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

by Levin, Edmund

  What of Tsar Nicholas? What was the sovereign’s view of the trial’s outcome? The day of the verdict found him at the Livadia Palace near Yalta, on the Black Sea, where he had gone to relax with the empress Alexandra and their family. When a member of his entourage informed him of the news from Kiev, Nicholas delivered his opinion: “It is certain that there was a ritual murder. But I am happy that Beilis was acquitted, for he is innocent.”

  This jury of common folk, in its wisdom, had found its way to the result most pleasing to their tsar. To Nicholas, who believed his rule to be divinely ordained, it must have seemed in the natural order of things. Yet in his ingrained and deepening fatalism, Nicholas took limited comfort even from welcome events. The tsar was given to speaking humbly of the impotence of the human will and of his own powerlessness to influence the course of history. As he had told Prime Minister Stolypin just a few years earlier, he knew he was destined for “terrible trials.” He often invoked a verse from the righteous sufferer Job on whose feast day he had been born:

  For what I feared has overtaken me;

  What I dreaded has come upon me.

  12

  “The Smell of Burning, Blood, and Iron”

  Who Killed Andrei Yushchinsky?

  On November 27, 1913, in the town of Fastov, about fifty miles southwest of Kiev, the body of a boy, aged eleven or twelve, was found in a timber yard, lying across neatly stacked boards, stabbed to death. Beneath him was a pool of blood. On his neck, tracing a line from ear to ear, were thirteen puncture wounds.

  The immediate, feverish response by the Black Hundreds and in the right-wing press was predictable. Here, without a doubt, they raged, was another Jewish ritual murder. The number of stab wounds was a kabbalistic one, they said, and proof that Jews were the killers. They made this claim in the face of a most inconvenient fact: the victim, Yossel Pashkov, was a Jew. Moreover, his apparent killer was a Christian. The authorities quickly apprehended a career criminal named Ivan Goncharuk, who had a lengthy record (the exact nature of his crimes is not clear) that included ten convictions. The local prosecutor’s office soon presented what it considered conclusive proof of Goncharuk’s guilt. But the Black Hundreds insisted that the supposed Jewishness of the victim was a fiendish deception. (That the victim was circumcised was seen as part of the plot.) They were convinced the body was that of a Christian child.

  However implausibly, the case followed the Beilis template with remarkable faithfulness. Justice minister Ivan Shcheglovitov took an interest in the investigation. Grigory Chaplinsky had just stepped down as chief prosecutor in the Kiev region but had not yet left to take up his new post as a senator. Chaplinsky consulted with the justice minister on the Fastov case and the course it took undoubtedly reflected the two men’s wishes.

  In December 1913, the acting chief prosecutor, a former Chaplinsky underling named Vodokovich, launched a new investigation, its mission to answer the question: Was the apparent victim in the Fastov case really Yossel Pashkov, or had his father, a tailor named Froim Pashkov, in fact killed a Christian child, contriving to pass off the body as that of his son? Proving the theory would require two elements: a missing Christian child and a hidden Jewish child, Yossel, who was still alive. That the authorities would entertain such an insane theory is a mark of their determination, or desperation, to instigate another ritual murder case and rescue their reputations in the wake of their defeat in the Beilis affair.

  As in the Beilis case, police investigators resisted supporting the blood accusation. A detective in Fastov obstinately found no evidence of ritual murder. The prosecutor judged him to be “biased in favor of the Jews” and he was soon replaced. The right-wing press spun a story about how the Jewish boy Yossel had fled to America, or perhaps to some other country, “together with Beilis.” But for some time the state had trouble coming up with a suitable missing Christian child. By January 1914, however, it had made progress. The parents of a missing boy named Boris Taranenko were brought in to the morgue to view the badly decayed corpse of the Fastov victim. They swore it was their son. Yossel’s father and his clerk were charged in Boris’s murder and put in prison. (Boris had disappeared in Zhitomir, more than a hundred miles to the west; the authorities never attempted to explain how he ended up in Fastov.) Professor Ivan Sikorsky, reprising his role as expert on the Jews’ psychiatric profile, offered his opinion to the popular right-wing paper New Times that, although “committed in a crude fashion” (the boy’s blood had pooled wastefully below his body), this was clearly a ritual murder.

