A Child of Christian Blood

3

“A Certain Jew Mendel”

On May 4, 1911, Nikolai Krasovsky, a provincial police official in western Ukraine, received an urgent telegram. The message was brief and clear: “By order of the governor, go to Kiev.”

Until the previous fall, Krasovsky had been the acting head of the criminal investigation division of the Kiev police force—the city’s chief detective. He had taken over the division three years earlier in the wake of a tremendous scandal. The then head of the division, Spiridon Aslanov, was exposed as being in the pay of Kiev’s notorious “King of Thieves.” The King, a flamboyant crook who also went by the nickname “Stovepipe Hat,” boasted of an income of a hundred thousand rubles a year and prided himself on stealing only from the well-off, sharing his booty generously with his small army of pickpockets, burglars, and second-story men. The gifts that he bestowed on Detective Aslanov, including a ring studded with precious stones, were for him the cost of doing business.

After Aslanov’s arrest, Krasovsky quickly gained respect by cracking a slew of cold cases. By the fall of 1908 he had become celebrated as the Sherlock Holmes who solved Kiev’s most sensational crime, the Ostrovsky murder case. The stabbing deaths of a middle-aged couple in their home, along with a young acquaintance, their laundress, and a seamstress, had traumatized the city. As the killers remained at large day after day, the Kiev journalist and politician Vasily Shulgin wrote, “It seemed as if a dark cloud were hanging over the city … Crowds of people stood for hours in front of that house [where the murders were committed], gloomy and distraught, staring at those walls with superstitious horror.”

In lifting that cloud, Krasovsky displayed stunning investigative virtuosity. He had a fair mastery of forensic science. (The field was surprisingly well advanced in Imperial Russia, whose chemists had devised tests still used today for detecting trace amounts of blood and certain poisons.) He had great powers of observation. He was a master of interrogation. Tallish and kindly looking, with blue eyes, a bushy mustache, and an unhurried air, he knew how to get people—ordinary folk and criminals—to tell him things. He was also cunning, fearless, and always willing to stand his ground. When detectives found jewelry purportedly belonging to the Ostrovskys in the home of a known thief, Krasovsky alone was unconvinced that he was the perpetrator. He proceeded to prove that engravings on the jewelry had been fabricated by a vengeful criminal (who himself had nothing to do with the murders) to incriminate his enemies. In a city with the highest crime rate in the empire, where two out of three cases went unsolved, Krasovsky was considered a hero for tracking down the four actual killers, one of them a psychopath who admitted to ten other murders and boasted of his ability to stab a person to death while shedding hardly any blood (the technique involved partial strangulation, then two stabs to the heart).

In an attempt to escape the hangman, the defendants appealed for help to the most famous Russian of his time, Count Leo Tolstoy, claiming they had only faithfully followed the famous writer’s Christian anarchist precepts. (The era’s spiritual ferment had seemingly penetrated even into the underworld.) “We acted according to your teachings because they had money and we didn’t. Defend us,” they wrote him in a postcard they sent from prison. Tolstoy, whose greatest wish at this stage of his life was to convey tenets of morality to common people, was greatly distressed by the notion that these men had operated under his influence. Tolstoy’s estranged wife, Sophia, took the opportunity to torment her husband, arguing that the men could indeed rightfully consider themselves to be his followers. Tolstoy, who deeply and publicly opposed capital punishment, is not known to have lent these killers his support. (Tolstoy’s morality, incidentally, extended to the acceptance of non-Christians as his equals. In November 1910, when the count died in a remote rural train station while fleeing his wife after a final quarrel, Russia’s Jews lost their most prominent Christian defender. It is fascinating to imagine the role he might have played in the Yushchinsky affair had he lived a few months longer. In a late interview, Tolstoy told the New York Times, “How do I account for all this anti-Jewish feeling in Russia? We often dislike more those whom we harm than those who harm us.”)

Krasovsky, given his record, surely deserved to have the “acting” removed from his title. But, as was so typical of the era, superior talent failed to be rewarded. Evgeny Mishchuk, who had served in St. Petersburg and no doubt had curried favor there, received the permanent chief detective post. But now Mishchuk had outrageously bungled the investigation into Andrei’s murder, and Krasovsky had been summoned—from exile, one might say—to lead the police investigation into what would shortly become the most infamous murder case of the age.

