A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel

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“Why Should I Be Afraid?”

Two boys were looking for buried treasure.

Early in the afternoon of March 20, 1911, a pair of gymnasium students of twelve or thirteen set off to explore the Berner Estate, a scruffy piece of wilderness adjoining the Lukianovka neighborhood on the northern outskirts of Kiev. A dozen or so acres in size, strewn with mysterious mounds, ruts, and ravines and dotted with brush, the Berner Estate had an outstanding feature irresistible to adventurous boys: its numerous caves. The caves had been uncovered accidentally by road workers some six decades earlier, causing considerable excitement among archaeologists and would-be treasure hunters. According to legend, treasure grounds were distinguished by unusual rock formations such as the ones found on the estate. A local landowner, convinced that the caves harbored the lost trove of an early eighteenth-century Cossack leader, ordered an intensive search back in the 1850s.

Treasure was said to be watched over by vengeful guardian spirits, but if the men obeying the landowner’s command were at all fearful of supernatural forces, they were also thorough; by the time archaeologists arrived, every cave but one had been scraped clean of every human artifact. In that sole untouched cave, however, they found the earliest known traces of Kiev’s first Neolithic inhabitants. These were remarkable discoveries—a flint blade, pottery shards, and a burned-out granite hearth so brittle from repeated firings that a trespasser could pulverize the stone to powder just by gripping a piece of it with his fingers. Further excavation of the area unearthed some two thousand human skeletons. The Berner Estate had been a burial ground.

By that spring day in 1911, the archaeologists were long gone, and the area had become a no-man’s-land, a local newspaper branding it “a place for the Lukianovka children’s games, where local hooligans and derelicts have convenient refuge.” But the lore persisted of lost Cossack treasure, hidden by a leader or “hetman,” or by the rebellious eighteenth-century plunderers known as the Haidamaks. In the imaginations of the two young boys that March afternoon, somewhere within this broad, bleak slope, only a thousand feet from their neighborhood’s crooked streets, vast riches lay hidden. Standing at the crest of the slope, which was rather steep, the boys could see the brownish ribbon of the Dnieper River, which marked Kiev’s upper boundary. To the right, about halfway down, they could see the awnings and chimneys of the brick factory owned by the Jew Zaitsev. The neighborhood children liked to sneak onto the factory grounds and play there until the watchman chased them off.

The boy in charge of the expedition, Peter Elansky, led his friend Boris Beloshchitsky downhill to a cave dug into the side of a small mound. At either end of the mound were two trees, standing like sentries, their roots intertwined above its black mouth. On the ground near the cave lay something that caught Peter’s eye—a torn-up school composition book. He read the name inscribed on the cover, but it meant nothing to him.

Boris was afraid of entering the cave. Treasure, everyone knew, could be guarded by the Haidamaks’ angry ghosts. But Peter did not hesitate. This cave was a perfect place for a Cossack to have stashed his gains, with an entrance about three and a half feet high and two and a half feet wide—small enough to discourage adults, but big enough for a boy to scuttle through in a crouch.

The entrance to the cave was partially blocked with melting snow. With the temperature now barely above freezing, Kiev was three days into the spring thaw that each year turned the city’s dirt streets into muddy rivers and aroused fears that the great Dnieper would brim over in another disastrous flood. A small stream of water trickled into the cave, but inside it was dry. After creeping six feet in, Peter could see that the cave forked at right angles into two niches. He could stand up easily now—inside, in places, the cave was more than five feet high. He looked first into the left-hand niche. He saw a figure, slumped against the wall. At first he thought it was a doll. Then he thought it was a woman. He had surely seen innumerable drunks passed out on the streets of Lukianovka, which had drinking establishments on nearly every corner. But this was motionlessness of a more peculiar and scary sort.

Peter ducked out of the cave and ran to get his stepfather, Leonty Sinitsky, who happened to be a police department paramedic. He was skeptical—surely, he thought, the boy was imagining things. But at about two p.m., he went with his stepson to the cave to check. He wriggled halfway in. There was not much light, but he could see there was a human figure, which looked to him like a man with a beard. He was seized by a fear that someone might be waiting within the cave to stab him. He squirmed out and ran with Peter to a nearby church, where he knew a policeman ought to be on duty.

