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

by Levin, Edmund

  Krasovsky began by testifying for almost four and half hours, nearly uninterrupted, with only occasional questions by the judge, as he recounted his investigation of the Yushchinsky murder. He spoke calmly, precisely, and in an unhurried manner. The jurors, whose attention had understandably wandered at times, listened with unbroken attentiveness. As Krasovsky testified, Vera Cheberyak looked so nervous, it seemed to a reporter she might get up at any moment and scream. As it was, she merely began dashing to the window to gulp down repeated glasses of water.

  Krasovsky told of his initial queasiness at the prospect of a case that would promise him nothing but “intrigues and trouble”; his initial suspicions that led him to arrest the dead boy’s stepfather and other family members; his realization that he had made a mistake, that the family was innocent, and that Vera Cheberyak was likely involved in the crime. Following this breakthrough came his struggles with the intrigues against him, as Kiev’s chief prosecutor, Grigory Chaplinsky, in league with the Black Hundreds, blocked his honest investigation. He told of his grateful return home to his provincial post, only to be cashiered from the police force on false charges. He then returned to Kiev with “the goal of restoring my reputation and seeing this case to its end,” that is, solving the crime.

  From Krasovsky the jury first heard an account of two seemingly sensational pieces of evidence—or, from the prosecution’s point of view, unfounded speculations—that implicated Vera Cheberyak and her gang. These were the “story of the switches” and the “Christian letters.” Along with the “the body in the carpet,” and Zhenya Cheberyak’s deathbed scene, these completed the quartet of haunting tales that formed the core of the case’s legend.

  Of the four different incidents, only Zhenya’s deathbed scene was undoubtedly true. It had been testified to by the most credible eye witnesses. But the veracity of the “story of the switches” and the “Christian letters,” as well as the “body in the carpet,” was more open to question.

  Krasovsky had heard from a number of witnesses that Andrei, Zhenya, and another boy had gone out one day to cut switches from some shrubs. They had quarreled over who would keep the best one. (Zhenya: “If you don’t give me yours, I’ll tell your aunt that you didn’t go to school, and you came here to play.” Andrusha: “And if you tell on me, I’ll write to the police that at your mother’s thieves are constantly hiding and bringing stolen things.”) The argument had supposedly led to suspicions that Andrei had betrayed Cheberyak’s gang. The prosecution forced Krasovsky to admit that story was at best thirdhand—he had heard it from a watchman with whom he’d struck up a conversation near a water main outlet, who had heard it from someone else, who said she had heard it from a boy known only as Sasha F., who had supposedly witnessed Zhenya and Andrei’s argument. Neither Krasovsky nor any other investigator could find that boy. This did not mean the story was not true, just that it was not proven. But perhaps the efficient Lukianovka rumor mill had simply fabricated a scene that would explain the killing, just has it had when Andrei’s mother and stepfather had been under suspicion and within days the story spread of their being seen loading into a cab, carrying a sack with Andrei’s body.

  The “Christian letters” were the two missives anonymously sent to Andrei’s mother and to the city coroner days after the body was discovered. Their author recounted how he had supposedly seen the boy in the company of an “old Jew” around the time of his murder and pointed to the Jews as the culprits. The judge did not allow the letters into evidence but permitted Krasovsky to describe them. Krasovsky claimed that the letters’ author described the wounds with great accuracy, even though the missives were posted before the coroner’s autopsy had been completed. He and Brazul also contended that the letter had been written by one of Vera Cheberyak’s gang members, Nikolai “Nicky the Sailor” Mandzelevsky, “at her dictation.”

  Unfortunately, only one of the letters, the one addressed to Andrei’s mother, survives in the archives. It does not mention the specific number of his wounds. The handwriting does not match that of Nicky the Sailor or that of several other Cheberyak gang members for whom there are handwriting samples. Perhaps the letter to the coroner did describe the wounds. But even if the description were accurate, the prosecution pointed out, an early newspaper account gave a fairly accurate sense of the number of wounds on the body, which had, in any event, been on public view for hours after being removed from the cave. The letters’ contents were spooky (“What if … the Jews need blood for the Passover holiday and a thin boy will be their victim”), but it could not be proved that either one had any connection to the killers.

