VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV
171
2. The Coincidence of Opposites
I don't know whether any of the KGB people have read G.K.
Chesterton's novel,
The Man Who Was Thursday.
But even if they
haven't, the police procedure described by Chesterton is so universal
and inevitable that ignorance or a lack of talent is no obstacle to its
implementation in the real world. This novel tells of an under–
ground revolutionary organization in England, all of whose
members had most unusual cover names: the days of the week.
"Thursday," the main character, is sent by the police to infiltrate the
organization. His mission is to gain the trust of the other members
and render their activity harmless. To his surprise, he discovers that
another member of the organization is an agent of Scotland Yard.
Then he finds out the same thing about a second member, a third,
and a fourth, until finally it turns out that all of the members,
including the mysterious leader called "Sunday," are police spies.
Having realized it was inevitable that a subversive organization
would come into being, Scotland Yard had preferred to create that
organization itself.
In Russia, such a novel could not have been written, if only
because its plot would not have seemed paradoxical. To the
contrary, it would have resembled a real-life story. Could it be that
Chesterton took that unusual plot from the usual, routine practice of
the Russian police? After all, many revolutionary actions were engi–
neered by the Okhrana, the czarist secret police. Thus, between 1901
and 1903, one Zubatov, chief of the Special Section of that police
force, engineered the founding of Russia's first trade unions, which
were thoroughly infiltrated by police agents. In 1905, Father Gapon,
with the knowledge of the police - and possibly on instructions from
them - organized a mass demonstration against the government at
the Winter Palace. As we know, the demonstrators were fired on by
troops, and the event went down in history as Bloody Sunday. Or,
take the case of the student Dmitri Bogrov, who in 1911 assassinated
Prime Minister Stolypin in a theater in Kiev. To this day it is not
known whether he did it on orders of the Okhrana (whose agent he
was), on instructions from the Social Revolutionary Party (of which
he was a member), or on his own initiative. About all we know is
that Bogrov, when asked why he had killed Stolypin and not
Nicholas
II,
who was standing nearby, answered that he was afraid
he might provoke a pogrom . (Bogrov was aJew.)
