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

by Levin, Edmund

  Krasovsky was not about to let himself be defeated. The truth that he so strongly suspected lay hidden in Luka’s guilt-ridden heart would be coaxed out into the open—with a small white lie easing its path. In Luka’s presence, two “witnesses” (actually officers in civilian clothes) positively “identified” Luka as being at the crime scene. Shaken, at this point Luka said something like, “I’m obviously not going to avoid the gallows, but at least let my sick father go.” These words were interpreted as a confession. Krasovsky believed he had his man.

  The local prosecutor, Brandorf, was also a firm opponent of the “ritual” theory of the Yushchinsky murder. But he had reached a different and much more well-founded conclusion: that Andrei died at the instigation of Vera Cheberyak. Golubev, by identifying Zhenya Cheberyak as a witness, had unintentionally led the authorities to the mother. Everyone who had talked to Zhenya believed he lived in fear of his mother and that he knew more than he was telling. It was clear to all, even to Chaplinsky, that she must be investigated as a suspect.

  In late May, Krasovsky and three other officers searched the Cheberyaks’ home. The presence of a citizen witness was a part of standard procedure and the long-suffering landlord, Stepan Zakharchenko, was summoned to fulfill that role. Zakharchenko wanted nothing more than to remove the whole Cheberyak family from his property. He was tired of harboring this villainous woman and had had enough of her raucous, drunken parties. He didn’t think much of her children either, who pilfered fruit from his orchard. What is more, he likely had recently learned Cheberyak had been chiseling money for years from his daughter, who ran a grocery store up the street, buying on credit and then paying back less than she had been charged. (His daughter inexplicably let Cheberyak maintain the account book.) His daughter had filed a complaint with the authorities, something Cheberyak probably did not yet know, and they were preparing to bring fraud charges against her. The landlord’s relationship with Cheberyak was also fraught in one more respect that would grow in importance: he was friendly with Mendel Beilis.

  As Zakharchenko went up the stairs to the Cheberyaks’ apartment to join the police officers, Cheberyak’s downstairs neighbor Zinaida Malitskaya followed him. She and Cheberyak had once been great friends, but their relationship had gone bad, as evidenced by their violent public quarrel some weeks earlier. (Cheberyak said Malitskaya had taunted her with a rumor she’d “spent the night” somewhere—she didn’t appreciate the intimation that she was a loose woman.) Sensing trouble, Zakharchenko waved Malitskaya off, but she went up anyway, explaining that she wanted to witness the “big day.” Upon seeing her, Cheberyak said, “What do you want?” Malitskaya said, “I came to see your big day.” Cheberyak said, “Go away, you know I’m an anxious woman.” Then she threw herself on Malitskaya and slapped her in the face. An officer pulled Cheberyak off and the search got under way.

  While Krasovsky and two officers examined the premises, the third officer struck up a conversation with Zhenya and asked him about the murder. “He wanted to tell me something,” the officer, a police supervisor named Evtikhy Kirichenko, recalled, “but suddenly stammered and said that he didn’t remember.” Kirichenko talked to the boy while sitting in a chair at the threshold between two rooms. Cheberyak was standing in the same room as Zhenya, across the threshold, off to the side but out of view. “When I asked Zhenya who killed [Andrei] I noticed that his face convulsed,” Kirichenko reported. Leaning down in his chair, Kirichenko managed to catch sight of Cheberyak “standing and with her hand and with her whole body making threatening gestures.” He and Zhenya caught the gestures at the same moment. Kirichenko, an experienced officer, was so overwhelmed that he broke his professional composure. It was as if he had come in touch with the “evil force,” the woman the neighborhood children believed could cast spells. He immediately halted the conversation with Zhenya and rushed to a fellow officer to share his powerful intuition that this woman must have been involved in the crime. Nothing else, he felt, could explain the vision of sheer malevolence he had witnessed at the mention of the dead boy’s name.

