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

by Levin, Edmund

  Surprisingly, both Gruzenberg and Beilis’s original attorney, Arnold Margolin, had something of a soft spot for Shmakov, whom they very generously credited with a misguided but genuine sort of integrity. For Margolin, the corpulent, elderly Shmakov “reminded one of a clumsy, sulky bear” who was “fair and honest in his fashion.” Gruzenberg wrote in his memoirs that Shmakov “was not by nature a malicious man … but rather one who had been completely possessed by a blind anti-Semitism.” As for Zamyslovsky, they simply found him “exceptionally vile,” a careerist and conniver who believed that he could turn fame from the Beilis case to his professional and material advantage.

  As for the four members of the judicial panel, only its impressively bearded chairman, Judge Fyodor Boldyrev, was of any importance. Karabchevsky had a low opinion of him—in fact, he had been making fun of this very man for most of his life without realizing it. Decades earlier Karabchevsky had been faced in a case by an insecure and incompetent prosecutor whom he remembered only as “Fedya” (the diminutive of Fyodor—the equivalent of “Teddy”). Before that trial, Fedya’s wife had paid Karabchevsky an unexpected call, imploring him to go easy on her husband and perhaps even give him a few pointers so he could at least give a respectable performance against his already celebrated young opponent. After that, Fedya had entered the lexicon of Karabchevsky and his circle. As in, “Could you believe that Fedya today?” Or, “That fellow was quite a Fedya.” But he had lost track of the real fellow entirely until one day he realized that the chief judge in this strange case was, astonishingly, the Fedya of legend.

  Boldyrev, somewhat inexplicably to outside observers, had been drafted for the case from a provincial court in the small city of Uman, about a hundred miles south of Kiev. His main qualification arose from a secret report assuring the authorities of his “firmly right-wing convictions.” Unbeknown to Karabchevsky and Gruzenberg, justice minister Ivan Shcheglovitov had promised Boldyrev the chairmanship of Kiev’s highest court, the Judicial Chamber. Boldyrev surely understood that the promotion was contingent upon his satisfactory conduct of the case. As the trial approached, a police agent reported that the judge was said to be in a highly anxious state “and had even undergone a special course of hydrotherapy.” Given the stakes for Boldyrev, his anxiety was understandable. The treatment seems to have been effective. Throughout the proceedings, Fyodor “Fedya” Boldyrev maintained his august judicial demeanor.

  By the time Beilis sat himself down in the prisoner’s dock, hope had left him. He stayed motionless for quite a while, staring at the jury. Then he turned to his left, glancing at his wife, Esther, in the front row, dressed in black, her head wrapped in a black lace scarf. From time to time he lifted his spectacles to wipe away tears with a handkerchief.

  The first two hours were taken up with maddening technicalities and bickering. The defense and prosecution teams argued over where they would sit. The defense objected when the prosecution was placed too close to the jury. The prosecution objected when it was seated next to the defense, complaining that the defense would overhear its conversations. Waving his hand contemptuously, Karabchevsky told them, “Your conversations interest us little.” The session could not begin until all witnesses were present, but Ulyana Shakhovskaya, the Lamplighter’s wife, was not to be found. The police tracked her down, roaming the streets drunk, and dragged her into court. At 2:28 p.m. a bailiff finally shouted, “Court is in session!”

  The judge began by questioning Mendel Beilis.

  “What is your name?”

  “Menahem Mendel Tevyev Beilis.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-nine.”

  “How many children do you have?”

  “Five.”

  “Your place of permanent residence is Kiev?”

  “Kiev.”

  “Are you a Jew?”

  Observers remarked that Beilis now spoke up noticeably, answering the question more loudly than the judge had asked it. “I did not recognize my own voice when I answered,” Beilis wrote later. He felt himself almost shouting:

  “Yes, a Jew!”

  The question about religion betrayed no special prejudice. The judge questioned all the witnesses in similar fashion and each was sworn in by a clergyman of his or her faith—Jews by a rabbi, Catholics by a Catholic priest, and so forth. The judge reprimanded the rabbi for adding, after swearing in his first witness, “May your testimony shed light on the truth.” The words were not relevant to the oath, the judge admonished. Thereafter the rabbi hewed to the oath as written.

