A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (6 page)

In the days after Andrei Yushchinsky’s funeral, the city entered its full spring thaw. In time for Easter, “the
cold and cloudy weather,” the
Kievan
effused, “gave way to wonderful, warm, spring days … as if Nature herself had acted in sympathy toward the holiday celebration.” The Dnieper came alive with ferries. In another month, the city’s celebrated chestnut trees would be flowering. Peddlers would take to the streets shoeless, leaving behind their precious felt boots until the next winter. But spring always brought an intimation of doom as well, of death by drowning or disease. As the temperature passed the freezing point, the river threatened to flood and the open sewers in the city’s poorer districts ran free (the city fathers hesitated at the expense of covering the festering ditches, with one councilman arguing, “
Why should we worry about cholera when all around us we have plague, diphtheria, scarlet fever and syphilis?”) This year, thankfully, the city had been spared serious flooding. But the discovery of Andrei’s body had unleashed another elemental, unpredictable, and destructive force that set the city on edge. The Black Hundreds were in a state of righteous rage. Jews prepared to hide in cellars or flee the city in fear of a coming pogrom.

For the Jews of the empire, Eastertide was always a menacing time. In the past, the holiday season had been marked by some of Russia’s most notorious pogroms. This year, in the aftermath of Andrei’s death, a pogrom seemed a near certainty. The day before Easter, on April 9, the newspaper
Zemshchina
(roughly, “The Realm”) published an article headlined “A Ritual Murder.” Based on allegedly leaked details of the autopsy report, the article affirmed that “the totality of the available information establishes that we are dealing here with a ritual murder, committed by a Jewish Hasidic sect.”

The article caused a sensation and indicated a turning point in the
case. This was not a leaflet handed out by an agitator at a funeral. This was an article in the newspaper controlled by one of the most prominent Black Hundred leaders, the State
Duma (parliament) member
N. E. Markov, soon to become president of the
Union of Russian People. “A
Ritual Murder” was widely reprinted, including in the almost equally far-right but much more widely read newspaper the
Moscow Gazette.
That paper noted in a companion piece the “alarming rumor” spreading in Kiev that the case might be
quashed and the perpetrators left unpunished. The paper complained “our Judeophile press is trying … to place the blame on anyone at all except persons of the Jewish tribe and faith.” The author appeals for action: “[The Jews’] complicity in the use of human blood in ritual meals cannot be hidden … The
blood of the unfortunate
Yushchinskys [of the world] cries out to the heavens!”

Further fueling the Black Hundreds’ outrage was the stalled police investigation. Nearly a month after the discovery of Andrei’s body, Vasily Fenenko, Kiev’s Investigating Magistrate for Especially Important Cases, declared that the police had reached a dead end. No progress at all had been made toward apprehending Andrei’s killer or killers. On April 14, 1911, Fenenko posted an appeal to the citizenry in the local Kiev papers:

The day-to-day sleuthing was still in the hands of Evgeny Mishchuk, chief detective of Kiev’s police force. But within days of the discovery at the cave,
Fenenko had been assigned major responsibility for overseeing the investigation. The ostensible reason for the assignment had been the unusual nature of the murder. But there is some
indication that Fenenko was chosen in part because it was believed he would unquestioningly carry out orders from above. If this was their expectation, his superiors in the Kiev Judicial Chamber were utterly mistaken. Fenenko was not a man meekly to carry out orders that conflicted with his common sense, let alone his conscience. A lifelong bachelor who
lived with his childhood nanny, at the age of thirty-six Fenenko had settled into a premature and respectable middle age. He was, by all accounts, honest, competent, and incorruptible. If at times he sounded self-righteous, he was indeed a righteous man.
Fenenko regarded his integrity to be his proudest possession. As the case unfolded, this quality would not necessarily prove an asset.

By mid-April Fenenko found himself in an extremely uncomfortable position. The Black Hundreds were decrying the incompetence of the
investigation and the injustice to Andrei’s memory. Their outrage at the authorities, at this point, was entirely justified. Detective Mishchuk’s stewardship of the case had been a fiasco. The police had brutalized Andrei’s family. In the eyes of the far-right wing in Kiev, the police were guilty of other offenses against the Russian people, as well.
Nikolai Pavlovich, the young man they believed had only tried to warn of the Jewish menace at Andrei’s funeral, was under arrest. Several of his fellow “Eaglets”—members of the local far-right group Society of the
Double Headed Eagle—had also been detained, and police had searched the group’s headquarters. Fenenko’s appeal to the citizenry for assistance only proved that he was, at best, incompetent, at worst (and the worst was only too believable), complicit in the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. How could anyone accept his absurd contention that the physical evidence led nowhere? To the Far Right, the motive of the crime and the nature of the perpetrators were as obvious as Andrei’s four dozen wounds.

The Far Right employed the publicly reported details of the crime to craft a tale of Jewish villainy that rabble-rousers could use to incite a murderous mob. In truth, however, Andrei’s corpse told the story not of some methodically executed blood ritual but of a crime committed in a frenzy, with no rational purpose other than, possibly, revenge.

The coroner submitted his
autopsy report on April 25. The pathologists determined
the first wounds came as Andrei was surprised from behind. The time of death, based on the undigested beets and potatoes in his stomach, was judged to be three to four hours after his morning meal. There were no signs of resistance. The murder weapon was established to be an awl with a diamond-shaped shaft whose tip had once broken off and later been resharpened. A frugal workingman’s tool.

