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

by Levin, Edmund

  A man of great intellectual sophistication, Shcheglovitov was probably no more anti-Semitic than the average Russian official and had even helped Gruzenberg win a lenient sentence for a Jewish vigilante convicted of trying to kill a notorious instigator of pogroms. Now, in 1911, only one motive could explain why such a man would support a ritual murder trial: self-interest. This, in turn, could only mean that he believed he was doing what the tsar wished him to do.

  True, the tsar’s wishes were often hard to discern. And, at this point, officials may have relied merely on his single brief gesture of crossing himself at the mention of the suspect or a meaningful nod to a minister during one or another briefing. But it stood to reason that a man who believed a divine whisper urged him to persecute the Jews was likely to welcome an endeavor that sought to prove their fanatical malevolence. Nicholas’s “inner voice” had not changed its counsel since his 1906 veto of the pro-Jewish measures. Just two weeks before his visit to Kiev, the tsar had signed yet another anti-Jewish restriction, one that limited trade by Jews east of the Urals, sternly instructing his ministers, “Everything needs to be done to prevent the Jews from taking over Siberia.”

  One powerful figure, however, was unquestionably appalled and unsettled by the Beilis case. In early September, as the brick-factory clerk neared the end of his stay in the quarantine cell, his best hope of avoiding prosecution lay in the possibility of intervention by the prime minister, Peter Stolypin. Stolypin was a fervent Russian nationalist. Like all senior tsarist officials, he was an anti-Semite, but he was not a racist. That is, he did not see the Jews as an irredeemably evil race. Rather, he saw the Jews as a political and social problem, one that could be dealt with, if only the tsar allowed it, by political means. No record exists of Stolypin’s opinion of the Beilis case, but it is inconceivable that he believed that putting a Jew on trial for killing a Christian boy would be in the interests of the regime. Such a public spectacle could only needlessly alienate the Jews even further. Stolypin, moreover, was greatly worried about the impact of Russia’s anti-Semitic excesses on the empire’s image abroad and on its foreign economic interests. He was specifically concerned in the fall of 1911 about an intense lobbying campaign—the first of its kind in history—led by the American financier Jacob Schiff calling for the abrogation of the Russo-American commercial treaty of 1832 as punishment for Russia’s anti-Jewish policies. A ritual murder case could only give the backers of this campaign more ammunition.

  A pragmatic anti-Semitic supporter of Stolypin’s later said the prime minister would never have let the Beilis case go forward. During the past year, Stolypin had shown his political fortitude by attempting to banish the “Mad Monk” Iliodor as well as Rasputin, both favorites of the tsar’s. He had stood up to the Far Right in a major confrontation dealing with the organization of local governments in the western provinces, so he may well have succeeded in thwarting a foolish endeavor that the tsar had not explicitly endorsed.

  When he was briefed on the case in Kiev, Stolypin could only have grown more alarmed. But any action to forestall the prosecution of Beilis would have to await his return to St. Petersburg, an event that depended on his continued existence, which in turn depended upon the efforts of his subordinate and political enemy, General Kurlov, who was in charge of all security precautions, as well as the Kiev Okhrana chief, Nikolai Kuliabko. Stolypin needed around-the-clock protection to stay alive. In his five years in office, he had survived some seventeen attempts on his life, including a spectacular bombing of his home that killed twenty-seven people and wounded two of his children. Kurlov arranged for Stolypin to be protected by a twenty-two-man security detail, but an aura of impending tragedy would overtake the prime minister’s visit to Kiev, thanks to an outburst by his nemesis Rasputin.

  The erratic and charismatic holy man was said to have a gift for prophecy, supposedly predicting the calamitous sinking of the Russian fleet in the war with Japan in 1905. He could also, it was said, predict the fates of individuals, whether they would fall ill, and how their lives would unfold. Seldom were his prognostications riddles to be unraveled; they were direct and verifiable. On the day the tsar and his entourage arrived in Kiev, his prophetic urge concerned the prime minister.

