The famous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in theirtime made a lot of noise around the world. The scandalous collection of texts was called nothing more than evidence of the world Jewish conspiracy of the Masonic Lodge, which consists in the destruction of the existing states and the proclamation of a new world order, where the "ruling class" are, of course, Jews. It all began in 1901, when the minutes of the secret meetings of the Masonic Lodge fell into the hands of the writer Sergei Nilus. The documents were written in French and resembled congresses of an organization called the General Union of Israelites.
Nilus was going to make the documents public, howeverhe was ahead, and in 1903 the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were first published. After this, several more journalists made this information public; in total, from 1905 to 1907, 6 publications of the Protocols were published. Nilus also released his version of the translation as a supplement to his book “The Great in the Little, or the Antichrist as a Close Political Opportunity”, which caused a stir in Russian society. As a result, after the first revolution, people were seriously ready to blame the world Zionist conspiracy for all the troubles.
The king got acquainted with the sensational "Protocols" in1906 and was inclined to believe this information. However, Stolypin, who served as Minister of the Interior, organized an investigation into the origin of the documents, during which it turned out that the time of writing the Protocols was 1897-1898, and the Paris anti-Semites created them. The minister immediately went to the tsar with a report and a request to ban "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in Russia, the text of which was completely falsified. The king listened to the report and agreed with the minister, so the book was banned.
As for the authorship and authenticity of the book,expert opinions still diverge. Some experts believe that the book was rigged by members of the Russian secret police. According to their version, the police followed in the footsteps of the creators of the famous pamphlet against Napoleon, published in France. Thus, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were fabricated in the Paris National Library. However, there are supporters of the opposite point of view, who believe that the document is absolutely real, as well as other texts of a similar subject: “Messages of the World Council of Freemasons”, “Kaiser's Sleep”, “Message of the General Union of Israelis” Russian émigrés managed to export the surviving copies of the Nilus book abroad, and in this way Europe and America also learned what the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are. The book was soon translated into 80 languages and spread throughout the world.
Books Nilus began to be issued again in Russiait was only in the 1990s, after the collapse of the USSR, and most recently, in 2006, human rights activists, together with the Public Chamber, made amendments to the legislation, including the creation of a list of extremist literature banned for distribution in Russia. This list includes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, along with the famous work of Mein Kampf.
