A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (10 page)

On May 8, Professor
Sikorsky rendered his psychological profile of the perpetrators. It was based on an astounding interpretation of the autopsy materials. “All the damage and wounds were inflicted by a steady and confident hand, one that was neither trembling in fear, nor moving with exaggerated scope and force out of rage,” he pronounced. While Fenenko and Brandorf believed the four dozen wounds, all over Andrei’s body, many with no clear purpose, testified to a crime committed in a frenzy, Sikorsky insisted, “This was precise, ruthless,
cold-blooded work, such as might have been performed by someone who was accustomed to slaughtering.”
Chaplinsky reported these revelatory findings to the justice minister:

“The racial revenge and vendetta of the sons of Jacob.” This was a powerful new formulation. Unlike Golubev and Ambrosius, Sikorsky was no one’s avatar. In the drama of the blood accusation he had created a new role—the psychiatric explorer—and added modern elements to the myth. “The nationality which commits this horrible deed,” Professor Sikorsky concluded, “as it is scattered among other nations, brings with it the traits of its racial psychology.” Race, genetics, inherited behavior—Sikorsky renovated the myth with pseudoscientific rigor. It was a signal achievement. The Jews had committed such “horrible” deeds in the past that they had become conditioned to perform them in the future and for all time. Murder was in their blood.

Liadov now declared himself to be confident that the crime had the character of a secret ritual. Based on what he had heard from Professor Sikorsky, Ambrosius, and the pathologist, he later said, he had “formed the personal conviction that Yushchinsky was killed by Jews.” But who was the culprit?

Liadov began to play detective, taking an unusual interest for a high official in the investigation’s operational details. He called attention to the testimony of the boy
Pavel Pushka who said Andrei would buy gunpowder from a Jew in Slobodka. According to Fenenko, Liadov instructed him “that as soon as the identity of this Jew was determined, he should be charged and placed under arrest.”

The gunpowder-selling Jew was never found, but another Jew of interest was identified. In a deposition on May 5, 1911, Golubev told investigators:

This is the first mention in the official record of Mendel Beilis. (Beilis was not the “manager,” but the clerk of the brick factory. All the rest of the report was unsubstantiated rumor.) Questioned the following day, Golubev again mentioned “the little Jew Mendel.” He told the authorities, “My personal opinion is that the murder was probably committed either [at the Zaitsev estate] or at the Jewish hospital” adjoining the factory, though adding with unaccustomed humility, “Of course, I am not able to present proof of that.”

Golubev would now dedicate himself to providing that proof.

On May 4, 1911,
Nikolai Krasovsky, a provincial police official in western
Ukraine, received an urgent telegram. The message was brief and clear: “
By order of the governor, go to Kiev.”

Until the previous fall, Krasovsky had been the acting head of the criminal investigation division of the Kiev police force—the city’s chief detective. He had taken over the division three years earlier in the wake of a tremendous scandal. The then head of the division,
Spiridon Aslanov, was exposed as being in the pay of Kiev’s notorious “
King of Thieves.” The King, a flamboyant crook who also went by the nickname “Stovepipe Hat,” boasted of an income of a hundred thousand rubles a year and prided himself on stealing only from the well-off, sharing his booty generously with his small army of pickpockets, burglars, and second-story men. The gifts that he bestowed on Detective Aslanov, including a ring studded with precious stones, were for him the cost of doing business.

After Aslanov’s arrest, Krasovsky quickly gained respect by cracking a slew of cold cases. By the fall of 1908 he had become celebrated as the Sherlock Holmes who solved Kiev’s most sensational crime, the
Ostrovsky murder case. The stabbing deaths of a middle-aged couple in their home, along with a young acquaintance, their laundress, and a seamstress, had traumatized the city. As the killers remained at large day after day, the Kiev journalist and politician
Vasily Shulgin wrote, “
It seemed as if a dark cloud were hanging over the city … Crowds of people stood for hours in front of that house [where the murders were committed], gloomy and distraught, staring at those walls with superstitious horror.”

In lifting that cloud,
Krasovsky displayed stunning investigative virtuosity. He had a fair mastery of forensic science. (The field was surprisingly well advanced in Imperial Russia, whose chemists had
devised tests still used today for detecting trace amounts of blood and certain poisons.) He had great powers of observation. He was a master of interrogation.
Tallish and kindly looking, with blue eyes, a bushy mustache, and an unhurried air, he knew how to get people—ordinary folk and criminals—to tell him things. He was also cunning, fearless, and always willing to stand his ground. When detectives found jewelry purportedly belonging to the Ostrovskys in the home of a known thief, Krasovsky alone was unconvinced that he was the perpetrator. He proceeded to prove that engravings on the jewelry had been fabricated by a vengeful criminal (who himself had nothing to do with the murders) to incriminate his enemies. In a city with the highest crime rate in the empire, where two out of three cases went unsolved, Krasovsky was considered a hero for tracking down the four actual killers, one of them a psychopath who admitted to ten other murders and boasted of his ability to stab a person to death while shedding hardly any blood (the technique involved partial strangulation, then two stabs to the heart).

