Singaevsky was key to the plan because he was the only one of Andrei’s suspected killers not in jail at the moment, except for Cheberyak herself. Karaev quickly turned to his vast network of criminal connections to find a way of meeting Singaevsky and gaining his confidence. It turned out the two men had a mutual acquaintance, someone Singaevsky trusted: Lenka, nicknamed Ferdydudel, a barber with underworld ties. On April 19, Ferdydudel tracked down Singaevsky in a bar and told him that the notorious outlaw Karaev wished to meet him. The small-time crook must have been awed by Karaev’s interest in him, and over the next several days Karaev loosened him up, taking him to restaurants to eat and, especially, drink. As a pretext for their meetings, he invented a story about needing some “good men” for a big robbery, a “wet job”—Russian criminal slang for murder—that involved killing as many as ten people for a prize of forty thousand rubles in loot. Would his new friend be able to help? Singaevsky was interested and lamented that his good comrades “Red Vanya” Latyshev and Boris Rudzinsky were in jail on robbery charges. In passing, he mentioned that some people were trying to “pin” the murder of the boy Yushchinsky on them.
Karaev felt he was getting somewhere, but Singaevsky still acted as if he knew nothing about Andrei’s murder. He was an utterly dim-witted fellow, and disappointingly cautious. After four days Karaev met with Krasovsky and Brazul to brief them and discuss how to proceed. They devised a clever ruse to pressure Singaevsky to open up about the crime. Karaev would warn him that he and his half sister, Vera, were going to be arrested for Andrei’s murder. On the afternoon of April 24, he took Singaevsky out to a criminal haunt, the restaurant Versailles, and broke the bad news: he had learned from “his man” in the Gendarmes that Singaevsky and Vera were about to be charged with Andrei’s murder. In fact, he said, the warrants had already been drawn up.
According to Karaev, Singaevsky panicked and began to talk. His first reaction was that the two shmary, “floozies,” who had seen something had to be rubbed out. “Measures” had to be taken. The “floozies” Singaevsky had in mind were two sisters, Ekaterina and Ksenia Diakonova, who would go on to play a dramatic and at times bizarre role at the Beilis trial. They were good friends of Vera Cheberyak’s who, Krasovsky had long suspected, knew more than they were telling. For weeks, he had been conducting his own parallel covert operation, patiently working to win the women’s confidence. He had managed to secure an introduction to them through an acquaintance and, posing as a Moscow gentleman, took them out almost daily to restaurants and the theater, talking at first of everything but the Beilis case. Finally, when they felt comfortable enough to open up to him, Ekaterina revealed that she had knocked on Cheberyak’s door on the day Andrei had disappeared, sometime in the morning or perhaps early afternoon. When the door opened she said she saw Singaevsky and Rudzinsky running from one room to another while Red Vanya covered something with a coat in the corner. Ekaterina asked what that pile in the corner was. Cheberyak said it was just some “junk,” slang for stolen goods. Ekaterina had a sense something was not right. The sisters also revealed an important material fact. They told Krasovsky that at Cheberyak’s they would often play a game called Post Office that involved writing little notes to one another. The game was played with pieces of perforated paper—very much like ones found near Andrei’s body.
If Singaevsky was about to confess, Karaev wanted there to be another witness. Karaev took him back to his hotel room, where they met with Makhalin, whom he introduced as a trustworthy criminal comrade. Karaev pretended to be desperately upset about his new friend’s situation, at one point pulling out his gun and beating himself on the head with it in feigned frustration. Singaevsky again cursed the “floozies” who had figured out that he had something to do with the crime. His mind veered from one desperate measure to another. They should kill the Diakonova sisters, Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov, and Officer Kirichenko, Singaevsky said, or break into the Gendarmes’ office and steal the case files. Karaev picked his moment and, gesturing to Singaevsky, said, “There’s the real killer of Yushchinsky.”
Singaevsky replied, “Yes, that was our job.” The gang’s business had been ruined, he said, “because of the bastard.”
Makhalin had to quickly decide the best way to get as detailed a confession as possible. He told Singaevsky that he wanted to help him, and it would be good if he told as much as possible about the circumstances of the crime.