  The bulk of the prosecution’s brutal cross-examination focused on Krasovsky’s decision to arrest Andrei’s family. Why had he arrested the boy’s stepfather, Luka Prikhodko, even though the man had a credible alibi? Why did Krasovsky arrest not only him but also his elderly father and even the brother of Andrei’s biological father? The prosecutor sarcastically asked Krasovsky if he had ever considered arresting Andrei’s elderly grandmother, too. (Krasovsky, in one of his less adept answers, responded, “There was no need.”) Why had the detective ordered that Luka Prikhodko’s hair be cut and dyed, so as to maximize his resemblance to a man that a witness had seen near the scene of the crime? How could he justify such chicanery? Krasovsky looked evasive and unconvincing and at times stumbled under the prosecution’s furious assault.

  Vladimir D. Nabokov, always the most morally subtle and clear-eyed of observers, did not so much defend Krasovsky as explain him. This old police hand, he admitted, was an imperfect hero. But it was not fair to judge him outside the context of his time and place. “Of course his methods were reprehensible,” Nabokov wrote in Speech, but, as a man who had served his whole career in the Russian police force, “where could he have been expected to glean the principles of respect for human dignity?” Krasovsky, overall, came across as a man who had, whatever his flaws, tried to correct his mistakes after he recognized them and who always pursued the truth as he saw it.

  For two years Oskar Gruzenberg had feared the consequences of what he viewed as Arnold Margolin’s reckless investigation of the case. So far the defense had weathered the prosecution’s assault. However, with the appearance of the young seamstress Ekaterina Diakonova, the defense would find its case veering into the hallucinatory.

  Diakonova was Vera Cheberyak’s onetime friend who Krasovsky had wooed by taking her out dozens of times to restaurants on the hunch that she knew more than she was telling about the crime. Eventually, she had appeared to provide useful information. She claimed to have dropped by Cheberyak’s on the day Andrei had disappeared and seen the three suspected gang members scurrying around suspiciously and hurriedly covering something with a coat in the corner as she entered the apartment. She and her sister Ksenia identified pieces of perforated paper found near Andrei’s body as being very similar to ones used at Cheberyak’s for a game called Post Office. It also appeared that she could identify a piece of embroidered pillowcase found in Andrei’s pocket as coming from the Cheberyaks’ apartment.

  Testimony over the paper and pillowcase went on at great length. If the items could have been established as coming from the Cheberyaks’ apartment, they would have constituted the first physical evidence linking Cheberyak to the crime. The testimony, though, while suggestive of a connection, was frustratingly inconclusive. The defense objected that Ekaterina Diakonova was unfairly forced to try to draw the pillowcase design from memory. Rare is the person, they said, who could draw from memory the pattern of a piece of clothing he or she was actually wearing, let alone a pattern unseen for years. Still, the defense could not come close to proving the origin of the items.

  But Ekaterina Diakonova had much, much else to say. From the pretrial depositions, Gruzenberg knew what was coming, which is why he must have been worried.

  Diakonova, a thin woman of twenty-four, with her hair done up in a massive chignon, told the court that on three occasions she had had long conversat
ions about the case with a mysterious masked man. The exchanges had lasted hours and had supposedly taken place while she and the man stood in the street. At one of the meetings, the man had supposedly told her that they needed to kill Krasovsky, Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov of the Gendarmes, and Investigator Fenenko. Why the masked man would talk to her of all people, she could not explain. Karabchevsky gamely attempted to mitigate the story’s incredibility. “Have you ever seen people who fly on airplanes, or ride on motorcycles?” he asked hopefully. Perhaps the man had on that kind of mask? No, she answered, it was a smooth black mask that clung closely to his face, held in place by a hat with earflaps fastened under his chin.

  Diakonova went on to tell a tale of how, the day after Andrei’s murder, a fearful Vera Cheberyak asked Ekaterina to stay overnight. They slept together in the same room and, in the middle of the night, Ekaterina poked her stockinged foot through the grate of the bed. She felt an object, wrapped up in cloth, standing in the corner. It felt to her like a body and it was deathly cold.

