Capitalised slogans scattered through the text form a hysterical poem in free verse that gives as good a précis of the book as any:

WE SHALL DESTROY GOD

MASSES LED BY LIES

MONOPOLY CAPITAL

WE SHALL ENSLAVE GENTILES

JEWISH SUPERSTATE

CHRISTIAN YOUTH DESTROYED

OUR GOAL – WORLD POWER

POISON OF LIBERALISM

WE NAME PRESIDENTS

WE SHALL DESTROY

WE CONTROL THE PRESS

ONLY LIES PRINTED

GENTILES ARE STUPID

WE FORBID CHRIST

WE SHALL BE CRUEL

WE SHALL CHANGE HISTORY

WE CAUSE DEPRESSIONS

GENTILE STATES BANKRUPT

WE ARE WOLVES

It should be laughable. The plagiarism from Maurice Joly is still as plain as daylight: whole chunks are verbatim quotes from the original. But somewhere in Nicolas’s being a tocsin bell is tolling. The wheels of the train beat out a single verse from Job: For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.

*

THERE IS AN INEVITABLE FORCE behind the clamour for more rights. In a world of telegraphs and flying machines, the claims of divinely sanctioned rule and the status-sustaining myth of a hereditary elite look crumblier than an old brocade. Rachkovsky knows this. He knows too that People’s Will are fanatical and violent (brave and unsentimental, they’d say, of course), but small in number. A bigger worry is what’s happening now: mass-based movements, moderates on the march, calling for a shake-up of the status quo. How might one counter that? What would blacken their reputation at a stroke? How might you seed doubt about progress in people’s minds?

Huge inequalities of wealth, unanswerable elites, hunger, plague, violence, the care of the sick and elderly, economic change scouring away old ways of life, unhappy would-be migrants desperate for a new homeland: these raise big and complex questions. To answer them, people would need to think deeply, talk to one another, ask which stories they’d prefer to live by.

The questions that need to be answered are the ones that have exercised the great minds of political philosophy for millennia: What is fair? What is the right way to be in this world, and what are its uses? How ought we to be governed? How do we reconcile the claims of faith and state, of law and conscience? How do we balance our freedom with our security? What is our obligation to the weakest in our society? How much responsibility do we bear for suffering beyond our borders?

Not one of them is easy. And there is a more troubling possibility hovering behind them: people are pursuing these questions as if they have answers, but what if they don’t?

Rachkovsky intends to make things simpler, to save people the effort of thinking too hard. Instead of politics and mess and many dispiriting questions, just the one: what do you think of the Jews?