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

by Levin, Edmund

  Fyodor had tracked down the witness, a stove repairman, some weeks earlier. The man had told only a few people about the person he had seen while on his way to the Zaitsev factory to do a job at seven a.m. on March 12. But the story quickly spread in the Lukianovka anthill, making its way to Andrei’s aunt Natalia, who told her brother about it. The man was known only by his nickname “Lapochka” (roughly translated, “Sweetie”), but Fyodor soon showed up at his door. His real name was Vasily Yashchenko; now he confirmed to the police that he’d seen someone near the Zaitsev factory on March 12 who struck him as suspicious.

  Fyodor, having found a witness who he believed implicated his brother-in-law, decided to keep this information to himself, for purely self-interested reasons. According to a police report, “He ended his investigation and decided to say nothing about his conjectures, reasoning that you couldn’t bring a dead boy back to life and the arrest of [Luka] would negatively affect the material situation of the family which he, Fyodor, would then have to support.” But now that Fyodor found himself on the verge of being charged with murder, the witness he had discovered was his ticket to freedom. An excited Krasovsky restyled Fyodor from a suspect into a “colleague,” as helpful citizens or informers were called, who would now aid in bringing his brother-in-law to justice.

  However much Chaplinsky, the chief prosecutor, wanted to charge a Jew or Jews with the crime, he could not now ignore the suspicions of the famed detective he himself had helped put in charge of the case. In early June he reluctantly reported to the justice minister that “Nezhinsky’s story could turn out to be truthful.” Another development may also have made him hesitate. On June 6, Father Alexander Glagolev, a Kiev professor and leading Christian authority on the Jewish religion and rituals whose opinion Chaplinsky had solicited a month earlier, delivered his formal statement. Father Glagolev acknowledged “evidence of the hatred of Jews for non-Jews in the Talmud” but thoroughly dismissed the blood accusation. Echoing the judgment of the council convened by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the very first such case in Fulda, he noted the age-old Jewish “prohibition … against the use of blood in any food” detailed in the Talmud. He emphasized that that proscription was “to my knowledge nowhere lifted, limited, or mitigated” in any known text and declared the very idea of a blood ritual “counter to the principles of Judaism, ancient and modern.” He further implied that the ultra-pious Hasids were, if anything, less likely than other Jews to commit such an act of sacrilege.

  Father Glagolev’s lengthy contemplation of the case was no mere dry scholarly exercise. The killing had affected him deeply, and he concluded his statement with an unusual cri de coeur: “The horrible, blood-curdling murder of the innocent boy … stands before my mind as an insoluble mystery, one which perhaps can only be uncovered by the All-Seeing Eye!”

  Sometime in late May or June, Evgeny Frantsevich Mishchuk, nominally Kiev’s chief detective but now officially relieved of the case (the “secret” of Krasovsky’s appointment had not remained so for long), sat himself down on an earthen bank near the Berner Estate in Andrei’s old neighborhood of Lukianovka and lit a cigarette. He was out of uniform. He had dressed as nondescriptly as he could. In one pocket he had some caramels. For hours he had been roaming Kiev’s impoverished, disreputable outskirts, sensing at every turn criminal dens and underworld hideouts where all sorts of fugitives, even wanted killers, took refuge. When he saw some children playing here, scampering up, down, and around the ruts, ravines, and caves near where Andrei’s body was found, he hoped he had found the break in the case he was looking for.

  Mishchuk was greatly troubled by the paths the investigation was taking. He no longer believed Andrei’s family had anything to do with his murder, but Krasovsky had redirected the case toward them. Nor did he believe, as Chaplinsky avowed, that the Jews were responsible. Mishchuk was not a well-educated man. He had been expelled from a gymnasium for poor grades. But the idea that Jews were responsible for the crime, as Professor Sikorsky insisted, made no sense to him. Brandorf, the local prosecutor, considered Mishchuk “sluggish and incompetent.” Krasovsky was certainly the better detective. But it was Mishchuk who at this point in the case had the superior intuition.

