The Occupation Fund Documents: A Reassessment of "A Crude and Ignorant Forgery"

Abstract

A collection of two hundred and forty-one highly incriminating documents which expose Russian policy during the critical decade of the eighteen-eighties was originally published in Bulgaria in 1892 by D. Petkov under the title, The Occupation Fund. The documents are best known to Western scholars in the French and German translations of R. Leonoff, entitled Documents secrets de la politique russe en orient, 1881-1890, and Geheime Dokumente der russischen Orient-Politik, 1881-1890 respectively. Since they were allegedly stolen from the secret archives of the Russian consulates in Bulgaria and Rumania by a former Russian official, Mikhail Jakobson, the group is frequently referred to as the Jakobson collection. The Documents secrets created a great sensation in their day, were denounced as forgeries by the tsarist Government and historians, and have remained a controversial collection ever since their publication. The October 1953 issue of The American Slavic and East European Review contains an article by Charles and Barbara Jelavich entitled “The Occupation Fund Documents: a Diplomatic Forgery.”