Pogrom

by Steven J. Zipperstein

  The traveler reacts angrily. It is precisely these privileges, he retorts, that had already been granted to Jews, who then squandered them, taking advantage of the freedom bestowed on them and using it to manipulate Russia’s economic well-being. True, he admits, Russians also engage in questionable economic practices, but in contrast to Jews they continue nonetheless to remain loyal to the nation. This is not true of Jews, who remain loyal only to their own. These traits, coupled with an unnaturally keen commercial ability sharpened over the generations, make Jews better able to exploit others while protecting their narrow parochial interests. Over time, he argues, they have lost all capacity to work the land or to live in the way that healthy people readily do.29

  Moreover, the narrator continues, never have Jews sought to remedy this dreadful situation. Instead they dream of a “Jewish stardom,” always thinking of themselves while dismissing everyone else. Never are they willing to admit that there is anything of value in the Christian world, and their obstinacy is something extraordinary to behold. They persist in their isolation from the larger world despite the humiliations they have suffered since the time of Titus, and the hatred leveled against them everywhere they have lived: “Just think! Can there be a greater curse or a greater punishment” than the loss of all links to the land, all love of it, and being completely stripped of any connection to the rest of humanity? Yet all their energy has been concentrated on commerce, shutting themselves off from all except their own. Is it any wonder that they are the target of “hostility and pogroms”?30

  Yet, he says, there is nothing new to Jewry’s self-imposed alienation: Jews have inspired hatred as far back as Kiev in 1092. Nothing has changed since then: “Remember Darwin’s idea . . . that by the laws of heredity, with time humankind will lose its left hand which is increasingly atrophied? Jews are the left hand of the organism of humanity.”31

  As the Jewish population expands, with some five million of these “aliens” wedged up against Russia’s western border, perilously close to Russia’s enemies, it is imperative that the problem finally be resolved. The narrator argues that if Russia is to avoid the use of draconian measures, then the only alternative is for the Jewish intelligentsia to see to the thorough reeducation of their own people. They are the only ones capable of teaching Jews to shift their priorities toward useful, decent labor. It is their responsibility to press Jews to abandon their isolation, to recognize that the interests of Russians are the same as their own. The old, tired methods used by Jews for so long, he says, whereby they pay for good press, hide the truth, and spread hatred and lies, will only serve to deepen antipathy. The traveler feels no hatred, only pity, toward Jews, but he certainly understands why so many despise them: “Russia has poured too much blood into its unification and can’t tolerate a foreign element hindering its move toward full strength within its very core.”32

  Jews sitting near the traveler are all but persuaded. One student admits that nearly everything the traveler has said is accurate, countering only that Jewry’s bad traits are the by-product of age-old “isolation from the human family.” The Gomel businessman is left utterly confounded. He acknowledges that if Jews cannot extricate themselves from the miserable residue of their history, then it is clear that Russia has no alternative but to turn its back on all constraint and to go after them with all the might and power at its disposal.33

  Later, Krushevan’s Bessarabets would print still worse accounts of Jews, though it sought to be a newspaper that covered a full range of national and international affairs. The front page of one issue (picked up by Michael Davitt during his Kishinev stay), dated May 12, 1903, featured reports on Austria-Hungary, the United States, and the two-hundredth anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg. A chronicle of local government notices, a regular feature, appeared on page 2. Essays on the arts and literature were printed side by side with local news, much of it sober, straightforward, and dull.34

  By that time Krushevan had relinquished day-to-day control of the paper. In the pogrom’s aftermath, the government tightened its hold and imposed greater control on media content. Even before the massacre, Bessarabets had covered the larger political and cultural scene, but its focus on Jews was relentless: “Zhidy think about how best to rob the honor, the conscience, the truth of peasants” (March 17, 1903). “What is the source of the success of the Jews? It is their unification under one single corruption and their capacity to act collectively, all for one and one for all. And we can mirror them united into one guild, one brotherhood” (March 4, 1903). “Everywhere Jews live they figure among the bulk of deviants, counterfeiters, handlers of illegal documents, goods, food, wine, medical supplies, delicacies” (March 23, 1903). It was furthermore claimed that Jews had invented a way of producing wine without grapes, and that Jewish doctors were part of a secret syndicate designed to swindle innocent patients.35

  With the outbreak of the pogrom, the fame Krushevan had sought since his youth was finally his. In many quarters, of course, this was actually infamy, since Krushevan was now lambasted in Russia and abroad as being among Jewry’s most powerful enemies. His lavishly illustrated guide to Bessarabia had elicited a commendation from the tsar. That volume was deemed so impressive that the new governor general, Urussov, regarded it as his main source of information about the province before his arrival. Krushevan had also recently received a handsome subsidy of five thousand rubles for the publication of Znamia. These expressions of sympathy reinforced the impression that Krushevan lived something of a charmed life and was supported generously by officialdom.36