At this sensitive moment, after the fiasco of the arrest of Andrei’s family, and in the face of the Black Hundreds’ incendiary anti-Semitic propaganda, the government needed a politically reliable professional of solid reputation to take charge. Renowned for his skill as a detective, Krasovsky was also, for reasons not entirely clear, well regarded by the right-wing Union of Russian People. Grigory Chaplinsky, the chief prosecutor and advocate for the blood accusation, thought he could find no better man for the job. But Chaplinsky had been in the Kiev post only about two months and did not really know Krasovsky, and ultimately he would want someone who would do as he was told. In that regard, Krasovsky—stubborn, crafty, incorruptible, but more than capable of dishonesty when necessary to his goals—would turn out to be a disastrous choice.

Krasovsky accepted the new mission reluctantly. The year before, after losing out to Mishchuk for the job of Kiev’s chief detective, he had happily settled into a new post in the provincial city of Khodorkov. He was wary of getting involved in another highly publicized case, having learned from experience, as he later said, that “I never got anything from it but intrigues and trouble from co-workers and others involved.” From the outset his apprehensions were disturbingly confirmed. Alexander Liadov, the St. Petersburg functionary sent to Kiev to oversee the case, insisted that Krasovsky’s participation be kept secret. No one would inform Mishchuk that he was effectively being relieved from the case. Krasovsky knew Mishchuk would surely find out soon enough what his old rival was up to, and he could be expected to attempt his revenge. Complicating matters still further, the Corps of Gendarmes—a secret police force empowered to arrest people with no formal charges—was conducting its own secret investigation. Over the next few months the case would become a round-robin of intrigues and backstabbing that would exceed Krasovsky’s greatest fears.

In early May, the far-right youth group leader, Vladimir Golubev, had identified as a person of interest a clerk at the Zaitsev brick factory, Mendel Beilis. But, within a few days, “the Yid Mendel,” as Golubev called him, fell away as an object of the investigation. The day after receiving Golubev’s supposed tip, Vasily Fenenko, the upstanding investigating magistrate, surveyed the Zaitsev factory and the area around it. Fenenko had been annoyed by Golubev’s habit of arriving at his office unannounced, ranting about Jews and blood and murder. But Liadov, whose mission was to focus the investigation on finding a Jew, had already made sure Golubev would be treated with respect, his “leads” acted upon promptly. The results of Fenenko’s survey were reported to the justice minister himself: “On the Zaitsev estate nothing suspicious was found and no cellars, which Golubev mentioned, turned out to be there.” On May 11, in a report to the justice minister, Chaplinsky noted the suspicions about “the Jew Mendel” but stated that, “regarding the factual side of the investigation, the witnesses have not given any significant material for solving the case.”

The right-wing press was appalled by what it believed to be the disastrous outcome of Liadov’s visit to Kiev (a mirror image of the equally incorrect view in the Jewish press, as noted earlier, of Liadov as a hero). On May 14, 1911, as Liadov departed for St. Petersburg, the newspaper of the Union of Russian People, the Russian Banner, despairingly asked its readers, “Do you doubt that the Worldwide Yid will spare millions on suppressing this case? Do you doubt that this worldwide moneylender and swindler will threaten [Russia’s] international loans…[and] international complications if the case … isn’t suppressed?” The authorities, it was clear, “have yielded [to the Jews] in violation of the law, the truth, and the self-esteem of the Russian people.” The paper was convinced that the killers would never be brought to justice. As for the Jews’ adherence to the Ecclesiastical admonition about times to be silent—pointed to with such pride in the Jewish press—this, too, could only be seen as sinister. “The Yids found that the only means of saving themselves is silence. Therefore not one Yid has said anything about the murder.”

