There are eight stab wounds in the central area of the xiphoid process [lower part of the sternum]. There are five stab wounds on the right side along the axillary line, of which the first is over the sixth rib, the second in the ninth intervertebral space, the third above the tenth rib, and the fourth midway between the hypochondrium and the pelvis, and the fifth at the edge of the iliac bone.
There are four stab wounds on the right side of the back along the shoulder blade line between the hypochondrium and the pelvis.
In all, the city coroner, Dr. A. M. Karpinsky, noted fifty wounds. A second autopsy reckoned their number at forty-seven, which would become the official count, with thirteen wounds on the right temple rather than fourteen. The first wounds, which were to the head and neck, the experts agreed, would have been fatal on their own. By matching the holes in the fabric with the wounds on his head, it was later determined that Andrei was wearing his cap tilted slightly upward and boyishly cocked to the left when the powerful initial blows penetrated the top of his skull, driving bits of bone into the skull cavity, the awl’s shaft spearing through the dura mater into the dural sinus, which carries blood from the brain. The wounds to the neck followed, causing profuse bleeding. While the head and neck wounds would have eventually caused death, they did not immediately kill the boy. Death came only twenty to thirty minutes later, due to the wounds he had suffered to the heart. In one place, the weapon was driven into the heart so deeply and with such force that the handle left an impression on the skin.
In Kiev and in the empire’s capital of St. Petersburg, the threat of a pogrom alarmed government officials as much as it did Kiev’s Jews. Even though the prosecution of the case over the next two and a half years would suggest little in the way of official sympathy for the Jews, the tsar’s top officials first became involved out of concern with preventing anti-Jewish violence. They did not act out of compassion. The regime’s top priority was the preservation of public order. Straight through to the end of the trial, the government was preoccupied with preventing the case from causing any disturbance in Russian society at an intensely volatile time.
Within days of the discovery of the body, St. Petersburg had taken notice of the murder. By March 27, the day of Andrei’s funeral, the minister of justice was being copied on the prosecutors’ reports. On April 1, the Ministry of the Interior adjured the Kiev region’s governor to keep it informed about the case.
Pavel Alexandrovich Kurlov, the deputy minister of the interior, commander of the Corps of Gendarmes, and overall supervisor of the imperial security apparatus, was an ironic, even perverse choice to monitor the case. Perhaps no senior official in the ministry had as much Jewish blood on his hands. During the wave of pogroms in 1905, when he was governor of Minsk, he had given the marauders free rein. There was hardly anyone to whom Kiev’s Jews would have been more unwilling to entrust their fate.
The situation appeared relatively quiet until the appearance of the “Ritual Murder” article on April 9, when public mutterings grew increasingly ominous. On April 13, Kiev’s governor, A. F. Giers, dispatched his first telegraphic distress call to General Kurlov, warning that a pogrom might be imminent. Right-wing organizations, he reported, were growing convinced that the government was engaged in a cover-up of the murder. On April 17, far-right groups were planning a public requiem for Andrei. Signs were mounting that the Black Hundreds would follow it with a massacre.
The authorities did not want a pogrom to take place. But what would they do to stop one? What actions would they take to restrain the bands of thugs whom they considered useful allies and even secretly admired? Much would depend on how the infamous Kurlov decided to respond to Giers’s warning. Would he order steps toward protecting the Jewish population? Or would he give the vigilantes carte blanche, as he had done six years earlier in Minsk, when more than a hundred Jews were killed and nearly five hundred wounded, and his men fired on a largely Jewish group of demonstrators, shooting most of them in the back?
Venal, unprincipled, and a master of the most convoluted intrigues, Kurlov was the extravagant embodiment of all the corruption and decay in a regime riddled with innumerable schemers, sycophants, and incompetents. A former governor of Kiev as well as Minsk, he was not unintelligent, but his main talent was for relentless bureaucratic advancement against all obstacles. He was said to owe his position to the empress Alexandra herself, who supposedly installed him as the protector of her beloved spiritual guide Rasputin. To the extent that Kurlov had principles, they were those of the Far Right. And having taken personal loans from the treasurer of the Union of Russian People, he was literally in the Black Hundreds’ debt.
