Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [40]
Vera Leonidovna:
“So, in response to the actions of the Jewish revolutionaries, on the eve of the revolution, the camarilla decided to play the Jewish card a different way. In Europe the ‘Will and Testament’ of Peter I was going around. This was a forgery created, apparently, by the French during the time of Napoleon.… From this document it followed that Peter the Great, dying, left to the Russian tsars his will and testament: conquer the world. Following this model, the Russian secret police started to publish books, only instead of the words ‘Russian threat’ they substituted ‘Jewish threat.’ This is how the Protocols of the Elders of Zion saw the light of day. The book was written like a mystery: the story of mankind as a series of calamities attributable to the Jews and the Masons, whom they controlled.… The charm of it lay in the fact that in Russia the most distinguished Russian families belonged to Freemasonry. In their day Field Marshal Kutuzov, Alexander I, and Tchaikovsky had all been Masons. Nicholas II’s friend Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich and his older brother Nicholas Mikhailovich were Masons. I myself was interested in Freemasonry. My idols—Mozart and Goethe—were Masons. Masons were always liberals. There was a constant struggle in Russia between the liberals and the nobility, and the nobility was an obstinate, dark force.… The camarilla was trying to discredit the liberal segment of the nobility by associating it with the Jews. By the way, my friend … he too was a Mason and belonged to a glorious noble family. He was incensed by the baldness of their intentions….
“The Protocols were presented to Nicholas. Everything had been calculated faultlessly: Nicholas had been raised since childhood in ‘state anti-Semitism.’ … ‘Those abominable Jews,’ ‘enemies of Christ’—that was the vocabulary of the court.… In his book, my husband Koltsov wrote a devastating portrait of Nicholas, but he didn’t understand him. I called the tsar a man from a Chinese play in which the evildoer lies to the good man—who for a moment believes. The intrigue builds on this. That is how they dealt with Nicholas. To the tsar, the pogroms organized by the police seemed like a holy outburst of popular indignation against the revolutionaries. A mob of coachmen and ignorant rabble, the Union of the Russian People was proclaimed a national movement—simple people defending their tsar. And he believed it. Childlike faith is an enchanting quality in an ordinary person—and a fatal quality in a ruler. What was even more amazing, the tsar didn’t believe in the Protocols! And that disappointed them greatly.”
The revolutionary Burtsev, who scarcely loved the tsar, confirmed this in his research on the Protocols:
“If in the beginning, when the Protocols first appeared, Nicholas II regarded them in good faith and was even delighted over them, he quickly recognized them as an obvious provocation.”
Vera Leonidovna:
“In short, before the revolution they had done everything in their power to push the tsar to the right, and suddenly he started to dig in his heels. There was even talk of reforms. That was when they realized that the weak tsar could not withstand a revolution—and he had decided to abdicate. All this forced the camarilla to act. My friend felt that by the end of 1904 there was a secret plot at court—and Bloody Sunday was a part of it.”
(Indeed, Zubatov passed on to Witte the secret conclusions of the Department of Police: a storm was brewing in the country. Anticipating that storm, the rightists were