Beilis might have slept less well had he known of the ordeals that his quartet of would-be saviors—all of them key witnesses for the defense—were enduring in those same weeks. Nikolai Krasovsky was unemployed, with no means of supporting his family. Though the persistent detective had been exonerated of all of the criminal charges against him, he was still reprimanded for “failure to observe formalities” in the matter of detaining the peasant Kovbasa. His arrest of that fellow, for belonging to an illegal political organization, had been justified, at least according to the standards of Russian law at that time. That the police later saw fit to rearrest Kovbasa did nothing to help Krasovsky, who remained banned from serving on the force.
Still hanging over the head of the journalist Stepan Brazul-Brushkovsky was an accusation of criminal libel by Vera Cheberyak, which threatened to land him in prison. However, the state had wisely moved to postpone the libel proceedings until after Beilis’s trial. After all, what if Brazul won? A victory would strengthen his credibility and tarnish a star prosecution witness. It apparently took some time to find a suitably absurd charge to lay Brazul low in time for the trial. In July, an army officer lodged a complaint with the authorities, swearing that he had witnessed Brazul in a Kiev public park rising to his feet the first two times the national anthem was played and remaining seated for the third. Brazul was charged with lèse-majesté—affronting the dignity of the emperor—and sentenced to a year in a fortress, standard punishment venue for political prisoners, where strict solitary confinement was the rule.
After his arrest in July 1912, the anarchist Amzor Karaev had been sentenced to five years of exile in a remote village in south-central Siberia thirty-five hundred miles from Kiev. He had sworn in an affidavit that Vera Cheberyak’s half brother, Peter Singaevsky, had confessed to him his role in the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky. As a witness duly subpoenaed by the defense, the state was duty bound to deliver him to the courtroom. But on August 30, Karaev wrote a letter to Krasovsky informing him that he was convinced the prosecution would make every effort to keep him from testifying. He was determined to come to Kiev on his own: in other words, to leave illegally. Escape from exile was relatively easy in tsarist Russia. It would have been much easier had he not written a letter to a man who he should have realized was almost surely under police surveillance. (Sometimes it seems as if Karaev was not completely sane.) The letter to Krasovsky was, of course, intercepted and the secret police had Karaev arrested for planning to escape.
Only Sergei Makhalin, Karaev’s partner in attempting to hoodwink a confession out of Singaevsky, had a relatively easy time of it, having made himself scarce by leaving Kiev. He had come into a modest legacy from his grandfather, enabling him to give up tutoring. He devoted himself now to his operatic training and indulging his taste for dandyish getups, which would attract much attention at the trial.
Very early on the morning of September 25, the racket of the thirteen locks came as sweet sounds to Mendel Beilis’s ears. A guard opened the cell door and took him to the prison office. There laid out for him was his old blue suit, which he had not seen for two and a half years. He was taken aback by the powerful effect the sight of it had on him. In the worn pieces of cloth he saw his freedom. A guard told him to don the suit, which he did gladly. Everyone was suddenly friendly toward him. The guard helped him on with his clothes and the prison officials escorted him to his carriage, Beilis recalled, “as if they were accompanying a groom.” It felt as if something magical had happened.
“Mr. Beilis,” the warden told him, “go in good health, and do not forget us.” The prison officials were calling him “Mister,” treating him like a human being. This was unexpected. Perhaps, he thought, this was a good sign. He was led to a coach surrounded by a dozen policemen on horseback. Beilis joked that anyone else would have to pay two hundred rubles for such royal treatment, but they were giving it to him for nothing. Everyone laughed.
Once inside the coach he looked out the window. Large numbers of people lined the streets the entire way to the courthouse. At first the crowds frightened him, but he was soon moved to tears. People cheered, doffed their hats, and waved handkerchiefs. Most were university students, but there were hundreds of others—men, women, children. He had heard that people supported him, but this was the first time he had seen it with his own eyes. They were everywhere straining to catch sight of him, looking out of their windows, even on rooftops. Some, it was true, were not well-wishers: he could recognize a good number of Black Hundreds by their badges. The entire route was lined with mounted Cossacks, to ensure that there was no disorder. When the crowds surged too close to the coach, the Cossacks drove them back, snapping their whips.
