Boris Leo Brasol, born Boris Lvovich Brazol (Russian: Борис Львович Бразоль; Ukrainian: Борис Львович Бразоль, romanized:Borys Lvovych Brazol; March 31, 1885 - March 19, 1963), was a Russian lawyer and literary critic. After the October Revolution he settled in the United States.[1]
Biography
Boris Brasol was born in Poltava (today in Ukraine), in 1885. His father was the homeopath Lev Evgenevich Brasol (aka Léon Brasol or Léon Brazol)[2] (1854 - January 1927), who was Superintendent of the Petrograd Homoeopathic Hospital in St. Petersburg, Russia. After graduation from the law department of St Petersburg University, Boris served in the Imperial Russian Ministry of Justice, where he took part in the prosecution of the Beilis blood libel case, in which Jewish factory superintendent Menahem Mendel Beilis was accused of ritual murder. In 1912, Brasol was sent to Lausanne to study forensic science.
During World War I, Brasol held the rank of Lieutenant in the Tsar's army. In 1916, he was recalled from the front and sent to the United States to work as a lawyer for an Anglo-Russian purchasing committee. After the October Revolution broke out Brasol stayed in the United States.[1]
Brasol had an extensive publishing career in the United States. He published "Socialism vs. Civilization" (1920), "The World at the Cross Roads" (1921), "The Balance Sheet of Sovietism" (1922), "Elements of Crime" (1927), and "The Mighty Three: Poushkin, Gogol, Dostoievsky" (1934). In 1935, he founded the Pushkin Committee, and from 1937 until 1963 served as President of the Pushkin Society in America.[1]
Brasol was a virulent anti-Semite, and he said about his work on disseminating the English translation of the Protocols, that "Within the last year I have written three books, two of which have done the Jews more injury than would have been done to them by ten pogroms."[7]
Brasol was member of Aufbau Vereinigung, which financed the Nazi Party. He received funding from American industrialist Henry Ford. In 1938, Brasol, who now had American citizenship, secretly helped organize an Anti-Comintern Congress in Germany with the support of the Gestapo. The assembly included representatives from Canada, France, England, and Switzerland.[9]Heinrich Himmler showed interest in Brasol in August 1938, and even asked Heinrich Müller to compile a report on the previous activities of the white emigration.[10]
↑Under the name Léon Brasol, Lev was the author of a work titled Samuel Hahnemann: A Sketch of His Life and Career (London: Adland and Son, 1896) (Reprinted from Transactions of the International Homoeopathic Convention, 1896)
↑"Archived copy". American Pushkin Society. Archived from the original on 25 December 2015. Retrieved 25 December 2015.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
