A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (51 page)

He was held in the palace for some time until
soldiers led him off to a large motorcar that inched along as crowds swarmed around it, the driver periodically calling out, “Automobile of the Provisional Government!,” to which the crowd responded with cries of “Hurrah!” and parted to make way. The scene was repeated again and again until the vehicle arrived at its destination, the gates of the Peter and Paul Fortress where the prisoner was locked in a cell.

Former interior minister Nikolai Maklakov, who was arrested the next day with two other officials, suffered rougher treatment. Maklakov related the experience to a fellow inmate who later set down his words:

The former head of the Department of
Police, Stepan Beletsky, was also arrested and locked up in the fortress. With his ministers
imprisoned and his government in ruins, still to be dealt with was the sovereign emperor—stranded in his imperial train two hundred miles southwest of Petrograd, powerless, but still Tsar of all the Russias. The task of securing his abdication fell to Vasily
Shulgin, the righteous anti-Semite and Duma member who had so famously opposed Beilis’s prosecution, and former Duma chairman
Alexander Guchkov. By the
time the two men sat down in the luxuriously appointed imperial railway car sitting room, outside the town of Pskov, the tsar had already reached the most difficult decision of his life. A few weeks earlier, Prime Minister Kokovtsov had thought Nicholas “on the verge of a
mental breakdown.” But now the tsar was calm. His infamous fatalism, such a maddening quality to his advisers, a wellspring of obstinacy, now eased his path toward acceptance of the inevitable. He had always believed he was destined to rule Russia but also to endure “terrible trials” and go to his death unrewarded. Now his own prophecy was fulfilled. According to one witness, he expressed “his strong conviction that he had been
born for misfortune, that he brought Russia great misfortune.” His advisers had persuaded him that he could not continue to rule. “If it is necessary for Russia’s welfare that I step aside,” he said, “I am prepared to do so.” He would abdicate for the good of the nation—in favor of his brother, the
Grand Duke Michael, rather than his incurably ill son
Alexis, explaining to Shulgin and Guchkov, “I hope you will understand the feelings of a father.”

Upon returning to Petrograd with the
tsar’s signed abdication decree, Shulgin immediately proceeded to the house where the Grand Duke Michael was
secretly residing.
Vladimir D. Nabokov and another jurist were summoned there to draft Michael’s renunciation of the throne. Nicholas’s brother had no desire to be tsar. For some reason the business was conducted in a child’s study. The document that Nabokov wrote out at a small
school desk, surrounded by toys, was one of the most consequential in Russia’s history. Signing it, the grand duke brought to a close three centuries of rule by the Romanov dynasty.

A few days later, Gruzenberg, after receiving the surprise telephone call from his colleague, was poring over the secret Beilis files. “By evening I had been furnished with five volumes,” he recalled in his memoirs. “
I seized the materials greedily and spent the entire night reading them.” He learned of the illegal surveillance of the jurors, of the correspondence among high officials who believed Beilis to be
innocent. He read letters that had been intercepted by the government, containing important information for the defense that had never been delivered. Also included were copies of letters Gruzenberg himself had written late at night to his son and daughter back in the capital after exhausting days at court. The files contained correspondence about placing under surveillance people who had written sympathetically to the defense.
The whole disgusting business was laid bare. “When I finished reading the secret materials,” Gruzenberg recalled, “dawn was already breaking. I went to the window and looked at the empty street, then across from my apartment at a [regimental barracks], bedecked with red flags and I said to myself, ‘We can thank fate that a people in revolt has swept away the dishonorable tsarist regime like a cobweb.’ ”