“There’s nothing to tell,” Singaevsky said. “We grabbed him and dragged him to my sister’s apartment.”
“Who do you mean by ‘we’?” Makhalin asked.
“Me, Borka, and Red Vanya,” Singaevsky replied, He added that Vanya was a good guy but wasn’t good for a wet job; he’d thrown up after the murder.
Why had the job had been so messy? Karaev asked. Why hadn’t they gotten rid of the body?
Singaevsky answered derisively, “That was dictated by Rudzinsky’s ministerial brain.” He told them now it had been a bad idea to leave the body so close to his sister’s house. They should have dumped it in the Dnieper, Singaevsky said, or put it in a basket and disposed of it somewhere on their way to Moscow, where they had fled the day after the crime.
Singaevsky, quieting down, stopped talking about desperate “measures” and said he needed to send a message to Boris Rudzinsky. He did not specify what the message was, but presumably it concerned Andrei’s murder. There would be an opportunity to get word to him, Singaevsky said, when Borka was escorted from prison to the investigator’s office at the courthouse on April 27. The only way to communicate with him would be through the secret sign language Russian convicts had developed to talk among themselves. Karaev was fluent in it, and now Singaevsky asked him to sign a message to his friend. He would tell Rudzinsky that Singaevsky would leave a note for Borka in the outdoor latrine at the courthouse. This scheme pleased Krasovsky and his partners; they now had the chance of obtaining an incriminating piece of written evidence in the perpetrator’s own hand. On the appointed day they stationed themselves near the building’s entrance. Krasovsky and Brazul lurked near the outhouse ready to grab the note. Karaev managed to catch Rudzinsky’s eye, and they began conversing in signs, but the guards, sensing something was up, hustled the prisoner away before Karaev could get his message across, and Singaevsky departed without leaving the note.
Still, the operation as a whole had been a tremendous success. Margolin and members of the Beilis Defense Committee decided that Brazul should deliver a written affidavit relating Singaevsky’s confession and the revelations of the Diakonova sisters to Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov, the head of the Gendarmes’ investigation. Brazul would make a further claim in the affidavit—that the mysterious letters implicating the Jews and signed by “a Christian,” which were sent to Andrei’s mother and the pathologist days after the body was discovered, were written “at the dictation of Vera Cheberyak” and that the handwriting matched that of a member of her gang. The affidavit was delivered into Ivanov’s hands on May 6. On May 30, the results of Brazul’s investigation were revealed in the Kiev newspapers and reprinted in papers across the empire. The stories created an unbelievable sensation. “Brazul’s Declaration,” as it was called, threw the prosecution into a state of chaos.
The defense demanded that the indictment be thrown out and the case remanded to the magistrate for a new investigation. Chaplinsky, the chief prosecutor, passionately resisted at first. His communications that May reveal a man in a deep state of anger, even emotional crisis. The case that was to make his reputation was falling apart. The high post in the capital that he craved was slipping from his grasp. He complained that his refusal to reopen the investigation in the face of new evidence was “arousing an outcry in the Yid press.” Yet he had to concede that it was not just the Jews who were against him. “Many influential people at the present time,” he noted with disapproval in a letter to an official, “are unfavorably disposed to the staging of a ritual murder case in court.”
He was di
smayed to hear such an opinion expressed even by people he might otherwise respect. On May 23, Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov recommended to Chaplinsky that Vera Cheberyak be arrested and asked his approval to move ahead and bring her in. Chaplinsky reported to the justice minister that Ivanov “regarded [the evidence] as completely sufficient material for the indictment in the murder not of Mendel Beilis but Vera Cheberyak, Latyshev, Rudzinsky and Singaevsky.” Chaplinsky added, without any explanation or justification, that he had denied Ivanov’s request. On May 28, Chaplinsky wrote in unusually personal terms to deputy justice minister Liadov, the man whose mission to Kiev had signaled the regime’s backing of the case a year earlier. “An onslaught is being conducted [on me] from all sides,” he complained, seeking to convince him to terminate the Beilis case. “I, of course, am not going to take this bait,” he concluded defiantly, “and chase my well-wishers away.”
