A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel
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On cross-examination, Gruzenberg adopted a restrained, nonaccusatory manner. He asked with brutal simplicity, “Why do you think that, if on the night of the twelfth … you were committing a robbery, then at 10 or 11 in the morning you couldn’t have committed a murder?” Without Zamyslovsky to prompt him, Singaevsky was helpless. At first, he could not answer. Then he responded that in the morning he had been at home with his confederate, Ivan “Red Vanya” Latyshev, who was, of course, dead, having jumped or fallen out of a window at a police station earlier in the year. Singaevsky clearly had no alibi. And why had Singaevsky, Latyshev, and Rudzinsky all left Kiev for Moscow the day after the murder? Singaevsky admitted they were penniless and had to borrow money for train tickets.
“So, you have no money,” Gruzenberg asked, “the three of you have committed a burglary, and you put the [stolen] things in one suitcase. Why would all three of you go to Moscow?”
Singaevsky responded, “I wanted to see Moscow because I’d never been there.”
When the defense was finished, Judge Boldyrev said, gesturing to the space beside Singaevsky, “Makhalin, come here.” The courtroom fell silent for the eye-to-eye confrontation. The judge asked Singaevsky if he knew the man now standing beside him. After a very long pause, he said, “Yes.”
It was not so much what Singaevsky said as how he looked while standing next to his accuser that made such an unforgettable impression on those present. Looking like a guilty man, of course, is not in itself evidence. Still, the visceral reaction of people who witnessed the confrontation, as reported in the press, was striking:
“When Makhalin went up to stand next to Singaevsky, the latter flinched. When Singaevsky’s and Makhalin’s eyes met, Singaevsky seemed close to giving himself away. He looked lost and on his face was an expression of horror.”
“On Singaevsky’s face … one could see pure mortal fear.”
“When Singaevsky saw Makhalin … his face transformed to such a degree, and on his face was written so much horror that it was chilling.”
When the spectators left the courtroom during the break, many were heard to say, “We have seen the killer.”
11
“Gentlemen of the Jury!”
The morning of the Beilis trial’s nineteenth day was marked by a notable change in mood as the power of rumor descended on the court for the first time. Certainly, the occasional rumor had been known to circulate—for example, that the jury was leaning eight to four to convict. But rumor as a force rippling through the crowd had, strangely, never arisen until now.
The trial was ripe for a wave of unconfirmed items of intelligence. The spectators, Vladimir Nabokov noted in his daily column, were awaiting “some kind of sensation.” While the trial was generally sensational, this day promised a thrill: a spy story, with double agents, backstabbing, provocateurs, and a witness’s finger pointed dramatically at a helpless figure in the courtroom. The eighteenth day had severely damaged the prosecution, but the whispering suggested all was not what it seemed and the defense would now be undone.
Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Ivanov, who had headed the Gendarmes’ investigation into the Andrei Yushchinsky case, was due to testify in the morning session. Would he really expose the revolutionary Sergei Makhalin as a renegade police informer in open court? If he did, he would discredit this important defense witness who had claimed to have tricked one of Andrei’s real killers into confessing.
Nabokov, a former Duma member, noted jurist, and founding member of the liberal Kadet Party, was not naive concerning government intrigues. He had once been imprisoned for three months for antigovernment activity. But the idea that one government faction was battling another to pull off some coup de théâtre seemed to him “fantastic” and “improbable.” Nabokov was wrong. Civil prosecutor and Duma member Georgy Zamyslovsky had threatened to embarrass the secret police and the whole Interior Ministry if it did not agree to expose in court Makhalin’s past as the informer code-named “Vasilevsky” and “Deputy.” The record suggests that state prosecutor Oskar Vipper approved of his colleague’s stance.
Before Ivanov could take the stand and confirm the rumor or not, the court had to hear yet another witness testify about the defendant’s cow. Ekaterina Maslash, a fruit seller, was grilled harshly by the prosecution, but she firmly avowed that Beilis had no cow in the spring of 1911. After another uninformative witness testified, Vera Cheberyak, her head humbly clad in a scarf instead of a hat, returned for an eye-to-eye confrontation with a journalist named Yablonovsky, who she was now contending had actually offered her the forty-thousand-ruble bribe. He said he was not even at that notorious Kharkov meeting; she did not exactly recognize him but was sure he was the right man “by the way he folded his hands.”