  In mid-February, Nikolai Chebyshev, Chaplinsky’s designated replacement as the Kiev region’s chief prosecutor, finally assumed the post. Known for prosecuting the instigators of pogroms, Chebyshev had a reputation for courageous and unimpeachable integrity. He quickly corrected course in the Fastov case. An autopsy specialist positively identified the body as that of Yossel, the boy’s father and the clerk were freed, and Ivan Goncharuk was convicted of the boy’s murder. In June, the authorities found the missing Boris Taranenko—he had run away from home but was quite alive—and returned him to his parents.

  Could Ivan Goncharuk have been Andrei Yushchinsky’s killer? Apparently no one asked that question for nearly a century. The authorities never investigated the possibility, or any other alternative hypothesis, for that matter. The first person to propose the idea, in 2005, was the noted Russian historian Sergei Stepanov. He correctly pointed out that, despite much suspicious behavior on the part of Vera Cheberyak and her gang, no direct evidence ever connected them to the murder. As for the revolutionaries/informers Karaev and Makhalin, it was entirely possible that they were lying when they claimed that Vera Cheberyak’s half brother, Peter Singaevsky, had confessed to them. Nothing but their testimony implicated Singaevsky.

  There is only one obstacle to the lone-killer theory: experts for both the defense and prosecution agreed that Andrei’s murder was not the act of a single maniac but of several people. However, one prominent defense witness disagreed with this view, though he did not say so at the trial. Vladimir Bekhterev, a world-renowned neurologist and leading authority on the physiology of the brain, had testified as a psychiatric expert, after examining all the autopsy reports, photographs, and physical exhibits. In a lengthy article published not long after the trial, he wrote:

  Although the other experts have argued that Yushchinsky’s murder was committed by at least two persons, because of the complexity of the murder, involving infliction of many wounds and suffocation, we think that it may be assumed that the murderer could well be a single individual, and that there is no need to postulate possible accomplices. After all, does it really require many people to knock out a boy in a surprise attack and, having inflicted a number of serious blows with an awl to the head and right side of the neck, finish him off by suffocating him and delivering more blows? Clearly not.

  Bekhterev’s argument seems persuasive. But as the historian Stepanov acerbically points out, “no one had any use for a sadistic murderer.” Both sides in the case were interested only in the multiple-killer theory. The defense had postulated that Andrei had been killed by Cheberyak’s gang; the prosecution averred the murder had been committed by a band of fanatical Jews. It can never be proven whether Goncharuk or some other maniac was responsible for Andrei’s killing, but the possibility cannot be eliminated.

  But what of Vera Cheberyak’s conduct after Andrei’s murder, which seemed so suspicious to people as to constitute virtual proof of her guilt? Why would she give false testimony against an innocent man, enlist her own daughter and husband in her perjury, as well as—infamously—beseech her dying son to exonerate her?

  Cheberyak was, after all, a suspect in a murder. If she had nothing to do with the crime, she needed to find a way to convince the authorities of her innocence. She was a woman who, in any situation, knew no other way out than to lie, deceive, and manipulate. A deeper psychological explanation also suggests itself. Cheberyak, after spending her life consorti
ng with the detritus of society, had finally found a stage that presented her talents to those she considered worthy of appreciating them. She discovered an opportunity to bend to her will prominent men—prosecutors, Duma members, government ministers. And whether she was guilty or innocent, she made sure to make the most of her role.

  For all this speculation, the theory that Andrei was killed by Vera Cheberyak’s gang remains the most plausible one. After the trial, Nikolai Krasovsky immediately set about proving it beyond a doubt. In February 1914, Krasovsky boarded an ocean liner bound for New York. His mission was to locate Adele Ravich, the woman who had supposedly seen Andrei’s body in Vera Cheberyak’s apartment and fled to America. When Krasovsky arrived in New York he was treated as a celebrity, “entertained at the Café Boheme in Second Avenue,” the New York Times reported, “by a number of [the city’s] Russian residents.”

