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

by Levin, Edmund

  As Krasovsky spent his first night in jail, his coinvestigators knew they, too, were in danger. Sergei Makhalin had the good sense to flee the city. Amzor Karaev, never one to flinch, rashly remained in Kiev and on August 13 the police arrested him as well. The exact pretext is unknown but, like Krasovsky, his true crime was undoubtedly that of challenging the blood accusation.

  By the end of the summer, the prosecution acquired one more exciting addition to its case: a self-proclaimed eyewitness to the crime—nine-year-old Ludmila Cheberyak. Almost exactly a year earlier Vera Cheberyak had pleaded with her dying son Zhenya to absolve her of Andrei’s murder, but the boy had failed her, with his last words earning her only more suspicion. Now the mother offered up her one surviving child to the prosecution to exonerate her by condemning another. Perhaps the girl would succeed.

  Vera Cheberyak must have been sufficiently self-aware to realize that her testimony alone would likely not be enough to convict Mendel Beilis. She was a notorious figure. People recognized her from her picture in the paper and harassed her on the street. On one occasion in mid-July of 1912, a passerby pointed her out, one thing led to another, and soon a large crowd of people was screaming, “Yushchinsky’s murderer!” as it chased after her. She had to duck into a courtyard and hide there until the mob dispersed.

  Unlike her mother, Ludmila could play the archetypal role of the virginal eyewitness. Unlike the pure maidservant in Thomas of Monmouth’s twelfth-century account, she would not claim to have seen the evil deed “through a chink in the door” but rather to have witnessed the crime in broad daylight. The case would be much the stronger with an innocent girl prepared to point her finger at the bestial Jew in the dock as the man who had killed her young friend.

  Ludmila had been questioned on May 14, 1912, separately from her mother. In that affidavit, which was kept secret from the defense, she said nothing to incriminate Beilis. But when she was questioned by the new investigating magistrate, Nikolai Mashkevich, three months later, on August 13, she suddenly told the story that made her the prosecution’s dream witness. She now claimed to have gone with Zhenya, Andrei, and other children to play on the clay grinders at the Zaitsev factory on March 12, 1911, the day Andrei disappeared. Mendel Beilis and two other Jews had chased after the children. (In this tale, unlike her mother’s account of Zhenya’s story, Beilis’s sons go unmentioned.) Beilis, she testified, “caught Zhenya and Andrusha by the hands and started dragging them away, but Zhenya broke away and ran away with the rest of us, but Andrusha was dragged away by the Jews somewhere.” That, she said, was the last she saw of him.

  The case against Menahem Mendel Tevyev Beilis, such as it was, was now complete. Beilis would have to maintain the patience and restraint of a hero for far longer than his attorneys had ever expected. If he thought of every day he survived in prison as a victory, then his victories would be many. He would have to wait more than a year for his chance to stand before the court and tell the judge, the jurors, and the world: “I am not guilty.”

  8

  “The Worst and Most Fearful Thing”

  One evening, as the new year of 1913 approached, Mendel Beilis was sitting alone in his cell (in one of the intervals when he had no cellmate) when he heard the approach of footsteps and several voices, and then a woman outside his door saying, “It would be curious to see this rascal.” Immediately there followed the grinding of the thirteen locks on his door, as each was opened in turn. The sound always unnerved Beilis, making him feel obsessively as if someone were hitting him on the head from behind over and over.

  A guard opened the door and the woman and a man in a general’s uniform stepped in. “What a terrible-looking creature,” the woman said. “How fierce he looks.”

  The general was interested in Beilis as more than a sideshow attraction and started up a conversation. He began by telling Beilis that he might soon be set free. “On what grounds?” Beilis asked.

  The general said that the tercentenary jubilee of the Romanov dynasty was approaching and, to demonstrate his mercy, the tsar would issue a broad pardon for convicts. If only Beilis would “tell the truth”—that is, confess—things would go well for him, he was sure.

