A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (44 page)

Diakonova went on to tell a tale of how, the day after Andrei’s murder, a fearful Vera Cheberyak asked Ekaterina to stay overnight. They slept together in the same room and, in the middle of the night, Ekaterina poked her stockinged foot through the grate of the bed. She felt an object, wrapped up in cloth, standing in the corner. It
felt to her like a
body and it was deathly cold.

“
When I was sleeping, it seemed to me that someone was standing there,” she told the court. “I woke up. Cheberyak said to me, ‘Why did you wake up? Sleep.’ I don’t know what was standing, but near the wardrobe, there was something, I don’t know what, but when I pushed it with my foot, it seemed to me that something was standing there. She again told me: ‘Don’t pay it any attention, sleep.’ I fell asleep. And then in the morning, she said, ‘Let’s drink tea.’ ” By that time, whatever had been standing in the corner had disappeared.

On the stand, Diakonova also asserted that
Adele Ravich had told her, too, about seeing a body wrapped in a carpet. This story had not been in her original deposition and subjected her to the suspicion that
she was merely mimicking the old man
Vyshemirsky’s account. But she added her own embroidery, asserting that before Adele Ravich had ever told her the story, she herself had seen the boy’s body lying in a carpet
in a
dream
. Moreover, she had told Cheberyak herself of her vision. “I tell her: ‘You know,
I had a dream that I saw Andrusha lying in a carpet in your big room.’ She says: ‘Please don’t tell the detectives that’…and she started to threaten me, what would happen to me if I told about that.”

Diakonova’s stories were not believable. And yet—could they be believed? Observers repeatedly used the word “
sincerity” to describe her demeanor, as she told her tales in a “crystalline” voice that projected to the back of the courtroom. She looked humanly nervous on the stand, but the prosecution could not rattle her. And if the prosecution had its Jews in strange black garments, and secret Semitic rites, why could the defense not have a mysterious masked man, objects appearing in the night, or reality first seen in a dream? As the young woman testified hour after hour, sober-minded journalists found themselves softening and suspending their disbelief. “The more you hear her testimony, the more convincing it seems,” one wrote. It all might be “in the realm of
psychosis or hallucination,” one commentator wrote sympathetically, “but had definitely made a sincere impression.” With her “sincerity and naive mixture of fantasy and reality,” in one reporter’s assessment, she had blunted the prosecution’s attacks. This was the most the defense could have hoped for.

And if the young woman had a certain enchanting effect on sophisticated correspondents, what of her effect on the peasant jurors, the sort who might consider the stuff of supernatural folklore—
domovois
(goblins) and ghostly emanations—to constitute part of everyday reality? Perhaps they, too, would be swayed by her tales. And who, really, was to say that they were not true?

Day sixteen. Beilis sat in the dock,
wholly expressionless, wholly motionless, with an occasional glance at the jurors the only movement a patient observer could detect. All around him, people tensed with anticipation at the testimony of the young revolutionary Sergei Makhalin. Makhalin had teamed up with the anarchist-communist Amzor Karaev to lure Vera Cheberyak’s half brother, Peter Singaevsky, into
confessing to Andrei’s murder. Both Karaev and
Makhalin claimed to have witnessed the confession, but only Makhalin would testify at the trial. The state had connived to prevent the court appearance of Karaev, then in
Siberian exile. Karaev’s deposition would be read aloud to the jury, but the credibility of the radicals’ story would essentially rest on Makhalin alone.

Gruzenberg, the defense team’s leader, had no idea of just how disastrously vulnerable a witness Makhalin was. Unknown to him, the revolutionary had been an informer, code-named “Deputy” and “Vasilevsky,” in the pay of two branches of the secret police. If this fact was revealed, the prosecution could easily portray him as an unprincipled mercenary. As Makhalin prepared to take the stand, officials at the highest levels of the government were debating whether to unmask him, thereby improving the prosecution’s chances.