  Living up to his reputation as “Russia’s Sherlock Holmes,” he soon found Adele Ravich and her husband, Amerik, possibly in Hoboken, New Jersey, where the 1930 U.S. census records them as living. Krasovsky claimed that he secured affidavits from the couple that would force the reopening of the case. “I am confident,” he told the Times, “that the outcome of the new trial will be the final destruction of popular faith in the old ritual-murder myth.” But when Krasovsky returned to Kiev, Arnold Margolin disagreed. Margolin writes in his memoirs that while the Raviches’ testimony was “highly interesting, tending to confirm that Vera Cheberyak had taken part in the murder,” it was not sufficient to reopen the case under Russian law. Margolin is frustratingly vague about the content of the affidavits, but it seems certain that the couple did not confirm seeing Andrei’s body in Vera Cheberyak’s apartment.

  Krasovsky still hoped to prove his case. But within four months a new Time of Troubles threw Russia into chaos and brought an end to all hopes and efforts to bring the killers of Andrei Yushchinsky to justice.

  1917

  One day in early March 1917, Oskar Gruzenberg answered a telephone call in his apartment in St. Petersburg, where he had been watching a revolution unfold outside his window. The call was from a colleague who had been assigned by the new Provisional Government to secure the files of the Department of Police. “Would you like to look through the secret materials on the Beilis case?” he asked. Gruzenberg, needless to say, immediately agreed. The files would be brought over forthwith.

  This moment had only been made possible by an unprecedented catastrophe for Russia. On August 1, 1914, just nine months after Mendel Beilis had left the Kiev courtroom a free man, Russia had been plunged into war. The “smell of burning, blood, and iron” that the poet Alexander Blok had sensed in the spring of 1911 had been a portent of the greatest carnage the world had yet seen, with Russia suffering more than nine million dead and wounded in its conflict with the Central Powers, Germany and Austria. Fate did not grant the empire the twenty-year breathing space that Prime Minister Peter Stolypin had known it must have if it was to reform and survive.

  The outbreak of World War I had at first been accompanied by a patriotic upsurge, national unity, and hopes that Russia might prevail. The tsar’s army even attained a few victories, but by the fall of 1915, Nicholas II had become, in Vasily Maklakov’s famous allegory of the time, the “mad chauffeur,” driving Russia to “inescapable destruction.” As if to speed the disastrous course, Nicholas, over the extreme protests of his ministers, took personal command of the armed forces. The tsar’s decision, as one minister noted, was “fully in tune with his … mystical understanding of his imperial calling.” For Nicholas, Russia’s salvation lay in the dictates of his “inner voice” and the miraculous bond of Tsar and People. But Nicholas’s departure for the front left the empress Alexandra, advised by Rasputin, holding power in Petrograd (as the Germanic-sounding Petersburg had been patriotically renamed). The result was utter bureaucratic chaos as one minister after another was promoted in reward for his obsequiousness, or cast out for supposed disloyalty, in the farcical game known as “ministerial leapfrog.” Over its final seventeen months, the government ran through four prime ministers, five ministers of the interior, three foreign ministers, three ministers of war, three ministers of transport, and four ministers of agriculture.

  The system could not endure the strain of the war and its mismanagement. The end, when it came, came suddenly, triggered by random events. The death agony commenced in Petrograd on February 23, 1917, International Women’s Day, the occasion for a large demonstration of women in the center of the city demanding equal rights and protesting against bread shortages. Strikes by some two hundred thousand Petrograd workers followed. The weather was unseasonably warm, encouraging large crowds of all sorts of people to take to the streets either as demonstrators or as sympathetic bystanders. Cossack troops showed hesitance in controlling the crowds. Nicholas then issued an order for the Petrograd garrison to put down the disorder. On February 26, troops fired on demonstrators in the city center, killing dozens of them, but widespread mutinies in the armed forces followed. In the end, the troops would not fire upon the people. Nicholas had become a nonentity, his orders ignored by his senior generals, who unanimously agreed that he should abdicate. Within four days the tsarist regime had collapsed. On February 27, the Duma began forming a provisional government.

