A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (5 page)

Nicholas never actively incited
violence against the Jews, but he took palpable satisfaction from seeing the mobs heed the vigilantes’ infamous call: “Beat the Yids. Save Russia.” Manifesting a shared vocabulary with men such as Pavlovich, he wrote to his mother, the dowager empress Maria, in October 1905:

Nicholas acted as the protector of the most infamous Black Hundred rabble-rouser of the time, the
“Mad Monk” Iliodor. At the very
moment Andrei was being buried,
Iliodor was reaching the height of his renown. Iliodor propagandized, in its purest form, the ideology of the Russian right, which, in the words of historian
Jacob Langer, “revolved around a view of the
Jews as a race of superhuman power spreading evil on a biblical scale.” Based in the southern Russian city of Tsaritsyn (now Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad), Iliodor proselytized his creed to crowds in the thousands. “The Jew drinks human blood,” he declaimed. “The Jew regards it as a pious deed to kill a
Christian, the Antichrist will spring from Jewish stock, the Jew is accused by God, the Jew is the source of all evil in the world.” The Mad Monk was so charismatic that he could reduce his female followers to a “tearful hysteria.” A contemporary observer was struck by the curious combination of his “
delicate, beautiful, feminine face” and “powerful will” that held his enthusiasts spellbound as he preached sermons vowing to drown every last Jew in the Black Sea.

Iliodor’s moniker was no exaggeration. The Mad Monk was a genuinely unbalanced demagogue. He once slandered the wife of a wealthy timber merchant for supposedly wearing a low-cut dress and singing “
filthy” songs at a charitable event (a fund-raiser for a temperance society, no less). The affair was taken up by the prime minister himself—an unavoidable intervention, given that Iliodor was a revered leader of a movement esteemed by the tsar. Such absurdities were routine in the end-time of the Romanovs, when a culture of intrigue mixed with operetta-style lunacy had deeply infected the Russian imperial court and government. Prime Minister Peter Stolypin, in fact, dared to side with the offended lady, ordering “rapid and decisive measures to protect the citizens of Tsaritsyn from public insults” of the kind inflicted by the Mad Monk. But the government was hesitant to the point of paralysis when it came to dealing with Iliodor’s more serious and even murderous threats to public order. Stolypin privately called Iliodor a “fanatic” and spreader of “
Black Hundred propaganda” who weakened the government’s authority. But Iliodor had insinuated himself into the court’s inner circle. He had secured the patronage of the powerful, and no less mad, “holy man” Grigory Rasputin, who was then at the height of his legendary and hypnotic influence over the royal family. The Church had tried to exile Iliodor to a remote parish, but Tsar Nicholas intervened to save him—“out of pity,” he said, for the holy man’s followers. The Mad Monk was untouchable.

Iliodor’s story lays bare the strange and paradoxical rules of the game
in end-stage tsarist
Russia. Iliodor targeted not just what he called the Jewish-led “Satan’s band,” but rich capitalists and landowners as well; he even called for the prime minister to be put to death. He was truly a subversive force. Tsar Nicholas, however, saw in him not an enemy bent on undermining the state but a kindred spirit, one of the “mass of loyal people” who defended him from the “insolence” of his enemies, “nine tenths” of whom he believed were Jews. And for Nicholas, the supposed archaic purity of Iliodor’s Russianness—his closeness to the
narod,
the people—trumped any concerns about his effect on the polity. The tsar’s obsession with a pure Russia foretold a monarchy that was
losing all sense of reality and becoming susceptible to fantasies of the darkest kind.

As it turned out, a few months after the death of Andrei
Yushchinsky, Iliodor would
self-destruct before he could put his talents to work in a case that might well have given him the ultimate pulpit for his anti-Semitic screeds. He betrayed his protector Rasputin, threatening to reveal the holy man’s debauchery, but was outmaneuvered, and ended up exiled and defrocked. It would fall to others to exploit the boy’s murder for their own ends.

At Andrei’s grave site, the mourners and provocateurs must have noticed a strange circumstance. While the deaths of children were tragically common in Russia, one aspect of the service surely distinguished it from any other child’s funeral the mourners may have attended: the parents were not present. Andrei’s schoolmates and teachers were there. His aunt Natalia, in the final stages of tuberculosis, stood there in the cold. Vera
Cheberyak was there with Zhenya and her two daughters. But as Andrei lay in his open coffin—his wounds covered by makeup, a cypress cross tied around his neck with a ribbon, wearing his one spare pair of school uniform trousers, with ten one-kopeck coins in the right pocket—his mother and stepfather were at the local police precinct, under arrest.

The story of the family’s three-month ordeal at the hands of the authorities, omitted or glossed over in the standard accounts of the case, is essential to understanding how the murder of a poor, troubled boy burgeoned from a family tragedy to a matter of state on the imperial agenda to a bizarre
trial that would be followed the world over.
The trajectory of the case is conventionally portrayed as a line leading from an investigation infused with official anti-Semitism straight to the Jew in the dock. But the path that led from “the
Yushchinsky murder” to “the Beilis affair” is as twisted as one of
Kiev’s winding streets.

Andrei’s family did seem to harbor the essential elements required of a routine domestic tragedy: an illegitimate child, a resentful stepfather, rumors of violent quarrels and abuse. As investigators talked to friends, neighbors, and relatives, their suspicions could only have grown. A teacher of Andrei’s had been sure something at home was wrong: “Thin, troubled … silent. He
walked the halls alone.” Classmates knew that Andrei often came to school hungry. Many witnesses told the authorities that Andrei’s mother beat him. Zhenya Cheberyak said, “
There were times when Andrusha’s mother would punish him, she would beat him sometimes with her hand, sometimes with a belt, for example when she’d send him somewhere and he didn’t go, and then she would thrash him for that. His mother never beat him badly, but a little, and never beat him so that he’d bleed.”

