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

by Levin, Edmund

  Then came the moment he had so feared. In the police precinct he had been allowed to spend one last night in his own clothes. Now he was led off to a room where he had to strip naked and put on his prison garb. As he tried to take off his boots, he felt he was going to faint. A guard came over and took them off for him. The rough black shirt he put on chafed his skin. After he got dressed an old man approached him and told him to sit down. The old man turned out to be a barber who cut his hair and beard. Then Beilis was taken to the quarantine ward where new inmates spent their first month of imprisonment.

  When the door to the quarantine ward was opened, Beilis was hit with a strong, dank, nauseating gust of wind that reeked of human filth. Before him was a large room with black tar-covered walls and barred windows. He stood at the door in a state of confusion, transfixed by the forty or so men in the room. “I see them pushing. They are shoving each other. They are hitting each other, they are cursing each other,” he recalled. One man was singing. Another was telling a dirty story. The room was bare of furniture, without a single chair or anything else to sit on.

  Moments after he entered the room there was a great commotion as a voice cried, “Dinner!”

  He had noticed four or five pails filled with slop lying on the floor—the men had been waiting for the cue to begin eating. The pails contained enough food for everyone, and each one was big enough for several prisoners at a time to eat from, but there were only three spoons. The meal call triggered a wild scuffle as the men fought over who was going to eat first. After some time, and not a few bruises, the winners emerged, a truce was agreed to, and the men, tired from the fighting, formed a line. Each took a set number of spoonfuls before passing the spoon to the next man. Sometimes a man tried to sneak an extra spoonful or two and another scuffle would break out. Beilis could not bring himself to eat the disgusting slop and watched the scene from a corner he had found to sit in. Mealtime only grew more unpleasant after a cellmate found a piece of a mouse in one of the pails, displaying it to all, not in complaint, Beilis later wrote, “but to deprive others of their appetite and get more for himself.”

  After dinner came “tea,” which appeared to be just hot water. A prisoner who looked Jewish to Beilis came up to him, making signs with his hands. The man, who was apparently mute, offered him a dirty piece of sugar. Beilis thanked the man with words and gestures but managed to put aside the gift covertly without eating it.

  Everyone here, too, knew what the charges were against him, but after his initial anxiety at the hostile reception in the waiting room, and the raucous antics that had greeted him here in the quarantine cell, he found that his fellow convicts actually treated him quite well—in fact, with a kind of rough-and-ready fair-mindedness. These men—many of them, no doubt, hardened criminals—did not assume that anyone was guilty as charged. They would judge for themselves, and in the ensuing days Beilis would undergo a kind of trial. The quarantine cell became an impromptu courthouse and jury room devoted to “the Beilis case,” as the matter came to be known, inside the prison walls and worldwide. The defendant watched as his fellow prisoners held conversations about the case and argued about it. Beilis seems to have stayed in his corner, not speaking up. But if the prisoners had read or been influenced by the debate in the lively local and national press (over what was then “the Yushchinsky case”), it would have given them plenty of ammunition for both sides. Kiev Opinion, the city’s leading liberal daily, with many Jewish staffers, was predictably anti-regime and opposed the blood accusation. Black Hundred papers like Russian Banner, on the other hand, railed against Jewish bloodsuckers, both figurative and literal, and would soon express great satisfaction at Beilis’s arrest. Most interesting was the Kievan, which, while anti-Semitic, stood for what it saw as principled conservatism, condemning the blood accusation as superstitious slander.

  It is striking to think that the first considered public debate about Mendel Beilis’s guilt took place in this fetid quarantine cell, anticipating the scenes about to erupt in barrooms, at dinner tables, and in drawing rooms across the empire, as well as in the State Duma. Even if Beilis himself said little, the prisoners must have weighed the evidence as they remembered it from the press as well as from Kiev’s prolific rumor mill. Perhaps a Jewish inmate or two dared to contribute his expertise. Many of his fellow prisoners knew a thing or two about the darker side of human nature and how to sniff out a liar. Eventually, Beilis recounted, the prisoners reached their verdict:

  They concluded that I am innocent, and that the entire story about blood in matzo is no more than a made-up story. One of the convicts came up to me and said: “You are a second Dreyfus!”

