A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (22 page)

The decision to prosecute Beilis was the product of two mentalities or sets of perceptions: the generally held belief in the menace presented by the Jews combined with Tsar Nicholas’s personal belief in the divine nature of his power and his mission on earth. Nicholas was a true believer in the myth of the
Tsar-Batiushka,
or saintly “Little Father Tsar.” Fundamental to the myth was the precept that the tsar’s authority came from God and from the personal bond between tsar and people. Nicholas’s recent predecessors had believed in this spiritual dictum, in principle, but Nicholas lived it out with unique intensity and relied on it as a guide to action. Nicholas more than once expressed his aversion to his rationalist ancestor Peter the Great, the legendary Westernizer who, in his view, heedlessly “
stamped out all the pure Russian customs.” Nicholas had an abiding nostalgia for an idealized Russia, before Peter’s reign began in 1682, when the connection between tsar and people was thought to have been close and pure. A part of that bond, for Nicholas, was shared hatred of the Jews.

It has been argued that the Beilis case was part of a
political agenda
by certain officials. It was, supposedly, a way of derailing a bill in the
Duma to abolish the
Pale of Settlement or, more generally, as the historian Orlando Figes put it, “to exploit xenophobia for monarchical ends … to mobilize the ‘loyal Russian people’ behind the defense of the tsar and the traditional social order.” But the bill on the Pale had died in committee several months earlier, in February 1911, before Andrei’s disappearance; it never had any chance of passing. Nor did the regime ever actively use the
Beilis case to rouse the population on behalf of Mother Russia. In fact, the record shows that the government was fearful of popular involvement straight through to the end of the
trial. Another motive explaining the prosecution of the case, pressure from the Far Right, is also unconvincing; the Far Right was a creature of the regime, heavily dependent on it for secret funding and, in any case, divided by vicious infighting, with the
Union of Russian People having split into three rival organizations. The government was quite able to defy the Far Right when it desired.

In pursuing this mad venture, then, the tsar’s personal ideology, not politics, was the necessary condition, the indispensable factor. Left to themselves and their generic anti-Semitic prejudice, the tsar’s ministers would have somewhat moderated the regime’s anti-Jewish policy. The tsar, however, had demonstrated his belief that his divine mission dictated the Jews’ unrelieved oppression. Thus the high officials who backed the Beilis case were motivated not by the desire to mobilize the people or to pursue a political agenda but to please the tsar and so advance themselves.

For political expediency in service to the tsar’s beliefs, there is no better example than the career of
Ivan
Shcheglovitov, the justice minister throughout the Beilis case. A former chief prosecutor of the State Senate, as the Russian supreme court was called, he had been one of the empire’s most distinguished jurists. He was regarded by none other than Oskar Gruzenberg, Russia’s most prominent Jewish defense attorney (and future head of Beilis’s defense team), as a man of unimpeachable integrity. Shcheglovitov, during his years as a prosecutor, law professor, and major architect of judicial regulations, was known as something of a progressive, even interceding more than once to commute the sentences of people convicted of political crimes. In his forties, however, Shcheglovitov was suddenly infected with an overpowering case of political ambition. He set his sights on becoming the minister of justice and left the Senate for a lesser position in the Justice Ministry,
calculating that he would succeed in rising to the top post, which he did in 1906—whereupon, as former prime minister Witte succinctly put it in his memoirs, he “destroyed the courts.” Shcheglovitov did his best to obliterate the hard-won independence of the judiciary—the one institution that
Russians could point to with pride as striving toward Western standards, forcing out judges and prosecutors deemed politically unreliable and sending out his minions to harass and intimidate officers of the court into producing verdicts the regime desired. Gruzenberg was shocked, writing in his memoirs that “Shcheglovitov’s moral transformation was not so much a decline as a roaring avalanche.” Shcheglovitov became known by the nickname “Vanka Cain” (“Johnny Cain”) after a legendary eighteenth-century brigand who duped the state into making him a powerful police official but used his post to unleash a massive crime wave.

