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

by Levin, Edmund

  Fenenko then asked him about a letter that had been found during the search of his home. The letter, which surely encouraged and relieved the prosecution, was from Jonah Zaitsev concerning the preparation of Zaitsev’s yearly batch of Passover matzo. It turned out that for many years Beilis had overseen the production of Passover matzo for Zaitsev’s family. At last, here was a direct connection between the suspect and the Jews’ diabolical parody of the host made with Christian blood. Much would be made of this connection at the trial.

  Beilis explained that one day, years ago, Zaitsev had offered him the opportunity to earn a few extra rubles by supervising this annual tradition—the baking and delivery of a ton of matzo for his large extended family and friends. He needed someone dependable and honest. For two weeks every year, Beilis supervised the baking of the matzo at Zaitsev’s estate outside of Kiev, and its delivery on Passover eve, until the old man’s death in 1907, when the tradition ceased. (Zaitsev’s heirs were modern Jews in “short clothing,” content to buy their matzo in a store.)

  Fenenko asked whether he ever had to chase neighborhood children, in particular Andrei, away from the clay grinders. Beilis told him he had not. Over the next few days Beilis was questioned again a number of more times. “On the one hand, I felt encouraged [each time],” he would later write in his memoirs, “for if they desired to question me it was a sign that they wanted to know the truth. On the other hand I would become frightened of the wild questions they were putting, questions designed to confuse and entangle me.”

  On August 3, Beilis was brought in to meet with Fenenko alone at the courthouse. Fenenko, who must have been greatly distressed, looked lost in thought.

  “I must send you to prison,” he said. Beilis began to cry.

  “Do not cry, Beilis,” he said. Beilis recalled Fenenko saying the words “in a soft and heartfelt voice in which I felt compassion.”

  Beilis asked Fenenko why he would send an innocent man to prison. Fenenko said his investigation, still in progress, would reveal the truth, but in the meantime he was “obligated” to imprison him. He repeated again that “this is what the prosecutor ordered.”

  “Will I have to wear prison clothing?” Beilis asked.

  Until now he had worn his own clothes. He later recalled the question with embarrassment: “Foolishness. That this is what I feared most of all at that moment. As long as I was in my own clothes, I saw myself as a free person who was arrested accidentally, and would soon be freed.” On his last night at the police precinct, a veteran convict tried to comfort him. “In prison,” he said, “it is much better. There at least you get some cooked food, while at the precinct you only get dry food.” Uncomforted, Beilis spent a sleepless night.

  As for Vera Cheberyak, who was also detained on July 22, little is known about her time as an Okhrana prisoner except for one exemplary episode. Cheberyak was probably held first at the Okhrana headquarters, but by the end of July she was transferred to a police precinct jail. On July 31, she had a new cellmate, Anna Darofeyeva, who had just killed her husband. Cheberyak might have seen in the forty-year-old Anna a kindred spirit or a woman in need of consolation (after all, in so many such cases, it was the man who had provoked the ultimate and decisive act). But instead, Cheberyak saw in Anna yet another potential mark.

  Cheberyak struck up a conversation with Anna, telling her it had been her bad luck that her son, Zhenya, had known Andrei Yushchinsky, which had led her to come under suspicion in his murder. Cheberyak drew out the vulnerable woman about her own situation. She told Cheberyak she had no children, no family, no one to look out for her. As people often do when confronted by misfortune too immense to comprehend, Anna fixated on trivialities. The police had taken some things of hers and she was worried about what would happen to them. Cheberyak said she would help. She was sure she would be released soon, and she would take care of Anna’s affairs. On a scrap of paper, Cheberyak had Anna draw up a document in her own hand. Anna, who must have been in a radical state of mental distress, thought she was giving Cheberyak permission only to take her things from the police station for safekeeping. In fact, in signing the paper, Anna apparently transferred to Cheberyak the right to dispose of all her worldly goods, such as they were.

  Cheberyak was right to believe she would soon be released. Although nearly everyone involved in the case—from the upright shoemaker Nakonechny to the unscrupulous prosecutor Chaplinsky—sensed she was somehow involved in Andrei’s murder, Cheberyak had never incriminated herself. As for that “shit Zhenya,” as she had called her son, while she was locked up he had said nothing to harm her.

