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. 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, a diary of Nilus' years at Optina. 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". 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. ==Bibliography==