  Barred by Stolypin from appearing in public with the tsar, Rasputin stood among the crowd of ordinary people on the street, watching the imperial family and the attending dignitaries pass by on the way to the cathedral. As Stolypin’s carriage passed, Rasputin exclaimed, “Death is following him! Death is riding behind him!” Rasputin reputedly spent the night tortured by the vision and was heard muttering about it over and over as he tossed in his bed. It was an eerie omen, though one that Stolypin, had he known about it, would certainly have shrugged off. No one was more fatalistic about his future than the prime minister himself. The first line of his last will and testament, drafted years earlier, read, “I want to be buried where I am assassinated.”

  The main event of the tsar’s visit to Kiev, the unveiling of a monument to his grandfather Alexander II, took place without incident. So did a number of other outdoor events, which were thought to present the greatest security risk. The command performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tale of the Tsar Saltan at Kiev’s Municipal Theater on September 1 was deemed to be thoroughly secure. The identities of all the guests were vetted. Only those possessing a special pass—the rarest of the twenty-six types issued for the Kiev events—were allowed to enter the theater. The Kiev Okhrana chief, Kuliabko, the man who had arrested Mendel Beilis six weeks earlier, was present to supervise security.

  The tsar and two of his daughters, accompanied by the Bulgarian crown prince, occupied the Kiev governor-general’s parterre box, the closest one to the stage. (That evening the empress Alexandra, as was so often the case, was indisposed and did not attend.) The first row of the orchestra was reserved for the highest officials, and Stolypin sat in seat number five, between the governor-general, F. F. Trepov, and the minister of the imperial court, Baron V. B. Fredericks. When the lights went up during the intermission, the prime minister stood up and leaned on the barrier of the orchestra pit. As he conversed with Baron Fredericks and another dignitary, a slim young man slipped into his row, stopping within five or six feet of him. The young man pulled a pistol out of his pocket and fired two shots. One bullet hit Stolypin in the hand and the other found its mark in the right side of his chest, shattering one of the orders hanging from a ribbon on his jacket. Kiev’s governor, A. F. Giers, described the scene:

  At first he did not seem to know what happened … With slow and deliberate movements he placed his hat and gloves on the barrier, opened his jacket and, seeing his vest heavily soaked with blood, waved his hand, as if wanting to say, “It is all over.” Then he sank heavily into his seat and said clearly and distinctly…“I am happy to die for the Tsar.”

  Nicholas had been in the drawing room with his children and immediately returned to his box when he heard the shots. Before being taken to the hospital, Stolypin, Nicholas later wrote his mother, “slowly turned toward me and crossed himself with his left arm.”

  The prime minister had been left totally unguarded. Not an officer was to be found within a hundred paces of him. Before the assassin could get off a third shot, he was set upon by a crowd of four dozen gentlemen in evening clothes who pushed him to the ground and beat him in the face with their opera glasses, egged on by the spectators’ cries of “Kill him!” Nicholas expressed regret, apparently with utter sincerity, that the police did not allow the crowd to beat the man to death.

  Stolypin was, of course, attended to by the best physicians in the city, including Dr. Nikolai Obolonsky, dean of the medical department of the Kiev’s St. Vladimir University, who had performed an autopsy on Andrei Yushchinsky. At first the doctors had a good deal of hope that the prime minister might survive. After three days, though, he took a turn for the worse, and he died on September 5, 1911. Damage to his liver had turned out to be more severe than first believed. The
main damage to the organ, it was determined, had been done mostly not by the bullet but by fragments of the Order of St. Vladimir of the Third Degree awarded him by Nicholas, which had been driven into his body. Prime Minister Stolypin had truly died for his service to the tsar.

  The shooting of Stolypin triggered new fears of a pogrom: the prime minister’s assassin—a twenty-four-year-old anarchist, law school graduate, and sometime secret police informer named Dimitry Bogrov—turned out to be a Jew. (In an act of staggering gullibility, Kuliabko had let Bogrov, whom he believed to be his agent, talk his way into the theater by claiming that he could prevent an attempt on the prime minister’s life.) Born into a prosperous and highly assimilated family, Bogrov was Jewish only in the ethnic sense, but in the aftermath of the assassination, that indisputable identity was all that mattered. Black Hundred agitators riled up crowds with incendiary speeches. The day after Stolypin’s death, a gang of twenty thugs threw stones at Jewish students and assaulted Jewish merchants on Alexander Street with knives. Thousands of Jews jammed into Kiev’s train station hoping to flee the city.