  Vera Cheberyak, small and thin, wearing a fashionable hat with yellow feathers, attracted the most attention. Impressions of her vary. Some found her beautiful, some not. All found her compelling. Nabokov, writing in Speech, described her as “dark-complexioned, with thick sensuous lips and an energetic chin.” Hers was an ordinary face, one you might pass by without giving a second glance, yet somehow also one you would never forget. Many commented on her distinctive, sharp body movements and large, dark, constantly darting eyes (“beautiful, restlessly wandering” in one mesmerized reporter’s description). When she was called to the witness stand—literally a stand, as all witnesses, unless infirm, stood while testifying—the judge asked her, “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” For once, Cheberyak looked cowed. She lowered her head and said nothing. The judge took the gesture as an affirmative response and it was entered into the record that she had been convicted of defrauding her local grocer and sentenced to a prison term. From the defense’s point of view, it was a good start—at least the jury would know this witness was a criminal.

  By the end of the session, which ran late into the evening, the proceedings were already taking a physical toll. Vera Cheberyak had fainted and several child witnesses had also collapsed, from hunger (the court had neglected to make provision to feed them). Beilis recalled that by the time he was led out of the courtroom, he himself was “near to fainting from boredom and exhaustion.”

  Upon returning to his cell, he found it pleasantly altered. Instead of a dirty mattress on the floor, there was now a nice cot. Moreover, he recalled, “all the guards acted like old friends.” Apparently the order had been given to treat him better and ensure he presented himself as a robust defendant. The regime knew the world was watching.

  The next morning Beilis’s journey from prison occasioned far less commotion than it had on the first day. Out of the small window of his carriage, unobstructed by crowds, Beilis could see the unreeling ribbon of pastel-painted plaster facades—yellow, blue, green, red, pink—of the low two- and three-story buildings so characteristic of Kiev and other cities in the empire. A final turn brought the conveyance back to the courthouse, an irregular pinkish brick polygon four stories high, occupying the better part of a city block. As if by an architect’s oversight, it lacked a grand entrance to impress the beholder with the power and authority of justice. The guards led Beilis in through one of its nondescript doorways and up stairs and down dimly lit corridors to the courtroom where, after more than two years of waiting for this moment, he would finally make his plea.

  Beilis sat nervously in the dock, his back to the row of windows, so strangely incapable of providing ventilation, but offering a beautiful view of the “many-tiered honeycomb” of the city, as the writer Mikhail Bulgakov called it, with the leaves just turning color, against the clear blue sky. He didn’t know where to put his hands, kept wiping his sweaty palms, squinted frequently at the crowd, and could not restrain his tears. Russian trials provided for no opening statements by the prosecution and defense. Instead, the indictment was read aloud. One of the assistant judges read it slowly, in a strong, clear voice that overcame the bad acoustics. Beilis, though he had read the document many times, listened attentively.

  Then chief judge Boldyrev turned to Beilis and asked him: “Do you admit your guilt in conspiring with other persons unknown, with the premeditated goal, out of motives of religious fanaticism, for ritual purposes, to deprive A
ndrei Yushchinsky of his life on March 12, 1911 … gagging him, and killing him … by inflicting forty-seven wounds on his head, neck and torso with a pointed instrument, causing injuries to veins in the brain and neck, arteries in the left temple and injuries to the dura mater [the outermost brain membrane], the liver, the right kidney, the lungs and heart—which injuries, accompanied by painful and prolonged suffering, resulted in the almost complete draining of blood from Yushchinsky’s body?”

  Beilis responded, “No, I am not guilty. I was a soldier, then I earned my living by honest work and raised my children. Suddenly I was taken, arrested, held in prison. Why I do not know. Nothing was …” Boldryev interrupted him, saying explanations were not appropriate at this time but that he would be free to speak his piece later and even question witnesses.

