The Story Behind an Inscription

Vladimir Lvovich Burtsev (1862-1942) was an ardent opponent of monarchism, Bolshevism, and Nazism. Dubbed “the Sherlock Holmes of the Russian Revolution” for exposing misdeeds of the tsarist secret police, he has always been a fascinating figure. My curiosity was therefore instantly provoked when, as I was doing research in the UCLA library, I happened upon a dedication he had written in one of his books. The book was Protocols of the Elders of Zion – A Proven Forgery.* The inscription read: “To dear Vasily Alexeyevich Maklakov from his client (1913). Vladimir Burtsev, February 24, 1938. In this book, I defend that which you have always defended.”

Just what was it that Burtsev spent his life defending? “The fight against anti-Semitism is our common cause!” he never tired of proclaiming, and, over the course of his long life, he was unwavering in his adherence to this idea. This fight took on new importance after the October Revolution, when the presence of a few prominent, ethnically-Jewish Bolsheviks among its leaders led many in the White émigré community to blame Jews as a whole for the revolution. (Even today, Jews are called on to publicly repent the misdeeds of Sverdlov, Zinoviev, Yurovsky and other prominent revolutionaries with Jewish roots.) During the Civil War that followed the revolution, frenzied anti-Semitism led to a spike in bloody pogroms.

In late 1919, Burtsev began a series of trips to Crimea and the Caucasus to gain audiences with Generals Denikin and Wrangel, to ask, convince, and ultimately insist that they take urgent measures to stop the barbarity. He tenaciously argued that the communist leaders were “renegades of the Jewish nation” with “no ties to Jewish history, Jewish religion, or the Jewish masses,” calling them “nothing but internationalists preaching ideas shared by socialists from other ethnic groups” and “outright enemies of the Jewish nation as a whole.” They were “swindlers who cut their ties to Judaism” and had absolutely nothing to do with it. Russia’s Jews as a whole “were not involved in Bolshevism and were not responsible for it, including those Jews forced to live and work under the Bolsheviks despite not being Bolsheviks themselves, just like many Russians who are committed anti-Bolsheviks.”

Although he himself was not Jewish, Burtsev took a lively and heartfelt interest in the Jewish question. He found himself “at the wellspring of most of the Jewish national currents,” including the Bund and Zionism. Ties of friendship bound Burtsev with prominent Jews holding the most varied political views, such as the Zionist Daniil Pasmanik and the anti-Zionist Henrik Sliozberg, along with many others who attracted him with their “sincerity, honesty, and competence.” He was present at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, presided over by Theodor Herzl, who impressed Burtsev with his exuberance and charisma and whose idea of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine he enthusiastically supported.

Burtsev relentlessly attacked anti-Semitism on the pages of the Russian-language newspaper he published in Paris, Common Cause (Obshchee delo, 1918-1922, 1928-1933), contending that the entrenched Judeophobia infecting a significant portion of the White émigré community only served to undermine the “common cause” under whose banner all true patriots of Russia should be uniting: the struggle against the communist regime.

His talent for exposing the workings of anti-Semitism were on full display when he served as a witness at the Berne Trial of 1933-1935. It was this trial that proved that the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion had been fabricated by the tsarist secret police. Contemporary historians have called this document “the greatest lie in history” and a “warrant for genocide.” Besides Burtsev, witnesses for the prosecution at this trial included the Russian historians and politicians Pavel Milyukov and Sergei Svatikov, and the Russian Marxist Boris Nicolaevsky.

The book I was reading in the UCLA library represents the culmination of Burtsev’s life’s work. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – A Proven Forgery features the trenchant subtitle: Rachkovsky Fabricated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler Made Them Famous. Drawing on a wide array of documentary sources and oral accounts, the book convincingly exposes The Protocols (which were originally published in 1903) as a brazen forgery, while also showing its misanthropic and destructive intent. (The Nazis later picked up the Protocols baton and translated the forgery into many languages; today, millions of copies are circulating all around the world, continuing the job of duping and corrupting the ignorant.) As Burtsev put it: “Those who propagandize The Protocols are wittingly promoting a dishonest, heinous, and violent cause. It cannot be said of them: ‘They know not what they do.’ No! No! They know perfectly well what they are doing.” Burtsev saw his book as “a starting point in the struggle against pernicious superstition and the dangerous mass psychosis of peoples infected with a maniacal and extremely vicious anti-Semitism.”