Gruzenberg had some reason for optimism about the future of his country. The state apparatus was now in the hands of men like himself. In fact, members of Mendel Beilis’s defense team, as well as their prominent supporters, were playing a significant role in the just-established Provisional Government. The new justice minister, Kerensky, called Karabchevsky for advice on organizing the department. He appointed as his deputy
Alexander Zarudny who, in four months, would become justice minister himself. Gruzenberg was made a senator, as Russia’s Supreme Court justices were called.
Vasily Maklakov held a series of temporary posts in the government. Nabokov was appointed head of the chancellery, essentially the chief of staff. The government convened what it called an Extraordinary Commission to investigate the crimes of Tsar Nicholas’s regime, which included high officials’ perversion of justice and grossly corrupt actions in the Beilis affair. Shcheglovitov, Nikolai Maklakov, and Beletsky were subjected to harsh questioning about their actions in the case. The two former ministers defended their conduct, though Shcheglovitov admitted that some of the state’s actions had been illegal. But Beletsky repeatedly expressed deep shame over his involvement in the conspiracy to frame an innocent man. “
My conscience is forcing me to speak,” he told the commission. “I want to confess and be of use.” Perhaps he was just trying to save himself, yet his condemnation of the
blood accusation sounded sincere. “This legend lived, lives, and maybe will live,” he declared, “until it is expelled from people’s minds.”

Unfortunately, the red flags that gladdened Gruzenberg’s heart did not bode well for Russia’s future. At first, red was simply the color of joy at the tsarist regime’s fall. The entire city was festooned with red flags. But, beginning in April, Nabokov noted something ominous about the flags.
Once pure red, they were now written over with slogans denouncing ministers and calling for the new government’s removal. On April 3,
Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (b)—better known as the
Bolsheviks—had returned to
Russia from his decade-long exile in Switzerland. Within three weeks, the Provisional Government was facing Bolshevik-inspired demonstrations and riots. The Bolsheviks did not take power in April, but they would soon enough. “Strictly speaking,” Nabokov later wrote, the next six months “were
one continual process of dying.” “Glorious February” would become an historical dead end. The victory of humane men like Nabokov, who wanted to turn Russia into a democratic state based on the rule of law, had been a chimera. Lenin’s October Revolution would sweep nearly all of them away.

Some prominent figures in the Mendel Beilis
trial died amid the battles and privations of
World War I. But Lenin’s revolution would decide the destinies of most of the players in the case, some of whom would die at the hands of Russia’s new leaders, while others would escape into exile.

Vladimir Golubev, who had first named Mendel Beilis as a suspect in Andrei Yushchinsky’s murder, was killed in 1915 while fighting in the First World War.

Alexei Shmakov, the attorney for Andrei’s mother, who was effectively
Vipper’s co-prosecutor, died in 1916.

After the trial, Father
Justin
Pranaitis returned to Tashkent, where he was soon embroiled in a scandal, caught embezzling some fifteen hundred rubles in donations from a Catholic charity that he headed. He died just before the revolution, in January 1917.

Dr. Ivan Sikorsky died in 1917, as well, in time to escape any retribution for his role in the Beilis trial.

Shmakov’s cocounsel,
Georgy Zamyslovsky, fled to the Caucasus region during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. He died of typhus in the city of Vladikavkaz in 1920.

Ivan Shcheglovitov,
Nikolai Maklakov, and
Stepan Beletsky were all executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.

Prosecutor
Oskar Vipper fled to the city of Kaluga, about a hundred miles south of
Moscow, keeping a low profile as a minor official in the Provincial Food Committee. He was eventually discovered, and in September 1919 he was tried for his role in the Beilis case by the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal. The prosecutor asked for the death penalty.
The tribunal, deciding mercy was in order, sentenced him “to be confined in a concentration camp until the complete establishment in the Republic of the communist system.” Vipper did not survive the year.

Sergei
Makhalin at first prospered after the revolution, serving in some sort of official post (exactly what is not known). But, according to a contemporary newspaper report, he soon found himself accused of having had connections to the tsarist secret police—which was true—and “to the well-known
anti-Semite A. S. Shmakov,” which almost certainly was not. After the accusations were made, his execution quickly followed.

