A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel

by Levin, Edmund

  At this point, the thinking of the would-be prosecution was taking a turn both logical and preposterous. Vera Cheberyak, they had reasonably concluded, could not be ignored as a suspect, and the Lamplighter himself was of the belief that she had something to do with the crime. Therefore, if the objective was to implicate the Jewish clerk, why not simply tie the two of them together? (This peculiar theory, unsupported by any evidence, would rise and then fade from view but strangely resurface during the trial as the prosecution became desperate to persuade jurors of their case.)

  Shakhovsky was hinting at a criminal partnership of Beilis and Vera Cheberyak, but a conjecture would not be enough to implicate them in the murder. What was needed was an eyewitness, not mere circumstantial testimony. On July 19, Polishchuk paid a visit to the Shakhovskys’ home, a bottle of vodka in hand. He worked on Ulyana as she drank herself into a near stupor. Polishchuk recognized he could not fabricate testimony outright. A witness was needed who would testify in court. He had to maneuver Ulyana into creating her own story. Surely she knew something? Surely she had heard something about Mendel? The operation was a delicate one, calibrating the dose of alcohol and the psychological pressure so that she would say the necessary words while drunk enough to be suggestible but not too drunk to speak. At a certain point, Ulyana uttered the desired words. Polishchuk reported, “Shakhovskaya told me directly that her husband knows everything and saw how Mendel, together with his son Davidka [actually Dovidke] led and dragged Andrei to the kiln.”

  At last Chaplinsky was close to obtaining the eyewitness testimony he needed. The next step was for formal depositions to be taken. But getting the alcohol-addled couple to agree on a single, consistent story soon proved to be beyond reach.

  On July 20, Kazimir Shakhovsky was questioned a third time in the presence of Chaplinsky. He now came up with an entirely new and different tale. He himself had not witnessed Andrei’s abduction by Mendel, he said, but he knew that Zhenya had:

  I forgot to mention one important circumstance. Around the Tuesday after Saturday March 12, when I saw Andrei Yushchinsky together with Zhenya Cheberyak … I ran into Zhenya near my aunt’s house … I asked Zhenya if he’d had a good time with Andrusha. He told me that it didn’t work out with Andrusha because they were scared off the Zaitsev factory, not far from the kiln, by some man with a black beard who had shouted at them … after which they ran off in different directions … I have almost no doubt that the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky took place in a kiln of the Zaitsev factory … There lived there at that time one man with a black beard, specifically Mendel, the factory clerk … that’s why this same Mendel must have taken part in the murder.

  It was true that Zhenya, Andrei, and their friends liked to sneak onto the Zaitsev factory grounds to play on the clay grinders, carousel-like contraptions with a central pillar from whose apex extended a long rod attached at the other end to a pair of old carriage wheels. The children would take turns precariously riding astride the rod, while the others played the part of the draft horse, pulling the contraption round and round. But it was suspicious, to say the least, that Shakhovsky suddenly recalled this incriminating conversation.

  Questioned separately the same day, Ulyana Shakhovskaya presented her own new and different story. No longer did she claim that her husband had witnessed the abduction. Instead, she declared she had an acquaintance—Anna “Volkivna,” or Anna “the Wolf”—who told her she had witnessed the crime. Volkivna, whose real last name was Zakharova, was an alcoholic derelict whose moniker derived from her custom of sleeping outdoors in a place called Wolf’s Ravine. She completes the drunken trio on which the initial case against Mendel Beilis was based. Ulyana’s revamped testimony amounts to one drunk’s retelling of another drunk’s tall tale:

  The day before yesterday I went out to light the lamps before evening and on the street I met my acquaintance Anna, nicknamed Volkivna. Volkivna, I remember, asked whether I knew anything about the boy’s murder. I told her I saw … Andrusha on March 12 in the morning and didn’t know anything else. Then Volkivna … told me that when Zhenya and Andrusha and a third boy went to play in the morning at the Zaitsev factory, they were frightened off by a man with a black beard who lived there, and what’s more, grabbing him … he carried Andrei into the brick kiln. Zhenya and the other boy ran away.