  As he sat smoking, fingering the caramels, Mishchuk knew he had to wait and let the children come to him. He waited patiently, he recalled later, “while the children running past sometimes stopped to take a look at what this old fellow was doing.” He gently struck up a conversation about what game they were playing and gave the children candy as they gathered around. When he sensed they were comfortable talking to him, he asked whether they were sorry that Andrei was gone, probing to see if they knew anything. Mishchuk found “the children were not greatly upset” by their playmate’s death, lamenting that “children soon forget such moments.” However hard he tried to draw out of them what they had heard among themselves or from their parents, “the children didn’t understand what all the fuss was about and apparently had no greater interest than their games.”

  Had any stranger been seen with Andrei? The children didn’t respond to his question, but they did volunteer their own fears. “Suddenly the children’s tongues loosened,” as they told of a notorious woman “in whose house all sorts of people were always hanging around, that there were parties, singing, noise, that at home their parents said it was a bad house, that they shouldn’t go there … that she was shady, a fortune teller, that she knew spells, and was involved in all sorts of things and that all the people were afraid of her and would avoid her on the street … and that she was a thief and a killer.” The children also said people mockingly called her “Cheberiachka.”

  In criminal patois, “cheberiachka,” according to a contemporary dictionary of criminal slang, meant a “merry song with indecent subject matter.” It was of a piece with Vera Cheberyak’s other nickname, “Sibiriachka”—“the Siberian”—an apparent reference to her criminal acquaintances and the frosty region where they had served time in prison, or were destined to. Cheberyak’s neighbors lived in dread of her. Questioned by the authorities, they called her “the lowest of the low,” “a dark figure,” an “evil presence.”

  Cheberyak was volatile and violent. Many a story about her ended with the words “and then she hit me in the face.” She quarreled with her downstairs neighbor, Zinaida Malitskaya, the liquor store cashier, and hit her in the face in broad daylight. She hit another acquaintance “in her physiognomy,” as the jocular Russian expression goes, for flirting with a man she considered hers. But such violence did not compare with the notorious and horrific act she had committed six years earlier—a crime that still haunted Lukianovka.

  Cheberyak freely admitted to blinding her lover, a French accordion player named Pavel Mifle, by throwing sulfuric acid in his face. (He went on to become known as “the blind musician.”) She matter-of-factly explained to acquaintances that she had retaliated after Mifle had hit her in the face. According to other accounts, she committed the act in a fit of jealous rage. Whatever her motivation for maiming her lover, she was tried for the crime and acquitted. Mifle testified in her defense, saying he had forgiven her, which apparently swayed the jury. After her acquittal, the relationship continued. Cheberyak would accompany Mifle to the clinic and to the French consulate, from which he received a tiny invalid’s stipend of about fifteen rubles a month. She visited him frequently and sometimes had friends take food to his apartment two doors down from hers on Upper Yurkovskaya Street.

  In her criminality and in her lying, Cheberyak was compulsive and impulsive. Her prevarications began with the name she went by in official documents: Vera Vladimirovna Cheberyak née Singaevskaya. She claimed to be twenty-nine years old, the daughter of a priest named Vladimir Singaevsky from Zhitomir, about a hundred miles west of Kiev, who died when she was six years old. In fact, her baptismal record shows the sacrament was administered on August 26, 1879, making her thirty-one years old in the spring of 1911. Court documents indicate her son, Zhen
ya, at first told police he was twelve. If his mother were truly twenty-nine, that would have made her a less than decent seventeen when she gave birth, which is likely why he later said he was eleven. He was actually thirteen, going on fourteen. But if the son had to remain a child so that the mother would not grow older, then she would see to it. As for her clergyman father, in the space on the certificate where her patronymic should have been, there was instead scrawled the abbreviation “illeg.”—illegitimate. Cheberyak was born to Yuliania Singaevskaya, from a family of small landowners (a class somewhat above common peasants) and an unknown man. Court inquiries later established that Vladimir the priest from Zhitomir did not exist.

  Cheberyak had a third nickname: “Verka Chinovnitsa,” meaning “Verka the Civil Servant’s Wife” (“Verka” being a diminutive of Vera). When Vera married Vasily Cheberyak, the son of a retired army captain some thirteen years her senior when she was only around seventeen, it must have seemed like a grand ascent. Unlike Andrei Yushchinsky’s mother who, despite giving birth out of wedlock, was able to find a husband, Cheberyak’s mother apparently never wed. Yuliania Singaevskaya gave birth to another illegitimate child—Vera’s half brother Peter—by still another man. As the daughter of a single unwed mother with two children and no man to support them, Cheberyak must have endured a hard childhood. Vasily may have appeared a savior. But although he was a dutiful employee of Kiev’s Central Telegraph Office, and steadily received promotions, he never made more than about forty-seven rubles a month. For Cheberyak—narcissistic, histrionic, emotionally and materially grasping, and magnetic to men, or at least a certain kind of man—simply to be “the civil servant’s wife” would not do. Cheberyak set about creating a criminal gang that would serve as a source of income and sensual amusement.

