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

2

“The Vendetta of the Sons of Jacob”

In the days after Andrei Yushchinsky’s funeral, the city entered its full spring thaw. In time for Easter, “the cold and cloudy weather,” the Kievan effused, “gave way to wonderful, warm, spring days … as if Nature herself had acted in sympathy toward the holiday celebration.” The Dnieper came alive with ferries. In another month, the city’s celebrated chestnut trees would be flowering. Peddlers would take to the streets shoeless, leaving behind their precious felt boots until the next winter. But spring always brought an intimation of doom as well, of death by drowning or disease. As the temperature passed the freezing point, the river threatened to flood and the open sewers in the city’s poorer districts ran free (the city fathers hesitated at the expense of covering the festering ditches, with one councilman arguing, “Why should we worry about cholera when all around us we have plague, diphtheria, scarlet fever and syphilis?”) This year, thankfully, the city had been spared serious flooding. But the discovery of Andrei’s body had unleashed another elemental, unpredictable, and destructive force that set the city on edge. The Black Hundreds were in a state of righteous rage. Jews prepared to hide in cellars or flee the city in fear of a coming pogrom.

For the Jews of the empire, Eastertide was always a menacing time. In the past, the holiday season had been marked by some of Russia’s most notorious pogroms. This year, in the aftermath of Andrei’s death, a pogrom seemed a near certainty. The day before Easter, on April 9, the newspaper Zemshchina (roughly, “The Realm”) published an article headlined “A Ritual Murder.” Based on allegedly leaked details of the autopsy report, the article affirmed that “the totality of the available information establishes that we are dealing here with a ritual murder, committed by a Jewish Hasidic sect.”

The article caused a sensation and indicated a turning point in the case. This was not a leaflet handed out by an agitator at a funeral. This was an article in the newspaper controlled by one of the most prominent Black Hundred leaders, the State Duma (parliament) member N. E. Markov, soon to become president of the Union of Russian People. “A Ritual Murder” was widely reprinted, including in the almost equally far-right but much more widely read newspaper the Moscow Gazette. That paper noted in a companion piece the “alarming rumor” spreading in Kiev that the case might be quashed and the perpetrators left unpunished. The paper complained “our Judeophile press is trying … to place the blame on anyone at all except persons of the Jewish tribe and faith.” The author appeals for action: “[The Jews’] complicity in the use of human blood in ritual meals cannot be hidden … The blood of the unfortunate Yushchinskys [of the world] cries out to the heavens!”

Further fueling the Black Hundreds’ outrage was the stalled police investigation. Nearly a month after the discovery of Andrei’s body, Vasily Fenenko, Kiev’s Investigating Magistrate for Especially Important Cases, declared that the police had reached a dead end. No progress at all had been made toward apprehending Andrei’s killer or killers. On April 14, 1911, Fenenko posted an appeal to the citizenry in the local Kiev papers:

Neither the circumstances nor the motive of the crime have been established and the investigation … has been hindered by an insufficiency of material … The Investigating Magistrate requests all persons who have any information about this case to inform him of such verbally or in written form.

The day-to-day sleuthing was still in the hands of Evgeny Mishchuk, chief detective of Kiev’s police force. But within days of the discovery at the cave, Fenenko had been assigned major responsibility for overseeing the investigation. The ostensible reason for the assignment had been the unusual nature of the murder. But there is some indication that Fenenko was chosen in part because it was believed he would unquestioningly carry out orders from above. If this was their expectation, his superiors in the Kiev Judicial Chamber were utterly mistaken. Fenenko was not a man meekly to carry out orders that conflicted with his common sense, let alone his conscience. A lifelong bachelor who lived with his childhood nanny, at the age of thirty-six Fenenko had settled into a premature and respectable middle age. He was, by all accounts, honest, competent, and incorruptible. If at times he sounded self-righteous, he was indeed a righteous man. Fenenko regarded his integrity to be his proudest possession. As the case unfolded, this quality would not necessarily prove an asset.

By mid-April Fenenko found himself in an extremely uncomfortable position. The Black Hundreds were decrying the incompetence of the investigation and the injustice to Andrei’s memory. Their outrage at the authorities, at this point, was entirely justified. Detective Mishchuk’s stewardship of the case had been a fiasco. The police had brutalized Andrei’s family. In the eyes of the far-right wing in Kiev, the police were guilty of other offenses against the Russian people, as well. Nikolai Pavlovich, the young man they believed had only tried to warn of the Jewish menace at Andrei’s funeral, was under arrest. Several of his fellow “Eaglets”—members of the local far-right group Society of the Double Headed Eagle—had also been detained, and police had searched the group’s headquarters. Fenenko’s appeal to the citizenry for assistance only proved that he was, at best, incompetent, at worst (and the worst was only too believable), complicit in the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. How could anyone accept his absurd contention that the physical evidence led nowhere? To the Far Right, the motive of the crime and the nature of the perpetrators were as obvious as Andrei’s four dozen wounds.

The Far Right employed the publicly reported details of the crime to craft a tale of Jewish villainy that rabble-rousers could use to incite a murderous mob. In truth, however, Andrei’s corpse told the story not of some methodically executed blood ritual but of a crime committed in a frenzy, with no rational purpose other than, possibly, revenge.

The coroner submitted his autopsy report on April 25. The pathologists determined the first wounds came as Andrei was surprised from behind. The time of death, based on the undigested beets and potatoes in his stomach, was judged to be three to four hours after his morning meal. There were no signs of resistance. The murder weapon was established to be an awl with a diamond-shaped shaft whose tip had once broken off and later been resharpened. A frugal workingman’s tool.

The report laid out a barrage of injuries to Andrei’s body:

A. External examination. The body is lying on its back on a table in the dissection hall of the office of forensic medicine, dressed in a white homespun linen shirt with embroidery on the chest, collar, cuffs, sleeves, and hem. The collar of the shirt is open. The button on the left side, two button loops on the right side, and almost every part of the shirt are covered with spots, smears, and spatters of dried blood…

B. Injuries. Shaving the hair on the head to the scalp, and cleaning the scalp of clay and clotted blood, reveals four linear 3–7-millimeter-long wounds in the middle part of the crown and a 4-millimeter wound of the same shape on the skin of the left temple. The right temple is covered with fourteen punctate stab wounds. These punctures are scattered on the outer edge of the temple, but are arranged in straight rows on the inner edge … There are four linear wounds on the right side of the neck, toward the nodding muscles, each about .5 centimeter long, and another similar wound under the left side of the lower jaw. There are two more in the area of the Adam’s apple and two stab wounds on the left cheek.

