Tsarskoye Selo appears in the novel as both a concrete setting in the history of anti-Semitic propaganda and a site absorbed into the characters’ increasingly elaborate conspiracy theory. The expanded edition of the Protocols is published there in 1905, and the novel traces how the text is given political and religious authority. In the trio’s conjectural reconstruction, Tsarskoye Selo also becomes a link in a supposed struggle between secret factions, showing how historical places are recruited to make fabricated explanations seem coherent.

Publication and Circulation of the Protocols

The novel distinguishes the expanded edition of the Protocols from earlier, cheaper publications. An incomplete version had appeared in 1903 in a St. Petersburg newspaper; a complete text followed anonymously in 1905 under the title The Source of Our Evils, edited by Boutmi. The expanded version that would be translated around the world appeared in the third edition of Sergei Nilus’s book, The Great in the Small: The Antichrist Is an Imminent Political Possibility, published at Tsarskoye Selo in 1905 under the auspices of a local Red Cross chapter.

That edition’s framing gave the text a broader reach: it presented the alleged plot within a work of mystical reflection, rather than merely as a pamphlet. The book reached the tsar, and the metropolitan of Moscow ordered it read aloud in the city’s churches. Tsarskoye Selo is therefore attached not simply to the appearance of a forged text, but to its passage into settings of official and religious authority.

The Characters’ Conspiracy Reconstruction

Diotallevi and Belbo fold the publication history into their invented account of a secret conflict. Diotallevi proposes that the major anti-Semitic campaign began late in the nineteenth century with the publication of the Protocols in Russia, and therefore attributes the initiative to the Paulicians. Belbo then imagines the Jerusalemite group as having divided into three branches: one inspiring neo-Templar circles, another becoming scientists and bankers, and a third establishing itself in Russia. In this fictional scheme, the Paulicians’ supposed alliance with landowners and influence at court explain their hostility toward Jews and their effort to discredit rival groups abroad.

Their reasoning turns the political uses of anti-Semitism into supposed evidence for an underground design. The novel makes clear that this account is the trio’s constructed explanation, not a verified history. Its force comes from the way disparate details—religious factions, Russian politics, and the text’s publication—are made to confirm one another once the characters treat the Protocols as a key to a larger plan.

Forgery, Rewriting, and Political Use

The novel traces the Protocols through competing claims about their source and function. When Jesuit polemicists find a fictional plan attributed to their order, they respond by attributing it to Jews; later, the London Times discovers that the Protocols borrow extensively from Maurice Joly’s 1864 Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel. The characters nevertheless extend the chain further, claiming that Joly copied an earlier document by Sue and then interpreting the resulting borrowings as evidence that the Templar Plan exists independently of its apparent authors.

A further proposed origin centers on Rachkovsky. In the trio’s account, he finds a pamphlet by Elie de Cyon, derived from Joly or Sue, that attacks Witte by assigning Machiavellian ideas to him. Rachkovsky substitutes Jews for Witte and circulates the altered text; Juliana or Justine Glinka then passes it through channels that ultimately bring it to the tsar. This explanation, like the larger Plan, is presented as the characters’ reconstruction. It exposes the mechanism by which a forged accusation can gain authority: borrowed language is recast, political enemies are named as conspirators, and the resulting document is circulated as evidence.

Antisemitism and the Limits of the Plan

The discussion of the Protocols records the contradictions embedded in their alleged program. The twenty-four declarations condemn press freedom while appearing to encourage libertinage, attack liberalism while advocating the use of liberal ideas to sow disorder, and describe both fomenting revolution and intensifying inequality. The text also advocates controlled governments, war, arms production, and underground metros, while repeating anti-Semitic stereotypes and presenting hatred as a declared motive. Rather than demonstrating a coherent Jewish conspiracy, these contradictions expose the fabricated text’s capacity to absorb incompatible fears and accusations.

Tsarskoye Selo’s place in this history thus carries a double significance. The setting marks a real stage in the Protocols’ publication and dissemination, while the characters transform that fact into a node in their invented network of hidden actors. Their method echoes the propaganda they discuss: fragments are selected, altered, and made to corroborate a predetermined story. The novel’s account makes the danger of that method legible by showing how the circulation of a forgery can be mistaken for proof—and how that mistake serves anti-Semitic politics.