  As it happened, investigating magistrate Vasily Fenenko, temporarily putting aside the Beilis case, was called upon to interrogate the assassin. Bogrov’s motives are not entirely clear, but his primary intention was likely to restore his honor after having been unmasked as a police informer. His anarchist comrades had recently discovered his treachery and confronted him, demanding that he prove his loyalty. (Such dramatic scenes were not uncommon: the revolutionaries’ ranks were riddled with informers.) Only a spectacular terrorist act that put his own life at risk would do. Bogrov had killed Stolypin, in part, to expiate his guilt over betraying his comrades, knowing that they would surely kill him if he did not follow their instructions. Bogrov also spoke bitterly to his interrogators of the regime’s intolerable treatment of the Jews, so his ethnic roots may have played a role in the assassination, as well. On a deeper psychological level, though, Bogrov—who was executed just eleven days after firing the fatal shot—may be judged one of the era’s numerous romantic suicides. During the last anxious years of the Romanov dynasty, the self-inflicted deaths of disillusioned young men and women had become an epidemic, a fashion, and a fixation, with morbidly curious readers opening their morning papers to find news of the most creative final expressions of despair, often cast as acts of social protest. (“Let my drop of blood fall so that the moment will draw nearer when the sea floods its banks and compels you to come to your senses,” read a precocious fifteen-year-old boy’s famous letter.) Bogrov was of this affectedly world-weary ilk. In a letter to a friend some months earlier he declared himself to be “depressed, bored, and lonely” and with “no interest in life,” which he saw as “nothing more than an endless series of cutlets” he would have to consume. After being exposed as an informer, he could have fled abroad but chose not to. He entered the Kiev theater of his own free will, knowing there would be no escape. At least his chosen path to self-annihilation would ensure that the entire society felt a disorienting shudder.

  Russia’s new prime minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, was determined to stop any anti-Jewish violence. He assured a delegation of concerned Jews that “the most decisive measures” would be taken to stop a pogrom. He made good on his promise. Three Cossack regiments were dispatched to predominantly Jewish neighborhoods in Kiev, and nearby governors were ordered to use force if necessary to stop pogroms in their regions. Tsar Nicholas approved all of the new prime minister’s actions; he, too, wanted no disorder. Within a few days, the threat of violence had passed.

  The country was left to ponder a scandal. How could it be that Dimitry Bogrov had been able to enter the theater, armed, and with a valid pass, and shoot the prime minister at virtually point-blank range? Rumors immediately began that Stolypin had been killed by a right-wing conspiracy with the collusion of the secret police. Colonel Kuliabko was sentenced to a prison term for negligence, but he was the only official punished. General Kurlov was known to have schemed extravagantly against Stolypin, even having the prime minister’s mail opened in the hope of finding compromising material. But the tsar terminated an investigation of Kurlov, ensuring that speculation about a conspiracy to assassinate the prime minister would never be laid to rest.

  Mendel Beilis knew nothing of politics, assassinations, and fatal blunders, or worse, among men with important titles. To him, all powerful men were simply part of the undifferentiated class of “the bosses.” Beilis did not understand what a personal disaster the death of Russia’s most powerful boss was for him. Stolypin was likely the only man in the empire who could have helped him. His successor, Kokovtsov, was a decent enough man but not nearly of the same stature; he was a caretaker, not someone to fight political battles. It was bad enough for Beilis that Stolypin was dead, but Stolypin had met his end at the hands of a Jew. The right-wing press, which had vilified Stolypin during his lifetime, deified him now. The newspaper of the Union of Russian People, Russian Banner, even asserted that Stolypin had been killed by a Jewish conspiracy because he had refused all attempts to bribe him to cover up the ritual murder and leave Mendel Beilis unpunished. If it had ever been possible for the government to drop the case, it was unthinkable now. Bogrov’s fatal shot all but assured that Mendel Beilis was going to stand trial.