  The Frenchman Mifle was far from her only lover. She had many others, young men whom people noticed entering her home wearing one set of clothes and leaving wearing another. In the winter of 1910–1911, her gang included nineteen-year-old Mitrofan Petrov, who lived with her for a time and whom she referred to as her “lodger,” eighteen-year-old Nikolai Mandzelevsky (“Nicky the Sailor”), and Ivan (“Red Vanya”) Latyshev. She was said to be romantically involved with all of them. Cheberyak would try to pass off some of her gang members as her “brothers.” Her half brother Peter (known as “Plis,” which means “Velveteen”) was also a member of her gang. But it was rare that the police weren’t looking for Peter for one reason or another, and he usually made himself scarce in Lukianovka.

  The Cheberyaks’ three-room apartment, above the state liquor store, was the scene of wild, drunken carousing that scandalized the neighborhood. For some time Vasily Cheberyak had slept in one bedroom with the three children, while Vera kept the other bedroom for herself and whomever she was entertaining. Vasily, conveniently, spent little time at home at night, because he worked the graveyard shift at the telegraph office. He left in the evening and returned home in the early morning to sleep, often working additional shifts to earn extra money. On the infrequent occasions when he intruded, Vera’s guests would drink him into a stupor so he could not interfere with their revelries (forensic chemical analysis of her home would find semen on the wallpaper). Vasily told a neighbor that he even suspected the young men slipped something into his drinks.

  The police believed Cheberyak was behind dozens of robberies. Mishchuk, who had only been working in Kiev a few months, puzzled over why she had never been arrested, and discovered she was a police informer, selectively betraying her brethren to keep her own concern in operation. But her fortunes in crime apparently varied, and her high-living ways kept the family on the edge of a precipice. Mifle’s mother, Maria, told the authorities, “Vera … would visit me, always wearing nice gold things and clothes. I would ask her where she got such things and she told me she bought them from her ‘lads’—that is, thieves.” A neighbor noticed that she wore a beautiful coat and changed her hats often. But others testified the family lived on the verge of poverty, amid shabby furniture, with Cheberyak sometimes complaining she had to stretch one day’s dinner into three.

  In the first months of 1911, Cheberyak’s life began to fall apart. Perhaps she had grown more reckless, or her preternatural run of luck had simply run out. But that winter she stumbled from one farcical debacle to another. On February 18 she walked into the Gusin watch store on Lvovsky Street and sold a watch and chain for seventeen rubles. A day later, a customer noticed the watch, which had been stolen just days earlier from his mother’s home. The storekeeper’s wife began keeping an eye out for Cheberyak and, spying her a few days later, confronted her. Cheberyak of course denied any wrongdoing and, to demonstrate her unconcern, gave Mrs. Gusin another piece of jewelry for repair. Cheberyak, brashly overconfident, returned to the store on March 8. Mrs. Gusin called the police and Cheberyak was taken to the precinct. But Cheberyak somehow escaped and could not immediately be tracked down because she had given a false name, posing as the wife of a Colonel Ivanov.

  On that very same day, Cheberyak was implicated in an entirely different crime. Some months earlier she had taken in a young woman who was down on her luck named Nadia Gaevskaya. Nadia at first believed that Cheberyak had befriended her out of kindness but to her irritation found herself treated as a servant. The relationship soured and, before the young woman left, Cheberyak sold Nadia a dress, saying it had become too small for her. On March 8, an outraged woman spotted Nadia on the street, recognizing the dress as her own—it had been stolen—and summoned the police. Nadia, in turn, accused Cheberyak, and the matter was turned over to a justice of the peace.

