A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (38 page)

The Beilis case had become a dangerous rallying point for opponents of the regime. After Shulgin’s article came out, the security apparatus stepped up efforts to
harass the press, ultimately punishing 102 papers. Six editors were arrested, thirty-six issues of various papers were confiscated, three papers were closed for the duration of the trial, and forty-three were fined a total of 12,850 rubles. The punishments, invariably “for an attempt to inflammatorily influence the public,” were all illegal because none of the material targeted was inflammatory, a fact tsarist officials admitted in secret communications. Moreover, the punishments inflicted were haphazard and ineffectual. (What, really, could be achieved by
fining Nabokov, coeditor of
Speech,
a hundred rubles?) The attacks on the press were part of a larger—and largely futile—attempt to maintain public order. Russia was in the middle of an escalating wave of strikes, which would continue for another eleven months until the first shots of the Great War. Countless groups of
striking workers adopted pro-Beilis resolutions. A demonstration of several thousand workers in Warsaw—
Poland was then part of the Russian Empire—had to be broken up by the police. Strikes of Jewish workers in
support of Beilis broke out in Vilnius, Riga, and
Minsk. University students across Russia held one-day protest strikes. At St. Petersburg University, following Shulgin’s example, right-wing students posted a letter declaring that,
although they considered the Jews to be “a harmful nation,” they could not support “the unjust charge of ritual murder.”

As for violent attacks on Jews, there were scattered incidents, but the regime—greatly concerned, in general, with suppressing all violence—was quite successful in preventing anti-Jewish retribution. The trial was a moral assault on the Jewish people, but Jews were relatively safe from bodily harm—for the time being.

The trial of Mendel Beilis was, both literally and figuratively, a messy and disorderly affair. With the passing days, cigarette butts, spittle stains, and other rubbish accumulated in the hallways. (Visitors ignored the numerous “Please Do Not …” signs staring reproachfully from the walls.) Inside the courtroom, witnesses for the defense and prosecution were often mixed together in no sensible pattern, called in no particular order, and even for no apparent reason. (In the Russian system, witnesses were called by the judge, who did the initial questioning, and were not identified to the jury as testifying for one side or the other.) Quite a few prosecution witnesses were asked only, “Do you know anything about this case,” said no, and were excused. On the evening of the fourth day, September 28, amid a run of wholly irrelevant witnesses, the judge called to the stand Mikhail Nakonechny. The erratic course of the trial had abruptly brought it to one of the strongest witnesses for the defense and perhaps the only one whom Beilis’s supporters could rightly call a hero.

Nakonechny, nicknamed “Frog,” was a shoemaker with seven children who lived not far from Beilis, at the opposite end of the same courtyard as
Vera Cheberyak. He more than anyone else had done his part to exonerate Beilis. Two years earlier, when he had heard that the lamplighter Kazimir Shakhovsky was incriminating Beilis, he immediately informed the authorities that he had heard this man vow to “pin the crime on Mendel.” Shakhovsky himself admitted that this damning account was truthful. Tall and neatly dressed, Nakonechny looked nothing like a frog; he had a side business as a kind of poor man’s attorney, filling out legal petitions for the illiterate and giving them advice in the bargain. All who saw him testify commented on the righteousness and sincerity that he projected.

Zamyslovsky, the prosecutor and esteemed Duma member, tried hard to confuse the poor Lukianovka shoemaker into a contradiction or at least unsettle him, but Nakonechny could not be
intimidated. When his opponent said accusingly, “
So you are a
professional
petitioner”—implying he was the clever sort who made up stories to fit the occasion—Nakonechny replied humbly that professionals appear in court, whereas “I consider myself a craftsman.” When Zamyslovsky tried to interrupt him, Nakonechny cut him off. “Let me finish,” he said. “My heart is anxious, and I want to make sure to keep nothing from the court.” When Zamyslovsky did speak, the shoemaker batted back his sneering insinuations. “So it seems you greatly
troubled yourself
to inform the investigator about everything regarding this case?” Zamyslovsky said sarcastically. “I didn’t ‘trouble myself,’ ” Nakonechny responded. “But I have a grain of decency and I considered it my obligation to say what I knew because an
innocent man might suffer.” At the words “innocent man,”
Beilis broke down, but the questioning continued.

