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

by Levin, Edmund

  Iliodor’s story lays bare the strange and paradoxical rules of the game in end-stage tsarist Russia. Iliodor targeted not just what he called the Jewish-led “Satan’s band,” but rich capitalists and landowners as well; he even called for the prime minister to be put to death. He was truly a subversive force. Tsar Nicholas, however, saw in him not an enemy bent on undermining the state but a kindred spirit, one of the “mass of loyal people” who defended him from the “insolence” of his enemies, “nine tenths” of whom he believed were Jews. And for Nicholas, the supposed archaic purity of Iliodor’s Russianness—his closeness to the narod, the people—trumped any concerns about his effect on the polity. The tsar’s obsession with a pure Russia foretold a monarchy that was losing all sense of reality and becoming susceptible to fantasies of the darkest kind.

  As it turned out, a few months after the death of Andrei Yushchinsky, Iliodor would self-destruct before he could put his talents to work in a case that might well have given him the ultimate pulpit for his anti-Semitic screeds. He betrayed his protector Rasputin, threatening to reveal the holy man’s debauchery, but was outmaneuvered, and ended up exiled and defrocked. It would fall to others to exploit the boy’s murder for their own ends.

  At Andrei’s grave site, the mourners and provocateurs must have noticed a strange circumstance. While the deaths of children were tragically common in Russia, one aspect of the service surely distinguished it from any other child’s funeral the mourners may have attended: the parents were not present. Andrei’s schoolmates and teachers were there. His aunt Natalia, in the final stages of tuberculosis, stood there in the cold. Vera Cheberyak was there with Zhenya and her two daughters. But as Andrei lay in his open coffin—his wounds covered by makeup, a cypress cross tied around his neck with a ribbon, wearing his one spare pair of school uniform trousers, with ten one-kopeck coins in the right pocket—his mother and stepfather were at the local police precinct, under arrest.

  The story of the family’s three-month ordeal at the hands of the authorities, omitted or glossed over in the standard accounts of the case, is essential to understanding how the murder of a poor, troubled boy burgeoned from a family tragedy to a matter of state on the imperial agenda to a bizarre trial that would be followed the world over. The trajectory of the case is conventionally portrayed as a line leading from an investigation infused with official anti-Semitism straight to the Jew in the dock. But the path that led from “the Yushchinsky murder” to “the Beilis affair” is as twisted as one of Kiev’s winding streets.

  Andrei’s family did seem to harbor the essential elements required of a routine domestic tragedy: an illegitimate child, a resentful stepfather, rumors of violent quarrels and abuse. As investigators talked to friends, neighbors, and relatives, their suspicions could only have grown. A teacher of Andrei’s had been sure something at home was wrong: “Thin, troubled … silent. He walked the halls alone.” Classmates knew that Andrei often came to school hungry. Many witnesses told the authorities that Andrei’s mother beat him. Zhenya Cheberyak said, “There were times when Andrusha’s mother would punish him, she would beat him sometimes with her hand, sometimes with a belt, for example when she’d send him somewhere and he didn’t go, and then she would thrash him for that. His mother never beat him badly, but a little, and never beat him so that he’d bleed.”

  But there were indications the beatings went beyond the routine. “I know that Alexandra … disliked Andrei very much,” an elderly neighbor testified, and claimed he saw her beat him several times. “What she beat him for, I don’t know, but through the fence I could see how awfully she treated him.” He reported that “as soon as his mother started beating him [Andrei] would run to his Aunt Natalia.” A classmate confirmed that “his mother punished him often, and … when his mother beat him he’d always run to his aunt.”

  Andrei’s maiden aunt Natalia was the boy’s savior and protector. “Since I had no children of my own, I very much loved my sister’s illegitimate son … Andrusha … and I decided to raise him and make something of him,” she said in a deposition after Andrei’s death, just months before she died of tuberculosis. A woman with a rare entrepreneurial streak, she ran a workshop out of her apartment, which made decorative boxes for a store on Kiev’s main street, Kreshchatik. Her income was modest, but it enabled her to pay for Andrei’s education.

