Black Hundred

The Black Hundreds are a Russian reactionary organization associated in the novel with pogroms, extremist violence, and the political circulation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Their history appears through the conspiratorial account assembled by Casaubon, Jacopo Belbo, and Diotallevi—a narrative that attributes the forged text to police manipulation and exposes how fabricated evidence can be made to seem like proof of a hidden plot.

Organization and Political Violence

The novel identifies the Union of the Russian People as the organization later known as the Black Hundreds. It was founded by Boutmi and Kruscevan, the editor of the St. Petersburg newspaper Znamia, which published an incomplete version of the Protocols in 1903. The group enlisted common criminals to carry out pogroms and other extremist right-wing violence, connecting its political activity to the dissemination of anti-Semitic propaganda.

The account places the organization within a broader struggle between reactionary and reformist forces in Russia. In the conspiracy assembled by the three researchers, the Paulicians are described as mystics aligned with landowners and influential at court, while the Jews are portrayed as targets of hostility and suspicion. This is the novel’s account of how anti-Semitic narratives were politically used, not evidence that the alleged secret factions or their imagined plots were real.

Rachkovsky and the Manufacture of Evidence

Pierre Ivanovitch Rachkovsky becomes a central figure in the group’s story. First a minor bureaucrat, he makes contact with revolutionary circles and is arrested in 1879 for allegedly sheltering companions after an attempted assassination. He then becomes a police informer and joins the Black Hundreds. In 1890, after discovering a Paris organization making bombs for demonstrations in Russia, he arranges for seventy-three people to be arrested; the narrative later says that the bombs had been made by his own men.

The account also portrays Rachkovsky as a producer and circulator of forged political texts. In 1887 he circulates a supposed confession by a repentant revolutionary claiming that most terrorists are Jews. In 1890, another purported confession accuses Russian revolutionaries in London of working for Britain. In 1892, a bogus text attributed to Georgi Plekhanov accuses leaders of the Narodnaya Volya party of arranging the earlier confession’s publication. In 1902, Rachkovsky forms a Franco-Russian anti-Semitic league. To build support, he declares that the league exists and circulates an appeal that attacks his own conduct while incorporating some true details, a tactic the novel describes as making the falsehood harder to doubt.

The Protocols and Their Political Uses

The Protocols are described as twenty-four declarations presented as a program of action attributed to the Elders of Zion. Their claims combine incompatible positions: they attack liberalism while urging the use of liberal ideas to provoke disorder, condemn some freedoms while appearing to advocate others, and promote both political manipulation and social division. The novel emphasizes that these contradictions do not prevent the text from being treated as a coherent revelation by those determined to find a secret design.

The publication history reinforces the distinction between the text’s claims and its provenance. After the incomplete version in Znamia, a complete version appeared anonymously in 1905 under the title The Source of Our Evils, edited by Boutmi. A much more widely disseminated version appeared that year in the third edition of Sergei Nilus’s The Great in the Small: The Antichrist Is an Imminent Political Possibility. The account says the book reached the tsar and that the metropolitan of Moscow ordered it read in the city’s churches. In the novel’s reconstruction, Rachkovsky adapts material derived from Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel, replacing its political target with the Jews; the supposed proof of a Jewish conspiracy is thus presented as a forged and repurposed text.

Narrative Function and Limits of the Conspiracy

The Black Hundreds’ connection to the Protocols forms part of the trio’s elaborate reconstruction of history as a continuous secret struggle. They connect the Russian text to older plots and imagined factions, repeatedly converting textual resemblance into evidence of a single design. The narrative thereby makes the mechanics of conspiracy visible: documents are copied, altered, circulated, and invested with authority, while gaps in the record invite increasingly expansive explanations.

The account also contains uncertainty that its conspiratorial framework tries to erase. It says Rachkovsky’s political sponsor was Sergei Witte, a minister seeking to modernize Russia, and proposes that Rachkovsky’s manipulation of material concerning Witte’s opponent Elie de Cyon helped produce the Protocols. It further imagines that Juliana or Justine Glinka passed the document onward through Russian officials until it reached the tsar. These explanations belong to the trio’s speculative reconstruction; the narrative’s more securely grounded point is that the Protocols had a history of publication and adaptation, and that their anti-Semitic claims served political ends.