A few moments later a policeman’s whistle rang out, rousing a beat cop who, informed of the situation, went with Sinitsky and his stepson to the cave. The officer squeezed in and lit a match. The body belonged to a boy, he said, not a man or a woman, and he was dead. Clad only in a shirt and knee-length underwear and a single threadbare sock, it was lying in a semi-upright position, its hands tied behind with twine. Directly above the body, five school composition books were wedged into a crevice in the cave wall. A belt lay on top of the half-bare legs, which were bent and crossed. When the belt was turned over, it revealed an inscription: Andrei Yushchinsky Kiev-St. Sophia Religious School.

Sinitsky and the police officer stood over the body, its image flashing out of the gloom with each new match the officer struck. The policeman wanted to take the belt out of the cave, but Sinitsky stopped him—he knew that nothing should be removed from the scene until investigators arrived. Sinitsky, present by happenstance, would turn out to be the only person who tried to prevent the disastrous mishandling of the crime scene. When reinforcements arrived, a certain Officer Rapota, a stout fellow, found he could not squeeze himself into the cave. A shovel appeared. The snow was cleared away, and with it any clues it might have contained.

Just three hundred yards away from the cave, a Jewish clerk, Mendel Beilis, was sitting at his desk in his office on the edge of the Zaitsev brick factory, where he had been working since before dawn. “As I looked through the window,” he later recalled, “I saw people hurrying somewhere, all in one direction. It was a usual thing to see individual workers coming to the factory, or passers-by. But now there were people in large groups, walking rapidly from various streets.” When he stepped outside to find out what was going on, he was told that the body of a boy had been found nearby. He considered this disturbing news for a moment, and then went back to filling out receipts for the endless convoy of horse-drawn carts leaving the factory laden with bricks.

Soon it seemed all of Lukianovka was streaming into the Berner Estate, with a local newspaper reporting that “crowds of the curious surrounded the cave in a thick circle.” Many of the onlookers wanted to get into the cave; reinforcements arrived but the officers had a hard time holding back the crowd. Everything should have been left undisturbed until the arrival of the lead detective; instead, the belt, the five notebooks (on which were also inscribed the same name, Andrei Yushchinsky), and some pieces of newspaper smeared with blood were sent back to the precinct house. The boy’s jacket and cap, found lying in the right-hand niche, were placed outside the cave, free for people in the gathering crowd to pick up and examine.

Among the first onlookers that the police invited into the cave to try to identify the body was Vera Cheberyak, the mother of Andrei Yushchinsky’s best friend, Zhenya. Cheberyak was a notorious figure in Lukianovka. Some years earlier she had blinded her lover, a French accordion player, with sulfuric acid, yet somehow escaped punishment. She was also reputed to be the keeper of a den of thieves, a fence for stolen goods, and a sometime procuress. For years, somewhat incongruously, she had been married to a respectable civil servant, with whom she had three children. When she saw the body, Vera Cheberyak told the police that the child did resemble a friend of her son’s but the name on the belt was not familiar to her. She knew the boy only by a nickname, “Domovoi” or “Goblin.” Later that day, she returned to the cave with Zhenya, who had told her his friend’s real name was Yushchinsky. Mother and son were led through the cave’s well-cleared entrance and into the left-hand niche. When the boy saw the body, he said, “Yes mama, that’s definitely him. It’s Goblin.”

Nearly everyone in Andrei Yushchinsky’s world seemed to have a nickname. “Honeybunch,” “Frog,” “Wolfie,” “Snub-Nose,” “Crooked Arm,” “Crosseyed,” “Sailor.” The provenance could be obvious or obscure. But once a Russian child was given a nickname, there was no outgrowing it. It followed you to the brink of the grave, where it was finally left behind, and a proper Christian name and surname etched on the nameplate affixed to the simple cross. Andrei, though, would be denied even that small dignity. His grave marker would always tell a half truth. Andrei was legally barred from bearing the name of the father who had sired him and then abandoned him and his mother, when he was less than two years old, to serve in the tsar’s army, it was said, somewhere in the Far East.