The complaints of the Black Hundreds initially appear bewildering. Had not Liadov fawned over Kiev’s young right-wing leader? Did he not put a distinguished new detective on the case? Had he not signaled the Justice Ministry’s approval of “the ritual version”? The continued indignation of the right wing exposes a paradox: even as top officials placated the local vigilantes, no one had informed the Far Right’s national leaders of this. The Russian Banner protested that St. Petersburg had not sent a single decent detective and that the case remained “under an impenetrable cover of secrecy.” The disconnect might be the result of routine bureaucratic ineptitude (a safe assumption for a regime where often even the right hand did not know what the right hand was doing). Or it might have been the product of some never-revealed intrigue (two of the most popular words in tsarist officials’ memoirs are “intrigue” and “camarilla”). But the authorities in Kiev and St. Petersburg had good reasons to keep the Far Right ignorant of the investigation.

At this point in the inquiry, the officials privately advocating for the blood accusation likely hesitated. Having sought to “find a Jew,” they had to acknowledge that no suitable Jew—one against whom witnesses could be produced—had been found. So, for now, they kept secret from the public the judgment of the distinguished psychiatrist Ivan Sikorsky that Andrei’s murder was an instance of the “revenge of the sons of Jacob.” In the absence of a flesh-and-blood suspect, such a revelation could only highlight the failure of the authorities to find the actual perpetrators, inflame the populace, and increase the possibility of a pogrom, which, as officials often stated, would be “most undesirable.” It would be some weeks before they could ready a case against a suitable Jew. Meanwhile, Krasovsky was taking the investigation in a very different direction.

Krasovsky “was not distinguished by especially firm moral qualities,” the local prosecutor, Nikolai Brandorf, later recalled with disapproval, “and was capable, when needed, of conducting a double game.” But a double game, or even a triple or quadruple game, it could be argued, was exactly what an investigator was required to play in this case. To maintain his freedom of action, Krasovsky had to indulge the Black Hundreds. He frequently met with Golubev and his chief investigator—a sometime police informer, moneylender, and former bordello proprietor named Rozmitalsky—and pronounced himself favorably disposed to the possibility that the crime was a ritual murder. Making his charade somewhat easier was the absence of any other persuasive theory of the case: at this point, he could honestly say, anything might be true.

Ironically, while Krasovsky had been unsettled by Liadov’s conspiratorial machinations, the St. Petersburg official had done him a great service by creating a breathing space in which he could try to solve the case. Liadov’s obeisance to Golubev and his crew, and the other actions he had taken, did not yet constitute a full-blown anti-Semitic conspiracy. The conciliatory gestures having been made to Kiev’s Far Right, Krasovsky and the other investigators were allowed to pursue leads as they pleased.

Immediately after arriving in Kiev, Krasovsky made a detailed survey of the physical evidence. He was appalled by the destruction of the crime scene by the police and public, which had left only the paltriest scraps of evidence to work with. A trace amount of semen was detected on a blood-soaked piece of pillowcase found in Andrei’s jacket pocket, pointing to a possible sexual motive for the crime. On the belt buckle, there were two clearly visible fingerprints—above and below the first letter of the word “School”—but, frustratingly, dusting with two types of powder failed to “develop” them. In the absence of a murder weapon, the four dozen wounds on the body pointed to no particular suspect. Imprinted in a muddy blotch on Andrei’s jacket was the figure a small Christmas tree, which turned out to be the distinctive mark of the rare Columbus brand of galoshes; the footprint, however, could not be matched to a suspect. The clay encrusted on Andrei’s clothes matched that in the cave and yielded no clues about the location of the murder, although Krasovsky did tease out one significant hypothesis. Based on meteorological reports that showed the only days when the temperature in Kiev was above freezing were March 16 and March 19, he believed the body had been dragged into the cave on one of those days, when wet clay and leaves could have stuck to the boy’s clothes and then dried. (This contradicted the conclusion of the autopsy report that the body had been taken to the cave while still in rigor mortis, within about twelve to twenty-four hours after death.) Krasovsky surveyed the Zaitsev brick factory in late May and, like Fenenko, came away convinced that the crime could not have taken place there. He briefly talked to Mendel Beilis and asked to look at his shoes. He found no Columbus galoshes, only a worn-out pair of the more common Conductor brand.