Finally, the judge called Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov.
Three days earlier, under pressure from civil prosecutor Zamyslovsky, the highest authorities had given Ivanov permission to unmask his former operative, Sergei Makhalin. Both the national chief of police, Stepan Beletsky, and interior minister Nikolai Makakov had signed off on the decision. But the secret police, uneasy about exposing their sources and methods to public view, kept urging Zamyslovsky to withdraw his ultimatum. To betray an agent publicly would harm their ability to recruit others, they argued. They made a tempting counterproposal: instead of exposing only one witness, Ivanov would testify that all of them—Makhalin, Karaev, Brazul, and Krasovsky—were in the pay of the Jews. Ivanov would assert he had proof that Jewish money funded the so-called private investigation implicating Vera Cheberyak and her gang. The day before Ivanov was to testify, Zamyslovsky dropped his demand to expose Makhalin as an informer. It was far better for Ivanov to declare him and all his comrades to be tools of the Jewish conspiracy.
Like Nabokov, the defense dismissed the rumors that Ivanov was in league with the prosecution and fully expected him to be a helpful witness. They knew that Ivanov believed Beilis to be innocent. One of the more intriguing figures in the entire affair, Ivanov was a man whose instincts had been to do what was right. He had recommended that the police arrest Vera Cheberyak and her gang for Andrei’s murder. He had planted the informer Ivan Kozachenko in Beilis’s cell but then drove the man to confess on his knees that he lied about Beilis’s offer to pay him to poison witnesses. When the prosecution included Kozachenko’s falsehood in the indictment, Ivanov confided the truth to the venerable conservative editor and publisher of the Kievan, Dimitry Pikhno, an opponent of the blood accusation. The defense knew about this conversation and now counted on Ivanov to tell the truth.
On the witness stand, however, Ivanov denied even meeting with Pikhno. The editor had since died and could not contradict the witness. In response to a series of simple questions about whom he had spoken to and what he had told them, Ivanov repeatedly pleaded amnesia. “I don’t remember this,” he said. “I cannot remember a conversation that happened two or three years ago.” “I don’t remember.”
Ivanov’s evasions likely went unnoted by the jurors while his accusation that Jewish money had funded the independent investigation was all too understandable.
“Is it known to you whether Brazul-Brushkovsky, Makhalin, and Karaev received sums of money from someone?” asked state prosecutor Vipper.
“In that regard, it is a reliable fact that in the files of the Gendarmes’ office, there is reliable information, that all persons taking part in the private investigation received compensation,” Ivanov replied.
Brazul, he told the court, had received at least three thousand rubles. The covert funding had even covered Brazul’s therapeutic visit to a Crimean resort after the group had completed implicating Vera Cheberyak and her gang. As for Karaev and Makhalin, Ivanov said each man received daily payments of fifty rubles. Krasovsky had also received money, he testified, though he didn’t know how much. Asked about the source of the money, Ivanov remained vague, though he did mention a lawyer named Vilensky, an associate of Beilis’s first attorney, Arnold Margolin.
Defender Karabchevsky, stunned by Ivanov’s testimony, pressed him to reveal the name of the person who supplied him with this information. “Are we supposed to just take you at your word and not have the opportunity to verify it?” he asked. Ivanov vouched for the “reliability” and even “infallibility” of his source but, “in view of my official obligations,” said he could not reveal it.
Gruzenberg was irate. No witness had the right to conceal information from the court.
He addressed the judge. “Why don’t you, Your Excellency, explain to him that his ‘official duty’ has no place here, and that here his only duty is to serve the truth?” But Judge Boldyrev rejected the argument, maintaining that the source of the information was irrelevant. Zamyslovsky then took the opportunity to provoke his opponent. “I would like to point out,” he said, “that this witness [Ivanov] was called at the request of the defense.”
