A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (4 page)

A little before seven a.m. on that Saturday, a
lamplighter named Kazimir Shakhovsky was walking home, ladder on his shoulder, having filled the streetlamps on his route with kerosene. He lived on Polovetskaya Street, about fifty steps away from Zhenya Cheberyak’s home on Upper Yurkovskaya Street. He remembered the day well because he was on his way back from his boss’s house, where he had just got a ruble advance on his salary and a fresh batch of kerosene. At home, his wife, Ulyana, took the ruble and headed to the grocery store. On the way, she saw Andrei and his friend Zhenya standing on the corner of Polovetskaya and Upper Yurkovskaya talking and eating candy. She noticed Andrei was not wearing a coat and was carrying his belt of books. She spent ten kopeks on some bread and sausage that her husband ate for breakfast.

Kazimir left the house, passing the state liquor store on the ground floor of the Cheberyaks’ building, which was already open, meaning it was a little past eight a.m. (the Russian Empire, brutal in so many ways, indulged its drinkers), and came upon Andrei and Zhenya, who were still standing on the sidewalk and talking, a little farther down the street from where Ulyana saw them. Kazimir noticed that Andrei had a jar about two inches tall with something black inside that he was sure was gunpowder. The boy was excited to see “Lamplighter,” according to Kazimir, though it is not clear why. “He ran up to me and hit me on my shoulder with his hand and asked me where I was going,” the man recalled. “He hit me pretty hard—it hurt, so I got angry … I told him he had no business knowing where I was going.” Turning around, he spat out, “Bastard!”

If Andrei was hurt by this word, which he must have heard many, many times in his brief life, he did not show it. “Gramps, where are you going? Take me with you,” he pleaded. Kazimir was going out to catch goldfinches to sell live at the market; Andrei, who had a net and liked to catch birds, would have enjoyed that. But Lamplighter pushed ahead to his destination, leaving Andrei behind, the taunt of “bastard” ringing in his ears. He was the last person known to have seen Andrei alive.

A short time after the body was discovered, Mendel
Beilis answered a knock at the door of his home on Upper Yurkovskaya Street, which was located in the same two-story building at the entrance to the factory that housed his office. The Beilis household constituted a tiny Jewish outpost in a part of Kiev otherwise off-limits even to those Jews fortunate enough to receive government permits to live in the city.
Russia’s Jews were subject to a vast, oppressive, and ever-growing burden of more than a thousand discriminatory statutes and regulations restricting where they could live, where they could worship, which schools they could attend, and what kind of work they could perform. In principle, Jews could only live in the fifteen western provinces known as the “
Pale of Settlement,” which did not include Kiev. The Beilis family was only granted permission to live in Kiev, and the special privilege of living in this neighborhood, thanks to the intervention of the
brick factory owner,
Jonah Zaitsev, with the authorities.

Beilis found a Russian neighbor was paying him a call. He knew the man was a proud member of the “Black Hundreds,” Russia’s anti-Semitic movement of right-wing nationalists, but that was not a barrier to social interaction between them. Beilis got along well with his Christian neighbors and had a friendly relationship with at least one other Black Hundred member. A man could hate Jews as a group and get on perfectly well with them individually.

The neighbor delivered an odd piece of news, telling Beilis that “my paper”—the organ of his local Black Hundred group—was declaring that the boy Andrei Yushchinsky had been murdered by Jews for “
ritual” purposes. Beilis would not recall perceiving this report as a threat to him or even to other Jews, and in fact the man may well have just been sharing the local news or even trying to convey to Beilis a friendly
warning of possible anti-Jewish reprisals for the boy’s killing. As the days passed, the brick factory clerk gave it little thought.

During his fifteen years
in Kiev, Mendel Beilis had only once felt mortal fear as a Jew, during the terrible pogrom of 1905, when the mobs had killed scores of Jews and vandalized nearly every Jewish residence and place of business down to the lowliest stall. But when the violence began, a local priest had a guard put on Beilis’s house. Beilis had
done the priest a number of favors, including arranging to sell him bricks at a discount to build a school for orphans, and allowing his funeral processions to take a shortcut across the factory grounds to the cemetery. (A nearby Christian factory owner refused the request—the priest would often tell people that the Jew had helped him out, while the Christian had not.) After the pogrom ended, the great Yiddish writer and Kiev native
Sholem Aleichem wrote his daughter that no one was spared: “They have
beaten our millionaires—the Brodskys, the Zaitsevs …” Indeed, the mansions of the Zaitsevs and the even wealthier Brodskys, in a fine part of town, were ransacked, while Beilis’s house was one of the few Jewish homes in the city to go untouched.

