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

by Levin, Edmund

  In lifting that cloud, Krasovsky displayed stunning investigative virtuosity. He had a fair mastery of forensic science. (The field was surprisingly well advanced in Imperial Russia, whose chemists had devised tests still used today for detecting trace amounts of blood and certain poisons.) He had great powers of observation. He was a master of interrogation. Tallish and kindly looking, with blue eyes, a bushy mustache, and an unhurried air, he knew how to get people—ordinary folk and criminals—to tell him things. He was also cunning, fearless, and always willing to stand his ground. When detectives found jewelry purportedly belonging to the Ostrovskys in the home of a known thief, Krasovsky alone was unconvinced that he was the perpetrator. He proceeded to prove that engravings on the jewelry had been fabricated by a vengeful criminal (who himself had nothing to do with the murders) to incriminate his enemies. In a city with the highest crime rate in the empire, where two out of three cases went unsolved, Krasovsky was considered a hero for tracking down the four actual killers, one of them a psychopath who admitted to ten other murders and boasted of his ability to stab a person to death while shedding hardly any blood (the technique involved partial strangulation, then two stabs to the heart).

  In an attempt to escape the hangman, the defendants appealed for help to the most famous Russian of his time, Count Leo Tolstoy, claiming they had only faithfully followed the famous writer’s Christian anarchist precepts. (The era’s spiritual ferment had seemingly penetrated even into the underworld.) “We acted according to your teachings because they had money and we didn’t. Defend us,” they wrote him in a postcard they sent from prison. Tolstoy, whose greatest wish at this stage of his life was to convey tenets of morality to common people, was greatly distressed by the notion that these men had operated under his influence. Tolstoy’s estranged wife, Sophia, took the opportunity to torment her husband, arguing that the men could indeed rightfully consider themselves to be his followers. Tolstoy, who deeply and publicly opposed capital punishment, is not known to have lent these killers his support. (Tolstoy’s morality, incidentally, extended to the acceptance of non-Christians as his equals. In November 1910, when the count died in a remote rural train station while fleeing his wife after a final quarrel, Russia’s Jews lost their most prominent Christian defender. It is fascinating to imagine the role he might have played in the Yushchinsky affair had he lived a few months longer. In a late interview, Tolstoy told the New York Times, “How do I account for all this anti-Jewish feeling in Russia? We often dislike more those whom we harm than those who harm us.”)

  Krasovsky, given his record, surely deserved to have the “acting” removed from his title. But, as was so typical of the era, superior talent failed to be rewarded. Evgeny Mishchuk, who had served in St. Petersburg and no doubt had curried favor there, received the permanent chief detective post. But now Mishchuk had outrageously bungled the investigation into Andrei’s murder, and Krasovsky had been summoned—from exile, one might say—to lead the police investigation into what would shortly become the most infamous murder case of the age.

  At this sensitive moment, after the fiasco of the arrest of Andrei’s family, and in the face of the Black Hundreds’ incendiary anti-Semitic propaganda, the government needed a politically reliable professional of solid reputation to take charge. Renowned for his skill as a detective, Krasovsky was also, for reasons not entirely clear, well regarded by the right-wing Union of Russian People. Grigory Chaplinsky, the chief prosecutor and advocate for the blood accusation, thought he could find no better man for the job. But Chaplinsky had been in the Kiev post only about two months and did not really know Krasovsky, and ultimately he would want someone who would do as he was told. In that regard, Krasovsky—stubborn, crafty, incorruptible, but more than capable of dishonesty when necessary to his goals—would turn out to be a disastrous choice.

