In brief, the triumph of Satan. The late Metropolitan continued in this vein: "We shall create chaos and confusion in the workings of the government." He dealt in considerable detail with the Protocols, noting that some historians do not believe in their authenticity or that of the Dulles Plan. He also attacked the Catholic West, which succumbed to "vanity and false glory of worldly greatness" and fell away from the universal fullness of the True Orthodox. He refers to the cynicism of "enlightened Europe", which is simply beyond words. He notes that not only the Learned Elders of Zion worked for the downfall of Russia; in 1564 a German named Heinrich Staden, having lived there for 13 years, worked out a plan for the seizure and destruction of the country. But he always returns to the Protocols. While admitting that their history is rather murky and that he is far from qualified to judge whether they are a forgery or not, he does not shrink from fully endorsing their message, because all that happened during the 80 years that have passed since they first appeared confirms this message.

The Dulles document appears therefore as a modernised version of the Protocols. It has been endorsed and/or quoted with approval by a whole array of prominent Russian citizens, including Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head of the Liberal-Democratic party (LDPR); Nikita Mikhailov, one of Russia's most distinguished film-makers; Sergei Kara Murza, professor of chemistry and political commentator; and Sergei Glazyev, another well-known political figure. There is, however, a very important difference between the Dostoevsky version and the one set out by the Metropolitan and his followers. In Dostoevsky's novel, the person announcing the conspiracy (the younger Verkhovensky) is a liar: there is no conspiracy, as it is a figment of his imagination, whereas the contemporary announcers talk about it as if it were a horrible, immediate reality, a danger just around the corner.

Since Allen Dulles has been dead for almost five decades, his "doctrine" had to be reinforced and updated by some more recent super secret plans, such as the often-quoted Brzezinski-Albright design for engineering the disintegration of Russia, invoked for instance by Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Russian National Security Council, in an interview this past October. However, since Zbigniew Brzezinski too has been out of office for a long time (since the Carter Administration of the 1970s, in fact), a more recent hostile cabal will probably have to be discovered soon.

The Dulles masterplan is by no means the most extreme case of political conspiracy theory; there have been many more in recent years. It has been adduced here in some detail because it helps to explain the readiness with which forgeries have been accepted as gospel truth by many in contemporary Russia, first by extremists only but subsequently also by sections of the establishment. A Russian citizen watching television in the evening will be exposed to the historical programme of Nikolai Starikov (to mention but one representative of this genre) which "prove" in convincing detail that the Russian revolutions of 1917 were engineered by the British secret service (the question of whether Somerset Maugham played the decisive role in this context is left open), and that Hitler too was an agent of MI5 or MI6 but did not really want to attack the Soviet Union. He was egged on, however, by Churchill and Roosevelt.

This will be followed by a documentary demonstrating that Trotsky was the father of German Nazism (this also happens to be the title of the series). If the viewer still has an appetite for sensational revelations, he can switch to yet another series dealing with the connection of the "German patriot Martin Heidegger" and the Balfour Declaration. Retiring to bed with a good book he may well chose the immensely popular Maxim Kalashnikov (no relation of the weapon designer) maintaining that while the present Russian generation is pretty hopeless, a new generation of heroes could be produced in record time, following the pioneering work done by the SS Ahnenerbe in the study of the Aryan race which will put right everything that is wrong or imperfect in contemporary Russia.