Kurlov never made a move that he did not perceive to be in his own interest, which makes his decision—untainted by any sense of honor or justice—especially notable. Kurlov replied to Governor Giers’s agitated telegram on the same day he received it in the clearest and most direct fashion. “It is vital,” he wrote, “to take the most decisive measures to maintain order; a pogrom must be avoided at all costs.” Other officials quickly issued numerous orders in the same vein. Black Hundred vigilantes had helped save the regime during the 1905 revolution, and its gratitude for that service was immense. But that moment had passed. The priority now was the preservation of order, even if it meant protecting Jews.
The local authorities prohibited the public requiem set for April 17. Despite the ban, a crowd of 150 or so hard-core “Unionists” gathered at Andrei’s grave. When the presiding priest hinted that the Jews were responsible for the murder, a police officer on the scene warned him that “such talk only inflames people’s passions.” The crowd dispersed without incident.
In dealing with the Far Right, though, the authorities mixed their warnings against violence with gestures of appeasement. Pavlovich, and several other Eaglets who had been detained, were released “for lack of evidence.” Behind the scenes, local Black Hundred leaders were coddled and kowtowed to. Preeminent among them was nineteen-year-old Vladimir Golubev. A Kiev university student and secretary of the city’s “patriotic” youth organization, Double Headed Eagle, Golubev could serve as a general refutation of the “great man” school of history. The head of a small, struggling group that was in fact losing members, Golubev, more than anyone, can be said to have created the case that would shock and dumbfound the world.
If Pavlovich represented the Black Hundreds’ criminal element, Golubev, the son of a professor at a Kiev religious academy, characterized its more reputable contingent. Fanatically sincere in his anti-Semitic beliefs, he was, in his way, a man of principle. One historian has called him a kind of “Black Hundred idealist.” Once, when he learned that a railroad was owned largely by Jews, he refused to buy a ticket and demonstratively walked several dozen miles along the tracks. After Andrei’s body was found, Golubev became obsessed with the case and launched an independent investigation. He was certain that a Jew had committed the crime, and he would not rest until he found a Jew whom the authorities would agree to charge. He even slept overnight once in the cave, which had served as such a fine natural morgue for Andrei; his enemies said he did it on a bet, but perhaps he was hoping for some paranormal insight into the crime.
His efforts would be rewarded. “Student Golubev,” as he was invariably called, was the freshest incarnation of an eight-hundred-year-old archetype: the dogged Christian detective who perceives in an unsolved murder a monstrous Jewish plot.
Golubev was taking on the role originated in the twelfth century by the Welsh monk Thomas of Monmouth. Around the year 1149, Thomas took it upon himself to investigate the unsolved murder of William of Norwich, a twelve-year-old apprentice skinner who had been found dead five years earlier, on the day before Easter in 1144. It was Thomas who laid the foundation for the medieval and modern myth of Jewish ritual murder. The origin of the myth can, rather astoundingly, be pinpointed to a specific time and place and an individual instigating mind. The foundational moment came in 1150, when Thomas published th
e first portion of his The Life and Miracles of Saint William the Martyr of Norwich. Thomas, as historian Gavin Langmuir has written, “did not alter the course of battles, politics or the economy. He solved no philosophical or theological problems.” Yet he created a myth that burrowed deeply into the Western mind “and caused, directly or indirectly, far more deaths than William’s murderer could ever have dreamt of committing.”
According to Thomas’s account, the week before Easter in 1144, a man claiming to be the archdeacon’s cook came to young William’s mother asking permission for the boy to work in his kitchen. Taking some money from the supposed cook, the mother allowed her son to be led away. Five days later the boy’s body was found in the woods outside the city. The boy’s uncle, who was a priest, rose before the local church synod to accuse the city’s Jews of the crime, but this charge met with skepticism from local notables, including the bishop of Norwich, the church prior, and the sheriff. Still, the people of Norwich grew angry at the city’s Jews, and the sheriff gathered them in the castle to assure their safety. The danger passed. No Jews, nor anyone else, were charged. Poor William, said like Andrei to be a “neglected” and “poor ragged little fellow” when alive, lay increasingly forgotten in his churchyard grave.