  Natalia claimed to investigators that she had no idea who killed Andrei and did not suspect anyone. She insisted that Luka Prikhodko, Andrei’s stepfather, was by nature “quiet, sober, modest and hardworking.” But Natalia did not completely conceal from the authorities the family’s tensions, admitting that her sister sometimes resented the way she displaced her as the dominant figure in Andrei’s life. Natalia was loving, but she could be harsh as she tried to keep the boy on the right path. Sometimes, Natalia said, “I would scream at [Andrusha] and he’d burst out crying. Then Alexandra would say she didn’t want me to pay for Andrusha’s education and I shouldn’t dare insult him. There were frequent scenes like that.”

  Whatever suspicions Natalia had would have carried great weight with investigators because she was more a mother to Andrei than anyone else in the boy’s life. From his earliest years he called his mother “Sashka” (a diminutive of Alexandra)—never “mama.” Zhenya said, “When I asked Andrusha if he loved his stepfather and his mother, he always answered that he loved his aunt more than anyone.” Natalia did not share her most disturbing suspicions with the police, but she did voice them in the presence of the local pub owner, Dobzhansky, who knew Andrei well—the boy would drop by the pub to have an egg for breakfast when he had a few extra kopeks—and was one of those who identified his body. In a sworn deposition Dobzhansky recounted how, after Andrei’s body was found, a “very despondent” Natalia “walked up to the cave and said ‘Andrusha was killed by no one other than his own people.’ ”

  The man in charge of following up these leads, at this point, was Detective Evgeny Mishchuk, head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Kiev police. Though he had some two decades of experience in law enforcement, he was of dubious competence and his investigative methods were reprehensible. He was gullible, reckless, and politically maladroit—qualities that would make him vulnerable to his enemies. Soon he would be the first victim of what would become a conspiracy to ensure that a Jew stood accused. But Mishchuk was honestly convinced that the family was involved in the crime—he utterly dismissed the “ritual murder” hypothesis—and he attempted to prove his theory with ruthless zeal.

  On March 24, just four days after Andrei’s body was found, Mishchuk personally arrested Luka and Alexandra Prikhodko, who was then four months pregnant, as well as Alexandra’s brother Fyodor Nezhinsky, accusing them of the boy’s killing. According to Alexandra, she implored, “Arrest me, but just allow me to bury my son, and I’ll come back.” Mishchuk answered: “It’s not allowed to let a murderer like you go.”

  Only after the arrest was there a hunt for actual evidence to justify the charges against the couple. Mishchuk was following the standard course of action for the police of the era: suspects were identified on whatever flimsy grounds presented themselves and then brought in for questioning. With the couple in custody, he then stepped up the quest for physical clues. The police searched the Prikhodkos’ home on March 25 and 26, employing the same finesse they demonstrated at the cave. “They broke everything and destroyed everything,” Andrei’s grandmother later testified. “I screamed and cried, ‘What are you doing?’ ” When she protested, she said, “They told me they’d pistol whip me.” The police chiseled out seven pieces of plaster with dark brown spots from the walls and took some of Alexandra’s and Luka’s clothes, which also had blood-colored spots. Alexandra was interrogated for twelve of her thirteen days in custody from nine a.m. until one or two in the morning. Like many innocent people, under interrogation she began to look only more guilty. Mishchuk reported: “Questioned in that regard [about the spots] Alexandra Prikhodko at first d
eclared that it wasn’t blood, and then started saying that it could have gotten on the clothes because of a nosebleed.” The couple were released on April 5. The spots on the clothes turned out to be vegetable juice. No blood was found anywhere in the apartment. The couple, having been deprived of a chance to grieve in dignity, returned after thirteen days to find a home that Luka said had been “rifled through, turned upside down, broken.” Luka said, “It was a time when I didn’t know whether to live or die.”

