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

by Levin, Edmund

  Fenenko knew there were problems with Malitskaya as a witness. She hated Cheberyak and fought with her, but then it was hard to find anyone in Lukianovka who knew Cheberyak and had not. She had waited months to come forward with her story. She explained she had been afraid of Cheberyak and guessed the police would eventually figure everything out, but her husband told her she had an obligation to tell what she knew. Her husband, Fyodor, backed up her story, telling Fenenko he had told her weeks earlier to reveal what she had heard. Fenenko went to Cheberyak’s old apartment with another officer and verified that footsteps and muffled voices really could be heard downstairs. Malitskaya seemed credible to Fenenko, which strengthened his conviction that Cheberyak and her gang were behind Andrei’s murder.

  Beilis’s path to “the monastery,” cell number nine, had been harrowing, but if the price was being punched in the face, then it was almost worth it. With only fourteen men, the cell was less crowded, his fellows were of a less crude sort, and the living conditions were somewhat better than in cell number five. The sense of menace was gone and Beilis even made a friend. Ivan Kozachenko was a gaunt fellow of thirty with whom he appeared to have quite a bit in common. Kozachenko told Beilis that he, too, was an army veteran and an innocent man, though his alleged crime—robbery and assault—was of a conventional sort. Before he had fallen on hard times, he said, he had for two years been an officer in the Kiev police force’s investigative division. Over the next two months, Beilis and Kozachenko spoke often. Beilis told him of his unbearable anxiety that nothing was being done to gain his freedom. Kozachenko listened sympathetically. If it weren’t for this kind man, Beilis was sure, he would be losing his mind.

  Kozachenko had fair hope of an acquittal, which meant Beilis now had someone who might be able to help him on the outside. Kozachenko agreed to contact Beilis’s family if he was released. For now, Kozachenko volunteered to help Beilis smuggle out letters. He knew that one of the guards took letters for a few kopeks and offered to act as a go-between. Beilis could not believe his good fortune and, indeed, should not have believed it: Kozachenko was a police informer.

  Kozachenko had been placed in Beilis’s cell at the request of Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Ivanov, deputy chief of the Kiev Gendarmes, who was in charge of the agency’s investigation into the Yushchinsky murder. An acquaintance described Kozachenko as a swindler who would pick your pocket as soon as look at you. But Kozachenko was not an especially successful crook. Before landing in prison he was homeless and went about in tattered clothing, eking out the occasional ruble by selling wild game birds.

  Later, not without reason, some observers and historians would assume that from the beginning Ivanov’s intent was to manufacture evidence against Beilis. The truth was more haphazard. Ivanov was, at this point, pursuing the investigation honestly. He did not believe that Beilis was guilty. The planting of an informer might, if anything, have aided in Beilis’s exoneration (though that was not Ivanov’s goal). But this was not how matters worked out. In mid-November, after Kozachenko obtained a slip of paper and a pencil, Beilis dictated a brief note to his wife in his broken Russian while another prisoner wrote it down, correcting the grammatical mistakes. (Presumably Kozachenko demanded the letter be written in Russian, rather than have Beilis write it himself in Yiddish, so that he would know what was in it.) In the note Beilis inquired after Esther’s health and that of the children. Then he asks “whether anyone is doing anything for me” and pleads, “How long will I have to suffer unjustly?”

  Kozachenko took the letter to the guard who, after receiving permission from the deputy warden, changed into civilian clothes and delivered it to Esther Beilis. Esther was overjoyed to hear from her husband. She was illiterate so she ran to get a neighbor to have the note read to her and to dictate a letter in response. She gave it to the prison guard along with fifty kopeks for his trouble. The deputy warden deposited the fifty kopeks in a collection box for the prisoners, examined Esther’s letter, and gave the guard permission to give it to Beilis. The guard handed it to Kozachenko who, no doubt desiring to keep his “friend” in a state of nervousness, did not pass it on to him.