  This story still did not fully satisfy her questioners. After the deposition was read to her—Ulyana was illiterate—the record shows she spoke up again, with startling specificity. “I want to add,” she said, “that Volkivna … told me that this person [the man with the black beard] was none other than the clerk of the Zaitsev brick factory Mendel.”

  Over the course of two days, then, the Shakhovskys had given three different stories implicating Beilis. First, Ulyana had claimed that her husband, Kazimir, had himself seen Andrei dragged off by a man with a dark beard. Second, Kazimir testified that Zhenya Cheberyak had told him he had witnessed the abduction by Beilis. Third, Ulyana asserted that her drunken friend Anna the Wolf had witnessed the crime—adding, doubtlessly under pressure, that the perpetrator was “Mendel.”

  That two witnesses had given three different and contradictory versions of events little troubled Chaplinsky, so eager was he for grounds to arrest Beilis. Chaplinsky allowed as how the testimony, taken piece by piece, was “not completely firm,” but astonishingly found the stories taken together to be mutually reinforcing. Vladimir Korolenko the writer would point out the irony that initially the case would stand on the testimony of witnesses who could barely stand on their two feet.

  Investigator Fenenko now found his prized integrity threatened, when Chaplinsky requested that he have Beilis arrested. Fenenko found the case against Beilis to be preposterous. But he could not defy orders—that would be insubordination, something his ethical code did not countenance. Fortunately, because Chaplinsky had given him what was formally not an order, but merely a request, he did his best to delay, telling Chaplinsky he needed three or four days to get the paperwork organized.

  It is at this point that “Student Golubev,” as he was invariably called, reenters the narrative. He had been the first one to identify Mendel Beilis as a suspect. Now he would make certain that the Jew was arrested. Chaplinsky recalled later that “an agitated Golubev came into my office and declared that all of Lukianovka knew about Shakhovsky’s testimony and … that the people are preparing to deal with Beilis and Zaitsev on their own and organize a pogrom.” Golubev was, more than likely, using this threat as a means of speeding up the arrest. But it was true that, while Mendel Beilis was unaware of it, word of Shakhovsky’s testimony had quickly spread in Lukianovka, where nothing could be kept secret.

  One of those who heard of it was a shoemaker named Mikhail Nakonechny, a mainstay of the local gossip mill who, because he could read and write, had a side business filling out documents for local residents. Nakonechny would be one of the few heroes of the Beilis case. (His young daughter, as a star witness for the defense, would become its great heroine.) He could not have wanted to get involved in the entire affair because he knew Vera Cheberyak all too well—his wife had once had a violent confrontation with her. But he knew something that he could not keep it to himself: Shakhovsky had a grudge against Beilis.

  By this time, Krasovsky’s common sense and investigative abilities were returning to him. He had belatedly come to realize that the weight of the evidence indeed pointed to Vera Cheberyak and her gang. When he found out about Shakhovsky’s testimony, and Beilis’s impending arrest, he headed for Lukianovka to see what he could find out. There he ran into the distraught shoemaker.

  “He came up to me, looking very upset,” Krasovsky recalled. Nakonechny told him: “What filth … it’s an absolute lie. Shakhovsky lives near the Zaitsev factory and has the habit of swiping firewood from [there]…He was called to account for the theft … and since it was Beilis who turned him in, he harbored a grudge against him.”