  Cheberyak, though, still did not feel she was out of danger. It was about to become evident that the mother was in mortal fear of her son, and she would soon come under plausible suspicion of wanting him dead.

  Knowing Cheberyak would have to be released in a few days, Detective Krasovsky set about wooing Zhenya while it was possible to question him outside of his mother’s influence. He went to a bakery to buy some pastries and had them delivered to the Cheberyaks’ home in the hope of putting the grateful boy in the right mood to open up when an officer paid a call.

  The treats were surely welcome. By the time that Vera Cheberyak was whisked off to the Okhrana, the neighbors were becoming concerned about her children. They were growing thin. Their father, Vasily, had dearly hoped for his wife’s removal from the family by the police, but the attention of the authorities had resulted in nothing but disaster. The destruction of Vera’s criminal gang had deprived the family of much of its livelihood. Vasily was on his way to losing his job at the telegraph office. (He ascribed this to Krasovsky’s machinations, later testifying that the detective had threatened, “I will ruin you,” if he did not tell what he knew.) Zakharchenko, the landlord, had evicted the family from their apartment, forcing them to move. The children still sneaked into Zakharchenko’s yard and stole fruit from his pear trees, no longer as a childish game but to stave off hunger.

  In the first days of August, all three children fell ill. Vasily at first thought it was from eating green pears, but their symptoms quickly grew worse. Zhenya was taken to the hospital with dysentery. The boy was growing weaker with each passing hour; the doctor had almost no hope of saving him. Vera Cheberyak was released from jail on August 7 and, after signing for her cellmate’s possessions on the way out, made her way to the hospital. It is not clear if the doctor told her that her son was, in all likelihood, dying, but he did tell her it would be better for her boy to stay where he was. She brought him home.

  The eerie and unnerving scene that then unfolded would become part of the case’s legend. It would become the focus of the wildest conspiracy theories and speculation. It would transfix the nation and serve as a linchpin of the defense. Though it may seem too contrived in its dramatic convenience to be credible, and as histrionic as a scene in a silent film (as indeed it would become in just a few months), it was witnessed by two men whose motives were unimpeachable, for neither wanted to undermine the blood accusation.

  When Krasovsky heard that Zhenya had been taken home, he immediately sent Polishchuk and another officer to watch over him. “In his delirium he kept saying Andrusha’s name,” Polishchuk reported, in an account recorded three days later. “Sometimes it seemed to Zhenya that Andrusha was catching him, and he cried, ’Oh, Andrusha, don’t catch, don’t catch; at other times [it seemed to him] that Andrusha was firing [from his gun], and then he began to cry: ‘Andrusha is firing, firing,’ and then … he cried: ‘Andrusha, don’t scream.’ ”

  Polishchuk’s account continues: “When Zhenya occasionally came to, his mother took him in her arms and gestured to the detectives: ‘Tell them, dear son, so that they won’t harm either your mother or you, since we both don’t know anything about the Andrei Yushchinsky case,’ to which Zhenya answered: ‘Leave me alone, mama, it’s painful for me to remember that.’ ” His mother prodded him: “Tell them, little one, that I have nothing to do with it.”

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nbsp; Polishchuk also noticed a contradictory impulse. When Zhenya started to say something, his mother did something strange and disturbing: she bent over him and covered his mouth with kisses. It seemed clear to Polishchuk that she wanted to prevent him from talking. When he questioned her about this, she said it was difficult for her son to talk and she didn’t want him troubled.

  Present to administer the final sacraments was Father Fyodor Sinkevich, a leader of the right-wing youth organization Double Headed Eagle who would soon become its chairman. Cheberyak later claimed that Zhenya had requested that she summon him, but Sinkevich did not know Zhenya. It is all but certain that inviting Sinkevich was Cheberyak’s idea. She must have nurtured a hope that this leading right-wing clergyman would bear witness as her son offered her a dying exoneration.

