Russia is both a geographical destination and a crucial hinge in the novel’s invented history of secret societies. As the Plan’s authors try to account for every political and religious movement, they make Russian mystical circles the refuge of an imagined Paulician branch, then enlist Russian agents and texts to explain the circulation of antisemitic conspiracy narratives. The resulting account folds real people, publications, and political conflicts into an unfounded master plot, exposing the mechanism by which a theory can turn historical particulars into apparent confirmation of itself.

Russia in the Plan’s Geography

In the group’s speculative genealogy, Russia is where Napoleon looks for the Paulicians, a secret tradition the planners have not yet assigned a final destination. The proposed explanation is that centuries of life in Slavic regions allowed the Paulicians to reorganize under the names of Russian mystical groups. Prince Galitzin, an adviser to Alexander I associated with Martinist sects, becomes one link in that imagined survival. De Maistre supplies another: before Napoleon’s search, he had served as plenipotentiary of the House of Savoy in St. Petersburg and formed connections with mystical circles there. The Plan interprets these different networks as traces of the same hidden lineage.

That interpretation depends on assigning opposed political meanings to groups that the plot has placed in contact. De Maistre distrusts the Illuminati and associates them with the Enlightenment and the Revolution; the Plan recasts his interest in Martinist circles as an effort to win over presumed Paulician heirs, supposedly the one faction not corrupted by Western thought. Napoleon’s turn toward Russia, De Maistre’s diplomatic connections, and the Paulicians’ supposed Slavic history thus become stages in a single imagined search rather than independent historical circumstances.

From Political Suspicion to Antisemitic Conspiracy

The Plan next makes Russia the setting for a struggle over who can claim authority over secret societies. It says Napoleon’s rapprochement with the Jews unsettles the Jesuits’ existing account of conspiracy. In 1806, according to the narrative, Captain Simonini writes to Barruel, linking Jews to the Old Man of the Mountain, Freemasonry, and other secret societies. Circulated in Paris while Napoleon is engaging with the Grand Sanhedrin, the letter supplies a new target for conspiracy claims. Barruel accepts the shift from a Masonic plot to a Judeo-Masonic one, a change that also lets him attack the Carbonari and anticlerical political figures.

The characters then project this political realignment onto Russia. They attribute the appearance of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion there to the Paulicians, and explain the supposed motive as an attempt to discredit Jews and, through them, the rival Jerusalemite groups identified in the Plan. Belbo sorts those imagined rivals into three branches: one associated with neo-Templarism, another with Baconian science and finance, and a Russian branch assigned to the Paulicians. In this conspiratorial taxonomy, Russian Jews are cast as members of a liberal and revolutionary intelligentsia, while the Paulicians are imagined as reactionary mystics with influence at court. The contrast is part of the characters’ explanatory scheme, not reliable historical description; it converts antisemitic stereotypes into purported evidence of a secret political contest.

The Protocols and the Work of Fabrication

The narrative gives the Protocols a form suited to the Plan’s method: they comprise twenty-four declarations that combine incompatible political prescriptions. They attack liberalism while advocating the use of liberal ideas to spread confusion, imagine controlled governments and the seizure of power, and endorse revolution, inequality, war, and arms production. They even turn urban infrastructure into part of the alleged design, treating the construction of metros as a means of undermining cities. The text’s contradictions do not weaken the conspiratorial reading advanced by the characters. Instead, the Plan absorbs them as evidence of a strategy comprehensive enough to contain opposites.

The account also supplies a history of literary borrowing that undermines the Protocols’ claim to authenticity. In 1921, the Times of London traces a Russian monarchist’s purchase of old books from a former Russian secret-police officer in Constantinople. Among them is a book identified by the spine marking “Joli,” which leads the newspaper to Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel. Joly’s pamphlet attacks Napoleon III, and the Protocols reproduce ideas attributed to its Machiavelli. The Times, in the story as told by the group, misses an earlier link: the text had already been adapted in Sue’s work. Rather than treat this chain of borrowing as evidence that the supposed master document is a constructed text, the Plan absorbs each prior source into its own speculative ancestry.

Russian Agents and the Plan’s Self-Sealing Logic

The characters give their account a plausible-looking political mechanism through Pierre Ivanovitch Rachkovsky, a police agent and skilled forger. After joining the Black Hundreds, Rachkovsky is described as arranging arrests, circulating false or manipulated documents, and mixing accurate details with fabrications so that readers will trust the whole. The narrative says his men made the bombs that he had arranged to have discovered in a Paris organization, and recounts forged texts that blamed Jews or British agents for revolutionary activity. His methods offer a concrete example of disinformation, but the Plan goes further by fitting them into its imagined succession of secret orders.

In the group’s proposed origin story for the Protocols, Rachkovsky’s patron, Count Sergei Witte, is a progressive minister with a political rival, Elie de Cyon. Rachkovsky searches de Cyon’s villa and finds a pamphlet based on Joly, or on the earlier text the characters attribute to Sue. He then substitutes Jews for Witte as the alleged conspirators and circulates the result. The name Cyon, resembling Zion, supplies another suggestive coincidence. The document reaches Juliana or Justine Glinka, who is portrayed as both a member of Madame Blavatsky’s Paris circle and a spy on Russian revolutionaries in exile. She sends it onward through military channels until it reaches the tsar, placing Witte in political difficulty. The narrative concludes that Rachkovsky’s anti-Semitism helps bring down his own patron, after which the agent disappears from view.

This sequence displays both the historical materials and the interpretive trap at the center of the Plan. Political surveillance, forged pamphlets, the Protocols’ literary sources, and the circulation of antisemitic accusations are distinct matters; the characters turn them into a seamless genealogy of hidden control. Their confidence that the resulting story is “true as the Bible” marks not the proof of the conspiracy but the success of a method that treats coincidence, contradiction, and documentary traces alike as confirmation.

Russia as Setting and Warning

Russia’s importance lies less in serving as a backdrop than in the role assigned to it by the Plan: it becomes the supposed refuge of one secret tradition and the source of a text that gives antisemitic conspiracy a modern political form. The novel’s account repeatedly shifts between identifiable historical names and invented connections, showing how real political manipulation can be appropriated to validate an imaginary universal plot. Russia therefore stands at the point where the Plan’s historical collage becomes most dangerous: the circulation of fabricated evidence and the exploitation of antisemitism are not merely games of interpretation, even when the grand system used to explain them is itself invented.