A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (50 page)

On November 27, 1913, in the town of Fastov, about fifty miles southwest of Kiev, the body of a boy, aged eleven or twelve, was found in a timber yard, lying across
neatly stacked boards, stabbed to death. Beneath him was a pool of blood. On his neck, tracing a line from ear to ear, were thirteen puncture wounds.

The immediate, feverish response by the
Black Hundreds and in the right-wing press was predictable. Here, without a doubt, they raged, was another Jewish ritual murder. The number of stab wounds was a kabbalistic one, they said, and proof that Jews were the killers. They made this claim in the face of a most inconvenient fact: the victim,
Yossel Pashkov, was a Jew. Moreover, his apparent killer was a Christian. The authorities quickly apprehended a career criminal named
Ivan Goncharuk, who had a lengthy record (the exact nature of his crimes is not clear) that included ten convictions. The local prosecutor’s office soon presented what it considered conclusive proof of Goncharuk’s guilt. But the Black Hundreds insisted that the supposed Jewishness of the victim was a fiendish deception. (That the victim was circumcised was seen as part of the plot.) They were convinced the body was that of a Christian child.

However implausibly, the case followed the Beilis template with remarkable faithfulness. Justice minister
Ivan Shcheglovitov took an interest in the investigation. Grigory Chaplinsky had just stepped down as chief prosecutor in the Kiev region but had not yet left to take up his new post as a senator. Chaplinsky consulted with the justice minister on the
Fastov case and the course it took undoubtedly reflected the two men’s wishes.

In December 1913, the acting chief prosecutor, a former Chaplinsky
underling named Vodokovich, launched a new investigation, its mission to answer the question: Was the apparent victim in the Fastov case really Yossel Pashkov, or had his father, a tailor named Froim Pashkov, in fact killed a Christian child, contriving to pass off the body as that of his son? Proving the theory would require two elements: a missing Christian child and a hidden Jewish child, Yossel, who was still alive. That the authorities would entertain such an insane theory is a mark of their determination, or desperation, to instigate another ritual murder case and rescue their reputations in the wake of their defeat in the Beilis affair.

As in the Beilis case, police investigators resisted supporting the
blood accusation. A detective in Fastov obstinately found no evidence of ritual murder. The prosecutor judged him to be “biased in favor of the Jews” and he was soon replaced. The right-wing press spun a story about how the Jewish boy Yossel had fled to America, or perhaps to some other country, “together with Beilis.” But for some time the state had trouble coming up with a suitable missing Christian child. By January 1914, however, it had made progress. The parents of a missing boy named
Boris Taranenko were brought in to the morgue to view the badly decayed corpse of the Fastov victim. They swore it was their son. Yossel’s father and his clerk were charged in Boris’s murder and put in prison. (Boris had disappeared in Zhitomir, more than a hundred miles to the west; the authorities never attempted to explain how he ended up in Fastov.) Professor Ivan Sikorsky, reprising his role as expert on the Jews’ psychiatric profile, offered his opinion to the popular right-wing paper
New Times
that, although “committed in a crude fashion” (the boy’s blood had pooled wastefully below his body), this was clearly a ritual murder.

In mid-February,
Nikolai
Chebyshev, Chaplinsky’s designated replacement as the Kiev region’s chief prosecutor, finally assumed the post. Known for prosecuting the instigators of
pogroms, Chebyshev had a reputation for courageous and unimpeachable integrity. He quickly corrected course in the Fastov case. An autopsy specialist positively identified the body as that of Yossel, the boy’s father and the clerk were freed, and Ivan
Goncharuk was convicted of the boy’s murder. In June, the authorities found the missing Boris Taranenko—he had run away from home but was quite alive—and returned him to his parents.