  Yet barely three weeks after Krushevan received the tsar’s laudatory letter, his debts were deemed so crushingly heavy that he was served with a bailiff’s letter inventorying his belongings for auction. The list was strikingly meager: bits and pieces of furniture, including one chair, one table, a few bookcases, and two printing presses, all stuffed into a modest flat on Gogol Street. He had sold Bessarabets, taking payment for the newspaper but managing nonetheless not to deliver it to its new owner; subscription payments were still in his hands. As a result legal proceedings were now initiated against him. In an undated letter Krushevan admitted to having incurred more than 11,400 rubles in debt. In compensation he offered the proceeds from the sale of his personal library.37

  Quite how he recovered, if at all, remains unclear. He would continue—even though he had sold Bessarabets when launching his new St. Petersburg daily—to serve as editor of the Kishinev paper. His new St. Petersburg publication was a four-page, large-size weekly available only by subscription because censors feared its explosive content, especially its antisemitism. They had good reason to do so. It was there that Krushevan published serially a text attributed to the “World Union of Freemasons and Sages of Zion,” under the banner headline “The Program of World Conquest by Jews.” This, as he acknowledged in the document’s foreword, was his own description of what the text contained.38

  Krushevan in 1900.

  Known universally, albeit read sparingly, with its essential message a commonplace, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as the document would soon be called, was translated into German, English, Swedish, Danish, Bulgarian, Finnish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Italian, Greek, and Arabic. In recent years it has become a mainstay of popular culture as the immediate backdrop to the wildly popular Da Vinci Code books and movies. The Protocols’ belief in dark, hidden forces that have long controlled the destiny of humanity remains among the cardinal assumptions of conspiracy theorists throughout the world.39

  Why this continuing allure? In part, no doubt, it is the by-product of the document’s anonymity as well as its insistence that it was an authentic transcript. The authors never came forward to acknowledge it as their creation: Its authorship was attributed variously by its devotees to a member of King Solomon’s entourage, Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, or the chief rabbi of Stockholm. The fact that it purported to be the real and uncensored words uttered by an elder of the Jews gave it a rare immediacy. It
s repetitiveness, which for some was a source of annoyance, was also a boon, because no more than a few pages were required for readers to absorb its message. This meant that even the illiterate or semiliterate could be readily acquainted with it if others read them just a page or two. And though it was written and first published in 1903, the text would rise to prominence only once Russia was in the grasp of the Bolsheviks and their explosive message was getting a receptive hearing across Europe. As an accessible, readily digestible text with a tantalizingly mysterious authorship, The Protocols’ horrifying message was tested amid the convulsions of war and revolution.40

  It has, of course, long been recognized as a forgery. Almost from the moment of its first widespread circulation, it was clear that it was lifted from an obscure anti-Napoleon III political satire: Maurice Joly’s 1864 Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavelli et Montesquieu. In 1921 the London Times published a three-part series featuring side-by-side passages from The Protocols and Joly’s work, revealing that nearly 70 percent of its words—still more, as it happens, in the 1903 version published by Krushevan—were drawn verbatim from Joly. The fact that the Times saw the value in this exercise is a good indication of the credibility that the document had already achieved.41

  The first mention of such a text had appeared in print a year before Krushevan’s version. Mikhail Osipovich Menshikov, a well-known antisemite and journalist, described how in 1902 a “mysterious lady” came to him with it, saying she had managed to acquire the document—apparently stealing it—in Nice and had translated it from its original French into Russian. Menshikov said that he doubted its authenticity and refused to have anything to do with it.42

  Questions regarding its credibility were raised, as we will see, even by Krushevan. Why was it discovered in French? Why would the Jewish elder, whose voice is its centerpiece, admit to all the dastardly things he acknowledges in it? What relation were these protocols meant to have with the protocols of the Zionist movement published in German, not French? These and many other issues—aside, of course, from the verifiable fact that nearly the entire document was lifted from a book that had nothing at all to do with Jews—have bedeviled the text’s credibility from nearly the moment it first surfaced in the public arena. But for many people these questions were overshadowed by its rhetorical power, the prospect it provided for eavesdropping on the most horrible of Jewish voices—one who was willing to acknowledge his contempt for all, including the Jews, his plans for world conquest, and his map for the restoration of the Davidic kingdom.

  Such enormous ambiguities have also done little to dampen the allegiance of the text’s adherents, some of whom insist, contrary to all evidence, that Joly himself was Jewish—as if that were a test of its accuracy. And the secrecy surrounding its authorship—those who produced it were committed, of course, to sustaining its anonymity—helped to perpetuate the notion that the voice captured in the document contained the actual words of a vaulted Jewish leader: It is a text whose greatest thrill is in the purported access to the unvarnished talk of humanity’s greatest foe.