  The revolution was perceived as utterly inevitable and yet, somehow, a surprise. “The most striking thing,” Blok wrote in his diary three months later, “was the utter unexpectedness of it, like a train crashing in the night, like a bridge crumbling beneath your feet, like a house falling down.”

  Russia’s new leadership quickly moved to hold the enemies of the people, including Mendel Beilis’s prime persecutors, accountable for their crimes. The former justice minister, Ivan Shcheglovitov, was the first high official to be arrested, seized in his kitchen on the evening of February 27 by a student who had, on his own initiative, flagged down a few soldiers. The former minister was hustled into custody, wearing no topcoat in the freezing cold. Moments after the arrest, Nikolai Karabchevsky’s assistant in the Beilis trial, Boris Utevsky, happened to catch sight of the prisoner, who struck him as “pallid, unshaven, flabby, frightened, but angry and full of hate.” Shcheglovitov was marched to the Tauride Palace where the Duma convened. There he was confronted by the well-known attorney and Duma member Alexander Kerensky, who would soon become Russia’s justice minister (and later, briefly, the government’s leader). Shcheglovitov stood there, head bowed, his face still red from the cold, as Kerensky proclaimed, “Citizen Shcheglovitov, in the name of the people I declare you under arrest!”

  He was held in the palace for some time until soldiers led him off to a large motorcar that inched along as crowds swarmed around it, the driver periodically calling out, “Automobile of the Provisional Government!,” to which the crowd responded with cries of “Hurrah!” and parted to make way. The scene was repeated again and again until the vehicle arrived at its destination, the gates of the Peter and Paul Fortress where the prisoner was locked in a cell.

  Former interior minister Nikolai Maklakov, who was arrested the next day with two other officials, suffered rougher treatment. Maklakov related the experience to a fellow inmate who later set down his words:

  Around us an enraged crowd snarled, cursing us, and sometimes hitting and pushing us to the complete indifference of our guards. Some huge fellow jumped on my back and squeezed me with his legs … Finally we came to the Peter and Paul Fortress. At the gates someone hit me on the head. I fell and, unconscious, was taken by the guards to my cell.

  The former head of the Department of Police, Stepan Beletsky, was also arrested and locked up in the fortress. With his ministers imprisoned and his government in ruins, still to be dealt with was the sovereign emperor—stranded in his imperial train two hundred miles southwest of Petrograd, powerless, but still Tsar of all the Russias. The task of securing his abdication fell to Vasily Shulgin, the righteous anti-Semite and Duma member who had so famously opposed
Beilis’s prosecution, and former Duma chairman Alexander Guchkov. By the time the two men sat down in the luxuriously appointed imperial railway car sitting room, outside the town of Pskov, the tsar had already reached the most difficult decision of his life. A few weeks earlier, Prime Minister Kokovtsov had thought Nicholas “on the verge of a mental breakdown.” But now the tsar was calm. His infamous fatalism, such a maddening quality to his advisers, a wellspring of obstinacy, now eased his path toward acceptance of the inevitable. He had always believed he was destined to rule Russia but also to endure “terrible trials” and go to his death unrewarded. Now his own prophecy was fulfilled. According to one witness, he expressed “his strong conviction that he had been born for misfortune, that he brought Russia great misfortune.” His advisers had persuaded him that he could not continue to rule. “If it is necessary for Russia’s welfare that I step aside,” he said, “I am prepared to do so.” He would abdicate for the good of the nation—in favor of his brother, the Grand Duke Michael, rather than his incurably ill son Alexis, explaining to Shulgin and Guchkov, “I hope you will understand the feelings of a father.”

  Upon returning to Petrograd with the tsar’s signed abdication decree, Shulgin immediately proceeded to the house where the Grand Duke Michael was secretly residing. Vladimir D. Nabokov and another jurist were summoned there to draft Michael’s renunciation of the throne. Nicholas’s brother had no desire to be tsar. For some reason the business was conducted in a child’s study. The document that Nabokov wrote out at a small school desk, surrounded by toys, was one of the most consequential in Russia’s history. Signing it, the grand duke brought to a close three centuries of rule by the Romanov dynasty.