Friends noticed Andrei avoided saying his last name, Yushchinsky, his mother’s maiden name, which was a mark of his illegitimate birth. (Some only learned of it for the first time after his death.) But he certainly liked to talk about his father. He mentioned him often, insisting to his friends that he would eventually be reunited with this mythical man, Feodosy Chirkov, who could not even give him his name. He would declare dreamily to his friends that his father would soon reappear and summon his son to go live with him, and how he would take only his grandmother along with him, not his mother or even his beloved aunt Natalia, because if he took them with him, people would think his father wanted only to beget another child with one woman or another, and he was not going to let people think that. At other times, he envisioned the reunion as happening in the more distant future. As soon as he came of age, he told his friends, he would track his father down in the Far East, where he was surely still alive and waiting for him.

As for his Christian name, all his life the family called Andrei by the usual Russian diminutive, “Andrusha.” But he was known to nearly everyone else in Lukianovka by his nickname, “Domovoi.” The word is usually translated as “goblin,” but “house spirit” gives a more accurate idea of its meaning. A domovoi is a kind of dwarfish, impish poltergeist. In Slavic folklore, the domovoi (from the root dom, meaning “home”) is the true master and protector of your household. If you are a good tenant of your residence, he will treat you well, tend the hearth and livestock, and safeguard your domicile. If you anger him, he will play tricks on you, make terrifying noises, throw crockery around in the dead of night.

Vera Cheberyak claimed it was her own Zhenya who had bestowed the nickname on the boy when Andrei was little because he wore a red hat, just as domovois were said to, but she made the claim only after both boys were dead. Perhaps the moniker’s origin had something to do with Andrei’s stature; as he entered adolescence, he seemed to grow hardly at all. But a neighbor who had known Andrei from his earliest years believed the nickname came about because of the boy’s restlessness after dark. Andrei would roam the streets at night alone. “I would ask him: ‘Why are you walking around so late? Aren’t you afraid?’ ” the neighbor recounted. “And he would say: ‘Why should I be afraid of anything?’ ”

On the morning of Saturday, March 12, 1911, Andrei awoke around six a.m. He got up carefully enough not to rouse his two brothers who slept in the same room. His mother and stepfather were both at work, so he didn’t have to worry about anyone asking him any questions. He could focus on his plans for this special day without having to waste his boyish ingenuity on lies. Andrei had a secret on this day. Maybe he thought of it as a reward for all the dogged schoolwork he had done. He was going to play hooky—the only time he was known to have done so—and visit his old neighborhood of Lukianovka.

In the kitchen he washed his hands with cold water—there was no soap and no mirror to help him groom his blond hair. He was lucky that morning there was some leftover borscht to eat for breakfast; more often than not there was nothing at all, and he would go hungry until the afternoon or later. The deprivation had likely stunted his growth. At thirteen, Andrei was barely four feet four inches tall. (The autopsy report would find his body to be “of weak build and not well nourished.”)

The borscht itself evinced the family’s desperation. The day before, Andrei’s mother, Alexandra, had gone to her own mother, complaining that she didn’t have a single kopek. Alexandra’s tiny income from taking in laundry and selling vegetables door-to-door, and her husband Luka’s wages as a bookbinder, were barely enough to fend off starvation. Alexandra’s mother had given her sixteen kopeks, enough to make the pot of soup with potatoes, beets, cabbage, and sunflower-seed oil.

Alexandra’s sister, Andrei’s aunt Natalia, had come by that night and taken the potato peels for her cow (outside its urban center, much of Kiev in those days was more village than city, and many people kept livestock). She tried the borscht and found it sour. But for Andrei the next morning a little of the borscht with a crust of bread made for a good start to his day.

