A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (39 page)

Beilis observed everything through the tiny window of his carriage. When the judge asked if he wished to be present during the examination of the various sites to be visited, he said, “Yes, yes,” and stepped onto the ground of his old neighborhood. Seeing some familiar faces, he doffed his cap and bowed.

At Vera Cheberyak’s old building, two boys were recruited to perform a test. They went up to her apartment on the second floor with a policeman and re-created Andrei’s supposed screams. One could indeed hear what was going on upstairs, which meant that the Cheberyaks’ downstairs neighbor,
Zinaida Malitskaya, could have discerned Andrei’s final cries and the shuffling of feet overhead. (“They were like a
dancing couple,” she testified in court, “as if they were doing a step, first in one direction and then in the other.”)

As Beilis walked the familiar streets, the crowd grew larger and noisier. The police could not keep the people away. Beilis was bowing often now. People shouted excitedly, “Beilis! Beilis!” He smiled, with tears coming to his eyes. The procession stopped at his former home at the edge of the Zaitsev factory. Did Beilis want to go into his old apartment? “I want to, I want to,” he said, tearing up again. After examining the premises, where his family no longer lived, the party proceeded to
the factory, surveying the famous clay grinders and the kiln into which the “men with black beards” had supposedly dragged their victim. “Everything is the same!”
Beilis exclaimed.

In fact, however, one thing had changed. Two years earlier, when Detective Mishchuk had visited Lukianovka in search of witnesses, he had been disappointed that Andrei’s playmates had refused to talk about their dead friend. They had seemed to want to forget him. But
Vladimir Korolenko, who covered the trial for the national newspaper the
Russian Gazette,
had found it easy to strike up a conversation with some children, evoking a flood of memories. “
Of course, we knew him!” they said. “How many times we played with him on the clay grinders together!” “When we played with toy soldiers, he always returned everything, never stole any.” (Unlike Vera Cheberyak’s Zhenya, who would steal and then say, “That’s mine.”) “He was very handy. He knew how to cast toy cannons in sand molds.” “He was such a good boy!” Now, everyone wanted to talk about Andrei.

At the cave where the boy’s body had been found, the shrub-strewn incline was so steep that weaker members of the party had to link arms with a steadier partner. The cave was lit by a flashlight, which observers said cast a spooky glow. The jurors entered it one at a time, each shaking the dust off his clothes as he came out. Now it was raining, and by the time they reboarded their vehicles, the court procession was drenched.
Vipper the prosecutor fretted he might fall ill and cause a delay in the trial. Beilis got into his coach for the ride back to prison, his homecoming at an end.

On the morning of the trial’s seventh day, the judge summoned Anna “the Wolf” Zakharova, and a flabby barrel of an old woman dressed in rags
shambled toward the bench. Anna, according to Shakhovskaya (in at least one version of her story), had said she’d seen Andrei dragged off by a man with a black beard. In a sworn deposition, the old woman had denied she’d seen or said any such thing. Yet as she reached the witness stand, the prosecutor rose to his feet with an
air of hopeful confidence.

The testimony reads like a cross-examination by the defense, even though the prosecutor asked all but the first question, which was posed by the judge.

“
What do you know about this case?”

“I don’t know anything.”

“Did you tell Ulyana Shakhovskaya that on the 12th of March you saw how a boy at the Zaitsev factory was grabbed by a man with a black beard?”

“No, I didn’t tell her that.”

“Where do you sleep at night?”

“Wherever I can.”

“Do you drink?”

“I drink a little.”
(Laughter in the hall)

“Did the detectives question you?”

“Yes. I said that I didn’t say anything, I didn’t know anything.”

“So Ulyana [Shakhovskaya] made up everything?”

“Yes, she made it up herself.”

“And do you like to babble when you drink?”

“No, I don’t like to.”

Twice during her testimony, to the laughter of the audience, Anna started wandering away from the stand, only to be steered back by a bailiff. Vipper, irritated, wrapped up his examination.

“Do you prefer to be silent or to speak?” he asked.

“I like to be silent more,” she said.