On the left side of the chest between the nipples and the hypochondrium [area below the ribs], there are seven stab wounds, of which the first is right below the nipple, the second 2 cm below the first, the third and fourth at the same height and 3 cm to the right, the fifth 1 cm below the third, the sixth 3 cm below the third, and the seventh 4.5 cm below the third…

There are eight stab wounds in the central area of the xiphoid process [lower part of the sternum]. There are five stab wounds on the right side along the axillary line, of which the first is over the sixth rib, the second in the ninth intervertebral space, the third above the tenth rib, and the fourth midway between the hypochondrium and the pelvis, and the fifth at the edge of the iliac bone.

There are four stab wounds on the right side of the back along the shoulder blade line between the hypochondrium and the pelvis.

In all, the city coroner, Dr. A. M. Karpinsky, noted fifty wounds. A second autopsy reckoned their number at forty-seven, which would become the official count, with thirteen wounds on the right temple rather than fourteen. The first wounds, which were to the head and neck, the experts agreed, would have been fatal on their own. By matching the holes in the fabric with the wounds on his head, it was later determined that Andrei was wearing his cap tilted slightly upward and boyishly cocked to the left when the powerful initial blows penetrated the top of his skull, driving bits of bone into the skull cavity, the awl’s shaft spearing through the dura mater into the dural sinus, which carries blood from the brain. The wounds to the neck followed, causing profuse bleeding. While the head and neck wounds would have eventually caused death, they did not immediately kill the boy. Death came only twenty to thirty minutes later, due to the wounds he had suffered to the heart. In one place, the weapon was driven into the heart so deeply and with such force that the handle left an impression on the skin.

In Kiev and in the empire’s capital of St. Petersburg, the threat of a pogrom alarmed government officials as much as it did Kiev’s Jews. Even though the prosecution of the case over the next two and a half years would suggest little in the way of official sympathy for the Jews, the tsar’s top officials first became involved out of concern with preventing anti-Jewish violence. They did not act out of compassion. The regime’s top priority was the preservation of public order. Straight through to the end of the trial, the government was preoccupied with preventing the case from causing any disturbance in Russian society at an intensely volatile time.

Within days of the discovery of the body, St. Petersburg had taken notice of the murder. By March 27, the day of Andrei’s funeral, the minister of justice was being copied on the prosecutors’ reports. On April 1, the Ministry of the Interior adjured the Kiev region’s governor to keep it informed about the case.

Pavel Alexandrovich Kurlov, the deputy minister of the interior, commander of the Corps of Gendarmes, and overall supervisor of the imperial security apparatus, was an ironic, even perverse choice to monitor the case. Perhaps no senior official in the ministry had as much Jewish blood on his hands. During the wave of pogroms in 1905, when he was governor of Minsk, he had given the marauders free rein. There was hardly anyone to whom Kiev’s Jews would have been more unwilling to entrust their fate.

The situation appeared relatively quiet until the appearance of the “Ritual Murder” article on April 9, when public mutterings grew increasingly ominous. On April 13, Kiev’s governor, A. F. Giers, dispatched his first telegraphic distress call to General Kurlov, warning that a pogrom might be imminent. Right-wing organizations, he reported, were growing convinced that the government was engaged in a cover-up of the murder. On April 17, far-right groups were planning a public requiem for Andrei. Signs were mounting that the Black Hundreds would follow it with a massacre.

The authorities did not want a pogrom to take place. But what would they do to stop one? What actions would they take to restrain the bands of thugs whom they considered useful allies and even secretly admired? Much would depend on how the infamous Kurlov decided to respond to Giers’s warning. Would he order steps toward protecting the Jewish population? Or would he give the vigilantes carte blanche, as he had done six years earlier in Minsk, when more than a hundred Jews were killed and nearly five hundred wounded, and his men fired on a largely Jewish group of demonstrators, shooting most of them in the back?

Venal, unprincipled, and a master of the most convoluted intrigues, Kurlov was the extravagant embodiment of all the corruption and decay in a regime riddled with innumerable schemers, sycophants, and incompetents. A former governor of Kiev as well as Minsk, he was not unintelligent, but his main talent was for relentless bureaucratic advancement against all obstacles. He was said to owe his position to the empress Alexandra herself, who supposedly installed him as the protector of her beloved spiritual guide Rasputin. To the extent that Kurlov had principles, they were those of the Far Right. And having taken personal loans from the treasurer of the Union of Russian People, he was literally in the Black Hundreds’ debt.

Kurlov never made a move that he did not perceive to be in his own interest, which makes his decision—untainted by any sense of honor or justice—especially notable. Kurlov replied to Governor Giers’s agitated telegram on the same day he received it in the clearest and most direct fashion. “It is vital,” he wrote, “to take the most decisive measures to maintain order; a pogrom must be avoided at all costs.” Other officials quickly issued numerous orders in the same vein. Black Hundred vigilantes had helped save the regime during the 1905 revolution, and its gratitude for that service was immense. But that moment had passed. The priority now was the preservation of order, even if it meant protecting Jews.

The local authorities prohibited the public requiem set for April 17. Despite the ban, a crowd of 150 or so hard-core “Unionists” gathered at Andrei’s grave. When the presiding priest hinted that the Jews were responsible for the murder, a police officer on the scene warned him that “such talk only inflames people’s passions.” The crowd dispersed without incident.

In dealing with the Far Right, though, the authorities mixed their warnings against violence with gestures of appeasement. Pavlovich, and several other Eaglets who had been detained, were released “for lack of evidence.” Behind the scenes, local Black Hundred leaders were coddled and kowtowed to. Preeminent among them was nineteen-year-old Vladimir Golubev. A Kiev university student and secretary of the city’s “patriotic” youth organization, Double Headed Eagle, Golubev could serve as a general refutation of the “great man” school of history. The head of a small, struggling group that was in fact losing members, Golubev, more than anyone, can be said to have created the case that would shock and dumbfound the world.

If Pavlovich represented the Black Hundreds’ criminal element, Golubev, the son of a professor at a Kiev religious academy, characterized its more reputable contingent. Fanatically sincere in his anti-Semitic beliefs, he was, in his way, a man of principle. One historian has called him a kind of “Black Hundred idealist.” Once, when he learned that a railroad was owned largely by Jews, he refused to buy a ticket and demonstratively walked several dozen miles along the tracks. After Andrei’s body was found, Golubev became obsessed with the case and launched an independent investigation. He was certain that a Jew had committed the crime, and he would not rest until he found a Jew whom the authorities would agree to charge. He even slept overnight once in the cave, which had served as such a fine natural morgue for Andrei; his enemies said he did it on a bet, but perhaps he was hoping for some paranormal insight into the crime.

His efforts would be rewarded. “Student Golubev,” as he was invariably called, was the freshest incarnation of an eight-hundred-year-old archetype: the dogged Christian detective who perceives in an unsolved murder a monstrous Jewish plot.