The carriage drew up to the courthouse on St. Sophia Square, across from the thirteen-domed cathedral where Andrei Yushchinsky had once studied, hoping to become a priest. Beilis jumped out, telling the driver, “I will pay you on my way back.” Again, people laughed. He was led through long corridors to a room that he was disappointed to find was only a waiting area for prisoners.
After a short while, a tall man with a beautiful head of gray hair, theatrically swept back, entered the room. Nikolai Karabchevsky was widely regarded as Russia’s foremost defense attorney. He had joined the defense team the year before, but Beilis was meeting him for the first time. Like everyone who met Karabchevsky, Beilis was struck by his imposing physical appearance. “It was as if a strong light had penetrated the room,” Beilis would say. Karabchevsky introduced himself but did not move to shake his hand, explaining that the authorities had ordered the defense team to stay at least three steps away from the defendant. It was outrageous, but they had to obey the rule for now. The attorney made sure Beilis was brought cigarettes and a meal from the court restaurant. Greatly fortified, Beilis remained in the waiting room for three hours until a small door opened and his guards led him into the courtroom. The trial was at last about to begin.
9
“Yes, a Jew!”
At around noon on October 25, 1913, Mendel Beilis, surrounded by guards, found himself in an oblong courtroom, with large windows on one side, big enough to seat two hundred people. Behind the judges’ bench, draped in crimson, sat four robed men, one of them with a magnificent gray beard parted in the middle to form two downy wings. Above, in the gallery, the four dozen Russian and foreign journalists fortunate enough to receive passes sat cramped together at tiny lecterns.
“A place can scarcely be found on the globe where people who know how to read are not aware of the Beilis case and do not have an opinion about it,” observed Vladimir D. Nabokov, a prominent liberal opponent of the regime (and the father of the novelist), who covered the trial for the newspaper Speech. Indeed, Mendel Beilis, dressed in his comforting old blue suit, approached the dock as the defendant in what was now undoubtedly the most notorious trial of the young century. In fact, the only legal case of the age to rival Beilis’s in worldwide attention and perceived significance had been that of another Jew, the French officer Alfred Dreyfus, who had been accused of passing secrets to the Germans, and whose identity as a Jew had been the primary source of contention around the justice he received.
Dreyfus’s two trials for treason, in 1894 and 1899, had occurred behind closed doors, but the proceedings against Beilis were public, attracting 150 news organizations, most of them foreign. At the main telegraph office, forty employees had been hired and extra lines installed to handle the increased traffic, but at the courthouse the facilities were inadequate. The acoustics were poor and, despite rumbling electric fans, the ventilation miserable. No matter the weather outside, the courtroom was oppressive and the air fetid. More than one witness would faint during the trial. Court was in session twelve to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, with a half-day break on Sundays the only respite.
Beilis exchanged a few words with his attorneys, men he had been told were the best lawyers in the land. Surely, he thought, they would not let him perish. Then he was seated in the
dock, perpendicular to the right side of the judge’s bench, and looked at the jurors, directly opposite him, across the width of the room. His heart sank. He had imagined the twelve men who would judge him would be people like his attorneys—educated and respectable citizens. But before him he saw mostly simple peasants, with bowl haircuts, some even wearing caftans tied at the waist, the traditional village garb. These were the ones who would decide his fate? Even apart from any prejudices they might have, how could they possibly understand the learned testimony of university professors? In Russian courts, verdicts were decided by majority vote. (A tie would mean acquittal.) Just seven of these men could destroy his life.
The composition of the jury stunned the liberal press, too. All adult males were eligible for jury duty, but Kiev was a university center, and a jury this uneducated was unheard of. In all, seven of the jurors were officially classified as “peasants.” Two were “townsmen” or “petty bourgeois” (the estate to which Beilis himself belonged and which included ordinary working folk). Three were “officials,” a category that encompassed nearly anyone who worked in a government office and held a pen.
