A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (23 page)

As it happened, investigating magistrate
Vasily Fenenko, temporarily putting aside the Beilis case, was called upon to interrogate the assassin.
Bogrov’s motives are not entirely clear, but his primary intention was likely to restore his honor after having been unmasked as a police informer. His anarchist comrades had recently discovered his treachery and confronted him, demanding that he prove his loyalty. (Such dramatic scenes were not uncommon: the revolutionaries’ ranks were riddled with informers.) Only a spectacular terrorist act that put his own life at risk would do. Bogrov had killed Stolypin, in part, to expiate his guilt over betraying his comrades, knowing that they would surely kill him if he did not follow their instructions. Bogrov also spoke bitterly to his interrogators of the regime’s intolerable treatment of the Jews, so his ethnic roots may have played a role in the assassination, as well. On a deeper psychological level, though, Bogrov—who was executed just eleven days after firing the fatal shot—may be judged one of the era’s numerous romantic suicides. During the last anxious years of the Romanov dynasty, the self-inflicted deaths of disillusioned young men and women had become an epidemic, a fashion, and a fixation, with
morbidly curious readers opening their morning papers to find news of the most creative final expressions of despair, often cast as acts of social protest. (“
Let my drop of blood fall so that the moment will draw nearer when the sea floods its banks and compels you to come to your senses,” read a precocious fifteen-year-old boy’s famous letter.) Bogrov was of this affectedly world-weary ilk. In a letter to a friend
some months earlier he declared himself to be “
depressed, bored, and lonely” and with “no interest in life,” which he saw as “nothing more than an endless series of cutlets” he would have to consume. After being exposed as an informer, he could have fled abroad but chose not to. He entered the Kiev theater of his own free will, knowing there would be no escape. At least his chosen path to self-annihilation would ensure that the entire society felt a disorienting shudder.

Russia’s new prime minister,
Vladimir Kokovtsov, was determined to stop any anti-Jewish
violence. He assured a delegation of concerned Jews that “the
most decisive measures” would be taken to stop a pogrom. He made good on his promise. Three Cossack regiments were dispatched to predominantly Jewish neighborhoods
in Kiev, and nearby governors were ordered to use force if necessary to stop
pogroms in their regions. Tsar Nicholas approved all of the new prime minister’s actions; he, too, wanted no disorder. Within a few days, the threat of violence had passed.

The country was left to ponder a scandal. How could it be that Dimitry Bogrov had been able to enter the theater, armed, and with a valid pass, and shoot the prime minister at virtually point-blank range? Rumors immediately began that Stolypin had been killed by a right-wing conspiracy with the collusion of the secret police. Colonel Kuliabko was sentenced to a prison term for negligence, but he was the only official punished. General Kurlov was known to have schemed extravagantly against Stolypin, even having the prime minister’s mail opened in the hope of finding compromising material. But the tsar terminated an investigation of Kurlov, ensuring that speculation about a conspiracy to assassinate the prime minister would never be laid to rest.

Mendel Beilis knew nothing of politics, assassinations, and fatal blunders, or worse, among men with important titles. To him, all powerful men were simply part of the undifferentiated class of “the bosses.” Beilis did not understand what a personal disaster the death of Russia’s most powerful boss was for him. Stolypin was likely the only man in the empire who could have helped him. His successor, Kokovtsov, was a decent enough man but not nearly of the same stature; he was a caretaker, not someone to fight political battles. It was bad enough for Beilis that Stolypin was dead, but Stolypin had met his end at the hands of a Jew. The right-wing press, which had vilified Stolypin during his lifetime, deified him now. The newspaper of the
Union of Russian People,
Russian Banner,
even asserted that Stolypin had been killed by a
Jewish conspiracy because he had refused all attempts to bribe him to cover up the ritual murder and leave Mendel Beilis unpunished. If it had ever been possible for the government to drop the case, it was unthinkable now. Bogrov’s fatal shot all but assured that Mendel Beilis was going to stand trial.