In resisting the “well-wishers” pushing him to quash the case, he had the full backing of justice minister Shcheglovitov. On June 8, the minister summoned Chaplinsky to St. Petersburg to consult over how to deal with the disastrous turn that the Beilis affair was taking. The two men reconsidered their strategy and decided that delay would work in their favor. They would take the opportunity to rid themselves of the pathetically weak indictment and begin the investigation afresh in the hope of strengthening the case against the accused.
On his return to Kiev, Chaplinsky announced that he was dropping his opposition to withdrawing the original indictment and agreed to have the case remanded back for reinvestigation. On June 19 the Kiev Judicial Chamber acceded to the request. The case was now back to where it had been almost exactly eleven months earlier when Beilis had been dragged from his home in the middle of the night. The court rejected a defense motion for Beilis to be freed on his own recognizance. He remained in prison, in a state of legal limbo, again an unindicted prisoner with limited legal rights.
Chaplinsky had great hopes for the new investigation. He had pushed aside the troublesome Vasily Fenenko, who had fought him at every step, and appointed a new, compliant investigating magistrate who was enthusiastic about making the case against a Jewish suspect. The chief prosecutor was heartened by two important developments that he knew about and the defense did not. First, Vera Cheberyak had formulated a promising new scheme to impugn the integrity of the defense and incriminate Mendel Beilis. Second, he knew that Brazul’s vaunted “independent investigation” was booby-trapped like an anarchist’s bomb: for Karaev and Makhalin, those supposed star witnesses for the defense, were not what they appeared to be.
Makhalin and Karaev were indeed revolutionaries. They presented themselves as classic specimens of the genre: Makhalin, the leftist of the high-minded sort, and Karaev, the radical outlaw. Yet these young men were also commonplace among the denizens of the revolutionary world in one other respect. Makhalin was registered in the files of the Okhrana or secret police under the code name “Deputy.” Karaev was known to the secret police under the rather obvious “Caucasian.” The two men had been—inevitably, one is tempted to say—informers.
The previous fall, Karaev had come under suspicion by his anarchist comrades of working for the Okhrana. His friend Makhalin, whose treachery was still undiscovered by his fellow radicals, organized an internal investigation that assuaged the cadre’s suspicions—raising enough doubts about Karaev’s alleged perfidy that no one felt confident enough of his guilt to kill him.
Karaev, smarting from the mistrust of his fellow revolutionaries, reacted much like Stolypin’s doomed assassin Dimitry Bogrov, who had been exposed by his comrades as an informer. He was looking for a way to cleanse his reputation. In the Beilis investigation he believed that he had found what he needed—except his would not be a suicidal act like Bogrov’s but instead one of regeneration. He would emerge alive, his honor restored, ready to bask in renewed adulation.
At the time Karaev had nearly been unmasked, he was in fact no longer working for the Okhrana. Although he had been receiving one hundred rubles a month for his services and appeared to earn his pay by supplying reliable information, he was let go for behavior judged too unseemly even by Okhrana standards. According to a department report, the information he provided was of serious interest but turned out to be the product of “the methods of the agent provocateur and his inclination to blackmail.” In other words, Karaev had not just tipped off the police about crimes that others had planned; he had entrapped his comrades, luring or coercing them into criminal schemes and setting them up to be arrested.
The prosecution thus had information that could destroy the credibility of these two key defense witnesses. Who would believe the story of two professional informers who had every incentive to lie, who indeed had lied for a living, at least one of whom had been dismissed in disgrace? But would the prosecution be able to use this top secret information in court? It was a question that would be debated intensely behind the scenes and resolved only at the last moment, as the witnesses took the stand.
Vera Cheberyak, in the wake of Brazul’s devastating declaration, decided to cast her lot definitively with the prosecution. Chaplinsky may have wanted to build a case without relying on the notorious villain of Lukianovka, but now he needed her. When it came to credibility in court, Cheberyak surely had her shortcomings, but compared to the witnesses he had, which at present numbered three well-known drunks, she amounted to a gift.
