A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (21 page)

Rasputin himself would be present in Kiev during the tsar’s visit and available to come to the aid of the royal heir, the sickly seven-year-old
Alexis, should he be stricken with one of his hemophilic episodes.
Nicholas and
Alexandra regarded Rasputin as a gift from God. The court physicians had proven powerless to stop their son’s excruciating bouts of internal bleeding; the desperate parents had no doubt that only the man they referred to as “Our Friend” had the power to relieve the boy’s suffering. For his part, Prime Minister Peter Stolypin, who also served as interior minister, viewed Rasputin as a mountebank and a threat to the reputation of the monarchy. During the past year, the press had published article after sensational article about the “
semi-literate” and “depraved”
Siberian peasant and “spiritual quack” who had become
a favorite in “certain court circles”; the newspapers had even featured lurid stories of innocent women he had defiled. After compromising pictures of him were brought to the tsar’s attention, Rasputin left the country in March 1911, at Nicholas’s prodding, on a long pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Stolypin had tried, unsuccessfully, to banish him from the capital permanently. But by August Rasputin had returned home and was again in the imperial couple’s embrace. Theirs was a deep emotional and spiritual bond that could not be broken. During the years of their intense relationship, Rasputin addressed Nicholas and Alexandra as “Papa” and “Mama” (ostensibly because they were the mother and father of the Russian people). To the tsar, Rasputin was a “good, religious, simple-minded Russian” and the sovereign treasured their frequent and lengthy conversations. “
When in trouble and assailed by doubts,” he once confided, “I like to have a talk with him and invariably feel at peace with myself afterward.” Their dialogues could combine the spiritual with the political, which surely worried Stolypin. In fact, just two weeks before coming to Kiev,
Nicholas had entrusted “Our Friend” with a mission of state importance: to evaluate a possible candidate to relieve Stolypin of his secondary post as minister of the interior. Rasputin told the gentleman that the tsar had sent him “to look into your soul.” While the story sounds implausible—that this poorly educated, physically filthy, licentious “holy man” would be entrusted with such vital government business—Rasputin was almost certainly telling the truth.

The two charlatans, Rasputin and Dr. Badmaev, would later form a partnership, helping install one of the doctor’s patients, Alexander Protopopov, who was rumored to suffer from advanced syphilis, as the empire’s final, half-mad, interior minister. But in August 1911 the two men were at odds. Badmaev schemed in vain to supplant Rasputin as healer to the tsarevich Alexis. Rasputin reputedly mocked Badmaev, saying, “He has
two infusions. You drink a little glass of one, and your cock gets hard; but there’s still the other: you drink a really tiny glass of it, and it makes you good-natured and kind of stupid, and you don’t care about anything.” Perhaps the bedridden general Kurlov ingested one that made him “kind of stupid”—there were rumors that Badmaev’s potions contained substances stronger than herbs. A more serious impairment to his security efforts in Kiev, however, was Kurlov’s near-total
lack of previous experience in police work. Owing his ascent
largely to the patronage of the empress, Kurlov, like so many other tsarist officials, could himself be counted as a kind of charlatan.

Still, the
security preparations for the imperial visit appeared impressive. The authorities in
Kiev had made a massive effort to round up undesirables. Large numbers of people deemed suspicious had been arrested, with the
police invoking the government’s emergency powers to keep them in custody. Along parts of the tsar’s route to and from the city, security officers were stationed every dozen yards. Three hundred buildings along critical routes within the city had been searched “from roof to cellar.”

The imperial train, with its eleven dark blue, gilt-trimmed cars, arrived in Kiev on August 29. The tsar was accompanied by the empress Alexandra and the couple’s “most august” children: their four daughters—Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia (OTMA as they dubbed themselves)—and their youngest child, the tsarevich Alexis. Prime Minister Stolypin and members of the cabinet had arrived earlier and were there on the platform, along with local dignitaries, to greet the imperial family.