  I asked him: “What is a Dreyfus?”

  Beilis knew nothing of the world-famous case of the Jewish army officer in France who, based on fabricated evidence, had been falsely accused of treason in 1894 and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. The affair had deeply divided the French Republic, inspiring a whole movement of “Dreyfusards” devoted to freeing Dreyfus and exposing the conspiracy and cover-up at the highest levels of the French government. Dreyfus had been freed only in 1899, thanks largely to the efforts of the writer Émile Zola, and not officially exonerated until 1906. Beilis’s cellmate tried to explain to him who Dreyfus was:

  “This,” he says to me, “was also a person who was arrested for nothing. The entire world, however, took up his cause. Do not be scared, your truth will also be revealed.”

  “What do I care about this Dreyfus,” I say, “as I must suffer in the meantime?”

  “Yes, yes,” he says to me, nodding his head, “in the meantime you must suffer.”

  On August 25, around the same time as Beilis was receiving his informal exoneration from his cellmates, Vera Cheberyak answered a knock at her door. As the month drew to a close, Cheberyak had every right to expect breathing space in which to mourn for her son and daughter in peace. The pathologists’ report had shown the children had died of natural causes. The yellow press could insinuate whatever it wanted, but there was no chance she would be charged in their deaths. As for Andrei’s murder, she had been detained and questioned about it for nearly six weeks in total, but she had said nothing to harm herself—and neither, as much as she had distrusted him, had her late son. What was more, she had only recently been released on the order of the chief prosecutor, Grigory Chaplinsky, himself; she now had a network of high-level protectors who would not allow her to be held for the crime because it conflicted with their plan to charge a Jew. But when Cheberyak, dressed in black, opened her door, she was confronted by a police officer who declared the unthinkable: she was under arrest for the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky.

  The arrest, it turned out, was the work of Evgeny Mishchuk, Kiev’s widely disrespected chief of detectives, who had been foisted on the city’s police department the previous year thanks to his St. Petersburg connections. Vasily Fenenko, the capable and fair-minded investigating magistrate, shared Mishchuk’s suspicions about Vera Cheberyak. But as a detective, he regarded Mishchuk to be totally inept. Fenenko was astonished to receive a telephone call around one p.m. informing him that Mishchuk was boasting of success where his detractors had failed: he was claiming to have literally unearthed proof that Cheberyak was behind Andrei’s murder. A cache of evidence had been found buried on Yurkovsky Hill in Lukianovka. Fenenko was to proceed there immediately.

  Fenenko arrived to find Detective Mishchuk strutting the scene with an unbearably self-satisfied air, proclaiming that Andrei’s missing belongings had been found and the case solved. He had received a letter from an anonymous informant telling him the exact location where Andrei’s belongings were buried, along with evidence that, according to the anonymous letter writer, implicated Vera Cheberyak. Officers had dug up a package wrapped in yellow paper. So sure was Mishchuk of its contents that, even before having it opened, he had ordered Cheberyak and a member of her gang arrested.

  The package now lay in the courtyard of a nearby buildi
ng, ready to be opened in the presence of witnesses, including Fenenko. An officer peeled away the paper to reveal a white cloth sack. Wrapped in the sack were some burned remnants of clothing, including suspenders, and two metal spikes. The officer then reached into the bag and pulled out the torn pieces of a letter, the contents of which had nothing to do with the crime. But Vera Cheberyak’s name was mentioned in the letter, as was the name of a member of her gang. The incriminating evidence had, it seemed, been carelessly left in the sack by the perpetrators. With an arrogant and victorious look on his face that infuriated Fenenko, Mishchuk declared, “Ritual murder in the twentieth century doesn’t happen.” Mishchuk was correct. Jewish ritual murder did not occur in the twentieth century, or in any other century for that matter. But he had not succeeded in ensnaring the killers. Instead, he had fallen into a trap.