  As for Mendel Beilis, some time after his Black Hundred neighbor dropped by to tell him of the accusation that Andrei had been killed by the Jews, he became aware that the police were taking the investigation in quite a different direction, pursuing Andrei’s family. If he had originally dismissed his neighbor’s report, Beilis was likely now even more inclined to push it out of his mind, especially since Mishchuk and other investigators were disregarding the “ritual” version, and the focus on Andrei’s family would continue for weeks after their initial arrest and release. Beilis, moreover, would soon hear there was a new suspect in the murder: his neighbor Vera Cheberyak. The name was a familiar one. She lived just a few dozen yards down the street from him, and he had long known of her villainous reputation. But it did not enter his mind that he had anything to fear from her or from the machinations of some of the most powerful men in Russia.

  * * *

  * Passover that year fell on March 31.

  2

  “The Vendetta of the Sons of Jacob”

  In the days after Andrei Yushchinsky’s funeral, the city entered its full spring thaw. In time for Easter, “the cold and cloudy weather,” the Kievan effused, “gave way to wonderful, warm, spring days … as if Nature herself had acted in sympathy toward the holiday celebration.” The Dnieper came alive with ferries. In another month, the city’s celebrated chestnut trees would be flowering. Peddlers would take to the streets shoeless, leaving behind their precious felt boots until the next winter. But spring always brought an intimation of doom as well, of death by drowning or disease. As the temperature passed the freezing point, the river threatened to flood and the open sewers in the city’s poorer districts ran free (the city fathers hesitated at the expense of covering the festering ditches, with one councilman arguing, “Why should we worry about cholera when all around us we have plague, diphtheria, scarlet fever and syphilis?”) This year, thankfully, the city had been spared serious flooding. But the discovery of Andrei’s body had unleashed another elemental, unpredictable, and destructive force that set the city on edge. The Black Hundreds were in a state of righteous rage. Jews prepared to hide in cellars or flee the city in fear of a coming pogrom.

  For the Jews of the empire, Eastertide was always a menacing time. In the past, the holiday season had been marked by some of Russia’s most notorious pogroms. This year, in the aftermath of Andrei’s death, a pogrom seemed a near certainty. The day before Easter, on April 9, the newspaper Zemshchina (roughly, “The Realm”) published an article headlined “A Ritual Murder.” Based on allegedly leaked details of the autopsy report, the article affirmed that “the totality of the available information establishes that we are dealing here with a ritual murder, committed by a Jewish Hasidic sect.”

  The article caused a sensation and indicated a turning point in the case. This was not a leaflet handed out by an agitator at a funeral. This was an article in the newspaper controlled by one of the most prominent Black Hundred leaders, the State Duma (parliament) member N. E. Markov, soon to become president of the Union of Russian People. “A Ritual Murder” was widely reprinted, including in the almost equally far-right but much more widely read newspaper the Moscow Gazette. That paper noted in a companion piece the “alarming rumor” spreading in Kiev that the case might be quashed and the perpetrators left unpunished. The paper complained “our Judeophile press is trying … to place the blame on anyone at all except persons of the Jewish tribe and faith.” The author appeals for action: “[The Jews’] complicity in the use of human blood in ritual meals cannot be hidden … The blood of the unfortunate Yushchinskys [of the world] cries out to the heavens!”

  Further fueling the Black Hundreds’ outrage was the stalled police investigation. Nearly a month after the discovery of Andrei’s body, Vasily Fenenko, Kiev’s Investigating Magistrate for Especially Important Cases, declared that the police had reached a dead end. No progress at all had been made toward apprehending Andrei’s killer or killers. On April 14, 1911, Fenenko posted an appeal to the citizenry in the local Kiev papers:

  Neither the circumstances nor the motive of the crime have been established and the investigation … has been hindered by an insufficiency of material … The Investigating Magistrate requests all persons who have any information about this case to inform him of such verbally or in written form.