The intentional public exposure of an agent was nearly unthinkable. But civil prosecutor and Duma member Georgy
Zamyslovsky, having somehow learned of Makhalin’s past employment, angrily insisted that the information so helpful to the prosecution had to be made public. Moreover, he threatened to embarrass the secret police if his demand was not met. He relayed a message to Stepan Beletsky, head of the national Department of Police, that if the prosecution lost, he would go to the floor of the Duma to hold the secret police responsible, accusing it of corruption. The minister of the interior,
Nikolai Maklakov, the archconservative brother of Beilis’s attorney
Vasily Maklakov,
acceded to a plan to reveal in court that Makhalin had been an informer who had been terminated the previous year for fraudulent use of expense money. (The fraud charge was likely false, concocted for the purposes of destroying Makhalin at the trial—no evidence in the archives supports it.) Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Ivanov of the
Gendarmes, due to testify in three days, would unmask Makhalin as an informer before the jury.

Makhalin turned out to be an unnervingly fantastic witness. Although he had lately come into a modest inheritance, and was attired in a foppish costume, he testified, as Nabokov wrote, with “
deadly simplicity, resourcefulness,” and common sense. The prosecution failed to trip him up. Moreover, Makhalin made a powerful moral impression. He recounted how, as a fourteen-year-old boy, he had witnessed a
pogrom in the town of Smela, south of
Kiev, that had radicalized
him. When the Yushchinsky case emerged, he understood the forces of hatred it could unleash. He resolved to discover the real killers, exonerate an
innocent man, and prevent acts of mass murder.

As Makhalin spoke, Nabokov thought to himself that by now everyone had surely forgotten about
Beilis except his family. “But suddenly, completely unexpectedly, into Makhalin’s rapid, well-crafted stream of words, there intruded distracting sounds. I turned and saw the
defendant had completely bent over, and was covering his face in his hands, as convulsive, uncontrollable sobbing shook his entire body.
Beilis had reminded us he was there.”

One commentator noted that, at this trial, one had to make an unusual distinction: Mendel Beilis was merely the “defendant,” while Peter Singaevsky was “the accused.” Singaevsky testified on the eighteenth day of the trial, the day after Makhalin had completed his testimony, along with his fellow suspect in Andrei’s murder, Cheberyak gang member Boris Rudzinsky. Both men had been transported to Kiev from Siberia, where they had been serving sentences for armed robbery. Singaevsky was by far the more important witness, as he had supposedly confessed to the crime in Makhalin’s presence.

He was led into the courtroom and up to the witness stand by four guards, two in front and two behind. Observers describe him as looking utterly dim-witted. Drawings depict a normal-looking fellow, although, had he been a fugitive, the
police could have described him as having a right ear noticeably higher than his left.

Vera Cheberyak bent over and cried softly, whether out of true feeling for her half brother or out of fear for herself. People had noted a change in her dress and demeanor. Her self-confidence seemed to be deserting her. In court she cast her eyes downward. Gone were her jaunty velvet hats with brilliantly colored feathers. Her head was now covered with a plain black scarf. As she listened to her brother testify, she grew more agitated than ever, her trips to the windowsill for water increasing in frequency.

Beilis stared intently at Singaevsky. The witness, of course, denied having confessed to the crime. The prosecution argued that it was ridiculous to think that two young revolutionaries could gain the confidence of an experienced criminal. But except for the matter of his
purported confession, Singaevsky’s account almost perfectly matched Makhalin’s, even in the most seemingly far-fetched details. Singaevsky, for example, confirmed that, at his request, Karaev attempted to send a message to Rudzinsky, then in jail, using sign language. If one thing was certain, it was that Makhalin and Karaev had won Singaevsky’s confidence.

Singaevsky had no alibi for the time of Andrei’s murder but had made comic attempts to concoct one. The previous year he and Rudzinsky had confessed to the robbery of an optical goods store in Kiev on the night of March 12, 1911, the day of Andrei’s disappearance. They freely admitted they were confessing to the robbery to prove they could not have committed the murder. But Andrei had been killed in the morning, which would have left them plenty of time for another crime. Some early reports had erroneously placed the time of the murder in the evening, apparently misleading the pair into believing the robbery would exonerate them. (In any event, they were very likely lying about being involved in the robbery, as they were never charged.)