In the absence of physical evidence or eyewitnesses, to solve the case Krasovsky would have to induce people to say things they did not want to say. A way would have to be found to sway souls, until unspeakable memories made lips begin to move and unintended words were uttered. Some might think the investigator’s methods amounted to coercion, but Krasovsky thought he was only after the truth. With the evidence at hand, he could not solve this crime. But perhaps he could find the killer by disinterring the secret history of Andrei’s family in all its bitterness, resentment, and despair.

What Krasovsky had learned about the family—and, more important, what the family said about itself—had aroused his deepest suspicions. The arrest of the family had been a fiasco, with Andrei’s relatives defended in the Duma itself, as the Far Right raged against the police for victimizing them. But that did not deter Krasovsky from focusing on them with renewed vigor. If the Black Hundreds had believed Krasovsky would be better than that contemptible tool of the Jews, Detective Mishchuk, they would soon be disappointed. Russia’s Sherlock Holmes was coming to believe that Andrei had indeed been killed, as his aunt Natalia suspected, by “one of his own.”

Andrei’s stepfather, Luka Prikhodko, seemed to have a solid alibi. His boss, whose name was Kolbasov, swore that Luka had spent ten straight days and nights at the bookbinding workshop where he worked, sleeping and taking his meals there. But there was an emotional entanglement between them that surely gave pause to the psychologically minded Krasovsky. The two men were drinking companions and it was rumored that Luka was having an affair with Kolbasov’s wife. It was hard to say whether this fraught relationship made Kolbasov more or less believable as an alibi witness, but clearly his motives could be complex.

There were still too many reasons to believe that Luka, and perhaps his wife, Alexandra, who was Andrei’s mother, and her brother, Fyodor Nezhinsky, were involved in the crime. And a primal motive was now coming into clearer focus: money. It had been reported to the investigators that at the cave, after Andrei’s body was found, witnesses had heard his uncle Fyodor declare that Andrei had been killed by his stepfather, and possibly other family members, “because of the promissory note.” Questioned by the police, Fyodor confirmed that he had indeed accused his brother-in-law, Luka, and that he believed that money was the motive.

At this point, another mysterious character—talked about, obsessed about, but never seen—finally enters the story in a ghostly manner. Andrei’s absent father, Feodosy Chirkov, whom his mother never married, lived with her for two years. While she was pregnant with their second child, a daughter who died shortly after birth, he left Kiev to fulfill his military service in the tsar’s army. Around that time, his family’s modest estate was sold and he received a share of the proceeds. By the time of Andrei’s murder no one knew for sure if he was dead or alive, though rumor had it he had perished during the Russo-Japanese War.

Chirkov liked to play cards and was said by an acquaintance to “associate with a not especially reputable crowd.” People who knew him had little doubt he would swiftly spend his inheritance. But after Chirkov’s exit, the legend grew that he had bequeathed a “promissory note.” Alexandra would often boast—particularly to her mother if the older woman reproached her for having an illegitimate son—that money existed in Andrei’s name, perhaps a thousand rubles. Andrei, who longed for his father (he was said to ask passing soldiers if they knew of him), filled the emotional void by making his mother’s story his own. He told one of his Jewish friends that his father had left him six hundred rubles and he lived on the interest. Until the day he died, he wanted to believe his father was providing for him.

The “promissory note” was a private myth, a weapon in a family battle, and a young boy’s consolation. But after the murder, when tears might have washed old resentments away, it emerged like a malicious domovoi to haunt the family. Inexorably, the presumed motive called into being the requisite trappings of guilt. Witnesses appeared. Incriminating evidence was duly found.

Investigators learned Luka and Alexandra had behaved quite suspiciously at the office of a local newspaper where they had gone to place a notice about Andrei’s disappearance. “[They] were completely composed, calm,” a newspaper employee told investigators. “Something here wasn’t right: the mother was too indifferent.” The couple had “smiled strangely.” A laundress claimed that Alexandra and her brother Fyodor had talked to her about Andrei’s disappearance “with a smile.” The overheated Kiev rumor mill produced a story that a man and woman resembling Luka and Alexandra had been seen hailing a cab, while carrying a big, heavy bag. In another version, the couple claimed the wrapped body was a sick boy they were taking to the hospital.