A man of great intellectual sophistication, Shcheglovitov was probably no more anti-Semitic than the average Russian official and had even helped Gruzenberg win a lenient sentence for a Jewish vigilante convicted of trying to kill a notorious instigator of
pogroms. Now, in 1911, only one motive could explain why such a man would support a ritual murder trial: self-interest. This, in turn, could only mean that he believed he was doing what the tsar wished him to do.

True, the tsar’s wishes were often hard to discern. And, at this point, officials may have relied merely on his single brief gesture of crossing himself at the mention of the suspect or a meaningful nod to a minister during one or another briefing. But it stood to reason that a man who believed a divine whisper urged him to persecute the Jews was likely to welcome an endeavor that sought to prove their fanatical malevolence.
Nicholas’s “inner voice” had not changed its counsel since his 1906 veto of the pro-Jewish measures. Just two weeks before his visit to Kiev, the tsar had signed yet another anti-Jewish restriction, one that limited trade by Jews east of the Urals, sternly instructing his ministers, “Everything needs to be done to prevent the Jews from
taking over
Siberia.”

One powerful figure, however, was unquestionably appalled and unsettled by the Beilis case. In early September, as the
brick-factory clerk neared the end of his stay in the quarantine cell, his best hope of avoiding prosecution lay in the possibility of intervention by the prime
minister, Peter Stolypin. Stolypin was a fervent Russian nationalist. Like all senior tsarist officials, he was an anti-Semite, but he was not a racist. That is, he did not see the Jews as an irredeemably evil race. Rather, he saw the Jews as a political and social problem, one that could be dealt with, if only the tsar allowed it, by political means. No record exists of Stolypin’s opinion of the
Beilis case, but it is inconceivable that he believed that putting a Jew on trial for killing a Christian boy would be in the interests of the regime. Such a public spectacle could only needlessly alienate the Jews even further. Stolypin, moreover, was greatly worried about the impact of Russia’s anti-Semitic excesses on the empire’s image abroad and on its foreign economic interests. He was specifically concerned in the fall of 1911 about an intense lobbying campaign—the first of its kind in history—led by the American financier
Jacob Schiff calling for the abrogation of the Russo-American commercial treaty of 1832 as punishment for Russia’s anti-Jewish policies. A ritual murder case could only give the backers of this campaign more ammunition.

A pragmatic anti-Semitic supporter of Stolypin’s later said the prime minister would never have let the Beilis case go forward. During the past year, Stolypin had shown his political fortitude by attempting to banish the “Mad Monk” Iliodor as well as Rasputin, both favorites of the tsar’s. He had stood up to the Far Right in a major confrontation dealing with the organization of local governments in the western provinces, so he may well have succeeded in thwarting a foolish endeavor that the tsar had not explicitly endorsed.

When he was briefed on the case in
Kiev, Stolypin could only have grown more alarmed. But any action to forestall the prosecution of Beilis would have to await his return to
St. Petersburg, an event that depended on his continued existence, which in turn depended upon the efforts of his subordinate and political enemy, General Kurlov, who was in charge of all
security precautions, as well as the Kiev
Okhrana chief,
Nikolai Kuliabko. Stolypin needed around-the-clock protection to stay alive. In his five years in office, he had survived some seventeen attempts on his life, including a spectacular bombing of his home that killed twenty-seven people and wounded two of his children. Kurlov arranged for Stolypin to be protected by a twenty-two-man security detail, but an aura of impending tragedy would overtake the prime minister’s visit to Kiev, thanks to an outburst by his nemesis Rasputin.

The erratic and charismatic holy man was said to have a gift for prophecy, supposedly predicting the calamitous sinking of the Russian fleet in the war with Japan in 1905. He could also, it was said, predict the fates of individuals, whether they would fall ill, and how their lives would unfold. Seldom were his prognostications riddles to be unraveled; they were direct and verifiable. On the day the tsar and his entourage arrived in
Kiev, his prophetic urge concerned the prime minister.

