A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (8 page)

“We must
pursue the whole malignant sect, the Jewish sect, which sends its butchers to collect the blood of Christian children, which prepares these butchers who collect children’s blood in cups and distributes this blood to the Jews—to feast on their Paschal lamb, to feast on their Passover, made of the blood of Christian infants,” Markov declaimed in the thundering bass voice that packed the galleries. He and his brethren had been told by the government not to worry, he said, that a fine investigator was on the case, that behind him was the prosecutorial apparatus, and that “we can just fall asleep”—but the judicial
authorities had betrayed his trust. He bluntly threatened a pogrom. “When the Russian people find that there is no possibility of exposing in court the Jew who cut up a child and drained the blood out of him, that neither the court, nor the
police, nor the governors nor the ministers, nor the supreme legislative institutions would be of assistance—that day, gentlemen, there will be pogroms of Jews. But neither I … nor the
Union of Russian People will create the pogrom. You yourself will create the pogrom. That pogrom will not be the kind we’ve seen so far, it will not be a pogrom of Yid feather beds, but all the Yids, down to the very last one, will be wiped out.”

The resolution provoked a
boisterous floor fight. A Social Democratic deputy, according to one account, “amid yells of defiance from the Right benches, denounced the [so-called] ‘Real Russians’ as ‘a band of robbers and murderers.’ ” Liberals and mainstream conservatives deplored what they said was an incitement to violence and the promulgation of paranoid medieval fantasies that were bringing shame upon Russia. The resolution failed by a vote of 108 to 93. The narrow numerical loss was something of a moral victory for the
Black Hundreds.

Markov’s genocidal histrionics led Kiev’s Jews to prepare for the worst. “The
most fearful two days”—Saturday, April 30, and Sunday, May 1, the two days after the Duma debate—“passed in an unusually oppressive mood on the part of the entire population,”
Haynt
’s Kiev correspondent wrote. In the Jewish neighborhoods “there was a kind of strange death-silence.” Jews who had the financial means checked into hotels, where they would be relatively safe. Hundreds of Jewish families packed their suitcases and began to flee the city.

The Black Hundreds’ triple-pronged attack on the regime—in the press, in the Duma, and on the streets of Kiev—deeply unnerved the upper echelons of the tsar’s government. Thanks to the fecklessness of the local investigation into Andrei’s murder, this case could no longer be managed haphazardly at a distance, with a minister prodding a vice minister, who prodded a governor, who prodded a police official. The central government would now impose direct oversight on the investigation.

On April 29, 1911, as the Duma debated the rightist resolution, the Justice Ministry official Alexander Liadov boarded a train in St. Petersburg bound for Kiev.
Liadov—vice director of the ministry’s First
Department, head of the Second Criminal Division—was the kind of bureaucrat often referred to as “colorless and faceless.” The impact of such a figure is easily underappreciated, especially in a drama like the Yushchinsky affair, with so many vivid characters contending for attention. But complex plots often require at least one such transparently functional character, and in his limited stage time
Liadov would set key plot mechanics into motion.

Exactly what Liadov’s orders were from his boss, justice minister Ivan Shcheglovitov, is not known. If they were written down, they have been lost. Most likely they were given verbally, with things said or hinted at that no one wanted put to paper. But it can be deduced from subsequent events that, as he arrived in Kiev, Liadov had a threefold mission. Its first two aspects were straightforward, comprehensible, and expedient. Liadov was to defuse the explosive young Black Hundred leader, Golubev, who was conducting his own independent investigation of Andrei’s murder and could ignite a pogrom whenever he chose to. Second, he was to make sure the investigation appeared to be in competent hands: the bumbling Mishchuk had to be replaced by someone with an unassailable reputation. Liadov’s third imperative, however, was neither straightforward nor sensible. As he settled into his Kiev hotel suite, he mentally unpacked this part of his brief: to focus investigators on the “ritual version”—the notion that Andrei had been killed by Jews for his blood to make
matzo for their Passover meals.

Why was Liadov pursuing the very scenario that the government feared as incendiary? The government was, after all, determined to prevent anti-Jewish violence “at all costs.” If the abiding priority of the state was to preserve order, why would it pursue the most inflammatory possible course, one that would threaten its interests, both foreign and domestic?