On June 3, the police arrested Fyodor. He, too, had an alibi, a coworker who swore they were together at Natalia’s workshop. But at this point, of all the family members, he was in the greatest legal jeopardy. The day before the body was discovered, on March 19, he had been seen in Lukianovka covered in clay—exactly what would be expected if he had wriggled in and out of a cave. A boy testified that Fyodor had had him brush off his clothes. Fyodor claimed he’d soiled his clothes while sleeping in the street, presumably after going on a bender. The boy did confirm Fyodor was somewhat drunk, which was hardly exculpatory. Other witnesses also claimed Fyodor had acted suspiciously.

Once in custody, Fyodor, not surprisingly, again pointed the finger at his brother-in-law, Andrei’s stepfather, Luka. More unexpectedly, he made a striking claim. He told Krasovsky he had found an important witness who had escaped the authorities’ notice: a man who had seen someone resembling Luka near the caves on the morning of Andrei’s murder. What was truly surprising was that Fyodor was telling the truth. Investigators confirmed the story.

Fyodor had tracked down the witness, a stove repairman, some weeks earlier. The man had told only a few people about the person he had seen while on his way to the Zaitsev factory to do a job at seven a.m. on March 12. But the story quickly spread in the Lukianovka anthill, making its way to Andrei’s aunt Natalia, who told her brother about it. The man was known only by his nickname “Lapochka” (roughly translated, “Sweetie”), but Fyodor soon showed up at his door. His real name was Vasily Yashchenko; now he confirmed to the police that he’d seen someone near the Zaitsev factory on March 12 who struck him as suspicious.

Fyodor, having found a witness who he believed implicated his brother-in-law, decided to keep this information to himself, for purely self-interested reasons. According to a police report, “He ended his investigation and decided to say nothing about his conjectures, reasoning that you couldn’t bring a dead boy back to life and the arrest of [Luka] would negatively affect the material situation of the family which he, Fyodor, would then have to support.” But now that Fyodor found himself on the verge of being charged with murder, the witness he had discovered was his ticket to freedom. An excited Krasovsky restyled Fyodor from a suspect into a “colleague,” as helpful citizens or informers were called, who would now aid in bringing his brother-in-law to justice.

However much Chaplinsky, the chief prosecutor, wanted to charge a Jew or Jews with the crime, he could not now ignore the suspicions of the famed detective he himself had helped put in charge of the case. In early June he reluctantly reported to the justice minister that “Nezhinsky’s story could turn out to be truthful.” Another development may also have made him hesitate. On June 6, Father Alexander Glagolev, a Kiev professor and leading Christian authority on the Jewish religion and rituals whose opinion Chaplinsky had solicited a month earlier, delivered his formal statement. Father Glagolev acknowledged “evidence of the hatred of Jews for non-Jews in the Talmud” but thoroughly dismissed the blood accusation. Echoing the judgment of the council convened by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the very first such case in Fulda, he noted the age-old Jewish “prohibition … against the use of blood in any food” detailed in the Talmud. He emphasized that that proscription was “to my knowledge nowhere lifted, limited, or mitigated” in any known text and declared the very idea of a blood ritual “counter to the principles of Judaism, ancient and modern.” He further implied that the ultra-pious Hasids were, if anything, less likely than other Jews to commit such an act of sacrilege.

Father Glagolev’s lengthy contemplation of the case was no mere dry scholarly exercise. The killing had affected him deeply, and he concluded his statement with an unusual cri de coeur: “The horrible, blood-curdling murder of the innocent boy … stands before my mind as an insoluble mystery, one which perhaps can only be uncovered by the All-Seeing Eye!”

Sometime in late May or June, Evgeny Frantsevich Mishchuk, nominally Kiev’s chief detective but now officially relieved of the case (the “secret” of Krasovsky’s appointment had not remained so for long), sat himself down on an earthen bank near the Berner Estate in Andrei’s old neighborhood of Lukianovka and lit a cigarette. He was out of uniform. He had dressed as nondescriptly as he could. In one pocket he had some caramels. For hours he had been roaming Kiev’s impoverished, disreputable outskirts, sensing at every turn criminal dens and underworld hideouts where all sorts of fugitives, even wanted killers, took refuge. When he saw some children playing here, scampering up, down, and around the ruts, ravines, and caves near where Andrei’s body was found, he hoped he had found the break in the case he was looking for.

