A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel
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Nakonechny, nicknamed “Frog,” was a shoemaker with seven children who lived not far from Beilis, at the opposite end of the same courtyard as Vera Cheberyak. He more than anyone else had done his part to exonerate Beilis. Two years earlier, when he had heard that the lamplighter Kazimir Shakhovsky was incriminating Beilis, he immediately informed the authorities that he had heard this man vow to “pin the crime on Mendel.” Shakhovsky himself admitted that this damning account was truthful. Tall and neatly dressed, Nakonechny looked nothing like a frog; he had a side business as a kind of poor man’s attorney, filling out legal petitions for the illiterate and giving them advice in the bargain. All who saw him testify commented on the righteousness and sincerity that he projected.
Zamyslovsky, the prosecutor and esteemed Duma member, tried hard to confuse the poor Lukianovka shoemaker into a contradiction or at least unsettle him, but Nakonechny could not be intimidated. When his opponent said accusingly, “So you are a professional petitioner”—implying he was the clever sort who made up stories to fit the occasion—Nakonechny replied humbly that professionals appear in court, whereas “I consider myself a craftsman.” When Zamyslovsky tried to interrupt him, Nakonechny cut him off. “Let me finish,” he said. “My heart is anxious, and I want to make sure to keep nothing from the court.” When Zamyslovsky did speak, the shoemaker batted back his sneering insinuations. “So it seems you greatly troubled yourself to inform the investigator about everything regarding this case?” Zamyslovsky said sarcastically. “I didn’t ‘trouble myself,’ ” Nakonechny responded. “But I have a grain of decency and I considered it my obligation to say what I knew because an innocent man might suffer.” At the words “innocent man,” Beilis broke down, but the questioning continued.
Nakonechny performed a great service to the defense by explaining clearly for the first time why the story of Beilis dragging off Andrei defied all common sense—something the defense had not yet had an opportunity to do. After Zamyslovsky mentioned the scenario, Nakonechny, almost screaming, said, “If that had happened, all the children would have raised such a cry that not an hour would have passed before we, the whole street, would have known about the boy’s disappearance.”
The prosecution should have objected, and the judge should have cut him off; this was merely the witness’s opinion, however well founded. But his dignity and passion cowed the court into letting him speak. Leaving the witness stand, Nakonechny fell on his fourteen-year-old daughter Dunya’s shoulder and cried. She, too, would be an important witness, coming face-to-face with Vera Cheberyak’s daughter in one of the most dramatic moments of the trial.
Her own testimony was several days off, but toward the end of the fourth day Vera Cheberyak managed to enter the trial in the most unexpected manner. Amid a run of useless prosecution witnesses, a woman named Daria Chekhovskaya stood to testify to the good character of Andrei’s mother. Asked the general question, “What do you know about this case?,” the woman stunned the courtroom. In the waiting room, she said, she had heard Vera Cheberyak trying to intimidate a young witness. The two women had been sitting on the same bench, back-to-back, when she heard Cheberyak call over one of Zhenya’s old playmates. “She started to coach him,” Chekhovskaya testified. “She told him: You tell the court, ‘All three of us went to the factory—Zhenya, and Andrusha and me. They chased us. We ran away and they grabbed Andrusha’…Say that you broke free from Beilis’s arms, and Andrusha was left behind. Say that he [Beilis] grabbed him and dragged him off.” According to Chekhovskaya, the boy told Cheberyak he wouldn’t say any of that. The prosecution tried to insinuate that the woman was lying. “You were called to testify about the mother and now you offer us this bit of news!” Vipper snapped. But he could not shake her testimony.
The stage was set for an “eye-to-eye” confrontation, a provision of Russian trials when witnesses contradicted each other directly. The judge would give Vera Cheberyak a chance to call the boy a liar to his face.