  Krasovsky accepted the new mission reluctantly. The year before, after losing out to Mishchuk for the job of Kiev’s chief detective, he had happily settled into a new post in the provincial city of Khodorkov. He was wary of getting involved in another highly publicized case, having learned from experience, as he later said, that “I never got anything from it but intrigues and trouble from co-workers and others involved.” From the outset his apprehensions were disturbingly confirmed. Alexander Liadov, the St. Petersburg functionary sent to Kiev to oversee the case, insisted that Krasovsky’s participation be kept secret. No one would inform Mishchuk that he was effectively being relieved from the case. Krasovsky knew Mishchuk would surely find out soon enough what his old rival was up to, and he could be expected to attempt his revenge. Complicating matters still further, the Corps of Gendarmes—a secret police force empowered to arrest people with no formal charges—was conducting its own secret investigation. Over the next few months the case would become a round-robin of intrigues and backstabbing that would exceed Krasovsky’s greatest fears.

  In early May, the far-right youth group leader, Vladimir Golubev, had identified as a person of interest a clerk at the Zaitsev brick factory, Mendel Beilis. But, within a few days, “the Yid Mendel,” as Golubev called him, fell away as an object of the investigation. The day after receiving Golubev’s supposed tip, Vasily Fenenko, the upstanding investigating magistrate, surveyed the Zaitsev factory and the area around it. Fenenko had been annoyed by Golubev’s habit of arriving at his office unannounced, ranting about Jews and blood and murder. But Liadov, whose mission was to focus the investigation on finding a Jew, had already made sure Golubev would be treated with respect, his “leads” acted upon promptly. The results of Fenenko’s survey were reported to the justice minister himself: “On the Zaitsev estate nothing suspicious was found and no cellars, which Golubev mentioned, turned out to be there.” On May 11, in a report to the justice minister, Chaplinsky noted the suspicions about “the Jew Mendel” but stated that, “regarding the factual side of the investigation, the witnesses have not given any significant material for solving the case.”

  The right-wing press was appalled by what it believed to be the disastrous outcome of Liadov’s visit to Kiev (a mirror image of the equally incorrect view in the Jewish press, as noted earlier, of Liadov as a hero). On May 14, 1911, as Liadov departed for St. Petersburg, the newspaper of the Union of Russian People, the Russian Banner, despairingly asked its readers, “Do you doubt that the Worldwide Yid will spare millions on suppressing this case? Do you doubt that this worldwide moneylender and swindler will threaten [Russia’s] international loans…[and] international complications if the case … isn’t suppressed?” The authorities, it was clear, “have yielded [to the Jews] in violation of the law, the truth, and the self-esteem of the Russian people.” The paper was convinced that the killers would never be brought to justice. As for the Jews’ adherence to the Ecclesiastical admonition about times to be silent—pointed to with such pride in the Jewish press—this, too, could only be seen as sinister. “The Yids found that the only means of saving themselves is silence. Therefore not one Yid has said anything about the murder.”

  The complaints of the Black Hundreds initially appear bewildering. Had not Liadov fawned over Kiev’s young right-wing leader? Did he not put a distinguished new detective on the case? Had he not signaled the Justice Ministry’s approval of “the ritual version”? The continued indignation of the right wing exposes a paradox: even as top officials placated the local vigilantes, no one had informed the Far Right’s national leaders of this. The Russian Banner protested that St. Petersburg had not sent a single decent detective and that the case remained “under an impenetrable cover of secrecy.” The disconnect might be the result of routine bureaucratic ineptitude (a safe assumption for a regime where often even the right hand did not know what the right hand was doing). Or it might have been the product of some never-revealed intrigue (two of the most popular words in tsarist officials’ memoirs are “intrigue” and “camarilla”). But the authorities in Kiev and St. Petersburg had good reasons to keep the Far Right ignorant of the investigatio
n.

  At this point in the inquiry, the officials privately advocating for the blood accusation likely hesitated. Having sought to “find a Jew,” they had to acknowledge that no suitable Jew—one against whom witnesses could be produced—had been found. So, for now, they kept secret from the public the judgment of the distinguished psychiatrist Ivan Sikorsky that Andrei’s murder was an instance of the “revenge of the sons of Jacob.” In the absence of a flesh-and-blood suspect, such a revelation could only highlight the failure of the authorities to find the actual perpetrators, inflame the populace, and increase the possibility of a pogrom, which, as officials often stated, would be “most undesirable.” It would be some weeks before they could ready a case against a suitable Jew. Meanwhile, Krasovsky was taking the investigation in a very different direction.