Nakonechny performed a great service to the defense by explaining clearly for the first time why the story of Beilis dragging off Andrei defied all common sense—something the defense had not yet had an opportunity to do. After Zamyslovsky mentioned the scenario, Nakonechny, almost screaming, said, “If that had happened, all the children would have raised such a cry that not an hour would have passed before we, the whole street, would have known about the boy’s disappearance.”

The prosecution should have objected, and the judge should have cut him off; this was merely the witness’s opinion, however well founded. But his dignity and passion cowed the court into letting him speak. Leaving the witness stand, Nakonechny fell on his fourteen-year-old daughter Dunya’s shoulder and cried. She, too, would be an important witness, coming face-to-face with Vera Cheberyak’s daughter in one of the most dramatic moments of the trial.

Her own testimony was several days off, but toward the end of the fourth day Vera Cheberyak managed to enter the trial in the most unexpected manner. Amid a run of useless prosecution witnesses, a woman named
Daria Chekhovskaya stood to testify to the good character of Andrei’s mother. Asked the general question, “What do you know about this case?,” the woman stunned the courtroom. In the waiting room, she said, she had heard Vera Cheberyak trying to intimidate a young witness. The two women had been sitting on the same bench, back-to-back, when she heard Cheberyak call over one of Zhenya’s old playmates. “She started to coach him,” Chekhovskaya testified.
“She told him: You tell the court, ‘All three of us went to the factory—Zhenya, and Andrusha and me. They chased us. We ran away and they grabbed Andrusha’…Say that you broke free from Beilis’s arms, and Andrusha was left behind. Say that he [Beilis] grabbed him and dragged him off.” According to Chekhovskaya, the boy told Cheberyak he wouldn’t say any of that. The prosecution tried to insinuate that the woman was lying. “You were called to testify about the mother and now you offer us this bit of news!” Vipper snapped. But he could not shake her testimony.

The stage was set for an “eye-to-eye” confrontation, a provision of Russian trials when witnesses contradicted each other directly. The judge would give Vera Cheberyak a chance to call the boy a liar to his face.

The fifth day, according to
Speech
correspondent
Stepan Kondurushkin, “could justifiably be called
‘the day of the black beards.’ ” To prove that Beilis and various other dark-bearded men were responsible for Andrei’s murder, the prosecution first turned to Kazimir and Ulyana Shakhovskaya, the Lamplighters. The hard-drinking couple had already given half a dozen different versions of their stories to investigators, contradicting themselves and each other, and finally recanting most of their testimony. Kazimir, an alcoholic wreck of a man, spoke haltingly and frequently got tied up in his own words. Attorneys for both sides had trouble getting sense out of him. He stuck by part of his story—that Zhenya had told him that someone had chased the boys away from the Zaitsev factory. But otherwise his testimony was less than helpful to the prosecution.

“
Did the detectives tell you to testify against Beilis?” the judge asked.

“The detectives gave me vodka to drink. They took us and told us to say this and that.”

“Did they ask you to testify against Beilis?”

“Yes.” […]

“Why were there so many changes in your testimony? Did they coach you?”

“Of course.”

“Did [the detectives] give you both [him and his wife] liquor until you were drunk?”

“
Yes, until we were drunk.”

Ulyana, a woman with watery eyes and a perpetually confused smile, simply gave the impression, the
Kievan
reported, “that she was not playing with a
full deck.” Did the derelict Anna the Wolf really tell her she saw a man in a black beard carrying off Andrei? “Yes,” she whispered. But pressed on what Anna had really told her, she said, “I don’t remember, she was too drunk, and I couldn’t make out what she said.” Did the detectives tell her to testify against Mendel? “Yes, yes.” Did she say anything against him? “No, I didn’t.”

The day’s final witness was Vladimir
Golubev, the volatile leader of the right-wing Kiev youth group
Double Headed Eagle. It was he who had first brought the man he called “the Yid Mendel” to the attention of the authorities as a suspect in May 1911. If not for him, it was nearly certain, the defendant would not be sitting in the dock. Golubev impressed Beilis as looking like some sort of outlaw, which was a more correct intuition than he probably realized.