Golubev was taking on the role originated in the twelfth century by the Welsh monk Thomas of Monmouth. Around the year 1149, Thomas took it upon himself to investigate the unsolved murder of William of Norwich, a twelve-year-old apprentice skinner who had been found dead five years earlier, on the day before Easter in 1144. It was Thomas who laid the foundation for the medieval and modern myth of Jewish ritual murder. The origin of the myth can, rather astoundingly, be pinpointed to a specific time and place and an individual instigating mind. The foundational moment came in 1150, when Thomas published the first portion of his The Life and Miracles of Saint William the Martyr of Norwich. Thomas, as historian Gavin Langmuir has written, “did not alter the course of battles, politics or the economy. He solved no philosophical or theological problems.” Yet he created a myth that burrowed deeply into the Western mind “and caused, directly or indirectly, far more deaths than William’s murderer could ever have dreamt of committing.”

According to Thomas’s account, the week before Easter in 1144, a man claiming to be the archdeacon’s cook came to young William’s mother asking permission for the boy to work in his kitchen. Taking some money from the supposed cook, the mother allowed her son to be led away. Five days later the boy’s body was found in the woods outside the city. The boy’s uncle, who was a priest, rose before the local church synod to accuse the city’s Jews of the crime, but this charge met with skepticism from local notables, including the bishop of Norwich, the church prior, and the sheriff. Still, the people of Norwich grew angry at the city’s Jews, and the sheriff gathered them in the castle to assure their safety. The danger passed. No Jews, nor anyone else, were charged. Poor William, said like Andrei to be a “neglected” and “poor ragged little fellow” when alive, lay increasingly forgotten in his churchyard grave.

When Thomas arrived in Norwich he became obsessed with solving the mystery of William’s murder, and he determined to prove that the boy was a martyr whose spirit could perform miracles. Like Golubev, his twentieth-century Russian avatar, Thomas was motivated by a dangerous mixture of true belief and personal ambition. As the propagator of the cult of a new martyr, and the caretaker of the boy’s sacred relics (for Thomas parlayed his advocacy into a position as sacristan of William’s shrine), he would acquire dramatically enhanced prestige.

In The Life and Miracles of Saint William, Thomas introduced the novel idea of ritual murder as a Jewish Passover rite. He also pioneered the sophistry, the twisting of evidence, and the calculated obtuseness that would mark all subsequent accusations of Jewish ritual murder. Thomas set an example for the ages by producing eyewitnesses who, long after the crime, came forward with vivid stories implicating the Jews (“… a certain poor maid-servant … through the chink in the door … managed to see the boy …”); in his caustic railing against the skeptics who refused to accept the victim as a true martyr (their “saucy cavils” irked him); and by accusing the Jews of bribing the authorities (“giving a hundred marks to the sheriff they were rid of their fear”).

But the most notorious and fraught motif he introduced, after the accusation of ritual murder itself, is the character of the apostate Jew who publicly reveals his people’s clandestine and insidious rite, one that is justified by their scripture. Thomas hears “from the lips” of a converted Jew, a monk named Theobald, how the Jews of Spain gather every year in the French city of Narbonne (which was, in fact, an important center of Jewish learning and leadership) to plot the annual sacrifice demanded by their ancient texts.

Theobald disclosed to Thomas that the Jews believe that without the shedding of Christian blood they cannot obtain their freedom or ever even have hope of returning to the land of their fathers from which they had been exiled. Therefore they have to sacrifice a Christian somewhere in the world “in scorn and contempt of Christ.” The Jewish elders assembled in Narbonne cast lots for all the countries of the world where Jews lived, and in 1144, the lot fell on Norwich. All the synagogues in England then gave their consent that the deed be carried out there. According to Thomas, the truth of Theobald’s words—“uttered by one who was a converted enemy, and had been privy to the secrets of our enemies”—were beyond doubt. Thomas did not succeed in having any Jews charged with the crime. But he did elevate William into a martyr murdered by the Jews. The ritual-murder myth spread throughout England and worked its way into the heart of the culture, as evidenced by “The Prioress’s Tale,” Geoffrey Chaucer’s story of the martyrdom of a pious seven-year-old child “of Christian blood”:

This cursed Jew hym hent [grabbed], and heeld hym faste,

And kitte his throte, and in a pit hym caste…

The blood out crieth on your cursed deed!

The notion that the Jews actually required human blood for their rituals arose when the myth spread to the Continent. The blood accusation, in its full form, emerged in the German town of Fulda in 1235. On Christmas day of that year, while a miller and his wife were at church, their mill burned down with their five sons inside. The Jews of Fulda were accused of slaughtering the children before the blaze was set and draining off their blood into waxed bags, to utilize it in some sort of ritual or medicine. On December 28, 1235, thirty-four Jews in Fulda were killed—by the town’s outraged citizens, according to one account, or by crusaders, in another version of the incident—and became the first known victims of the blood accusation. The authors of the calumny that Jews need human blood for ritual purposes remain unknown. But it is likely the blood accusation sprang from the creative imaginations of some Fulda inhabitants or passing crusaders in 1235, who were inspired to embroider the original slander of Thomas of Monmouth.

The governing powers of Europe quickly understood the danger that the emergent myth presented to the state. Frederick II, the Holy Roman emperor, sought to stamp out the inflammatory accusation and the public’s wrath against the Jews; like Thomas of Monmouth, he turned for help to Jewish apostates, but with the opposite purpose. In 1236, just months after the Fulda massacre, he convened an assembly of Jewish converts to Christianity from across Europe. They found that none of the Jews’ sacred texts indicated they were “greedy for human blood.” Accepting their judgment, Frederick declared the Jews of Fulda to be exonerated and forbade anyone from ever again making such a charge. His imperial edict was followed in 1247 by a papal bull from Innocent IV, declaring the blood accusation to be false. But once the potent fiction had lodged in people’s minds, not even the Vicar of Christ, in all his purported infallibility, had the power to stop its spread.

Golubev did not know of his debt to Thomas of Monmouth (who was by then an obscure figure even to scholars, not having earned the renown he surely craved). But Golubev was likely acquainted with the works of anti-Semitic pseudo-scholarship then circulating in Russia, and so would have been familiar with the five slaughtered brothers of Fulda; Andreas of Rinn, supposedly killed by the Jews on the “Judenstein” or Jew-Stone in 1462; and Simon of Trent, a murdered boy whose case codified the blood accusation’s essentials in 1475, establishing the motif of Christian blood being used to bake Passover matzo. Golubev also undoubtedly knew of the most notorious cases of the past three decades, nearly all of which originated to the west of Russia.