“There you go!” he said, pouncing as if she had betrayed the truth. The witness, he implied, had been pressured into silence. The defense declined to ask any questions, considering it unnecessary. The judge called Shakhovskaya to the stand for an “eye-to-eye” confrontation with “the Wolf.” The two women started heatedly gibbering at each other, again to titters from the crowd. When the court was done with her, Anna shuffled off,
crossing herself with great relief. In the wake of Anna the Wolf’s testimony, the correspondent for the
Times
of London wrote, “The last of the prosecution’s patchwork evidence against Beilis, derived admittedly from thieves and drunkards, has thus disappeared and it seems incredible that the imperial authorities will allow this
nauseous case to proceed further.”

At this point in the trial, the incredulous spectator could rightfully ask not only how the case could go on, but how the prosecution could conduct the case in such a way as to inevitably attract ridicule. The prosecutors were reasonably intelligent men. The case was closely supervised by justice minister Shcheglovitov who, whatever his flaws, was a highly sophisticated jurist. In its discovery procedures, the
Russian judicial system was fairly thorough; all the key witnesses had been deposed in advance, sometimes on multiple occasions. The prosecution
knew
what Anna the Wolf and the Lamplighters would say, yet relied on them nonetheless.

In the history of the blood accusation, the prosecutors of Mendel
Beilis stand out for their fumbling inability to craft a convincing narrative of guilt. Critics invariably called the Beilis case “medieval,” but the comparison was misleading. Ritual-murder prosecutions of centuries past often achieved a kind of persuasive power. The twelfth-century monk
Thomas of Monmouth, the originator of the ritual-murder myth, set a high standard; in
The Life and Miracles of Saint
William of Norwich
he builds his case against the Jews quite compellingly. In its narrative art, the work is something of a masterpiece. For pure storytelling, the 1475 trial of twenty-three Jews for the murder of little
Simon of Trent overwhelms with its brutal logic, as the prosecutors extract ever more detailed confessions from the accused. (The torture inflicted upon each defendant—hoisting by the arms tied behind the back with a device called a strappado—was legally sanctioned and noted in the transcript.) In the
Tiszaeszlar trial of 1882–1883 in Hungary—the first ritualmurder case of the modern era in a Western country—interrogators coerced a detailed account of the crime out of a supposed eyewitness, the thirteen-year-old son of a synagogue sexton; the boy’s narrative of the killing of a fourteen-year-old girl was so convincing that an honest deputy prosecutor, Ede Szeyffer, concluded that it was a lie only a full month into the trial, at which point he convinced the court to free the fifteen defendants.

As for the Beilis case, minister of justice Shcheglovitov confidentially acknowledged its
flimsiness to more than one person. But there was never any question of dropping the case. The minister looked upon the thinness of the evidence against the defendant as but a challenge to be overcome. Conversations he had in the year or so leading up to the trial document how he groped toward a novel and cunning solution.

A meeting with an old acquaintance in mid- to late 1912 captures Shcheglovitov when he was at his most uncertain and even pathetic. When the acquaintance, a government official named Vladimir
Talberg, scolded him for backing a case that rested on such a “shaky foundation,” he did not dispute the assessment. But he insisted that “long experience” had taught him that even in a “hopeless” case, “the talent of
the chief judge,” as well as the prosecutor, aided by “unexpected turns of events,” could result in a conviction. He was, in other words, counting largely on biased conduct from the bench and blind luck.

By the summer of 1913—that is, two or three months before the trial—Shcheglovitov seized on the hope that the problem lay not in the evidence but the failure of the prosecution to make the most of it.
He complained that
Kiev’s chief prosecutor,
Grigory Chaplinsky, had let him down. Surely, he thought, a competent investigator could firm up the case. To that end, he summoned
Arkady
Koshko, the chief of detectives of the
Moscow police, to St. Petersburg to review the entire case file.

After a full month of work, Koshko met with the minister again to brief him on his conclusions. Koshko’s memoir sheds unusual light on the minister’s thinking. “The investigation was conducted improperly, one-sidedly and, I would say, in a biased manner,” Koshko recalled telling the minister, to his extreme irritation. The detective saw no evidence that Beilis was guilty, nor any convincing reason to believe the crime was ritual in character.

After listening to Koshko’s presentation for a few minutes, the minister interjected, “I can see that at the impending trial the Jews will have no better defender than you!”

“I am not at all defending the Jews,” Koshko replied. “I am just reporting to Your Excellency my completely objective opinion.”

Shcheglovitov then took another tack, whose significance Koshko did not fully understand at the time. “Let us assume for a moment that Beilis is innocent,” he said. “Isn’t it obvious to you that this was ritual crime?”

