A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (28 page)

On February 12, Beilis was led into the
visitors’ chamber at the prison and locked into one of its wire cages as his wife, children, and brother Aaron were brought in to see him. The noise and commotion in the large room were so intense that he and Esther could hardly hear each other. He was shocked at her appearance—now that he could see her up close, she appeared years older than when he had last looked
in her eyes seven months earlier. They spoke little and could do little more than cry and touch each other’s hands through the small gaps in the wire mesh. Because their conversations were monitored, they were allowed to speak only in
Russian, which made communication frustratingly awkward; Esther could barely speak the language and
Beilis only imperfectly. Still, seeing his family greatly lifted his spirits. He ate and slept better and felt much healthier. He knew it was important that he maintain his strength as best he could in this hellish place where six or seven convicts a day died of
typhoid fever. He viewed every day he survived as a victory.

Now that Beilis was officially an indicted prisoner, his lawyers were finally able to take action on his behalf, filing reams of petitions, motions, and lists of witnesses to be summoned. Margolin visited him in prison and reassured him that everyone knew he was
innocent and that the indictment only reinforced that belief. Indeed, the indictment was pathetically feeble and unconvincing, at times even comic in its candor (“[The witness] Ulyana Shakhovskaya recounted her story in a drunken state …”). The document reads more like an exoneration until the point in the narrative where
Vasily
Cheberyak finally appears with his story of how Zhenya and Andrei were being chased by Beilis the clerk from the Zaitsev
brickworks. Then the informer Kozachenko materializes with his tale of the defendant promising him untold Jewish lucre to poison the “Lamplighter” and “Frog.” No mention is made of Kozachenko’s admission to Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov that he had made everything up.

The indictment was most notable for a striking omission: nowhere in it was there a direct accusation of ritual murder. Margolin and his colleagues puzzled over why this might be so. Most likely, they concluded, the prosecution was acting out of strategic considerations; the skeleton, so to speak, of the ritual murder charge was undeniably there. While Professor Sikorsky’s pronouncement about “the revenge of the sons of Jacob” was nowhere mentioned, the indictment did quote his judgment that the crime was marked by “
slow blood loss” and “the extraction of blood,” which were referred to together as a “goal” of the crime. Moreover, the indictment, with no pretext, notes Beilis’s role in preparing the
Zaitsev family’s matzo and that Beilis’s father had been a pious Hasid. The inclusion of all this material made no sense unless the prosecution was planning to use the blood accusation, if only in an underhanded way. With such a weak case, Margolin guessed, the prosecution
had decided that it was better to avoid direct mention of the ritual-murder charge and let the jury, as he put it, “
read between the lines.” He was likely correct about the prosecution’s strategy at this point. In fact, in April the court even ruled against allowing expert testimony on Judaism on the grounds that the prosecution was not making religion an issue in the case. Within months, however, the state would change course, deciding to embrace the medieval myth fully and—although it would deny doing so—put the Jewish religion itself on
trial.

As the first anniversary of Andrei Yushchinsky’s murder approached, Vladimir Golubev, head of the
Kiev right-wing youth group
Double Headed Eagle, found himself surprisingly frustrated. He had arguably done more than anyone to create the case against Mendel Beilis, having first brought the name of this Jew to the attention of the authorities. But he had ended up marginalized, his organization under close official supervision, unable to participate actively in the case. Now that Beilis was indicted, he could do little more than fret that the boy-martyr’s death was not being acknowledged with proper solemnity. On the day before the anniversary, as
police officers stood close by, a small group of about thirty
Black Hundreds gathered at Andrei’s grave. Aside from the chanting of prayers, the gathering was quiet—the authorities had forbidden any speeches for fear of provoking anti-Jewish violence. On March 12, the day of the anniversary, a
requiem for Andrei was held at
St. Sophia Cathedral without incident. All this left Golubev greatly distressed. The commemorations were perfunctory, he felt; the whole city should have joined in mourning. When he heard that a nationalist organization was holding a ball that very night, he grew enraged. He
stalked into the ball, mounted the stage, and began loudly reproaching the dancing couples for enjoying themselves on such a sacred day. The revelers refused to be conscience-stricken and Golubev refused to break off his rant. The police had to be called, and he was escorted from the premises. Little more would be heard of him until Beilis’s trial, when the prosecution would welcome his amateur detective work and febrile rage.

