The Velizh Affair
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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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the Velizh affair
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
tsar alexanDer Pays a Visit
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