, we had naturally secured the right of surveillance over the military, and had even established a precedent for the Okhrana intervening in Imperial Guard appointments.

And now the Rasputin affair had driven the wedge home.

The Orthodox Church had come within our watch as well, and under the pretext of sweeping up the attempted assassination of the Tsar we had seized the justification for carrying out operations on a nationwide scale.

And on top of all that, had the Tsar not handed down a nearly extralegal delegation of power, ‘handle it as you see fit and simply report to me’.

Even that much amounted to considerable power, but the problem was that all of it, so far, had been rule-of-thumb administration resting on the Tsar’s spoken orders.

It needed to be honed into a power that was more formal and clearer in substance.

Of course, sustaining a break with precedent on that scale required results to match, and fortunately there was no obstacle on that score.

“Section Chief, the results from the first week of the Church audit.”

“You’re telling me results are in already?”

I watched Section Chief Yakov’s eyes go wide as he opened the report.

One week into the audit, the number of cases of corruption uncovered stood at a full 47.

From skimming monastery lands to embezzling church donations, simony, and the sale of counterfeit holy relics, it was a complete set, with nothing left out.

The Church’s own people had probably never imagined their body was rotten to this degree.

Each had assumed that only he himself was skimming a modest amount; who could have guessed that his friends, his colleagues, his superiors, his juniors, all of them of one heart and one mind, were in dead earnest about plundering the wealth of the nation?

“Section Chief, they’re saying that on the Church side there’s so much corruption we’re actually short of hands.”

“Ha ha… you may well say so. At this rate, a month could pass and we still wouldn’t be finished searching out the corruption in the major dioceses.”

Dig and dig, and there is no end to it, so that an extraordinary spectacle is unfolding, a search run aground on its own abundance.

“Then let us make that our grounds for a request to His Majesty. If we show him in figures just how capable the Okhrana is, obtaining his sanction for the next stage will be far easier.”

When the sight of corruption being rooted out spreads through the press, public opinion improves along with it.

Let results pile up and let opinion follow, and the justification for expanding the organization comes rolling in of its own accord.

A tree with rotten roots cannot be saved.

Either it must be pulled out entirely and a new tree planted in its place, or it must be cut down before it rots any further and made into a useful piece of furniture.

Judging that the time had come, Section Chief Yakov worked with me to complete, step by careful step, the Okhrana’s reorganization and expansion plan.

And at last, before the Tsar and the Empress, Yakov began to lay out the organizational chart of the Okhrana as it was now to be constituted.

“First, the Gendarme Corps must be absorbed into the Okhrana. The Gendarme Corps maintains 7 districts across the country and branches in every province and county, so with it incorporated the Okhrana would become a nationwide organization at a stroke.”

Second, the Special Section is to be merged in. Intelligence collection and analysis must come under one roof, so that the lag between information and action disappears.”

“Hmm….”

“Third, officers whose loyalty to Your Majesty has been verified must be seconded from the military, giving us a special operations capability. Only then can the Okhrana’s ability to manage the military show its true worth.”

“There is sense in that.”

“Fourth, in place of the present arrangement of reporting to both the Police Department and Your Majesty, we must be separated from the Police Department entirely and elevated to an organ answering directly to His Imperial Majesty.”

The Tsar, following the section chief’s explanation and studying the chart before him, nodded again and again.

“Misha, so what this means is that all of it is truly necessary for the investigations?”

“Yes, Your Majesty. In this attempted assassination there were districts where the sweep was delayed by three whole days because word reached the Gendarme Corps too slowly. Had they been unified with us, it would have been finished in a single day.”

“It will not do for an organization to run inefficiently.”

“And in the Church audit as well, the Okhrana has nowhere near enough people, so the investigation isn’t moving quickly, Your Majesty. If another case as large as this one breaks, we cannot meet it with the manpower we have now.”

The Tsar read the plan through carefully, then glanced at the Empress seated beside him.

In the past she would have found some reason to sulk, but today was different.

She was simply looking at me, smiling warmly.

Whether it was relief at the news that Rasputin’s execution had been decided, or whether she had truly come to trust me.

Most likely both, I suspect.

“Very well. I grant it.”

The Tsar signed the document and added.

“But if the Okhrana is to grow this large, Misha, your own position will have to be made clear.”

The moment my official position was mentioned, the Empress beside him reacted.

“Then our Misha is to be the head of the Okhrana?”

“…Our? No, well, that is… he’s still only ten, Sunny.”

“And what’s wrong with ten? There isn’t a grown man in this palace cleverer than our Misha.”

Her hostility being gone was all very well, but the way it had flipped clean over to the opposite extreme was hardly reassuring either.

Small wonder the Tsar simply laughed and looked away.

“That may be so, but there are forms to observe. For now, Section Chief Yakov will be raised to Director at the point when the Okhrana absorbs the Gendarme Corps, and….”

He sank into thought for a moment, then went on.

“Misha, I appoint you Chief Aide to the Director of the Imperial Security Bureau. With the condition of probationary status attached, of course.”

On the surface it would be explained as a post assisting the Director and learning the work under him.

But even as things stood, the Okhrana’s principal figures seemed to have at least a vague notion of who truly held power in the organization.

In such a situation, if a ten-year-old child became aide to the Director, probationary or not, they could hardly fail to be certain of it.

“When you have grown a little more, I shall give you a post worthy of your abilities at once. So go on doing your utmost for the imperial house, just as you do now.”

“Yes, Your Majesty! I will do everything in my power never to betray Your Majesty’s expectations.”

After thanking him politely, I slipped in a further word.

“And so there is something I have been turning over for some time that I would like to put before you.”

A plan I had been holding ever since the day the Okhrana came into my hands.

“The Okhrana must be not only Your Majesty’s shield, but Your Majesty’s sword. For Your Majesty is the master of this Russia.”

Authority over Russia is an inborn right bestowed by God, and the Okhrana must become the organization that symbolizes it.

The Tsar smiled.

With the utmost satisfaction.

~~~

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