  Mishchuk was not the most competent detective, but he was still a threat to the conspiracy to charge a Jew with Andrei’s murder. Though he had been shunted aside, he was still chief of the investigative division of the Kiev police force. He was unyielding in his opposition to the blood accusation (for which he must be given credit). The proponents of the blood accusation had to find a means to get him out of the way. Their plot would play on his arrogance, his unwarranted self-confidence, and his justifiable suspicions about the identities of the killers. In the weeks after Andrei’s murder, a petty criminal named Semyon Kushnir had offered his services to Mishchuk as an informer. It was Kushnir who had passed along the anonymous letter pointing to the location of the buried cache of supposed evidence. Since the letter confirmed what Mishchuk already believed to be true, he did not doubt its authenticity.

  When Nikolai Krasovsky arrived, he pushed his way through the large crowd that had gathered around Mishchuk’s find. It took just one glance to relieve him of any concern that his despised rival had solved the case. The metal spikes were each the diameter of a small candle and nearly a foot long. Neither one, he was sure, could have served as the murder weapon, which had been thinner in diameter and far shorter. As for the burned clothes, among the shreds of quilted fabric supposedly from Andrei’s coat he noticed a piece that looked like a flounce from a woman’s garment.

  Later that evening, Fenenko consulted the autopsy specialist who confirmed that the long spikes could have had nothing to do with the murder. As for the clothing, Andrei had never worn suspenders and the ones that were found were, in any case, those of an adult. What was more, the package was determined to have been in the ground only two or three days. This had all been a crude fabrication.

  Mishchuk was dismissed from his post and he and three other officers were arrested on charges of falsifying evidence. Kushnir later confessed to drafting the supposedly anonymous letter. It was never established on whose orders he was acting, but the scheme may well have originated high up in the chain of command, possibly with Grigory Chaplinsky, though it is also possible that the hoax was perpetrated by criminals hoping for a reward and that the prosecutor merely exploited the opportunity to eliminate the troublesome detective. In any case, Chaplinsky took an extreme measure in indicting Mishchuk. Kiev’s governor, A. F. Giers, was against bringing charges, but Chaplinsky threatened to wage bureaucratic war against him by blocking appointments to key posts. There was never a genuine investigation as to who was behind the fabrication as the case against Mishchuk went forward.

  Despite Chaplinsky’s efforts, Mishchuk and his codefendants would be acquitted of all charges a year later by a panel of independent-minded judges in Kiev, which took about ten minutes to come to a decision after hearing witnesses who contradicted themselves or were discredited on the stand. Under the Russian justice system, though, a not-guilty verdict could be appealed, and the prosecutor exercised his privilege, citing several dubious technicalities. The appeals court voided the guilty verdict, basing their decision on a discrepancy between the original panel’s summary verdict, which stated the defendants were “not guilty,” and the same panel’s explanatory opinion, which stated only that the charges were “not proven.” It then took the virtually unheard-of step of remanding the case to a court in a different city. The authorities were clearly counting on a more submissive panel of judges coming to an opposite decision. On retrial by the Kharkov court, Mishchuk was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison. His conviction would send a signal: this is what would happen to opponents of the blood accusation.

  For the high officials determined to charge a Jew with the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky, Krasovsky was a far greater threat than Mishchuk. But Krasovsky was too clever to fall for a crude trap. His enemies would need to devise a different and even more brazen scheme to get him out of the way. But that lay months in the future.

  Meanwhile, Krasovsky had regained his footing as an investigator. He had spent days meandering along Lukianovka’s streets, dressed in the clothes of a simple workingman, striking up conversations with anyone who might have seen or heard something about the case. From a night watchman he first heard a story circulating in the neighborhood that filled in the critical piece missing amid the suspicion surrounding Vera Cheberyak: a motive.