  Sinkevich could see that the boy was near death. “I gave him communion, then made to leave, when the boy called out to me, ‘Father,’ ” Sinkevich later testified. “I approached him with a tender feeling and asked, ‘What is it, my child.’ He didn’t say anything. Then he called out ‘Father’ again. I again asked ‘What is it, my child.’ He again said nothing, and however hard I tried with soothing words to encourage him to say what he wanted to, he didn’t say anything.” Sinkevich later shared his impression with the court: “It seemed to me that he wanted to say something but for some reason couldn’t bring himself to. It made the impression of some kind of complicated psychological process going on.”

  Cheberyak had followed the young priest into the room, so quietly he did not notice her until he happened to turn around. He formed a sense that Cheberyak, standing behind him and facing the bed, was trying to communicate something to the boy wordlessly.

  After he left the boy’s bedside, Sinkevich had a conversation with Cheberyak in which she said something quite striking. They talked about the Beilis case and, while he could not remember everything she said, he did recall her saying, “They are wrongly accusing the Jews.” Cheberyak was clearly in the midst of her own “complex psychological process.” Just a few months earlier she had told the authorities she believed the Jews had something to do with the crime. Now, she inscrutably needed to tell a leader of the city’s anti-Semites that her previous avowal was not true. Perhaps it was a momentary pang of conscience seeping through her twisted and tormented psyche under the unbearable stress of the moment. She would change her mind one final time about whom to implicate in the murder—with dramatic consequences—in time for the trial.

  Zhenya died on August 8, the day after he was brought home from the hospital. A few days later his eight-year-old sister, Valentina, died. Only nine-year-old Ludmila survived. Andrei had been in Zhenya’s thoughts in his final moments but, if the dying boy knew anything about the identity of the killer, he took it with him to the grave.

  Did Vera Cheberyak have something to do with her son’s death? Polishchuk told Fenenko he suspected her. Of course, she was locked up at the Okhrana when the boy fell ill, but perhaps she had somehow gotten the message out and had the deed done.

  Others also believed the children had been poisoned but, depending upon their political beliefs, they singled out different culprits. The liberal paper Contemporary Word pointed the accusing finger at the Far Right: “It is well-known that the Union of Russian People has taken this matter in hand. Is it any wonder that, as a result, there has occurred a new crime?” The far-right paper Zemshchina implicated the Jews, noting that “during the investigation of Dreyfus, that lowly traitor, eleven witnesses in turn, one after the other, fell victim to sudden death.” The “elimination” of a witness, the paper said, “constitutes the usual method of the bloodthirsty [Jewish] tribe.” Although the coroner’s official microscopic analysis found the bacteria causing dysentery in Zhenya’s body—clear evidence of a natural death—the accusations persisted willy-nilly. It was said that “a large amount of cuprous poisons” had been found in the boy’s bowel—or that death came from one of those insidious toxins that leave no trace.

  In the aftermath of her children’s deaths, Cheberyak’s emotional and financial circumstances could not have been more desperate. She raised what money she could. She sold the things she had filched from Anna Darofeyeva, the murderess she had duped. (A dismayed Anna received a postcard from Cheberyak in jail informing her that her things had been sold for three rubles, of which she never saw a kopek.) Meanwhile, with the children just a few days in their graves, Cheberyak suddenly emerged as everyone’s favorite villain. Cozying up to Father Sinkevich had bought her no immediate goodwill on the right. The Black Hundred press had begun to implicate her in Andrei’s murder, a collaboration that they may have felt their Jewish murder conspiracy logically required. Cheberyak had conspired with the Jews to kill Andrei, and now they had killed Zhenya as well. “It turns out she was close to a certain Yid,” Zemshchina noted, apparently with Beilis in mind. “How could Zhenya remain among the living? After all, he could let something slip out.” Certainly, a reporter of any political stripe knew Vera Cheberyak made fantastic copy. Zemshchina dramatically reported on August 17: “[Zhenya’s] death was not an unexpected event for his neighbors, for they often heard how the mother threatened the boy: ‘If you let your tongue go loose I’ll kill you like a dog. I’ll strangle you with my own hands, if you let out so much as a squeak.’ ” (Whether true or not, to anyone who knew her the quotation sounded utterly believable.) The focus on Cheberyak as a Jewish accomplice would turn out to be a brief detour. Right-wing reporters would soon opt for a more streamlined version of events, as the prosecution had, with both Andrei and Zhenya the victims of the Jews alone, ceding the lurid fascinations of Lukianovka’s evil presence to the progressive press.

