The Velizh Affair

  name I don’t know, to grant me legal protection, but he declined my

  request. I’ve seen him six times to demand my rights, but instead he

  ordered that I be kept under police watch and be given twelve kopeks

  a day. Although I’m free now, I want to live without harassment in

  my town of Velizh. The Jews told me repeatedly that they’re planning

  on kidnapping me, and I’m still running away from them. Now, as a

  result of the loss of my son by people who don’t believe in Christ our

  lord, I’ve come running to the feet of your imperial majesty, begging

  for your royal protection.2

  Notwithstanding Terenteeva’s far- fetched claim that the boy in question

  was her biological son or the fact that she did not even get the name

  right, Alexander took the murder charge seriously. He immediately for-

  warded the complaint to Nikolai Nikolaevich Khovanskii, the governor-

  general of Vitebsk, Mogilev, Smolensk, and Kaluga provinces, who was

  residing at the time in the provincial capital of Vitebsk.

  Like so many talented young noblemen, Khovanskii began his career

  in the military. He swiftly rose through the ranks, distinguishing himself

  for his meritorious duties in the Russian- Turkish War in 1810 and once

  more in the Napoleonic Campaign. In 1813, he was promoted to lieu-

  tenant general. Eight years later, he relocated to St. Petersburg to serve

  as senator in the First Department. The same year that Fedor’s body

  was found in the woods, Khovanskii was promoted to full general with

  an appointment as the governor- general of the northwest provincial

  region, a post he held until 1836. As part of a transformation of govern-

  ment in the late eighteenth century, the office of the governor- general

  served as the most important intermediary between the imperial center

  and the provincial world. His duties included promoting agriculture,

  The first page of Maria Terenteeva’s complaint addressed to Tsar Alexander I, written on official government paper with a seal of a double- headed eagle. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 1, l. 5

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  the Velizh affair

  industry, and economy; keeping roads in working order; providing for

  the poor and needy; and maintaining law and security. Most important,

  the statesman enjoyed extensive policing authority over the region he

  governed. Although Khovanskii did not have formal judicial powers and

  could not receive appeals against provincial court decisions, he could

  order criminal investigations and interfere in both civil and criminal

  procedure as he saw fit.3

  Terenteeva’s complaint set off a chain of events that resulted in an

  extraordinarily complex criminal investigation. Alexander I died sud-

  denly on November 19, 1825. The accession of Nicholas I to the throne

  signaled the beginning of an aggressively conservative political agenda.

  The Decembrist Rebellion of December 14, 1825, created an atmosphere

  of fear, hostility, and crisis that would dominate Nicholas’s reign. To

  promote his supreme authority, Nicholas championed military disci-

  pline and the official defense of the Russian Orthodox Church. In the

  second quarter of the nineteenth century, Nicholas received disturbing

  reports from all corners of the vast empire: of religious perversion, spirit possession, and rebellion.4 Dedicated to policing the boundaries of true

  belief, the regime threw its moral weight into imposing harsh penalties

  for behavior deemed especially dangerous to the social order. Efforts to

  suppress sectarian communities who deviated from established religious

  doctrines resulted in dozens of arrests, trials, and forced resettlements.

  Given the wider preoccupations with strange and unnatural activities,

  the Russian government saw no choice but to respond to blood libel

  allegations in a most serious manner. After all, even the Skoptsy, con-

  sidered the most pernicious of the sects for dismembering their bodies,

  was not accused of practicing cold- blooded murder as a religious rite.5

  On November 4, 1825, nearly twelve months after the Vitebsk pro-

  vincial court wrote off Fedor’s death to the “will of God,” the governor-

  general reopened the case. Khovanskii’s first order of business was to

  appoint inspector- councilor Vasilii Ivanovich Strakhov as the lead inves-

  tigator to the case. Trained as a civil servant, Strakhov had climbed

  to the respectable rank of fifth grade. His assignment was straight-

  forward: to follow routine administrative procedure, question every

  individual linked to the crime, and bring the investigation to a timely

  resolution.

  tsar alexanDer Pays a Visit

  61

  The criminal file before him totaled nearly one thousand pages, con-

  taining, among other things, police and autopsy reports, material evi-

  dence, and dozens of depositions. A survey of the town revealed that

  there was no shortage of witnesses to interview, even though several

  individuals who played a key role in the case had died. Fedor’s mother,

  Agafia Prokof’eva, passed away approximately four months after her

  son’s body was found in the woods. In less than twelve months after

  the Vitebsk provincial court acquitted the Jews of the ritual murder

  charge, Mirka Aronson had passed away as well. Several other important

  suspects, including Shmerka Berlin and Iosel’ Glikman, would die long

  before the investigation was completed.