Golubev, while useful to the prosecution, was also dangerous. He had spent the past year and a half under the authorities’ watch—alternately coddled and scolded. The chief prosecutor,
Grigory Chaplinsky, would consult with him about the case. But Golubev also had to suffer what he must have considered continual petty indignities. The police
fined him ten rubles for placing an unapproved notice in his group’s newspaper announcing a public requiem for Andrei. Another issue was
confiscated due to an inflammatory article about the case and a poem seen as calling for a pogrom. All this was humiliating. Had he not kept his word—for more than two years—not to incite a pogrom? The authorities, however, were right to be concerned. By the late summer of 1912 his desire to shed Jewish blood had begun to overwhelm him. Until then, Golubev seems to have been more a talker than a doer. But on the
night of September 5, 1912, he and about ten of his comrades set out for the largely Jewish Podol neighborhood armed with iron bars and rubber truncheons. They shouted, “Beat the Jews,” and “Take that for Stolypin”—it was the first anniversary of the assassinated prime minister’s death—as they struck several Jews (as well as one Russian student, apparently by mistake). Pursued by police, they rushed off to the vicinity of the Choral Synagogue, where they beat a few more Jews. Just after midnight, Golubev hit a Jewish student on the head. There the police caught up with him and his crew and they were arrested. But
he was never charged with a crime and so, when he gave his oath to the court, he could honestly claim a spotless record.

Testifying ought to have been the greatest moment of his young life. He had been waiting for it for so long. No one could censor him. His every word would be taken down and published in full in the morning papers—even the liberal papers. But his gait was shaky, his face pale. The witness did not at all live up to the grand role of instigator of the case that now gripped the world. He looked so ill that the judge told him he could postpone his testimony until the next day if he wished. “
No, I can talk,” Golubev said, and then promptly fainted and fell to the ground.

A refreshed Golubev testified the next morning. He mainly restated his reasons for suspecting the
brick-factory clerk, while sprinkling his remarks with the word “Yid” (
zhid
) and its adjectival variant (
zhidovskii
). Guided by the writings of the pseudo-scholar
Hippolyte Liutostansky, he had quickly concluded that the crime followed the pattern of “Yid ritual murders.” He canvassed the Lukianovka neighborhood to find out “whether the boy Yushchinsky had any relationships with Yids.” He implied that Detectives Krasovsky and Mishchuk must have been in the pay of the Jews. With his confident manner, he was probably the best prosecution witness so far. But under cross-examination by Gruzenberg, he let slip one item of great significance for the defense. A few weeks after Andrei’s murder Golubev had been the first person to question Zhenya Cheberyak about the last time he had seen his friend Andrei. At that time, Golubev admitted, Zhenya had said nothing about playing with him on the clay grinders at the Zaitsev factory or about being chased by men with black beards. According to Golubev, Zhenya had told him that he and Andrei had played in a field, bought lard at a store, then dropped by Zhenya’s house and—here is the key detail—Andrei left without his coat. Andrei, this account clearly suggests, had left his coat in the Cheberyaks’ apartment. It was never found. The defense did its best to hint at the obvious conclusion: whoever knew what had happened to Andrei’s coat knew what had happened to Andrei.

Golubev also offered some unintended comic relief. At one point he assured the court that the defendant came from a line of tzaddiks,
or wise men, and “was respected because he was a tzaddik” himself.
Beilis, for once,
erupted in laughter.

Around one p.m. on this, the sixth day of the trial—September 30, 1913—the judges, the jury, the attorneys, and selected witnesses, including Golubev, exited the courthouse and
piled into twenty-five carriages and automobiles. Accompanied by policemen on horseback, the vehicles snaked toward Lukianovka to survey sites relevant to the case. As a safety precaution, the defendant traveled in his coach along quiet side streets. Two years, two months, and eight days after his arrest in the middle of the night, Mendel Beilis was going home.

The day was cold and windy. Overhead, storm clouds threatened. As the convoy arrived in Lukianovka, the smell of smoke pervaded the air—somewhere nearby a building was on fire. But nothing could keep away the curious. A reporter noted that they loitered “by houses, in doorways and in windows … children, women, workers and prostitutes.” Shooed away by the police, they would reappear minutes later a few steps down the street.