Matvei Golovinski

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Matvei Vasilyevich Golovinski (alternatively Mathieu; Russian: Матвей Васильевич Головинский; 1865-1920) was an operative of Imperial Russian secret service, a writer and journalist. Based on evidence, it is currently believed that it was he who was the author of the infamous and notorious plagiarism, and hoax, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Contents

[edit] Life

Matvei Golovinski was born into an aristocratic family in the village of Ivashevka (Ивашевка), Simbirsk guberniya. His father, Vasili Golovinski (Василий Головинский) was a friend of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Both were members of the Petrashevsky Circle, sentenced to the capital punishment as conspirators and both were pardoned later. Vasili Golovinski died in 1875 and Matvei Golovinski was reared by his mother and the French nanny.

While studying jurisprudence, Golovinski joined an anti-Semitic counter-revolutionary group Holy Brotherhood ("Святое Братство"). [1] Upon graduation, he worked for the Okhranka, secretly arranging pro-government coverage in the press. Golovinski's career almost collapsed and he had to leave the country after his activities were publicly exposed by Maxim Gorky. In France, he wrote and published articles on assignments of Chief of Russian secret service in Paris, Pyotr Rachkovsky.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Golovinsky switched sides and worked for the Bolsheviks until his death in 1920.

[edit] Authorship of the Protocols

On November 19, 1999, Patrick Bishop reported from Paris:

Research by a leading Russian historian, Mikhail Lepekhine, in recently opened archives has found the forgery to be the work of Mathieu Golovinski, opportunistic scion of an aristocratic but rebellious family that drifted into a life of espionage and propaganda work. After working for the czarist secret service, he later changed sides and joined the Bolsheviks. Mr. Lepekhine’s findings, published in the French magazine L'Express, would appear to clear up the last remaining mystery surrounding the Protocols.[1]

In his 2001 book The Question of the Authorship of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a Ukrainian scholar Vadim Skuratovsky offers a scrupulous and extensive literary, historical and linguistic analysis of the original Russian language text of the Protocols. Skuratovsky provides evidence that Charles Joly, a son of Maurice Joly (on whose writings the Protocols are based), visited Saint Petersburg in 1902 and that Golovinsky and Charles Joly worked together at Le Figaro in Paris. Skuratovsky also traces the influences of Dostoyevsky's prose (in particular, The Grand Inquisitor and The Possessed) on Golovinsky's writings, including The Protocols.

In his book The Non-Existent Manuscript. A Study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion, Italian researcher Cesare De Michelis writes [2] that hypothesis of Golovinski authorship was based on statement by Princess Catherine Radziwill, who claimed that she had seen manuscript of the Protocols written by Golovinsky, Rachkovsky and Manusevich in 1905, but in 1905 Golovinsky and Rachkovsky had already left Paris and moved to Saint-Petersburg. Princess Radziwill was known to be an unreliable source.

Golovinski had been linked to the work before; the German writer Konrad Heiden identified him as an author of the Protocols in 1944.[3]

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Protocols of Zion forger named by Patrick Bishop (Daily Telegraph) November 19, 1999 (Issue 1638)
  2. ^ [1]
  3. ^ Forging Protocols by Charles Paul Freund. Reason Magazine, February 2000

[edit] External links

[edit] Further reading

  • (Russian) The Question of the Authorship of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" by Vadim Skuratovsky: Kiev, 2001. ISBN 966-7273-12-1
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../m/a/t/Matvei_Golovinski_8605.html"
In other languages