But there were indications the beatings went beyond the routine. “
I know that Alexandra … disliked Andrei very much,” an elderly neighbor testified, and claimed he saw her beat him several times. “What she beat him for, I don’t know, but through the fence I could see how awfully she treated him.” He reported that “as soon as his mother started beating him [Andrei] would run to his Aunt Natalia.” A classmate confirmed that “his mother punished him often, and … when his mother beat him he’d always run to his aunt.”

Andrei’s maiden aunt Natalia was the boy’s savior and protector. “
Since I had no children of my own, I very much loved my sister’s illegitimate son … Andrusha … and I decided to raise him and make something of him,” she said in a deposition after Andrei’s death, just months before she died of tuberculosis. A woman with a rare entrepreneurial streak, she ran a workshop out of her apartment, which made decorative boxes for a store on Kiev’s main street, Kreshchatik. Her income was modest, but it enabled her to pay for Andrei’s education.

Natalia claimed to investigators that she had no idea who killed Andrei and did not suspect anyone. She insisted that Luka Prikhodko, Andrei’s stepfather, was by nature “quiet, sober, modest and hardworking.” But Natalia did not completely conceal from the authorities the family’s tensions, admitting that her sister sometimes resented the way
she displaced her as the dominant figure in Andrei’s life. Natalia was loving, but she could be harsh as she tried to keep the boy on the right path. Sometimes, Natalia said, “
I would scream at [Andrusha] and he’d burst out crying. Then Alexandra would say she didn’t want me to pay for Andrusha’s education and I shouldn’t dare insult him. There were frequent scenes like that.”

Whatever suspicions Natalia had would have carried great weight with investigators because she was more a mother to Andrei than anyone else in the boy’s life. From his earliest years he called his mother “Sashka” (a diminutive of Alexandra)—never “mama.” Zhenya said, “When I asked Andrusha if he loved his stepfather and his mother, he always answered that he loved his aunt more than anyone.” Natalia did not share her most disturbing suspicions with the police, but she did voice them in the presence of the local pub owner,
Dobzhansky, who knew Andrei well—the boy would drop by the pub to have an egg for breakfast when he had a few extra kopeks—and was one of those who identified his body. In a sworn deposition Dobzhansky recounted how, after Andrei’s body was found, a “very despondent” Natalia “walked up to the cave and said ‘Andrusha was killed by no one other than his own people.’ ”

The man in charge of following up these leads, at this point, was Detective Evgeny Mishchuk, head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Kiev police. Though he had some two decades of experience in law enforcement, he was of dubious competence and his investigative methods were reprehensible. He was gullible, reckless, and politically maladroit—qualities that would make him vulnerable to his enemies. Soon he would be the first victim of what would become a conspiracy to ensure that a Jew stood accused. But Mishchuk was honestly convinced that the family was involved in the crime—he utterly dismissed the “ritual murder” hypothesis—and he attempted to prove his theory with ruthless zeal.

On March 24, just four days after Andrei’s body was found, Mishchuk personally arrested Luka and Alexandra Prikhodko, who was then four months pregnant, as well as Alexandra’s brother
Fyodor Nezhinsky, accusing them of the boy’s killing. According to Alexandra, she implored, “Arrest me, but just allow me to bury my son, and I’ll come back.” Mishchuk answered: “It’s not allowed to let a murderer like you go.”

Only after the arrest was there a hunt for actual evidence to justify the charges against the couple. Mishchuk was following the standard course of action for the police of the era: suspects were identified on whatever flimsy grounds presented themselves and then brought in for questioning. With the couple in custody, he then stepped up the quest for physical clues. The police searched the Prikhodkos’ home on March 25 and 26, employing the same finesse they demonstrated at the cave. “
They broke everything and destroyed everything,” Andrei’s grandmother later testified. “I screamed and cried, ‘What are you doing?’ ” When she protested, she said, “They told me they’d pistol whip me.” The police chiseled out seven pieces of plaster with dark brown spots from the walls and took some of Alexandra’s and Luka’s clothes, which also had blood-colored spots. Alexandra was interrogated for twelve of her thirteen days in custody from nine a.m. until one or two in the morning. Like many innocent people, under interrogation she began to look only more guilty. Mishchuk reported: “Questioned in that regard [about the spots] Alexandra Prikhodko at first declared that it wasn’t blood, and then started saying that it could have gotten on the clothes
because of a nosebleed.” The couple were released on April 5. The spots on the clothes turned out to be vegetable juice. No blood was found anywhere in the apartment. The couple, having been deprived of a chance to grieve in dignity, returned after thirteen days to find a home that Luka said had been “rifled through, turned upside down, broken.” Luka said, “It was a time when I
didn’t know whether to live or die.”

As for Mendel Beilis, some time after his
Black Hundred neighbor dropped by to tell him of the accusation that Andrei had been killed by the Jews, he became aware that the police were taking the investigation in quite a different direction, pursuing Andrei’s family. If he had originally dismissed his neighbor’s report, Beilis was likely now even more inclined to push it out of his mind, especially since Mishchuk and other investigators were disregarding the “ritual” version, and the focus on Andrei’s family would continue for weeks after their initial arrest and release. Beilis, moreover, would soon hear there was a new suspect in the murder: his neighbor Vera Cheberyak. The name was a familiar one. She lived just a few dozen yards down the street from him, and he
had long known of her villainous
reputation. But it did not enter his mind that he had anything to fear from her or from the machinations of some of the most powerful men in Russia.