The blood accusation in the case of Andrei Yushchinsky would soon cause the tsarist regime to be condemned in the West for its shocking retrogression to a medieval mentality of prejudice and vengeance. Yet nearly forgotten amid the outrage was that some of the most “civilized” parts of Europe had recently witnessed the largest outbreak of ritual murder charges in three centuries. According to the most reliable count, for the decade from 1891 to 1900, there were seventy-nine significant ritual murder cases in Europe where specific allegations were made to the authorities or at least gained wide popular currency. Only five cases took place in the Russian Empire. The majority were in Austria-Hungary (thirty-six) and Germany (fifteen). Men like Golubev knew the most notorious of them like a catechism. A handful had come to trial. Kutaisi (Georgia, part of the Russian Empire) 1879: nine Jews, tried in the murder of a six-year-old girl. Tisza-Eszlar (Hungary) 1882: a Jewish synagogue sexton, tried in the murder of a fourteen-year-old servant girl. Xanten (Prussia) 1891: a Jewish butcher, accused of killing a five-year-old-boy, whose throat had been slit ear-to-ear. Polna (Bohemia) 1899: a twenty-two-year-old cobbler’s apprentice, tried in the murder of a nineteen-year-old seamstress. Konitz (Prussia) 1900: a Jewish butcher and an animal skinner, accused in the killing and dismembering of an eighteen-year-old gymnasium student.

As Golubev combed the area around the cave for clues and canvassed the Lukianovka neighborhood for witnesses, he must have been conscious of his potential place in history. With the ambiguous exception of Polna (where the defendant was convicted, but the state officially rejected the ritual motive), in every recent case the Jewish suspects had, frustratingly, been exonerated. Moreover, these cases had been treated primarily as local matters. In modern times, no ritual murder case had had the unmitigated support of a European central government. Golubev sought to change the legacy of the modern blood accusation: he would enlist the highest authorities in the empire behind his cause, including, he hoped, the sovereign himself.

Within months, Golubev’s amateur sleuthing would have a decisive impact on the official investigation. At this point, however, the authorities were pressuring the young hothead to refrain from inciting violence. Careful not to offend him or his comrades, they cajoled him into promising, on his honor, that he would do nothing to instigate attacks on the Jews, at least through the end of the summer. The deputy head of the Kiev Okhrana, or secret police, reported in mid-April that “everything has turned out all right. Golubev has quieted down. They have decided to postpone their action until the Sovereign’s departure from Kiev [that is, after the tsar’s planned visit in August]…(B)eating the Yids … they’ve postponed until fall.”

But even though Golubev had been “quieted down,” the threat of a pogrom still felt real, both to Kiev’s Jews and to the government. The pages of the right-wing press were filled with venomous screeds declaring that the four dozen wounds on the “boy martyr” were clearly the work of Jews who were part of a powerful cabal that had duped inept investigators or, more likely, bought them off.

The government and the extreme right both contended for control over the case. On April 18, the minister of justice, Ivan Shcheglovitov, asked Prime Minister Stolypin to pay it special attention; he also met with the tsar, possibly briefing him on it for the first time. On the same day, the justice minister also sent a telegram to Kiev, removing the case from the purview of the local police and prosecutor and putting it under the personal supervision of Grigory Chaplinsky, prosecutor of the Kiev Judicial Chamber (a post somewhat analogous to that of a U.S. state attorney general). The justice minister instructed Chaplinsky to deliver regular, detailed reports; the local murder case would now be followed in its minutest details at the highest levels of the government.

Also on April 18, the extreme right proceeded with a plan to shame and threaten the government in the most public forum: the State Duma. The right-wing deputies met secretly to discuss passing a resolution that would demand the government explain why it was not treating Andrei’s killing as a ritual murder.

On the afternoon of Saturday, April 23, came the first serious acts of anti-Jewish violence connected with the Yushchinsky murder. Black Hundred thugs began attacking Jews on the street at random in the largely Jewish suburb of Nikolskaya Slobodka on the left bank of the Dnieper, where Andrei had lived. “The entire Sabbath day … the ‘Unionists’ [members of the Union of Russian People] took a ‘stroll’…pulling ‘pranks’ on all the Jews that they encountered,” reported the Kiev correspondent of the Yiddish newspaper Haynt. “These ‘jokes’ often ended sadly, many Jews ending up bandaged … Many Jews … hide in their attics or even escape over the Dnieper to Kiev.” But the city of Kiev itself soon felt unsafe. “Various dark rumors have begun to spread,” Haynt reported, “one worse than the other” about impending revenge being taken on the Jews for Andrei’s murder. Kiev’s Jews—at least “those who take an interest in other things besides sugar and the stock exchange,” sniped the reporter—were seized by fear of a full-fledged pogrom.

The jibe was directed at the Jewish denizens of the city’s famous stock exchange, who remained preoccupied with their furious buying and selling of sugar-backed notes and securities (Kiev, despite much poverty, was something of a beet boomtown) before heading off to relax at the card tables, the one place where Jews and Gentiles could mix easily. But even the stock traders must have paused to take notice when, on April 29, the far-right faction introduced its resolution on the Duma floor charging the Kiev administration with obstructing the Yushchinsky investigation. The authorities were wasting time going down false paths, persecuting the poor boy’s mother, the resolution declared, “instead of addressing the question of the fanatical Jewish sect whose members committed the murder.” By Black Hundred standards, the tone of the document was measured. N. E. Markov, the Black Hundred leader who commissioned the “Ritual Murder” article, mounted the Duma rostrum to make his group’s demands, and threats, entirely clear. Markov was in every sense an outsize figure. Enormously tall, with dark, curly hair, he was said to bear a resemblance to the six-foot-eight-inch tsar Peter the Great, earning him the nickname “the Bronze Horseman,” after the statue of Peter in St. Petersburg immortalized in Alexander Pushkin’s poem. Even compared with his fellow rightists, his views were extreme: he was among a minority that seriously raised the question of expelling all of Russia’s Jews.

“We must pursue the whole malignant sect, the Jewish sect, which sends its butchers to collect the blood of Christian children, which prepares these butchers who collect children’s blood in cups and distributes this blood to the Jews—to feast on their Paschal lamb, to feast on their Passover, made of the blood of Christian infants,” Markov declaimed in the thundering bass voice that packed the galleries. He and his brethren had been told by the government not to worry, he said, that a fine investigator was on the case, that behind him was the prosecutorial apparatus, and that “we can just fall asleep”—but the judicial authorities had betrayed his trust. He bluntly threatened a pogrom. “When the Russian people find that there is no possibility of exposing in court the Jew who cut up a child and drained the blood out of him, that neither the court, nor the police, nor the governors nor the ministers, nor the supreme legislative institutions would be of assistance—that day, gentlemen, there will be pogroms of Jews. But neither I … nor the Union of Russian People will create the pogrom. You yourself will create the pogrom. That pogrom will not be the kind we’ve seen so far, it will not be a pogrom of Yid feather beds, but all the Yids, down to the very last one, will be wiped out.”