In January 1914, thanks in part to testimony from her blinded
ex-lover
Pavel Mifle, Vera
Cheberyak was convicted of selling stolen property to the
Gusin watch store. She was sentenced to two months in prison. No reliable information exists on her life over the next four years. What is certain is that she was executed by the Bolsheviks in
Kiev in 1918.
According to an agent of the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, who was captured and interrogated by the “White” forces that were battling the “Reds,”
Cheberyak was shot along with a number of others as punishment for their connection to the
Union of Russian People—the
Black Hundreds—which had played such a prominent role in propagandizing for the
blood accusation against the Jews. The most credible account of how she died was published in the early 1960s in the New York Yiddish newspaper
Tog-Morgn Zhurnal
(Day-Morning Journal). A longtime journalist for the paper, Chaim
Shoshkess, reported that he was locked up in a Bolshevik prison in the city of
Kharkov in 1920 when a prison overseer named
Antizersky boasted to his Jewish prisoners that he had interrogated the infamous Vera Cheberyak in the Kiev Cheka headquarters and that he had ended the life of the “wonderful lady,” as he mockingly called her, with his own hand. “She was on her knees beating her head against the ground, begging everyone for her life,” he told the prisoners. “But after three days of ‘speaking’ with her I gave her a bullet in the neck.” Her half brother, Peter Singaevsky, was also said to have been shot by the Bolsheviks.

Vladimir D.
Nabokov was shot to death in Berlin in 1922 while trying to defend his friend, the former Kadet Party leader Paul Miliukov, from an assassination attempt by right-wing Russian émigrés. His son, Vladimir Vladimirovich, went on to write such classic novels as
Lolita
and
The Gift
.

After his abdication, Nicholas Romanov, his wife,
Alexandra, and
their five children became captives, first of the Provisional Government, then of the Bolsheviks. Nicholas and his family were executed—shot and bayoneted to death—by their Bolshevik guards in July 1918 in the Russian city of Ekaterinburg, twelve hundred miles east of
Moscow, in the basement of the mansion where they were being held. In August 2000 Nicholas and his family were canonized by the
Russian Orthodox Church.

All of Beilis’s attorneys but one immigrated to Western
Europe.

Just before the October 1917 revolution,
Vasily Maklakov was appointed the Provisional Government’s ambassador to
France and remained there for most of his life. He died in Switzerland in 1957.

Nikolai Karabchevsky also immigrated to France, dying in Paris in 1925.

Oskar Gruzenberg died in Nice, France, in December 1940. When he was dying, a Christian colleague volunteered to give his blood for a transfusion. After the procedure, Gruzenberg found the strength to joke, “
Well, how can anyone say now that Jews do not use Christian blood.” He died that night. In 1950, in accordance with his last wishes, his remains were reinterred in
Israel.

Alexander Zarudny, who was a member of a small socialist party, made his peace with the Bolsheviks and remained in the
Soviet Union until his death in 1934.

Stepan
Brazul-Brushkovsky also remained in the Soviet Union, but had the misfortune of living until the bloodiest year of Stalin’s Great Terror. He was arrested and shot in 1937.

After the Bolshevik Revolution,
Nikolai Krasovsky moved to the Polish city of
Rovno. (The city, called Rivne, is now part of
Ukraine.) He was last heard from in 1927 when he wrote a letter to a French Zionist activist, attempting to secure payment for his memoirs, the publication of which, he maintained, would eliminate all doubt about who had killed Andrei Yushchinsky. “Having emigrated and therefore having endured all possible material privations,” he wrote, “these material benefits would finally extricate me from this difficult situation which, in any case, I
did not deserve.” Krasovsky, as far as is known, received no help. His memoirs, it can be hoped, survive in some archive, waiting to be found.

Arnold
Margolin was unusual, though not unique among elite Jews, in his strong identification with the Ukrainian culture and nation and in his belief that both the Ukrainians and the Jews should have their
own homeland. He served as a supreme court justice and vice minister of foreign affairs in the short-lived independent Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1918–1919, before the country was reconquered by the Bolsheviks. In 1922, Margolin immigrated to the
United States. Within a few years he had passed the state bar exams in Massachusetts and New York and was a practicing attorney again, specializing in Russian law. During and after
World War II he advocated for settlement of Jewish refugees in
Palestine and in other countries. Margolin, who died in Washington in 1956, lived to see the creation of the state of Israel. His vision of an independent Ukraine only came to pass with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 2000, the U.S. Department of State established the annual
Fulbright-Margolin Prize for Ukrainian writers, named for Senator J. William Fulbright and Arnold D. Margolin, “the outstanding Ukrainian lawyer and diplomat.”