  Strakhov realized that the events in Velizh were extraordinarily con-

  fusing, and that first he needed to get the facts of the case straight. With the presumption of guilt running against Jews, the inspector- councilor

  decided not to jump to hasty conclusions. Instead, he talked at length

  to several Christian residents who were either directly related to Fedor,

  such as the father and aunt, or had served as important witnesses in the

  case, but no one revealed anything different from what they testified

  originally.6 Strakhov then turned his attention to the star witness, Maria

  Terenteeva, at which point the investigation took an unexpected turn.

  Why did the beggar woman refer to the boy as her own son? Surely,

  Terenteeva did this for good reason, and Strakhov had every intention

  of getting to the bottom of things as quickly as possible.

  Strakhov summoned Maria Terenteeva for an interview on November

  22, 1825. Terenteeva, encouraged to speak freely and at length, began

  her story just as she had in 1823. On Easter Sunday at noontime, she

  explained, she was walking back home from the town center. After

  passing a castle and several empty storefronts, she descended a small

  slope to the Slobotsky Bridge. “At that very moment, I heard a little girl

  call out something to a little boy. I noticed Khanna Tsetlina standing

  nearby. She gave the boy a piece of sugar and grabbed him by the arm

  and escorted him to her cottage.” Fearing that something was terribly

  amiss, Maria decided to follow Khanna. She clearly remembered, as if

  it were yesterday, that Khanna’s housekeeper, Avdotia Maksimova, and

  three Jewish women, none of whom she had seen before, opened the

  fron
t door when they came inside the courtyard. Avdotia said something

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  in Yiddish to Khanna, which she could not understand, and motioned

  everyone inside.7

  What happened next Maria observed with her own eyes. In hopes of

  protecting the child, Maria told the people around her that Fedor was

  her son. “No one paid any attention to me,” Maria explained. “Instead,

  they proceeded to do unimaginable horrors to the boy. Avdotia locked

  the boy inside an adjoining chamber. Khanna fed me wine until my

  head began to spin and then told me to leave.” Inebriated, Maria did

  not have the strength to walk back home, so she curled up on the porch

  and slept for several hours. It was late in the evening when she finally

  woke up. Khanna gave her vodka and two silver rubles, and they al

  walked across the market square to Mirka Aronson’s large brick house.

  One of Aronson’s servants opened the gate and immediately ushered

  the boy down to the cellar, at which point Aronson handed Maria two

  more silver rubles and vodka and made her promise not to say a word

  to anyone about what she had witnessed. Maria did not know what the

  Jewish women intended to do with the boy, but she warned them, “If

  I find out whose boy this is, I’ll reveal everything.”8

  It turned out that this was not the first time that Khanna Tsetlina

  asked Maria to “bring back” an innocent child. Even if Maria could

  not recall the precise date, she distinctly remembered Khanna asking

  for a “good Christian boy,” to which she responded by saying that she

  “didn’t know of such a boy.” Now, after having witnessed a most disturb-

  ing scene unfold, her mood changed for the worse. On her walk home—

  she rented a small room on the outskirts of town across the river— she

  felt as though the entire town was watching her every move. She

  recalled that a little white dog, or perhaps a rabbit, ran between her legs.

  “I fell flat on my face,” she went on, “and as I was lying on the ground,

  such a tremendous burden weighed on me that I wasn’t able to stand

  up for quite some time.” When she finally made it home, Maria told

  her landlady everything that she witnessed, but decided to keep quiet

  about what happened inside Mirka Aronson’s house. To her surprise, her

  landlady revealed that the Jews had ritually murdered Emel’ian Ivanov’s

  little boy.9

  On the third day of Easter week, Maria was walking around town

  begging for alms when she decided to stop by Emel’ian Ivanov’s cottage.

  She found both parents in tears. They had searched everywhere for their

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  63

  son, so they told her, and even used a special map and magic straws to

  help them locate their son. Not knowing what else to do or whom to

  turn to, they decided to visit a local fortune- teller. But the fortune- teller was not very helpful. “What kind of a fortune- teller can’t predict where

  your son is?” Maria fumed. “Besides, how can a young boy suddenly

  disappear in such a small town?” She offered her services and asked them

  to bring her wax and a cup of water. Later that week, Maria went over

  to the cottage to see if they were able to locate the boy. “Why didn’t you

  go out to look?” Maria inquired. “How can we?” Ivanov shouted back.

  “It was you who killed him!” But no matter how awful Ivanov’s accusa-

  tion may have been, Maria maintained her innocence. She emphasized

  that she had no intention of “spreading wild rumors or saying anything

  objectionable about anyone” and that she visited Ivanov “without pre-

  tense or ill will.”10

  The moment Maria left Ivanov’s cottage, she walked directly to Mirka

  Aronson’s brick house. Together with five other Jews, all of whom she

  could easily identify, Maria went down to the basement and saw the boy

  on the ground wrapped in linen. A basin filled with blood stood nearby.