The resolution provoked a boisterous floor fight. A Social Democratic deputy, according to one account, “amid yells of defiance from the Right benches, denounced the [so-called] ‘Real Russians’ as ‘a band of robbers and murderers.’ ” Liberals and mainstream conservatives deplored what they said was an incitement to violence and the promulgation of paranoid medieval fantasies that were bringing shame upon Russia. The resolution failed by a vote of 108 to 93. The narrow numerical loss was something of a moral victory for the Black Hundreds.

Markov’s genocidal histrionics led Kiev’s Jews to prepare for the worst. “The most fearful two days”—Saturday, April 30, and Sunday, May 1, the two days after the Duma debate—“passed in an unusually oppressive mood on the part of the entire population,” Haynt’s Kiev correspondent wrote. In the Jewish neighborhoods “there was a kind of strange death-silence.” Jews who had the financial means checked into hotels, where they would be relatively safe. Hundreds of Jewish families packed their suitcases and began to flee the city.

The Black Hundreds’ triple-pronged attack on the regime—in the press, in the Duma, and on the streets of Kiev—deeply unnerved the upper echelons of the tsar’s government. Thanks to the fecklessness of the local investigation into Andrei’s murder, this case could no longer be managed haphazardly at a distance, with a minister prodding a vice minister, who prodded a governor, who prodded a police official. The central government would now impose direct oversight on the investigation.

On April 29, 1911, as the Duma debated the rightist resolution, the Justice Ministry official Alexander Liadov boarded a train in St. Petersburg bound for Kiev. Liadov—vice director of the ministry’s First Department, head of the Second Criminal Division—was the kind of bureaucrat often referred to as “colorless and faceless.” The impact of such a figure is easily underappreciated, especially in a drama like the Yushchinsky affair, with so many vivid characters contending for attention. But complex plots often require at least one such transparently functional character, and in his limited stage time Liadov would set key plot mechanics into motion.

Exactly what Liadov’s orders were from his boss, justice minister Ivan Shcheglovitov, is not known. If they were written down, they have been lost. Most likely they were given verbally, with things said or hinted at that no one wanted put to paper. But it can be deduced from subsequent events that, as he arrived in Kiev, Liadov had a threefold mission. Its first two aspects were straightforward, comprehensible, and expedient. Liadov was to defuse the explosive young Black Hundred leader, Golubev, who was conducting his own independent investigation of Andrei’s murder and could ignite a pogrom whenever he chose to. Second, he was to make sure the investigation appeared to be in competent hands: the bumbling Mishchuk had to be replaced by someone with an unassailable reputation. Liadov’s third imperative, however, was neither straightforward nor sensible. As he settled into his Kiev hotel suite, he mentally unpacked this part of his brief: to focus investigators on the “ritual version”—the notion that Andrei had been killed by Jews for his blood to make matzo for their Passover meals.

Why was Liadov pursuing the very scenario that the government feared as incendiary? The government was, after all, determined to prevent anti-Jewish violence “at all costs.” If the abiding priority of the state was to preserve order, why would it pursue the most inflammatory possible course, one that would threaten its interests, both foreign and domestic?

Liadov’s mission marks the start of this central mystery of the Yushchinsky affair. Russia, if measured by its skein of legal restrictions on Jews, was the most anti-Semitic country in the world, but this alone is not sufficient to explain how a medieval fantasy could engender a conspiracy at the highest levels of the tsar’s government. Was Liadov’s brief the result of some arcane political calculation? Possibly. But the answer may lie at a more atavistic level—within the warped mentality of a doomed regime and, ultimately, in the mind of the tsar himself. If there is one constant in the late period of imperial Russian decadence, it was the urge of all officials to please the tsar, or those whose positions depended on the tsar’s favor. The tsar himself was notoriously inscrutable. In what remained an essentially absolute monarchy with profound rot at its core, much depended on what officials thought the tsar thought about a matter, or thought he would think about it if he took the time to think about it. Liadov and the rightists knew that the tsar planned an official visit to Kiev at the end of the summer, when the unsolved murder of a poor Christian boy promised to cast a shadow over his tour. Well aware that the proponents of the blood accusation would be hoping for a sign of imperial favor for their cause, Liadov had to recognize the signal importance of his mysterious but calculated mission.

The day after his arrival in Kiev Liadov initiated his first delicate maneuver by summoning Golubev to his hotel suite for a meeting with him and the chief prosecutor, Chaplinsky. The young extremist was in a hostile mood. He refused to talk to Chaplinsky, whom he was meeting for the first time, regarding him as an enemy. Liadov told the young man that if he had anything to say, the prosecutor would listen. When Golubev insisted that “we”—that is, his band of thugs—“have an interest in preventing that horror,” meaning ritual murder, Liadov had his opening. He gave Golubev an uncompromising warning but presented the threat in the most empathetic manner possible. Liadov later recounted the conversation as accurately as he could remember it.

“I don’t think it would be in your interest to organize a pogrom,” he told Golubev.

“Why?” Golubev replied.

“Because,” Liadov said, “the Sovereign is expected to visit [Kiev]. If any of your fellow members cause a pogrom and there are disturbances in Kiev, then you’ll have as much chance of seeing the festivities as of seeing your own ears [as the Russian saying goes], and it probably would be more pleasant for you and your organization to see the Sovereign.”

“That thought never occurred to me,” Golubev replied obligingly. “I promise you that there will be not be a pogrom.”

Perhaps out of politeness, Golubev apparently did not mention that he had heard exactly the same line of coaxing from the Kiev Gendarmes two weeks earlier. Liadov believed he had found the perfect psychological lever and reported to the justice minister, “The desire to avoid a pogrom [on Golubev’s part], as I came to understand, was aroused exclusively by the fear that if there were disturbances in Kiev, then the visit of the sovereign would not take place.” However, it would be a mistake to interpret this as implying official approval of a future pogrom to occur after the tsar’s visit. Liadov was clearly only using the tsar’s visit as an excuse for Golubev to back down without losing face. When the threat of pogroms emerged later, officials would act quickly to suppress them without recourse to excuses.

In any event, believing he had defused Golubev, Liadov now prepared to fulfill his aim of steering the investigation toward the motive of the “ritual version.”