“No, it is not at all obvious,” Koshko replied.

The minister told Koshko, “I have never doubted it [the crime’s ritual character] for a minute, based on the irrefutable conclusions of the great authority, Father Pranaitis,” the prosecution’s expert witness on the Jewish religion. For some time the detective and the minister argued over this point—whether the evidence pointed toward a ritual murder, irrespective of Beilis’s guilt. As they sparred, the minister demonstrated great familiarity with the work of the Tashkent priest.

“I hope that the verdict of the jurors will shake your philo-Semitic views,” the minister said, concluding the conversation, pointedly without extending his hand: “Good day, sir!”

Shcheglovitov’s remarks to Koshko were the first hints that the state had come up with an innovative insurance policy against the failure to convict the defendant. The minister’s attempt to separate the issue of
Beilis’s guilt from that of the
ritual nature of the crime would become the heart of the prosecution’s strategy. Judge Boldyrev, it was decided, would ask the jury to consider two questions separately. The first question would be straightforward: Was the defendant innocent or guilty of the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky? The second question would, in effect, ask the jury to decide whether Andrei Yushchinsky had been killed as part of a Jewish ritual. (The exact wording of the question, which had yet to be worked out, would be indirect, but unmistakable in its implication.) The jury would be free to find Mendel Beilis not guilty, but the prosecution’s argument would lead it to answer the second question affirmatively. Treating the issue of the blood accusation separately from the guilt of the defendant appears to have been historically unprecedented. Whoever thought of it, perhaps Shcheglovitov himself, had hit upon an ingenious maneuver.

The prosecution, then, felt an unusual level of comfort in putting on a case against Beilis that it understood was highly flawed. It knew that it would still have a chance at a favorable verdict, even if the jury found the defendant not guilty. On this matter the prosecution was surprisingly candid. Not long before the trial began, Beilis’s attorney Vasily
Maklakov ran into civil prosecutor Georgy
Zamyslovsky in the halls of the Duma, the parliamentary body in which they both served. Maklakov told Zamyslovsky that he thought the prosecution’s case was weak. “
Let him [Beilis] be acquitted,” Zamyslovsky replied. “What’s important to us is to prove that this was a ritual murder.”

Still, the prosecution had hardly given up on getting a murder conviction against Mendel Beilis and condemning him to a life of hard labor. It knew that it had two illicit advantages over the defense: it was receiving daily intelligence reports on the sequestered jurors, and it had an active ally in Judge Boldyrev. For the first five days of the trial, the judge, perhaps out of concern for his reputation, had conducted the trial in an impartial manner, repeatedly admonishing prosecutor Vipper for his procedural infractions. “The judge often interrupts the prosecutor,” a police agent telegraphed in a report to St. Petersburg at the end of the fifth day, “That
severely unnerves him.” The judge’s conduct of the trial, the agent noted, greatly dissatisfied Kiev’s chief
prosecutor, Grigory Chaplinsky. Someone, probably Chaplinsky himself, must have had a talk with Boldryev because the next day the agent reported that the judge and Vipper had “made up.” By the eleventh day, another agent noted approvingly that “
the judge skillfully directs the attention of the jurors to the details [of the prosecution’s case]…and subtly but unmistakably guides witnesses who become confused to the right path.”

Boldyrev was aware of the illegal surveillance of the jurors, approved of it, and, with Vipper and Zamyslovsky, avidly listened to reports of their private conversations. His bias in favor of the prosecution would become more and more apparent. But only at the end of the trial would it become clear to what extreme lengths Judge Boldyrev would go to maximize the chances of a conviction.

Unaware of these machinations, after a long court day was over, the exhausted defendant looked forward to laying himself down on his nice new cot; but as he slumbered his trial went on. All over America Mendel
Beilises were taking to the stage, putting themselves in the dock with great flair, lending the proceedings the fine dramatic form they lacked in real life. “The Mendel Beilis epidemic,” anticipated with such distaste by a dyspeptic critic, was intensifying. The Yiddish
productions played to packed houses of spectators who cheered Gruzenberg, hooted at the prosecution, and cried at the woes of the defendant, who was invariably tortured without mercy. The Yiddish press expressed outrage and embarrassment at the plays, denouncing them as
“shund”
—trash, cheap melodrama. “The audience
sheds rivers of tears,” one dismissive critic wrote of a New York production. “Every woman soaks seven handkerchiefs … and every man three.”