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

by Levin, Edmund

  On January 10, Beilis’s attorney, Arnold Margolin, received word from his sources that his client was to be indicted for the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky. Margolin believed that the defense had to launch an offensive against the prosecution’s case immediately—do anything possible to undermine or perhaps even forestall the indictment. But Kiev’s Jewish leaders were unwilling to take any action other than to print up some academic tracts arguing against claims of Jewish ritual murder. Margolin felt frustration and contempt for these timid men, so fearful of being accused of “meddling” or “provoking” the regime that they would do nothing to stop a case that threatened every Jew in the empire. “Under the circumstances,” Margolin wrote in his memoir of the case, “inactivity seemed to me to be nothing less than criminal.” With a certain arrogance, but not without justification, he complained that any necessary measures “involving not only real but merely imaginary personal risk were graciously left exclusively to myself.”

  But what action could Margolin take? The young attorney had to admit that the available ammunition for an offensive was meager. He resorted to the only weapon he had: his bumbling journalist friend Stepan Brazul-Brushkovsky. Margolin encouraged Brazul to go to the authorities with his theory of the case, based on what Vera Cheberyak had told him, implicating her blinded former lover, Pavel Mifle, and others in Andrei’s murder. Margolin was certain that Brazul’s theory was wrong. Cheberyak, he believed, was not merely a helpful source, as Brazul thought, but was complicit in the crime. No matter. In deploying Brazul, he felt he was at least drawing attention to Cheberyak, with the potential result that someone would get spooked, something would shake loose, and the real killers would be revealed.

  On January 18, Brazul submitted an affidavit to Investigator Fenenko and went public in the newspapers with his account of Vera Cheberyak’s accusation that Andrei had been killed by a “gang of thieves” that included Mifle, Andrei’s stepfather, his uncle Fyodor, and others, to keep him quiet about their supposed crimes. Brazul’s scenario seemed absurd to everyone but him and did nothing to slow down the process of indicting Beilis. But the blank shot did have an immediate effect of some consequence: it unleashed a mother’s rage. When Maria Mifle heard that that the woman who had maimed her son now dared to accuse him of murdering a child, she was determined to get revenge. She had information that could put Vera Cheberyak behind bars, and now she was going to use it.

  Maria Mifle’s son Pavel had recently shared a secret with her. When his former paramour was escorting him to the French consulate to receive his invalid’s pension, he noticed she was taking a roundabout route. When he asked why, she confessed it had to do with the near disaster the previous March, when she had been arrested for selling a stolen watch and chain to a store and had barely managed to flee the police precinct after giving a false name. Fearful she would be recognized, she made sure to give the store a wide berth. Three days after Brazul’s story broke, Maria Mifle went to the police. (Only later did her son agree to testify.) They arrested Cheberyak on January 25 and called in Mrs. Gusin, proprietress of the Gusin watch store, who identified her as the “Mrs. Ivanov” who had sold stolen goods to her. A few weeks earlier, Cheberyak had also been charged with another crime—defrauding her local grocer. Now, for the first time since she had thrown sulfuric acid in Pavel Mifle’s face six years earlier, Vera Cheberyak was in serious danger of going to prison.

  Margolin was pleased. Just as he had hoped, Brazul’s story put Cheberyak under the authorities’ further scrutiny. This, he believed, could only be to the good.

  Meanwhile, on January 30, Beilis was again roused from his cell for another excruciating walk to the courthouse to receive his formal indictment. Beilis was overjoyed to catch a glimpse of his wife and children, who were in the courtroom—it was the first time in six months he had laid eyes on them, though he was not allowed to speak to them and was taken back to prison without being able to do more than turn his head and wave.