The house had no clock. But Andrei somehow always woke up on time. His teachers said his attendance record was good and he always arrived punctually at eight thirty a.m. As Andrei left the house that Saturday morning, he appeared to be on his way to the Kiev-St. Sophia Religious School (a six-day school week was the norm in Russia) where he was studying with the eventual goal of becoming a Russian Orthodox priest. Prodded by his aunt Natalia, he had worked with a tutor (who had found him to be “very receptive,” though “a little moody”) for nine months to prepare for the school entrance exam. He had attended school regularly since the fall of the previous year and had received average grades, no mean accomplishment considering his circumstances.

He wore a blouse, embroidered by his mother, dark trousers, a cap with the school badge, a uniform jacket, and a padded felt coat. He bound his schoolbooks with the two leather straps his aunt Natalia, who paid for his schooling, had given him for Christmas. His schoolwork required only three books or so each day, but he always carried all seven or eight, plus a half-dozen notebooks with him because he was afraid one of his younger half brothers would tear them up if he left them at home.

Andrei went down a few steps to the street—the building stood on pillars, insurance against a modest flood. A boy who lived next door, Pavel Pushka, saw Andrei leave the house, slinging over his shoulder the heavy load of books, which were mere props that day. Pavel walked along with him a bit, but Andrei didn’t say a word.

The previous fall, Andrei’s family had moved from Lukianovka to Nikolskaya Slobodka, just outside the city on the Dnieper’s left bank. Andrei still did not feel at home there. He would play in the street with the shopkeepers’ sons, and some of the Jewish children (his new neighborhood was an area where Jews could live freely), but he had no real friends. He must have missed Lukianovka, where he ran with his best friends Zhenya, Ivan the cabdriver’s son, and Andrei Mais-trenko, whose mother was a state liquor store cashier. But they rarely all played together; when Andrei was with Zhenya they liked it to just be the two of them.

As Andrei walked westward past the mostly commercial storefronts of Slobodka’s dreary streets, he may have looked forward to strolling across the magnificent entrance to the city of Kiev, the famous Nikolaevsky Chain Bridge over the Dnieper. Half a mile long, with four stone towers, each one hundred feet tall, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world when it was completed in 1856.

Little more is known about what Andrei did after he crossed that bridge. He was spotted at a market that morning about a half hour from home; he may have been looking to buy gunpowder for his homemade gun, which was his passion. He had fashioned it out of a piece of pipe he’d bought for thirty kopeks. (A handy boy—later, at the trial, his grandmother Olympiada said, “Whatever he saw, he made.”) Maybe he was planning all the while to obtain the gunpowder from Zhenya, who made his own. Whatever the exact nature of his plans, walking at a good pace, it took him over an hour to get to the Cheberyak house in Lukianovka. He knocked on the door and Zhenya came out to play.

A little before seven a.m. on that Saturday, a lamplighter named Kazimir Shakhovsky was walking home, ladder on his shoulder, having filled the streetlamps on his route with kerosene. He lived on Polovetskaya Street, about fifty steps away from Zhenya Cheberyak’s home on Upper Yurkovskaya Street. He remembered the day well because he was on his way back from his boss’s house, where he had just got a ruble advance on his salary and a fresh batch of kerosene. At home, his wife, Ulyana, took the ruble and headed to the grocery store. On the way, she saw Andrei and his friend Zhenya standing on the corner of Polovetskaya and Upper Yurkovskaya talking and eating candy. She noticed Andrei was not wearing a coat and was carrying his belt of books. She spent ten kopeks on some bread and sausage that her husband ate for breakfast.

Kazimir left the house, passing the state liquor store on the ground floor of the Cheberyaks’ building, which was already open, meaning it was a little past eight a.m. (the Russian Empire, brutal in so many ways, indulged its drinkers), and came upon Andrei and Zhenya, who were still standing on the sidewalk and talking, a little farther down the street from where Ulyana saw them. Kazimir noticed that Andrei had a jar about two inches tall with something black inside that he was sure was gunpowder. The boy was excited to see “Lamplighter,” according to Kazimir, though it is not clear why. “He ran up to me and hit me on my shoulder with his hand and asked me where I was going,” the man recalled. “He hit me pretty hard—it hurt, so I got angry … I told him he had no business knowing where I was going.” Turning around, he spat out, “Bastard!”