Could Ivan Goncharuk have been Andrei Yushchinsky’s killer?
Apparently no one asked that question for nearly a century. The authorities never investigated the possibility, or any other alternative hypothesis, for that matter. The first person to propose the idea, in 2005, was the noted Russian historian Sergei Stepanov. He correctly pointed out that, despite much suspicious behavior on the part of Vera Cheberyak and her gang, no direct evidence ever connected them to the murder. As for the revolutionaries/informers Karaev and Makhalin, it was entirely possible that they were lying when they claimed that Vera Cheberyak’s
half brother, Peter Singaevsky, had confessed to them. Nothing but their testimony implicated Singaevsky.

There is only one obstacle to the lone-killer theory: experts for both the defense and prosecution agreed that Andrei’s murder was not the act of a single maniac but of several people. However, one prominent defense witness disagreed with this view, though he did not say so at the
trial.
Vladimir
Bekhterev, a world-renowned neurologist and leading authority on the physiology of the brain, had testified as a psychiatric expert, after examining all the autopsy reports, photographs, and physical exhibits. In a lengthy article published not long after the trial, he wrote:

Bekhterev’s argument seems persuasive. But as the historian Stepanov acerbically points out, “
no one had any use for a sadistic murderer.” Both sides in the case were interested only in the multiple-killer theory. The defense had postulated that Andrei had been killed by Cheberyak’s gang; the prosecution averred the murder had been committed by a band of fanatical Jews. It can never be proven whether Goncharuk or some other maniac was responsible for Andrei’s killing, but the possibility cannot be eliminated.

But what of Vera
Cheberyak’s conduct after Andrei’s murder, which seemed so suspicious to people as to constitute virtual proof of her guilt? Why would she give false testimony against an innocent man, enlist her own daughter and husband in her perjury, as well as—infamously—beseech her dying son to exonerate her?

Cheberyak was, after all, a suspect in a murder. If she had nothing to do with the crime, she needed to find a way to convince the authorities of her innocence. She was a woman who, in any situation, knew no other way out than to lie, deceive, and manipulate. A deeper psychological explanation also suggests itself. Cheberyak, after spending her life consorting with the detritus of society, had finally found a stage that presented her talents to those she considered worthy of appreciating them. She discovered an opportunity to bend to her will prominent men—prosecutors, Duma members, government ministers. And whether she was guilty or innocent, she made sure to make the
most of her role.

For all this speculation, the theory that Andrei was killed by Vera Cheberyak’s gang remains the most plausible one. After the trial, Nikolai Krasovsky immediately set about proving it beyond a doubt. In February 1914, Krasovsky boarded an ocean liner bound for New York. His mission was to locate
Adele Ravich, the woman who had supposedly seen Andrei’s body in Vera Cheberyak’s apartment and fled to America. When Krasovsky arrived in New York he was treated as a celebrity, “entertained at the
Café Boheme in Second Avenue,” the
New York Times
reported, “by a number of [the city’s] Russian residents.”

Living up to his reputation as “Russia’s Sherlock Holmes,” he soon found Adele Ravich and her husband, Amerik, possibly in Hoboken, New Jersey, where the 1930 U.S. census records them as living. Krasovsky claimed that he secured affidavits from the couple that would force the reopening of the case. “I am confident,” he told the
Times,
“that the outcome of the new trial will be the final destruction of popular faith in the old ritual-murder myth.” But when Krasovsky returned to Kiev, Arnold
Margolin disagreed. Margolin writes in his memoirs that while the Raviches’ testimony was “highly interesting, tending to confirm that Vera Cheberyak had taken part in the murder,” it was not sufficient to reopen the case under Russian law. Margolin is
frustratingly vague about the content of the affidavits, but it seems certain that the couple did not confirm seeing Andrei’s body in Vera Cheberyak’s apartment.

Krasovsky still hoped to prove his case. But within four months a new Time of Troubles threw Russia into chaos and brought an end to all hopes and efforts to bring the killers of Andrei Yushchinsky to justice.

One day in early March 1917, Oskar
Gruzenberg answered a telephone call in his apartment in St. Petersburg, where he had been watching a revolution unfold outside his window. The call was from a colleague who had been assigned by the new Provisional Government to secure the files of the Department of
Police. “Would you like to look through the
secret materials on the Beilis case?” he asked. Gruzenberg, needless to say, immediately agreed. The files would be brought over forthwith.