But let us return to the inscription Burtsev made in the copy I found in the UCLA library. Who was this “Vasily Alexeyevich Maklakov”? What did Burtsev mean when he wrote that they were both defending the same thing, and what was the significance of “1913”?

It turns out that Vasily Alexeyevich Maklakov (1869-1957) was a leading member of Russia’s Constitutional Democratic Party (the Kadets) and an outstanding orator during the Second, Third, and Fourth State Dumas. After the February 1917 revolution, the Provisional Government had appointed him as a Ministry of Justice commissar. There were even plans to appoint him minister, but Alexander Kerensky wound up taking that post. For a while, Maklakov chaired the Provisional Government’s Legal Conference. Later, in emigration, he served as the Provisional Government’s ambassador to France, and played an active role in the White movement.

But much earlier, by the dawn of the twentieth century, Maklakov had already become, in the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russia’s “greatest lawyer.” A comrade-in-arms of the renowned lawyer and orator Fyodor Plevako, he gained fame across Russia for the brilliant role he played in a number of trials centering on religion and social and political issues. His professionalism, integrity, and humanity (his “noble and kind heart”) were highly valued by his clients. But his legal talents were most impressively and consequentially exhibited in one of the early twentieth century’s most notorious trials: the case of the Jew Menachem Mendel Beilis, who was falsely accused of the ritual killing of the Christian boy Andrei Yushchinsky. This case was tried in 1913.

The right-wing press used the case to inflame a rabid anti-Semitic hysteria and incite a merciless bloodbath against Jews, “the outcasts of the human race.” As an example, the newspaper Russian Banner (Russkoe znamya, no. 177, 1913), an organ of the Black Hundred far-right nationalist movement, vituperated before the trial: “The government has to recognize that the Jewish people are every bit as dangerous for human life as wolves, scorpions, vipers, poisonous spiders, and other creatures that should be destroyed for their predatory behavior against people and whose destruction is countenanced by the law. Zhids have to be specially placed in conditions that will promote their continual extinction: this is what the government and the country’s best people must do.”

Despite threats by the okhotnoryadtsy (a word derived from the name of Moscow’s Okhotny Ryad shopping district, whose storekeepers were associated with anti-Jewish pogroms), Maklakov served as Beilis’s defense lawyer and played an important role in his acquittal. In the face of expectations by anti-Semites that the Jew would receive the harshest possible sentence, Maklakov delivered a compelling closing argument to the jury. Speaking simply and persuasively, he spelled out the true motives behind the absurd accusations leveled against Beilis.

We are being told that the eyes of the world are on this trial, but I would like to forget about that and talk directly to you, gentlemen of the jury. Beilis is mortal. Even if he’s unjustly convicted, time will pass and that will be forgotten. It’s no rarity for innocent people to be convicted. Human life is short – people die and are forgotten, and Beilis will die, his family will die, all will be forgotten, all will be forgiven, but this verdict... this verdict will not be forgotten, will not be effaced, and in Russia people will forever remember and know that a Russian jury, out of hatred for the Jewish people, turned its back on the truth.

The lawyer’s final words were pronounced amid a tense silence:

They are doing everything they can to set you against Jews. You are being told that Jews are your enemies, that they mock you, that they don’t consider you human. You are being invited to mirror this attitude. Do not fall for this. If you convict Beilis based on something other than the evidence against him, if he is sacrificed for the sins of others, even if there are some who at first, in their embitterment, will applaud your verdict, with the passage of time they themselves will come to regret this, and this verdict will live on as a sad page in the history of Russian jurisprudence. Remember that when you decide Beilis’s fate.

The jury delivered a verdict of not guilty.

At this point, Vasily Maklakov’s brother, Nikolai Maklakov (1871-1918), makes his entrance into our story. The polar opposite of his lawyer brother, Nikolai was an inveterate conservative and monarchist who earned the moniker “the flaming reactionary.” He was infused with a ferocious hatred for liberals, which set him in good stead with Nicholas II, who was once moved to exclaim of him: “Finally, I’ve found someone who understands me and with whom I can work.” The tsar and Nikolai Maklakov both believed that the liberal opposition could never have any support among the people and could only serve to inoculate Russia against large-scale revolutionary unrest. As further evidence of his inclinations, Nikolai Maklakov was a member of the odious Union of the Russian People, an organization favored by the tsar that had as its slogan: “Beat the zhids, save Russia!”