The fifth day, according to Speech correspondent Stepan Kondurushkin, “could justifiably be called ‘the day of the black beards.’ ” To prove that Beilis and various other dark-bearded men were responsible for Andrei’s murder, the prosecution first turned to Kazimir and Ulyana Shakhovskaya, the Lamplighters. The hard-drinking couple had already given half a dozen different versions of their stories to investigators, contradicting themselves and each other, and finally recanting most of their testimony. Kazimir, an alcoholic wreck of a man, spoke haltingly and frequently got tied up in his own words. Attorneys for both sides had trouble getting sense out of him. He stuck by part of his story—that Zhenya had told him that someone had chased the boys away from the Zaitsev factory. But otherwise his testimony was less than helpful to the prosecution.
“Did the detectives tell you to testify against Beilis?” the judge asked.
“The detectives gave me vodka to drink. They took us and told us to say this and that.”
“Did they ask you to testify against Beilis?”
“Yes.” […]
“Why were there so many changes in your testimony? Did they coach you?”
“Of course.”
“Did [the detectives] give you both [him and his wife] liquor until you were drunk?”
“Yes, until we were drunk.”
Ulyana, a woman with watery eyes and a perpetually confused smile, simply gave the impression, the Kievan reported, “that she was not playing with a full deck.” Did the derelict Anna the Wolf really tell her she saw a man in a black beard carrying off Andrei? “Yes,” she whispered. But pressed on what Anna had really told her, she said, “I don’t remember, she was too drunk, and I couldn’t make out what she said.” Did the detectives tell her to testify against Mendel? “Yes, yes.” Did she say anything against him? “No, I didn’t.”
The day’s final witness was Vladimir Golubev, the volatile leader of the right-wing Kiev youth group Double Headed Eagle. It was he who had first brought the man he called “the Yid Mendel” to the attention of the authorities as a suspect in May 1911. If not for him, it was nearly certain, the defendant would not be sitting in the dock. Golubev impressed Beilis as looking like some sort of outlaw, which was a more correct intuition than he probably realized.
Golubev, while useful to the prosecution, was also dangerous. He had spent the past year and a half under the authorities’ watch—alternately coddled and scolded. The chief prosecutor, Grigory Chaplinsky, would consult with him about the case. But Golubev also had to suffer what he must have considered continual petty indignities. The police fined him ten rubles for placing an unapproved notice in his group’s newspaper announcing a public requiem for Andrei. Another issue was confiscated due to an inflammatory article about the case and a poem seen as calling for a pogrom. All this was humiliating. Had he not kept his word—for more than two years—not to incite a pogrom? The authorities, however, were right to be concerned. By the late summer of 1912 his desire to shed Jewish blood had begun to overwhelm him. Until then, Golubev seems to have been more a talker than a doer. But on the night of September 5, 1912, he and about ten of his comrades set out for the largely Jewish Podol neighborhood armed with iron bars and rubber truncheons. They shouted, “Beat the Jews,” and “Take that for Stolypin”—it was the first anniversary of the assassinated prime minister’s death—as they struck several Jews (as well as one Russian student, apparently by mistake). Pursued by police, they rushed off to the vicinity of the Choral Synagogue, where they beat a few more Jews. Just after midnight, Golubev hit a Jewish student on the head. There the police caught up with him and his crew and they were arrested. But he was never charged with a crime and so, when he gave his oath to the court, he could honestly claim a spotless record.
Testifying ought to have been the greatest moment of his young life. He had been waiting for it for so long. No one could censor him. His every word would be taken down and published in full in the morning papers—even the liberal papers. But his gait was shaky, his face
pale. The witness did not at all live up to the grand role of instigator of the case that now gripped the world. He looked so ill that the judge told him he could postpone his testimony until the next day if he wished. “No, I can talk,” Golubev said, and then promptly fainted and fell to the ground.