  Brandorf had argued to Chaplinsky a number of times that Vera Cheberyak should be arrested but Chaplinsky had refused his request, as he had Mishchuk’s. Brandorf felt he had no choice but to maneuver behind Chaplinsky’s back to have Vera Cheberyak detained. He tried to convince investigating magistrate Fenenko, who shared his views, to act. But in the face of the opposition of his superior, Chaplinsky, and in the absence of clear evidence, the hypercorrect Fenenko would not take the risk.

  As a last resort, Brandorf schemed to have Cheberyak detained by the Corps of Gendarmes, which had the power to take practically anyone into custody if he or she was deemed a possible threat to “state security.” The powers of the Kiev Gendarmes had been further enhanced in anticipation of the upcoming official visit of Tsar Nicholas, along with Prime Minister Stolypin, at the end of August to unveil a statue of Nicholas’s grandfather, Alexander II. The authorities were determined to clear the city of troublemakers. The deputy interior minister, General Pavel Kurlov, who had so decisively intervened to stop a pogrom in the wake of Andrei’s murder, personally headed security for the visit. Nothing would be allowed to disrupt the majestic honor of the sovereign’s presence in Kiev.

  Therefore it attracted little attention when, on June 9, gendarmes led away one more potential troublemaker on the pretext that “suspicious persons, taking part in a political movement, gather at her home.” In fact, the only people gathering at Vera Cheberyak’s home were her young lovers and other assorted criminals. Brandorf had high hopes that he had the killer. “I firmly expected that if she sat in jail for a few days,” he later testified, “the whole case would be solved.”

  Vera Cheberyak’s husband, Vasily, also had high hopes—that Vera’s arrest would finally change his luck for the better. His life with Vera—the long overnight shifts at the telegraph office, punctuated by the humiliating oblivion of drinking binges among her lovers, and now the constant fear of police raids—had made him a desperate man. The appearance of the gendarmes at his doorstep must have seemed like a deus ex machina. “I’ll be free of her,” he told a friend after his wife was arrested, “and I’ll be able to start living a normal life.”

  But the hopes of both husband and prosecutor depended on an event that had not yet happened: a confession, or at least some slip, however small, under the pressure of hour after hour of questioning, which would implicate Cheberyak and her gang. Cheberyak possessed a fantastic and frightening capacity to intimidate, dominate, manipulate, and evade her accusers. (In her most recent such feat, she had beaten the rap in the matter of the stolen dress she had sold to her sometime boarder by somehow producing three witnesses—two female friends and a baker named Abramov—who swore she had come by it honestly.) But Brandorf and the senior gendarme officer, Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov, believed that Cheberyak would be a different, more vulnerable woman now that she was under arrest “as a matter of state security,” a limbo where there were no lawyers and no means of appeal. While in confinement and under intense interrogation—something she had never experienced—they were confident she would crack.

  Just as important, police could now question Zhenya Cheberyak out of his mother’s earshot. In previous interrogations, the boy had clearly betrayed a desire to reveal the truth. With his mother safely behind bars, gentle questioning might loosen the bonds of the boy’s fear. Indeed Zhenya, questioned a week after his mother’s detention, did let slip some details that converged with what other witnesses were saying. He now admitted that Andrei had come by the Cheberyaks’ house for some gunpowder. “I was afraid to tell you about the gunpowder in the last questioning because I thought that you would beat me for that,” he admitted, “but now, when you explained that investigators can’t beat anyone, I’m telling you the truth.” And he confirmed that the last time he saw Andrei, the boy was without his coat, which was never found (a circumstantial detail that would grow in importance later in the investig
ation). But while he admitted that Andrei had visited him, he insisted that it was at two p.m., not in the morning, and denied that the day could have been March 12, the day his friend disappeared. The investigators were frustrated that Zhenya could not seem to break his mother’s spell.

