A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (49 page)

The defense argued that there was no basis in law for the first question and that the way both were formulated was
prejudicial. Judge Boldyrev overruled the objections and prepared to give his charge to the jury. This was his moment. Boldyrev’s superiors had promised him a promotion should he perform his duties at the trial to their satisfaction. Now he would prove himself worthy.

Boldyrev’s two-hour address was as biased toward the prosecution as he could manage without shedding all pretense to juridical propriety. “Essentially,”
Nabokov wrote in his daily analysis, “it was a summation for the prosecution, deliberate and well thought out.” In summarizing the thirty-three days of testimony for both sides, Judge Boldyrev gave a more compelling account of the prosecution’s point of view, though he was always careful to add that the jury could reject it. He stated, “
You know that the body was drained of blood,” even though the experts for the defense disputed that contention. “Why did the killers allow blood to flow?” he asked. “What was the point of looking at their victim, as blood flowed out of him?” He saved his major nod to respectability for the end. “A great deal was said here about the Jews,” he told the jurors. “Forget all of that. You are deciding the fate only of Beilis.”

The judge handed the list of charges to the foreman and sent the jurors off to deliberate. Expressionless, the twelve men filed out of the courtroom, led by the foreman, whose fawning demeanor toward the judge and prosecutor had so aroused Gruzenberg’s distrust. Gruzenberg made a final motion, asking the judge to call the jury back and amend his charge with material from the defense. Boldyrev denied the motion, and the waiting began.

Most of those who had only read about the trial—including, confidentially, senior Russian officials—believed the jury would vote to acquit. But they were thinking in terms of logic and of evidence. Most of the observers who had actually sat through the trial, Nabokov among them, believed that Beilis would be found guilty.

The defendant’s lead attorney was ready for the worst. Gruzenberg confessed to a reporter that, as he waited, he could think only of reasons the jury would convict. The jurors were “exceptionally ignorant.” He
had seen their faces, growing more “confused, helpless, embittered, sullen” with each passing day. The relentless talk of “Jewish domination,” “all-powerful Jewish gold,” and blood sacrifice, beaten into their heads for thirty-three days, must have succeeded in arousing in these simple Russians an instinctive ethnic animosity. His last hope had been Judge Boldyrev’s charge to the jury. But when the judge sent the jurors off,
Gruzenberg could only think to himself, “Beilis is finished.”

Russian jurors usually came back with a verdict quickly.
After an hour passed, some pro-Beilis spectators argued that hesitance to convict was a good sign, but several attorneys in the crowd outside the courtroom said that long deliberations usually went against the defendant. Quite a few spectators, certain of the guilty verdict and overcome with anxiety, were heard to say, “I can’t take this,” and left the courthouse.

After one hour and twenty minutes of deliberations a bell sounded inside the building. The jury had reached a verdict. The spectators stopped arguing and dashed into the courtroom to take their seats. Mendel Beilis was led in, leaning heavily on his guards, who sat him down in the prisoner’s dock for the last time.

Court procedure could not be rushed. The bailiff cried out, “Court is in session! Please rise!” Everyone rose. The four judges entered and took their places at the bench, and then everyone sat down again. At 5:40 p.m. the bailiff announced, “The jury is entering! Please rise!” Everyone rose. The foreman handed Judge Boldyrev the sheet of paper with the verdicts. The judge read it and handed it back to him. Then all took their seats, except for the foreman, wearing his pince nez, who still stood before the bench, the piece of paper in his hand. The judge told him to proceed. The foreman began to read the first question, about whether the crime had been committed on the premises of the Zaitsev brick factory and in what manner.

The question was long, but he was obliged to recite it in its entirety. The words—“blood loss,” “five glasses,” “forty-seven”—escaped his lips in a soft,
quavering voice until he finally reached “and in his death.” The foreman then uttered two more words: “Yes, proven.” Regardless of the defendant’s guilt, the crime had been committed in the manner the prosecution had contended.

The foreman then moved on to the second question. After he finished reading it, he pronounced three more words. Beilis began to sob violently, though people noticed there were no tears. He fell forward
onto the railing of the dock. He rose up a number of times and then fell back again. He was reacting physically to the verdict, but it seemed to people that he gave no sign of understanding what it meant. In fact, he understood, but at first
could not believe the three words:
“Net, ne vinoven.”
“No, not guilty.”

The chief guard tried to give Beilis a glass of water, but Zarudny grabbed it from him, saying curtly, “
Beilis is not yours anymore, he belongs to us,” and handed it to Beilis himself. Judge
Boldyrev then told Beilis, “You are a
free man. You may take your place among the public.” His guards stood aside, but Beilis did not move. The judges withdrew for a few minutes and returned to declare the case resolved. Beilis, still crying, managed to half stand and bow.

He was held in the courthouse for nearly two hours until the crowd had dispersed. At seven thirty p.m. a
police wagon took him back one last time to the prison, where he signed for the return of his belongings. Then he was conveyed to the Zaitsev
brick factory, heavily guarded by police and night watchmen. At nine thirty p.m. he finally walked through the door of his home into his family’s arms.

The next morning Beilis awoke as the man everyone in Kiev wanted to meet. “
Old people and children, fashionably turned-out ladies and simple peasant women, workers and students, and little schoolchildren,” a
Kiev Opinion
reporter wrote, “they all make their way to the Zaitsev factory.” So many people were asking directions that at Alexandovskaya Square the tram conductor took to crying out, “Take Number 16 to Beilis’s!” Someone set up a sign outside the home saying “
Beilis Station.” The arriving visitors stood in line to spend a moment with the world-famous defendant. Over the course of two days Beilis shook thousands of hands.