Liadov’s mission marks the start of this central mystery of the Yushchinsky affair.
Russia, if measured by its skein of legal restrictions on Jews, was the most anti-Semitic country in the world, but this alone is not sufficient to explain how a medieval fantasy could engender a conspiracy at the highest levels of the tsar’s government. Was Liadov’s brief the result of some arcane political calculation? Possibly. But the answer may lie at a more atavistic level—within the warped mentality of a doomed regime and, ultimately, in the mind of the tsar himself. If there is one constant in the late period of imperial Russian
decadence, it was the urge of all officials to please the tsar, or those whose positions depended on the tsar’s favor. The tsar himself was notoriously inscrutable. In what remained an essentially absolute monarchy with profound rot at its core, much depended on what officials thought the tsar thought about a matter, or thought he would think about it if he took the time to think about it. Liadov and the rightists knew that the tsar planned an official visit to Kiev at the end of the summer, when the unsolved murder of a poor
Christian boy promised to cast a shadow over his tour. Well aware that the proponents of the blood accusation would be hoping for a sign of imperial favor for their cause, Liadov had to recognize the signal importance of his mysterious but calculated mission.

The day after his arrival in Kiev Liadov initiated his first delicate maneuver by summoning Golubev to his hotel suite for a meeting with him and the chief prosecutor,
Chaplinsky. The young extremist was in a hostile mood. He refused to talk to Chaplinsky, whom he was meeting for the first time, regarding him as an enemy. Liadov told the young man that if he had anything to say, the prosecutor would listen. When Golubev insisted that “we”—that is, his band of thugs—“have an interest in preventing that horror,” meaning ritual murder, Liadov had his opening. He gave Golubev an uncompromising warning but presented the
threat in the most empathetic manner possible. Liadov later recounted the conversation as accurately as he could remember it.

“I don’t think it would be in your interest to organize a pogrom,” he told Golubev.

“Why?” Golubev replied.

“Because,” Liadov said, “the Sovereign is expected to visit [Kiev]. If any of your fellow members cause a pogrom and there are disturbances in Kiev, then you’ll have as much chance of seeing the festivities as of seeing your own ears [as the Russian saying goes], and it probably would be more pleasant for you and your organization to see the Sovereign.”

“That thought never occurred to me,” Golubev replied obligingly. “I promise you that there will be not be a pogrom.”

Perhaps out of politeness, Golubev apparently did not mention that he had heard exactly the same line of coaxing from the Kiev
Gendarmes two weeks earlier. Liadov believed he had found the perfect psychological lever and reported to the justice minister, “The desire to avoid a pogrom [on Golubev’s part], as I came to understand, was aroused
exclusively
by the fear that if there were disturbances in Kiev, then the visit of the sovereign would not take place.” However, it would be a mistake to interpret this as implying official approval of a future pogrom to occur
after
the tsar’s visit. Liadov was clearly only using the tsar’s visit as an excuse for Golubev to back down without losing face. When the threat of pogroms emerged later, officials would act quickly to suppress them without recourse to excuses.

In any event, believing he had defused Golubev, Liadov now prepared to fulfill his aim of steering the investigation toward the motive of the “ritual version.”

From the whisperings about the progress of the investigation, the prominent Jews of Kiev felt reassured. The Yiddish press was reporting (inaccurately) that, thanks to Liadov’s intervention, the
ritual-murder theory had been decisively rejected. Weeks earlier, after “the dark rumors” of violence had begun to spread, Jewish community leaders in Kiev conferred about what to do. They considered offering a reward for the apprehension of Andrei’s killer or killers but rejected the proposal as likely only to draw more unwanted suspicion. Although some wanted to issue a proclamation declaring the Jewish people innocent of the crime, in late April,
Haynt
reported, Jewish leaders reached a consensus to employ a “tactic of remaining silent and waiting.” They would “
patiently refrain from anything that might anger the dark gangs.” That is, they had decided to do nothing. The reaction of Kiev’s Jewish leadership was typical of the inertia and cautiousness, as well as a pragmatism shading into wishful thinking, which often characterized its response to threats from outside.