  The next day, March 9, came the catastrophe: five members of her gang were arrested while entering a bathhouse, charged with the theft of two thousand rubles’ worth of revolvers. Cheberyak’s home was searched the following day, March 10, and though no evidence was found against her, her gang had been wrecked. She knew better than most that when the police targeted suspects, more often than not it was with the help of informers. Who had informed on her this time? Could it have been Pavel Mifle, at whose home she sometimes stashed stolen goods, or members of his family, whom she on more than one occasion complained “nursed a grudge against me”? Could it have been one of her beloved “lads”? Or could it been have been one of her son Zhenya’s lousy friends?

  It was just two days after the police raid that Andrei disappeared. Another week would pass before the two boys looking for treasure discovered his corpse in the cave. A neighbor who was a close friend of Vasily Cheberyak’s noticed a striking change in Vera after Andrei’s body was found. Her demonic self-confidence had deserted her. “She looked somehow upset, as if she had been blindsided by something,” he recalled. “She walked around as if something had scalded her.”

  Detective Mishchuk had come to believe the trail led to Vera Cheberyak’s doorstep. The sleuthing of Golubev, the right-wing hothead, had luckily uncovered one genuine witness: Zhenya Cheberyak. Vera’s son told Golubev that he’d seen Andrei on the morning of March 12, the day the boy disappeared, though he soon took back the story, and denied he’d seen or met Andrei that day. Zhenya was questioned by the authorities on May 11. This time the boy said he had seen Andrei about ten days to two weeks before his body was found, but he did not give an exact day. And he lied, saying Andrei had come by to play but that he had refused.

  A theory of the case was assembling itself in Mishchuk’s mind. The boy, it was clear, had seen Zhenya on the day he disappeared. Vera Cheberyak, it had been rumored, had taken advantage of the 1905 pogrom to loot fabulous amounts of property during the chaos. He formulated a hypothesis that Andrei’s murder was committed “with the goal of simulating a ritual murder and inciting a pogrom.” That part of the scenario could be considered wild conjecture. But he rightly believed Cheberyak had to be considered a leading suspect and that intense attention should be focused on her and her gang. For better or worse in the Russia of 1911, detaining suspects in order to press them to confess was sta
ndard procedure. But when Mishchuk recommended arresting Vera Cheberyak, Chaplinsky, the chief prosecutor, scolded him: “Why are you torturing an innocent woman?”

  At the same time, Mishchuk began scheming against Krasovsky, just as the other detective had feared. Mishchuk may have felt his intrigue was justified, however. In a letter to the Kiev police chief on June 13, he accused Krasovsky of attempting to suborn witnesses against Andrei’s stepfather. The chief of police forwarded the letter to the governor, who sent it to Chaplinsky, who scrawled on it, “Relations between Krasovsky and Mishchuk are very bad.” But no action was taken against Krasovsky who, strictly speaking, did not fabricate testimony, though he would come very close to the line.

  Krasovsky was now free to turn his attention to Andrei’s family. He prepared to exhume their delusions and bitter rifts and turn them into his own theory of the case.

  Nikolai Krasovsky believed the evidence against Luka was accumulating. In June, a search of his workstation at the bookbinder turned up clippings from right-wing newspapers about ritual murder, along with a slip of paper tucked into a book with notes on the anatomy of the blood vessels in the temple—the area of the skull where Andrei was stabbed some thirteen times. Krasovsky ordered Luka arrested on June 26. Also arrested were Luka’s brother and, possibly to exert excruciating emotional leverage on the suspects, their blind father.

  Krasovsky supervised as the police ordered Luka to dress in new clothes and try on various hats. A barber shaved Luka’s beard, gave him a haircut (Luka noticed the barber paid particular attention to shearing the right side), and dyed his hair and eyebrows black. One of Krasovsky’s deputies personally attended to curling Luka’s mustache. When tears rolled down his face, the police raised their hands threateningly and told him, “Don’t you dare cry, you so-and-so … your tears will make your mustaches unwind.” The suspect was brought to the exact spot on a street bordering the area of the caves where the stove repairman Yashchenko said he had seen the man he described as “dark” and “dressed like a gentleman” (a description that in itself made it improbable the man was Luka). Despite the rather drastic makeover, Yashchenko still did not positively identify Luka as the man he had seen. Looking at him from one angle, he thought Luka might be the same person, but some facial features, particularly the nose, he said, were different.