The world of revolutionaries was as far removed as could be imagined from that of Mendel Beilis, as he awaited his imminent transfer from the quarantine cell to the general prison population. But with Stolypin’s death, help would have to come from the most unexpected places. It was from the shadowy and treacherous realm inhabited by men such as Bogrov that two prospective saviors would, astonishingly, emerge.

As for Vera Cheberyak, her “most humble petition” to the tsar, pleading with him to help clear her of suspicion in Andrei’s murder, was passed on to the sovereign on September 4, before his return to
St. Petersburg. No record exists of any response. Cheberyak, bereaved and besieged, set about gathering all her wiles to deflect suspicion from her door.

In mid-September 1911, after spending a month in the squalid quarantine cell, Mendel Beilis was led off to his new quarters. Bidding good-bye to the men who had, in a manner of speaking, acquitted him of Andrei Yushchinsky’s murder, he was led to another large cell, which housed about thirty men. If the men of cell number five were like his previous cellmates, then things might still be tolerable, he hoped, at least in terms of human companionship. And at first some of the men were friendly toward him. Two of his fellow prisoners were Jews, one a robber, the other a merchant named
Eisenberg who had been imprisoned due to an irregularity with a promissory note. Beilis had grown tired of talking about his predicament, so when Eisenberg asked what he was in for, he told him he was a horse thief.

Weighing on Beilis the most was that he had not seen or heard from his family for nearly two months. The prison authorities did not allow him to send or receive any letters, nor were they required to. Under the Russian legal system, until there was an indictment, a prisoner had very limited legal rights and could not even be represented by an attorney. Was anyone trying to help him? Beilis had no idea. Maybe there was nothing to be done and he would remain in prison forever. His only connection with his family came through the food packages he received every Sunday, but the strongest prisoners wrested the packages from him and left him little or nothing. Of the prison food, all he could bring himself to eat was the bread ration.

Beilis’s most immediate concern was his feet. As a former infantryman who had endured many a long march in the cold, he knew that scrupulous care of one’s feet—with
good-fitting boots, and the regular changing and cleaning of foot wraps (socks were unknown)—had to be strictly observed. (The tsar’s army made it clear that a soldier’s feet were his own responsibility. On being drafted, he was issued a few
pieces of leather and had to make his boots himself or, as most recruits did, take them to a cobbler at his own expense.)

But in his intense state of worry, Beilis couldn’t stop pacing the cell hour after hour, and the exposed nails inside the crudely made prison shoes dug into his soles. Walking became an agony. One day, about a week after his arrival in the cell, he noticed the lone chair across the room was empty. He crawled over to the chair and pulled himself onto it. The moment he sat down, a prisoner—one of the men who, until now, had treated him kindly—approached him and said sharply, “Stand up, let me sit down!” Beilis told him his feet hurt and he could not move. The man punched him hard in the face, drawing blood. Beilis screamed and the other prisoners gathered around him. On the verge of passing out, he heard some of the prisoners saying to each other that the assault was
an “analysis.” An “analysis,” he was about to learn, was prison jargon for the testing of a new prisoner to see if he could be trusted. The men who had been nice to him had just been sizing him up. Would he take his blows and remain silent? Or would he turn informer? The greatest sin in jail was to complain to “the bosses.” If he held his tongue, he would be considered a “brother.” If he told, he was a traitor and might be killed unless the prison authorities removed him in time.

His cellmate Eisenberg, agitated, rushed up to him, and explained that he must say nothing. “You do indeed see,” he said softly yet firmly in Beilis’s ear, “what kind of people are here. They are convicted criminals, murderers. Act as if nothing happened,” he advised. “Stay silent, the pain will go away.” Beilis managed to stop crying from the pain. Someone brought him some water and he washed the blood off his face, but he could do nothing about the swelling.