As governor of Chernigov Province, Nikolai Maklakov used his administrative resources and other means to significantly weaken those advocating the transition to a constitutional monarchy or democracy, thereby improving the electoral chances of right-wing, pro-government groups. Although pressure from outraged liberals in Chernigov forced the tsar to relieve Nikolai of his position as governor, his star was rising.

In December 1912, the tsar unexpectedly put Nikolai in charge of administering the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Just two months later, in February 1913, he was made minister, and by May he was given the title of Hofmeister, putting him in charge of running His Majesty’s court – over the objections of other high-ranking officials, who felt that his “excessively extreme monarchism” and blind loyalty to the emperor could only serve to undermine unity. Nikolai Maklakov tried to talk the tsar into dissolving the State Duma and prohibiting civic organizations from engaging in politics, which even annoyed right-wingers prepared to find common ground with liberals. He was so categorical and narrow minded in his thinking that he became a target of open ridicule. His brother Vasily called him “the government baby.”

But let us return to the Beilis case. What did Nikolai, the newly minted Minister of Internal Affairs make of this case? In contrast with his brother Vasily, the lawyer, he felt strongly that Beilis should be convicted. In fact, his ministry’s budget secretly funded “expert” testimony for the prosecution and a hunt for ancient books of obscure Jewish sects that could help support a case for conviction. Furthermore, Nikolai had members of the jury secretly followed, and had his men protect Beilis’s accusers. All this was done “sparing no expense.” Special ministry agents submitted classified reports about how the trial was going and anything that might affect its outcome. It is hard to know whether the minister himself actually believed that Beilis had committed ritual murder, but he clearly felt that conviction would represent a win for his side.

When Beilis was acquitted, all of democratic Russia congratulated Vasily Maklakov on his victory. The prominent politician and member of the State Council Mikhail Stakhovich sent him a telegram with the words: “I embrace you. Your wondrous and, most importantly, intelligent speech was murderous to the prosecution and the shameless people behind the charges.”

Congratulations also came from Ivan Petrunkevich and Dmitry Shipov, along with other leading lights of Russian liberalism. Ordinary people – workers and peasants – also expressed their support for Maklakov. A letter from the board of Rostov-on-Don’s Main Choral Synagogue read: “The Beilis case that you so heroically defended was a case for all of thinking humankind. You were the most brilliant expression of all that is best and noblest that flowed forth so forcefully, so elementally, so beautifully and majestically in your talented defense.”

In his inscription, Burtsev’s reference to “1913” and to Maklakov’s “defending” clearly suggests that he had the Beilis case in mind. In 1913 Burtsev himself had written an article defending Beilis in the newspaper The Future (Budushchee), which he was publishing in Paris as he was taking up the fight against those popularizing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, since he anticipated that this forgery would be cited by the prosecution. Burtsev wrote:

The accusers, the anti-Semites, were counting on this trial to deal a death blow to Jews. They spent more than a year preparing for it. But the charges were false, and, as the case was being made to the jury, it unraveled, it collapsed. Beilis was acquitted by the court. When this trial was being prepared, I thought that members of the Russian government would cite The Protocols and would therefore try to prove that they are genuine. I was convinced of this in particular, because it was decided within government circles to support the myth of ritual murders.

On that count, however, Burtsev need not have worried: the prosecution, in the end, did not cite The Protocols. In failing to do so, they seem to have unwittingly recognized their illegitimacy, two decades before the Berne Trial formally proved that they were a forgery.

There was one other puzzling thing about the inscription: why did Burtsev refer to himself as Maklakov’s “client” (podzashchitny)? This is all the more perplexing, as he was not involved in any legal cases during this period and, furthermore, was living abroad. Evidently, he was using this word metaphorically. Burtsev had been shaken to his core by the Beilis case and felt such profound sympathy for the debased and defamed Jew, it was almost as if he himself were on trial. Maklakov was not just standing up for Beilis in that courtroom – he was standing up for the lofty ideals of the Russian intelligentsia, for Burtsev’s own ideals. In his book, Burtsev includes a quote from Carl Albert Loosli, an expert who testified at the Berne Trail, that seems to reflect his own thinking: “It is not a principled enemy, not even a human enemy that we are battling. We must battle unscrupulousness and mendacity incarnate, a symptom of general impetuous, automatic, and soulless derangement. This means that we must be both ruthless and tireless until this hydra, which grows seven new heads every time you chop off one, has been decisively slain.”