  The body and the head were pierced all over, the nails on the hands and

  toes trimmed to the very tips, the tongue completely severed, as was

  his penis, directly at the scrotum. Surprisingly, Maria did not see blood

  on either the body or the cloth. The moment that Jews “screamed for

  her to get out of the cellar,” she decided to go back home. The next day

  one of Maria’s neighbors informed her that the body had been found

  and the police were looking for her. “If they are looking for me,” Maria

  snapped, “then I’ll go talk to them myself.” She told Strakhov that she

  described everything just as she did in the summer of 1823 save for two

  important details: that she took money and spirits from Mirka and

  Khanna and that she helped Khanna transfer the body to the woods in

  a spring britzka.11

  To the question of why she referred to herself as the boy’s mother,

  Maria had a simple explanation. “Ever since Agafia Prokof’eva passed

  away, I considered the boy my own. When the father, Emel’ian Ivanov,

  didn’t make the slightest effort to search for him, I decided to take

  matters into my own hands and [to seek justice] myself. When Tsar

  Alexander passed through Velizh, I seized the opportunity to deliver the

  petition. And just as Alexander was leaving the St. Nicholas Cathedral,

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  I got down on both knees and placed the piece of paper on his crown.

  A man by the name of Luk Oleinikov wanted to take it away from me,

  but the crowd that had gathered around didn’t let him.” “But why call

  the boy Demian?” Strakhov inquired. “For the simple reason,” Maria

  reasoned, “that she had forgotten his name; it was a mistake.”12

  Maria concluded the testimony by describing how unbearable life had

  become because of dealings with the Jews. The first incident took place

  when she purchased a piece of herring from Avdotia Maksimova. One

  Sunday morning, at the beginning of the Lenten season, she noticed

  Avdotia sitting at a stall at the marketplace selling herring. Avdotia

  immediately ran up to Maria to see if she was interested in buying a

  nice fatty fish. Maria, deciding to do her acquaintance a favor, bought

  the herring. But when she tried to clean it that afternoon, the fish inex-

  plicably slipped out of her hands, falling flat on the ground at least four times. Maria finally got a hold of it and managed to tear it in half with

  her bare hands, giving a piece to her landlady and saving the rest for

  herself. The landlady, fearing that someone must have contaminated

  the fish, ate a small bite and immediately felt sick to her stomach; the

  vomiting continued all day and night. After finishing her portion, Maria

  did not feel anything unusual, but the moment she woke up the next

  morning her stomach began to cramp. For three days and nights, she

  vomited blood with such intensity that she thought she would die right

  there and then. Her landlady instructed her to tell the authorities what

  had happened, but the only thing the town mayor did was “to warn

  Maria not to buy anything from the kikes.”13

  The final episode occurred around twel
ve months after little Fedor’s

  death. Maria was certain that, if she ever tried to leave town, the Jews

  would find a way to harm her. It was late in the evening when she

  decided to fetch fresh water from the river. The moment that she passed

  by Gavrilov’s house, forty Jews, none of whom she had ever seen before,

  encircled her and grabbed her violently by the hair. When she began

  to scream, they al hid inside the house. A few days later (it was the

  Jewish Sabbath) the Jewess Leia asked Maria if she would be interested

  in milking her cows. Maria agreed to perform the deed, and while she

  was milking the cows, the Jew Abram and two Jewesses, none of whom

  she had ever seen before, entered the courtyard. They all went inside

  Leia’s house, at which point Abram’s wife Nakhana [Khanna Tsetlina’s

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  65

  sister] revealed the real reason they summoned her. They wanted to

  dress Maria in Jewish clothing and take her “somewhere important.”

  Maria explained that the Jewesses “ordered her to take off her simple

  peasant blouse and handed her a dress, two sheepskin overcoats, and

  two Jewish- looking shawls.” And as they were walking down to the river,

  they ran into an old acquaintance who asked where she was going. “My

  God, I don’t even know myself,” Maria responded, “apparently to the

  very same house where they murdered the soldier’s boy.” Lots of people

  had gathered on the street that day. Maria recalled that two clergymen

  came over to warn her that she should never “trust the kikes,” and so

  she promptly undressed and went back home.14

  Jews, at all levels of society, employed Christians as drivers, wet

  nurses, watchmen, cooks, governesses, and maids. The reasons had to

  do as much with economic considerations as with pressure to conform

  to halakhic traditions. It was not uncommon for a well- to- do family

  to employ half a dozen or more Christian servants, the vast majority

  of whom came from the margins of society and were usually homeless

  and without permanent employment.15 In addition to working around

  the clock, they labored on the Sabbath and on holidays when Jews were

  prohibited from carrying objects from one domain to another, prepar-

  ing fires, traveling outside boundary limits, delivering letters, fetching