A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (14 page)

The
liberal press rejoiced at the discovery of the culprit—or rather culprits, because it was assumed everyone in custody was guilty. “All the information that the murderers have been found is now revealed,”
Russia’s Morning
opined. “Five [relatives] have been arrested … Two of them belong to the most active ranks of the Union of Russian People.” The Kadet newspaper
Speech
expressed the opinion that the relatives had imitated a ritual killing. The “whole fanatical gang” that had “shamed the Russian people” had to be brought to justice.

But the case against Luka, if it ever can be said to have truly existed, quickly fell apart. Alexandra had not been indifferent to her son’s disappearance, as some witnesses claimed; she had fallen into faints and frantically searched for Andrei throughout the city. The promissory note did not exist. Andrei’s father had given Alexandra seventy-five rubles from the sale of the estate (including twenty-five for Andrei’s education); she filed suit in court for more but lost. Luka’s alibi was confirmed by his boss’s neighbors. As for the
slip of paper with the description of blood vessels in the skull, Luka had tried to explain that it fell out of a medical handbook given him for binding. The owner of the book was found and confirmed the note had been written by him—largely in Latin.

Krasovsky’s instincts, for once, had failed him. He had fallen into the trap that the great
Hans Gross, the
Austrian founder of the discipline of criminalistics, had cautioned about in his pioneering treatise of the era,
Criminal Investigation
. The detective had resorted to “
heaping testimony on testimony,” a path that invariably “will excite the babbler to babble still more … encourage the impudent, confuse the timid, and let the right moment slip past.”

With the falseness of the accusation against the family exposed—for the second time in three months—the Far Right was handed a tremendous propaganda advantage. (This is why a reconstruction of the largely ignored prehistory of the Beilis case is critical to
understanding how it unfolded.) The credibility of the official investigation was shattered, and the liberal press—regarded as the Jewish press—made to look foolish. (It played into the Right’s hands that some of the purveyors of misleading information, like the newspaper employee who claimed Alexandra and Luka had behaved suspiciously, were Jews.) How could anyone believe a simple artisan could write a note in Latin? Who could not have sympathy for the poor Christian mother who had been forced to miss her son’s funeral and now had nearly lost her husband and brother?

Luka was released on July 14, after nearly three weeks in custody. Krasovsky had wasted his invaluable respite from right-wing agitation. Other investigators, lacking any concern whatever for the truth, were closing in on their preferred suspect.

By mid-July, Chaplinsky must have despaired of finding a way to charge a Jew with Andrei’s murder and surely feared for his future advancement as he again came under sneering personal assault in the right-wing press. “
Unfortunately, one cannot count on the Kiev prosecutor,” an editorial in
Zemshchina
declared. “It is apparent that the interests of the Jews are dearer to him than justice.” The
Russian Banner
slapped him indirectly, demanding that “the minister of Justice take a personal interest in the
Yushchinsky case,” implying that the chief prosecutor should be relieved of the matter. Chaplinsky, who was of Polish descent, had converted from Catholicism to Orthodoxy in his eagerness to prove himself a true Russian. For a man of such great, if hollow, ambition, his eye on a seat on the empire’s highest court, the Far Right’s attacks must have been distressing beyond measure. But fortune was about to provide him with an unlikely trio of saviors.

The first of them to appear—Kazimir “the Lamplighter” Shakhovsky and his wife, Ulyana Shakhovskaya—came to the authorities’ attention in early July. The Russian writer
Vladimir Korolenko described the couple as “poor,
wasted shells.” Ulyana was hardly ever sober. Kazimir was also a heavy drinker. They worked together, though it was a common sight in
Lukianovka to see Ulyana staggering alone down the street in the evening, ladder over her shoulder, as neighborhood boys trailed behind, eager to help her light the 140 lamps on the couple’s route.