Mishchuk was greatly troubled by the paths the investigation was taking. He no longer believed Andrei’s family had anything to do with his murder, but Krasovsky had redirected the case toward them. Nor did he believe, as Chaplinsky avowed, that the Jews were responsible. Mishchuk was not a well-educated man. He had been expelled from a gymnasium for poor grades. But the idea that Jews were responsible for the crime, as Professor Sikorsky insisted, made no sense to him. Brandorf, the local prosecutor, considered Mishchuk “sluggish and incompetent.” Krasovsky was certainly the better detective. But it was Mishchuk who at this point in the case had the superior intuition.

As he sat smoking, fingering the caramels, Mishchuk knew he had to wait and let the children come to him. He waited patiently, he recalled later, “while the children running past sometimes stopped to take a look at what this old fellow was doing.” He gently struck up a conversation about what game they were playing and gave the children candy as they gathered around. When he sensed they were comfortable talking to him, he asked whether they were sorry that Andrei was gone, probing to see if they knew anything. Mishchuk found “the children were not greatly upset” by their playmate’s death, lamenting that “children soon forget such moments.” However hard he tried to draw out of them what they had heard among themselves or from their parents, “the children didn’t understand what all the fuss was about and apparently had no greater interest than their games.”

Had any stranger been seen with Andrei? The children didn’t respond to his question, but they did volunteer their own fears. “Suddenly the children’s tongues loosened,” as they told of a notorious woman “in whose house all sorts of people were always hanging around, that there were parties, singing, noise, that at home their parents said it was a bad house, that they shouldn’t go there … that she was shady, a fortune teller, that she knew spells, and was involved in all sorts of things and that all the people were afraid of her and would avoid her on the street … and that she was a thief and a killer.” The children also said people mockingly called her “Cheberiachka.”

In criminal patois, “cheberiachka,” according to a contemporary dictionary of criminal slang, meant a “merry song with indecent subject matter.” It was of a piece with Vera Cheberyak’s other nickname, “Sibiriachka”—“the Siberian”—an apparent reference to her criminal acquaintances and the frosty region where they had served time in prison, or were destined to. Cheberyak’s neighbors lived in dread of her. Questioned by the authorities, they called her “the lowest of the low,” “a dark figure,” an “evil presence.”

Cheberyak was volatile and violent. Many a story about her ended with the words “and then she hit me in the face.” She quarreled with her downstairs neighbor, Zinaida Malitskaya, the liquor store cashier, and hit her in the face in broad daylight. She hit another acquaintance “in her physiognomy,” as the jocular Russian expression goes, for flirting with a man she considered hers. But such violence did not compare with the notorious and horrific act she had committed six years earlier—a crime that still haunted Lukianovka.

Cheberyak freely admitted to blinding her lover, a French accordion player named Pavel Mifle, by throwing sulfuric acid in his face. (He went on to become known as “the blind musician.”) She matter-of-factly explained to acquaintances that she had retaliated after Mifle had hit her in the face. According to other accounts, she committed the act in a fit of jealous rage. Whatever her motivation for maiming her lover, she was tried for the crime and acquitted. Mifle testified in her defense, saying he had forgiven her, which apparently swayed the jury. After her acquittal, the relationship continued. Cheberyak would accompany Mifle to the clinic and to the French consulate, from which he received a tiny invalid’s stipend of about fifteen rubles a month. She visited him frequently and sometimes had friends take food to his apartment two doors down from hers on Upper Yurkovskaya Street.

