Dmitri Navashin

Dmitri Navachine is a Mason and Martinist, a former director of a Moscow bank and economic adviser to the Front Populaire. His assassination on January 24, 1937, becomes a contested episode in the novel’s history of synarchy: one faction says he was killed because he had uncovered its secrets, but the surrounding narrative repeatedly shows how such claims are constructed, recycled, and turned against opposing political camps.

Identity and Political Setting

Navachine’s brief profile places him at the crossing of institutions that conspiracy narratives readily fuse. He had directed a Moscow bank and later served as economic adviser to the Front Populaire; he was also identified as a Mason and Martinist. The narrator acknowledges uncertainty about Martinism rather than explaining it, a small sign of how the characters assemble unfamiliar affiliations into an increasingly elaborate interpretive system.

His assassination is attributed to La Cagoule, the Organisation secrète d’action révolutionnaire et nationale, which the account says was financed by Mussolini. Navachine’s own political position and affiliations are thus set beside a violent anti-revolutionary organization and a claim of hidden occult direction. The episode supplies material for competing theories, but does not establish that a secret synarchic authority actually controlled the murder.

Assassination and the Synarchy Claims

A contemporary explanation held that La Cagoule was guided by a secret synarchy and that Navachine had been killed because he had discovered its mysteries. The account then moves to a document from left-wing circles during the Occupation, which blamed the French defeat on a secret Pact of the Empire and described the pact as an expression of Portuguese-style fascism. Yet the supposed secret document had been drawn up by Du Mas and Canudo from ideas they had already published openly. What one political reading presented as concealed proof was, in this instance, a public set of ideas recast as hidden knowledge.

The pattern grows more contradictory when Husson’s 1946 book, Synarchie, panorama de 25 annees d’activite occulte, denounces a revolutionary synarchic pact of the left. The same synarchy can therefore be represented as a right-wing conspiracy against a left-wing adviser, a fascist influence behind France’s defeat, and a revolutionary pact supposedly operating on the left. Navachine’s death is not resolved by these accounts; it is absorbed into their rival explanations.

From Political Allegation to Antisemitic Forgery

The novel places this episode in a wider genealogy of conspiratorial claims. A later account of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion attributes their production to the Russian secret-police officer Rachkovsky: after a search of Elie de Cyon’s villa in 1897, Rachkovsky supposedly altered a pamphlet derived from Joly or Sue by substituting the Jews for Witte and circulating it as evidence of a Jewish plot. The narrative links the forged text to political maneuvering and the attempt to discredit Witte’s modernization program. This is a distinct later episode, not a demonstrated connection to Navachine’s murder, but it illustrates the book’s recurring concern with how conspiracy claims are manufactured and politically repurposed.

The text also recounts how an anti-Semitic accusation could be redirected: after the Jesuits were blamed for an alleged secret document, they exploited Simonini’s letter to attribute it to Jews. It then traces the Protocols to Maurice Joly’s liberal pamphlet against Napoleon III and describes the work’s contradictory program—attacking liberalism while calling for revolution, inequality, managed regimes, and political confusion. These are presented as features of a fabricated accusation, not as reliable evidence about Jewish intentions. The sequence makes explicit the harm of the conspiracy tradition into which Navachine’s supposed discovery is folded: political texts and affiliations are detached from their contexts, rearranged, and made to authorize antisemitic claims.

Narrative Significance

Navachine has little narrated life beyond his affiliations, political work, and death, but that compression is significant. His assassination becomes a node to which rival accounts attach mutually incompatible causes, each treating the existence of a secret synarchy as settled while disagreeing over who directs it and whom it targets. The novel thereby shows how an unexplained political killing can be made to support a theory precisely because the theory is flexible enough to absorb opposing evidence.

That mechanism reaches its most disturbing extreme when the characters’ invented Plan is used to explain the Holocaust as a search for a hidden message among the murdered Jews. This is presented as the grotesque consequence of their interpretive method, not as historical truth. Against that later misuse, Navachine’s episode establishes an early pattern: an actual death is converted into supposed confirmation of a secret plot, while the changing stories reveal more about their political narrators than about any proven hidden organization.