  By this point, though, the drive to take B
eilis into custody was unstoppable. After Golubev raised the threat of a mob taking matters into its own hands, the histrionic head of the Kiev Okhrana, or secret police, Nikolai Kuliabko, contacted Chaplinsky, offering his help. Kuliabko appeared in the prosecutor’s office and, “making a conspiratorial expression,” as Chaplinsky described it, declared that he could detain Beilis using the enhanced powers granted him in connection with the tsar’s impending visit. Chaplinsky told him that Vera Cheberyak should also be arrested, as Beilis’s accomplice; at this point, he believed he could make a stronger case by treating them as a tandem. He confided that he was happy to have a pretext for Kuliabko’s assistance. As the Okhrana chief recollected this critical meeting, the prosecutor urgently wanted him to arrest the pair as soon as possible in part because he was suspicious that the regular police were in the pay of the Jews:

  [Chaplinsky] explained to me that … Mendel Beilis and Vera Cheberyak were involved [in the crime]…It was being proposed to charge Beilis and Cheberyak, but in order to “prepare” the warrant, the investigative authorities needed two or three days, and there was information that Beilis and Cheberyak might flee, and therefore it was necessary to promptly detain them. Chaplinsky went on to tell me that he did not consider it possible to entrust the detaining of Beilis and Cheberyak to the police … since it was bought off and therefore was entrusting [the arrests]…to me.

  Chaplinsky reported to the minister of justice on July 21 that Vera Cheberyak was a suspect in the murder and that she should be detained. She “manifest[ed] exceptional interest in the course of the investigation,” he wrote, “was collecting information about the facts the witnesses had related and there were rumors that she restrained witnesses from giving honest testimony, frightening them with the threat of reprisal.” In particular, “her influence on the case was evident in how she constantly watched over her son Zhenya … apparently fearful that he might let something slip out,” adding, “the boy gave the impression of knowing more than he told.” Chaplinsky concluded: “Her detention might aid in the discovery of the truth.”

  Chaplinsky’s report indicates he fully understood that Vera Cheberyak was, by all rights, the prime suspect in Andrei’s murder. Yet he dearly wanted to charge a Jew with the crime. Unfortunately, the only halfway suitable Jew that could be found was a modest, hardworking, not terribly religious family man. Chaplinsky’s initial solution—one that perhaps he thought ingenious—was to fasten the case against the Jew to Lukianovka’s infamous Cheberiachka. Such was the strange beginning of what would soon become known as the Beilis affair.

  At three o’clock in the morning, on July 22, 1911, a large detachment of police and fifteen gendarme officers under the command of Kiev Okhrana chief Kuliabko stormed the home of Mendel Beilis. The scale of the operation, suitable to the capture of an armed and dangerous underworld overlord, was risibly out of proportion to its humble and defenseless target. An immature and melodramatic Kuliabko was playing with his toy soldiers.

  “Suddenly I heard knocking on the door—such knocking that I thought that there was, God forbid, a fire at the factory,” Beilis recalled. “I jumped out of bed and ran barefoot to open the door. As soon as the door opened, approximately twelve men stormed in screaming loudly, ‘Are you Beilis? You are arrested, arrested!’ And they surrounded me from all sides. Stood themselves so firmly, exactly as if they were scared that I would break away from their hold and escape. I tried to ask, ‘Why? What?’ ” A policeman told him he would find out soon enough and to move faster and get dressed.

  Beilis was asked to account for all the money in his possession, presumably so the officers could not be accused later of stealing any of it. He had seventy-five kopeks. He was asked if he wanted to take the money with him or leave it with his wife. He said he wanted to leave it with Esther, who would need it more than he would, but he was not allowed to hand her the money himself. He had to give the coins to an officer, who then handed them to his wife. He was a prisoner now, subject to all the absurdities of “procedure.”

  The children had awakened and Beilis wanted to say good-bye to them, but the gendarmes forbade it. “ ‘Come!’ They yelled at me, and led me out of the home,” he recalled. As he walked out of his house, he was handed over to four officers. Beilis did not know that procedure called for an arrested person to be marched down the street, not on the sidewalk. When he asked to walk on the sidewalk, an officer pushed him. “You walk here!” he sneered, “On the sidewalk he wants to go!” He was led on a winding route for nearly two miles down Kiev’s nearly deserted streets until they reached the headquarters of the dread Okhrana where he entered into a nightmare that would destroy the life he had known and arouse the indignation of the world.