  After returning to his cell, he spent entire days intensely studying the document he had been handed. “Menahem Mendel Tevyev Beilis,” he read, “is indicted for entering into an … agreement with other persons unknown to deprive Andrei Yushchinsky of life, and in a torturous manner.” He found the charge understandable enough, though horrible, but many of the words were unfamiliar to him. He knew what a “law” was, but what was an “article”? As Beilis would often say later, prison was a “good school.” Eventually he would feel himself to be quite a zakonnik—or man well versed in law. But he did understand the most important thing: the court had set a trial date—the seventeenth of May. It was a long time to wait, but he started to feel much better. He could count the days now with a sense of purpose. And, more good news, Margolin had arranged for him to have weekly visits with his family.

  On February 12, Beilis was led into the visitors’ chamber at the prison and locked into one of its wire cages as his wife, children, and brother Aaron were brought in to see him. The noise and commotion in the large room were so intense that he and Esther could hardly hear each other. He was shocked at her appearance—now that he could see her up close, she appeared years older than when he had last looked in her eyes seven months earlier. They spoke little and could do little more than cry and touch each other’s hands through the small gaps in the wire mesh. Because their conversations were monitored, they were allowed to speak only in Russian, which made communication frustratingly awkward; Esther could barely speak the language and Beilis only imperfectly. Still, seeing his family greatly lifted his spirits. He ate and slept better and felt much healthier. He knew it was important that he maintain his strength as best he could in this hellish place where six or seven convicts a day died of typhoid fever. He viewed every day he survived as a victory.

  Now that Beilis was officially an indicted prisoner, his lawyers were finally able to take action on his behalf, filing reams of petitions, motions, and lists of witnesses to be summoned. Margolin visited him in prison and reassured him that everyone knew he was innocent and that the indictment only reinforced that belief. Indeed, the indictment was pathetically feeble and unconvincing, at times even comic in its candor (“[The witness] Ulyana Shakhovskaya recounted her story in a drunken state …”). The document reads more like an exoneration until the point in the narrative where Vasily Cheberyak finally appears with his story of how Zhenya and Andrei were being chased by Beilis the clerk from the Zaitsev brickworks. Then the informer Kozachenko materializes with his tale of the defendant promising him untold Jewish lucre to poison the “Lamplighter” and “Frog.” No mention is made of Kozachenko’s admission to Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov that he had made everything up.

  The indictment was most notable for a striking omission: nowhere in it was there a direct accusation of ritual murder. Margolin and his colleagues puzzled over why this might be so. Most likely, they concluded, the prosecution was acting out of strategic considerations; the skeleton, so to speak, of the ritual murder charge was undeniably there. While Professor Sikorsky’s pronouncement about “the revenge of the sons of Jacob” was nowhere mentioned, the indictment did quote his judgment that the crime was marked by “slow blood loss” and “the extraction of blood,” which were referred to together as a “goal” of the crime. Moreover, the indictment, with no pretext, notes Beilis’s role in preparing the Zaitsev family’s matzo and that Beilis’s father had been a pious Hasid. The inclusion of all this material made no sense unless the prosecution was planning to use the blood accusation, if only in an underhanded way. With such a weak case, Margolin guessed, the prosecution had decided that it was better to avoid direct mention of the ritual-murder charge and let the jury, as he put it, “read between the lines.” He was likely correct about the prosecution’s strategy at this point. In fact, in April the court even ruled against allowing expert testimony on Judaism on the grounds that the prosecution was not making religion an issue in the case. Within months, however, the state would change course, deciding to embrace the
medieval myth fully and—although it would deny doing so—put the Jewish religion itself on trial.