When Margolin told Beilis that everyone believed him to be innocent, he himself had no idea just how right he was. At the upper levels of
the empire’s security apparatus, the opinion was unanimous: the defendant was innocent and Tsar Nicholas’s regime was courting political disaster by pursuing the case. Astoundingly, no police official, of either high or low rank, ever even pretended to consider Mendel
Beilis seriously as a suspect.

On January 28, two days before the indictment was handed down, Colonel
Alexander Shredel, head of the Kiev office of the Corps of Gendarmes, wrote a report to his superior in St. Petersburg, a vice director of the national Department of Police. After dismissing Brazul’s outlandish scenario, Shredel let it be known that his office’s secret investigation “gives a
firm basis to propose that the murder of the boy
Yushchinsky occurred with the participation of [Vera] Cheberyak” and members of her gang. On February 14, in a follow-up report titled “
Personal. Top Secret. Deliver Directly to Recipient’s Hands,” he wrote that in spite of Beilis’s indictment, the Kiev Gendarmes’ investigation was still continuing under the direction of his subordinate, Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov, and was still “chiefly concentrated around … Vera Vladimirovna Cheberyak and criminals directly connected to her.” He named seven of her gang members as suspects. Ivanov’s investigation would soon narrow down the list of perpetrators to three: Vera’s half brother Peter “Plis” (“Velveteen”) Singaevsky, Boris “Borka” Rudzinsky, and Ivan “Red Vanya” Latyshev. The investigation, Shredel declared, was operating on the assumption that Andrei “was the unwilling witness of a criminal act of this gang whom ‘it was necessary to do away with out of fear.’ ” The last phrase was in quotation marks, meaning it was apparently a verbatim quote from testimony by a witness cited in a previous report that has unfortunately been lost. The full range of the testimony on which Ivanov based his judgment will never be known, but it is clear he had little doubt about who the real killers were.

Regarding the strength of the charges against the Jewish prisoner accused of killing Andrei, Shredel made a harsh and strikingly candid judgment. “The indictment of Mendel Beilis,” he wrote, “given the
inadequacy of the evidence against him and the widespread interest in this case, which is becoming known throughout almost all of Europe, may occasion a great deal of unpleasant consequences for officials of the judicial branch and completely justified reproaches regarding the conduct of the investigation, the hastiness of the conclusions and even their one-sidedness.” On March 14, along similar lines, he warned:
“The … evidence against Beilis, as is now becoming clear, will completely fall away in the course of
trial testimony.”

As for the prosecutors (as opposed to police officials), a peculiar episode in the spring of 1912 casts light on their own private doubts about the defendant’s guilt. Among the local
Black Hundred leaders offering to assist the prosecution was
Grigory
Opanasenko, chairman of the Railroad and Cabdrivers’ Division of the
Russian National Union of the Archangel Michael, one of the larger far-right organizations. The prosecution paid his theories of the case serious attention, in particular the notion that the draining of Andrei’s blood was achieved with the help of highly insidious “special instruments” peculiar to the Jews. (The theory was, in the end, never adopted.) On April 29, Opanasenko sought out a key member of the prosecution team,
A. A. Karbovsky, to inform him of an eerie rumor. “Yushchinsky’s ghost is appearing to the perpetrators of the crime and demands their clothing,” he had heard. “They do not sleep at night and are ready to confess.” Karbovsky, apparently in all seriousness, set about trying to confirm whether Andrei’s restless spirit had been seen calling upon anyone at the witching hour. Opanasenko did not name the haunted men but must have had in mind Beilis and his supposed black-bearded accomplices. But in a striking indication of his personal beliefs about the case, Karbovsky seemed to question everyone about this apparition except Mendel Beilis and, as far as is known, not a single Jew. Most tellingly, he paid a visit to a prison where he queried two members of Vera Cheberyak’s gang doing time there for robbery. One was Ivan Latyshev, whom the Kiev Gendarmes had identified as one of Andrei’s likely killers. Both convicts answered the prosecutor’s strange question in the negative, with Red Vanya declaring: “I have had no alarming dreams and suffer from no hallucinations.”