From the whisperings about the progress of the investigation, the prominent Jews of Kiev felt reassured. The Yiddish press was reporting (inaccurately) that, thanks to Liadov’s intervention, the ritual-murder theory had been decisively rejected. Weeks earlier, after “the dark rumors” of violence had begun to spread, Jewish community leaders in Kiev conferred about what to do. They considered offering a reward for the apprehension of Andrei’s killer or killers but rejected the proposal as likely only to draw more unwanted suspicion. Although some wanted to issue a proclamation declaring the Jewish people innocent of the crime, in late April, Haynt reported, Jewish leaders reached a consensus to employ a “tactic of remaining silent and waiting.” They would “patiently refrain from anything that might anger the dark gangs.” That is, they had decided to do nothing. The reaction of Kiev’s Jewish leadership was typical of the inertia and cautiousness, as well as a pragmatism shading into wishful thinking, which often characterized its response to threats from outside.

The community’s leaders represented their course of inaction as an opportunity for the Jews to show their inner strength. “In such a dangerous situation [Kiev’s Jews] sit and grind their teeth and remain silent; this is truly a courageous act that only Jews who understand the term ‘a time to be silent’ are capable of,” Haynt reported, referring to Ecclesiastes 3:7 (“A time to be silent, a time to speak”). When to stand up to the authorities and when to hold one’s tongue in the face of danger and oppression was a fraught and divisive question for Russia’s Jews. But in this case it seemed that the sage counsel of the rabbis and sugar barons had proven prudent.

These were not naive men. They claimed history, as well as common sense, on their side. For all its anti-Semitism—its segregation of the Jews in the Pale of Settlement, its funding of the Black Hundreds, its past toleration, if not outright encouragement, of pogroms—the tsarist state had propagated the blood accusation only inconsistently. To be sure, the record was disturbingly mixed. In 1817, Tsar Alexander I approved a decree that barred accusations of ritual murder against Jews based only on the prejudice of their supposed need for Christian blood. There had to be evidence. If “suspicion should fall upon the Jews [in a case of child-murder],” the decree said, “then an investigation should be carried out following the legal procedures that are followed when investigating people of any other religion, when they are accused of murder.” Yet in 1823, Alexander ordered the investigation of a thoroughly baseless charge of ritual murder in the Belarusian town of Velizh that dragged on for more than a decade as the authorities arrested much of the Jewish communal leadership and shuttered the synagogue by imperial degree. Only in 1835 did Alexander’s successor, Nicholas I, finally quash the Velizh case. But the notoriously reactionary Nicholas, known as the “Gendarme of Europe,” rejected his advisers’ counsel to reaffirm Alexander’s 1817 declaration, averring “that there truly exist among the Jews fanatics or sectarians, who consider Christian blood necessary for their rites.”

Still, over the previous century such cases had, in fact, been fairly rare in Russia, with only a half-dozen or so significant prosecutions. Russia’s only conviction for ritual murder, of a group of Jewish soldiers in Saratov in the 1856 deaths of two young boys, had attracted little attention. Popular rumors of ritual murders did play a role in inciting pogroms in 1903 in Kishinev, but the state had not endorsed the accusations. The most recent actual court case, in 1900–1902, involved a Jewish barber in Vilna named David Blondes. He was convicted of assaulting, but not attempting to kill, a female servant who claimed he had wanted her blood. In convicting him, the court did not affirm the crime’s supposed ritual nature (the woman’s wounds amounted to a few scratches). The case was notable for exposing a definite timidity among Jewish leaders in defending their people against the ritual murder charge. When Blondes was convicted on the assault count, some in the Jewish community, and even one of his own attorneys, recommended that he accept his prison sentence of a few months. An appeal, it was feared, could only promote the ugly libel against the Jews and inflame the Christian populace. Blondes, urged by Oskar Gruzenberg, the empire’s most prominent Jewish defense attorney, courageously decided to challenge the verdict. He wrote Gruzenberg from prison, “Am I really going to have to suffer from a false accusation, just because I was born a Jew?” He understood the case was not just about him but the entire Jewish people. On appeal, he was given a new trial and a jury cleared him of all charges.

Yet now the imperial government was preparing to abet a vengeful demand by political extremists for Jewish blood, even though investigators had discovered no indication of ritual murder. Liadov and his Kiev associates had only one possible shred of evidence on which to build a case. Andrei’s mother, Alexandra, had received a strange and disturbing letter, the envelope addressed to “Yushchinskaya—Mother of the Murdered Boy.” The anonymous author claimed that “on the day of the murder I saw your boy walking on Lukianovskaya [Street] with some sort of Jew. Near St. Fyodor’s Church an old Jew joined them … That was probably your boy [I saw]…I was plagued with a thought that wouldn’t leave me alone. The fact is that I had the thought, and what if … the Jews need blood for the Passover holiday and a thin boy will be their victim.” The letter, postmarked March 24, was signed, “A Christian.” A similar letter was sent to the coroner. But the “Christian Letters” would ultimately prove more useful to the defense than the prosecution. They would attract extraordinary attention when the defense put forward the theory that the missives were written at the behest of the real killers and held the key to solving the case.

In the initial investigation, before Liadov had come on the scene, mutterings swirled in the streets of Kiev that a Jewish cabal had killed the boy Andrei. The police had canvassed the Slobodka suburb and the boy’s old neighborhood of Lukianovka, interviewing numerous residents and potential witnesses—and heard the same rumors repeated over and over again. Typical was the weary answer of a man named Tolkachev: “At the market they’re saying all sorts of things—at first they said it looked like he was killed by his mother, then they said Andrusha was killed by the Yids, now I’m not sure I know what they’re saying.”

One of the last people to be questioned in this initial phase of the investigation, sometime in April, was Vera Cheberyak, who was happy to aggravate the rumors. Investigators were aware, of course, of her villainous reputation; she and her gang were currently under investigation in two major robberies, including the theft of two thousand rubles’ worth of revolvers. But they viewed her mainly as the woman who, along with her son, had helped identify Andrei’s body and had no reason to speculate that her criminal activity was related to Andrei’s murder. They might have thought differently if they had known that Cheberyak had withheld a vital piece of information: her son Zhenya had gone out to play with Andrei the morning he disappeared. Revealing that fact would have made it clear that the murdered boy had last been seen alive just a few dozen yards from her doorstep. She told the police nothing of particular note, but she did volunteer that she was surer than most about who had killed Andrei. Having seen the Black Hundreds’ leaflets at the funeral, she said, “Now it seems to me that Andrusha was probably killed by Jews since no one in general needed Andrusha dead.” She admitted, though, “I cannot offer proof confirming my supposition.”

Just a few days after Vera Cheberyak’s testimony, Alexander Liadov set about searching for proof of the “supposition” that a Jew had committed the crime. The motives of Vera Cheberyak and those of the state would eventually intersect and produce one of the stranger collaborations in judicial history. But that lay many months in the future. Meanwhile, three obstacles stood in the way of any attempt to pin Andrei’s murder on Jews: the lack of evidence, the absence of witnesses, and the opposition of the two respected local officials in charge of the case—the local prosecutor, Nikolai Brandorf, and Investigator Vasily Fenenko.