The report laid out a barrage of injuries to Andrei’s body:

In all, the city coroner, Dr.
A. M. Karpinsky, noted fifty wounds. A second autopsy reckoned their number at forty-seven, which would become the official count, with thirteen wounds on the right temple rather than fourteen. The first wounds, which were to the head and neck, the experts agreed, would have been fatal on their own. By
matching the holes in the fabric with the wounds on his head, it was later determined that Andrei was wearing his cap tilted slightly upward and boyishly cocked to the left when the powerful initial blows penetrated the top of his skull, driving bits of bone into the skull cavity, the awl’s shaft spearing through the dura mater into the dural sinus, which carries blood from the brain. The wounds to the neck followed, causing profuse bleeding. While the head and neck wounds would have eventually caused death, they did not immediately kill the boy. Death came only twenty to thirty minutes later, due to the wounds he had suffered to the heart. In one place, the weapon was driven into the heart so deeply and with such force that the handle left an impression on the skin.

In Kiev and in the empire’s capital of
St. Petersburg, the threat of a pogrom alarmed government officials as much as it did Kiev’s Jews. Even though the prosecution of the case over the next two and a half years would suggest little in the way of official sympathy for the Jews, the tsar’s top officials first became involved out of concern with preventing anti-Jewish violence. They did not act out of compassion. The regime’s top priority was the preservation of public order. Straight through to the end of the
trial, the government was preoccupied with preventing the case from causing any disturbance
in Russian society at an intensely volatile time.

Within days of the discovery of the body, St. Petersburg had taken notice of the murder. By March 27, the day of Andrei’s funeral, the
minister of justice was being copied on the prosecutors’ reports. On April 1, the Ministry of the Interior adjured the Kiev region’s governor to keep it informed about the case.

Pavel Alexandrovich Kurlov, the deputy minister of the interior, commander of the
Corps of Gendarmes, and overall supervisor of the imperial security apparatus, was an ironic, even perverse choice to monitor the case. Perhaps no senior official in the ministry had as much Jewish blood on his hands. During the wave of
pogroms in 1905, when he was governor of
Minsk, he had given the marauders free rein. There was hardly anyone to whom Kiev’s Jews would have been more unwilling to entrust their fate.

The situation appeared relatively quiet until the appearance of the “Ritual Murder” article on April 9, when public mutterings grew
increasingly ominous. On April 13, Kiev’s governor, A. F. Giers, dispatched his first telegraphic distress call to General Kurlov, warning that a pogrom might be imminent. Right-wing organizations, he reported, were growing convinced that the government was engaged in a cover-up of the murder. On April 17, far-right groups were planning a
public requiem for Andrei. Signs were mounting that the Black Hundreds would follow it with a massacre.

The authorities did not want a pogrom to take place. But what would they do to stop one? What actions would they take to restrain the bands of thugs whom they considered useful allies and even secretly admired? Much would depend on how the infamous Kurlov decided to respond to Giers’s warning. Would he order steps toward protecting the Jewish population? Or would he give the vigilantes carte blanche, as he had done six years earlier in Minsk, when more than a hundred Jews were killed and nearly five hundred wounded, and his men fired on a largely Jewish group of demonstrators, shooting most of them in the back?

Venal, unprincipled, and a master of the most convoluted intrigues, Kurlov was the extravagant embodiment of all the corruption and decay in a regime riddled with innumerable schemers, sycophants, and incompetents. A former governor of Kiev as well as Minsk, he was not unintelligent, but his main talent was for relentless bureaucratic advancement against all obstacles. He was said to
owe his position to the empress Alexandra herself, who supposedly installed him as the protector of her beloved spiritual guide
Rasputin. To the extent that Kurlov had principles, they were those of the Far Right. And having taken personal loans from the treasurer of the
Union of Russian People, he was literally in the Black Hundreds’ debt.

Kurlov never made a move that he did not perceive to be in his own interest, which makes his decision—untainted by any sense of honor or justice—especially notable. Kurlov replied to Governor Giers’s agitated telegram on the same day he received it in the clearest and most direct fashion. “It is vital,” he wrote, “to take the most decisive measures to maintain order; a
pogrom must be avoided at all costs.” Other officials quickly issued numerous orders in the same vein. Black Hundred vigilantes had helped save the regime during the 1905
revolution, and its gratitude for that service was immense. But that moment had passed. The priority now was the preservation of order, even if it meant protecting Jews.

The local authorities prohibited the public requiem set for April 17. Despite the ban, a crowd of 150 or so hard-core “Unionists” gathered at Andrei’s grave. When the presiding priest hinted that the Jews were responsible for the murder, a
police officer on the scene warned him that “such talk only
inflames people’s passions.” The crowd dispersed without incident.

In dealing with the Far Right, though, the authorities mixed their warnings against violence with gestures of appeasement. Pavlovich, and several other Eaglets who had been detained, were released “for lack of evidence.” Behind the scenes, local Black Hundred leaders were coddled and kowtowed to. Preeminent among them was nineteen-year-old Vladimir
Golubev. A Kiev university student and secretary of the city’s “patriotic” youth organization,
Double Headed Eagle, Golubev could serve as a general refutation of the “great man” school of history. The head of a small, struggling group that was in fact losing members, Golubev, more than anyone, can be said to have created the case that would shock and dumbfound the world.