Aohraná

The Okhrana is the tsarist secret police in the novel, but its role extends beyond that institutional identification: it becomes the hinge joining political forgery, antisemitic conspiracy, and the protagonists’ increasingly self-confirming Plan. Through the story told by Salon and elaborated by Casaubon, the service’s historical operations are recast as evidence of a secret continuity linking Rachkovsky, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the mysterious figures surrounding the Plan. The novel presents this linkage as an ingenious construction assembled from facts, while showing how the construction turns suspicion into apparent proof.

Identity and Narrative Introduction

Salon first explains that his father worked for the Okhrana, directly under Rachkovsky. Casaubon recognizes the name as a possible connection to the mysterious Rakosky associated with Colonel Ardenti’s story, but checks himself: coincidence is precisely the kind of clue the Plan has taught him to overvalue. The exchange establishes the Okhrana as more than background history. It supplies a family connection through which Salon can claim privileged knowledge, while giving Casaubon another opportunity to see the present as an echo of an older secret network.

The organization’s name returns when Belbo investigates the unexplained disappearance of Aglie from his rented house. The house has been vacated abruptly, and the rental had been arranged through a French firm under the name M. Ragotgky. Belbo connects that name to Rakosky, the mysterious visitor sought by De Angelis and Interpol; in the group’s constructed story, Ardenti’s Rakosky is a reincarnation of Rachkovsky, and therefore of the supposedly enduring Saint-Germain. The connection is an inference within their story, not independent confirmation that the Okhrana or Rachkovsky had anything to do with Aglie.

Rachkovsky and the Politics of Fabrication

The novel’s account makes Rachkovsky an operative whose career passes through several incompatible roles. Initially a minor bureaucrat, he comes into contact with revolutionary groups; in 1879 he is arrested by the secret police for sheltering associates accused of terrorism. He then becomes an informer and joins the Black Hundreds. In 1890, after locating a Paris organization making bombs for demonstrations in Russia, he arranges for seventy-three alleged terrorists to be arrested on their return. A later discovery that his own men had made the bombs reverses the apparent meaning of the operation: the police informer has helped produce the danger he claims to expose.

Rachkovsky’s other alleged interventions follow the same pattern of manufactured evidence. In 1887 he circulates a letter attributed to a repentant revolutionary, claiming that most terrorists are Jewish. In 1890 he circulates a purported confession blaming exiled revolutionaries in London on British agents; in 1892 a false Plekhanov text accuses the leaders of Narodnaya Volya of publishing that confession. The episodes present forgery not as a single deception but as an accumulating political method: one fabricated document can be used to authenticate or implicate another.

In 1902, according to the novel’s reconstruction, Rachkovsky forms a Franco-Russian antisemitic league. He tries to make the organization real by announcing its existence, anticipating that people will create what they have been told already exists. He also mixes apparently damaging truths about himself into a misleading appeal, hoping that disclosures which seem to compromise him will make the false elements more credible. The technique resembles the novel’s account of the Rosicrucians’ declared existence, but here it serves a political campaign rather than an esoteric one.

The Protocols and a Counterfeit Genealogy

The dialogue among Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotallevi treats the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as the culmination of this culture of political fabrication. They describe the text as twenty-four declarations attributed to the Elders and note its contradictory program: it condemns freedom of the press while appearing to encourage libertinism, attacks liberalism while advocating social confusion, and combines schemes for revolution with a desire to deepen inequality. Its claims about power, gold, controlled governments, war, arms production, and underground city works are read by the protagonists as an all-purpose conspiracy narrative. Its invocation of antisemitism makes the forgery especially destructive: the text attributes to Jews a plot that is itself being used to spread hostility toward them.

The novel also recounts an earlier chain of literary borrowing. In 1921, the Times of London traces a Russian refugee’s copy of the Protocols to an old, coverless book marked “Joli.” Research in the British Museum identifies the source as Maurice Joly’s 1864 Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel, a political pamphlet against Napoleon III. In Joly’s dialogue, Machiavelli voices the dictator’s cynicism; passages in the Protocols reproduce that material, while the attribution shifts from Joly’s fictional speaker to Napoleon and then to the alleged Jewish conspirators. The Times recognizes Joly’s book as a source, but the three protagonists extend the plagiarism chain backward to a document attributed to Sue, which they claim preceded Joly by at least seven years.

That extension exposes the method by which the Plan absorbs refutation. Nesta Webster, an antisemitic writer committed to conspiracy explanations, responds to the Protocols’ exposure as plagiarism by proposing that Joly was an initiate who knew the Plan of the Unknown Superiors. In her reasoning, proof that the document is copied does not disprove the Plan; it merely shifts authorship and preserves the supposed conspiracy. The protagonists then push the same logic further: because the Plan they have constructed resembles what they attribute to the Templars, they conclude that it must be the Templar Plan. The Okhrana’s history of alleged forgeries thus becomes material for a story whose interpretive rules turn counterevidence into further confirmation.

Rachkovsky’s Alleged Role in the Protocols

The group’s most detailed account connects the Protocols to Rachkovsky through his patron, the modernizing minister Sergei Witte, and Witte’s political opponent Elie de Cyon. In 1897, on Witte’s orders, Rachkovsky has de Cyon’s villa searched and finds a pamphlet derived from Joly’s book, or from the earlier Sue text, which transfers Machiavelli’s accusations against Napoleon III to Witte. The protagonists propose that Rachkovsky altered the pamphlet by replacing Witte with the Jews and then arranged for the new version to circulate. De Cyon’s name, they add, could be made to suggest “Zion,” lending the document an apparent Jewish source.

In their account, the text passes to Juliana or Justine Glinka, who moves in Madame Blavatsky’s Parisian circle while spying on Russian revolutionaries in exile. The protagonists identify her as an agent of the Paulicians and describe her as sending the document to General Orgeievsky, from whom it reaches the tsar through the commander of the imperial guard. The result, in this speculative chain, is political damage to Witte. Rachkovsky’s alleged forgery therefore injures the very patron whose orders enabled him to obtain the material. After this point the group loses track of Rachkovsky; within their narrative, his disappearance invites one more transformation, as they imagine that Saint-Germain may have adopted another identity.

The Invisible Okhrana and the Limits of the Plan

Salon supplies another link between the Okhrana and secret history when he recalls that the tsarist police had once been concerned with the Assassins. He says that Rachkovsky learned of that trail first, but that the investigation was abandoned because implicating the Assassins would weaken the accusation that Jews were the danger. Casaubon is left with a suggestive but unresolved possibility: the Templars had been accused of colluding with the Assassins, so Salon’s account seems to offer another bridge into the Plan. Salon himself regrets having said so much and leaves; Casaubon also sees him meet an Oriental, though he admits uncertainty about whether the sight had been a hallucination.

At the later ceremony in the Conservatoire, the supposed connection is staged as an actual office in the Plan’s invented hierarchy. Bramanti recites a procession of elaborate titles, including “Supreme Patriarch of the Invisible Okhrana,” and Salon appears in the role. The title does not establish a real organization or historical continuity. It dramatizes how the Plan converts a known institution, a reported family connection, a chain of forged texts, and uncertain coincidences into a single hidden order. The Okhrana matters to the novel both as a state police force and as a name that the protagonists use to make their fabricated history feel continuous, secret, and complete.