The community’s leaders represented their course of inaction as an opportunity for the Jews to show their inner strength. “In such a dangerous situation [Kiev’s Jews] sit and grind their teeth and remain silent; this is truly a courageous act that only Jews who understand the term ‘a time to be silent’ are capable of,”
Haynt
reported, referring to Ecclesiastes 3:7 (“A time to be silent, a time to speak”). When to stand up to the authorities and when to hold one’s tongue in the face of
danger and oppression was a fraught and divisive question for Russia’s Jews. But in this case it seemed that the sage counsel of the rabbis and sugar barons had proven prudent.

These were not naive men. They claimed history, as well as common sense, on their side. For all its anti-Semitism—its segregation of the Jews in the
Pale of Settlement, its funding of the
Black Hundreds, its past toleration, if not outright encouragement, of pogroms—the tsarist state had propagated the blood accusation only inconsistently. To be sure, the
record was disturbingly mixed. In 1817, Tsar
Alexander I approved a decree that barred accusations of
ritual murder against Jews based only on the prejudice of their supposed need for Christian blood. There had to be evidence. If “suspicion should fall upon the Jews [in a case of child-murder],” the decree said, “then an investigation should be carried out following the legal procedures that are followed when investigating people of any other religion, when they are accused of murder.” Yet in 1823, Alexander ordered the investigation of a thoroughly baseless charge of ritual murder in the Belarusian town of Velizh that dragged on for more than a decade as the authorities arrested much of the Jewish communal leadership and shuttered the synagogue by imperial degree. Only in 1835 did Alexander’s successor, Nicholas I, finally quash the Velizh case. But the notoriously reactionary Nicholas, known as the “Gendarme of Europe,” rejected his advisers’ counsel to reaffirm Alexander’s 1817 declaration, averring “that there truly exist among the Jews fanatics or sectarians, who consider Christian blood necessary for their rites.”

Still, over the previous century such cases had, in fact, been fairly rare
in Russia, with only a half-dozen or so significant prosecutions. Russia’s only conviction for ritual murder, of a group of Jewish soldiers in
Saratov in the 1856 deaths of two young boys, had attracted little attention. Popular rumors of ritual murders did play a role in inciting pogroms in 1903 in Kishinev, but the state had not endorsed the accusations. The most recent actual court case, in 1900–1902, involved a Jewish barber in Vilna named
David Blondes. He was convicted of assaulting, but not attempting to kill, a female servant who claimed he had wanted her blood. In convicting him, the court did not affirm the crime’s supposed ritual nature (the woman’s wounds amounted to a few scratches). The case was notable for exposing a definite timidity among Jewish leaders in defending their people against the ritual
murder charge. When Blondes was convicted on the assault count, some in the Jewish community, and even one of his own attorneys, recommended that he accept his prison sentence of a few months. An appeal, it was feared, could only promote the ugly libel against the Jews and inflame the Christian populace. Blondes, urged by
Oskar Gruzenberg, the empire’s most prominent Jewish defense attorney, courageously decided to challenge the verdict. He wrote Gruzenberg from prison, “Am I really going to have to suffer from a false accusation, just because I was born a Jew?” He understood the case was not just about him but the entire Jewish people. On appeal, he was given a new trial and a jury cleared him of all charges.

Yet now the imperial government was preparing to abet a vengeful demand by political extremists for Jewish blood, even though investigators had discovered no indication of ritual murder. Liadov and his Kiev associates had only one possible shred of evidence on which to build a case. Andrei’s mother, Alexandra, had received a strange and disturbing letter, the envelope addressed to “Yushchinskaya—Mother of the Murdered Boy.” The anonymous author claimed that “on the day of the murder I saw your boy walking on Lukianovskaya [Street] with some sort of Jew. Near St. Fyodor’s Church an old Jew joined them … That was probably your boy [I saw]…I was plagued with a thought that wouldn’t leave me alone. The fact is that I had the thought, and what if … the Jews need blood for the Passover holiday and a thin boy will be their victim.” The letter, postmarked March 24, was signed, “A Christian.” A similar letter was sent to the coroner. But
the “
Christian Letters” would ultimately prove more useful to the defense than the prosecution. They would attract extraordinary attention when the defense put forward the theory that the missives were written at the behest of the real killers and held the key to solving the case.