[Sharing Lights]

Historical publications, usage, and investigations

Emergence in Russia

The chapter "In the Jewish Cemetery in Prague" from Goedsche's Biarritz, with its strong anti-semitic theme containing the alleged rabbinical plot against the European civilization, was translated into Russian as a separate pamphlet in 1872.[11] Okhranka, the tsarist secret police, found these works useful in their effort to discredit liberal reformers and revolutionaries who were rapidly gaining popular support, especially among oppressed minorities such as Russian Jews.


Recent research by Russian historian Mikhail Lepekhine traced the Protocols to Matvei Golovinski, agent provocateur of Okhranka, as part of a scheme to persuade Tsar Nicholas II that the modernization of Russia was really a Jewish plot to control the world. Lepekhine discovered Golovinski's authorship in Russia's long-closed archives and published his findings in November 1999 in the French newsweekly L'Express.[12] According to Will Eisner, "From the Tsar's French files, Lepekhine unearthed the evidence of Golovinski's role."[13] Golovinski had been linked to the work before; the German writer Konrad Heiden identified him as an author of the Protocols in 1944.[14] Golovinski worked together with Charles Joly (son of Maurice Joly) at Le Figaro in Paris and wrote articles at the direction of Pyotr Rachkovsky, Chief of the Russian secret service. During the Dreyfus affair in France, when polarization of European attitudes towards the Jews was at a maximum, the publication began private circulation as The Protocols in 1897.[15] After the 1917 revolution, Golovinski became a Bolshevik propagandist.

A Ukrainian scholar Vadim Skuratovsky offers extensive literary, historical and linguistic analysis of the original text of the Protocols and traces the influences of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's prose (in particular, The Grand Inquisitor and The Possessed) on Golovinski's writings, including the Protocols.[16]

In his book The Non-Existent Manuscript. A Study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion, Italian researcher Cesare G. De Michelis writes[17] that hypothesis of Golovinski authorship was based on statement by Princess Catherine Radziwill. She claimed that she had seen a manuscript of the protocols written by Golovinski, Rachkovsky and Manusevich in 1905, but in 1905 Golovinski and Rachkovsky had already left Paris and moved to Saint Petersburg. Princess Radziwill was known to be an unreliable source.

The Protocols were first mentioned in the Russian press on April 1902, by the Saint Petersburg newspaper, Novoye Vremya (Новое Время - The New Times). The article was written by a famous conservative publicist Mikhail Menshikov as a part of his regular series "Letters to Neighbors" ("Письма к ближним") and was entitled "Plots against Humanity." The author described his meeting with a lady (Yuliana Glinka, as it is known now) who, after telling him about her mystical revelations, implored him to get familiar with the documents later known as the Protocols; but after reading some excerpts Menshikov became quite skeptical about their origin and did not publish them.[18]