A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (31 page)

Karaev, smarting from the mistrust of his fellow revolutionaries, reacted much like Stolypin’s doomed assassin
Dimitry Bogrov, who had been exposed by his comrades as an informer. He was looking for a way to cleanse his
reputation. In the Beilis investigation he believed that he had found what he needed—except his would not be a suicidal act like Bogrov’s but instead one of regeneration. He would emerge alive, his honor restored, ready to bask in renewed adulation.

At the time Karaev had nearly been unmasked, he was in fact no longer working for the Okhrana. Although he had been receiving
one hundred rubles a month for his services and appeared to earn his pay by supplying reliable information, he was let go for behavior judged too unseemly even by Okhrana standards. According to a department report, the information he provided was of serious interest but turned out to be the product of “the methods of the
agent provocateur and his inclination to blackmail.” In other words, Karaev had not just tipped off the police about crimes that others had planned; he had entrapped his comrades, luring or coercing them into criminal schemes and setting them up to be arrested.

The prosecution thus had information that could destroy the credibility of these two key defense witnesses. Who would believe the story of two professional informers who had every incentive to lie, who indeed had lied for a living, at least one of whom had been dismissed in disgrace? But would the prosecution be able to use this top secret information in court? It was a question that would be debated intensely behind the scenes and resolved only at the last moment, as the witnesses took the stand.

Vera
Cheberyak, in the wake of
Brazul’s devastating declaration, decided to cast her lot definitively with the prosecution.
Chaplinsky may have wanted to build a case without relying on the notorious villain of
Lukianovka, but now he needed her. When it came to credibility in court, Cheberyak surely had her shortcomings, but compared to
the witnesses he had, which at present numbered three well-known drunks, she amounted to a gift.

Reacting to Brazul’s report, Chaplinsky’s chief deputy,
A. A. Karbovsky, searched frenetically for some way to strengthen the case, reinterviewing key witnesses. On May 14 he questioned Cheberyak. In seven previous depositions to Investigator Fenenko, she had never mentioned Mendel Beilis or said anything about Zhenya and Andrei visiting the Zaitsev factory. In December, her husband, Vasily, had suddenly recalled that Zhenya told him that he and Andrei had been chased away by Beilis, but Vasily did not clearly implicate him. Now, fourteen months after Andrei’s death, Vera suddenly recalled that her son had directly accused Mendel Beilis of the crime.
She told Karbovsky:

The role of the prosecution in sculpting Cheberyak’s testimony remains a matter of speculation. On June 2, in an unusual step for a man of his position, Chaplinsky had a personal conversation with the witness and had her questioned again by another prosecutor. The historian Alexander
Tager, who reviewed three of her depositions in which she recounted her new story, noted substantial inconsistencies among them, suggesting that the prosecution helped shaped her account. Only the final version was made public.

On May 30, Vera Cheberyak came to prosecutors with another striking story. She revealed that, in December of the previous year, the journalist Brazul had taken her to Kharkov to meet with some sort of gentleman for a strange talk about the
Yushchinsky case. She described the man as “
a Jew, very plump, slightly balding, with bulging eyes and a slight lisp.” It did not take long for the authorities to figure out that this was Arnold
Margolin. In her telling, during the meeting she was offered a forty-thousand-ruble bribe to admit to Andrei’s murder. (She was never clear on whether it was Margolin or another participant in
the meeting who made the offer.) She was told she could be spirited out of the country to enjoy her new wealth, but even if she had to stand trial, the best lawyers in the empire would have no difficulty securing her acquittal. Thanks to Cheberyak’s allegation, Margolin now had to admit to his meeting with her, which he had wanted to keep secret. He denied the fantastic story of the bribe, but with the state moving to disbar him for his alleged interference in an official investigation, he had no alternative except to resign as Beilis’s attorney. Gruzenberg was livid at his colleague’s recklessness. The
Black Hundreds, not to mention the prosecution, could point to Margolin’s escapade as proof of a Jewish conspiracy to cover up the hideous ritual. This was a disaster for the defense.

The authorities’ next target for harassment was Brazul. In early July, Vera Cheberyak slapped Brazul with a
lawsuit claiming injury to her reputation. She also
filed libel suits against several newspaper editors who had printed his charges against her. Given the volume of the paperwork and the rapidity with which it was filed, it is inconceivable that Cheberyak mounted this effort on her own; the suits were undoubtedly organized by
Chaplinsky’s office to bolster her credibility as a witness.

The prosecutor and his superiors then turned their attention toward
neutralizing Nikolai Krasovsky, who had for so long been such a nuisance. Krasovsky was unemployed, but he was a free man and a threat. In the eyes of the public he was still the great detective who had cracked so many unsolvable cases and was now receiving encomiums in the liberal and enlightened conservative press for revealing the true killers of Andrei Yushchinsky. This could not stand. On July 17 he was confronted by police officers and read a list of charges against him. He was now criminally accused of improperly arresting the peasant
Kovbasa, the purported offense that had gotten him fired from the police force. He was charged with destroying official paperwork regarding his assessment of an unpaid tax in the amount of sixteen kopeks from a citizen in 1903. (The implication was that he had pocketed the money.) Most absurdly, he was being investigated for stealing a winning lottery ticket while conducting a search (whether of a person or someone’s premises is not clear). The man who people were calling the
Sherlock Holmes of Russia was under arrest.