  Zhenya, moreover, suddenly and suspiciously claimed to remember something that he had failed to mention in previous interrogations—and that implicated Andrei’s uncle Fyodor. On the evening of March 12, he said he had been sent by his father to the beer hall to fetch two bottles and had encountered a “very drunk” Fyodor who, “seeing me, bent over and quietly said, ‘Andrusha is no more, he’s been stabbed to death.’ ” Questioned separately, his mother told a slightly different version of the story. Investigators found Zhenya’s testimony to be contradicted by many witnesses. Cheberyak had probably planned for this testimony when mother and son would be separated. It was likely the story was a well-crafted but imperfectly coordinated lie to divert suspicion away from her.

  A pattern had emerged: Vera Cheberyak invariably pointed the finger at the leading or most convenient suspect of the moment. After Andrei’s mother was arrested, she was said to have spread stories about her abusive treatment of her son. When attention focused on the Jews, she avowed that they were the perpetrators. Now, when she believed Fyodor to be a prime suspect, she did what she could to pin the crime on him. The pattern would persist.

  Cheberyak was held from June 9 to July 9 as a matter of “state security.” But the security organs could hold her no longer without formal charges. On July 9 Brandorf found it necessary to have Officer Krasovsky arrest her formally for suspicion in Andrei’s death. Her confinement could be kept secret no longer. Just five days later, she was released at the insistence of Chaplinsky after an indignant Golubev, greatly outraged that no Jew had yet been charged, demanded she be freed.

  Little else is known about Cheberyak’s five-week confinement. But the break the prosecutor and her husband both hoped for never came. She did not crack, and she returned home to her hapless husband who, far from being rid of her, would now be drawn further into her machinations.

  Krasovsky had been on the scene when Officer Kirichenko had his unnerving encounter with Vera Cheberyak and must have been briefed about it. But he ignored it, even though Kirichenko was one of his protégés. He continued to prosecute his investigation of Luka Prikhodko with ruthless zeal. The tsarist justice system was not without checks and balances, and Luka could have complained about any mistreatment he had suffered when he was brought in to be interviewed by Investigator Fenenko. Asked later why he did not protest, Luka said, “If they had asked me that night what my name was I couldn’t have told them.”

  The liberal press rejoiced at the discovery of the culprit—or rather culprits, because it was assumed everyone in custody was guilty. “All the information that the murderers have been found is now revealed,” Russia’s Morning opined. “Five [relatives] have been arrested … Two of them belong to the most active ranks of the Union of Russian People.” The Kadet newspaper Speech expressed the opinion that the relatives had imitated a ritual killing. The “whole fanatical gang” that had “shamed the Russian people” had to be brought to justice.

  But the case against Luka, if it ever can be said to have truly existed, quickly fell apart. Alexandra had not been indifferent to her son’s disappearance, as some witnesses claimed; she had fallen into faints and frantically searched for Andrei throughout the city. The promissory note did not exist. Andrei’s father had given Alexandra seventy-five rubles from the sale of the estate (including twenty-five for Andrei’s education); she filed suit in court for more but lost. Luka’s alibi was confirmed by his boss’s neighbors. As for the slip of paper with the description of blood vessels in the skull, Luka had tried to explain that it fell out of a medical handbook given him for binding. The owner of the book was found and confirmed the note had been written by him—largely in Latin.

  Krasovsky’s instincts, for once, had failed him. He had fallen into the trap that the great Hans Gross, the Austrian founder of the discipline of criminalistics, had cautioned about in his pioneering treatise of the era, Criminal Investigation. The detective had resorted to “heaping testimony on testimony,” a path that invariably “will excite the babbler to babble still more … encourage the impudent, confuse the timid, and let the right moment slip past.”

  With the falseness of the accusation against the family exposed—for the second time in three months—the Far Right was handed a tremendous propaganda advantage. (This is why a reconstruction of the largely ignored prehistory of the Beilis case is critical to understanding how it unfolded.) The credibility of the official investigation was shattered, and the liberal press—regarded as the Jewish press—made to look foolish. (It played into the Right’s hands that some of the purveyors of misleading information, like the newspaper employee who claimed Alexandra and Luka had behaved suspiciously, were Jews.) How could anyone believe a simple artisan could write a note in Latin? Who could not have sympathy for the poor Christian mother who had been forced to miss her son’s funeral and now had nearly lost her husband and brother?

