Sergei Aleksandrovich Nilus (also Sergius, and variants; Russian: Серге́й Алекса́ндрович Ни́лус; – 14 January 1929) was a Russian religious writer, self-described mystic, and prolific anti-Semite.
His book Velikoe v malom i antikhrist, kak blizkaja politicheskaja vozmozhnost. Zapiski pravoslavnogo ("The Great within the Small and Antichrist, an Imminent Political Possibility. Notes of an Orthodox Believer", 1903), about the coming of the Antichrist, is now primarily known for the fact that in its second edition, in 1905, Nilus published the pseudohistory Protocols of the Elders of Zion as his final chapter. This was the first time that this text was published in full in Russia (an abridged version had reportedly been published in 1903 in the newspaper Znamya). He wrote a number of further books, mostly on topics of the end times and the Antichrist, published between 1908 and 1917. After the Russian Revolution, his warning of the coming of the Antichrist were interpreted as a warning of the impending communist revolution, and his works were banned as anti-Soviet propaganda in the Soviet Union.
Sergei Nilus was born on in Moscow, the son of Alexander Petrovich Nilus, a landowner in the governorate of Orel. His father was a Lutheran of Livonian extraction (the surname Nilus is a Livonian form of Nicholas), his mother was from Russian nobility. Sergei was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church.[1] He studied law and graduated from the University of Moscow, and was a magistrate in Transcaucasia. He later moved to Biarritz, living there with a mistress named Natalya Komarovskaya until his estates went bankrupt and she broke off their relationship. Though he was raised in the Russian Orthodox Church, Nilus did not care much about his religion until an accident with his horse caused him to recall an unfulfilled childhood vow to visit the Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra. Later he met St. John of Kronstadt, whom Nilus credited with both healing a throat infection and turning him back to his Christian faith.
In 1903, Nilus published his book Velikoye v malom i antikhrist kak blizkaya politicheskaya vozmozhnost'. Zapiski pravoslavnogo veruyushchego (The Great Within the Small and Antichrist, an Imminent Political Possibility. Notes of an Orthodox Believer). The text of the Protocols appeared as Chapter Twelve of the 1905 reprint of the book. The newly appointed chairman of the Council of Ministers, Pyotr Stolypin, ordered an investigation into the provenance of the text, and it was soon discovered that it had first appeared in antisemitic circles in Paris, around the year 1897 or 1898.
In 1906, Nilus married Yelena Alexandrovna Ozerova, who had served as a lady-in-waiting to Alexandra Feodorovna, last empress of Russia. In 1907, the Niluses moved into a small house just outside the Optina Monastery near Kozelsk, where he lived until 1912. During that time he published several books on spiritual topics. One, intriguingly, was to become his most widely read book and one which the last Tsar and Empress were to read during their last incarceration at the Ipatiev House, On the Banks of the River of God,[2] a diary of Nilus' years at Optina, of his conversations with the many Orthodox Starets living there, and particularly of how they viewed the increasing De-Christianization of Russian culture even long before the October Revolution.
For example, Nilus wrote, "A nun arrived... and told me that it is impossible now for nuns to travel by train: there is no abuse, mockery, or oath that Satanic malice will not pour down on their poor heads... She has to put on a dark blue skirt so as to pass for a peaceable old woman, since otherwise she would be unable to walk down the aisle for all the cursing of monasteries and those who practice the monastic life. Such is Holy Rus! The poor people! Pitiful Russia!"[3]
At another point in the same book, an Optina Starets confided in Nilus, "A godless, faithless time has come for Orthodox Russia. The Russian has begun to live by the flesh and only the flesh... He is an Orthodox Christian in name but no longer in spirit."[4]
Nilus discovered the papers of Nikolay Motovilov, a member of the Russian nobility, Fool for Christ, and a disciple of St. Seraphim of Sarov. Nilus published one of Motoviliv's manuscripts as "A Wonderful Revelation to the World: The Conversation of St. Seraphim with Nicholas Alexandrovich Motovilov on the acquisition of the Holy Spirit".[5] That manuscript would become one of the most-read Orthodox texts of modern times. In 1912, a report was received by the Holy Synod that Nilus was living inside the monastery with his wife. Although the Niluses were not actually living within the monastery, but rather as guests in a small house nearby, Nilus was ordered by the Synod to leave Optina.
Nilus circulated several editions of The Protocols in Russia during the first decade of the twentieth century. Though the early prints were in Russian, The Protocols soon spread to the rest of Europe via anti-communist Russian refugees who fled after the October Revolution. The Russian text was also reprinted in Berlin, in 1922. Meanwhile, due to censorship in the Soviet Union, Nilus was unable to publish any further writings until his death in 1929.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Nilus' works were again edited in Russia, beginning in 1992, with an edition of his collected works appearing in five volumes in 2009.
Posthumous editions:
"Vladimir Solov’ev and Sergej Nilus: Apocalypticism and Judeophobia" in Reconciler and Polemicist (eds.) Wil van den Bercken, Manon de Courten, Evert van der Zweerde, and Vladimir Solov’ev (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), pp. 287–296.