  “When I was sleeping, it seemed to me that someone was standing there,” she told the court. “I woke up. Cheberyak said to me, ‘Why did you wake up? Sleep.’ I don’t know what was standing, but near the wardrobe, there was something, I don’t know what, but when I pushed it with my foot, it seemed to me that something was standing there. She again told me: ‘Don’t pay it any attention, sleep.’ I fell asleep. And then in the morning, she said, ‘Let’s drink tea.’ ” By that time, whatever had been standing in the corner had disappeared.

  On the stand, Diakonova also asserted that Adele Ravich had told her, too, about seeing a body wrapped in a carpet. This story had not been in her original deposition and subjected her to the suspicion that she was merely mimicking the old man Vyshemirsky’s account. But she added her own embroidery, asserting that before Adele Ravich had ever told her the story, she herself had seen the boy’s body lying in a carpet in a dream. Moreover, she had told Cheberyak herself of her vision. “I tell her: ‘You know, I had a dream that I saw Andrusha lying in a carpet in your big room.’ She says: ‘Please don’t tell the detectives that’…and she started to threaten me, what would happen to me if I told about that.”

  Diakonova’s stories were not believable. And yet—could they be believed? Observers repeatedly used the word “sincerity” to describe her demeanor, as she told her tales in a “crystalline” voice that projected to the back of the courtroom. She looked humanly nervous on the stand, but the prosecution could not rattle her. And if the prosecution had its Jews in strange black garments, and secret Semitic rites, why could the defense not have a mysterious masked man, objects appearing in the night, or reality first seen in a dream? As the young woman testified hour after hour, sober-minded journalists found themselves softening and suspending their disbelief. “The more you hear her testimony, the more convincing it seems,” one wrote. It all might be “in the realm of psychosis or hallucination,” one commentator wrote sympathetically, “but had definitely made a sincere impression.” With her “sincerity and naive mixture of fantasy and reality,” in one reporter’s assessment, she had blunted the prosecution’s attacks. This was the most the defense could have hoped for.

  And if the young woman had a certain enchanting effect on sophisticated correspondents, what of her effect on the peasant jurors, the sort who might consider the stuff of supernatural folklore—domovois (goblins) and ghostly emanations—to constitute part of everyday reality? Perhaps they, too, would be swayed by her tales. And who, really, was to say that they were not true?

  Day sixteen. Beilis sat in the dock, wholly expressionless, wholly motionless, with an occasional glance at the jurors the only movement a patient observer could detect. All around him, people tensed with anticipation at the testimony of the young revolutionary Sergei Makhalin. Makhalin had teamed up with the anarchist-communist Amzor Karaev to lure Vera Cheberyak’s half brother, Peter Singaevsky, into confessing to Andrei’s murder. Both Karaev and Makhalin claimed to have witnessed the confession, but only Makhalin would testify at the trial. The state had connived to prevent the court appearance of Karaev, then in Siberian exile. Karaev’s deposition would be read aloud to the jury, but the credibility of the radicals’ story would essentially rest on Makhalin alone.

  Gruzenberg, the defense team’s leader, had no idea of just how disastrously vulnerable a witness Makhalin was. Unknown to him, the revolutionary had been an informer, code-named “Deputy” and “Vasilevsky,” in the pay of two branches of the secret police. If this fact was revealed, the prosecution could easily portray him as an unprincipled mercenary. As Makhalin prepared to take the stand, officials at the highest levels of the government were debating whether to unmask him, thereby improving the prosecution’s chances.

  The intentional public exposure of an agent was nearly unthinkable. But civil prosecutor and Duma member Georgy Zamyslovsky, having somehow learned of Makhalin’s past employment, angrily insisted that the information so helpful to the prosecution had to be made public. Moreover, he threatened to embarrass the secret police if his demand was not met. He relayed a message to Stepan Beletsky, head of the national Department of Police, that if the prosecution lost, he would go to the floor of the Duma to hold the secret police responsible, accusing it of corruption. The minister of the interior, Nikolai Maklakov, the archconservative brother of Beilis’s attorney Vasily Maklakov, acceded to a plan to reveal in court that Makhalin had been an informer who had been terminated the previous year for fraudulent use of expense money. (The fraud charge was likely false, concocted for the purposes of destroying Makhalin at the trial—no evidence in the archives supports it.) Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Ivanov of the Gendarmes, due to testify in three days, would unmask Makhalin as an informer before the jury.