“It does not matter by whom the witness was called,” Gruzenberg retorted. “There are no witnesses for the defense or for the prosecution. There are only honest witnesses and dishonest witnesses.” Now the attorney was showing his rash and reckless side. To imply that a government official was a liar constituted a gross, and punishable, breach of decorum. Judge Boldyrev called a recess, after which he warned Gruzenberg of “extreme measures” in the event of another such outburst.
The prosecution relentlessly probed the question of covert subsidies to Brazul, Krasovsky, and the rest. Their logic was not unreasonable. Did Margolin and, perhaps, other well-to-do members of the Jewish community indeed fund the investigators? Krasovsky and Karaev were, after all, unemployed. Makhalin, as a freelance tutor before he received his inheritance, had no money to spare. Brazul insisted he had bankrolled much of the venture on his newspaperman’s salary but that, too, seemed questionable. Where did the money come from for the trip to Kharkov, and the wining and dining of Vera Cheberyak and the Diakonova sisters?
Nabokov seems to have been the first observer to confront this question unflinchingly. “I believe that Jewish people of means did not only have the right to spend their money on a private investigation but it was their moral responsibility to do so,” he wrote in his commentary the day after Ivanov’s testimony. If Jews used their money to rescue one of their brethren who stood falsely accused, that “does not deserve condemnation but the reverse.” With a flourish, Nabokov added that he gladly offered the right wing this helpful “new material.”
Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov was the last of the trial’s witnesses addressing facts or circumstances relating to the case. Now came the expert witnesses—on forensic pathology, psychiatry, and religion. In his daily report on the trial, a Department of Police agent struck a perverse note of optimism. “In general the evidence against Beilis is very weak,” he wrote, “but … the dim jurors may convict on the basis of tribal enmity.”
On the twentieth day, the courtroom was nearly empty as the judges read aloud the autopsy reports on the victim and lengthy, lulling descriptions of the material evidence. A funereal solemnity filled the air. Beilis, the jurors, the attorneys for both sides, and the row of experts sat through it all nearly stock-still. To Stepan Kondurushkin of Speech, the proceedings resembled the traditional Russian Orthodox reading of the psalter over the body of the deceased:
The eyelids are covered with dried clay. The ears and nose are intact, the external ear canals, nostrils and lips are covered with dried clay, the mouth is closed, the teeth are intact…
The twine was wound twice around [the right wrist] and tied in a knot, then the left wrist was secured to the right, the twine criss-crossed, wound twice around the wrists, and then knotted…
Underdrawers. Children’s. Of white cloth with blue stripes. Button at the waist missing … The ends of the cord are frayed. The area of the frontal opening is soaked with a brownish-red substance, evidently blood.
The funeral analogy was more than apt; the words were intoned in the presence of the victim’s remains. On a table in front of the judges’ bench, sitting there like a coffin, was an open wooden box with jars containing his preserved organs. The pathologists explained the jars could be opened to display their contents—the boy’s punctured lungs, his liver and right kidney, a part of his brain, and the target of the final wounds, his heart.
After two days of preliminaries, the first expert witness, the pathologist Dr. Dimitry Kosorotov, finally took the stand. Kosorotov, together with the psychiatrist Dr. Ivan Sikorsky and the Catholic priest, Father Justin Pranaitis, formed a trio that would supposedly demonstrate the ritual nature of Andrei Yushchinsky’s murder. Dr. Kosorotov, however, could claim a unique distinction: of all the witnesses, he alone is known to have extracted a bribe for his testimony that was paid for, in principle, by the tsar himself.
After the death of its original witness on the autopsy, Dr. Nikolai Obolonsky, the prosecution had drafted Dr. Kosorotov, who had obliged them by affirming that the wounds on Andrei “were inflicted with the goal of collecting the greatest quantity of blood,” a conclusion that no other pathologist had been willing to draw so explicitly. But as the trial approached, Dr. Kosorotov became difficult. The proceedings, he complained to the prosecution, would take up so much of his time. His university in St. Petersburg would dock his pay. The official state rate of compensation for a witness was not nearly sufficient.