As Krasovsky spent his first night in jail, his coinvestigators knew
they, too, were in danger. Sergei
Makhalin had the good sense to flee the city. Amzor Karaev, never one to flinch, rashly remained in Kiev and on August 13 the police arrested him as well. The exact pretext is unknown but, like Krasovsky, his true crime was undoubtedly that of challenging the blood accusation.

By the end of the summer, the prosecution acquired one more exciting addition to its case: a self-proclaimed eyewitness to the crime—nine-year-old Ludmila Cheberyak. Almost exactly a year earlier Vera Cheberyak had pleaded with her dying son Zhenya to absolve her of Andrei’s murder, but the boy had failed her, with his last words earning her only more suspicion. Now the
mother offered up her one surviving child to the prosecution to exonerate her by condemning another. Perhaps the girl would succeed.

Vera Cheberyak must have been sufficiently self-aware to realize that her testimony alone would likely not be enough to convict Mendel Beilis. She was a notorious figure. People recognized her from her picture in the paper and harassed her on the street. On one occasion in mid-July of 1912, a passerby pointed her out, one thing led to another, and soon a large crowd of people was screaming, “
Yushchinsky’s murderer!” as it chased after her. She had to duck into a courtyard and hide there until the mob dispersed.

Unlike her mother, Ludmila could play the archetypal role of the virginal eyewitness. Unlike the pure maidservant in
Thomas of Monmouth’s twelfth-century account, she would not claim to have seen the evil deed “through a chink in the door” but rather to have witnessed the crime in broad daylight. The case would be much the stronger with an innocent girl prepared to point her finger at the bestial Jew in the dock as the man who had killed her young friend.

Ludmila had been questioned on May 14, 1912, separately from her mother. In that affidavit, which was kept secret from the defense, she said nothing to incriminate Beilis. But when she was questioned by the new investigating magistrate,
Nikolai Mashkevich, three months later, on August 13, she suddenly told the story that made her the prosecution’s dream witness. She now claimed to have gone with Zhenya, Andrei, and other children to play on the clay grinders at the Zaitsev factory on March 12, 1911, the day Andrei disappeared. Mendel Beilis
and two other Jews had chased after the children. (In this tale, unlike her mother’s account of Zhenya’s story, Beilis’s sons go unmentioned.) Beilis, she testified, “
caught Zhenya and Andrusha by the hands and started dragging them away, but Zhenya broke away and ran away with the rest of us, but Andrusha was dragged away by the Jews somewhere.” That, she said, was the last she saw of him.

The case against Menahem Mendel Tevyev Beilis, such as it was, was now complete. Beilis would have to maintain the patience and restraint of a hero for far longer than his attorneys had ever expected. If he thought of every day he survived in prison as a victory, then his victories would be many. He would have to wait more than a year for his chance to stand before the court and tell the judge, the jurors, and the world: “I am not guilty.”

One evening, as the new year of 1913 approached, Mendel Beilis was sitting alone in his cell (in one of the intervals when he had no cellmate) when he heard the approach of footsteps and several voices, and then a woman outside his door saying, “
It would be curious to see this rascal.” Immediately there followed the grinding of the thirteen locks on his door, as each was opened in turn. The sound always unnerved Beilis, making him feel obsessively as if someone were hitting him on the head from behind over and over.

A guard opened the door and the woman and a man in a general’s uniform stepped in. “What a terrible-looking creature,” the woman said. “How fierce he looks.”

The general was interested in Beilis as more than a sideshow attraction and started up a conversation. He began by telling Beilis that he might soon be set free. “On what grounds?” Beilis asked.

The general said that the
tercentenary jubilee of the Romanov dynasty was approaching and, to demonstrate his mercy, the tsar would issue a broad
pardon for convicts. If only Beilis would “tell the truth”—that is, confess—things would go well for him, he was sure.

Beilis answered that he didn’t need a pardon; he needed exoneration. He would not leave prison until he was declared innocent. Beilis grew enraged, though his impression was that the man was sincerely trying to give him some “good advice.” (The general and the lady, to all appearances, were a pair of curiosity seekers with no sinister motive—certainly the lady’s presence was no aid to any scheme.) However, even if his advice was well meaning, the general was quite wrong, as were hopes among the Jewish population that the tsar would soon set Beilis free. The impending festivities did not improve Beilis’s chances for release. In fact, his trial would serve as the climactic public spectacle of a year dedicated to the greater glory of the House of Romanov.

Tsar Nicholas was indeed looking forward to the tercentenary celebrations as he greeted New Year’s Day 1913 at the Grand Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, the “Tsar’s Village,” south of
St. Petersburg, where he spent as much time as he could. He disliked the capital. “Peter’s City” was too modern for his taste and, he felt, inauthentic and inorganic to Russia. Tsar Peter had, as Nicholas once put it, recklessly uprooted “
healthy shoots” of the Russian way of life along with the weeds. Nicholas belonged in
Moscow, the true heart of the Russian Empire. Once a tiny medieval principality just six hundred square miles in size, Moscow had grown into the enormous realm over which he now ruled. Residing in Moscow was not a practical possibility for the Russian sovereign; the machinery of government had been established in St. Petersburg for some two centuries. But in Tsarskoe Selo, Nicholas erected a perfect replica of an old Russian town as the headquarters for the
Cossack squadrons of his Personal Convoy and Imperial Rifles, who went about in
seventeenth-century costume. Here Nicholas could commune with the glorious Muscovite past.