Telegrams arrived by the hundreds. One, from Chicago, was in English. When someone was found to read it, it turned out to be an offer from an impresario to perform in his theater for a twenty-week run for twenty thousand rubles. Beilis laughed.

The onetime brick factory clerk was utterly exhausted. He would have loved to leave the city, go somewhere to rest. But for now he would remain in Kiev, he told a reporter, “so that the Unionists”—that is, the
Black Hundreds—“
won’t say that I ran away.”

Beilis’s
supporters were overwhelmed by joy at the acquittal. But in the trial’s aftermath, the double verdict allowed both sides to claim victory. Civil prosecutor Zamyslovsky admitted that he was, of course, disappointed at the not-guilty verdict but insisted that the main goal—demonstrating the nature of the crime—had been accomplished. “The
peculiarities of that act, given in detail,” he contended, “leave no doubt about the ritual character of the murder.” Beilis’s attorneys argued that the positive verdict on the first question in no way confirmed that the crime was a ritual murder. The question posed to the jury contained no reference to religion. To find that the crime took place somewhere on the Zaitsev factory’s thirty-three acres of grounds in itself meant nothing. Moreover, the prosecution had argued that if Jews had committed the murder, then Beilis must be involved. So, in exonerating Beilis, the jury must have exonerated the Jews. To paint the trial’s results as victory for the prosecution, Gruzenberg declared, was “a
comic effort that deserves pity.”

How had the jurors reached their decision? According to the popular right-wing newspaper
New Times
, the vote on Beilis’s guilt had been a six-six tie. This rumor grew into fact, but there was no proof of it. The verdict led some to speculate it had been rigged by the state. The Anglo-Jewish journalist and activist
Lucien Wolf had little doubt that the outcome “was
engineered by the authorities with the idea of throwing dust in the eyes of foreigners, while at the same time preserving the blood accusation.” Herman Bernstein, secretary of the American Jewish Committee, concluded that the verdicts were clearly “prearranged” to satisfy both public opinion in the West and the Black Hundreds in Russia. Such suspicion was reasonable, but the archival record, which includes numerous secret communications, contains absolutely nothing to support it. It is nearly certain that the jurors came to the decision on their own. As Gruzenberg told a reporter, “
The muzhichki”—the little peasants—“they stood up for themselves.” Gruzenberg further recounts in his memoirs that the jury’s initial vote was seven to five to convict “
but when the foreman began taking the final vote one peasant rose to his feet, prayed to an icon, and said resolutely, ‘I don’t want to have this sin on my conscience—he’s not guilty.’ ” (This beautiful and oft-repeated story unfortunately remains unconfirmed.)

Agent Pavel Liubimov, in his final, secret report to the chief of the national police, called the Beilis trial a “
political Tsushima”—referring
to the sinking of the Russian fleet by the Japanese in 1905—“which will never be forgiven.” Many in the government undoubtedly did view it as a disaster on a par with a military defeat. Yet whatever the verdict, the case could only have ended as a fiasco for the regime. The whole affair, Vasily Maklakov wrote soon after the trial, was a sign “of a
dangerous internal illness afflicting the state itself.” A regime that could prosecute such a bizarre case suffered from the kind of rot that only reform—or revolution—could root out. A jury’s decision one way or the other could not alter that profound reality.

For the government officials directly involved in it, the case was an undoubted success. In St. Petersburg, ten days after the verdict, a
victory banquet was held “in honor of the heroes of the Kiev trial.” The minister of justice, Shcheglovitov himself, and prosecutor Oskar Vipper were the guests of honor. Also present was Alexander Dubrovin, founder of the
Union of Russian People, the group synonymous with the term “Black Hundreds.” Congratulatory telegrams were sent to the absent heroes—including Chaplinsky, Dr. Kosorotov (who had been paid the balance of his four-thousand-ruble bribe for a job well done), Dr. Sikorsky, and others—praising them for their “noble patriotic courage” and “great moral dignity.”

These men had correctly calculated that the case would advance their careers. They were showered with praise,
promotions, and material rewards. Kiev’s chief prosecutor, Grigory Chaplinsky, was appointed to Russia’s highest court, the Senate. Judge Boldyrev received his promised appointment as chief judge of the Kiev Judicial Chamber, as well as an illegal pay increase. Civil prosecutor Zamyslovsky was paid twenty-five thousand rubles from the tsar’s secret fund to write a book about the case.

What of Tsar Nicholas? What was the sovereign’s view of the trial’s outcome? The day of the verdict found him at the Livadia Palace near Yalta, on the Black Sea, where he had gone to relax with the empress
Alexandra and their family. When a member of his entourage informed him of the news from Kiev, Nicholas delivered his opinion: “
It is certain that there was a ritual murder. But I am happy that
Beilis was acquitted, for he is innocent.”

This jury of common folk, in its wisdom, had found its way to the
result most pleasing to their tsar. To Nicholas, who believed his rule to be divinely ordained, it must have seemed in the natural order of things. Yet in his ingrained and deepening fatalism, Nicholas took limited comfort even from welcome events. The tsar was given to speaking humbly of the impotence of the human will and of his own powerlessness to influence the course of history. As he had told Prime Minister Stolypin just a few years earlier, he knew he was destined for “terrible trials.”
He often invoked a verse from the righteous sufferer Job on whose feast day he had been born: