A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel

by Levin, Edmund

  As Andrei walked westward past the mostly commercial storefronts of Slobodka’s dreary streets, he may have looked forward to strolling across the magnificent entrance to the city of Kiev, the famous Nikolaevsky Chain Bridge over the Dnieper. Half a mile long, with four stone towers, each one hundred feet tall, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world when it was completed in 1856.

  Little more is known about what Andrei did after he crossed that bridge. He was spotted at a market that morning about a half hour from home; he may have been looking to buy gunpowder for his homemade gun, which was his passion. He had fashioned it out of a piece of pipe he’d bought for thirty kopeks. (A handy boy—later, at the trial, his grandmother Olympiada said, “Whatever he saw, he made.”) Maybe he was planning all the while to obtain the gunpowder from Zhenya, who made his own. Whatever the exact nature of his plans, walking at a good pace, it took him over an hour to get to the Cheberyak house in Lukianovka. He knocked on the door and Zhenya came out to play.

  A little before seven a.m. on that Saturday, a lamplighter named Kazimir Shakhovsky was walking home, ladder on his shoulder, having filled the streetlamps on his route with kerosene. He lived on Polovetskaya Street, about fifty steps away from Zhenya Cheberyak’s home on Upper Yurkovskaya Street. He remembered the day well because he was on his way back from his boss’s house, where he had just got a ruble advance on his salary and a fresh batch of kerosene. At home, his wife, Ulyana, took the ruble and headed to the grocery store. On the way, she saw Andrei and his friend Zhenya standing on the corner of Polovetskaya and Upper Yurkovskaya talking and eating candy. She noticed Andrei was not wearing a coat and was carrying his belt of books. She spent ten kopeks on some bread and sausage that her husband ate for breakfast.

  Kazimir left the house, passing the state liquor store on the ground floor of the Cheberyaks’ building, which was already open, meaning it was a little past eight a.m. (the Russian Empire, brutal in so many ways, indulged its drinkers), and came upon Andrei and Zhenya, who were still standing on the sidewalk and talking, a little farther down the street from where Ulyana saw them. Kazimir noticed that Andrei had a jar about two inches tall with something black inside that he was sure was gunpowder. The boy was excited to see “Lamplighter,” according to Kazimir, though it is not clear why. “He ran up to me and hit me on my shoulder with his hand and asked me where I was going,” the man recalled. “He hit me pretty hard—it hurt, so I got angry … I told him he had no business knowing where I was going.” Turning around, he spat out, “Bastard!”

  If Andrei was hurt by this word, which he must have heard many, many times in his brief life, he did not show it. “Gramps, where are you going? Take me with you,” he pleaded. Kazimir was going out to catch goldfinches to sell live at the market; Andrei, who had a net and liked to catch birds, would have enjoyed that. But Lamplighter pushed ahead to his destination, leaving Andrei behind, the taunt of “bastard” ringing in his ears. He was the last person known to have seen Andrei alive.

  A short time after the body was discovered, Mendel Beilis answered a knock at the door of his home on Upper Yurkovskaya Street, which was located in the same two-story building at the entrance to the factory that housed his office. The Beilis household constituted a tiny Jewish outpost in a part of Kiev otherwise off-limits even to those Jews fortunate enough to receive government permits to live in the city. Russia’s Jews were subject to a vast, oppressive, and ever-growing burden of more than a thousand discriminatory statutes and regulations restricting where they could live, where they could worship, which schools they could attend, and what kind of work they could perform. In principle, Jews could only live in the fifteen western provinces known as the “Pale of Settlement,” which did not include Kiev. The Beilis family was only granted permission to live in Kiev, and the special privilege of living in this neighborhood, thanks to the intervention of the brick factory owner, Jonah Zaitsev, with the authorities.

  Beilis found a Russian neighbor was paying him a call. He knew the man was a proud member of the “Black Hundreds,” Russia’s anti-Semitic movement of right-wing nationalists, but that was not a barrier to social interaction between them. Beilis got along well with his Christian neighbors and had a friendly relationship with at least one other Black Hundred member. A man could hate Jews as a group and get on perfectly well with them individually.

  The neighbor delivered an odd piece of news, telling Beilis that “my paper”—the organ of his local Black Hundred group—was declaring that the boy Andrei Yushchinsky had been murdered by Jews for “ritual” purposes. Beilis would not recall perceiving this report as a threat to him or even to other Jews, and in fact the man may well have just been sharing the local news or even trying to convey to Beilis a friendly warning of possible anti-Jewish reprisals for the boy’s killing. As the days passed, the brick factory clerk gave it little thought.

  During his fifteen years in Kiev, Mendel Beilis had only once felt mortal fear as a Jew, during the terrible pogrom of 1905, when the mobs had killed scores of Jews and vandalized nearly every Jewish residence and place of business down to the lowliest stall. But when the violence began, a local priest had a guard put on Beilis’s house. Beilis had done the priest a number of favors, including arranging to sell him bricks at a discount to build a school for orphans, and allowing his funeral processions to take a shortcut across the factory grounds to the cemetery. (A nearby Christian factory owner refused the request—the priest would often tell people that the Jew had helped him out, while the Christian had not.) After the pogrom ended, the great Yiddish writer and Kiev native Sholem Aleichem wrote his daughter that no one was spared: “They have beaten our millionaires—the Brodskys, the Zaitsevs …” Indeed, the mansions of the Zaitsevs and the even wealthier Brodskys, in a fine part of town, were ransacked, while Beilis’s house was one of the few Jewish homes in the city to go untouched.

  After the revolutionary and anti-Semitic turmoil of 1905 subsided, the brick factory resumed operation. Jonah Zaitsev, a sugar magnate, used the profits from the factory to help maintain the Jewish Surgical Hospital, a state-of-the-art facility open free of charge to indigent patients of all faiths, which he had founded with a thirty-thousand-ruble donation, in honor of the wedding of Tsar Nicholas II and Alexandra in 1894. He and other Jewish notables hoped that such beneficent institutions would testify to the community-mindedness of Kiev’s Jews and their loyalty to the regime. The 1905 pogrom had been an unfortunate step backward, but the hospital’s good works continued. In working at the factory, Mendel Beilis, it could be said, was doing his part to win the goodwill of the Russian people and state.

  A week after the ghastly discovery in the cave, Andrei’s burial in the cemetery of his old Lukianovka neighborhood was a kind of homecoming, with the funeral drawing scores of mourners. His former tutor presided, and as he intoned the Russian Orthodox service he noticed pieces of paper fluttering into the open grave. At first, he assumed they were farewell notes written by friends and schoolmates. But the mimeographed sheets, caught by the breeze as bewildered mourners perhaps let them slip from their hands, spoke not of grief but of hatred and revenge:

  Orthodox Christians! The Yids have tortured Andrusha Yushchinsky to death! Every year, before their Passover,* they torture to death several dozens of Christian children in order to get their blood to mix with their matzo. They do this to commemorate the suffering of our Savior, whom they tortured to death on the cross. The official doctors found that before the Yids tortured Yushchinsky, they stripped him naked, tied him up, stabbing him in the principal veins so as to get as much blood as possible. They pierced him in fifty places. Russians! If your children are dear to you, beat the Yids. Beat them up until there is not a single Yid left in Russia. Have pity on your children! Avenge the unfortunate martyr. It is time! It is time!

  Police soon arrested a young man named Nikolai Pavlovich on suspicion of incitement to violence for handing out the inflammatory leaflets. They were unsigned, but there
was little doubt about who lay behind their creation. The Okhrana, Russia’s secret police, confirmed the twenty-two-year-old Pavlovich was “known to the division” as a member of the foremost Black Hundred organization, the Union of Russian People, and of the local right-wing youth group, the Society of the Double Headed Eagle. The tsarist security forces kept close watch on any significant political organization, even if it was ostensibly friendly to the imperial regime. Pavlovich, a sometime metalworker and petty criminal, was a typical specimen of one slice of the Black Hundreds, which included a substantial criminal element—men who did not shrink from assault, robbery, or murder. But the Black Hundreds were also the first genuine right-wing movement that united all Russia’s social classes—peasants, workers, priests, shopkeepers, nobles—in defense of the tsar, against every enemy. Above all, against the Jews. The Black Hundreds would play a central and sinister role in the Yushchinsky case. Their success in elevating a local murder into a national rallying cry epitomizes this historical moment in Imperial Russia. The venom released by the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky would signal the progressive moral and societal rot that had taken hold in Russia, and which within a half-dozen years would fatally undermine the tsarist regime.