  The world of revolutionaries was as far removed as could be imagined from that of Mendel Beilis, as he awaited his imminent transfer from the quarantine cell to the general prison population. But with Stolypin’s death, help would have to come from the most unexpected places. It was from the shadowy and treacherous realm inhabited by men such as Bogrov that two prospective saviors would, astonishingly, emerge.

  As for Vera Cheberyak, her “most humble petition” to the tsar, pleading with him to help clear her of suspicion in Andrei’s murder, was passed on to the sovereign on September 4, before his return to St. Petersburg. No record exists of any response. Cheberyak, bereaved and besieged, set about gathering all her wiles to deflect suspicion from her door.

  6

  “Cheberyak Knows Everything”

  In mid-September 1911, after spending a month in the squalid quarantine cell, Mendel Beilis was led off to his new quarters. Bidding good-bye to the men who had, in a manner of speaking, acquitted him of Andrei Yushchinsky’s murder, he was led to another large cell, which housed about thirty men. If the men of cell number five were like his previous cellmates, then things might still be tolerable, he hoped, at least in terms of human companionship. And at first some of the men were friendly toward him. Two of his fellow prisoners were Jews, one a robber, the other a merchant named Eisenberg who had been imprisoned due to an irregularity with a promissory note. Beilis had grown tired of talking about his predicament, so when Eisenberg asked what he was in for, he told him he was a horse thief.

  Weighing on Beilis the most was that he had not seen or heard from his family for nearly two months. The prison authorities did not allow him to send or receive any letters, nor were they required to. Under the Russian legal system, until there was an indictment, a prisoner had very limited legal rights and could not even be represented by an attorney. Was anyone trying to help him? Beilis had no idea. Maybe there was nothing to be done and he would remain in prison forever. His only connection with his family came through the food packages he received every Sunday, but the strongest prisoners wrested the packages from him and left him little or nothing. Of the prison food, all he could bring himself to eat was the bread ration.

  Beilis’s most immediate concern was his feet. As a former infantryman who had endured many a long march in the cold, he knew that scrupulous care of one’s feet—with good-fitting boots, and the regular changing and cleaning of foot wraps (socks were unknown)—had to be strictly observed. (The tsar’s army made it clear that a soldier’s feet were his own responsibility. On being drafted, he was issued a few pieces of leather and had to make his boots himself or, as most recruits did, take them to a cobbler at his own expense.)
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  But in his intense state of worry, Beilis couldn’t stop pacing the cell hour after hour, and the exposed nails inside the crudely made prison shoes dug into his soles. Walking became an agony. One day, about a week after his arrival in the cell, he noticed the lone chair across the room was empty. He crawled over to the chair and pulled himself onto it. The moment he sat down, a prisoner—one of the men who, until now, had treated him kindly—approached him and said sharply, “Stand up, let me sit down!” Beilis told him his feet hurt and he could not move. The man punched him hard in the face, drawing blood. Beilis screamed and the other prisoners gathered around him. On the verge of passing out, he heard some of the prisoners saying to each other that the assault was an “analysis.” An “analysis,” he was about to learn, was prison jargon for the testing of a new prisoner to see if he could be trusted. The men who had been nice to him had just been sizing him up. Would he take his blows and remain silent? Or would he turn informer? The greatest sin in jail was to complain to “the bosses.” If he held his tongue, he would be considered a “brother.” If he told, he was a traitor and might be killed unless the prison authorities removed him in time.

  His cellmate Eisenberg, agitated, rushed up to him, and explained that he must say nothing. “You do indeed see,” he said softly yet firmly in Beilis’s ear, “what kind of people are here. They are convicted criminals, murderers. Act as if nothing happened,” he advised. “Stay silent, the pain will go away.” Beilis managed to stop crying from the pain. Someone brought him some water and he washed the blood off his face, but he could do nothing about the swelling.