If Andrei was hurt by this word, which he must have heard many, many times in his brief life, he did not show it. “Gramps, where are you going? Take me with you,” he pleaded. Kazimir was going out to catch goldfinches to sell live at the market; Andrei, who had a net and liked to catch birds, would have enjoyed that. But Lamplighter pushed ahead to his destination, leaving Andrei behind, the taunt of “bastard” ringing in his ears. He was the last person known to have seen Andrei alive.

A short time after the body was discovered, Mendel Beilis answered a knock at the door of his home on Upper Yurkovskaya Street, which was located in the same two-story building at the entrance to the factory that housed his office. The Beilis household constituted a tiny Jewish outpost in a part of Kiev otherwise off-limits even to those Jews fortunate enough to receive government permits to live in the city. Russia’s Jews were subject to a vast, oppressive, and ever-growing burden of more than a thousand discriminatory statutes and regulations restricting where they could live, where they could worship, which schools they could attend, and what kind of work they could perform. In principle, Jews could only live in the fifteen western provinces known as the “Pale of Settlement,” which did not include Kiev. The Beilis family was only granted permission to live in Kiev, and the special privilege of living in this neighborhood, thanks to the intervention of the brick factory owner, Jonah Zaitsev, with the authorities.

Beilis found a Russian neighbor was paying him a call. He knew the man was a proud member of the “Black Hundreds,” Russia’s anti-Semitic movement of right-wing nationalists, but that was not a barrier to social interaction between them. Beilis got along well with his Christian neighbors and had a friendly relationship with at least one other Black Hundred member. A man could hate Jews as a group and get on perfectly well with them individually.

The neighbor delivered an odd piece of news, telling Beilis that “my paper”—the organ of his local Black Hundred group—was declaring that the boy Andrei Yushchinsky had been murdered by Jews for “ritual” purposes. Beilis would not recall perceiving this report as a threat to him or even to other Jews, and in fact the man may well have just been sharing the local news or even trying to convey to Beilis a friendly warning of possible anti-Jewish reprisals for the boy’s killing. As the days passed, the brick factory clerk gave it little thought.

During his fifteen years in Kiev, Mendel Beilis had only once felt mortal fear as a Jew, during the terrible pogrom of 1905, when the mobs had killed scores of Jews and vandalized nearly every Jewish residence and place of business down to the lowliest stall. But when the violence began, a local priest had a guard put on Beilis’s house. Beilis had done the priest a number of favors, including arranging to sell him bricks at a discount to build a school for orphans, and allowing his funeral processions to take a shortcut across the factory grounds to the cemetery. (A nearby Christian factory owner refused the request—the priest would often tell people that the Jew had helped him out, while the Christian had not.) After the pogrom ended, the great Yiddish writer and Kiev native Sholem Aleichem wrote his daughter that no one was spared: “They have beaten our millionaires—the Brodskys, the Zaitsevs …” Indeed, the mansions of the Zaitsevs and the even wealthier Brodskys, in a fine part of town, were ransacked, while Beilis’s house was one of the few Jewish homes in the city to go untouched.

After the revolutionary and anti-Semitic turmoil of 1905 subsided, the brick factory resumed operation. Jonah Zaitsev, a sugar magnate, used the profits from the factory to help maintain the Jewish Surgical Hospital, a state-of-the-art facility open free of charge to indigent patients of all faiths, which he had founded with a thirty-thousand-ruble donation, in honor of the wedding of Tsar Nicholas II and Alexandra in 1894. He and other Jewish notables hoped that such beneficent institutions would testify to the community-mindedness of Kiev’s Jews and their loyalty to the regime. The 1905 pogrom had been an unfortunate step backward, but the hospital’s good works continued. In working at the factory, Mendel Beilis, it could be said, was doing his part to win the goodwill of the Russian people and state.