  Having received no response, Beilis sank into despair. (If he had gotten Esther’s brief note, it would not have brought him much comfort. She said nothing about any efforts to help him. “Do not worry,” she wrote, “God will provide and you will be freed. God knows the truth that you are in prison for no reason.”) By November 22, the four-month anniversary of his arrest, he had not received a single communication from anyone in the outside world. But Beilis still felt hopeful because Kozachenko had been acquitted and was about to be released. Beilis hastened to dictate another letter, a longer one, this time transcribed by a helpful nobleman who had been jailed on fraud charges. The letter read:

  My dear wife, the person who will give you this note served in prison with me … I ask you to welcome him as one of our own. If it weren’t for him I would have been lost long ago. Do not be afraid of this man, he can help you a great deal in my case. Tell him who is testifying falsely against me. Go with him to Mr. Dubovik [the factory manager]. Why is no one doing anything to help me?…I’ve been suffering here for four months, and it is clear no one is doing anything. Everyone knows I am here unjustly as if I am a thief or a murderer. Everyone knows I am an honest person … I feel that I cannot endure it anymore if I have to stay in prison any longer. If this man asks you for any money, give him some for expenses … Is anyone doing anything to get me out on bail? These enemies of mine who testify falsely against me are getting revenge on me because I didn’t give them firewood … All the best to you and the children.

  Kozachenko asked Beilis to sign the letter himself and write a few words to make it clear the letter was from him. Taking the pencil, Beilis squeezed in at the bottom of the page a postscript in his ungrammatical Russian: “I am Mendel Beilis don’t worries you can depends on this person as on me.” Beilis read over the letter several times before turning it over to Kozachenko who folded it, wrapped it in a handkerchief, and placed it in a side pocket of his jacket. When it was time for Kozachenko to go, Beilis started crying and pleaded with him to “do something” to help get him out of prison. Kozachenko promised that he would and told him not to worry, that in two or three weeks he would be free.

  Kozachenko had no intention of turning over this letter to the authorities, likely because he was hoping to extract money from the Beilis family for his supposed assistance. Desperate to secure his help, Beilis, according to a cellmate’s later testimony, had impulsively offered to pay his friend’s hundred-ruble legal bill. Being an independent con man was looking to be more lucrative than being a police informer. But as Kozachenko was being processed for release, a guard asked him if he was taking any notes from prisoners. He told Kozachenko he would frisk him, so there was no point in hiding anything. As Kozachenko reached into his pocket and turned over the letter, his imagination began working.

  Why Kozachenko did what he did next is not entirely clear. He liked to make up stories and was a convincing liar; even the criminals in cell number nine believed him when he said he had been a policeman. He may have been afraid that attempting to smuggle out the letter would get him into trouble, so to turn the situation to his advantage he would say what he thought the authorities wanted him to say. Moreover, he was of a type that Beilis in fact would encounter fairly rarely in prison: a visceral Jew-hater. A longtime acquaintance later recalled going on a walk a few years earlier with a very drunk Kozachenko in their home village when they came upon a Jewish wedding where children were running around. Kozachenko started hitting them. Then he started going after the adults, threatening that the Christian villagers would soon “stir up a riot against them.” Both fear and hatred must have swirled in his mind as his way to the prison exit was blocked and he was led off to explain the presence of the contraband letter.

  By the time he reached the warden’s office Kozachenko had concocted the core of his story. The missive m
ight seem harmless, he explained, but it was in fact a letter of introduction to the Jewish cabal whose mission was to obstruct the investigation. He was then delivered immediately for questioning by Investigator Fenenko. Kozachenko explained how the letter had come to be written and how Beilis had entrusted him to deliver it to his wife. Then he made a horrifying claim: Beilis had enlisted him to poison two witnesses in the case, “the Lamplighter,” Shakhovsky, and a man who went by the nickname of “Frog,” whose name he did not know. “I expressed my agreement,” Kozachenko said, “but, of course, I would not have done that since I don’t want a Yid to drink Russian blood.” Beilis had instructed him to dispatch the two men using vodka laced with strychnine, Kozachenko declared. The strychnine would come from the Jewish Hospital adjoining the factory grounds. He said that Beilis had told him that the Lamplighter had to be eliminated because he had seen him with Andrei Yushchinsky. Beilis had not explained what he had against “Frog.” Kozachenko would initially be given three hundred or four hundred or even five hundred rubles for his expenses, but if he succeeded in his deadly mission, “they would give me money enough to last for my entire life, and the money would be given to me by the entire Jewish nation.”