  But now Cheberyak prepared to take steps to defend her honor. As a grieving and slandered mother, she readied herself to make a personal appeal to the very highest authority in the empire. For in a few days, as if by divine coincidence, the imperial sovereign, Tsar Nicholas II, was arriving in Kiev.

  5

  “You Are a Second Dreyfus”

  At nine o’clock in the morning on August 4, 1911, Mendel Beilis departed the police precinct for the provincial prison about two miles away where he would spend more than two years of his life. He was accompanied by a single officer. It was an act of remarkable negligence, for Beilis was now the most important prisoner in the Russian Empire. This ordinary man who had never pretended to be anything else had become an irreplaceable figure in a drama at the highest levels of the regime. Tsarist officials, moreover, were already realizing that this case was sure to draw the attention of the world. With the success of a show trial dependent on his continued survival, the authorities should have treated the health and safety of Mendel Beilis as a matter of high importance. Yet here he was, walking down the street, virtually unguarded, a target for any fanatical avenger of Andrei, the Boy Martyr, who had supposedly been killed by this Jew for his blood.

  On the other hand, the negligence was perhaps not so remarkable; the lax security was just another symptom of a wider systemic disorder in the tsar’s realm. Strangely for a quasi-police state, the empire’s security organs never developed a true culture of professionalism; they were rife with incompetence. Before the month was out, this deficiency would bring about a deadly debacle in the very heart of Kiev that would shock all of Russia and profoundly affect the life of Mendel Beilis. But on this summer day, as he walked along, looking like anyone else in his own clothes, the disregard for his safety amounted to the small gift of a final human hour before the prison gates closed behind him.

  The officer escorting him, unlike the gruff crew that had taken him from his home thirteen days earlier, was a kindly fellow who insisted they take the trolley. At some point Beilis’s neighbor Stepan Zakharchenko, who was Vera Cheberyak’s landlord, boarded the trolley car. He wore his Union of Russian People badge, with an image of Saint George slaying the dragon set beneath a cross and the imperial crown, over the motto, “For Faith in Tsar and Fatherland.” The badge ma
rked him as a “true Russian,” a Black Hundred sympathizer. But when he noticed Beilis, he came over and embraced and kissed him. “Do not be scared,” Zakharchenko told his neighbor. “Have no fear, we will all take care of you … All of us in Lukianovka know that you are innocent. We will do anything that we can for you. We will not permit an innocent person to rot in prison. Have no fear, have no fear.” When Zakharchenko got off the trolley, the two men parted warmly.

  Beilis and his guard disembarked at the Lukianovka market, and from there it was a brief walk to the prison. On the way, the officer bought ten pears from a fruit stand and, to Beilis’s surprise, offered them to him. Beilis tried to refuse, but the officer insisted, stuffing them into the prisoner’s pockets. “Don’t worry, I bought them for you,” the officer told him. “We know that you are innocent, that you are suffering for nothing.”

  The compassion of these two Christians—Zakharchenko and this officer—gave Beilis hope and left him greatly moved. He could see the officer was moved as well. If such men could see he was innocent, he thought, then maybe he would soon be freed.

  The feeling lasted only until he reached the prison.

  In the waiting area he joined fifteen new arrivals. They knew exactly who he was. “They all surrounded me and looked at me as if looking at a wild animal,” he recalled. “I saw how they crossed themselves and heard them saying, ‘That is Yushchinsky’s murderer.’ ” Until now, Beilis had comforted himself with the thought that sometimes a mistaken accusation happens. Maybe someone had falsely denounced him. Whatever the case, the error would eventually be recognized and corrected. But now people were calling him a murderer to his face, and with such certainty, with such a look in their eyes.