A week after the ghastly discovery in the cave, Andrei’s burial in the cemetery of his old Lukianovka neighborhood was a kind of homecoming, with the funeral drawing scores of mourners. His former tutor presided, and as he intoned the Russian Orthodox service he noticed pieces of paper fluttering into the open grave. At first, he assumed they were farewell notes written by friends and schoolmates. But the mimeographed sheets, caught by the breeze as bewildered mourners perhaps let them slip from their hands, spoke not of grief but of hatred and revenge:

Orthodox Christians! The Yids have tortured Andrusha Yushchinsky to death! Every year, before their Passover,^* they torture to death several dozens of Christian children in order to get their blood to mix with their matzo. They do this to commemorate the suffering of our Savior, whom they tortured to death on the cross. The official doctors found that before the Yids tortured Yushchinsky, they stripped him naked, tied him up, stabbing him in the principal veins so as to get as much blood as possible. They pierced him in fifty places. Russians! If your children are dear to you, beat the Yids. Beat them up until there is not a single Yid left in Russia. Have pity on your children! Avenge the unfortunate martyr. It is time! It is time!

Police soon arrested a young man named Nikolai Pavlovich on suspicion of incitement to violence for handing out the inflammatory leaflets. They were unsigned, but there was little doubt about who lay behind their creation. The Okhrana, Russia’s secret police, confirmed the twenty-two-year-old Pavlovich was “known to the division” as a member of the foremost Black Hundred organization, the Union of Russian People, and of the local right-wing youth group, the Society of the Double Headed Eagle. The tsarist security forces kept close watch on any significant political organization, even if it was ostensibly friendly to the imperial regime. Pavlovich, a sometime metalworker and petty criminal, was a typical specimen of one slice of the Black Hundreds, which included a substantial criminal element—men who did not shrink from assault, robbery, or murder. But the Black Hundreds were also the first genuine right-wing movement that united all Russia’s social classes—peasants, workers, priests, shopkeepers, nobles—in defense of the tsar, against every enemy. Above all, against the Jews. The Black Hundreds would play a central and sinister role in the Yushchinsky case. Their success in elevating a local murder into a national rallying cry epitomizes this historical moment in Imperial Russia. The venom released by the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky would signal the progressive moral and societal rot that had taken hold in Russia, and which within a half-dozen years would fatally undermine the tsarist regime.

Russia in these years was, as the noted historian W. Bruce Lincoln described it, a society “consumed by a sense of doom.” One of the era’s greatest poets, Alexander Blok, would date his intense anxiety for the future of Russia to the very season of Andrei’s killing, the spring of 1911, when he wrote, “one could already begin to sense the smell of burning, blood and iron in the air.” When Russia’s most gifted artists and writers fixed their gaze on the future, they saw impending desolation, the fulfillment of the dread prophecies of the New Testament’s book of Revelation, including the coming of the Antichrist. The politically minded on both the right and the left also expressed their anxiety in metaphors. They often talked of living “on a volcano.” Within a few years, the liberal politician Vasily Maklakov (who would be one of Mendel Beilis’s defense attorneys) would famously compare Russia to an automobile being driven down a steep and hazardous road at breakneck speed by “a mad chauffeur,” heedless of all danger, resistant to the advice of competent drivers, steering Russia to inevitable destruction. All understood that the man at the wheel in this allegory was Tsar Nicholas II.

Nicholas himself, ruler of the largest country on earth—sprawling on either side of the Urals, to cover a third of the European continent and a third of Asia—shared the sense of foreboding. Many observers commented on his strong fatalism, which deepened with the years. “The emperor’s salient characteristic,” one of his ministers remarked, “is mystic resignation.” Nicholas made much of the coincidence of his birthday with the Russian Orthodox feast day of Job, the “righteous and blameless” man in the Old Testament who maintained his faith in God despite a plague of undeserved misfortune. “I have a presentiment—more than a presentiment, a secret conviction,” he once confided to his prime minister, Peter Stolypin, “that I am destined for terrible trials.” He added with resignation, though, that unlike Job, to whom the Lord had restored everything he had lost and more, “I shall not receive my reward on this earth.”