Among those at the station was Father
Fyodor Sinkevich, the priest who had been present at Zhenya
Cheberyak’s
deathbed. He delivered a few words welcoming the tsar in the name of Kiev’s monarchist organizations such as
Double Headed Eagle. As he addressed the tsar he may have already had in his possession the “
most humble petition” from Vera Cheberyak and been looking for an opportunity to pass it on to the sovereign. The suspicious scene the priest had witnessed three weeks earlier as Zhenya lay dying had done nothing to undermine his belief that a Jew had killed Andrei for his blood. Cheberyak’s plan to enlist Father Sinkevich as her protector had succeeded. In the petition, Cheberyak expressed bewilderment as to why suspicion fell on her in the matter of Andrei Yushchinsky’s murder. As one who had led an “irreproachable life of toil” and “in the name of the sufferings of a mother deprived of two of her children,” she pleaded with the tsar to reveal the names of the people persecuting her, so that she could “once and for all be rid of this matter.”

From the train station the imperial carriages proceeded along the three-mile route to the physical and
spiritual heart of the city, the magnificent
St. Sophia Cathedral, dark green and white, its thirteen golden domes shining. The streets, brightly decorated with banners
welcoming the sovereign, were lined with worshipful, cheering crowds. Such demonstrations of affection were expected and encouraged;
Nicholas took deep satisfaction in public displays of adoration by the common people. But Kievans had been warned not to throw flowers in the path of the tsar’s carriage: any flying object had to be treated as a
bomb. A contingent of students who had been deemed reliable had strewn a token stretch of one thoroughfare with blossoms. When Nicholas and his family arrived at the cathedral, where Andrei Yushchinsky had once studied at the religious school, they were anointed with holy water by the metropolitan, and the tsar’s week of official activities began.

At some point in the next two days, Tsar Nicholas was briefed on the Yushchinsky investigation. The tsar had likely received his first briefing on the case from justice minister
Ivan Shcheglovitov in
St. Petersburg on May 18, probably a summation of the results of his deputy
Liadov’s mission to Kiev. It was then that Nicholas may have first heard mention of the poor Jewish
brick factory clerk. There is no record of any other briefing on the case between May and the tsar’s arrival in Kiev. While the tsar was an ardent reader of the right-wing press, during the languid days of August he may not have paid close attention to news of the investigation and not known of the purported break in the case.

For Grigory Chaplinsky, the chief prosecutor, the meeting with the tsar was surely one of the greatest moments of his life. He had only a few minutes with the sovereign, but he required just a few words to sum up his progress.
Dimitry Grigorovich-Barsky, at the time a senior prosecutor, who later became an attorney for Beilis, witnessed this key meeting. He later gave an account that might seem to stretch credulity but was confirmed decades later in a document from the archives of the Ministry of Justice. Chaplinsky told the tsar, “Your majesty, I am happy to report that the true culprit in the murder of Yushchinsky has been found. It is the Yid Beilis.”

If Nicholas responded verbally, it was not recorded; but upon hearing this news Nicholas bowed his head and
crossed himself.

Nicholas did not like Jews. He believed they were exploiters of poor and vulnerable Russians and fomenters of revolution and likely agreed with this father,
Alexander III, who wrote in the margin of a report on the wretched state of Russian Jewry, “
We must not forget that it was the Jews who crucified our Lord and spilled his precious blood.” While
he did not directly provoke
violence against the Jews, he sympathized with the Black Hundreds and was grateful for their support in suppressing “bad elements” in the populace during the 1905
revolution. In December 1905, he not only gratefully accepted the badges presented to him and his son by a delegation of the
Union of
Russian People, both he and
Alexis wore them for years. (On one occasion, when Nicholas gave an audience to the editor of a Black Hundred newspaper, the man dandled the tsarevich on his knee. Seeing the badge on the man’s chest, the little boy pointed to his own and said, “
I’m a Unionist too!”)