After the revolutionary and anti-Semitic turmoil of 1905 subsided, the brick factory resumed operation.
Jonah Zaitsev, a sugar magnate, used the profits from the factory to help maintain the
Jewish Surgical Hospital, a state-of-the-art facility open free of charge to indigent patients of all faiths, which he had founded with a thirty-thousand-ruble donation, in honor of the wedding of Tsar Nicholas II and
Alexandra in 1894. He and other Jewish notables hoped that such beneficent institutions would testify to the community-mindedness of Kiev’s Jews and their loyalty to the regime. The 1905 pogrom had been an unfortunate step backward, but the hospital’s good works continued. In working at the factory, Mendel Beilis, it could be said, was doing his part to win the goodwill of the Russian people and state.

A week after the ghastly discovery in the cave, Andrei’s burial in the cemetery of his old
Lukianovka neighborhood was a kind of homecoming, with the funeral drawing scores of mourners. His former tutor presided, and as he intoned the Russian Orthodox service he noticed pieces of paper fluttering into the open grave. At first, he assumed they were farewell notes written by friends and schoolmates. But the
mimeographed sheets, caught by the breeze as bewildered mourners perhaps let them slip from their hands, spoke not of grief but of hatred and revenge:

Police soon arrested a young man named
Nikolai Pavlovich on suspicion of incitement to violence for handing out the inflammatory leaflets. They were unsigned, but there was little doubt about who lay behind their creation. The
Okhrana, Russia’s secret police, confirmed the twenty-two-year-old Pavlovich was “known to the division” as a member of the foremost Black Hundred organization, the
Union of Russian People, and of the local right-wing youth group, the Society of the
Double Headed Eagle. The tsarist security forces kept close watch on any significant political organization, even if it was ostensibly friendly to the imperial regime. Pavlovich, a sometime metalworker and petty
criminal, was a typical specimen of one slice of the Black Hundreds, which included a substantial criminal element—men who did not shrink from assault, robbery, or murder. But the Black Hundreds were also the first genuine right-wing movement that united all Russia’s social classes—peasants, workers, priests, shopkeepers, nobles—in defense of the tsar, against every enemy. Above all, against the Jews. The Black Hundreds would play a central and sinister role in the Yushchinsky case. Their success in elevating a local murder into a national rallying cry epitomizes this historical moment in Imperial Russia. The venom released by the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky would signal the progressive
moral and societal rot that had taken hold in Russia, and which within a half-dozen years would fatally undermine the tsarist regime.

Russia in these years was, as the noted historian W. Bruce Lincoln described it, a society “
consumed by a sense of doom.” One of the era’s greatest poets,
Alexander Blok, would date his intense anxiety for the future of Russia to the very season of Andrei’s killing, the spring of 1911, when he wrote, “one could already begin to sense the
smell of burning, blood and iron in the air.” When Russia’s most gifted artists and writers fixed their gaze on the future, they saw impending desolation, the fulfillment of the dread prophecies of the New Testament’s book of Revelation, including the coming of the Antichrist. The politically minded on both the right and the left also expressed their anxiety in metaphors. They often talked of
living “on a volcano.” Within a few years, the liberal politician
Vasily Maklakov (who would be one of Mendel Beilis’s defense attorneys) would famously compare Russia to an automobile being driven down a steep and hazardous road at breakneck speed by “
a mad chauffeur,” heedless of all danger, resistant to the advice of competent drivers, steering Russia to inevitable destruction. All understood that the man at the wheel in this allegory was Tsar Nicholas II.

