A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (43 page)

The testimony of Brazul took up most of the day. He thoroughly agitated Vera Cheberyak, who repeatedly scurried to a windowsill to pour herself a
glass of water. But observers agreed the journalist was an ineffective witness for the defense; civil prosecutor Shmakov caught him in a slew of inconsistencies. Vladimir D. Nabokov, who covered the trial for
Speech,
found that while Brazul was “undoubtedly sincere,” he came off as “
unthoughtful, gullible,” someone easily bamboozled. The correspondent for the
Jewish Chronicle
was harsher, saying that Brazul came across as “an
honest, thick-skinned busybody with an exaggerated opinion of his detective talents.”

Margolin took the stand next. As a professional advocate of the first rank, he conducted himself with immense skill. As the prosecution probed his dealings with Vera Cheberyak, along with Brazul and two or three other of Brazul’s colleagues in the city of Kharkov in December 1911, he was never trapped in contradictions. In fact, he himself
came armed to point out errors in Vera Cheberyak’s account (what shirt he had been wearing, the layout of his hotel room, and so forth) that ate up time and neutralized the prosecution’s attacks. As Shmakov questioned him aggressively, Margolin responded in kind. When asked if he had offered Vera Cheberyak forty thousand rubles to admit to the crime, he answered, “I think that only a demented person could do such a thing.”

“I want a yes or no answer,” Shmakov retorted.

“I just answered no,” Margolin replied. “After all, no one has yet subjected my
mental faculties to any doubt.”

The prosecution did make Margolin look less than candid around his efforts to keep the Kharkov meeting a secret. Margolin unconvincingly contended that he had done nothing to “hide” the meeting but had merely been “silent” about it. However, it was obvious that he had gone to some lengths to keep the meeting from being publicly known.

Margolin, though, made sure he would fire the final salvo at the most auspicious moment. When the judge summoned Vera Cheberyak to the stand for an
eye-to-eye confrontation with the witness, she told the court she recognized Margolin, though “he was a lot fatter then.” She reaffirmed her tale about the forty-thousand-ruble bribe, and Margolin denied it.

Then, with Vera Cheberyak standing beside him, Margolin explained why her behavior made sense only if she had been an accomplice in Andrei’s murder. Why had this known criminal made such efforts to implicate others, while seeking no reward at all for herself? “Only someone who was defending herself against a threatening danger,” he argued, “who was trying to deflect suspicion from herself toward other persons, who wanted to lead astray the investigative authorities” would behave in such a way. When he finished, Vera Cheberyak remained silent.

On the morning of the fourteenth day, an unusually large crowd
swarmed the court tearoom to fortify themselves before the session began. No one wanted to miss a single word of the day’s proceedings. The courtroom was going to be as packed as it had been six days earlier for Vera Cheberyak’s main testimony. Nikolai Krasovsky—former acting chief detective of the Kiev police force, former
provincial police official, former lead investigator into the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky—was about to take the stand. His various “formers” had not been joined by any current position, the
Beilis affair having provided him only with vilification in the far-right press, respect if not adulation in the liberal press, and worldwide fame. In
Europe and the United States the reportage portrayed him as the Russian Sherlock Holmes who had cracked the case. But at home Krasovsky was unemployed and unemployable.

The detective had enjoyed a twenty-year career of successes followed by drastic disappointments. An intelligent man who had for some reason failed to finish his gymnasium education, he had entered the police force, risen by dint of his competence to the post of acting chief detective, only to be sent to the provinces when his rival, Evgeny Mishchuk, beat him out for the Kiev post. Then he had been specially recalled to Kiev to handle the politically sensitive murder case, with consequences that now made him hero, villain, and star witness.

The day had brought some welcome news for Beilis’s supporters.
Prince A. D. Obolensky, former ober-procurator (or lay administrator) of the Russian Orthodox Holy Synod, the governing body of the Church, condemned as “blasphemy” the prosecution’s references to the Holy Bible. (He had earlier denounced the ritual-murder charge, in general, noting that “the use of blood is contrary to all the teachings of the Jewish religion.”) The day before,
King
Constantine of Greece had denounced the myth in an audience with the rabbis of Salonika and invited the chief rabbi to his yacht to tell him personally: “You may assure the entire Jewish population that the calumny will never be repeated in my kingdom.” (King Constantine seems to have been the only head of state to denounce the blood accusation in connection with the Beilis trial.) A number of Russian Orthodox clergymen had also publicly denounced the blood accusation in recent days. But in the courtroom the entire focus was on the former detective.