  4

  “Andrusha, Don’t Scream”

  At five o’clock in the morning, Mendel Beilis, escorted by a few gendarmes, arrived at the Kiev branch of the Okhrana. The rest of the contingent had stayed behind to search the home. After about an hour of waiting, Beilis heard the stomping of horses’ hooves, followed by the clatter of spurs in the corridor. When the door to the room opened, he recognized the gendarmes who had been searching his house and felt somehow reassured to see the men were done with their work. When Nikolai Kuliabko, the Kiev Okhrana chief, entered, Beilis hoped that he would finally be questioned and clear up the whole matter, whatever it was. But Kuliabko only led him to another room, asked that he be brought tea and a roll, and immediately left.

  “Remaining alone, I began to calm down from the sudden fear that had so confused me,” Beilis later recalled. “I did not know what was happening or what they wanted from me.” Though his tongue was “dry as hot sand,” he could not drink the tea. The roll went untouched. “I was certain that as soon as they questioned me they would immediately see the mistake they had made, and would release me.”

  After three hours, Kuliabko entered. He had no formal role in the murder investigation—he was only holding the prisoner for a few days until his transfer to the police. So the personal command he took of the case was striking. For one thing, the Kiev Okhrana chief was well-known for his laziness. Repeated requests for information from St. Petersburg would pile up on his desk before he would respond. His ineptitude, too, was well-known. An official review had found his operation riddled with administrative deficiencies and staffed by ignoramuses. (Among other things, his top investigator, responsible for tracking revolutionary groups, did not know the meaning of the word “anarchism.”) His brother-in-law was head of the imperial palace guard and Kuliabko had used that bureaucratic foothold to secure other influential patrons, including one whom he shared with the powerful deputy interior minister, General Kurlov, who blocked any attempt to demote him.

  Within weeks Kuliabko’s incompetence would lead to fatal results that would shake the empire and land him on the other side of the interrogation table. But at this early stage he seems to have perceived that the regime—in some sense, even its future—was to be invested in this peculiar case. Kuliabko, who was rumored to have his eye on a high post in the capital, apparently understood the fantastic gains to be made if only he could force a confession out of this poor Jew sitting before him in a tattered waistcoat.

  “Well, did you drink the tea?” he asked.

  “What do I need the tea for,” Beilis said. “It would be better if you released me from jail, let me go to my wife and children. What do you want from me? I have committed no crime.”

  Kuliabko, perhaps taken aback by the prisoner’s temerity, left the room without responding. When he returned, he handed Beilis a sheet of paper with questions written on it. Beilis was to write down his answers and then ring the bell. Kuliabko left Beilis alone with the large sheet of paper and a pen. Beilis made his way down the list:

  Where are you from?

  Who is your father?

  What is your religion?

  Do you have any relatives?

  What do you know about Yushchinsky’s murder?

  When Beilis came t
o the last question he felt “the knife at my throat.” He finally understood why he was there. He tried to console himself with the open-ended phrasing of the question. Perhaps he was only regarded as a possible witness. Because he was barely literate in Russian beyond the few words needed for the brick factory receipts, writing in the language came to him with difficulty. He wrote down his answers in Cyrillic letters whose gently curved pen strokes, like those of many a Russian Jew, bore a distinctly Semitic stamp. He wrote that he knew only what everybody knew, what he heard on the street. He rang the bell.

  Kuliabko came in and examined the piece of paper, covered now with an alien scrawl. He told Beilis angrily that this would not do. The anger may have been feigned; he surely could not have expected an immediate written confession. The questionnaire was likely his idea of a psychological ploy.

  “What do you know about Yushchinsky?”

  Beilis shrugged. “What should I know? I only know that they found him dead.”

  “And who killed him?”

  “How can I know?”

  Kuliabko asked him the question repeatedly. “What do you know about Yushchinsky?” Beilis kept giving the same answer—that he knew nothing.

  “Tell the truth.”

  “But this is the truth, that I do not know anything about it.”

  “Well, we will soon see about this,” Kuliabko said. He left, slamming the door.

  Beilis was again alone in the room.