Derisory Numbers

A letter found in the Times Literary Supplement:-

The ‘Protocols’

Sir, – Christopher Hitchens, in the course of his somewhat hysterical review of Denis MacShane’s Globalising Hatred (November 21), declares that “the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion . . . are a mere fabrication, put together by Eastern Orthodox Christian fanatics in the pay of the tsarist secret police”. In their scholarly history of the pre-Revolutionary Russian secret police, Fontanka 16, Charles A. Ruud and Sergei A. Stepanov subject this oft-repeated claim to careful analysis, concluding that the Okhranka had nothing to do with the production of this lurid booklet, which was published in derisory numbers in Russia. Has Hitchens come across evidence showing that the Imperial police did after all arrange its publication? If so it would be of great interest to Russian historians, and one hopes he will make the evidence known in the pages of the TLS...

NIKOLAI TOLSTOY
Court Close, Southmoor, near Abingdon, Berkshire.

So, derisory numbers is supposed to minimize the invidious and deathly influence of that tract?