“The name of the notorious Alexey Nikolayevitch Sukhotin means nothing to the present generation. But there was a time when his name attracted attention.
“Sukhotin arrested the peasants of a whole village for refusing to cart manure from his stables because the animals there were infected with glanders. Judge Tsurikov released the peasants. Tsurikov was removed for this, while Sukhotin justified his act by writing to the Minister of the Interior, Durnovo, that he had arrested the peasants not because they refused to cart his manure but because they dared disobey him as a zemstvo official. The reactionary Chernsk nobility made Sukhotin marshal of nobility. So it was this man who furnished the protocols of the secret meetings of the representatives of Zion! But how did Sukhotin get the protocols? An unknown friend had brought them to him. They were given to him by an unknown lady who had received them from an unknown but energetic participant in the Basle Congress. Is this credible? Well, then, there is another version of the origin of the protocols—but that is for the German readers. The Russian government sent a spy to the Basle Congress. He did not go to the Congress himself, but bribed one of the participants. He was carrying the protocols from Basle to Frankfurt to the local masonic organization. He stopped on the way in a little town, and gave the protocols to the spy. He engaged copyists who worked all night and copied the protocols.
“In the first Russian version the protocols were supposed to have been brought to Russia in French. According to the German version, the protocols were copied, consequently they were in German, but the most important thing is that the protocols are not protocols at all, but a monograph—which could be called ‘the dream of a member of the Black Hundreds.’”
A distinguished Russian publicist says of the sponsor of the “protocols” as follows:
“In Russia the problems of Christianity and Judaism have been studied by such men as Vladimir Solovyov, Professor Troitzky, Professor Kokovtsev, Kartashov, Bulgakov, Berdyayev—men of profound intellect and a living conscience. In them the counterfeit ravings of the ignorant monk (Nilus) evoked but a smile of contempt. The low level of the circles in which men like Nilus moved and worked is only too well known. It was the world of police denunciations, divorce perjuries, monastic servility and feigned, blasphemous piety. In order to attract attention, Nilus’s ‘Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion’ had to emigrate from Russia. And the further away they went, the better they fared.”
CHAPTER TWO
THE STORY FROM WHICH THE PROTOCOLS WERE FABRICATED
Essence of “Protocols” Was German Fiction of “Sir John Retcliffe”—Who Was “Retcliffe”?—His Infamous Record—His Bloodcurdling Story—The Meeting in the Cemetery—An Avowed Myth—Meeting Every Hundred Years Attended by “Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel”—The “Son of the Accursed” Also Attends and Provides Comic Interludes.
The query now naturally arises, what is the origin of these much heralded “Protocols” which were published in Russia by Sergius Nilus in 1905, and a copy of which, it is triumphantly announced, is now in the British Museum?