A refreshed Golubev testified the next morning. He mainly restated his reasons for suspecting the brick-factory clerk, while sprinkling his remarks with the word “Yid” (zhid) and its adjectival variant (zhidovskii). Guided by the writings of the pseudo-scholar Hippolyte Liutostansky, he had quickly concluded that the crime followed the pattern of “Yid ritual murders.” He canvassed the Lukianovka neighborhood to find out “whether the boy Yushchinsky had any relationships with Yids.” He implied that Detectives Krasovsky and Mishchuk must have been in the pay of the Jews. With his confident manner, he was probably the best prosecution witness so far. But under cross-examination by Gruzenberg, he let slip one item of great significance for the defense. A few weeks after Andrei’s murder Golubev had been the first person to question Zhenya Cheberyak about the last time he had seen his friend Andrei. At that time, Golubev admitted, Zhenya had said nothing about playing with him on the clay grinders at the Zaitsev factory or about being chased by men with black beards. According to Golubev, Zhenya had told him that he and Andrei had played in a field, bought lard at a store, then dropped by Zhenya’s house and—here is the key detail—Andrei left without his coat. Andrei, this account clearly suggests, had left his coat in the Cheberyaks’ apartment. It was never found. The defense did its best to hint at the obvious conclusion: whoever knew what had happened to Andrei’s coat knew what had happened to Andrei.
Golubev also offered some unintended comic relief. At one point he assured the court that the defendant came from a line of tzaddiks, or wise men, and “was respected because he was a tzaddik” himself. Beilis, for once, erupted in laughter.
Around one p.m. on this, the sixth day of the trial—September 30, 1913—the judges, the jury, the attorneys, and selected witnesses, including Golubev, exited the courthouse and piled into twenty-five carriages and automobiles. Accompanied by policemen on horseback, the vehicles snaked toward Lukianovka to survey sites relevant to the case. As a safety precaution, the defendant traveled in his coach along quiet side streets. Two years, two months, and eight days after his arrest in the middle of the night, Mendel Beilis was going home.
The day was cold and windy. Overhead, storm clouds threatened. As the convoy arrived in Lukianovka, the smell of smoke pervaded the air—somewhere nearby a building was on fire. But nothing could keep away the curious. A reporter noted that they loitered “by houses, in doorways and in windows … children, women, workers and prostitutes.” Shooed away by the police, they would reappear minutes later a few steps down the street.
Beilis observed everything through the tiny window of his carriage. When the judge asked if he wished to be present during the examination of the various sites to be visited, he said, “Yes, yes,” and stepped onto the ground of his old neighborhood. Seeing some familiar faces, he doffed his cap and bowed.
At Vera Cheberyak’s old building, two boys were recruited to perform a test. They went up to her apartment on the second floor with a policeman and re-created Andrei’s supposed screams. One could indeed hear what was going on upstairs, which meant that the Cheberyaks’ downstairs neighbor, Zinaida Malitskaya, could have discerned Andrei’s final cries and the shuffling of feet overhead. (“They were like a dancing couple,” she testified in court, “as if they were doing a step, first in one direction and then in the other.”)
As Beilis walked the familiar streets, the crowd grew larger and noisier. The police could not keep the people away. Beilis was bowing often now. People shouted excitedly, “Beilis! Beilis!” He smiled, with tears coming to his eyes. The procession stopped at his former home at the edge of the Zaitsev factory. Did Beilis want to go into his old apartment? “I want to, I want to,” he said, tearing up again. After examining the premises, where his family no longer lived, the party proceeded to the factory, surveying the famous clay grinders and the kiln into which the “men with black beards” had supposedly dragged their victim. “Everything is the same!” Beilis exclaimed.
In fact, however, one thing had changed. Two years earlier, when Detective Mishchuk had visited Lukianovka in search of witnesses, he had been disappointed that Andrei’s playmates had refused to talk about their dead friend. They had seemed to want to forget him. But Vladimir Korolenko, who covered the trial for the national newspaper the Russian Gazette, had found it easy to strike up a conversation with some children, evoking a flood of memories. “Of course, we knew him!” they said. “How many times we played with him on the clay grinders together!” “When we played with toy soldiers, he always returned everything, never stole any.” (Unlike Vera Cheberyak’s Zhenya, who would steal and then say, “That’s mine.”) “He was very handy. He knew how to cast toy cannons in sand molds.” “He was such a good boy!” Now, everyone wanted to talk about Andrei.
At the cave where the boy’s body had been found, the shrub-strewn incline was so steep that weaker members of the party had to link arms with a steadier partner. The cave was lit by a flashlight, which observers said cast a spooky glow. The jurors entered it one at a time, each shaking the dust off his clothes as he came out. Now it was raining, and by the time they reboarded their vehicles, the court procession was drenched. Vipper the prosecutor fretted he might fall ill and cause a delay in the trial. Beilis got into his coach for the ride back to prison, his homecoming at an end.