  Krasovsky “was not distinguished by especially firm moral qualities,” the local prosecutor, Nikolai Brandorf, later recalled with disapproval, “and was capable, when needed, of conducting a double game.” But a double game, or even a triple or quadruple game, it could be argued, was exactly what an investigator was required to play in this case. To maintain his freedom of action, Krasovsky had to indulge the Black Hundreds. He frequently met with Golubev and his chief investigator—a sometime police informer, moneylender, and former bordello proprietor named Rozmitalsky—and pronounced himself favorably disposed to the possibility that the crime was a ritual murder. Making his charade somewhat easier was the absence of any other persuasive theory of the case: at this point, he could honestly say, anything might be true.

  Ironically, while Krasovsky had been unsettled by Liadov’s conspiratorial machinations, the St. Petersburg official had done him a great service by creating a breathing space in which he could try to solve the case. Liadov’s obeisance to Golubev and his crew, and the other actions he had taken, did not yet constitute a full-blown anti-Semitic conspiracy. The conciliatory gestures having been made to Kiev’s Far Right, Krasovsky and the other investigators were allowed to pursue leads as they pleased.

  Immediately after arriving in Kiev, Krasovsky made a detailed survey of the physical evidence. He was appalled by the destruction of the crime scene by the police and public, which had left only the paltriest scraps of evidence to work with. A trace amount of semen was detected on a blood-soaked piece of pillowcase found in Andrei’s jacket pocket, pointing to a possible sexual motive for the crime. On the belt buckle, there were two clearly visible fingerprints—above and below the first letter of the word “School”—but, frustratingly, dusting with two types of powder failed to “develop” them. In the absence of a murder weapon, the four dozen wounds on the body pointed to no particular suspect. Imprinted in a muddy blotch on Andrei’s jacket was the figure a small Christmas tree, which turned out to be the distinctive mark of the rare Columbus brand of galoshes; the footprint, however, could not be matched to a suspect. The clay encrusted on Andrei’s clothes matched that in the cave and yielded no clues about the location of the murder, although Krasovsky did tease out one significant hypothesis. Based on meteorological reports that showed the only days when the temperature in Kiev was above freezing were March 16 and March 19, he believed the body had been dragged into the cave on one of those days, when wet clay and leaves could have stuck to the boy’s clothes and then dried. (This contradicted the conclusion of the autopsy report that the body had been taken to the cave while still in rigor mortis, within about twelve to twenty-four hours after death.) Krasovsky surveyed the Zaitsev brick factory in late May and, like Fenenko, came away convinced that the crime could not have taken place there. He briefly talked to Mendel Beilis and asked to look at his shoes. He found no Columbus galoshes, only a worn-out pair of the more common Conductor brand.

  In the absence of physical evidence or eyewitnesses, to solve the case Krasovsky would have to induce people to say things they did not want to say. A way would have to be found to sway souls, until unspeakable memories made lips begin to move and unintended words were uttered. Some might think the investigator’s methods amounted to coercion, but Krasovsky thought he was only after the truth. With the evidence at hand, he could not solve this crime. But perhaps he could find the killer by disinterring the secret history of Andrei’s family in all its bitterness, resentment, and despair.

  What Krasovsky had learned about the family—and, more important, what the family said about itself—had aroused his deepest suspicions. The arrest of the family had been a fiasco, with Andrei’s relatives defended in the Duma itself, as the Far Right raged against the police for victimizing them. But that did not deter Krasovsky from focusing on them with renewed vigor. If the Black Hundreds had believed Krasovsky would be better than that contemptible tool of the Jews, Detective Mishchuk, they would soon be disappointed. Russia’s Sherlock Holmes was coming to believe that Andrei had indeed been killed, as his aunt Natalia suspected, by “one of his own.”