The Lamplighters, as the couple was called, were the first witnesses
to place Andrei in the vicinity of the cave on March 12, the day he disappeared. This made them the most important witnesses who had been discovered so far, though, for Chaplinsky’s purposes, their initial testimony was of little use.

In his first
deposition on July 9, Kazimir revealed how he had seen Andrei around eight in the morning on March 12, standing with Zhenya near the state liquor store, above which the Cheberyak family lived. He told of his last encounter with Andrei, how the boy had struck him playfully, but painfully, and how he had dispatched him with a crude insult. Ulyana had caught sight of Andrei with Zhenya slightly earlier but did not speak to him. Kazimir was emphatic that he had no idea what had happened to Andrei: “Where Zhenya and Andrusha went I don’t know, only that since then I never saw Andrusha again.”

Kazimir quite believably explained why he had avoided talking to the authorities for four months: “I myself am illiterate, I don’t read the newspapers … I was afraid to get involved in this case because I have to walk the streets at night and early in the morning and people who didn’t like my testimony might knife me.” He hinted of whom specifically he might be afraid, saying, “You would be better off questioning Vera Cheberyak’s neighbors. Those witnesses would know more than I do. They’ll tell you what kind of person Cheberyak is. I myself heard she was a thief, but I can’t tell you any more about her. For now I have nothing further to say.”

In that “for now,” leaving the door ajar, there was perhaps a hint of the pressure applied by Kazimir’s lead questioner. Adam Polishchuk was one of two former Kiev police detectives Krasovsky had inexplicably retained as his assistants. Both of them had recently been cashiered from the force for assorted misconduct, including “
consorting with
criminals.” Unbeknown to Krasovsky, Polishchuk was, in a sense, a double agent working undercover; he was
cooperating with Golubev. He may have perceived in the case a path to rehabilitating himself through influential people. (He would, in fact, later be hired by one of the imperial security services and the Union of Russian People would arrange for his material reward.)

On July 18, Shakhovsky was questioned again, and his responses suggest he was trying to please his interrogators. “
The place where Cheberyak lives is located next to the Zaitsev factory and is separated from it by a high fence. On March 12, you could pass from where she lived to the factory because the fence was badly damaged and parts of the fence
were even missing … The factory grounds were managed by the clerk Mendel … I know that Mendel is on good terms with Cheberyak and would visit her home. For now I have nothing further to add.”

At this point, the thinking of the would-be prosecution was taking a turn both logical and preposterous. Vera Cheberyak, they had reasonably concluded, could not be ignored as a suspect, and the Lamplighter himself was of the belief that she had something to do with the crime. Therefore, if the objective was to implicate the Jewish clerk, why not simply tie the two of them together? (This peculiar theory, unsupported by any evidence, would rise and then fade from view but strangely resurface during the
trial as the prosecution became desperate to persuade jurors of their case.)

Shakhovsky was hinting at a criminal partnership of
Beilis and Vera Cheberyak, but a conjecture would not be enough to implicate them in the murder. What was needed was an eyewitness, not mere circumstantial testimony. On July 19, Polishchuk paid a visit to the Shakhovskys’ home, a bottle of vodka in hand. He worked on Ulyana as she drank herself into a near stupor. Polishchuk recognized he could not fabricate testimony outright. A witness was needed who would testify in court. He had to maneuver Ulyana into creating her own story. Surely she knew something? Surely she had heard something about Mendel? The operation was a delicate one, calibrating the dose of alcohol and the psychological pressure so that she would say the necessary words while drunk enough to be suggestible but not too drunk to speak. At a certain point, Ulyana uttered the desired words. Polishchuk reported, “
Shakhovskaya told me directly that her husband knows everything and saw how Mendel, together with his son Davidka [actually Dovidke] led and dragged Andrei to the kiln.”

At last Chaplinsky was close to obtaining the eyewitness testimony he needed. The next step was for formal depositions to be taken. But getting the alcohol-addled couple to agree on a single, consistent story soon proved to be beyond reach.