  Beilis answered that he didn’t need a pardon; he needed exoneration. He would not leave prison until he was declared innocent. Beilis grew enraged, though his impression was that the man was sincerely trying to give him some “good advice.” (The general and the lady, to all appearances, were a pair of curiosity seekers with no sinister motive—certainly the lady’s presence was no aid to any scheme.) However, even if his advice was well meaning, the general was quite wrong, as were hopes among the Jewish population that the tsar would soon set Beilis free. The impending festivities did not improve Beilis’s chances for release. In fact, his trial would serve as the climactic public spectacle of a year dedicated to the greater glory of the House of Romanov.

  Tsar Nicholas was indeed looking forward to the tercentenary celebrations as he greeted New Year’s Day 1913 at the Grand Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, the “Tsar’s Village,” south of St. Petersburg, where he spent as much time as he could. He disliked the capital. “Peter’s City” was too modern for his taste and, he felt, inauthentic and inorganic to Russia. Tsar Peter had, as Nicholas once put it, recklessly uprooted “healthy shoots” of the Russian way of life along with the weeds. Nicholas belonged in Moscow, the true heart of the Russian Empire. Once a tiny medieval principality just six hundred square miles in size, Moscow had grown into the enormous realm over which he now ruled. Residing in Moscow was not a practical possibility for the Russian sovereign; the machinery of government had been established in St. Petersburg for some two centuries. But in Tsarskoe Selo, Nicholas erected a perfect replica of an old Russian town as the headquarters for the Cossack squadrons of his Personal Convoy and Imperial Rifles, who went about in seventeenth-century costume. Here Nicholas could commune with the glorious Muscovite past.

  Dressed in the contemporary uniform of his Cossack guardsmen (Nicholas loved uniforms and had closetsful of many different kinds), he faced a New Year’s Day dominated by tiresome official duties, as he personally received official good wishes from scores of notables, including nearly every official of the foreign diplomatic corps all the way down the ranks to the third secretary of the Persian mission, Mr. Hassan Han-Gaffari. As a teenager, Nicholas had found this duty so painful the first time that he had virtually run away from it. Nicholas’s mother, the empress Maria Fyodorovna, had once scolded the young Nicholas to mind his manners in such situations, writing him in a letter, “Above all, never show you are bored.” Nicholas had since developed stoic endurance in the face of his tedious ceremonial responsibilities.

  As the new year began, Nicholas had reason to worry about the condition of his realm. The years 1910 and 1911 had mostly been marked by domestic tranquillity, with the significant exception of Prime Minister Stolypin’s assassination. But 1912 had witnessed the revival of mass social unrest. In April 1912 soldiers had fired on a crowd of peaceful demonstrators at the Lena goldfields in southern Siberia, killing five hundred miners. The massacre sparked a relentless wave of strikes that had drawn in some seven hundred thousand workers to date and was only escalating.

  However, if Nicholas found himself feeling worried or bored as one dignitary after another bowed before him, he could find relief in pleasanter thoughts. The year 1913 was to be a special year for him, his family, and all of Russia. It was to be a year of celebration, of deeply meaningful reflection on Russia’s past that would reaffirm the everlasting, mystical bond of tsar and people. In the coming months Nicholas and his family, together with all his subjects, would commemorate with the grandest of ceremonies the founding of the Romanov dynasty.

  The coronation in 1613 of the current monarch’s ancestor Michael, the first Romanov tsar, had brought an end to the Time of Troubles, a calamitous fifteen-year period that had left Russia leaderless, beset by famine, ensnared in two wars (with Poland and Sweden), and co
mbating numerous internal rebellions that left Moscow largely burned to the ground. Many observers had compared the Revolution of 1905 to the Time of Troubles; as for Nicholas, he seemed to draw spiritual inspiration from the challenge presented by the massive disorder. He saw himself as the heir to Michael and the other Romanov tsars, not just in lineage but in resolve and historic import; like them, he had faced wars and uprisings and would become one with the people as their God-given commander, leading Russia back on a course to greatness.