Later, when a guard saw that Beilis had been punched and demanded to know the culprit, Beilis said nothing. But another prisoner, perhaps a naive new arrival, pointed to the man who had hit Beilis and said, “Him.”

“Why did you hit him?” the guard shouted.

“Why did he murder a
Christian child?” the man retorted.

“And you yourself saw this?” the guard asked.

The guard led Beilis and his assailant toward the prison office, punching the man a few times. Along the way, other officers punched him and he was thrown down a flight of stairs. Despite what the man had done to him, Beilis worried that the man might break his neck.

Even though
Beilis himself had, by all rights, passed his “analysis”—he had kept his silence—the warden considered it unsafe to leave him in cell number five. He was transferred to cell number nine, the “informers’ room”—known as “the monastery”—for prisoners who were in danger of being killed by their fellow inmates. In the monastery he would be safe from attempts on his life, but his new home would prove to hold other dangers.

If the Beilis family can be said to have been lucky in something, it was that fate had chosen the right brother to be sent to prison. Mendel and his older brother,
Aaron, were opposite in
physique and temperament. Aaron was a rangy and dapper six-footer. Mendel was of medium height and a little plump—at least before his
arrest—and dressed shabbily. Aaron was in a turbulent and unhappy marriage, while Mendel had a placid and satisfying family life. Aaron was caustic, combative, worldly, and intensely interested in politics. (He likely had a better
education than Mendel, with their father making the common choice to concentrate the family’s resources on one son.) Aaron worked on
Kiev’s stock exchange—one of the strivers out of a
Sholem Aleichem story. Mendel was an agreeable sort with no ambition other than to secure his children a good education and a better life. He could, as he was finding out, stoically endure hardship—harsh interrogation, near starvation, even a bloody “analysis.” Aaron, who never could hold his tongue, would likely not have lasted a day in prison. Aaron was not close to his brother. The two men inhabited different worlds and saw each other only a few times a year. But Aaron would prove the right man to fight for his brother’s freedom.

In mid-September, soon after the
assassination of Prime Minister Stolypin, Aaron took Mendel’s wife, Esther, for a consultation with Arnold Davidovich
Margolin, one of Kiev’s best-known defense attorneys. The thirty-four-year-old Margolin was famous for his work as an advocate for victims of
pogroms and for defending Jews who had organized armed self-defense units to fight against the
Black Hundred marauders. An ardent Zionist, he served as the president of the Russian branch of the
Jewish Territorial Organization, devoted to creating a Jewish national home in a place other than
Palestine. (The group believed a return to the ancestral homeland was an unrealistic goal and
explored the possibility of settlement in, among other places, Uganda and Angola.) Margolin was also the son of one of Russia’s wealthiest men. His father,
David Margolin, was a self-made multimillionaire who owned two shipping companies and a number of sugar refineries and factories in the Kiev region. The younger Margolin was as well connected as any Jew in the city. He was someone who could marshal the support of Kiev’s Jewish grandees.

In explaining Mendel’s predicament to Margolin, Aaron likely communicated his somewhat condescending attitude toward his brother. He did not appreciate Mendel’s simple virtues. To Aaron, his brother was a person without much initiative, someone “
who had always worked for others.” He more than once implied that Mendel had been taken advantage of by the Zaitsevs who, he felt, paid him poorly. Aaron was agitated. The main thing he wanted Margolin to know was that his brother was a simple man with little education who did not know his rights. He and Esther wanted action to speed Mendel’s release from prison.

Margolin did his best to calm them down. He shared the prevailing belief in Kiev’s elite circles that, despite the unpleasantness of the prime minister’s assassination by a Jew, the Yushchinsky matter would be cleared up in a few days and Mendel Beilis would soon be released. He sincerely could not believe that the regime would go forward with a trial for ritual murder. He also explained to Aaron and Esther that, at this point, there was little of a practical nature he could do. Under the Russian justice system, a defense lawyer had no role until the preliminary investigation was concluded, the indictment handed down, and the defendant bound over for trial.