  Russia in these years was, as the noted historian W. Bruce Lincoln described it, a society “consumed by a sense of doom.” One of the era’s greatest poets, Alexander Blok, would date his intense anxiety for the future of Russia to the very season of Andrei’s killing, the spring of 1911, when he wrote, “one could already begin to sense the smell of burning, blood and iron in the air.” When Russia’s most gifted artists and writers fixed their gaze on the future, they saw impending desolation, the fulfillment of the dread prophecies of the New Testament’s book of Revelation, including the coming of the Antichrist. The politically minded on both the right and the left also expressed their anxiety in metaphors. They often talked of living “on a volcano.” Within a few years, the liberal politician Vasily Maklakov (who would be one of Mendel Beilis’s defense attorneys) would famously compare Russia to an automobile being driven down a steep and hazardous road at breakneck speed by “a mad chauffeur,” heedless of all danger, resistant to the advice of competent drivers, steering Russia to inevitable destruction. All understood that the man at the wheel in this allegory was Tsar Nicholas II.

  Nicholas himself, ruler of the largest country on earth—sprawling on either side of the Urals, to cover a third of the European continent and a third of Asia—shared the sense of foreboding. Many observers commented on his strong fatalism, which deepened with the years. “The emperor’s salient characteristic,” one of his ministers remarked, “is mystic resignation.” Nicholas made much of the coincidence of his birthday with the Russian Orthodox feast day of Job, the “righteous and blameless” man in the Old Testament who maintained his faith in God despite a plague of undeserved misfortune. “I have a presentiment—more than a presentiment, a secret conviction,” he once confided to his prime minister, Peter Stolypin, “that I am destined for terrible trials.” He added with resignation, though, that unlike Job, to whom the Lord had restored everything he had lost and more, “I shall not receive my reward on this earth.”

  Even if he saw himself as a figure destined to be beset by tribulation, Nicholas dismissed apocalyptic fears for the country’s future, even though Russia had experienced a revolution—the first in its history—just a few years earlier, in 1905. Nicholas’s complacency stemmed from the pride he took in his supposed personal bond with his subjects. To a degree, the connection he felt was based on reality. The tsar, in fact, had much in common with men like the Jew-hating, petty criminal and Black Hundred rabble-rouser Nikolai Pavlovich. Both belonged to the Union of Russian People; Nicholas was an honorary member. The tsar was deeply grateful to malefactors like Pavlovich because they had helped him keep his throne. In December 1905, after a chaotic year for Russia, he had warmly accepted the organization’s official badges for himself and his son, the tsarevich Alexis, telling a delegation, “I believe with your help I and the Russian people will succeed in defeating the enemies of Russia.”

  The Black Hundreds had emerged as malevolent and potent antagonists to the tsar’s enemies amid the chaos of the 1905 Russian Revolution, which had threatened the very existence of the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty. Russia had long had revolutionaries, but until 1905 it had never endured an actual revolution. Which is not to say that the country had previously enjoyed domestic tranquillity: a generation earlier, Russians had virtually invented modern political terrorism. In 1881, a radical group called the People’s Will assassinated Nicholas’s grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, in what is regarded as history’s first suicide bombing. (Ironically, this “Tsar-Liberator” who had freed the serfs was the most liberal sovereign Russia would ever have.) In the first years of the new century, successor groups of radicals—preeminently the party of Socialist Revolutionaries, which was inspired by native populist thinkers as well as Karl Marx—were killing tsarist officials by the thousands. (In the most murderous year, from the fall of 1905 to the fall of 1906, the dead numbered 3,611.) The radicals’ taste for imperial blood enthralled rather than appalled much of the educated liberal public, who initially viewed the bombings, murders, and robberies (or “expropriations”) as acts of romantic and heroic despair. Expressing support for the revolutionaries was considered, in the words of one contemporary observer, “a sign of good manners,” showing you were on the right side of history. In 1905 the revolutionaries suddenly became a mortal threat to the decrepit autocracy, weakened as it was by a disastrous war with Japan. The revolution began with “Bloody Sunday” on January 22 when the police fired on a large demonstration of workers marching to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. There followed strikes, peasant uprisings, and even rebellions in the armed forces, the most famous of which was the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin in the Black Sea. The year culminated in the world’s first general strike and the tsar’s grudging issuance of the October Manifesto, in which the “unlimited” sovereign found himself forced to make odious concessions, including the creation of the first elected parliament in Russia’s history.