  The story existed in two versions, differing about the timing, but with the same core. One day Andrei had decided to cut school and he, Zhenya, and a third boy had gone out near the caves to cut off some switches from the shrubs there. Andrei’s switch had been the best, longer and more flexible than Zhenya’s. Zhenya had demanded that Andrei give it to him. Andrei had refused, and the two boys had quarreled. Zhenya had told Andrei, “If you don’t give me yours, I’ll tell your aunt that you didn’t go to school, and you came here to play.” Andrei had supposedly answered, “And if you tell on me, I’ll write to the police that at your mother’s thieves are constantly hiding and bringing stolen things.” Zhenya, the story went, had gone home and told his mother.

  In one version, the quarrel had taken place some days or weeks before Andrei’s disappearance. After hearing Zhenya’s story, two of Cheberyak’s cohorts had supposedly said that Andrei needed to be “quieted down,” so he wouldn’t blab and that if necessary, he needed to be “rubbed out.” Nothing had come of that, at first. Then, on March 9, came the arrest of four members of Cheberyak’s gang and, a day later, the search of Cheberyak’s home by the police. Now the hunt by the gang for the informer was on. Suspicion turned to Andrei. When he knocked on Zhenya’s door on March 12, Cheberyak and her gang took advantage of the opportunity to do away with him.

  According to the other version of the story circulating in the neighborhood, the boys’ quarrel had taken place on the very morning Andrei had disappeared. In that case, the gang may have assumed that, if Andrei was talking about betraying them, then perhaps he had already done so. Panicked and angry, Cheberyak’s men had not needed a well-thought-out reason to take their revenge. After Zhenya ran off, Andrei had made his way back to his friend’s house, carrying his switch, perhaps to make up with his friend. There he’d been confronted. Then: shouted accusations, the boy’s frightened look, conclusions quickly drawn, and action taken.

  Krasovsky had his men canvass Lukianovka for witnesses, attempting to trace the story back to its source, but the mysterious third boy proved elusive. Still, the essence of the story sounded plausible, though if Andrei was indeed killed for being a stool pigeon, his death was doubly tragic. Police records note the name of the informer behind the March 10 police search: it was not Andrei, but Evgeny Mifle, brother of Pavel, Vera Cheberyak’s blind lover. The Mifle family was determined to see Cheberyak put behind bars. In the end, the search had resulted in no charges against her for robbery or selling stolen goods. But her gang’s ensuing frenzy of suspicion may have led to a far more horrible crime.

  Only a few hours after Cheberyak was arrested, she was just as suddenly released. Such outrageous treatment at the hands of Kiev’s chief detective must have made her even more determined to make a personal appeal to the tsar to restore her good name. Nicholas took with great seriousness the thousands of
petitions he received from ordinary citizens requesting his mercy and intervention in matters large and small; he spent hours each week personally reviewing them. He treasured this duty because with each plea he took in his hands, he felt the age-old, mystical bond between tsar and people come to life.

  In just four days Tsar Nicholas II was due to arrive in Kiev on an official visit. Cheberyak must have felt blessed that her appeal could be conveyed to the tsar here, in her native city, rather than having to forward it to the capital. Amid her endless misfortune, the tsar’s visit surely seemed an unearthly piece of good luck, and she intended to take advantage of it.

  General Pavel Kurlov, assistant minister of the interior and head of the Corps of Gendarmes, was already in Kiev to supervise the extensive security precautions in advance of the tsar’s arrival. A few months earlier, from his desk in the capital, he had saved the Jews of Kiev from a pogrom in the aftermath of Andrei’s murder by dispatching a timely order to protect them. His mission remained the prevention of disorder of any sort in the city, with the supremely important priority of ensuring the safety of the sovereign emperor. Unfortunately Kurlov, at the worst possible time, was in an impaired state, laid up in his hotel suite with back pain. Desperate for relief, he summoned the fashionable doctor of Tibetan medicine Peter Badmaev, who treated much of St. Petersburg high society, including members of the court and Duma leaders, for all manner of complaints (in particular, venereal diseases and impotence) with exotic herbal infusions and “arousing powders.” Typically for the era, even such a trivial thing as being treated for an aching back was bound up with court intrigue. Badmaev was a would-be rival of the imperial couple’s beloved, madly charismatic holy man, Grigory Rasputin.