The doctor clearly knew his importance to the state’s case and meant to exploit it. Alarmed, the prosecution sent out a distress call to St. Petersburg that reached all the way to justice minister Ivan Shcheglovitov and interior minister Nikolai Maklakov, who quickly agreed to secure the doctor’s cooperation.
Six days before the trial began, the national chief of police, Stepan Beletsky, paid Dr. Kosorotov a call. Beletsky had with him a sum of four thousand rubles in cash, money disbursed from the tsar’s secret Ten Million Ruble Fund for expenses to be kept off the official budget books. Beletsky, fearing to insult the doctor by being too direct, began by flattering him about the significance of his testimony in such a historic case. Kosorotov had no need for the polite prelude. The two men agreed on a price, four thousand rubles, the exact amount Beletsky happened to have with him. But because Zamyslovsky, the civil prosecutor, had said to pay out only half the agreed-on sum, with the balance to be delivered if the testimony proved satisfactory, Beletsky politely fibbed that he unfortunately had only two thousand rubles with him. He assured the doctor he would receive the balance on his return home from the trial.
Kosorotov did not disappoint his benefactors. He proved to be the most coherent prosecution witness so far. “If they had wanted only to kill [the boy],” he explained to the jury, “they could have hit him with a stone and he would have been dead.” With an awl, “the killers still could have immediately plunged it into the heart,” causing death instantaneously. But the killers did not do that, which, he reasoned, meant the goal was not murder, but something else—“torture and wounding in such places as are rich in blood.”
The doctor gestured to the jar holding Andrei’s dissected heart. The organ contained only two small clots the size of a pea. “That’s all the blood remaining in Yushchinsky’s heart,” he declared. From the amount of blood contained in the internal organs and from the autopsy reports, he concluded that Andrei had lost more than half his blood. The perpetrators, he believed, would have collected the blood from the wounds to the right side of the neck, which bled profusely.
The medical experts for the defense then took the stand. Dr. Evgeny Pavlov, who held the honorary title of court-surgeon, and Dr. Alexander Kadyan, both professors from St. Petersburg, were far more distinguished than Dr. Kosorotov. They had no doubt that from the first blow, the killers—they agreed there had been more than one—had intended to kill. That is why they first went for the head, with blows that punctur
ed the skull and penetrated into the brain. The heart, they explained, is actually not an easy target, something Andrei’s body attested to: of the eight stab wounds in the area of his heart, only three had hit their mark. Dr. Pavlov explained that the preserved organs were now in nothing like the state they were in at the time of death; most of the blood in them would have been squeezed out during the dissection and more would have leached out over time into the formalin preservative. The autopsy, in fact, indicated that while the blood loss was significant, the veins were filled with blood, there were rose-colored tissues, and not a single organ was bloodless.
The doctors made clear that the notion that the crime had been committed to harvest the boy’s blood was absurd. Any layman could see that the best way to obtain blood was to open up a vessel near the skin. As Dr. Kadyan put it: “If you want to get blood from the arm you make a cut and lower the limb so blood will flow. It’s the same with a leg. If you cut open a vein, the blood will flow.” Moreover, the natural tool for the purpose would be a knife that could make a clean cut, not an awl that could only puncture. To open a vessel with a puncture wound requires a very experienced hand. A layman, even with fair aim, would likely push a vessel aside rather than pierce it. In any event, Dr. Kadyan pointed out, not a single one of the wounds corresponded to the location of a major blood vessel.
Moreover, to collect blood from the head, as Kosorotov insisted had been done, the killers would have had to turn the boy upside down. “The idea that you would wound the head … the very uppermost part of the body in order to obtain blood is”—Dr. Kadyan said, using the English word—“nonsense.” The bleeding from the wounds to the neck was, in any case, mostly internal. The numerousness of the wounds was surely not an aid to collecting blood but, if anything, the reverse. The wounds to the vital organs, neck, and skull were undoubtedly meant to kill. The two dozen remaining wounds had no clear purpose and tell a story of killers in a frenzy. All in all, the signs pointed to a murder committed on the spur of the moment “with whatever weapon was at hand.”