When Thomas arrived in Norwich he became obsessed with solving the mystery of William’s murder, and he determined to prove that the boy was a martyr whose spirit could perform miracles. Like Golubev, his twentieth-century Russian avatar, Thomas was motivated by a dangerous mixture of true belief and personal ambition. As the propagator of the cult of a new martyr, and the caretaker of the boy’s sacred relics (for Thomas parlayed his advocacy into a position as sacristan of William’s shrine), he would acquire dramatically enhanced prestige.
In The Life and Miracles of Saint William, Thomas introduced the novel idea of ritual murder as a Jewish Passover rite. He also pioneered the sophistry, the twisting of evidence, and the calculated obtuseness that would mark all subsequent accusations of Jewish ritual murder. Thomas set an example for the ages by producing eyewitnesses who, long after the crime, came forward with vivid stories implicating the Jews (“… a certain poor maid-servant … through the chink in the door … managed to see the boy …”); in his caustic railing against the skeptics who refused to accept the victim as a true martyr (their “saucy cavils” irked him); and by accusing the Jews of bribing the authorities (“giving a hundred marks to the sheriff they were rid of their fear”).
But the most notorious and fraught motif he introduced, after the accusation of ritual murder itself, is the character of the apostate Jew who publicly reveals his people’s clandestine and insidious rite, one that is justified by their scripture. Thomas hears “from the lips” of a converted Jew, a monk named Theobald, how the Jews of Spain gather every year in the French city of Narbonne (which was, in fact, an important center of Jewish learning and leadership) to plot the annual sacrifice demanded by their ancient texts.
Theobald disclosed to Thomas that the Jews believe that without the shedding of Christian blood they cannot obtain their freedom or ever even have hope of returning to the land of their fathers from which they had been exiled. Therefore they have to sacrifice a Christian somewhere in the world “in scorn and contempt of Christ.” The Jewish elders assembled in Narbonne cast lots for all the countries of the world where Jews lived, and in 1144, the lot fell on Norwich. All the synagogues in England then gave their consent that the deed be carried out there. According to Thomas, the truth of Theobald’s words—“uttered by one who was a converted enemy, and had been privy to the secrets of our enemies”—were beyond doubt. Thomas did not succeed in having any Jews charged with the crime. But he did elevate William into a martyr murdered by the Jews. The ritual-murder myth spread throughout England and worked its way into the heart of the culture, as evidenced by “The Prioress’s Tale,” Geoffrey Chaucer’s story of the martyrdom of a pious seven-year-old child “of Christian blood”:
This cursed Jew hym hent [grabbed], and heeld hym faste,
And kitte his throte, and in a pit hym caste…
The blood out crieth on your cursed deed!
The notion that the Jews actually required human blood for their rituals arose when the myth spread to the Continent. The blood accusation, in its full form, emerged in the German town of Fulda in 1235. On Christmas day of that year, while a miller and his wife were at church, their mill burned down with their five sons inside. The Jews of Fulda were accused of slaughtering the children before the blaze was set and draining off their blood into waxed bags, to utilize it in some sort of ritual or medicine. On December 28, 1235, thirty-four Jews in Fulda were killed—by the town’s outraged citizens, according to one account, or by crusaders, in another version of the incident—and became the first known victims of the blood accusation. The authors of the calumny that Jews need human blood for ritual purposes remain unknown. But it is likely the blood accusation sprang from the creative imaginations of some Fulda inhabitants or passing crusaders in 1235, who were inspired to embroider the original slander of Thomas of Monmouth.