  As recently as the late nineteenth century, Peter the Great, who ruled from 1682 to 1725, had been regarded as the indisputable founding figure of modern Russia. He was the great Westernizer, the giant of a man who had delighted in roughly shaving off the beards of the retrograde noble class of boyars, forcing them to cast off the old ways. Nicholas’s father, Alexander III, who took the throne in 1881, initiated a movement toward a nostalgic premodern vision of Russia, one that demoted Peter the Great and even disparaged him as un-Russian. (Alexander, quite conscious of the symbolism, was the first tsar in two centuries to wear a full beard.) Nicholas would now make the break with Peter even more explicit. The celebrations would proclaim: modern Russia was born not with Peter’s Westernizing reforms but with a uniquely and deeply Russian event: the divinely inspired decision of the Zemsky Sobor, or Assembly of the Land, to select Michael as the first Romanov tsar on February 21, 1613.

  Leading up to the 1913 jubilee, the regime launched an unprecedented effort to burnish the cult of the past using modern means of publicity. The departures from tradition—even in the name of upholding it—caused consternation among some of its guardians. New Year’s Day 1913 saw the issuance of the first-ever postage stamps bearing portraits of the tsars, including the reigning one. Some befuddled postmasters balked at defacing Nicholas’s image with a cancellation stamp, which seemed a sacrilege. In the official organ of the Holy Synod, the soiling of the tsar’s image with a postmark so sickened one bishop that he was moved to despair. Was he still in Russia, he asked “or has the kike come and conquered our tsardom?” Some traditionalists were appalled as the imperial court for the first time authorized the mass production of various knickknacks—commemorative medallions, posters, decorative boxes, even pencil cases—bearing the tsar’s image. But progress, at least of this backward-looking sort, could not be stopped.

  One uncontroversial innovation was the first-ever official biography of a living tsar. During the month of January, Nicholas took time personally to go over the proofs of The Reign of the Sovereign Emperor Nicholas Alexandrovich, authored by Andrei Elchaninov, a major general and military academy professor who was a member of the tsar’s suite or retinue. Nicholas must have been greatly pleased by the book’s central metaphor; it perfectly expressed his image of himself. “Thousands of invisible threads center on the Tsar’s heart,” Elchaninov wrote, “and these threads stretch to the huts of the poor and the palaces of the rich. And that is why the Russian people always acclaim its tsar with such fervent enthusiasm.”

  The strongest of threads connected Nicholas to the Black Hundreds, which he knew to be fomenting the blood accusation and the case against the Jewish clerk. That bond was never on more exalted display than it was in St. Petersburg on February 21, 1913, as the tercentenary celebrations began. A thirteen-hundred-member contingent of the two largest far-right organizations, the Union of Russian People and the Russian National Union of the Archangel Michael, marched in official religious processions through the streets of the city, then massed in front of the Kazan Cathedral, waving their overtly political banners during an outdoor church service in honor of the anniversary. No one could doubt that these extremists enjoyed the favor of the tsar. Their causes were the tsar’s causes, including their intense anti-Semitism. Nicholas had become the first Russian ruler to convey clearly to the narod, the common people, his belief in the existence of Jewish ritual murder. He never articulated this message in words but conveyed it through unmistakable ceremonial symbolism—by so visibly supporting the Black Hundreds, as on this day—and through the actions of his officials in the notorious Kiev murder case.

  Another invisible thread, of exactly the benign sort Nicholas’s biographer Elchaninov had in mind, had once connected Tsar Nicholas to Mendel Beilis. Beilis, a veteran of the tsar’s army, had labored in a factory whose profits supported a hospital founded in honor of Nicholas and Alexandra’s marriage and dedicated to doing good works. With Beilis’s arrest that thread had been severed. But his indictment represented a new sort of bond, indeed a strange sort of dependence, between the imperial sovereign and the lowly prisoner, as he lay in his cell, louse-ridden, shivering himself to sleep every night in his second winter in prison.

  The ultimate cause of Beilis’s nightmare lay in Nicholas’s mystical self-image. This is why the historian Hans Rogger declared that “no purely rational explanation [of the Beilis case] seems to ‘make sense.’ ” Its “rationale” was intuitive and unconscious—nonrational, if not irrational. The true motive behind the prosecution of Mendel Beilis was the same as that of the freshly minted stamps, the mass-produced souvenirs, and General Elchaninov’s gaudily laudatory tome: to strengthen the bond between the ruler and his people. That effort, Nicholas believed, was the surest way of warding off a new Time of Troubles. In a sense, Mendel Beilis had once again been drafted into the service of the tsar.