Reacting to Brazul’s report, Chaplinsky’s chief deputy, A. A. Karbovsky, searched frenetically for some way to strengthen the case, reinterviewing key witnesses. On May 14 he questioned Cheberyak. In seven previous depositions to Investigator Fenenko, she had never mentioned Mendel Beilis or said anything about Zhenya and Andrei visiting the Zaitsev factory. In December, her husband, Vasily, had suddenly recalled that Zhenya told him that he and Andrei had been chased away by Beilis, but Vasily did not clearly implicate him. Now, fourteen months after Andrei’s death, Vera suddenly recalled that her son had directly accused Mendel Beilis of the crime. She told Karbovsky:
About a week after Andrusha’s funeral Zhenya told me that he and Andrusha … and other children … on March 12, 1911, played at the Zaitsev factory … At that time Mendel Beilis jumped out with his sons and other Jews. Beilis’s sons ran after Zhenya and Mendel himself chased Andrusha. Zhenya ran away … and saw, in his words, that Mendel Beilis grabbed Andrusha … and dragged him to the [brick] kiln.”
The role of the prosecution in sculpting Cheberyak’s testimony remains a matter of speculation. On June 2, in an unusual step for a man of his position, Chaplinsky had a personal conversation with the witness and had her questioned again by another prosecutor. The historian Alexander Tager, who reviewed three of her depositions in which she recounted her new story, noted substantial inconsistencies among them, suggesting that the prosecution helped shaped her account. Only the final version was made public.
On May 30, Vera Cheberyak came to prosecutors with another striking story. She revealed that, in December of the previous year, the journalist Brazul had taken her to Kharkov to meet with some sort of gentleman for a strange talk about the Yushchinsky case. She described the man as “a Jew, very plump, slightly balding, with bulging eyes and a slight lisp.” It did not take long for the authorities to figure out that this was Arnold Margolin. In her telling, during the meeting she was offered a forty-thousand-ruble bribe to admit to Andrei’s murder. (She was never clear on whether it was Margolin or another participant in the meeting who made the offer.) She was told she could be spirited out of the country to enjoy her new wealth, but even if she had to stand trial, the best lawyers in the empire would have no difficulty securing her acquittal. Thanks to Cheberyak’s allegation, Margolin now had to admit to his meeting with her, which he had wanted to keep secret. He denied the fantastic story of the bribe, but with the state moving to disbar him for his alleged interference in an official investigation, he had no alternative except to resign as Beilis’s attorney. Gruzenberg was livid at his
colleague’s recklessness. The Black Hundreds, not to mention the prosecution, could point to Margolin’s escapade as proof of a Jewish conspiracy to cover up the hideous ritual. This was a disaster for the defense.
The authorities’ next target for harassment was Brazul. In early July, Vera Cheberyak slapped Brazul with a lawsuit claiming injury to her reputation. She also filed libel suits against several newspaper editors who had printed his charges against her. Given the volume of the paperwork and the rapidity with which it was filed, it is inconceivable that Cheberyak mounted this effort on her own; the suits were undoubtedly organized by Chaplinsky’s office to bolster her credibility as a witness.
The prosecutor and his superiors then turned their attention toward neutralizing Nikolai Krasovsky, who had for so long been such a nuisance. Krasovsky was unemployed, but he was a free man and a threat. In the eyes of the public he was still the great detective who had cracked so many unsolvable cases and was now receiving encomiums in the liberal and enlightened conservative press for revealing the true killers of Andrei Yushchinsky. This could not stand. On July 17 he was confronted by police officers and read a list of charges against him. He was now criminally accused of improperly arresting the peasant Kovbasa, the purported offense that had gotten him fired from the police force. He was charged with destroying official paperwork regarding his assessment of an unpaid tax in the amount of sixteen kopeks from a citizen in 1903. (The implication was that he had pocketed the money.) Most absurdly, he was being investigated for stealing a winning lottery ticket while conducting a search (whether of a person or someone’s premises is not clear). The man who people were calling the Sherlock Holmes of Russia was under arrest.
A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel Page 23