Even if he saw himself as a figure destined to be beset by tribulation, Nicholas dismissed apocalyptic fears for the country’s future, even though Russia had experienced a revolution—the first in its history—just a few years earlier, in 1905. Nicholas’s complacency stemmed from the pride he took in his supposed personal bond with his subjects. To a degree, the connection he felt was based on reality. The tsar, in fact, had much in common with men like the Jew-hating, petty criminal and Black Hundred rabble-rouser Nikolai Pavlovich. Both belonged to the Union of Russian People; Nicholas was an honorary member. The tsar was deeply grateful to malefactors like Pavlovich because they had helped him keep his throne. In December 1905, after a chaotic year for Russia, he had warmly accepted the organization’s official badges for himself and his son, the tsarevich Alexis, telling a delegation, “I believe with your help I and the Russian people will succeed in defeating the enemies of Russia.”

The Black Hundreds had emerged as malevolent and potent antagonists to the tsar’s enemies amid the chaos of the 1905 Russian Revolution, which had threatened the very existence of the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty. Russia had long had revolutionaries, but until 1905 it had never endured an actual revolution. Which is not to say that the country had previously enjoyed domestic tranquillity: a generation earlier, Russians had virtually invented modern political terrorism. In 1881, a radical group called the People’s Will assassinated Nicholas’s grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, in what is regarded as history’s first suicide bombing. (Ironically, this “Tsar-Liberator” who had freed the serfs was the most liberal sovereign Russia would ever have.) In the first years of the new century, successor groups of radicals—preeminently the party of Socialist Revolutionaries, which was inspired by native populist thinkers as well as Karl Marx—were killing tsarist officials by the thousands. (In the most murderous year, from the fall of 1905 to the fall of 1906, the dead numbered 3,611.) The radicals’ taste for imperial blood enthralled rather than appalled much of the educated liberal public, who initially viewed the bombings, murders, and robberies (or “expropriations”) as acts of romantic and heroic despair. Expressing support for the revolutionaries was considered, in the words of one contemporary observer, “a sign of good manners,” showing you were on the right side of history. In 1905 the revolutionaries suddenly became a mortal threat to the decrepit autocracy, weakened as it was by a disastrous war with Japan. The revolution began with “Bloody Sunday” on January 22 when the police fired on a large demonstration of workers marching to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. There followed strikes, peasant uprisings, and even rebellions in the armed forces, the most famous of which was the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin in the Black Sea. The year culminated in the world’s first general strike and the tsar’s grudging issuance of the October Manifesto, in which the “unlimited” sovereign found himself forced to make odious concessions, including the creation of the first elected parliament in Russia’s history.

During that traumatic year, Black Hundred groups functioned as vigilante or paramilitary organizations in support of the tsarist regime, fighting in the streets against its opponents, attacking bystanders whom they suspected of antigovernment sympathies, and assassinating liberal politicians. Black Hundred thugs were known to waylay people—especially Jews and university students—whom they suspected of disloyalty and force them to kneel in front of an image of the tsar. They were most notorious, in Russia and abroad, for perpetrating murderous pogroms across the empire in 1905 and 1906, including in Kiev. Contrary to suspicions at the time and subsequently, historians have found little in the way of premeditation or planning. Still, some three thousand Jews were killed, and thousands more injured, as the marauders attacked people in the street and went from house to house, searching cellars where any Jews may have tried to hide. Countless Jewish homes and businesses were damaged and destroyed.

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:

In the first days after the Manifesto, the bad elements boldly raised their heads, but then a strong reaction set in and the whole mass of loyal people took heart. The result, as is natural and usual with us, was that the people became enraged by the insolence and audacity of the revolutionaries and socialists; and because nine tenths of them are Yids, the people’s whole wrath turned against them. That is how the pogroms happened.

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.

^* Passover that year fell on March 31.