Barred by Stolypin from appearing in public with the tsar, Rasputin stood among the crowd of ordinary people on the street, watching the imperial family and the attending dignitaries pass by on the way to the cathedral. As Stolypin’s carriage passed, Rasputin exclaimed, “
Death is following him! Death is riding behind him!” Rasputin reputedly spent the night tortured by the vision and was heard muttering about it over and over as he tossed in his bed. It was an eerie omen, though one that Stolypin, had he known about it, would certainly have shrugged off. No one was more fatalistic about his future than the prime minister himself. The first line of his last will and testament, drafted years earlier, read, “
I want to be buried where I am assassinated.”

The main event of the tsar’s visit to Kiev, the unveiling of a monument to his grandfather
Alexander II, took place without incident. So did a number of other outdoor events, which were thought to present the greatest security risk. The command performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Tale of the Tsar Saltan
at Kiev’s Municipal Theater on September 1 was deemed to be thoroughly secure. The identities of all the guests were vetted. Only those possessing a special pass—the rarest of the twenty-six types issued for the Kiev events—were allowed to enter the theater. The Kiev Okhrana chief, Kuliabko, the man who had arrested Mendel Beilis six weeks earlier, was present to supervise security.

The tsar and two of his daughters, accompanied by the Bulgarian crown prince, occupied the Kiev governor-general’s parterre box, the closest one to the stage. (That evening the empress Alexandra, as was so often the case, was indisposed and did not attend.) The first row of the orchestra was reserved for the highest officials, and Stolypin sat in seat number five, between the governor-general, F. F. Trepov, and the minister of the imperial court,
Baron V. B. Fredericks. When the
lights went up during the intermission, the prime minister stood up and leaned on the barrier of the orchestra pit. As he conversed with Baron Fredericks and another dignitary, a slim young man slipped into his row, stopping within five or six feet of him. The young man pulled a pistol out of his pocket and fired two shots.
One bullet hit Stolypin in the hand and the other found its mark in the right side of his chest, shattering one of the orders hanging from a ribbon on his jacket. Kiev’s governor,
A. F. Giers, described the scene:

Nicholas had been in the drawing room with his children and immediately returned to his box when he heard the shots. Before being taken to the hospital, Stolypin, Nicholas later wrote his mother, “slowly turned toward me and
crossed himself with his left arm.”

The prime minister had been left totally unguarded. Not an officer was to be found within a hundred paces of him. Before the assassin could get off a third shot, he was set upon by a crowd of four dozen gentlemen in evening clothes who pushed him to the ground and beat him in the face with their opera glasses, egged on by the spectators’ cries of “
Kill him!” Nicholas expressed regret, apparently with utter sincerity, that the police did not allow the crowd to beat the man to death.

Stolypin was, of course, attended to by the best physicians in the city, including Dr. Nikolai Obolonsky, dean of the medical department of the Kiev’s St. Vladimir University, who had performed an autopsy on Andrei Yushchinsky. At first the doctors had a good deal of hope that the prime minister might survive. After three days, though, he took a turn for the worse, and he died on September 5, 1911. Damage to his liver had turned out to be more severe than first believed. The main damage to the organ, it was determined, had been done mostly not by the bullet but by
fragments of the Order of St. Vladimir of the Third Degree awarded him by Nicholas, which had been driven into his body. Prime Minister Stolypin had truly died for his service to the tsar.

The shooting of Stolypin triggered new fears of a pogrom: the prime minister’s assassin—a twenty-four-year-old anarchist, law school graduate, and sometime secret
police informer named
Dimitry
Bogrov—turned out to be a Jew. (In an act of staggering gullibility, Kuliabko had let Bogrov, whom he believed to be his agent, talk his way into the theater by claiming that he could prevent an attempt on the prime minister’s life.) Born into a prosperous and highly
assimilated family, Bogrov was Jewish only in the ethnic sense, but in the aftermath of the assassination, that indisputable identity was all that mattered.
Black Hundred agitators riled up crowds with incendiary speeches. The day after Stolypin’s death, a gang of twenty
thugs threw stones at Jewish students and assaulted Jewish merchants on Alexander Street with knives. Thousands of Jews jammed into Kiev’s train station hoping to flee the city.