On the morning of the trial’s seventh day, the judge summoned Anna “the Wolf” Zakharova, and a flabby barrel of an old woman dressed in rags shambled toward the bench. Anna, according to Shakhovskaya (in at least one version of her story), had said she’d seen Andrei dragged off by a man with a black beard. In a sworn deposition, the old woman had denied she’d seen or said any such thing. Yet as she reached the witness stand, the prosecutor rose to his feet with an air of hopeful confidence.
The testimony reads like a cross-examination by the defense, even though the prosecutor asked all but the first question, which was posed by the judge.
“What do you know about this case?”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Did you tell Ulyana Shakhovskaya that on the 12th of March you saw how a boy at the Zaitsev factory was grabbed by a man with a black beard?”
“No, I didn’t tell her that.”
“Where do you sleep at night?”
“Wherever I can.”
“Do you drink?”
“I drink a little.” (Laughter in the hall)
“Did the detectives question you?”
“Yes. I said that I didn’t say anything, I didn’t know anything.”
“So Ulyana [Shakhovskaya] made up everything?”
“Yes, she made it up herself.”
“And do you like to babble when you drink?”
“No, I don’t like to.”
Twice during her testimony, to the laughter of the audience, Anna started wandering away from the stand, only to be steered back by a bailiff. Vipper, irritated, wrapped up his examination.
“Do you prefer to be silent or to speak?” he asked.
“I like to be silent more,” she said.
“There you go!” he said, pouncing as if she had betrayed the truth. The witness, he implied, had been pressured into silence. The defense declined to ask any questions, considering it unnecessary. The judge called Shakhovskaya to the stand for an “eye-to-eye” confrontation with “the Wolf.” The two women started heatedly gibbering at each other, again to titters from the crowd. When the court was done with her, Anna shuffled off, crossing herself with great relief. In the wake of Anna the Wolf’s testimony, the correspondent for the Times of London wrote, “The last of the prosecution’s patchwork evidence against Beilis, derived admittedly from thieves and drunkards, has thus disappeared and it seems incredible that the im
perial authorities will allow this nauseous case to proceed further.”
At this point in the trial, the incredulous spectator could rightfully ask not only how the case could go on, but how the prosecution could conduct the case in such a way as to inevitably attract ridicule. The prosecutors were reasonably intelligent men. The case was closely supervised by justice minister Shcheglovitov who, whatever his flaws, was a highly sophisticated jurist. In its discovery procedures, the Russian judicial system was fairly thorough; all the key witnesses had been deposed in advance, sometimes on multiple occasions. The prosecution knew what Anna the Wolf and the Lamplighters would say, yet relied on them nonetheless.
In the history of the blood accusation, the prosecutors of Mendel Beilis stand out for their fumbling inability to craft a convincing narrative of guilt. Critics invariably called the Beilis case “medieval,” but the comparison was misleading. Ritual-murder prosecutions of centuries past often achieved a kind of persuasive power. The twelfth-century monk Thomas of Monmouth, the originator of the ritual-murder myth, set a high standard; in The Life and Miracles of Saint William of Norwich he builds his case against the Jews quite compellingly. In its narrative art, the work is something of a masterpiece. For pure storytelling, the 1475 trial of twenty-three Jews for the murder of little Simon of Trent overwhelms with its brutal logic, as the prosecutors extract ever more detailed confessions from the accused. (The torture inflicted upon each defendant—hoisting by the arms tied behind the back with a device called a strappado—was legally sanctioned and noted in the transcript.) In the Tiszaeszlar trial of 1882–1883 in Hungary—the first ritualmurder case of the modern era in a Western country—interrogators coerced a detailed account of the crime out of a supposed eyewitness, the thirteen-year-old son of a synagogue sexton; the boy’s narrative of the killing of a fourteen-year-old girl was so convincing that an honest deputy prosecutor, Ede Szeyffer, concluded that it was a lie only a full month into the trial, at which point he convinced the court to free the fifteen defendants.