On July 20, Kazimir Shakhovsky was questioned a third time in the presence of Chaplinsky. He now came up with an entirely new and different tale. He himself had not witnessed Andrei’s abduction by Mendel, he said, but he knew that Zhenya had:

It was true that Zhenya, Andrei, and their friends liked to sneak onto the Zaitsev factory grounds to play on the
clay grinders, carousel-like contraptions with a central pillar from whose apex extended a long rod attached at the other end to a pair of old carriage wheels. The children would take turns precariously riding astride the rod, while the others played the part of the draft horse, pulling the contraption round and round. But it was suspicious, to say the least, that Shakhovsky suddenly recalled this incriminating conversation.

Questioned separately the same day, Ulyana Shakhovskaya presented her own new and different story. No longer did she claim that her husband had witnessed the abduction. Instead, she declared she had an acquaintance—Anna “Volkivna,” or Anna “the Wolf”—who told her she had witnessed the crime. Volkivna, whose real last name was Zakharova, was an alcoholic derelict whose moniker derived from her custom of sleeping outdoors in a place called Wolf’s Ravine. She completes the drunken trio on which the initial case against Mendel Beilis was based. Ulyana’s revamped testimony amounts to one drunk’s retelling of another drunk’s tall tale:

This story still did not fully satisfy her questioners. After the deposition was read to her—Ulyana was illiterate—the record shows she spoke up again, with startling specificity. “I want to add,” she said, “that Volkivna … told me that this person [the man with the black beard] was none other than the clerk of the Zaitsev brick factory Mendel.”

Over the course of two days, then, the Shakhovskys had given three different stories implicating
Beilis. First, Ulyana had claimed that her husband, Kazimir, had himself seen Andrei dragged off by a man with a dark beard. Second, Kazimir testified that Zhenya Cheberyak had told him he had witnessed the abduction by Beilis. Third, Ulyana asserted that her drunken friend Anna the Wolf had witnessed the crime—adding, doubtlessly under pressure, that the perpetrator was “Mendel.”

That two witnesses had given three different and contradictory versions of events little troubled Chaplinsky, so eager was he for grounds to
arrest Beilis. Chaplinsky allowed as how the testimony, taken piece by piece, was “not completely firm,” but astonishingly found the stories taken together to be mutually reinforcing.
Vladimir
Korolenko the writer would point out the irony that initially the case would stand on the testimony of witnesses who could barely stand on their two feet.

Investigator Fenenko now found his prized integrity threatened, when Chaplinsky requested that he have Beilis arrested. Fenenko found the case against Beilis to be preposterous. But he could not defy orders—that would be insubordination, something his ethical code did not countenance. Fortunately, because Chaplinsky had given him what was formally not an order, but merely a request, he did his best to delay, telling Chaplinsky he needed three or four days to get the paperwork organized.

It is at this point that “Student Golubev,” as he was invariably called, reenters the narrative. He had been the first one to identify Mendel Beilis as a suspect. Now he would make certain that the Jew was arrested. Chaplinsky recalled later that “
an agitated Golubev came into my office and declared that all of Lukianovka knew about Shakhovsky’s testimony and … that the people are preparing to deal with Beilis and Zaitsev on their own and organize a pogrom.” Golubev was, more than likely, using this threat as a means of speeding up the arrest. But it was true that, while Mendel Beilis was unaware of it, word of Shakhovsky’s testimony had quickly spread in Lukianovka, where nothing could be kept secret.

One of those who heard of it was a shoemaker named Mikhail
Nakonechny, a mainstay of the local gossip mill who, because he could read and write, had a side business filling out documents for local residents. Nakonechny would be one of the few heroes of the
Beilis case. (His young daughter, as a star witness for the defense, would become its great heroine.) He could not have wanted to get involved in the entire affair because he knew Vera
Cheberyak all too well—his wife had once had a violent confrontation with her. But he knew something that he could not keep it to himself: Shakhovsky had a grudge against Beilis.