Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (9 page)

What I learned on that journey was that invocations of the
Protocols
and other manifestations of European anti-Semitism were rife in the Arab and wider Muslim world. Take just one example, from the “Political National Education” page of the Palestinian Authority daily newspaper
Al-Hayat al-Jadida
(January 25, 2001). There it claimed that “disinformation has been one of the bases of moral and psychological manipulation among the Israelis . . .
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
did not ignore the importance of using propaganda to promote the Zionist goals.” And it directly quoted our old friend Protocol Twelve, though leaving out any archaic references to the god Vishnu.

The Palestinians are few in number and the nature of their grievance against some Jews is well understood. The tensions in the Middle East also exemplify the danger that the
Protocols
still represent. At the time of this writing, there is considerable concern that the Islamic Republic of Iran might be developing a nuclear weapon. As the prime target for such a weapon, Israel might seek to take preemptive action—action which could lead to a wider war—as it did in 1981, when it bombed the first Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq.

In April 2004, an Iranian TV station broadcast a documentary series titled
Al-Sameri wa al-Saher
. The series’ purpose was to explain to Iranians how the Jews control Hollywood. For example,
Funny Girl—
starring “the ugly Jewish actress Barbra Streisand”—was one of a number of movies designed to depict the Jews favorably.
Tootsie
was another.
Yentl “
dealt with the Zionists’ wish to benefit from feminism.”
The Matrix
was a “meeting point between Hollywood and Jewish Zionist fundamentalism”;
Lawrence of Arabia
was an attempt to “infantilize the Arabs”; and
Alien
was designed to demonize non-Westerners. All of this, a narrator claimed, was “in total compliance with
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
.”

But just in case the Iranian viewer of the early twenty-first century was not fully versed in the story of the
Protocols
, the documentary carefully outlined the story of the Basel Congress of 1897, with its own new twist. In this version, some Russian policemen set fire to the congress hall while the delegates were inside. Terrified, “the Jews fled, and the policemen went inside and gathered up all the documents and sent them to Moscow.” Among these writings they found what was later called
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. “The
Protocols
were divided into twenty-four parts,” the narrator claimed, “and included the Satanic Jewish ideas of taking over the world using a Jewish government, after destroying all of Orthodox Russia, Catholic Europe, the pope’s reign, and Islam.”

In May and June 2008, the Iranian television news channel IRINN showed a series titled
The Secret of Armageddon
, in which various academics and “researchers” testified to the truth of the
Protocols
. The narrator concluded the series by tying the old conspiracy to new ones:

Today, there are many indications that the “hidden hands” of world Zionism were involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack. According to a large group of Western intellectuals, the Zionists are the real rulers of the United States. According to irrefutable documents published by independent American media outlets, the Zionists used intelligence agents and spies, with the full cooperation of agencies with[in] the country, to carry out this terrorist operation in full view of the world, in order to prepare the ground for taking over Afghanistan and Iraq, and to realize the dream of a greater Israel.

The thread from Goedsche to the present day has never properly been snapped. Johann von Leers died in 1965, incidentally, but not in prison or in Germany or even in a South American hideaway. Somehow he had fled to the Middle East, lain low, converted to Islam under the name of Omar Amin, and then resurfaced in Egypt as an adviser on propaganda to the Arab nationalist government of President Nasser. One of Nasser’s practices, while von Leers was with him, was to hand out, to those who wanted them and those who didn’t, copies of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
.

