'Sherlock Holmes of the Revolution' who serially exposed Tsarist secret police agents provocateurs
On the night of the October Revolution, Trotsky's men knocked on his Petrograd apartment door. Burtsev had just published Nashe Obshcheye Delo that morning — the only opposition newspaper to appear in the city that day.
A revolutionary and publisher from the Narodnaya Volya tradition, he became known as the 'Sherlock Holmes of the Revolution' for serially exposing Okhrana agents provocateurs including Yevno Azef. He founded the historical journal Byloye (Былое), systematically documenting the 19th-century Russian revolutionary movement, and testified at the Berne Trial that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an Okhrana forgery. Arrested on Trotsky's orders on the day of the October Revolution, he became the Soviet regime's first political prisoner, and continued his anti-Bolshevik and anti-fascist struggle from exile in Paris.
Career Timeline
- 1882–1885Studied at St. Petersburg and Kazan universities; joined Narodnaya Volya circles
- 1885–1888Arrested, imprisoned at Peter and Paul Fortress, exiled to Irkutsk region
- 1888–1904In exile, published Svobodnaya Rossiya and Narodovolets; published Za Sto Let in London
- 1900–1907Founded and edited the historical journal Byloye in London and St. Petersburg
- 1906–1909Serially exposed Okhrana agents provocateurs: Azef, Harting, and others
- 1911–1914Published Budushcheye in Paris
- 1914–1917Returned to Russia, arrested and exiled to Turukhansk; amnestied, published anti-Bolshevik Obshcheye Delo
- 1918–1942Exiled in Paris, anti-Bolshevik and anti-fascist activities, testified at the Berne Trial
Related historical events
Exposing the Protocols Forgery and the Anti-Fascist Struggle
In the 1930s Burtsev fought against Nazism and the antisemitism that served as its propaganda instrument. At the Berne Trial of 1933–1935, he testified alongside P.N. Milyukov, B.I. Nicolaevsky, and S.G. Svatikov that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a fabrication of the Tsarist Okhrana. Burtsev traced the forgery to Pyotr Rachkovsky, head of the Okhrana's Paris bureau, who had stitched together passages from Maurice Joly's satirical Dialogue in Hell and Hermann Goedsche's novel Biarritz. He applied the same investigative methods, cross-referencing secret police documents, that he had used to expose Yevno Azef in 1908.
In 1938 Burtsev published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Proved Forgery in Paris; its subtitle declared: 'Rachkovsky fabricated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Hitler gave them worldwide fame.' The research also appeared in The Slavonic and East European Review (1938). After the occupation of Paris, the Gestapo summoned him for interrogation but released him due to his advanced age; he died in a charity hospital in 1942. His proof of the Protocols forgery stood as both the culmination of the counter-Okhrana work that had begun with Azef and his final turn toward anti-fascism.