  Andrei’s stepfather, Luka Prikhodko, seemed to have a solid alibi. His boss, whose name was Kolbasov, swore that Luka had spent ten straight days and nights at the bookbinding workshop where he worked, sleeping and taking his meals there. But there was an emotional entanglement between them that surely gave pause to the psychologically minded Krasovsky. The two men were drinking companions and it was rumored that Luka was having an affair with Kolbasov’s wife. It was hard to say whether this fraught relationship made Kolbasov more or less believable as an alibi witness, but clearly his motives could be complex.

  There were still too many reasons to believe that Luka, and perhaps his wife, Alexandra, who was Andrei’s mother, and her brother, Fyodor Nezhinsky, were involved in the crime. And a primal motive was now coming into clearer focus: money. It had been reported to the investigators that at the cave, after Andrei’s body was found, witnesses had heard his uncle Fyodor declare that Andrei had been killed by his stepfather, and possibly other family members, “because of the promissory note.” Questioned by the police, Fyodor confirmed that he had indeed accused his brother-in-law, Luka, and that he believed that money was the motive.

  At this point, another mysterious character—talked about, obsessed about, but never seen—finally enters the story in a ghostly manner. Andrei’s absent father, Feodosy Chirkov, whom his mother never married, lived with her for two years. While she was pregnant with their second child, a daughter who died shortly after birth, he left Kiev to fulfill his military service in the tsar’s army. Around that time, his family’s modest estate was sold and he received a share of the proceeds. By the time of Andrei’s murder no one knew for sure if he was dead or alive, though rumor had it he had perished during the Russo-Japanese War.

  Chirkov liked to play cards and was said by an acquaintance to “associate with a not especially reputable crowd.” People who knew him had little doubt he would swiftly spend his inheritance. But after Chirkov’s exit, the legend grew that he had bequeathed a “promissory note.” Alexandra would often boast—particularly to her mother if the older woman reproached her for having an illegitimate son—that money existed in Andrei’s name, perhaps a thousand rubles. Andrei, who longed for his father (he was said to ask passing soldiers if they knew of him), filled the emotional void by making his mother’s story his own. He told one of his Jewish friends that his father had left him six hundred rubles and he lived on the interest. Until the day he died, he wanted to believe his father was providing for him.

  The “promissory note” was a private myth, a weapon in a family battle, and a young boy’s consolation. But after the murder, when tears might have washed old resentments away, it emerged like a malicious domovoi to haunt the family. Inexorably, the presumed motive called into being the requisite trappings of guilt. Witnesses appeared. Incriminating evidence was duly found.

  Investigators learned Luka and Alexandra had behaved quite suspiciously at the office of a local newspaper where they had gone to place a notice about Andrei’s disappearance. “[They] were completely composed, calm,” a newspaper employee told inves
tigators. “Something here wasn’t right: the mother was too indifferent.” The couple had “smiled strangely.” A laundress claimed that Alexandra and her brother Fyodor had talked to her about Andrei’s disappearance “with a smile.” The overheated Kiev rumor mill produced a story that a man and woman resembling Luka and Alexandra had been seen hailing a cab, while carrying a big, heavy bag. In another version, the couple claimed the wrapped body was a sick boy they were taking to the hospital.

  On June 3, the police arrested Fyodor. He, too, had an alibi, a coworker who swore they were together at Natalia’s workshop. But at this point, of all the family members, he was in the greatest legal jeopardy. The day before the body was discovered, on March 19, he had been seen in Lukianovka covered in clay—exactly what would be expected if he had wriggled in and out of a cave. A boy testified that Fyodor had had him brush off his clothes. Fyodor claimed he’d soiled his clothes while sleeping in the street, presumably after going on a bender. The boy did confirm Fyodor was somewhat drunk, which was hardly exculpatory. Other witnesses also claimed Fyodor had acted suspiciously.

  Once in custody, Fyodor, not surprisingly, again pointed the finger at his brother-in-law, Andrei’s stepfather, Luka. More unexpectedly, he made a striking claim. He told Krasovsky he had found an important witness who had escaped the authorities’ notice: a man who had seen someone resembling Luka near the caves on the morning of Andrei’s murder. What was truly surprising was that Fyodor was telling the truth. Investigators confirmed the story.