Arapov corresponded frequently with the leading members of the Eurasianist movement, particularly Suvchinsky and Savitsky. But he left few clues about his identity or what he had done prior to entering their lives. One of the scarce hints that remain of Arapov’s dark side survives in the margin of a letter he wrote to Savitsky, who left a note saying Arapov had taken part in mass executions during his service with Wrangel’s army during the civil war, and this was the reason for his deteriorating mental health. Savitsky also noted that Arapov had considerable success with women, but that he exploited them for money out of some dark cynical urge.17
Arapov’s natural charisma and exceptional networking skills paid off almost immediately. On a trip to England he stayed at the home of Prince Vladimir Golitsyn and his wife Ekaterina (where his mother was also staying). There he was introduced to a wealthy British industrialist, Henry Norman Spalding, and managed to convince him to take an interest in Eurasianism. Spalding eventually agreed to finance the movement with a £10,000 grant.
In 1923, Arapov offered yet another introduction – a tantalizing and mysterious one. His good friend Yury Artamonov, a fellow former officer who worked for the British embassy in Warsaw as a translator, introduced Arapov to one Alexander Langovoy. Langovoy told Arapov that he was a member of a shadowy underground movement inside the USSR known as the ‘Trust’, which was dedicated to overthrowing the Bolshevik government. Arapov introduced his new acquaintance to his Eurasianist colleagues, who apparently swallowed the story hook, line and sinker. ‘He is devoted to the Trust, but at the same time he is devoted to us, demonstrates sincere worship for the [Eurasianist] founders, and I believe that our authority is capable of replacing the authority of the Trust in his eyes’, wrote Trubetskoy to Suvchinsky in a series of letters recently unearthed by historian Sergey Glebov.18 ‘The task at hand is to transform the Trust into a Eurasianist organization, capable of carrying out Eurasianist goals’, he wrote to Savitsky in 1924.19 ‘In essence, the Trust is a good mechanism, but without a spirit, and this mechanism could be a weapon in the hands of any group… we have to use this situation.’
But he could not have been more wrong about Langovoy, the son of a famous Moscow doctor. In fact, Langovoy was a Cheka agent. He had been a convinced communist from an early age, had fought on the Bolshevik side in the civil war and was the recipient of the Red Banner award for bravery. After the civil war he had continued in the communist cause by becoming an officer in the OGPU (the successor to the Cheka), which was eager to recruit men from intelligentsia backgrounds who had foreign languages and could move easily in émigré circles. He found it easy to convince the credulous academics that he had converted to Eurasianism, and offered them cooperation with the Trust.
The fabled Trust was actually the complete opposite of what Langovoy said it was. The organization was nothing but a Bolshevik ploy, intended to lure émigré groups out into the open and to their doom. Believing the fledgling Soviet regime to be in mortal danger of being overthrown by Western intelligence services working with Russian émigré groups, the Cheka had ambitiously created an entire false-flag conspiracy, which presented itself to émigré groups as an anti-Soviet movement in the heard of the USSR’s establishment. In reality, it was a trap.
The Trust organization had once been a real underground monarchist organization, the Monarchist Organization of Central Russia, whose head, Alexander Yakushev, former chief of the water transport department in the tsar’s Ministry of the Interior, had been arrested in 1921. Instead of executing Yakushev, however, the Cheka worked on him, recruiting him as one of their agents, and turning his organization into a false-flag group. Yakushev travelled throughout Europe meeting monarchists and recruiting supporters. He claimed to represent an underground conspiracy of anti-communists at the heart of the Bolshevik government. One of his former acquaintances had an entrée to General Kutepov, one of the White generals who were organizing terrorist attacks inside the USSR, and he had served alongside the charismatic former guards officer Arapov, who would ultimately be the conduit for the Trust into the Eurasianists’ circle.
The intention of operations like the Trust was to convince the émigré groups in Europe not to act forcefully against the Bolsheviks, but instead to give the organization time to do its work on the inside. In reality, by cooperating with the Trust’s objectives, they were giving the Bolshevik leadership time to consolidate its rule.
The Trust offered émigré forces in Europe what they believed was access to a network of operatives inside the USSR, dedicated to overthrowing the Bolsheviks. These ‘operatives’ would find real intelligence, recruit ‘agents’, run errands inside the USSR – anything to boost their credibility with the émigré groups. In 1925, for example, while on a trip to the Soviet Union, Langovoy received a panic-stricken note from Arapov telling him of the arrest of an agent named Demidov-Orsini. Langovoy told the OGPU, and Demidov-Orsini (who, it seems, was Wrangel’s agent and had nothing to do with the Eurasianists) was freed. This operation seemed to prove the Trust’s bona fides and improved relations with the émigrés.20 Gradually the émigré forces – who were by no means neophytes in the provocation game – started to believe that the Trust was real, and began to let its operatives into their ranks. Then, mysteriously, their agents in the USSR – the real ones – began to get arrested. Their leaders in Europe were kidnapped. Their organizations somehow were infiltrated.
What helped the Trust immeasurably was the pervasive optimism of the émigrés, who continued to believe that the collapse of the Bolshevik regime was just around the corner, and with it, their return to the motherland. When the Trust appeared, it was as though something that had long been prophesied had finally come to pass. As Sergey Glebov, chronicler of the early movement, has written:
First and foremost, the very fact of the appearance [of the Trust] was consistent with the ideology constructed by the Eurasianists. According to their theory of revolution, a narrow elite of people must inevitably evolve inside Russia who would seize power from inside. The main task would then be to convert them to Eurasianism.21
The Eurasianists had produced mountains of pamphlets predicting the imminent demise of the Bolsheviks, and the replacement of communism by a Eurasian ideocracy. Amid the eschatological prophecy and divine mystery that filled their rhetoric, there was something appropriately symmetrical about the appearance on their doorstep of just what they had predicted: a conspiracy within the Bolsheviks to overthrow the government. Now the conspirators sought ties with the Eurasianists. This seemed too good to be true – and of course it was. But the desperate hopes of the émigrés for a return to their motherland overcame common sense and would ultimately lead to their undoing as a movement.
Today, we know that Arapov was probably not an OGPU agent, but rather a credulous and unsophisticated dupe. In 1930, after returning to the Soviet Union, he was arrested by the OGPU, sentenced to ten years in prison in 1934, and shot for counter-revolutionary activities in 1938 (most of the OGPU’s upper echelons responsible for the Trust were also executed in 1937 and 1938). An abridged summary of his interrogation was found by historian Kseniya Ermishina in the Lithuanian Special Archive. In it, Arapov described being tricked by Langovoy: ‘It was clear to me that Langovoy did not fully understand our Eurasianist position – the reasons for this not understanding were not, of course, clear to me, but later they became clear when it was revealed that the Trust was in fact the OGPU.’ With Langovoy’s help, Arapov made trips to the USSR between 1924 and 1926.