  Luka was released on July 14, after nearly three weeks in custody. Krasovsky had wasted his invaluable respite from right-wing agitation. Other investigators, lacking any concern whatever for the truth, were closing in on their preferred suspect.

  By mid-July, Chaplinsky must have despaired of finding a way to charge a Jew with Andrei’s murder and surely feared for his future advancement as he again came under sneering personal assault in the right-wing press. “Unfortunately, one cannot count on the Kiev prosecutor,” an editorial in Zemshchina declared. “It is apparent that the interests of the Jews are dearer to him than justice.” The Russian Banner slapped him indirectly, demanding that “the minister of Justice take a personal interest in the Yushchinsky case,” implying that the chief prosecutor should be relieved of the matter. Chaplinsky, who was of Polish descent, had converted from Catholicism to Orthodoxy in his eagerness to prove himself a true Russian. For a man of such great, if hollow, ambition, his eye on a seat on the empire’s highest court, the Far Right’s attacks must have been distressing beyond measure. But fortune was about to provide him with an unlikely trio of saviors.

  The first of them to appear—Kazimir “the Lamplighter” Shakhovsky and his wife, Ulyana Shakhovskaya—came to the authorities’ attention in early July. The Russian writer Vladimir Korolenko described the couple as “poor, wasted shells.” Ulyana was hardly ever sober. Kazimir was also a heavy drinker. They worked together, though it was a common sight in Lukianovka to see Ulyana staggering alone down the street in the evening, ladder over her shoulder, as neighborhood boys trailed behind, eager to help her light the 140 lamps on the couple’s route.

  The Lamplighters, as the couple was called, were the first witnesses to place Andrei in the vicinity of the cave on March 12, the day he disappeared. This made them the most important witnesses who had been discovered so far, though, for Chaplinsky’s purposes, their initial testimony was of little use.

  In his first deposition on July 9, Kazimir revealed how he had seen Andrei around eight in the morning on March 12, standing with Zhenya near the state liquor store, above which the Cheberyak family lived. He told of his last encounter with Andrei, how the boy had struck him playfully, but painfully, and how he had dispatched him with a crude insult. Ulyana had caught sight of Andrei with Zhenya slightly earlier but did not speak to him. Kazimir was emphatic that he had no idea what had happened to Andrei: “Where Zhenya and Andrusha went I don’t know, only that since then I never saw Andrusha again.”

  Kazimir quite believably explained why he had avoided talking to the authorities for four months: “I myself am illiterate, I don’t read the newspapers … I was afraid to get involved in this case because I have to walk the streets at night and early in the morning and people who didn’t like my testimony might knife me.” He hinted of whom specifically he might be afraid, saying
, “You would be better off questioning Vera Cheberyak’s neighbors. Those witnesses would know more than I do. They’ll tell you what kind of person Cheberyak is. I myself heard she was a thief, but I can’t tell you any more about her. For now I have nothing further to say.”

  In that “for now,” leaving the door ajar, there was perhaps a hint of the pressure applied by Kazimir’s lead questioner. Adam Polishchuk was one of two former Kiev police detectives Krasovsky had inexplicably retained as his assistants. Both of them had recently been cashiered from the force for assorted misconduct, including “consorting with criminals.” Unbeknown to Krasovsky, Polishchuk was, in a sense, a double agent working undercover; he was cooperating with Golubev. He may have perceived in the case a path to rehabilitating himself through influential people. (He would, in fact, later be hired by one of the imperial security services and the Union of Russian People would arrange for his material reward.)

  On July 18, Shakhovsky was questioned again, and his responses suggest he was trying to please his interrogators. “The place where Cheberyak lives is located next to the Zaitsev factory and is separated from it by a high fence. On March 12, you could pass from where she lived to the factory because the fence was badly damaged and parts of the fence were even missing … The factory grounds were managed by the clerk Mendel … I know that Mendel is on good terms with Cheberyak and would visit her home. For now I have nothing further to add.”