On the one hand, Nicholas’s attitude toward the Jews was unremarkable for his time and among his circle. Even his most forward-looking officials, like former prime minister
Sergei Witte, believed Jews to be either revolutionaries or capitalist bloodsuckers. Or, strangely enough, both. As the eminent historian
Hans
Rogger pointed out, an odd feature of tsarist anti-Semitism was that both the most reactionary and progressive officials shared the assumption that “Jewish money … would join with Jewish misery for a common assault on the regime.” The striking aspect of the regime’s policy, according to Rogger, was “the way reality and delusion combined to shape action.” Even such sophisticated men as Witte, and perhaps even Stolypin, sincerely believed that the all-powerful “leaders” of Russian Jewry could manipulate their five million coreligionists into doing their bidding. The oft-expressed notion that the regime cynically used anti-Semitism as a means of deflecting popular anger is largely a misconception. In fact, tsarist officials truly saw the Jews as a monstrous, multi-tentacled threat. The “Jewish question” was for them a real and pressing problem, not a political ploy.

On the other hand, Nicholas’s hostility toward the Jews had an especially extreme aspect that confounded even his closest advisers.

While many officials shared a belief in the worldwide Jewish conspiracy and the mythical union of Jewish capital and the revolutionary movement, most of them understood the reality of Jewish poverty in the
Pale of Settlement and the counterproductive nature of many anti-Jewish governmental restrictions. Many people in authority shared the understanding that Jewish discontent was a threat to public order that needed to be defused. A reasonable policy, in their view, would require some harsh measures to deal with the “Jewish threat” but would also involve significant accommodations.

In October 1906, when the horrific year of revolutionary violence had abated, Prime Minister Stolypin felt the time had come to
alleviate or eliminate some of the hundreds of anti-Jewish measures established by the government. Many of the edicts, he believed, were merely irritants that could even inflame Jews, especially Jewish youth, toward revolution. In a private conversation he told a journalist, “
The Jews throw bombs. And do you know the conditions under which they live in the Western parts [of the empire]? Have you seen the poverty of the Jews? If I lived under such circumstances perhaps I too would start to throw bombs.”

Stolypin was no liberal. During and after the revolution of 1905, he had thousands of alleged revolutionaries and opponents of the regime summarily executed by field courts-martial without due process of law. The nooses from which they were hanged were dubbed “Stolypin’s neckties,” and decades later railway cars for transporting prisoners were still called “Stolypins” in Russia. But he was an ambitious reformer who famously declared that, given twenty years of peace, he would transform the country. His mission was to create a state based on the rule of law, which would remain an autocracy, to be sure, but with a well-educated populace and a thriving new class of independent farmers. “I am
fighting on two fronts,” Stolypin confided to the renowned British historian of Russia Bernard Pares. “I am fighting against revolution, but for reform. You may say that such a position is beyond human strength and you might be right.” Part of his plan to create a law-based state was, to a degree, normalizing the situation of the Jews.

After a series of
contentious meetings in the early fall of 1906, the Council of Ministers sent a very modest packet of reforms to Tsar Nicholas for his approval. One measure, for example, would grant to Jews who had worked as artisans or merchants for a certain period of time outside the Pale of Settlement the permanent right to live there. Another called for special fines on families of Jewish draft evaders to be abolished. In a report to the tsar, Stolypin laid out at length the pragmatic arguments for improving the lot of the Jews. He clearly had every expectation that the tsar would approve of the measures because he noted in his report that only those who have “a general feeling of intransigent hostility toward Jewry” could oppose them.

Nicholas took nearly two months to reply. On December 10, 1906, Stolypin received the tsar’s extraordinary response. The tsar had decided to reject the contents of this ministerial “journal,” as it was called, in its entirety:

The emphasis on
“never”
is in the original. The tsar believed his “inner voice” was infallible. And, in this instance, the voice dictated that he should take no action to alleviate Jewish suffering, even though his ministers believed the situation undermined the stability of the regime. Stolypin’s personal reaction went unrecorded, but he was surely shocked. The moderately conservative
Vladimir Kokovtsov, an ally of Stolypin who was finance minister at the time, wrote in his memoirs: “None of the documents in my possession shows so clearly the
Tsar’s mystical attitude toward the nature of his imperial power as this letter.” The “inner voice” episode also provides a kind of key to the regime’s mysterious decision to pursue the case against Mendel Beilis.