Krasovsky began by testifying for almost four and half hours, nearly uninterrupted, with only occasional questions by the judge, as he recounted his investigation of the Yushchinsky murder. He spoke calmly, precisely, and in an unhurried manner. The jurors, whose attention had understandably wandered at times, listened with unbroken attentiveness. As Krasovsky testified, Vera Cheberyak looked so nervous, it seemed to a reporter she might get up at any moment and
scream. As it was, she merely began dashing to the window to gulp down repeated glasses of water.

Krasovsky told of his initial queasiness at the prospect of a case that would promise him nothing but “intrigues and trouble”; his initial suspicions that led him to arrest the dead boy’s stepfather and other family members; his realization that he had made a mistake, that the family was innocent, and that Vera Cheberyak was likely involved in the crime. Following this breakthrough came his struggles with the intrigues against him, as Kiev’s chief prosecutor, Grigory Chaplinsky, in league with the Black Hundreds, blocked his honest
investigation. He told of his grateful return home to his provincial post, only to be cashiered from the police force on false charges. He then returned to Kiev with “the goal of restoring my reputation and seeing this case to its end,” that is, solving the crime.

From Krasovsky the jury first heard an account of two seemingly sensational pieces of evidence—or, from the prosecution’s point of view, unfounded speculations—that implicated Vera Cheberyak and her gang. These were the “
story of the
switches” and the “
Christian letters.” Along with the “the body in the carpet,” and Zhenya Cheberyak’s
deathbed scene, these completed the quartet of haunting tales that formed the core of the case’s legend.

Of the four different incidents, only Zhenya’s deathbed scene was undoubtedly true. It had been testified to by the most credible eye witnesses. But the veracity of the “story of the switches” and the “Christian letters,” as well as the “body in the carpet,” was more open to question.

Krasovsky had heard from a number of witnesses that Andrei, Zhenya, and another boy had gone out one day to cut switches from some shrubs. They had quarreled over who would keep the best one. (Zhenya: “If you don’t give me yours, I’ll tell your aunt that you didn’t go to school, and you came here to play.” Andrusha: “And if you tell on me, I’ll write to the police that at your mother’s thieves are constantly hiding and bringing stolen things.”) The argument had supposedly led to suspicions that Andrei had betrayed Cheberyak’s gang. The prosecution forced Krasovsky to admit that story was at best thirdhand—he had heard it from a watchman with whom he’d struck up a conversation near a water main outlet, who had heard it from someone else, who said she had heard it from a boy known only as
Sasha F., who had supposedly witnessed Zhenya and Andrei’s argument. Neither Krasovsky
nor any other investigator could find that boy. This did not mean the story was not true, just that it was not proven. But perhaps the efficient Lukianovka rumor mill had simply fabricated a scene that would explain the killing, just has it had when Andrei’s mother and stepfather had been under suspicion and within days the story spread of their being seen loading into a cab, carrying a sack with Andrei’s body.

The “
Christian letters” were the two missives anonymously sent to Andrei’s mother and to the city coroner days after the body was discovered. Their author recounted how he had supposedly seen the boy in the company of an “old Jew” around the time of his murder and pointed to the Jews as the culprits. The judge did not allow the letters into evidence but permitted Krasovsky to describe them. Krasovsky claimed that the letters’ author described the wounds with great accuracy, even though the missives were posted before the coroner’s autopsy had been completed. He and Brazul also contended that the letter had been written by one of Vera Cheberyak’s gang members, Nikolai “Nicky the Sailor” Mandzelevsky, “at her dictation.”

