Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [231]
Why can the Protocols be attributed to Rachkovsky?
Rachkovsky’s sponsor is Count Sergei Witte, a minister who desires to turn Russia into a modern country. Why the progressive Witte makes use of the reactionary Rachkovsky, God only knows; but at this point the three of us would have been surprised by nothing. Witte has a political opponent, Elie de Cyon, who has already attacked him publicly, making assertions that recall certain passages in the Protocols, except that in Cyon’s writings there are no references to the Jews, since he is of Jewish origin himself. In 1897, at Witte’s orders, Rachkovsky has Cyon’s villa at Territat searched, and he finds a pamphlet by Cyon drawn from Joly’s book (or Sue’s), in which the ideas of Machiavelli-Napoleon III are attributed to Witte. With his genius for falsification, Rachkovsky substitutes the Jews for Witte and has the text circulated. The name Cyon is perfect, suggesting Zion, and now everybody sees that an eminent Jewish figure is denouncing a Jewish plot. This is how the Protocols are born. The text falls into the hands of Juliana or Justine Glinka, who in Paris frequents Madame Blavatsky’s Parisian circle, and in her free time she spies on and denounces Russian revolutionaries in exile. This Glinka woman is undoubtedly an agent of the Paulicians, who are allied to the agrarians and therefore want to convince the tsar that Witte’s programs are part of the international Jewish plot. Glinka sends the document to General Orgeievsky, and he, through the commander of the imperial guard, sees that it reaches the tsar. Witte is in trouble.
So Rachkovsky, driven by his anti-Semitism, contributes to the downfall of his sponsor. And probably to his own. Because from that moment on we lose all trace of him. But Saint-Germain perhaps donned new disguises, moved on to new reincarnations. Nevertheless, our story was plausible, rational, because it was backed by facts, it was true—as Belbo said, true as the Bible.
Which reminded me of what De Angelis had told me about the synarchy. The fine thing about the whole story—our story, and perhaps also History itself, as Belbo hinted, with feverish eyes, as he handed me his file cards—was that groups locked in mortal combat were slaughtering one another, each in turn using the other’s weapons. “The first duty of a good spy,” I remarked, “is to denounce as spies those whom he has infiltrated.”
Belbo said: “I remember an incident in ***. At sunset, along a shady avenue, I always ran into this guy named Remo—or something like that—in a little black Balilla. Black mustache, curly black hair, black shirt, and black teeth, horribly rotten. And he would be kissing a girl. I was revolted by those black teeth kissing that beautiful blonde. I don’t even remember what her face was like, but for me she was virgin and prostitute, the eternal feminine. And great was my revulsion.” Instinctively he adopted a lofty tone to show irony, aware that he had allowed himself to be carried away by the innocent tenderness of the memory. “I asked myself why this Remo, who belonged to the Black Brigades, dared allow himself to be seen around like that, even in the periods when *** was not occupied by the Fascists. Someone whispered to me that he was a Fascist spy. However it was, one evening I saw him in the same black Balilla, with the same black teeth, kissing the same blonde, but now with a red kerchief around his neck and a khaki shirt. He had shifted to the Garibaldi Brigades. Everybody made a fuss over him, and he actually gave himself a nom de guerre: X9, like the Alex Raymond character whom I had read about in the Awenturoso comics. Bravo, X9, they said to him...And I hated him more than ever, because he