This moment had only been made possible by an unprecedented catastrophe for Russia. On August 1, 1914, just nine months after Mendel Beilis had left the Kiev courtroom a free man, Russia had been plunged into war. The “smell of burning, blood, and iron” that the poet
Alexander Blok had sensed in the spring of 1911 had been a portent of the greatest carnage the world had yet seen, with Russia suffering more than nine million dead and wounded in its conflict with the Central Powers,
Germany and
Austria. Fate did not grant the empire the twenty-year breathing space that Prime Minister
Peter Stolypin had known it must have if it was to reform and survive.

The outbreak of
World War I had at first been accompanied by a patriotic upsurge, national unity, and hopes that Russia might prevail. The tsar’s army even attained a few victories, but by the fall of 1915, Nicholas II had become, in
Vasily Maklakov’s famous allegory of the time, the “mad chauffeur,” driving Russia to “inescapable destruction.” As if to speed the disastrous course, Nicholas, over the extreme protests of his ministers, took personal command of the armed forces. The tsar’s decision, as one minister noted, was “
fully in tune with his … mystical understanding of his imperial calling.” For Nicholas, Russia’s salvation lay in the dictates of his “inner voice” and the miraculous bond of Tsar
and People. But Nicholas’s departure for the front left the empress Alexandra, advised by
Rasputin, holding power in Petrograd (as the Germanic-sounding Petersburg had been patriotically renamed). The result was utter bureaucratic chaos as one minister after another was promoted in reward for his obsequiousness, or cast out for supposed disloyalty, in the farcical game known as “
ministerial leapfrog.” Over its final seventeen months, the government ran through four prime ministers, five ministers of the interior, three foreign ministers, three ministers of war, three ministers of transport, and four ministers of agriculture.

The system could not endure the strain of the war and its mismanagement. The end, when it came, came suddenly, triggered by random events. The death agony commenced in Petrograd on February 23, 1917, International Women’s Day, the occasion for a large demonstration of women in the center of the city demanding equal rights and protesting against bread shortages. Strikes by some two hundred thousand Petrograd workers followed. The weather was unseasonably warm, encouraging large crowds of all sorts of people to take to the streets either as demonstrators or as sympathetic bystanders.
Cossack troops showed hesitance in controlling the crowds. Nicholas then issued an order for the Petrograd garrison to put down the disorder. On February 26, troops fired on demonstrators in the city center, killing dozens of them, but widespread mutinies in the armed forces followed. In the end, the troops would not fire upon the people. Nicholas had become a nonentity, his orders ignored by his senior generals, who unanimously agreed that he should abdicate. Within four days the tsarist regime had collapsed. On February 27, the Duma began forming a provisional government.

The
revolution was perceived as utterly inevitable and yet, somehow, a surprise. “
The most striking thing,” Blok wrote in his diary three months later, “was the utter unexpectedness of it, like a train crashing in the night, like a bridge crumbling beneath your feet, like a house falling down.”

Russia’s new leadership quickly moved to hold the enemies of the people, including Mendel Beilis’s prime persecutors, accountable for their crimes. The former justice minister, Ivan Shcheglovitov, was the first high official to be arrested, seized in his kitchen on the evening of February 27 by a student who had, on his own initiative, flagged down
a few soldiers. The former minister was hustled into custody, wearing no topcoat in the freezing cold. Moments after the arrest, Nikolai Karabchevsky’s assistant in the Beilis
trial, Boris Utevsky, happened to catch sight of the prisoner, who struck him as “
pallid, unshaven, flabby, frightened, but angry and full of hate.” Shcheglovitov was marched to the Tauride Palace where the Duma convened. There he was confronted by the well-known attorney and Duma member
Alexander Kerensky, who would soon become Russia’s justice minister (and later, briefly, the government’s leader).
Shcheglovitov stood there, head bowed, his face still red from the cold, as Kerensky proclaimed, “Citizen Shcheglovitov, in the name of the people I declare you under arrest!”