  As the first anniversary of Andrei Yushchinsky’s murder approached, Vladimir Golubev, head of the Kiev right-wing youth group Double Headed Eagle, found himself surprisingly frustrated. He had arguably done more than anyone to create the case against Mendel Beilis, having first brought the name of this Jew to the attention of the authorities. But he had ended up marginalized, his organization under close official supervision, unable to participate actively in the case. Now that Beilis was indicted, he could do little more than fret that the boy-martyr’s death was not being acknowledged with proper solemnity. On the day before the anniversary, as police officers stood close by, a small group of about thirty Black Hundreds gathered at Andrei’s grave. Aside from the chanting of prayers, the gathering was quiet—the authorities had forbidden any speeches for fear of provoking anti-Jewish violence. On March 12, the day of the anniversary, a requiem for Andrei was held at St. Sophia Cathedral without incident. All this left Golubev greatly distressed. The commemorations were perfunctory, he felt; the whole city should have joined in mourning. When he heard that a nationalist organization was holding a ball that very night, he grew enraged. He stalked into the ball, mounted the stage, and began loudly reproaching the dancing couples for enjoying themselves on such a sacred day. The revelers refused to be conscience-stricken and Golubev refused to break off his rant. The police had to be called, and he was escorted from the premises. Little more would be heard of him until Beilis’s trial, when the prosecution would welcome his amateur detective work and febrile rage.

  When Margolin told Beilis that everyone believed him to be innocent, he himself had no idea just how right he was. At the upper levels of the empire’s security apparatus, the opinion was unanimous: the defendant was innocent and Tsar Nicholas’s regime was courting political disaster by pursuing the case. Astoundingly, no police official, of either high or low rank, ever even pretended to consider Mendel Beilis seriously as a suspect.

  On January 28, two days before the indictment was handed down, Colonel Alexander Shredel, head of the Kiev office of the Corps of Gendarmes, wrote a report to his superior in St. Petersburg, a vice director of the national Department of Police. After dismissing Brazul’s outlandish scenario, Shredel let it be known that his office’s secret investigation “gives a firm basis to propose that the murder of the boy Yushchinsky occurred with the participation of [Vera] Cheberyak” and members of her gang. On February 14, in a follow-up report titled “Personal. Top Secret. Deliver Directly to Recipient’s Hands,” he wrote that in spite of Beilis’s indictment, the Kiev Gendarmes’ investigation was still continuing under the direction of his subordinate, Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov, and was still “chiefly concentrated around … Vera Vladimirovna Cheberyak and criminals directly connected to her.” He named seven of her gang members as suspects. Ivanov’s investigation would soon narrow down the list of perpetrators to three: Vera’s half brother Peter “Plis” (“Velveteen”) Singaevsky, Boris “Borka” Rudzinsky, and Ivan “Red Vanya” Latyshev. The investigation, Shredel declared, was operating on the assumption that Andrei “was the unwilling witness of a criminal act of this gang whom ‘it was necessary to do away with out of fear.’ ” The last phrase was in quotation marks, meaning it was apparently a verbatim quote from testimony by a witness cited in a previous report that has unfortunately been lost. The full range of the testimony on which Ivanov based his judgment will never be known, but it is clear he had little doubt about who the real killers were.

  Regarding the strength of the charges against the Jewish prisoner accused of killing Andrei, Shredel made a harsh and strikingly candid judgment. “The indictment of Mendel Beilis,” he wrote, “given the inadequacy of the evidence against him and the widespread interest in this case, which is becoming known throughout almost all of Europe, may occasion a great deal of unpleasant consequences for officials of the judicial branch and completely justified reproaches regarding the conduct of the investigation, the hastiness of the conclusions and even their one-sidedness.” On March 14, along similar lines, he warned: “The … evidence against Beilis, as is now becoming clear, will completely fall away in the course of trial testimony.”

