(Continued from page 30)

While it is clear that some individuals involved in the revolution were Masons, the Craft of Freemasonry in Russia was banned in 1822 during the reign of Alexander I.  After pointing out the apparent Masonic parallels in our Alexei's story I cannot avoid the need to deal with the spectre of anti-Semitism that was so prevalent in the years leading up to and during the revolution.  At its centre was a highly questionable collection of twenty-four lectures, or chapters, known as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" which were alleged to be evidence of a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy aimed at world domination.

Now dismissed as a complete fabrication and possibly the work of the Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, the "Protocols" first appeared in St. Petersburg at the turn of the century.  The man responsible for concocting the forgery may have been Pyotr Rachkovsky, who had been head of the Okhrana outside Russia until he was recalled from Paris in 1902.

Before Rasputin made his first appearance the superstitious Tsarina had turned to the French faith healer Phillipe Vachot in 1901 to help her in her desperate desire to give Nicholas a male heir.  After the birth of Anastasia in 1902 and a claimed false pregnancy a year later Vachot fell out of favour.  In the book "Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion" Professor Norman Cohn suggested in 1966 that those in the circle around the Dowager Empress Maria had called on Rachkovsky to help them get rid of Vachot.  Rachkovsky then used the "Protocols" in an effort to convince the Tsar that Vachot was the agent of a Masonic conspiracy.

Professor Cohn presented evidence that a link existed between Rachkovsky and another shadowy figure named Sergei Nilus who included the "Protocols" in a revised edition of his book "The Great in the Small".  That edition was published in December 1905 under the imprint of the local Red Cross at the Imperial residence of Tsarskoe Selo.

It was Nilus's book that first brought the "Protocols" into the public eye and sparked the fire of anti-Semitism which led to the Second World War's Nazi holocaust.  Empress Alexandra was sent a copy of the book while the Romanovs were under house arrest in Tobolsk, and White Army investigators entering the Impatiev House after the murders on Ekaterinburg found the book on a pedestal together with the first volume of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and a Russian Bible.

Remembering the propaganda wars that were being raged at that time and that it was the Cheka secret police who killed nine, and possibly ten, of the Bolsheviks' eleven Imperial hostages... is it feasible that the murders were deliberately given the appearance of a Masonic ritual to make it look as if the Tsar's assassination was part of the fictitious Jewish-Masonic conspiracy to destroy Russia?  Might the Jewish sounding name of Veermann have served the same purpose if Alexei's survival had been discovered?

©  J. Kendrick 1997                                                                                                                                            (Continued on page 32)