St. Petersburg serves as a hinge between the novel’s speculative genealogy of secret traditions and the documented publication history of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In the account narrated by Casaubon, the city is both a destination for mystic networks and a setting in which political rivalries help turn an alleged secret text into an instrument of antisemitism.

Martinists, Paulicians, and Russian Mysticism

The novel places St. Petersburg within a conjectural chain linking the Paulicians to Russian mystical groups. Because the Paulicians were said to have lived for centuries in Slavic regions, the speakers propose that they could have reorganized under successive Russian religious labels. Prince Galitzin, an influential adviser to Alexander I, is connected with Martinist sects; Joseph de Maistre, meanwhile, is said to have entered the city more than a decade before Napoleon, as plenipotentiary of the House of Savoy, and formed ties with its mystical circles.

This imagined inheritance is also a story of political suspicion. De Maistre distrusts Illuminati organizations, associating them with the Enlightenment figures he blames for the French Revolution’s violence. The speakers suggest that he may have sought to win over the Martinist groups because he regarded them as heirs to the Paulicians, supposedly the one tradition not yet corrupted by Western thought. The maneuver apparently fails: in 1815 the Jesuits are expelled from St. Petersburg, and de Maistre returns to Turin. The city thus marks both an attempted convergence of mystical lineages and the limits of the narrative’s proposed connections.

The Protocols and a Struggle for Influence

The novel’s account next makes St. Petersburg a stage for a late-nineteenth-century contest around the Russian court. Papus, described as a leading Martinist, impresses Nicholas II during a visit to Paris and then travels to Moscow with Philippe Nizier Anselme Vachot. Philippe’s rise—from healer and magnetizer to court physician, general, and state councillor—provokes rivals to counter his influence with another charismatic figure, Sergei Nilus.

Nilus is portrayed as an itinerant monk preoccupied with the Antichrist. According to the speakers’ reconstruction, a text of the Protocols is given to him after Philippe’s supporters attack Nilus’s conduct. The proposed motive is to discredit Martinists by associating them with Martinez Pasqualis, whom rumor identified as Jewish, and thereby to undermine Philippe at court. This explanation is presented as part of the characters’ speculative reconstruction, not as an independently established account of the text’s origins.

Publication and Political Afterlife

The narrative distinguishes that proposed court intrigue from the publication record it recounts. An incomplete version of the Protocols appeared in 1903 in Znamia, a St. Petersburg newspaper edited by the antisemitic publisher Kruscevan. In 1905, a complete text appeared anonymously under the title The Source of Our Evils, with government censorship approval. The account connects its editor, Boutmi, with Kruscevan and the Union of the Russian People, later known as the Black Hundreds, which recruited criminals for pogroms and far-right violence.

A more expansive version appeared in 1905 in the third edition of Nilus’s The Great in the Small: The Antichrist Is an Imminent Political Possibility, published at Tsarskoye Selo under the aegis of a local Red Cross chapter. The book gave the text a mystical framework; it reached the tsar, and the metropolitan of Moscow ordered it read aloud in the city’s churches. St. Petersburg therefore belongs to a larger geography of production and circulation: the newspaper and court-centered publication story begins there, while the expanded edition and its public religious reception extend beyond the city.

Narrative Significance

St. Petersburg’s importance lies in how readily the novel’s history can make a place seem to confirm an entire hidden lineage. The speakers connect Paulicians, Martinists, court advisers, rival mystics, and the Protocols through successive acts of resemblance and suspicion. Yet the city’s role also anchors that imaginative construction in specific circumstances: de Maistre’s diplomatic presence, Philippe’s court advancement, the appearance of the text in a local newspaper, and its later association with Russian antisemitic politics. The result is both a setting and a test case for the book’s distinction between a traceable publication history and a grand secret plan inferred from it.