  Beilis had been able to control himself during his plea, but as his attorneys argued with the judge, he put his head to his knees and erupted in loud, deeply resonant sobs. The passionate wailing filtered through the still air all the way up to the gallery where it was heard as a dull room-filling drone. Beilis’s sobs would punctuate the proceedings every few days. The eruptions could come at any moment—during testimony by a witness for the defense or for the prosecution or a dispute over a procedural matter. The judge would ask the defendant if he needed some time. Beilis would invariably say no, to please let things proceed. His sobs visibly discomfited the judges and court officers. They brought tears to the eyes of some spectators. But the noted Yiddish writer S. Ansky, who covered the trial, wrote, “It is clear that Beilis is not a broken man.” He wore an “expression of suffering—but not of a timid or submissive person, but of an indignant one.”

  The first witness was Andrei’s mother, Alexandra Prikhodko, a woman of about thirty-five, her long hair plaited in a braid. Given her mistreatment of her son, her testimony was poignantly double-edged, honest grief mixed with unspoken regret. “Andrei was illegitimate. Did you love him just as you did your other children?” the prosecution asked. “More than any of them,” she answered. Andrei’s maternal grandmother, Olympiada Nezhinskaya, notably refused to say anything against the Jews. It seemed Andrei had a Jewish friend, Gershik Arendar. “Did you take any notice of the fact that he was friends with a Jewish boy?” the prosecution asked. “No,” she answered. Had she asked the police if “maybe the Jews killed him?” Again, no.

  The initial witnesses were wholly irrelevant to the question of Mendel Beilis’s guilt. After a few days, the left-wing activist Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, writing in Kiev Opinion, mockingly declared, “We must inform our readers of an exceptionally important and interesting piece of news: Beilis has ceased to be the defendant!” Beilis’s odd status as a nonentity at his own trial was one of the most widely commented on aspects of the proceedings. Nabokov’s colleague at Speech, Stepan Kondurushkin, noted that one could sit in the courtroom for hours on end, even a whole day, without knowing who was on trial. One of the two police officials filing daily reports noted: “The trial is making a strange impression: over the course of three days, no one is interested in Beilis.”

  Also prominent in the first days was the testimony of a series of squirming police officers who tried to explain away their mishandling of the crime scene. It often seemed, many observers noted, as if the Kiev police were on trial. Andrei’s mother, stepfather, and grandmother recounted in detail their weeks of torment at the hands of detectives Mishchuk and Krasovsky. The prosecution broadly hinted that some sort of Jewish conspiracy was at work in misleading the police.

  A series of Andrei’s friends and schoolmates, bashful, stammering boys tugging at their trousers and the hems of their jackets, spoke of their friend. Gershik testified how Andrei had shared his fantasies about his real father, who would surely call for him one day. He also told of how he had once given his friend the best possible present, a toy gun that used gunpowder and could shoot real bullets (ones you had to cast yourself out of melted lead). When cross-examining Gershik’s father, Gruzenberg brought up that Russian children often played with Jewish ones on the streets of the Slobodka suburb. “And none of them disappeared?” he asked. To which the man replied, of course not.

  The prosecution made much of an old Jew named Tartakovsky who roomed with the Arendars and was said to be devastated by Andrei’s death. An old man with no family took a shine to a young boy and was stricken with grief at his murder—something was suspicious here. As for the poor man’s subsequent death from choking on a bone during a meal, the prosecution hinted at a Jewish cabal.

  Zarudny popped up with continual objections, which had their intended effect. Vipper, the state prosecutor, would try to adopt a sarcastic and haughty air but often looked jumpy, unnerved, and even disoriented. Shmakov, on the other hand—fat, slow-moving, with an old man’s muttering tone—maintained his sarcastic composure. “Every time I say something about Jews Mr. Zarudny asks for it to be entered into the record,” he cracked at one point. “So the whole record is going to be scribbled over entirely with Jews!”

  On the morning of the third day, people swarmed Kiev’s newspaper stalls. The most sensational event of the trial’s opening phase had occurred not inside the courtroom but outside it, in the form of the lead article on the front page of the Kievan by the paper’s editor, Vasily Shulgin—a full-blown attack on the prosecution. Demand for copies colossally outstripped supply. Newspaper sellers made a killing as customers paid a ruble just to read the issue while standing at the stall. The defense bought an early copy for three rubles. The price quickly went up to five. By evening the issue had been confiscated by the government and copies were going for fifteen rubles.

