Katkov became the key intellectual in the promotion of the counter-reforms which began during the reign of Aleksandr III; his radical conservative views bolstered repressive legislation in schools, universities and the press (Riabov, 2010). The counter-revolutionary measures introduced by the government and the rise of radical Russian nationalism led to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories which became central to the conspiratorial discourse up to the October 1917 revolution and since then have been an important element in the conspiratorial discourse of Russia’s far right movements (Shnirel’man, 2002; Rossman, 2002; Shnirel’man, 2012).
Savelii Dudakov (1993) undertook a detailed study of the anti-Jewish conspiratorial attitudes in Russian nineteenth-century fiction which provided the impetus for the dissemination of one of the most persistent anti-Jewish conspiratorial texts of all times, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This fabricated pamphlet was used as evidence of a global ‘Jewish-Masonic conspiracy’ to achieve world domination. Its impact on Russian society was enormous. Its origins are still not fully understood. It is likely that it stemmed from long-standing anti-Jewish sentiment, which increased considerably in the late nineteenth century. As Michael Hagemeister (2008) demonstrates, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories existed in Russia long before the Protocols appeared; they were just another iteration of the conspiracy myth.
Jacob Brafman’s The Book of the Kahal could be considered a conceptual precursor of the Protocols. The Kahal was a traditional form of social organization of Eastern European Jews. The Russian authorities, together with enlightened and secularized Jews, attempted to dismantle the Kahal to assimilate Jews, who had hitherto lived in the pale of settlement, into mainstream Russian society. The state plan to take the Jews out of the Kahal was not well designed and was inconsistently applied, often leaving the newly assimilated Jews with, at best, very limited rights (Lowe, 1993). However, Brafman’s interpretation of the persistence of the Kahal was influential. The author presented the Kahal as a ‘state within the state’ – a typical anti-Semitic image – which supposedly had tremendous power over its members, as well as tentacles which reached beyond its borders into the Russian Empire as a whole (Brafman, 2005). This portrayal of the Jewish organization added to concern on the part of Russian intellectuals from both sides of the political spectrum about the reforms in Russia. As Israel Bartal (2005) noted, the Jews were the ‘convenient Other’ for the left, who saw them as landowners and exploiters of peasants; while for the right they were subversive agents of Western modernization and hence represented mortal danger to the Russian nation.
The spread of popular political movements and the growth of the far-right movement in the run up to the 1905 revolution turned anti-Jewish conspiracy theories into a powerful instrument for popular mobilization (Laquer, 1993). The ‘Black Hundreds’, a conglomerate of far right political movements in late Imperial Russia, were in the vanguard of the Russian conspiracy culture. They embraced anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, especially the Protocols, which won them substantial support. The anti-Jewish pogroms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which were organized by the ‘Black Hundreds’, demonstrate the potentially destructive nature of conspiratorial ideas (Klier, 2014).
The rapidly changing socio-economic environment following Aleksandr II’s reforms left many people vulnerable to the changing environment of everyday life, and this explains, to a certain extent, the wide acceptance of these ideas. There was a developing nationalist mood in Russia before and during the First World War, and this was used by the authorities to foster short-term social cohesion in support of the regime (Schimmelpenninck Van Der Oye, 2001; Lohr, 2003). As was usually the case, this mobilization was achieved by creating an image of a dangerous, conspiring ‘Other’, in the form of other nationalities. This alienated many ethnic groups, which in turn led to concern on the part of the authorities about potential treason.
Fears about rebellion within the Russian Empire demonstrate the pervasiveness of conspiracy theories among different social and political groups by the end of the Imperial period. Fuller (2006) argues that the pattern of conspiracy thinking, together with other social and political developments, prepared the intellectual platform for the February and October revolutions of 1917, and played a crucial role in undermining the position of the ruling elites. Fear of treason and conspiracy became accepted features of the interpretation of the political situation in late Imperial Russia, and contributed to the development of a conspiracy culture in the Soviet period.
The Soviet Period
While the political and intellectual elites of Imperial Russia occasionally utilized ideas of conspiracy to secure their positions, and justify the suspension of liberal reforms, in the Soviet period these ideas found a new purpose. The politics of large-scale social and economic modernization led to the instrumental deployment of conspiracy discourse in Soviet propaganda. The ‘enemy of the people’ (vrag naroda) is a particularly clear example of the Bolsheviks’ binary view of the world (Bonnell, 1999), as is the discursive division of the world into the socialist and capitalist blocs. The search for internal and external enemies became a paradigm of Bolshevik rule after the 1917 revolution. The Bolshevik state had to protect itself from plots by capitalists and members of the ancien régime. The Emergency Committee (the notorious Cheka) and the Red Army fought against counter-revolutionaries who, in cahoots with their Western allies, had supposedly started the Civil War to reinstate the capitalist exploiters (Mints, 1979). This understanding of the Soviet Union as a besieged nation became a norm in Soviet life, especially in the 1930s when the active search for public enemies and ‘wreckers’ began. During the Great Terror, as Sheila Fitzpatrick (2000) has demonstrated, the pursuit of conspiracies affected millions of citizens in all walks of life. To the authorities’ suspicious eye, friends and colleagues who created informal networks to help each other survive the hard times of post-revolutionary Russia looked like groups of plotters and spies.
The incredible number of deaths in the first post-revolutionary decades, as well as the devastated state of the economy, put additional burdens both on the party apparatus, and on ordinary people. The latter had to work in extreme conditions and under enormous pressure because of the state’s single-minded focus on the country’s economic development. The growth of Nazism and the threat of foreign invasion by the capitalist states meant that what had previously just been speculation about the possibility of conspiracy and ‘wrecking’ was now portrayed as fact. In 1937, an article in the Pravda, the Soviet main newspaper, stated: ‘We know that engines do not stop by themselves, machine tools do not break down on their own, boilers do not explode on their own. Someone’s hand is hidden behind these events’ (quoted in Rittersporn, 2014, p. 34). This supposed certainty about the work of a malevolent hand enabled bureaucrats at all levels to explain away malfunctions in the economy and industry. In this environment of Stalinist repression, suspicion about conspiracies infiltrated all layers of Soviet life and even undermined the legitimacy of ruling elites.
The mass purges of the 1930s are often explained by reference to Stalin’s paranoid personality (Robins and Post, 1987; Rhodes, 1997; Stal, 2013). This is an oversimplification although it is worth noting that constant power struggles did result in Stalin becoming suspicious. He dealt with internal opposition, as well as criticism from ‘old Bolsheviks’, with extreme post-revolutionary brutality, even though most of his victims swore allegiance to him (Khlevniuk, 2009). The battle for rapid industrialization resulted in a complete refusal to compromise and a demand for total loyalty. In the 1930s the intelligence service [OGPU] warned of imminent war on two fronts: with Japan and the Nazi Germany; this exacerbated the atmosphere of fear of subversion, which in turn reinforced Stalin’s conviction that there were indeed malevolent plots. OGPU derived its ‘evidence’ of conspiracies by forcefully extracting the names of possible co-conspirators from people who had already been arrested. The apparent prevalence of ‘enemies’ was a further factor in spreading fear throughout the population, and reinforced Stalin’s belief that there were malevolent plots against the country. Hence this use of fear was not a cynical ruse to gain greater control over the population; Stalin succumbed to it himself. In the view of the Soviet rulers, any relaxation of domestic policies, or the toning down of punishment for those who had not fulfilled the plan, could provide counter-revolutionaries with a reason for not adhering to the demands of the state (Harris, 2015). The notion that the country was under siege instrumentalized the conspiratorial discourse, turning it into an effective tool to secure absolute power.