  One part of his wild statement did ring true. Beilis, he said, had told him he was sure “that if he were convicted, then the whole Jewish nation would suffer.” Beilis was indeed coming to understand the larger importance of his case and that the honor of the Jewish people depended on what happened to him and how he conducted himself. It was a thought that would sustain him in prison and, it is no exaggeration to say, save his life. And the first time he expressed it may have been to this false friend.

  Kozachenko was then questioned by Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov, who headed the Corps of Gendarmes’ independent investigation into the murder. Ivanov undertook to check the veracity of Kozachenko’s story. He deputized Kozachenko as a “colleague” and sent him out to the Zaitsev factory, where he could present himself as Beilis’s former cellmate and gather information. Ivanov had Kozachenko followed, and he questioned him upon his return from each of his forays. Eventually, Ivanov caught Kozachenko in a clear lie: he had invented a meeting with Aaron Beilis that had not happened. Ivanov brought in the agents who had tailed him and confronted him. “I screamed at Kozachenko,” Ivanov later testified, “and said that I would immediately send him to prison. Kozachenko fell onto his knees, started crying, and said, ‘Forgive me, I made it all up.’ ” In conversations with others about the incident, Ivanov explicitly declared that Kozachenko confessed that his whole story about Beilis had been a fabrication.

  Ivanov immediately called Fenenko and told him that Kozachenko’s testimony was false. He asked if he should deliver a report, but the chief prosecutor, Chaplinsky, intervened, saying no report was needed, that everything would be sorted out during the investigation. In fact, Chaplinsky had no intention of disregarding Kozachenko’s accusations. The deposition remained in the record, never formally retracted. This testimony was, of course, as Chaplinsky had said about the alcoholic Shakhovskys’, “not completely firm.” But that was not a serious problem in the mind of the prosecutor. Chaplinsky believed that a solid case could be made out of less-than-firm building blocks if enough of them could be found. It did not matter that one part of the story made no sense—“Frog” (the shoemaker Nakonechny) had given testimony that was favorable to Beilis. He reported to justice minister Shcheglovitov that if the Shakhovskys’ testimony gave sufficient cause for Beilis’s arrest, then Kozachenko’s strengthened the case enough to proceed with the indictment.

  Kozachenko was never punished for his perjury, but Beilis suffered severely for trying to smuggle out the letters. Two days after he bade Kozachenko farewell, the door of his cell opened and a guard called his name. Beilis was told to get his things. He felt a surge of hope. Was he finally being freed? Maybe his friend had managed to help him already. “I thought perhaps God Almighty was having mercy,” he recalled, “but wait, it was too good to be true.” Instead, he was summoned to the prison office, where he was confronted with the letters he had written. For the violation of prison rules, he was punished with solitary confinement. His new cell, as he recalled in his lengthy interview after the trial in the Yiddish newspaper Haynt, was “simply a grave for living people,” dark, cold, and totally bare:

  A cold shiver ran through me. I began to walk around, back and forth—in order to warm up a little. But it did not help. I felt the tips of my fingers freezing. What saved me a little was only the small lamp which stood on the iron-forged table, with which I warmed my hands the entire night. And just imagine that in such a room, better said a grave, I would have to stay for the entire winter. They did bring me a mattress the next day; however, the cold and darkness were unbearable. I felt just like an animal in a cage. Entire days I paced from one corner to another. I longed for some nice light. I literally climbed the walls and managed to reach the tiny little window which was high up and took a look at the light of the world.

  In November, the attorney Arnold Margolin made what small steps he could toward helping Beilis. He had Aaron write a letter to his brother instructing him to file a motion for dismissal of the case and request testimony from expert witnesses—including pathologists and a noted Hebraist—who could refute the case against him. (The authorities never delivered the letter, but it was unlikely that Beilis would have been capable of acting on the advice in any event.) Margolin and Gruzenberg drafted a petition on behalf of Beilis’s wife, Esther, requesting a prompt conclusion to the preliminary investigation. But the investigation dragged on, an indictment grew more likely, and, for Margolin, the need to identify the real killers grew more urgent. The ever-cautious Fenenko, who had already taken an uncharacteristic risk by secretly talking to Margolin, could offer no concrete assistance. Margolin knew he had to venture somehow into the criminal underworld. But he was stymied about finding a way in.