Zamyslovsky attempted to contort the story into something that would exculpate his witness. Surely, he asked Singaevsky, it would be impossible to commit two such complex crimes in the same day? Robbery was, after all, an all-consuming endeavor. You had to spend days planning the crime. And, of course, even if he had committed a murder in the morning, he would not have had time to hide a body in the evening if he were committing a robbery? “Exactly right,” Singaevsky replied.

On cross-examination, Gruzenberg adopted a restrained, nonaccusatory manner. He asked with brutal simplicity, “Why do you think that, if on the night of the twelfth … you were committing a robbery, then at 10 or 11 in the morning you couldn’t have committed a murder?” Without Zamyslovsky to prompt him, Singaevsky was helpless. At first, he could not answer. Then he responded that in the morning he had been at home with his confederate, Ivan “Red Vanya” Latyshev, who was, of course, dead, having jumped or fallen out of a window at a police station earlier in the year. Singaevsky clearly had no alibi. And why had Singaevsky, Latyshev, and Rudzinsky all left Kiev for
Moscow the day after the murder? Singaevsky admitted they were penniless and had to borrow money for train tickets.

“So, you have no money,” Gruzenberg asked, “the three of you have
committed a burglary, and you put the [stolen] things in one suitcase. Why would all three of you go to Moscow?”

Singaevsky responded, “I wanted to see Moscow because I’d never been there.”

When the defense was finished, Judge Boldyrev said, gesturing to the space beside Singaevsky, “Makhalin, come here.” The courtroom fell silent for the
eye-to-eye confrontation. The judge asked Singaevsky if he knew the man now standing beside him. After a very long pause, he said, “Yes.”

It was not so much what Singaevsky said as how he looked while standing next to his accuser that made such an unforgettable impression on those present. Looking like a guilty man, of course, is not in itself evidence. Still, the
visceral reaction of people who witnessed the confrontation, as reported in the press, was striking:

“When Makhalin went up to stand next to Singaevsky, the latter flinched. When Singaevsky’s and Makhalin’s eyes met, Singaevsky seemed close to giving himself away. He looked lost and on his face was an expression of horror.”

“On Singaevsky’s face … one could see pure mortal fear.”

“When Singaevsky saw Makhalin … his face transformed to such a degree, and on his face was written so much horror that it was chilling.”

When the spectators left the courtroom during the break, many were heard to say, “We have seen the killer.”

The morning of the Beilis trial’s nineteenth day was marked by a notable change in mood as the power of
rumor descended on the court for the first time. Certainly, the occasional rumor had been known to circulate—for example, that the jury was leaning eight to four to convict. But rumor as a force rippling through the crowd had, strangely, never arisen until now.

The trial was ripe for a wave of unconfirmed items of intelligence. The spectators, Vladimir Nabokov noted in his daily column, were awaiting “
some kind of sensation.” While the trial was generally sensational, this day promised a thrill: a spy story, with double agents, backstabbing, provocateurs, and a witness’s finger pointed dramatically at a helpless figure in the courtroom. The eighteenth day had severely damaged the prosecution, but the whispering suggested all was not what it seemed and the defense would now be undone.

Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Ivanov, who had headed the Gendarmes’ investigation into the Andrei
Yushchinsky case, was due to testify in the morning session. Would he really expose the revolutionary Sergei Makhalin as a renegade police informer in open court? If he did, he would discredit this important defense witness who had claimed to have tricked one of Andrei’s real killers into confessing.

Nabokov, a former Duma member, noted jurist, and founding member of the liberal Kadet Party, was not naive concerning government intrigues. He had
once been imprisoned for three months for antigovernment activity. But the idea that one government faction was battling another to pull off some coup de théâtre seemed to him “
fantastic” and “improbable.” Nabokov was wrong. Civil prosecutor and Duma member Georgy
Zamyslovsky had threatened to embarrass the secret police and the whole Interior Ministry if it did not agree to expose in court Makhalin’s past as the informer code-named “Vasilevsky” and
“Deputy.” The record suggests that state prosecutor
Oskar Vipper approved of his colleague’s stance.