2. DARK MIRACLES

The Communist Party is based on the principle of coercion which doesn’t recognize any limitations or inhibitions. And the central idea of this principle of boundless coercion is not coercion by itself but the absence of any limitation whatsoever—moral, political, and even physical. Such a party is capable of achieving miracles

—GEORGY PYATAKOV, CONVERSATION WITH NIKOLAI VALENTINOV
¹

O
n January 23, 1937, a trial began in central Moscow, the second of three great Soviet judicial events that were to shock the world. Under the high ceiling of a room that had been, in pre-revolutionary days, part of the fashionable Nobles’ Club, seventeen senior members of the Communist Party confessed to having done everything they could to undermine the new Soviet Union and to bring about its collapse. For a week, during morning, afternoon, and evening sessions, an audience composed of party members, selected “workers,” representatives of the diplomatic corps, and foreign journalists listened with growing consternation and bewilderment as the seventeen confessed to a secret campaign of deliberately sabotaging Soviet industry. And as if this weren’t diabolical enough, the conspirators agreed that they had done this in collaboration with the Soviet Union’s greatest enemies, the German National Socialists—all at the behest of the renegade exile, Leon Trotsky. The story that came out at the trial went like this.

In August 1931, Georgy (Yuri) Leonidovich Pyatakov, chairman of the Central Administration of Chemical Industries of the USSR, traveled to Germany on an official visit for discussions with local civil servants and industrialists. However, these legitimate contacts were not the only people he met. He also had a meeting that was well outside the official itinerary. In fact, the encounter was top secret, even from the Soviet security apparatus.

This clandestine rendezvous, arranged through intermediaries, took place at the restaurant Am Zoo just off Berlin’s fashionable Kurfürstendamm. Waiting for Pyatakov at a small table was a young, dark-haired man whom Pyatakov would have known immediately—though he hadn’t seen him for a number of years—as Leon Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov.

Now Pyatakov, who in the 1920s had been one of Trotsky’s most fervent supporters, was no longer an ally of the exiled leader, having on a number of occasions made clear his later allegiance to Trotsky’s successful nemesis, Stalin. Nevertheless, he sat down with Sedov and listened to what the young man had to say. Apparently, Sedov had come at his father’s urgent behest.
²
There may have been a recent lull in Trotsky’s never-ending campaign against Stalin, but according to Sedov, the struggle was now being resumed. Except this time Trotsky had allies, big allies, at the heart of the Communist Party itself. The followers of two other major leaders, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, were going to join with Trotsky’s acolytes in an all-out attempt to remove Stalin from power. “Trotsky asks,” said Sedov, “do you, Pyatakov, intend to take a hand in this fight?”

As the waiters cleared away the dishes around the two Russians and as other customers sipped their coffees, Pyatakov gave his consent: he was in. Sedov was delighted. His father, he said, had never had any doubt that, despite their earlier falling-out, Comrade Pyatakov would step up to the plate when he was needed. Then the son outlined the plan. It was Trotsky’s view that there was no way to get rid of Stalin by anything as noble as a mass movement of the workers and peasants. Only a strategy of “wrecking” was likely to work, in which the achievements of the rapidly industrializing socialist state were systematically undermined through sabotage and terrorism. But it had also been concluded that such wrecking was insufficient on its own. The plotters would require the help of countries antagonistic toward the still youthful Soviet Union. A betrayal of all Bolshevik values though this might seem, it was necessary to get the job done. “Whoever tries to brush these questions aside,” said Sedov, passing on what Trotsky had told him, “signs his own
testimonium pauperatis
.”
³
Pyatakov didn’t demur.

Party Quarrels

Let us stop a moment and consider this man Pyatakov, who has just given himself over to a plot to destroy almost everything that he and his comrades have been building for nearly fifteen years.