  The day-to-day sleuthing was still in the hands of Evgeny Mishchuk, chief detective of Kiev’s police force. But within days of the discovery at the cave, Fenenko had been assigned major responsibility for overseeing the investigation. The ostensible reason for the assignment had been the unusual nature of the murder. But there is some indication that Fenenko was chosen in part because it was believed he would unquestioningly carry out orders from above. If this was their expectation, his superiors in the Kiev Judicial Chamber were utterly mistaken. Fenenko was not a man meekly to carry out orders that conflicted with his common sense, let alone his conscience. A lifelong bachelor who lived with his childhood nanny, at the age of thirty-six Fenenko had settled into a premature and respectable middle age. He was, by all accounts, honest, competent, and incorruptible. If at times he sounded self-righteous, he was indeed a righteous man. Fenenko regarded his integrity to be his proudest possession. As the case unfolded, this quality would not necessarily prove an asset.

  By mid-April Fenenko found himself in an extremely uncomfortable position. The Black Hundreds were decrying the incompetence of the investigation and the injustice to Andrei’s memory. Their outrage at the authorities, at this point, was entirely justified. Detective Mishchuk’s stewardship of the case had been a fiasco. The police had brutalized Andrei’s family. In the eyes of the far-right wing in Kiev, the police were guilty of other offenses against the Russian people, as well. Nikolai Pavlovich, the young man they believed had only tried to warn of the Jewish menace at Andrei’s funeral, was under arrest. Several of his fellow “Eaglets”—members of the local far-right group Society of the Double Headed Eagle—had also been detained, and police had searched the group’s headquarters. Fenenko’s appeal to the citizenry for assistance only proved that he was, at best, incompetent, at worst (and the worst was only too believable), complicit in the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. How could anyone accept his absurd contention that the physical evidence led nowhere? To the Far Right, the motive of the crime and the nature of the perpetrators were as obvious as Andrei’s four dozen wounds.

  The Far Right employed the publicly reported details of the crime to craft a tale of Jewish villainy that rabble-rousers could use to incite a murderous mob. In truth, however, Andrei’s corpse told the story not of some methodically executed blood ritual but of a crime committed in a frenzy, with no rational purpose other than, possibly, revenge.

  The coroner submitted his autopsy report on April 25. The pathologists determined the first wounds came as Andrei was surprised from behind. The time of death, based on the undigested beets and potatoes in his stomach, was judged to be three to four hours after his morning meal. There were no signs of resistance. The murder weapon was established to be an awl with a diamond-shaped shaft whose tip had once broken off and later been resharpened. A frugal workingman’s tool.

  The report laid out a barrage of injuries to Andrei’s body:

  A. External examination. The body is lying on its back on a table in the dissection hall of the office of forensic medicine, dressed in a white homespun linen shirt with embroidery on the chest, collar, cuffs, sleeves, and hem. The collar of the shirt is open. The button on the left side,
two button loops on the right side, and almost every part of the shirt are covered with spots, smears, and spatters of dried blood…

  B. Injuries. Shaving the hair on the head to the scalp, and cleaning the scalp of clay and clotted blood, reveals four linear 3–7-millimeter-long wounds in the middle part of the crown and a 4-millimeter wound of the same shape on the skin of the left temple. The right temple is covered with fourteen punctate stab wounds. These punctures are scattered on the outer edge of the temple, but are arranged in straight rows on the inner edge … There are four linear wounds on the right side of the neck, toward the nodding muscles, each about .5 centimeter long, and another similar wound under the left side of the lower jaw. There are two more in the area of the Adam’s apple and two stab wounds on the left cheek.

  On the left side of the chest between the nipples and the hypochondrium [area below the ribs], there are seven stab wounds, of which the first is right below the nipple, the second 2 cm below the first, the third and fourth at the same height and 3 cm to the right, the fifth 1 cm below the third, the sixth 3 cm below the third, and the seventh 4.5 cm below the third…