  Makhalin turned out to be an unnervingly fantastic witness. Although he had lately come into a modest inheritance, and was attired in a foppish costume, he testified, as Nabokov wrote, with “deadly simplicity, resourcefulness,” and common sense. The prosecution failed to trip him up. Moreover, Makhalin made a powerful moral impression. He recounted how, as a fourteen-year-old boy, he had witnessed a pogrom in the town of Smela, south of Kiev, that had radicalized him. When the Yushchinsky case emerged, he understood the forces of hatred it could unleash. He resolved to discover the real killers, exonerate an innocent man, and prevent acts of mass murder.

  As Makhalin spoke, Nabokov thought to himself that by now everyone had surely forgotten about Beilis except his family. “But suddenly, completely unexpectedly, into Makhalin’s rapid, well-crafted stream of words, there intruded distracting sounds. I turned and saw the defendant had completely bent over, and was covering his face in his hands, as convulsive, uncontrollable sobbing shook his entire body. Beilis had reminded us he was there.”

  One commentator noted that, at this trial, one had to make an unusual distinction: Mendel Beilis was merely the “defendant,” while Peter Singaevsky was “the accused.” Singaevsky testified on the eighteenth day of the trial, the day after Makhalin had completed his testimony, along with his fellow suspect in Andrei’s murder, Cheberyak gang member Boris Rudzinsky. Both men had been transported to Kiev from Siberia, where they had been serving sentences for armed robbery. Singaevsky was by far the more important witness, as he had supposedly confessed to the crime in Makhalin’s presence.

  He was led into the courtroom and up to the witness stand by four guards, two in front and two behind. Observers describe him as looking utterly dim-witted. Drawings depict a normal-looking fellow, although, had he been a fugitive, the police could have described him as having a right ear noticeably higher than his left.

  Vera Cheberyak bent over and cried softly, whether out of true feeling for her half brother or out of fear for herself. People had noted a change in her dress and demeanor. Her self-confidence seemed to be deserting her. In court she cast her eyes downward. Gone were her jaunty velvet hats with brilliantly colored feathers. Her head was now covered with a p
lain black scarf. As she listened to her brother testify, she grew more agitated than ever, her trips to the windowsill for water increasing in frequency.

  Beilis stared intently at Singaevsky. The witness, of course, denied having confessed to the crime. The prosecution argued that it was ridiculous to think that two young revolutionaries could gain the confidence of an experienced criminal. But except for the matter of his purported confession, Singaevsky’s account almost perfectly matched Makhalin’s, even in the most seemingly far-fetched details. Singaevsky, for example, confirmed that, at his request, Karaev attempted to send a message to Rudzinsky, then in jail, using sign language. If one thing was certain, it was that Makhalin and Karaev had won Singaevsky’s confidence.

  Singaevsky had no alibi for the time of Andrei’s murder but had made comic attempts to concoct one. The previous year he and Rudzinsky had confessed to the robbery of an optical goods store in Kiev on the night of March 12, 1911, the day of Andrei’s disappearance. They freely admitted they were confessing to the robbery to prove they could not have committed the murder. But Andrei had been killed in the morning, which would have left them plenty of time for another crime. Some early reports had erroneously placed the time of the murder in the evening, apparently misleading the pair into believing the robbery would exonerate them. (In any event, they were very likely lying about being involved in the robbery, as they were never charged.)

  Zamyslovsky attempted to contort the story into something that would exculpate his witness. Surely, he asked Singaevsky, it would be impossible to commit two such complex crimes in the same day? Robbery was, after all, an all-consuming endeavor. You had to spend days planning the crime. And, of course, even if he had committed a murder in the morning, he would not have had time to hide a body in the evening if he were committing a robbery? “Exactly right,” Singaevsky replied.