is said that the manuscript was given to Nilus by Sukhotin, the notorious zemstvo official of Chernsk.
“The Berlin edition contains no mention of Sukhotin, but in that edition Nilus said, ‘Pray for the soul of the boyar Alexis.’
“The name of the notorious Alexey Nikolayevtich Sukhotin means nothing to the present generation, But there was a time when his name attracted attention.
“Sukhotin arrested the peasants of a whole village for refusing to cart manure from his stables because the animals there were infected with glanders. Judge Tsurikov released the peasants. Tsurikov was removed for this, while Sukhotin justified his act by writing to the Minister of the Interior, Durnovo, that he had arrested the peasants not because they refused to cart his manure but because they dared disobey him as a zemstvo official. The reactionary Chersnk nobility made Sukhotin marshal of nobility. So it was this man who furnished the protocols of the secret meetings of the representatives of Zion! But how did Sukhotin get the protocols? An unknown friend had brought them to him. They were given to him by an unknown lady who had received them from an unknown but energetic participant in the Basle Congress. Is this credible? Well, then, there is another version of the origin of the protocols—but that is for the German readers. The Russian government sent a spy to the Basle Congress. He did not go to the Congress himself, but bribed one of the participants. He was carrying the protocols from Basle to Frankfurt to the local masonic organization. He stopped on the way in a little town, and gave the protocols to the spy. He engaged copyists who worked all night and copied the protocols.
“In the first Russian version the protocols were supposed to have been brought to Russia in French. According to the German version, the protocols were copied, consequently they were in German, but the most important thing is that the protocols are not protocols at all, but a monograph—which could be called ‘the dream of a member of the Black Hundreds.’”
A distinguished Russian publicist says of the sponsor of the “protocols” as follows:
