The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

Russia’s contribution to German anti-Semitism was plagiarized from a work of political satire, Dialogues from Hell Between Montesquieu and Machiavelli, written by a French lawyer, Maurice Joly, and first published in Brussels in 1864. Montesquieu speaks for liberalism, Machiavelli for despotism. The concoction of the Protocols was probably the work of the head of the czarist secret police outside Russia, a Paris-based agent named Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky. Borrowing and paraphrasing Machiavelli’s speeches without even bothering to change their order and attributing them to a secret Jewish council, Rachkovsky was attempting to discredit Russian liberalism by showing it to be a Jewish plot. A St. Petersburg newspaper serialized the earliest version of the Protocols in 1903. It was one of three books belonging to the Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna—the other two were the Bible and War and Peace—found among her possessions at Ekaterinburg after the murder of the imperial family by Communist revolutionaries on July 17, 1918.