Unfortunately, only one of the letters, the one addressed to Andrei’s mother, survives in the archives. It does not mention the specific number of his wounds. The handwriting does not match that of Nicky the Sailor or that of several other Cheberyak gang members for whom there are handwriting samples. Perhaps the letter to the coroner did describe the wounds. But even if the description were accurate, the prosecution pointed out, an
early newspaper account gave a fairly accurate sense of the number of wounds on the body, which had, in any event, been on public view for hours after being removed from the cave. The letters’ contents were spooky (“What if … the Jews need blood for the
Passover holiday and a thin boy will be their victim”), but it could not be proved that either one had any connection to the killers.

The bulk of the prosecution’s brutal cross-examination focused on Krasovsky’s decision to arrest Andrei’s family. Why had he arrested the boy’s stepfather, Luka Prikhodko, even though the man had a credible alibi? Why did Krasovsky arrest not only him but also his elderly father and even the brother of Andrei’s biological father? The prosecutor sarcastically asked Krasovsky if he had ever considered arresting Andrei’s elderly grandmother, too. (Krasovsky, in one of his less adept answers, responded, “There was no need.”) Why had the detective ordered that Luka Prikhodko’s hair be cut and dyed, so as to maximize
his resemblance to a man that a witness had seen near the scene of the crime? How could he justify such chicanery? Krasovsky looked evasive and unconvincing and at times stumbled under the prosecution’s furious assault.

Vladimir D. Nabokov, always the most morally subtle and clear-eyed of observers, did not so much defend Krasovsky as explain him. This old police hand, he admitted, was an imperfect hero. But it was not fair to judge him outside the context of his time and place. “Of course his
methods were reprehensible,” Nabokov wrote in
Speech,
but, as a man who had served his whole career in the Russian police force, “where could he have been expected to glean the principles of respect for human dignity?” Krasovsky, overall, came across as a man who had, whatever his flaws, tried to correct his mistakes after he recognized them and who always pursued the truth as he saw it.

For two years Oskar Gruzenberg had feared the consequences of what he viewed as Arnold Margolin’s reckless investigation of the case. So far the defense had weathered the prosecution’s assault. However, with the appearance of the young seamstress Ekaterina
Diakonova, the defense would find its case veering into the hallucinatory.

Diakonova was Vera Cheberyak’s onetime friend who Krasovsky had wooed by taking her out dozens of times to restaurants on the hunch that she knew more than she was telling about the crime. Eventually, she had appeared to provide useful information. She claimed to have dropped by Cheberyak’s on the day Andrei had disappeared and seen the three suspected gang members scurrying around suspiciously and hurriedly covering something with a coat in the corner as she entered the apartment. She and her sister Ksenia identified pieces of perforated paper found near Andrei’s body as being very similar to ones used at Cheberyak’s for a game called Post Office. It also appeared that she could identify a piece of embroidered pillowcase found in Andrei’s pocket as coming from the Cheberyaks’ apartment.

Testimony over the paper and pillowcase went on at great length. If the items could have been established as coming from the Cheberyaks’ apartment, they would have constituted the first physical evidence linking Cheberyak to the crime. The testimony, though, while suggestive of a connection, was frustratingly inconclusive. The defense objected that
Ekaterina Diakonova was unfairly forced to try to draw the pillowcase design from memory. Rare is the person, they said, who could draw from memory the pattern of a piece of clothing he or she was actually wearing, let alone a pattern unseen for years. Still, the defense could not come close to proving the origin of the items.

But Ekaterina Diakonova had much, much else to say. From the pretrial depositions, Gruzenberg knew what was coming, which is why he must have been worried.

Diakonova, a thin woman of twenty-four, with her hair done up in a massive chignon, told the court that on three occasions she had had long conversations about the case with a mysterious
masked man. The exchanges had lasted hours and had supposedly taken place while she and the man stood in the street. At one of the meetings, the man had supposedly told her that they
needed to kill Krasovsky, Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov of the
Gendarmes, and Investigator
Fenenko. Why the masked man would talk to her of all people, she could not explain. Karabchevsky gamely attempted to mitigate the story’s incredibility. “Have you ever seen people who fly on
airplanes, or ride on motorcycles?” he asked hopefully. Perhaps the man had on that kind of mask? No, she answered, it was a smooth black mask that clung closely to his face, held in place by a hat with earflaps fastened under his chin.