A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (33 page)

Toward the end of March, Mendel Beilis was summoned to the office of Mashkevich, the investigating magistrate, who told him that the investigation had been completed. Fourteen months had passed since Beilis had taken that excruciating walk across snow and ice to hear very similar news from Mashkevich’s predecessor, Vasily Fenenko. But where Fenenko was deeply ashamed of his involvement in the case, Mashkevich had no such qualms. The investigator read aloud portions of the record to familiarize the defendant with the
evidence. For the first time Beilis heard about
Brazul, the
Diakonova sisters, Malitskaya, and others. “He reads and reads,” Beilis recalled of the investigator, “and my head simply began to swim.” Disoriented, he found himself casting his eyes about the room as if searching for answers. When Mashkevich finished his presentation, he told Beilis he was turning the material over to
the prosecution. Beilis still did not fully understand the judicial process and again became overly optimistic that the whole case might soon be coming to an end. He looked forward to giving Esther the good news. But, while he was visiting with his wife, the assistant prosecutor, Karbovsky, who always monitored their conversations, interrupted Beilis to explain that the end of the investigation did not at all signal the conclusion of the case against him. The investigation would be followed by the
indictment, which would take time to draw up; then, after more preparation, came the
trial. Esther began to cry. As Beilis, crestfallen, prepared to return to his cell, Karbovsky offered him a cigarette. When Beilis accepted it, Karbovsky made a strange remark, asking with a smile, “Aren’t you afraid I might try to poison you?” Puzzled, Beilis responded, “Why would someone want to
poison me?”

The meaning of the mysterious remark became clear a short while later when one of his attorneys,
Dimitry Grigorovich-Barsky, came to visit. The attorney told Beilis he had an important request that he knew would be hard on him: he had to stop receiving food from home. The
Black Hundred newspapers were claiming that the Jews planned to poison him out of fear that he might confess and reveal the truth of the blood accusation. The defense team was concerned that someone on the Far Right would actually try to poison him, to make the conspiracy theory about the Jews appear to be true, as well as to avert the embarrassment of a potential acquittal. Beilis immediately agreed to the request and, on his own initiative, tried to eliminate all chance that he would be poisoned. He had been receiving his food alone, in his isolation cell. Now he petitioned to take his meals with the other prisoners. The prison authorities refused the request, telling him, “If you want to eat, eat what you are given—if not,
you can starve. No special privileges for you.”

Beilis feared angering his guards, who would kill a prisoner on the slightest provocation. In general, he tried to be as accommodating as possible. But now he responded with a courageous act of defiance: he declared a
hunger strike. For three days, the guards slipped the tray with his meals through an aperture in the door of his cell and each time when they took it away the food was untouched. Prisoners who did not eat for three days had to be examined by a court officer, so on the third day Karbovsky appeared. He reiterated to Beilis that he could not get special treatment. To Beilis’s surprise, however, the authorities shortly
relented and soon he was eating with his fellow prisoners again from a common pot. The food was nearly inedible and at mealtimes he could force down barely enough to keep himself alive. He was living his life half-starved, but he had won a small victory.

Later that month, though,
Beilis failed to carry out one of his attorney’s other crucial instructions—causing a near disaster for the defense. Grigorovich-Barsky had asked him to
request a copy of the entire preliminary investigation—hundreds of pages of reports and depositions. Under Russian law, only the defendant himself could submit the request. Beilis did so and the next morning Mashkevich called on him at the prison. He asked Beilis if he was sure he wanted to make this request, warning that it could delay the trial by several months. The idea of more delay was simply unbearable and threw Beilis into a panic. Of course, Mashkevich might be trying to scare him, but what if he was telling the truth? Beilis figured that if the defense really needed the documents, it would find a way to get them. So he told Mashkevich that he was changing his mind. He withdrew his request.