The governing powers of Europe quickly understood the danger that the emergent myth presented to the state. Frederick II, the Holy Roman emperor, sought to stamp out the inflammatory accusation and the public’s wrath against the Jews; like Thomas of Monmouth, he turned for help to Jewish apostates, but with the opposite purpose. In 1236, just months after the Fulda massacre, he convened an assembly of Jewish converts to Christianity from across Europe. They found that none of the Jews’ sacred texts indicated they were “greedy for human blood.” Accepting their judgment, Frederick declared the Jews of Fulda to be exonerated and forbade anyone from ever again making such a charge. His imperial edict was followed in 1247 by a papal bull from Innocent IV, declaring the blood accusation to be false. But once the potent fiction had lodged in people’s minds, not even the Vicar of Christ, in all his purported infallibility, had the power to stop its spread.
Golubev did not know of his debt to Thomas of Monmouth (who was by then an obscure figure even to scholars, not having earned the renown he surely craved). But Golubev was likely acquainted with the works of anti-Semitic pseudo-scholarship then circulating in Russia, and so would have been familiar with the five slaughtered brothers of Fulda; Andreas of Rinn, supposedly killed by the Jews on the “Judenstein” or Jew-Stone in 1462; and Simon of Trent, a murdered boy whose case codified the blood accusation’s essentials in 1475, establishing the motif of Christian blood being used to bake Passover matzo. Golubev also undoubtedly knew of the most notorious cases of the past three decades, nearly all of which originated to the west of Russia.
The blood accusation in the case of Andrei Yushchinsky would soon cause the tsarist regime to be condemned in the West for its shocking retrogression to a medieval mentality of prejudice and vengeance. Yet nearly forgotten amid the outrage was that some of the most “civilized” parts of Europe had recently witnessed the largest outbreak of ritual murder charges in three centuries. According to the most reliable count, for the decade from 1891 to 1900, there were seventy-nine significant ritual murder cases in Europe where specific allegations were made to the authorities or at least gained wide popular currency. Only five cases took place in the Russian Empire. The majority were in Austria-Hungary (thirty-six) and Germany (fifteen). Men like Golubev knew the most notorious of them like a catechism. A handful had come to trial. Kutaisi (Georgia, part of the Russian Empire) 1879: nine Jews, tried in the murder of a six-year-old girl. Tisza-Eszlar (Hungary) 1882: a Jewish synagogue sexton, tried in the murder of a fourteen-year-old servant girl. Xanten (Prussia) 1891: a Jewish butcher, accused of killing a five-year-old-boy, whose throat had been slit ear-to-ear. Polna (Bohemia) 1899: a twenty-two-year-old cobbler’s apprentice, tried in the murder of a nineteen-year-old seamstress. Konitz (Prussia) 1900: a Jewish butcher and an animal skinner, accused in the killing and dismembering of an eighteen-year-old gymnasium student.
As Golubev combed the
area around the cave for clues and canvassed the Lukianovka neighborhood for witnesses, he must have been conscious of his potential place in history. With the ambiguous exception of Polna (where the defendant was convicted, but the state officially rejected the ritual motive), in every recent case the Jewish suspects had, frustratingly, been exonerated. Moreover, these cases had been treated primarily as local matters. In modern times, no ritual murder case had had the unmitigated support of a European central government. Golubev sought to change the legacy of the modern blood accusation: he would enlist the highest authorities in the empire behind his cause, including, he hoped, the sovereign himself.
Within months, Golubev’s amateur sleuthing would have a decisive impact on the official investigation. At this point, however, the authorities were pressuring the young hothead to refrain from inciting violence. Careful not to offend him or his comrades, they cajoled him into promising, on his honor, that he would do nothing to instigate attacks on the Jews, at least through the end of the summer. The deputy head of the Kiev Okhrana, or secret police, reported in mid-April that “everything has turned out all right. Golubev has quieted down. They have decided to postpone their action until the Sovereign’s departure from Kiev [that is, after the tsar’s planned visit in August]…(B)eating the Yids … they’ve postponed until fall.”
But even though Golubev had been “quieted down,” the threat of a pogrom still felt real, both to Kiev’s Jews and to the government. The pages of the right-wing press were filled with venomous screeds declaring that the four dozen wounds on the “boy martyr” were clearly the work of Jews who were part of a powerful cabal that had duped inept investigators or, more likely, bought them off.
A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel Page 5