  As for the prosecutors (as opposed to police officials), a peculiar episode in the spring of 1912 casts light on their own private doubts about the defendant’s guilt. Among the local Black Hundred leaders offering to assist the prosecution was Grigory Opanasenko, chairman of the Railroad and Cabdrivers’ Division of the Russian National Union of the Archangel Michael, one of the larger far-right organizations. The prosecution paid his theories of the case serious attention, in particular the notion that the draining of Andrei’s blood was achieved with the help of highly insidious “special instruments” peculiar to the Jews. (The theory was, in the end, never adopted.) On April 29, Opanasenko sought out a key member of the prosecution team, A. A. Karbovsky, to inform him of an eerie rumor. “Yushchinsky’s ghost is appearing to the perpetrators of the crime and demands their clothing,” he had heard. “They do not sleep at night and are ready to confess.” Karbovsky, apparently in all seriousness, set about trying to confirm whether Andrei’s restless spirit had been seen calling upon anyone at the witching hour. Opanasenko did not name the haunted men but must have had in mind Beilis and his supposed black-bearded accomplices. But in a striking indication of his personal beliefs about the case, Karbovsky seemed to question everyone about this apparition except Mendel Beilis and, as far as is known, not a single Jew. Most tellingly, he paid a visit to a prison where he queried two members of Vera Cheberyak’s gang doing time there for robbery. One was Ivan Latyshev, whom the Kiev Gendarmes had identified as one of Andrei’s likely killers. Both convicts answered the prosecutor’s strange question in the negative, with Red Vanya declaring: “I have had no alarming dreams and suffer from no hallucinations.”

  With the arrival of spring, both Kiev and Beilis’s spirits began to thaw. The poorly heated cell became a little more habitable. He no longer awoke, as he had sometimes, to find his hand frozen to the wall. He was given an occasional cellmate, which relieved his solitude. (One of them, a Russian peasant, was quite a decent fellow who Beilis decided, probably correctly, was not an informant.) Most of all, he was happy about the progress toward his May 17 trial. On April 7 a panel of prospective jurors was selected. When he was summoned a few days later to the prison office for a visit with Margolin, Beilis had no reason to expect any bad news. During their meetings, Margolin invariably said something to make him feel better. “You will be victorious,” he would say, and reassure him that he would not have to wait long. Now, when Beilis casually asked if there was anything new, Margolin got right to the point: the trial was being postponed, with no new date assigned. “I felt like a bullet was shot in my head,” Beilis recalled. “I thought that I would go insane.” He had been counting the days and the hours, and now the clock had stopped.

  Margolin explained that an expert had fallen ill and the trial could not begin without him. An “expert”? Beilis had learned what an “investigator,” a “prosecutor,” and a “juror” were, but he was yet not enough of a zakonnik to know what an “expert” was. But he knew it sounded serious. Margolin tried to reassure him that this was a minor setback. The trial would still happen soon. Beilis began to cry and accused Margolin of not wanting to tell him that things were going badly. Margolin tried to calm him down. Professor Sikorsky, a key prosecution witness, had, in fact, taken ill. But Beilis returned to his isolation cell feeling “like a live body in a grave.”

  Beilis recalled this as the very lowest moment of his years in prison. Adding to his torment, under the system’s absurd rules, as a prisoner without a trial date, he had his family visitation rights suspended. He was utterly alone again. For the first time he thought of suicide. “ ‘Rather than such a life,’ I thought to myself, ‘Death is better.’ And I certainly would have done it, as these were minutes when life
became unbearable.” But as his thoughts darkened, he found unexpected comfort in his identity as a Jew and in the religion that had been a marginal presence in his life since the day he had left for the army some twenty years earlier. He had come to understand that his case was not just about him but about the Jewish people as a whole:

  “Well, if this is so,” I said to myself, “then my death will leave a stain on the Jews. Because if I commit suicide, the Jew-haters will certainly say that I myself caused my death because I saw that I am not able to prove my innocence, or that the Jews did it to me in order that the truth would not be exposed.” And this truly did prevent me from taking this terrible step, and gave me strength and courage.

  Comforting words from his youth, long dormant, came to him now:

  I myself am not a great scholar of Jewish books. But from heder [primary school] I still remembered some verses and words which remained in my memory. I remembered the verse “eyzehu gibor ha’kovesh et yitsro” [Who is a hero? He that conquers his evil inclination]. And this verse constantly floated in front of my eyes when the terrible thought of suicide would arise. “One must be a hero,” I thought to myself, “by restraining the evil inclination and indeed live.”