A few days later, on March 31, Beilis’s wife and brother came to visit him. Even though the visits were monitored, Aaron remained true to his abrasive self. Karbovsky noted with indignation in one report that Aaron “allows himself ironic comments about the investigation” and cited one of Aaron’s sarcastic witticisms. “They are looking for a Jew with a black beard,” Aaron told his brother, “and you grew yourself a beard, didn’t you?”

During this visit, Aaron asked his brother if he’d ordered the copies. When Mendel said no, Aaron started screaming at him. “Mashkevich says something to you and you refuse the copies?!” Aaron told him he shouldn’t listen to anybody’s stories. A copy of the preliminary investigation was the basis for preparing the defense. “The devil knows what’s in it!” he shouted. The defense had to find out soon. And did his brother understand that this was not an ordinary case but a “political” one? Aaron would not stop screaming. Karbovsky summoned a guard and had the man escorted from the prison. He noted that further visits by Aaron would be “undesirable.”

Aaron had been somewhat unfair to his brother, who well understood his was no ordinary case, but in his anxiety had let himself be tricked. When Beilis finally ordered the copies, it caused no delay in the case. But he would have to wait six more months for his day in court.

In these eventful weeks, the prosecution lost one witness, Dr. Obolonsky, and came out the better for it. The defense also lost a witness, albeit a hostile one, for whom there was unfortunately no replacement. On the night of March 28, 1913, Ivan “Red Vanya” Latyshev was caught after breaking into the fabric store of the
brothers Gorenstein on Konstantinovskaya Street, trying to make off with six hundred rubles’ worth of silk. Latyshev, who had been in and out of jail for the past two years, was known to the
police as a breaking-and-entering specialist and a member of Vera Cheberyak’s gang. He was also, according to Krasovsky and Brazul’s
investigation, one of Andrei’s three killers. When Latyshev was brought into a precinct office on the robbery charge, it seemed like a routine arrest. But when an investigator mentioned that he recognized his picture from newspaper stories about the Yushchinsky case, Latyshev apparently grew spooked. He
dashed for a window, opened the shutters, and stepped out onto a drainpipe. Whether he was trying to escape or kill himself cannot be known for certain, but he managed to land on the roadway headfirst, as if in a dive. He died of his injuries hours later at the hospital. Latyshev had once insisted he had had “no alarming dreams” and “no hallucinations” about Andrei. But he was the one who reputedly had thrown up after the murder, lacking the stomach for a “wet job.” Perhaps he had been hounded by guilt, or was pursued by fear of the boy nicknamed
Domovoi, after the creature known to haunt people’s nights.

On May 24, a mild spring day, guards took Beilis to the courthouse where he was handed his new
indictment, which was some
forty-two pages long. He rolled it up into a cylinder and clutched it in his hand as he was taken back to prison. By now he understood that this was only the beginning of a lengthy process that would lead to his trial.

After Beilis received the indictment, Oskar Gruzenberg, now his primary attorney, came to visit him for the first time. Beilis asked Gruzenberg to just tell him the truth. He was already used to disappointments, he said. What were his chances at his trial? Beilis’s first attorney,
Arnold Margolin, had always tried to rally Beilis’s spirits with optimistic talk during their visits, assuring him he would eventually be freed.
Gruzenberg was given to speaking more straightforwardly. “Certainly it is not going badly,” he told
Beilis. “Everyone does indeed see that you are
innocent. However, one cannot know what can happen.” Gruzenberg then related a story about one of his brothers, who had been perfectly healthy but had come down with some sort of illness. The doctors had laughed it off, telling him it was nothing, but he never got better and eventually he died from the illness. “It is the same with trials,” he told Beilis. “
No one can know how it can sometimes turn. There is no basis at all on which to convict you, and we can all certainly hope that you will be freed. However, no lawyer can say with certainty that the sick man will get better. That is the truth.”