  Until recently it was widely assumed—beyond, that is, its most loyal devotees—that The Protocols had been stitched together by the Paris-based Okhrana chief Pyotr Rachkovsky and right-wing journalist Matvei Golovinskii, and that it was produced either at the time of the First Zionist Congress in 1897 or a year or two before then. Evidence supporting the claim, solidified in the wake of testimony at the Bern trial of 1934–35, in which Swiss publishers of the tract were accused by leaders of the Jewish community of plagiarism and forgery, has subsequently been upended by conclusive linguistic and historical evidence. Especially because of its reference to events occurring after its reputed composition in the mid-1890s, it is clear that neither Rachkovsky nor Golovinskii was its author.43

  Amid the welter of tales surrounding the document’s origins, there has never been any doubt that its first version was in Krushevan’s newspaper. This remained, however, the most obscure of all its Russian-language versions, all but forgotten until it appeared in several editions in book form in 1905–6. Krushevan himself would never mention the document again, despite its many subsequent editions and his continued prominence on Russia’s Right. Benjamin Segel, the author of one of the earliest exposés of the text—Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion, published in 1924—did not even know of the existence of Krushevan’s version. In the tale of the origins of The Protocols as told in right-wing circles by a Russian princess of Polish origin, Catherine Radziwill, it was an agent of the foreign branch of the Okhrana, the Russian secret police, Golovinskii, who visited her Paris apartment in 1904 or 1905 (on Rachkovsky’s orders) and handed her the first version, in French, of The Protocols. “Radziwill,” writes Michael Hagemeister, “gave an exact description of the manuscript: different handwritings, yellow paper, and a big spot of blue ink on the first page.” Radziwill also showed no awareness that The Protocols had already been published in Russia a year or two earlier.44

  Evidence that Krushevan was its author, or at least its coauthor, is convincing. The Italian linguist Cesare G. De Michelis has identified crucial markers in the document itself that he likens to fingerprints in his annotated translation of the first version, The Non-Existent Manuscript: A Study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion. To unearth the document’s author, he considers “the sole element that cannot lie: the text itself, its linguistic nature, its construction and the modalities of its tradition . . . an operation as obvious and banal as it has been systematically overlooked.”45

  It was revealed by these textual markers that the text was produced in the eastern Ukraine or Bessarabia. There, for example, the preposition u was standard rather than the Russian v, and it is the Ukrainian variant that is utilized throughout the first version. Prolific in all versions was the word for “gentile,” which in Znamia’s account was Ukrainian goyevskii, not the Russian goyskii. These and other examples of Ukrainian usage were then corrected or excised from subsequent book-length editions of The Protocols, together with the many redundancies and misprints scattered throughout the original text.46

  The first variant, copied almost straight from Joly, also leaves the clear impression of a hurriedly produced text. Curiously Krushevan himself would acknowledge this sloppiness in his foreword, as we will see. Evidence that it was the product of very recent work—done no earlier than 1901 or 1902—abounds: for example, references to the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900 and to the killing of President William McKinley in Buffalo in 1901. No less persuasively, the fact that the ferociously anti-Jewish compendium Talmud i evrei (Talmud and Jews), which contains every conceivable antisemitic text appearing in Russia at the time, includes Krushevan’s variant—publishing the first of its sections in full—only in its third edition, which was released in 1903, dates its composition explicitly to 1902–3.47

  Krushevan and his close friend G. Butmi from the same region (Butmi was born in Yampol in central Ukraine), both fluent in French, were likely the first authors of the document. Butmi would publish his own version in 1906, titling it The Enemies of the Human Race: Protocols Extracted from the Archives of the Central Chancellery of Zion (where the root is of the present disorder in Europe in general and of Russia in particular). He was then a widely translated if idiosyncratic economic theorist, but he had fallen into obscurity by the early 1920s when The Protocols first captured widespread attention. By then Krushevan had long been dismissed as little more than a crass rabble-rouser. Both had been leaders of the Union of Russian Peoples, which—except in the rarefied confines of the far Right—had by then been wholly discredited after the White Army’s outright bigotry and slaughter in its battle with Bolshevism. Of course no one on the Right had a vested interest in identifying the authors of The Protocols. Both Butmi and Krushevan were therefore overlooked or sidelined in the vast body of literature generated by partisans and critics of the infamous work.48

  The only comments Krushevan would ever make about the Znamia text that he published
were in its foreword and afterword. These were disjointed, uncharacteristically meandering pieces, replete with excuses and equivocations. In them Krushevan apologizes for the document’s imperfections—though what they are he does not say—and how drastically it differs from the original—though he does not indicate where the original copy might be found or what it contains. He also points out that the document is incomplete, and—though he rejects the idea that it is a hoax—he leaves open the possibility that it could be, as he puts it, “apocryphal.”49

  In the foreword Krushevan describes how he received the minutes of the “World Union of Freemasons and Elders of Zion” after they were stolen in France and brought to St. Petersburg. Why the document was written in French, who the courier was, and how it was acquired are all left unasked. Yet time and again he dwells on its “authenticity,” sometimes insisting that proof of its Jewish authorship is in its “cynical logic” and coldness of heart, so intrinsic to Jews. But he backtracks, too, allowing for the possibility that it is not what it purports to be—which, he insists, does not minimize its significance, since it is clear that, no matter who wrote it, the author is a “profound observer” of the Jewish people.50

  Its author understood well, according to Krushevan, the intention of Jews to “take over the world and create a ‘superstate.’ ” Consequently, whether the actual words of the text are apocryphal or not, its importance is undeniable, especially since Jews have now put their plans into motion through the channels of the Zionist movement, which “calls for all Jews in the world to unify into a union more cohesive and dangerous than the Jesuit order.”51