In an attempt to escape the hangman, the
defendants appealed for help to the most famous Russian of his time, Count
Leo Tolstoy, claiming they had only faithfully followed the famous writer’s
Christian anarchist precepts. (The era’s spiritual ferment had seemingly penetrated even into the underworld.) “We acted according to your teachings because they had money and we didn’t. Defend us,” they wrote him in a postcard they sent from prison. Tolstoy, whose greatest wish at this stage of his life was to convey tenets of morality to common people, was greatly distressed by the notion that these men had operated under his influence. Tolstoy’s estranged wife, Sophia, took the opportunity to torment her husband, arguing that the men could indeed rightfully consider themselves to be his followers. Tolstoy, who deeply and publicly opposed capital punishment, is not known to have lent these killers his support. (Tolstoy’s morality, incidentally, extended to the acceptance of non-Christians as his equals. In November 1910, when the count died in a remote rural train station while fleeing his wife after a final quarrel, Russia’s Jews lost their most prominent Christian defender. It is fascinating to imagine the role he might have played in the Yushchinsky affair had he lived a few months longer. In a late interview,
Tolstoy told the
New York Times,
“How do I account for all this anti-Jewish feeling in Russia? We often dislike more those whom we harm than those who harm us.”)

Krasovsky, given his record, surely deserved to have the “acting” removed from his title. But, as was so typical of the era, superior talent failed to be rewarded. Evgeny Mishchuk, who had served in
St. Petersburg and no doubt had curried favor there, received the permanent chief detective post. But now Mishchuk had outrageously bungled the investigation into Andrei’s murder, and Krasovsky had been summoned—from exile, one might say—to lead the police investigation into what would shortly become the most infamous murder case of the age.

At this sensitive moment, after the fiasco of the
arrest of Andrei’s family, and in the face of the
Black Hundreds’ incendiary
anti-Semitic propaganda, the government needed a politically reliable professional of solid reputation to take charge. Renowned for his skill as a detective, Krasovsky was also, for reasons not entirely clear, well regarded by the right-wing
Union of Russian People. Grigory Chaplinsky, the chief prosecutor and advocate for the blood accusation, thought he could find no better man for the job. But Chaplinsky had been in the Kiev post only about two months and did not really know Krasovsky, and ultimately he would want someone who would do as he was told. In that regard, Krasovsky—stubborn, crafty, incorruptible, but more than capable of dishonesty when necessary to his goals—would turn out to be a disastrous choice.

Krasovsky accepted the new mission reluctantly. The year before, after losing out to Mishchuk for the job of Kiev’s chief detective, he had happily settled into a new post in the provincial city of Khodorkov. He was wary of getting involved in another highly publicized case, having learned from experience, as he later said, that “I never got anything from it but
intrigues and trouble from co-workers and others involved.” From the outset his apprehensions were disturbingly confirmed. Alexander Liadov, the St. Petersburg functionary sent to Kiev to oversee the case, insisted that Krasovsky’s participation be kept secret. No one would inform Mishchuk that he was effectively being relieved from the case. Krasovsky knew Mishchuk would surely find out soon enough what his old rival was up to, and he could be expected to attempt his revenge. Complicating matters still further, the Corps of Gendarmes—a secret police force empowered to arrest people with no formal charges—was conducting its own secret investigation. Over the next few months the case would become a round-robin of intrigues and backstabbing that would exceed Krasovsky’s greatest fears.

In early May, the far-right youth group leader,
Vladimir Golubev, had identified as a person of interest a clerk at the Zaitsev
brick factory, Mendel Beilis. But, within a few days, “the Yid Mendel,” as Golubev called him, fell away as an object of the investigation. The day after receiving Golubev’s supposed tip,
Vasily Fenenko, the upstanding investigating magistrate, surveyed the Zaitsev factory and the area around it. Fenenko had been annoyed by Golubev’s habit of arriving at his office unannounced, ranting about Jews and blood and murder. But
Liadov, whose mission was to focus the investigation on finding a Jew, had already made sure Golubev would be treated with respect, his “leads” acted upon promptly. The results of Fenenko’s survey were reported to the justice minister himself: “On the Zaitsev estate nothing suspicious was found and no cellars, which Golubev mentioned, turned out to be there.” On May 11, in a report to the justice minister, Chaplinsky noted the suspicions about “the Jew Mendel” but stated that, “
regarding the factual side of the investigation, the witnesses have not given any significant material for solving the case.”

The right-wing press was appalled by what it believed to be the disastrous outcome of Liadov’s visit to Kiev (a mirror image of the equally incorrect view in the Jewish press, as noted earlier, of Liadov as a hero). On May 14, 1911, as Liadov departed for St. Petersburg, the newspaper of the Union of Russian People, the
Russian Banner,
despairingly asked its readers, “Do you doubt that the
Worldwide Yid will spare millions on suppressing this case? Do you doubt that this worldwide moneylender and swindler will threaten [Russia’s] international loans…[and] international complications if the case … isn’t suppressed?” The authorities, it was clear, “have yielded [to the Jews] in violation of the law, the truth, and the self-esteem of the Russian people.” The paper was convinced that the killers would never be brought to justice. As for the Jews’ adherence to the Ecclesiastical admonition about times to be silent—pointed to with such pride in the Jewish press—this, too, could only be seen as sinister. “The Yids found that the only means of saving themselves is silence. Therefore not one Yid has said anything about the murder.”