  The attorney’s unlikely entrée to the criminal lower depths appeared in the somewhat absurd figure of a journalist named Stepan Brazul-Brushkovsky. For some weeks Brazul (as he was usually called) had been conducting his own private investigation into the Yushchinsky murder. He was, in a way, the mirror image of the young right-wing leader Vladimir Golubev, who had first proposed Mendel Beilis as a suspect. Brazul, too, was an amateur for whom the case had become an obsession. His colleagues at Kiev Opinion mocked him for it. But he was a liberal and, being married to a Jewish woman, quite literally a philo-Semite. As a journalist, he was a journeyman of modest reputation. As a detective, he was inept and laughably gullible. But his investigation would improbably, even farcically, lurch toward revealing a plausible scenario for Andrei’s murder.

  Brazul knew Krasovsky from his days as Kiev’s chief detective. He had approached him over the summer and tried to persuade him they should work together on the Yushchinsky case, but Krasovsky was, not surprisingly, uninterested. They remained in touch, however, and Krasovsky confided to Brazul his frustration at the arrest of an innocent man. He could not share any specific information, but he gave Brazul one piece of advice. “I’ll put it simply,” he told him. “The whole case, the whole riddle lies with Vera Cheberyak. Focus yourself on Vera Cheberyak, and the case will be cracked.” Brazul, who could be dense, apparently failed to understand what Krasovsky was trying to tell him: that he believed Cheberyak was behind the crime. Brazul understood him to mean only that Cheberyak had useful information. Still, on that assumption, he began to focus on her with single-minded intensity.

  Brazul took the opportunity to introduce himself to Cheberyak at Zhenya’s funeral and express his condolences. When the young journalist contacted Cheberyak again sometime in mid-September, she did not know quite what to make of him—or how to take advantage of him. That would take time to figure out. Meanwhile, she accepted his invitations to go out to eat and drink with his friends, which would at least allow her to enjoy some fine free meals. As they met over the next few weeks, she talked a great deal
about her dead children, who she was sure had been poisoned by someone. Her husband had been let go from his job at the telegraph office, and she had to work, picking up the odd client as a midwife and “healer.” (She had taken some classes in midwifery as a young woman but never completed the course.) The rest of her time was taken up by the endless summonings of investigators. She was being persecuted, she said, by Fenenko and Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov, who unjustly suspected her of involvement in Andrei’s murder. She complained of feeling hounded and harassed. She was exhausted. “I’m a woman,” she told him. “I have a little girl, I need to be home.” Blind to her scheming nature, Brazul may have been unduly moved by her plight.

  For two months, Cheberyak continued to deny her involvement in the crime and said nothing of what she might know about who had killed Andrei. Then, on November 29, according to Brazul, she told him that, while she didn’t know who the culprit was, she was in a position to find out. She suggested that there was truth to the original theory that Andrei’s stepfather and uncle had been involved. Brazul believed her. A colleague who joined Brazul for one of these evenings told him bluntly, “This is a woman who always lies. She lies even when she’s telling the truth. And if she’s talking in her sleep, then while she’s talking she probably also lies.” Brazul ignored the warning. He continued to insist Cheberyak was not involved in the crime but could find the killer.

  On December 1, Brazul dropped by Vera Cheberyak’s house and was surprised to find her lying in bed, “half dead,” as he recalled, her head wrapped in bandages. “That’s it,” she told him, “yesterday I really got it good.” Cheberyak said that she had been coming home at night when two men assaulted her, one of them beating her with an iron “chocolate bar.” (Cheberyak’s speech was always peppered with criminal slang.) Bandaged and bloody, she now revealed to Brazul what she said were her true suspicions regarding who had killed Andrei. The night that she was ambushed, it had been too dark for her to see her attackers, but she was sure that one of them had been Pavel Mifle, the lover she had blinded six years earlier by throwing sulfuric acid in his face. She was certain he had organized the vicious assault because he knew that she was trying to find out who had killed Andrei. Cheberyak said she had told Mifle she was going out to buy candles that she would use to divine the murderer’s identity—the villain’s face, she told him, would appear before her in the candles’ glow. Upon hearing that, she claimed Mifle said, “Don’t you start divining.” Mifle had to have been involved in Andrei’s murder, she claimed to Brazul, along with Andrei’s stepfather, Luka, and others, including Mifle’s brother and mother, but she explained that she had to go to a prison in the city of Kharkov to talk to a convict who had more information. To Brazul, this all made perfect sense.