Liadov later claimed that he had no preconceived notions about what he sought to find. But according to Fenenko, in early May, when Liadov summoned him and a number of others for a meeting in his rooms at the European Hotel, he revealed a very definite view of the case—a view he made it clear was shared by the man who had sent him on this mission. The meeting would turn out to be one of the most pivotal events in the whole affair. Liadov, in Fenenko’s telling, declared that “the Minister of Justice does not doubt the ritual character of the murder.” Chaplinsky, Kiev’s chief prosecutor, piped in that he was glad to hear that the minister was of the same opinion as he was. One participant in the meeting expressed the fear that propagating the blood accusation could provoke a pogrom. Chaplinsky, according to Fenenko, replied he would have no objection “if the Jews were beaten up a bit.” Given the government’s intense concern with preserving order, it is inconceivable that Chaplinsky meant this remark to be taken seriously. In fact, just days earlier, Chaplinsky himself had warned the justice minister about the danger of a pogrom. But the sardonic taunt exposed the government’s official stance: in this matter, Jews were targets.

Investigator Fenenko and Prosecutor Brandorf believed the ritual-murder explanation of the crime was absurd. The autopsy reports told a story of homicidal rage and possibly revenge, not of a calm and deliberate ritual for collecting blood. In the days leading up to Liadov’s arrival from St. Petersburg on May 1, the two men must have felt under increasing pressure to produce a definitive dismissal of the ritual-murder hypothesis. But how could they dispose of the ridiculous charge once and for all? One approach would be to profile the mind of the killer or killers based on the autopsy and what evidence there was at the crime scene. In late April, before Liadov’s arrival, Brandorf recommended to Investigator Fenenko that he retain a renowned professor of psychiatry, Ivan Sikorsky, to analyze the full range of evidence. Students of the case have long assumed, quite reasonably, that Chaplinsky must have recommended Sikorsky, hoping that he would support the ritual accusation. But the documents suggest that getting Sikorsky involved in the case was very possibly Brandorf’s idea. Brandorf may have sincerely hoped that seeking the distinguished professor’s opinion would help lay the ritual accusation to rest. But it was a step that would help tip the case into madness.

Professor Emeritus Ivan Sikorsky of Kiev’s St. Vladimir University was one of Russia’s most eminent psychiatric researchers. While his achievements would soon be far outshone by those of his son, the aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky—already gaining fame in 1911 as the inventor of the helicopter—Ivan was so esteemed that he had once been honored by the great Leo Tolstoy with an audience at his estate at Yasnaya Polyana. He was the author of works on general psychology, and numerous specialized studies on subjects ranging from child development to the effect of fatigue on intellectual function, which were widely published and cited abroad. He had started out his career as an anatomist-pathologist and was active in promoting the new science of criminalistics and the systematic use of psychiatric expertise in the courts. He was considered an expert on religious fanaticism and folk belief: his most popularly known work was a report on the horrific mass suicide in the town of Ternov, where twenty-five members of a Christian cult had themselves intentionally buried alive.

Sikorsky could by all rights have been considered the ideal man to evaluate the evidence in a case centering on questions of human anatomy and the fanatical mind. But his arrogant devotion to the pseudoscience of his day inspired and reinforced in him a virulent racism and anti-Semitism that would prove profoundly destructive to the cause of justice he professed to support. Sikorsky emerged as a full-fledged anti-Semite only very late in life, not long before Andrei’s murder. An early indication of his noxious system of thinking can be found in his preoccupation with “sectology,” the study of religious sectarianism, a discipline that had an inevitably political slant.

Russians at all levels of society were engaged in a scattershot spiritual awakening, with a proliferation of unconventional forms of belief, or “God-seeking,” a quest for meaning amid the turbulence and trauma of the modern age. The most renowned God-seeker, Leo Tolstoy, had died only a few months earlier in the fall of 1910: his search had led him to a Christian-anarchist, pacifist philosophy that rejected basic tenets of the Orthodox Church, resulting in his excommunication. The search for the transcendent drew God-seeking intellectuals and members of the upper class to mysticism, spiritualism, and Eastern religions and healing. Tsar Nicholas and the empress Alexandra, in their devotion to a spiritual guide, were in many ways typical God-seekers of their era. (In fact, before Rasputin, in the years 1900–1902 the royal couple had formed a close bond with another mystic and faith healer, the Frenchman Philippe Nizier-Vachod, who was sent packing when his powers failed to help the empress conceive a male heir.) The lower classes were drawn to individual charismatic leaders in a popular religious revival that was rightly regarded by the Russian Orthodox Church as a threat to its authority. Some charismatic leaders were even imprisoned.

Sikorsky’s worldview was largely constrained by the pseudosciences of his day, from social Darwinism to physiognomy. (In his analysis of a photograph of Fyodor Kovalev, the young man who buried alive the twenty-five Ternov cultists, Sikorsky wrote, “The left eyebrow is a little higher than the right, while the muscle around the eye on the right side is contracted more strongly than on the left, as a consequence of which the right eye seems smaller than the left one. This irregularity of his expression … constitutes a sign of degeneration and indicates Kovalev’s belonging to a psychopathic family.”) Sikorsky idolized Herbert Spencer, the renowned British social Darwinist and, like Spencer, simultaneously believed in Darwinism and the very theory it had discredited, Lamarckism, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, including ancestors’ learned behavior. (Attributes could travel curious paths indeed: a widow, Sikorsky believed, could have children with a second husband bearing “the outer traits and character of the first husband.”)

Sikorsky’s pseudoscientific principles easily extended into ardent and avowed racism. Central to his beliefs was the notion that the races could be divided into two types, “higher” and “lower.” During their meeting in 1890, Leo Tolstoy already sensed something not quite right about this professor, who apparently treated him to a disquisition on his obsession, the danger of national “hereditary degeneration.” After Sikorsky took his leave, Tolstoy wrote in his diary of the man’s “astonishing foolishness” and added one curious but pungent remark: “A nice fellow—but gone rotten.”