  During that traumatic year, Black Hundred groups functioned as vigilante or paramilitary organizations in support of the tsarist regime, fighting in the streets against its opponents, attacking bystanders whom they suspected of antigovernment sympathies, and assassinating liberal politicians. Black Hundred thugs were known to waylay people—especially Jews and university students—whom they suspected of disloyalty and force them to kneel in front of an image of the tsar. They were most notorious, in Russia and abroad, for perpetrating murderous pogroms across the empire in 1905 and 1906, including in Kiev. Contrary to suspicions at the time and subsequently, historians have found little in the way of premeditation or planning. Still, some three thousand Jews were killed, and thousands more injured, as the marauders attacked people in the street and went from house to house, searching cellars where any Jews may have tried to hide. Countless Jewish homes and businesses were damaged and destroyed.

  Nicholas never actively incited violence against the Jews, but he took palpable satisfaction from seeing the mobs heed the vigilantes’ infamous call: “Beat the Yids. Save Russia.” Manifesting a shared vocabulary with men such as Pavlovich, he wrote to his mother, the dowager empress Maria, in October 1905:

  In the first days after the Manifesto, the bad elements boldly raised their heads, but then a strong reaction set in and the whole mass of loyal people took heart. The result, as is natural and usual with us, was that the people became enraged by the insolence and audacity of the revolutionaries and socialists; and because nine tenths of them are Yids, the people’s whole wrath turned against them. That is how the pogroms happened.

  Nicholas acted as the protector of the most infamous Black Hundred rabble-rouser of the time, the “Mad Monk” Iliodor. At the very moment Andrei was being buried, Iliodor was reaching the height of his renown. Iliodor propagandized, i
n its purest form, the ideology of the Russian right, which, in the words of historian Jacob Langer, “revolved around a view of the Jews as a race of superhuman power spreading evil on a biblical scale.” Based in the southern Russian city of Tsaritsyn (now Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad), Iliodor proselytized his creed to crowds in the thousands. “The Jew drinks human blood,” he declaimed. “The Jew regards it as a pious deed to kill a Christian, the Antichrist will spring from Jewish stock, the Jew is accused by God, the Jew is the source of all evil in the world.” The Mad Monk was so charismatic that he could reduce his female followers to a “tearful hysteria.” A contemporary observer was struck by the curious combination of his “delicate, beautiful, feminine face” and “powerful will” that held his enthusiasts spellbound as he preached sermons vowing to drown every last Jew in the Black Sea.

  Iliodor’s moniker was no exaggeration. The Mad Monk was a genuinely unbalanced demagogue. He once slandered the wife of a wealthy timber merchant for supposedly wearing a low-cut dress and singing “filthy” songs at a charitable event (a fund-raiser for a temperance society, no less). The affair was taken up by the prime minister himself—an unavoidable intervention, given that Iliodor was a revered leader of a movement esteemed by the tsar. Such absurdities were routine in the end-time of the Romanovs, when a culture of intrigue mixed with operetta-style lunacy had deeply infected the Russian imperial court and government. Prime Minister Peter Stolypin, in fact, dared to side with the offended lady, ordering “rapid and decisive measures to protect the citizens of Tsaritsyn from public insults” of the kind inflicted by the Mad Monk. But the government was hesitant to the point of paralysis when it came to dealing with Iliodor’s more serious and even murderous threats to public order. Stolypin privately called Iliodor a “fanatic” and spreader of “Black Hundred propaganda” who weakened the government’s authority. But Iliodor had insinuated himself into the court’s inner circle. He had secured the patronage of the powerful, and no less mad, “holy man” Grigory Rasputin, who was then at the height of his legendary and hypnotic influence over the royal family. The Church had tried to exile Iliodor to a remote parish, but Tsar Nicholas intervened to save him—“out of pity,” he said, for the holy man’s followers. The Mad Monk was untouchable.