The jury had almost certainly been rigged, at least as much as was possible, primarily through restricting which citizens were allowed onto the panel from which the final twelve were chosen. The previous year, the justice minister had sent out a secret order that the regime’s opponents—“strangers to the high aims of justice”—should be expunged from the jury rolls. In practice, this meant excluding many educated citizens. For the Beilis trial, someone had apparently taken that directive to an extreme. The thirty-three-member panel had only four people of any education. No direct evidence of jury-rigging ever surfaced, but in other panels chosen in the courthouse at the same time, the educated contingent was about three times as great.
What is certain is that, after the panel was selected, interior minister Nikolai Maklakov made an illegal and risky move: he ordered the secret police to put all prospective jurors under surveillance. Eight days before the trial began, the chief of the imperial Department of Police, Stepan Beletsky, sent a coded telegram to the Kiev authorities ordering the Kiev Gendarmes to place the panel “under the closest, most careful, and most competent observation” and gather information “for judging [their] state of mind.” A senior agent in Kiev warned his superiors that the effort was futile and, if discovered, would surely cause a public scandal. He was ignored. The initial surveillance in fact yielded no useful material. But when the twelve final jurors were sequestered in courthouse apartments for the trial’s duration, the interior minister had twenty-three agents, some of them masquerading as court pages, keeping them under close watch and listening in on their conversations.
Mendel Beilis’s five-member defense team, which worked pro bono, were the greatest collection of Russian legal luminaries ever assembled to defend a single man. The head of the team, and its only Jewish member, was Oskar Gruzenberg. The leadership role was somewhat unsuited to his temperament. He admitted in his memoirs that “my bellicose character and my inability (or rather my unwillingness) to smooth off the sharp edges frequently made me unbearable.” He had often been threatened with disciplinary action after an altercation with prosecutors and judges and was so intemperate that he had once penned a grossly insulting letter about a minister of justice that was certain to be opened and read by the police (the letter was addressed to a prisoner). His colleagues in the bar emphatically agreed that he could be quarrelsome and domineering, but he was undoubtedly a great attorney and one of the few who had experience with a ritual murder accusation, having successfully defended the Vilna barber David Blondes a decade earlier.
Gruzenberg would share the greater part of the cross-examination duties with Nikolai Karabchevsky, who was not merely an eminent attorney but a national celebrity. At sixty-two, he was still an attractive man, carried himself like a romantic hero, and enjoyed a legion of female fans. The court enthusiasts known as “legal ladies” would take in his trials as they would the theater, so transporting did they find his orations. Gruzenberg thought Karabchevsky was overrated as an orator, but he had achieved some astounding victories, with a special genius for defending admittedly guilty clients in sensational murder cases: a man obsessed with a prostitute whom he killed in a rage when she refused his offer of marriage; a young woman who shot to death her sadistic lover; an Armenian who fatally stabbed the Turk who had massacred his family after running into him in a coffeehouse years later. (The two men were acquitted, and the woman got off with a token sentence.)
Karabchevsky loved receiving large fees but gave much of his money away, had a strong social conscience, and represented many clients pro bono, including Jewish victims of pogroms, in civil suits. He defended the most violent opponents of the regime. His most stirring moment was surely his summation in the 1904 trial of Egor Sazonov, who had assassinated the brutal and widely despised interior minister Viacheslav Plehve. Karabchevsky boldly attacked Sazonov’s victim, essentially arguing that killing a butcher such as Plehve could not properly be considered murder. “And grasping the bomb with trembling hands,” Karabchevsky declared, “[Sazonov] believed that it was not so much filled with dynamite and fulminate of mercury, as with the tears, sorrow, and calamity of his people. And when the shards of the bomb exploded and scattered, it seemed to him that it was the clanking and breaking of the chains which had been binding the Russian people.” That a political moderate like Karabchevsky could so passionately defend a terrorist is a striking indication of the progressive elite’s profound alienation from the regime. The court, which reacted to his speech with public hostility, may have been more like-minded than it let on. It spared Sazonov the noose, sentencing him to a life of hard labor.