Nicholas himself, ruler of the largest country on earth—sprawling on either side of the Urals, to cover a third of the
European continent and a third of Asia—shared the sense of foreboding. Many observers commented on his
strong fatalism, which deepened with the years. “The emperor’s
salient characteristic,” one of his ministers remarked, “is mystic resignation.” Nicholas made much of the coincidence of his birthday with the Russian Orthodox feast day of Job, the “righteous and blameless” man in the Old Testament who maintained his faith in God despite a plague of undeserved misfortune. “I have a presentiment—more than a presentiment, a secret conviction,” he once confided to his prime minister,
Peter Stolypin, “that I am destined for terrible
trials.” He added with resignation, though, that unlike Job, to whom the Lord had restored everything he had lost and more, “I shall not receive my reward on this earth.”

Even if he saw himself as a figure destined to be beset by tribulation, Nicholas dismissed apocalyptic fears for the country’s future, even
though
Russia had experienced a
revolution—the first in its history—just a few years earlier, in 1905.
Nicholas’s complacency stemmed from the pride he took in his supposed personal bond with his subjects. To a degree, the connection he felt was based on reality. The tsar, in fact, had much in common with men like the Jew-hating, petty criminal and Black Hundred rabble-rouser
Nikolai Pavlovich. Both belonged to the
Union of Russian People; Nicholas was an honorary member. The tsar was deeply grateful to malefactors like Pavlovich because they had helped him keep his throne. In December 1905, after a chaotic year for Russia, he had warmly accepted the organization’s
official badges for himself and his son, the tsarevich
Alexis, telling a delegation, “I believe with your help I and the Russian people will succeed in defeating the enemies of Russia.”

The Black Hundreds had emerged as malevolent and potent antagonists to the tsar’s enemies amid the chaos of the 1905 Russian Revolution, which had threatened the very existence of the three-hundred-year-old
Romanov dynasty. Russia had long had revolutionaries, but until 1905 it had never endured an actual revolution. Which is not to say that the country had previously enjoyed domestic tranquillity: a generation earlier, Russians had virtually invented
modern political terrorism. In 1881, a radical group called the People’s Will assassinated Nicholas’s grandfather, Tsar
Alexander II, in what is regarded as history’s first suicide bombing. (Ironically, this “Tsar-Liberator” who had freed the serfs was the most liberal sovereign Russia would ever have.) In the first years of the new century, successor groups of radicals—preeminently the party of Socialist Revolutionaries, which was inspired by native populist thinkers as well as Karl Marx—were killing tsarist officials by the thousands. (In the most murderous year, from the fall of 1905 to the fall of 1906, the dead numbered 3,611.) The radicals’ taste for imperial blood enthralled rather than appalled much of the educated liberal public, who initially viewed the bombings, murders, and robberies (or “expropriations”) as acts of romantic and heroic despair. Expressing support for the revolutionaries was considered, in the words of one contemporary observer, “a
sign of good manners,” showing you were on the right side of history. In 1905 the revolutionaries suddenly became a mortal threat to the decrepit autocracy, weakened as it was by a disastrous war with Japan. The revolution began with “
Bloody Sunday” on January 22 when the police fired on a large demonstration of
workers marching to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. There followed strikes, peasant uprisings, and even rebellions in the armed forces, the most famous of which was the mutiny on the battleship
Potemkin
in the Black Sea. The year culminated in the world’s first general strike and the tsar’s grudging issuance of the
October Manifesto, in which the “unlimited” sovereign found himself forced to make odious concessions, including the creation of the first elected parliament in Russia’s history.

During that traumatic year, Black Hundred groups functioned as vigilante or paramilitary organizations in support of the tsarist regime, fighting in the streets against its opponents, attacking bystanders whom they suspected of antigovernment sympathies, and assassinating liberal politicians. Black Hundred thugs were known to waylay people—especially Jews and university students—whom they suspected of disloyalty and force them to kneel in front of an image of the tsar. They were most notorious, in Russia and abroad, for perpetrating murderous pogroms across the empire in 1905 and 1906, including
in Kiev.
Contrary to suspicions at the time and subsequently, historians have found little in the way of premeditation or planning. Still, some three thousand Jews were killed, and thousands more injured, as the marauders attacked people in the street and went from house to house, searching cellars where any Jews may have tried to hide. Countless Jewish homes and businesses were damaged and destroyed.