Gruzenberg was careful not to raise his client’s hopes, but the new indictment did give the defense reason for optimism. The document was four times longer than the previous indictment, but the case against Beilis, in the attorneys’ opinion, was still ridiculously weak. The most significant change had nothing to do with the evidence against the defendant. In the first indictment, Jewish blood lust was hinted at but not overtly mentioned as a motive—the prosecution, as Margolin put it, made you play a game of “
blind man’s buff.” In the new indictment, the prosecution played no games. No ambiguity remained: the state had fully embraced the blood accusation.

The prosecution made two assertions. First, it averred that Jewish ritual murder was a reality, not a myth. Second, it claimed that the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky was a hideous example of this diabolical practice. The indictment cited two witnesses in support of both assertions. The first witness was Dr. Ivan Sikorsky. The new indictment now quoted his judgment, made in May 1911, that Andrei’s murder showed all the signs of the “vendetta of the sons of Jacob.” Sikorsky, whatever one thought of his racial or religious views, was unquestionably an eminent and respectable figure. The other witness affirming the blood accusation, Father Justin Pranaitis, was, most assuredly, not respectable in the least.

That the prosecution was relying on Pranaitis was an indicator of its desperation. Pranaitis was a Catholic priest from Lithuania who lived in the Uzbek city of Tashkent, in Central Asia. The lead prosecutor,
Oskar Vipper, told a newspaper after the trial that Pranaitis had been chosen “because among the Russian Orthodox clergy there were no such
resolute, steadfast men.” The state, in fact, could not find a single
suitable expert among the Russian Orthodox clergy or lay scholars of religion to testify to the reality of
ritual murder by the Jews.

This disappointment was foreseeable. While the regime was highly anti-Semitic, the religious and cultural roots of the blood accusation in Russia were, in fact, rather shallow. The myth sprang preeminently out of the Catholic tradition; it was, as the noted historian John Klier put it, a
Catholic “import” to Russia, amounting to “learned behavior” on the part of Russians. Certainly, many ordinary Russians believed in it and many Russian Orthodox priests expressed their belief in it in their sermons and even in church publications. Moreover, rumors of ritual murder had played a role in instigating some
pogroms. But the Russian Orthodox
Church, as such, had never advocated for the myth; its theologians did little to spread it and, on occasion, even denounced it.

The most active propagators of the blood accusation in the Russian Empire were Roman Catholics or Eastern Rite Catholics, also called Uniates. The most notorious and influential of these was the flamboyant charlatan
Hippolyte
Liutostansky, a Polish Catholic priest who had been defrocked for sexual misconduct (he had ended up contracting syphilis), and then converted to Russian Orthodoxy, taking vows as an Orthodox monk before leaving religious orders to write such works as
The Question of the Use by Jewish-Sectarians of Christian Blood for Religious Purposes in Connection with Questions of the General Attitudes of Jewry to Christianity.
Quite literally a buffoon, he performed comical “Jewish sketches” in a
St. Petersburg tavern, fabricated claims that prominent Jews had offered him a hundred thousand rubles to suppress his work, was sued by his own publisher for defamation, publicly renounced his anti-Semitic views and denounced pogroms, then later claimed that the Jews had intimidated him into his renunciation, and resumed his anti-Semitic career.

Liutostansky seems a figure impossible to take seriously, yet many respectable people embraced his lurid pseudo-scholarship unblinkingly. He was likely an influence on Pranaitis, who was of the same ilk, if not quite as colorful. Pranaitis had written a pamphlet in 1892, in Latin, entitled,
Christianus in Talmude Iudaeorum sive Rabbinicae Doctrinae de Christianis Secreta
(
The Christian in the Jewish Talmud, or the Secret Rabbinical Teachings Concerning Christians,
published in English as
The Talmud Unmasked
). The work attracted little notice at first, but by the time of Andrei’s death it had been translated into
Russian, and leading far-right figures were citing it in support of the ritual murder charge. Pranaitis had written that he was
sure he would be murdered by the Jews for revealing the truth about them, but in the intervening twenty years no one had obliged by fulfilling the prophecy. He was in fine health in December 1912 when he was invited to testify for the prosecution.