I’ve become intrigued by the 1894 story of the anarchist Polti being arrested through the agency of a female detective to whom he showed some documents, and it’s all a little bit strange.

The early newspaper accounts mention a female detective (unamed) being involved.

So my next question was what was the female detective’s involvement.

Polti, and his accomplice Farnara went to trial in the Old Bailey in April 1894. Farnara pleaded guilty to the charge of seeking to blow up the Stock Exchange and added that he wanted to kill all capitalists, while Polti pleaded not guilty.

Reading the Old Bailey transcript of the trial it’s quite clear that Farnara and Polti were seeking to make a pipe bomb or bombs and most of the transcript deals with them seeking to have the bomb tubes made up and them having both dynamite and sulphuric acid in their posession.

The interesting aspect of the trial is that the judge directed that the documents would not be read into the transcript and that it would feed Polti’s vanity to do so, and there is no mention in the trial proceedings of the female detective, but then the only detective named is the officer who questioned the innocent metal fabricators who were asked to make up the bomb cases.

Farnara was sentenced to twenty years, Polti to ten, after which he appears to disappear from the records, meaning we have no idea where he served his sentence, or if indeed he did serve it

Now, we know that various left wing anti capitalist groups planned attacks at the time both in England and mainland Europe, and that England, which was extremely relaxed at the time about allowing foreigners residence – no passports required and as long as you didn’t commit a criminal offence you could disappear into the large immigrant communities in London.

Trotsky did it, Lenin did it, even Stalin, who lived in Stepney at the time of the 1907 party congress in exile. (I used to wonder, given Stalin’s involvement in robbing banks in Russia for the party, if Stalin had been involved in the jewel heist that led to the Sidney Street siege – but unless he was involved in the early discussions it’s unlikely as he was exiled in Siberia at the time.)

And the result of this laissez faire attitude to foreign ‘politicals’ was that the Special Branch were paranoid about anarchist terrorism, and the possiblity of overseas anarchists forming common cause with Irish Fenians to blow up gatherings of the good and the great.

So did Polti’s documents suggest links between terrorist groups, and did he get a lighter sentence because he surrendered his documents to the police?

We’ll probably never know, but it’s an interesting parallel that of the two women involved in the Sidney Street events, one, Nina Vassileva, received a sentence of only two years, which was commuted after a month or so despite her clear involvement in a murder.

The other woman involved in the Sidney Street events (and the associated Houndsditch murders), Sara Rosa Trassjonski was confined in Colney Hatch asylum and then threatened with deportation, although the order was never carried out due to the poor state of her mental health, which makes me wonder if the use of female secret agents was part of Special Branch playbook in the years before the first world war…

Update 05/02/2025

I’ve done a little more reading on the subject – the Okhrana clearly had agents within the migrant community, and these agents clearly also had informers among the migrant community.

More interestingly there are letters in the British police archives from the Russian Imperial embassy about the conditions attached to ‘off the record’ meetings – no names, no notes and in a public place such as a railway station waiting room – clearly suggesting that there was some information sharing between the Okhrana and Special Branch.

And that leaves me with a little puzzle.

Rosa Trassjonsky was clearly traumatised by the experience and had clearly been investigated by the Okhrana prior to her fleeing to London, and the stresses of the experience led her to descend into insanity. There’s no evidence that she was an Okhrana informer, and I think she was simply a poor broken soul.

Nina Vassileva is a more interesting and enigmatic case.

After her release from prison she continued to live in the East End of London. Unlike many of the emigre revolutionaries she did not attempt to return to Russia after the 1917 revolutions although she did later work for the Soviet trade mission in London.

This was during the 1920s when there were no official diplomatic relations between Britain and the Soviet Union.

There’s some evidence that she was under Special Branch surveillance for most of her life – was she an Okhrana informer and perhaps also worked for Cheka or its successors – after all the Cheka was probably as likely threaten family members still in Russia as the Okhrana to secure her co-operation – or was she something else – perhaps an informer for the British intelligence services.

I guess we’ll never know. She continued to live in a series of bedsits in the East End dying in 1963, and almost certainly any sensitive files relating to her have been shredded …