  Nicholas was abetted by his ministers, who acted out of careerism but, more deeply, by the need, in Rogger’s words, to “supply the ingredients for a missing faith.” Their staging of the affair was part of “the search for a principle, for a common belief that would rally and bind together the disheartened forces of unthinking monarchism.” Given Nicholas’s deficiencies as a ruler, “they had only anti-Semitism and the notion of universal evil, with the Jews as its carriers, to make sense of a world that was escaping their control and their intellectual grasp. To give visible proof that ritual murder had been committed would confirm such a version of events, give it body and reality.”

  The jubilee gave Nicholas a welcome excuse to escape the capital on a pilgrimage into the heart of Russia that would conclude in his beloved Moscow. As for Mendel Beilis, during the first months of 1913 he felt himself going nearly out of his mind from the endless delays in his case. “Generally speaking, the life of a prisoner in jail is hell,” he wrote in his memoirs, and his seemed an all-too-genuine hell, a torment without end. He was plagued by nightmares. “The usual kind of nightmare,” he wrote, “was that I was either led to execution or being chased after, choked or beaten. I would awake, shuddering with fear.” He noted, in bitter irony, “I felt a sort of relief in finding upon awakening that I was still in jail—and not in the torture house of my dreams.” Six times a day he was roughly strip-searched by a team of five guards. Frequently the guards had to undress him because his fingers were so numb from cold that he could not unbutton his own clothes. The guards would taunt him, without much imagination, often repeating the same line, “You liked to stab the boy Andrusha, to draw his blood. We will do the same thing to you now.”

  Beilis was not aware of it, but by the late winter of 1913, events were in fact moving forward toward his trial. The investigating magistrate, Nikolai Mashkevich, was close to completing the work that would serve as the basis for the second indictment of Beilis in the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky. The period of the late winter and early spring of 1913 was also crowded with other important developments that would influence Beilis’s fate: several court cases involving Nikolai Krasovsky and Vera Cheberyak, and the sudden deaths of two men, including one of Andrei’s suspected killers.

  Krasovsky, a key witness for the defense, had spent the better part of a year under relentless judicial assault. He had been arrested in mid-July 1912; after his release six weeks later, he went through endless hearings and at least two trials. The state had pressed a total of five charges against him. (The original charge—that he stole a winning lottery ticket from someone during a search—appears to ha
ve been dropped.) On February 5, a court acquitted him of improperly destroying official correspondence regarding the assessment of an unpaid tax of sixteen kopeks. Krasovsky’s wife finally found the missing papers in a trunk they had packed for their journey back home from Kiev; they were duly forwarded to the proper authorities and Krasovsky was exonerated. He was also acquitted in the case of his alleged illegal detention of the peasant Kovbasa and on three other charges whose exact nature is not known. Over half a year’s time, the state had tried to destroy Krasovsky and it had failed.

  February 8 brought more good news for the defense. Vera Cheberyak, the prospective star witness for the prosecution, was convicted of forgery in a fraud case involving her local grocer and sentenced to eight months in prison, later reduced to five. The conviction was an indignity to her in three respects. For the first time in her life she had been found guilty of a crime: the infamous Cheberiachka was now, officially, a crook and a convict. Second, the crime of which she was convicted was unworthy of her reputation. This was the woman whose den of thieves reputedly organized spectacular robberies—the woman who, according to rumor, had so filled her apartment with plunder during the Kiev pogrom of 1905 that she fueled her hearth with bolts of silk fabric looted from Jewish stores. The charges that finally brought her down were pitiful: the jury found her guilty of making seventy-six erasures in an account book of money she owed, changing “1 ruble 73 kopeks to 1 ruble 19 kopeks; 2 rubles 13 kopeks to 13 kopeks … 70 kopeks to 10 kopeks,” and so forth. The swindle netted her only a few dozen rubles. And Vera Cheberyak suffered a third humiliation: she lost her name. In the course of the proceedings the court discovered her true origins. She was stripped of the patronymic “Vladimirovna,” to which she was legally not entitled. The woman sentenced to prison in court documents was recorded as “Vera Illegitimate Cheberyak.” She was now branded with the same middle name that had haunted Andrei Yushchinsky to the end of his life.