  Shulgin was one of the most intriguing figures in the entire Beilis affair: a brilliant journalist, a member of the Duma, an uncompromising opponent of the blood accusation, a convinced monarchist, and a die-hard anti-Semite who believed the Jews were a pernicious, exploitative force that needed to remain suppressed. He also thought the trial was an offense to anyone’s sense of justice. He thundered:

  The Beilis indictment is not simply an indictment of one man, but an indictment of an entire people for one of the most heinous of crimes, the indictment of an entire religion for one of the most infamous superstitions…

  One doesn’t have to be a lawyer, but need only have some common sense, to understand that the Beilis indictment is mere prattle which any defense attorney could break down without even trying.

  Shulgin attacked chief Kiev prosecutor Grigory Chaplinsky for removing Detectives Mishchuk and Krasovsky from the case for their refusal to hunt down a man merely because he was a Jew. “The entire police force,” he wrote, “terrorized by the actions of the judicial chamber’s prosecutor, realized that anyone who uttered a word … other than what the authorities wanted to hear … would immediately be thrown in prison.” Risking prosecution for criminal libel, he concluded, “We assert that the prosecutor of the judicial chamber, Privy Councillor Grigory Gavrilovich Chaplinsky, intimidated his subordinates and choked off all attempts to cast light on the case.”

  Shulgin had shockingly accused the regime of conspiring to convict an innocent man. Accounts of the article, though not the full text, were printed in papers across the empire. This was the “J’accuse” moment of the Beilis case. Unlike Émile Zola’s famous broadside in the Dreyfus case in France, it did not exactly fuel a movement. But it did have an enormous impact on educated public opinion. “Look at what Shulgin says …” was a trump argument for those trying to convince their friends that the prosecution of the brick-factory clerk was a travesty of justice.

  The Beilis case had become a dangerous rallying point for opponents of the regime. After Shulgin’s article came out, the security apparatus stepped up efforts to harass the press, ultimately punishing 102 papers. Six editors were arrested, thirty-six issues of various papers were confiscated, three papers were closed for the duration of the trial, and forty-three were fined a total of 12,850 rubles. The punishments, invariably “for an attempt to
inflammatorily influence the public,” were all illegal because none of the material targeted was inflammatory, a fact tsarist officials admitted in secret communications. Moreover, the punishments inflicted were haphazard and ineffectual. (What, really, could be achieved by fining Nabokov, coeditor of Speech, a hundred rubles?) The attacks on the press were part of a larger—and largely futile—attempt to maintain public order. Russia was in the middle of an escalating wave of strikes, which would continue for another eleven months until the first shots of the Great War. Countless groups of striking workers adopted pro-Beilis resolutions. A demonstration of several thousand workers in Warsaw—Poland was then part of the Russian Empire—had to be broken up by the police. Strikes of Jewish workers in support of Beilis broke out in Vilnius, Riga, and Minsk. University students across Russia held one-day protest strikes. At St. Petersburg University, following Shulgin’s example, right-wing students posted a letter declaring that, although they considered the Jews to be “a harmful nation,” they could not support “the unjust charge of ritual murder.”

  As for violent attacks on Jews, there were scattered incidents, but the regime—greatly concerned, in general, with suppressing all violence—was quite successful in preventing anti-Jewish retribution. The trial was a moral assault on the Jewish people, but Jews were relatively safe from bodily harm—for the time being.

  The trial of Mendel Beilis was, both literally and figuratively, a messy and disorderly affair. With the passing days, cigarette butts, spittle stains, and other rubbish accumulated in the hallways. (Visitors ignored the numerous “Please Do Not …” signs staring reproachfully from the walls.) Inside the courtroom, witnesses for the defense and prosecution were often mixed together in no sensible pattern, called in no particular order, and even for no apparent reason. (In the Russian system, witnesses were called by the judge, who did the initial questioning, and were not identified to the jury as testifying for one side or the other.) Quite a few prosecution witnesses were asked only, “Do you know anything about this case,” said no, and were excused. On the evening of the fourth day, September 28, amid a run of wholly irrelevant witnesses, the judge called to the stand Mikhail Nakonechny. The erratic course of the trial had abruptly brought it to one of the strongest witnesses for the defense and perhaps the only one whom Beilis’s supporters could rightly call a hero.