Georgy Leonidovich Pyatakov (party names: Kyivsky, Lyalin, Petro, or Yaponets) was born in the Cherkassy district of Ukraine and had probably just celebrated his forty-first birthday at the time of his trip to Berlin. Into those forty-one years he had stuffed several lifetimes of agitating, revolutionizing, fighting, organizing, administering, and finally state-building. His proletarian record was exemplary. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1912, and in the civil war following the 1917 revolution helped organize the Red Army in Ukraine, which was then largely occupied by White Russian forces under General Denikin. On one occasion, he, along with his brother, was taken by the enemy. As Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher heard it, the two Pyatakov brothers, along with a number of other Bolsheviks, were led out to be dispatched. “The execution was in progress and the brother had already been shot when the firing squad had to flee before the Reds who had captured the town and were converging on the site where the massacre took place. Straight from the corpses of his brother and of his nearest comrades, Pyatakov went to assume command over the Red Guards.”
⁴

So this was no armchair revolutionary. Photographs taken at the time show a thin man in a leather jacket, with a thick blondish beard, an explosion of hair, and steel-rimmed spectacles. When the war was over and the Bolsheviks had won, Pyatakov threw himself into the business of helping to construct the new economy of the world’s first socialist state. He was to become, in Deutscher’s words, the “moving spirit and chief organizer of the Soviet drive for industrialization.”
⁵

Pyatakov evolved into what some other Bolshevik leaders—believing in the primacy of revolutionary politics over mere administration and government—condescendingly called a
spetz
, or specialist. In 1921 he took over the vast coal-mining industry in the Donbas area, and in 1922 became a deputy head of the State Planning Committee (known as Gosplan) and deputy chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy of the USSR. By then he was in his early thirties, and his devotion to building the nation’s economy earned him a strange double accolade from the living prophet of the Russian Revolution, Lenin himself. In his famous testament written over Christmas and New Year of 1922-1923 and designed to be read out at the Twelfth Party Congress later that spring, Lenin advised his colleagues to remove Stalin from the general secretaryship of the party and warned of the possibility of a serious future schism between the Georgian roughneck and Trotsky. But Lenin also singled out four other leading cadres for special mention: Zinoviev, Kamenev, and two of their more junior colleagues, Bukharin and Pyatakov. “Of the younger members of the Central Committee,” Lenin wrote, “I want to say a few words about Bukharin and Pyatakov. They are, in my opinion, the most able forces among the younger ones.” He added, “Pyatakov is a man undoubtedly distinguished in will and ability, but too much devoted to administration and the administrative side of things to be relied on in a serious political question.”
⁶
Lenin hoped, however, that Pyatakov would be able to evolve.

Two months later, the father of Russian communism suffered a nearly fatal stroke that put an end to his effective leadership. He died at the beginning of 1924. His testament, too critical of almost all his potential successors, was never read to the congress, and the very battle he’d warned about was gradually joined.

Over the next five years, and in various permutations, Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin made alliances against one another, now combining as a “left,” now as a “right” strand. The two constants were that Trotsky and Stalin were always opposed to each other, and that Stalin—a master of such maneuvers—always won. Crudely, the right, led by Bukharin, Tomsky, and Rykov, believed in a more gradual transformation of society in alliance with the peasants, alongside some level of private enterprise. The left, antagonistic toward the peasants, opposed to any trace of capitalism and in favor of rapid industrialization, was headed by the Leningrad (as Saint Petersburg was called from 1924 to 1991) party boss Zinoviev, the Moscow boss Kamenev, and Trotsky himself.
⁷
Stalin held the ring, making and unmaking alliances as was convenient, using the personal jealousies and anxieties of the other leaders for his own ends. Trotsky, cast as the dangerous Bonaparte figure, waiting in the wings for the moment to end the Revolution and assert his own power, was deserted at the critical moment by Zinoviev and Kamenev. Together with Stalin, these two formed a temporary triumvirate at the head of the party.

It was in October 1926, at a meeting of the Politburo, that Trotsky finally lost his temper and in front of the astounded members denounced Stalin as “the gravedigger of the Revolution.” Shocked and by now frightened, his supporters made their way to Trotsky’s flat in the Kremlin. Among them was Pyatakov. In Trotsky’s absence, he flopped down into a chair and muttered, “You know, I have smelled gunpowder, but I have never seen anything like this. Why did Lev Davidovich say it? Stalin will never forgive him until the third and fourth generation!”
⁸