Lastly, Burtsev said of Maklakov that he had “always” defended Jews. This is true. In 1919, as ambassador for the Provisional Government (now based on Paris), Vasily Maklakov traveled to the headquarters of General Denikin in the Caucasus and convinced him to issue a statement that Jews would have equal rights in the future Russia. In the 1920s, Maklakov engaged in a polemic with the prominent anti-Semite Vasily Shulgin, who caused a sensation with his book What We Don’t Like About Them (Chto nam v nikh ne nravitsya, Paris, 1930) about the causes and nature of the October Revolution. Shulgin claimed that the revolution had been carried out by Jews resentful toward the government and “strongly unified by a conscious and unconscious urge to dominate.” In a March 5, 1925, letter, Maklakov offered the following response:

You paint Jews as representing resentment. Here, you are of course right, but rather than a matter of ethnicity, this is a consequence of our foolish policies... It shouldn’t be surprising that we have more dissatisfied and resentful Jews than anywhere else, and that more of them are intellectuals. We can thank the Pale of Settlement for that as well. I know that Jews do not assimilate very well with other ethnic groups, but I observe Jews in France, and here there is nothing like the psychology of Russian Jews, and there is even less of it in England. So, observing the development of the Russian Revolution I can say to you the same thing that Laplace said to Napoleon about God: “To explain what is happening in the world, I have no need for that hypothesis.” I have no need to talk about the Jewish question in order to understand how revolution developed in Russia; this issue’s role is so secondary that I’m convinced that even if you erase all Jews, in its main contours, the revolution would have occurred in exactly the same way.

In exploring the spiritual legacies of Burtsev, Maklakov, and other opponents of anti-Semitism in Russia, we cannot ignore the fact that these figures still provoke outrage and anger in today’s nationalistic “patriots,” who denounce them as everything from “Russophobes” to “Shabbos goy” to “agents of world Zionism.” In fact, these men were the true Russian patriots. During the Second World War, after the Nazi occupation of Paris, Burtsev was targeted by German authorities as an opponent of Nazism and repeatedly summoned by the Gestapo. They released him only because of his advanced age, and this “Russophobe,” as the daughter of author Alexander Kuprin recalls, “foamed at the mouth as he argued that Russia would triumph and could not fail to triumph.”

Maklakov was less fortunate: in April 1941 he was arrested by the Gestapo for his anti-fascist views and spent five months in prison. Yet he survived the ordeal, and in February 1945 he visited the Soviet Embassy in Paris as part of a delegation of Russian émigrés and proclaimed: “I feel a profound elation and joy that I have lived to see the day when I, a former Russian ambassador, am able to welcome, here, in the Russian Embassy, representatives of the Motherland and join in its struggle against the invading enemy.”

And what about the glorified nationalist “patriots,” passing themselves off as “true protectors of the Fatherland,” the ones who saw a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy as the main threat? How did they defend their country against the invading enemy? One former State Duma member, Nikolai Markov II, who called for a “final solution to the Jewish question,” ended his career as a “patriot” consulting for the Gestapo. Another, Grigory Bostunich, author of Freemasonry and the Russian Revolution and a promoter of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, worked his way up to the rank of SS Standartenführer and was made an honorary SS professor because of his unrivaled expertise in the devious machinations of world Jewry. Then there was the rabidly anti-Semitic General Pyotr Krasnov, who welcomed Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and actively collaborated with the Nazis, fighting for the enemy (he, by the way, reproached another traitor to Russia, General Vlasov, for not being sufficiently consistent in his anti-Jewish propaganda). There are many such examples.

The true heroes in this story were those who fought evil and strove to make Russia a better and more humane place. The values of justice and goodwill always need to be defended. Indeed, even today Vladimir Burtsev and Vasily Maklakov often need defending against lies and calumny, ignorance, obscurantism, and prejudice.