With the arrival of spring, both Kiev and Beilis’s spirits began to thaw. The poorly heated cell became a little more habitable. He no longer awoke, as he had sometimes, to find his hand frozen to the wall. He was given an occasional cellmate, which relieved his solitude. (One of them, a Russian peasant, was quite a decent fellow who Beilis decided, probably correctly, was not an informant.) Most of all, he was happy about the progress toward his May 17 trial. On April 7 a panel of prospective jurors was selected. When he was summoned a few days later to
the prison office for a visit with Margolin, Beilis had no reason to expect any bad news. During their meetings, Margolin invariably said something to make him feel better. “You will be victorious,” he would say, and reassure him that he would not have to wait long. Now, when Beilis casually asked if there was anything new, Margolin got right to the point: the trial was being postponed, with no new date assigned. “I
felt like a bullet was shot in my head,” Beilis recalled. “I thought that I would go insane.” He had been counting the days and the hours, and now the clock had stopped.

Margolin explained that an expert had fallen ill and the trial could not begin without him. An “expert”? Beilis had learned what an “investigator,” a “prosecutor,” and a “juror” were, but he was yet not enough of a
zakonnik
to know what an “expert” was. But he knew it sounded serious. Margolin tried to reassure him that this was a minor setback. The trial would still happen soon. Beilis began to cry and accused Margolin of not wanting to tell him that things were going badly. Margolin tried to calm him down. Professor Sikorsky, a key prosecution witness, had, in fact, taken ill. But Beilis returned to his isolation cell feeling “like a live body in a grave.”

Beilis recalled this as the very lowest moment of his years in prison. Adding to his torment, under the system’s absurd rules, as a prisoner without a trial date, he had his family visitation rights suspended. He was utterly alone again. For the first time he thought of
suicide. “ ‘Rather than such a life,’ I thought to myself, ‘Death is better.’ And I certainly would have done it, as these were minutes when life became unbearable.” But as his thoughts darkened, he found unexpected comfort in his identity as a Jew and in the
religion that had been a marginal presence in his life since the day he had left for the army some twenty years earlier. He had come to understand that his case was not just about him but about the Jewish people as a whole:

Comforting words from his youth, long dormant, came to him now:

Drawing on the power of that Talmudic saying,
Beilis began to eat and sleep better; maintaining his own well-being was a way to spite his people’s enemies. He resolved to live to see the day when the truth would be revealed.

As Beilis sat alone in his jail cell, murmuring long-forgotten prayers, he could take solace from something else as well. Civilized opinion was rallying to his cause. He was indeed becoming “a second Dreyfus.”

The
first mention in the West of Andrei Yushchinky’s murder came from
Reuter’s news agency. At the end of April 1911, the agency—with no editorial comment—telegraphed to its subscribers a translation of a sensational article about the case from the Russian far-right press. (A sample: “In bygone days the Chassidim used to crucify their victim, but later they considered it sufficient to drive nails into various parts of his body …”) Credulous editors published the article in a half-dozen provincial newspapers in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and it also served as the basis for a few reports in American papers. The London-based
Jewish Chronicle
expressed outrage “that an agency of the reputation and standing of Reuter’s should aid in circulating these infamous slanders.” Dr.
Herbert Friedenwald, secretary of the
American Jewish Committee, accused the Russian government of ginning up the ritual murder charge “as a pretext for starting a pogrom” or, even more insidiously, with the goal of inciting the Russian populace in order to demonstrate that the regime had the power to
prevent
a pogrom if it so desired. (The speculation was off the mark—even at that early stage of the affair, the regime sought to avert anti-Jewish violence.)
Friedenwald declared the case to be another reason to
support the committee’s campaign for the abrogation of America’s commercial treaty with Russia.