When it came to the Yushchinsky case, however, the problem with Sikorsky was not his pseudoscientism or, exactly, his racism; racial pseudoscience was widespread in the era. Rather, it was that these intellectual foundations gave rise to a late-blooming, fanatical anti-Semitism that would poison his inquiry into the murder. Sikorsky had previously expressed alarm about the rising number of Jews in the empire and hinted that Jews were responsible for the plague of Russian alcoholism. (“Moneylenders”—their ethnicity was clear—supposedly lent the common folk the funds to buy liquor on what the professor called “ruinous terms.”) He emerged as a full-fledged political anti-Semite in April 1910, when he delivered an address at the Club of Russian Nationalists. (The term “nationalists” generally referred to a political group that was somewhat more moderate than the Black Hundreds.) While wars used to be primarily over territory, Sikorsky argued, now one of the main aims of the enemies of the Russian people was “spiritual destruction.” At the front lines of this conflict was an army of scribbling lowlifes in the liberal press, ideological warriors who attacked the nation’s great men. Behind them, Sikorsky declared, stood a certain “opponent” of the Russian people. “This opponent consists of those pious people who hourly, from the depths of their offices, send up their prayers to the Almighty so that he would not lessen their profits on their international loans. These pious people … believe in the power of gold.” Again, he did not need to specify the ethnicity of this “opponent.”

When Sikorsky received the official request to consult on the notorious Yushchinsky case, he must have been gratified. His academic career had been in decline; he had found himself pushed aside by younger colleagues. He welcomed this unexpected opportunity to regain his prominence and determined to make the most of it. Sikorsky’s academic writings could be long-winded, but for this case he would coin a memorably concise statement of the blood accusation: deftly epigrammatic, it would echo through the trial and beyond.

Liadov explored the cave where Andrei’s body had been found. He met with Professor Sikorsky and they visited the anatomical theater, where they were shown the victim’s preserved organs, and conferred with Dr. Nikolai Obolonsky, who had performed a second autopsy on the boy.

Given the case’s notoriety, the authorities had retained Dr. Obolonsky and autopsy specialist N. N. Tufanov of St. Vladimir University’s department of forensic medicine to perform an independent examination of the corpse. They did not endorse the ritual version but would not rule it out. Their autopsy report differed from the coroner’s in only one significant respect: they concluded that in the course of the crime “there took place the body’s almost complete exsanguination” and that the cause of death was “acute blood loss.” As will later become clear, these conclusions were dubious. They were likely rendered under pressure from high officials.

Liadov then went to Kiev’s Monastery of the Caves to meet a monk named Ambrosius. If Golubev was a Christian detective like Thomas of Monmouth, then Ambrosius was an avatar of the renegade Jew Theobald, the “converted enemy” who reveals his people’s clandestine rituals.

Ambrosius was the first “expert” in the case to testify to the existence of ritual murder.

He claimed that during his residence at another monastery:

I had numerous occasions to talk on the subject (of ritual murder) with various people, in particular with two Orthodox monks who had been converted from the Jewish religion to the Christian … All these discussions … gave me reason to believe that among the Jews, especially the Hasidim, it is the custom to obtain blood, particularly by the murder of Christian boys. This blood is required for the preparation of the Paschal matzos for the following reasons:

According to the Talmud blood is the symbol of life; the Jews are the sole masters of the world and all other peoples are simply their slaves; and so the blood of Christian boys in the matzos symbolizes that to the Jews is given the right to take the lives of those slaves … The Jews want this to be known by non-Jews, too, and that is why the body of a Christian from which the blood is taken must not be completely destroyed … When such bodies are found, the Jews arranged it so that there is no clue to the place where the murder was committed, but the non-Jews who find the body are made to remember that the Jews have a right to their lives as masters of life and death.

Ambrosius also claimed that “there must be a specific number of wounds in such cases in a specific part of the body: the number of wounds is approximately forty-five.” In his May 1911 deposition Ambrosius acknowledged that he himself had not personally studied the alleged Jewish texts concerning the ritual murder of Christians. Moreover, he admitted that the two monks who were his main sources were “Cantonists,” Jews who had been impressed as early as the age of twelve into the tsar’s army for twenty-five years and knew little of their religion. Liadov nonetheless was highly impressed with Ambrosius’s testimony.

On May 8, Professor Sikorsky rendered his psychological profile of the perpetrators. It was based on an astounding interpretation of the autopsy materials. “All the damage and wounds were inflicted by a steady and confident hand, one that was neither trembling in fear, nor moving with exaggerated scope and force out of rage,” he pronounced. While Fenenko and Brandorf believed the four dozen wounds, all over Andrei’s body, many with no clear purpose, testified to a crime committed in a frenzy, Sikorsky insisted, “This was precise, ruthless, cold-blooded work, such as might have been performed by someone who was accustomed to slaughtering.” Chaplinsky reported these revelatory findings to the justice minister:

Professor Sikorsky, based on considerations of an historical and anthropological character, considers the murder of Yushchinsky, in its chief and consistent characteristics—the slow draining of blood, torture, and killing of the victim—typical of a series of similar murders which have happened repeatedly in Russia and other countries. The psychological basis of this type of murder, in the opinion of Professor Sikorsky, is the “racial revenge and vendetta of the sons of Jacob.”

“The racial revenge and vendetta of the sons of Jacob.” This was a powerful new formulation. Unlike Golubev and Ambrosius, Sikorsky was no one’s avatar. In the drama of the blood accusation he had created a new role—the psychiatric explorer—and added modern elements to the myth. “The nationality which commits this horrible deed,” Professor Sikorsky concluded, “as it is scattered among other nations, brings with it the traits of its racial psychology.” Race, genetics, inherited behavior—Sikorsky renovated the myth with pseudoscientific rigor. It was a signal achievement. The Jews had committed such “horrible” deeds in the past that they had become conditioned to perform them in the future and for all time. Murder was in their blood.

Liadov now declared himself to be confident that the crime had the character of a secret ritual. Based on what he had heard from Professor Sikorsky, Ambrosius, and the pathologist, he later said, he had “formed the personal conviction that Yushchinsky was killed by Jews.” But who was the culprit?

Liadov began to play detective, taking an unusual interest for a high official in the investigation’s operational details. He called attention to the testimony of the boy Pavel Pushka who said Andrei would buy gunpowder from a Jew in Slobodka. According to Fenenko, Liadov instructed him “that as soon as the identity of this Jew was determined, he should be charged and placed under arrest.”

The gunpowder-selling Jew was never found, but another Jew of interest was identified. In a deposition on May 5, 1911, Golubev told investigators:

Near [the area of the cave] there is located the enormous estate of the Yid Zaitsev. The manager of that estate and of the brick factory [there] is a certain Yid Mendel … who after the discovery of Yushchinsky’s body behaved somewhat strangely, giving out candy to children and asking them not to say anything to the police.

This is the first mention in the official record of Mendel Beilis. (Beilis was not the “manager,” but the clerk of the brick factory. All the rest of the report was unsubstantiated rumor.) Questioned the following day, Golubev again mentioned “the little Jew Mendel.” He told the authorities, “My personal opinion is that the murder was probably committed either [at the Zaitsev estate] or at the Jewish hospital” adjoining the factory, though adding with unaccustomed humility, “Of course, I am not able to present proof of that.”

Golubev would now dedicate himself to providing that proof.