Some of Karabchevsky’s gifts were, unfortunately, of limited use in the trial about to get under way in Division 10 of the Kiev Circuit Court. The great attorney was a virtuoso of melodramatic rhetoric that bewitched enlightened judges and cultured jurors steeped in Russian and world literature. (His summation in defense of the Armenian killer quoted Gibbon.) To win over this jury, he would have to adjust his natural style.
The third attorney, Alexander Zarudny, was a small, bearded man of fifty who appeared so unimposing that a friend once joked that one had to look closely to notice him. Yet he was renowned for his tireless work defending political prisoners. Gruzenberg likened him to a one-man rescue team who raced along icy and dangerous legal roads from one political case to another. The two men had defended members of the revolutionary 1905 St. Petersburg Soviet, including its leader, Leon Trotsky. Zarudny, though unprepossessing, was quite capable of making himself noticed. He would have a secondary role in the questioning in the Beilis case but would regularly explode with cries of “Objection!” and “I request this be noted in the record!” His objections were meant to keep the prosecution off balance and help lay the grounds for an appeal, should one become necessary, but his demeanor risked alienating the jury. Gruzenberg found him to be a brilliant orator at his best, but uneven, while Karabchevsky likened Zarudny’s arguments to moves in chess that skipped over squares, forcing the listener to strain to sort out the speaker’s logical steps.
Soon to arrive from St. Petersburg was perhaps the most intellectually brilliant member of Beilis’s legal team, Vasily Maklakov. A prominent advocate for revolutionary defendants, Maklakov was also a member the Duma, where he belonged to the Kadet or Constitutional Democratic faction that sought to transform Russia into a state based on the rule of law. Maklakov personified the extreme division rending the upper levels of Russian society: his younger brother, the reactionary and anti-Semitic Nikolai Maklakov, was the minster of the interior actively conspiring to convict Mendel Beilis. (The brothers lived on neighboring estates but, not surprisingly, had not spoken in nearly two decades.) At forty-four, Vasily Maklakov was one of a younger breed of attorneys who adopted a more plainspoken style than his elders. By the end of the trial some would think Beilis’s freedom hinged on th
e effectiveness of Maklakov’s summation.
Rounding out the team was the respected Kiev attorney Dimitry Grigorovich-Barsky, who had often visited Beilis in prison. He had something of a personal interest in the case. As a prosecutor, he had been involved in the failed effort to convict Vera Cheberyak in the blinding of her former lover, Pavel Mifle, seven years earlier. He would now have a chance to face her again and, if not convict her, then at least hold her accountable for an even more terrible crime.
The prosecution was composed of far less eminent figures. Technically, there was only one prosecutor, Oskar Vipper. A thin, tense greyhound of a man, Vipper was an assistant prosecutor of the St. Petersburg Judicial Chamber, the capital’s highest court. Why he had been especially selected for this case is not completely clear. Gruzenberg thought Vipper lacking talent, but the Kievan, which opposed the case, rated him as moderately competent.
Vipper was joined by Georgy Zamyslovsky, a far-right-wing member of the Duma, and Alexei Shmakov, a notoriously and proudly anti-Semitic attorney and Moscow city council member, who decorated his study with pictures of Jewish noses. Shmakov was the author of some of the most popular Russian works on the supposed global Jewish conspiracy, most recently The International Secret Government (Revised and Expanded Edition), in which he wrote, “In the world there exist not fifteen million Jews … but one Jew copied fifteen million times.” The two men were technically “attorneys for the civil plaintiff,” representing Andrei Yushchinsky’s mother, but they functioned as co-prosecutors (and will be referred to hereafter as the “civil prosecutors”). Under Russian law, a criminal trial and a civil suit for damages could be combined. The two attorneys were seeking five thousand rubles (about a decade’s worth of his old salary) from the virtually penniless defendant.
A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel Page 27