In her criminality and in her lying, Cheberyak was compulsive and impulsive. Her prevarications began with the name she went by in official documents: Vera Vladimirovna Cheberyak née Singaevskaya. She claimed to be twenty-nine years old, the daughter of a priest named Vladimir Singaevsky from Zhitomir, about a hundred miles west of Kiev, who died when she was six years old. In fact, her baptismal record shows the sacrament was administered on August 26, 1879, making her thirty-one years old in the spring of 1911. Court documents indicate her son, Zhenya, at first told police he was twelve. If his mother were truly twenty-nine, that would have made her a less than decent seventeen when she gave birth, which is likely why he later said he was eleven. He was actually thirteen, going on fourteen. But if the son had to remain a child so that the mother would not grow older, then she would see to it. As for her clergyman father, in the space on the certificate where her patronymic should have been, there was instead scrawled the abbreviation “illeg.”—illegitimate. Cheberyak was born to Yuliania Singaevskaya, from a family of small landowners (a class somewhat above common peasants) and an unknown man. Court inquiries later established that Vladimir the priest from Zhitomir did not exist.

Cheberyak had a third nickname: “Verka Chinovnitsa,” meaning “Verka the Civil Servant’s Wife” (“Verka” being a diminutive of Vera). When Vera married Vasily Cheberyak, the son of a retired army captain some thirteen years her senior when she was only around seventeen, it must have seemed like a grand ascent. Unlike Andrei Yushchinsky’s mother who, despite giving birth out of wedlock, was able to find a husband, Cheberyak’s mother apparently never wed. Yuliania Singaevskaya gave birth to another illegitimate child—Vera’s half brother Peter—by still another man. As the daughter of a single unwed mother with two children and no man to support them, Cheberyak must have endured a hard childhood. Vasily may have appeared a savior. But although he was a dutiful employee of Kiev’s Central Telegraph Office, and steadily received promotions, he never made more than about forty-seven rubles a month. For Cheberyak—narcissistic, histrionic, emotionally and materially grasping, and magnetic to men, or at least a certain kind of man—simply to be “the civil servant’s wife” would not do. Cheberyak set about creating a criminal gang that would serve as a source of income and sensual amusement.

The Frenchman Mifle was far from her only lover. She had many others, young men whom people noticed entering her home wearing one set of clothes and leaving wearing another. In the winter of 1910–1911, her gang included nineteen-year-old Mitrofan Petrov, who lived with her for a time and whom she referred to as her “lodger,” eighteen-year-old Nikolai Mandzelevsky (“Nicky the Sailor”), and Ivan (“Red Vanya”) Latyshev. She was said to be romantically involved with all of them. Cheberyak would try to pass off some of her gang members as her “brothers.” Her half brother Peter (known as “Plis,” which means “Velveteen”) was also a member of her gang. But it was rare that the police weren’t looking for Peter for one reason or another, and he usually made himself scarce in Lukianovka.

The Cheberyaks’ three-room apartment, above the state liquor store, was the scene of wild, drunken carousing that scandalized the neighborhood. For some time Vasily Cheberyak had slept in one bedroom with the three children, while Vera kept the other bedroom for herself and whomever she was entertaining. Vasily, conveniently, spent little time at home at night, because he worked the graveyard shift at the telegraph office. He left in the evening and returned home in the early morning to sleep, often working additional shifts to earn extra money. On the infrequent occasions when he intruded, Vera’s guests would drink him into a stupor so he could not interfere with their revelries (forensic chemical analysis of her home would find semen on the wallpaper). Vasily told a neighbor that he even suspected the young men slipped something into his drinks.

The police believed Cheberyak was behind dozens of robberies. Mishchuk, who had only been working in Kiev a few months, puzzled over why she had never been arrested, and discovered she was a police informer, selectively betraying her brethren to keep her own concern in operation. But her fortunes in crime apparently varied, and her high-living ways kept the family on the edge of a precipice. Mifle’s mother, Maria, told the authorities, “Vera … would visit me, always wearing nice gold things and clothes. I would ask her where she got such things and she told me she bought them from her ‘lads’—that is, thieves.” A neighbor noticed that she wore a beautiful coat and changed her hats often. But others testified the family lived on the verge of poverty, amid shabby furniture, with Cheberyak sometimes complaining she had to stretch one day’s dinner into three.

In the first months of 1911, Cheberyak’s life began to fall apart. Perhaps she had grown more reckless, or her preternatural run of luck had simply run out. But that winter she stumbled from one farcical debacle to another. On February 18 she walked into the Gusin watch store on Lvovsky Street and sold a watch and chain for seventeen rubles. A day later, a customer noticed the watch, which had been stolen just days earlier from his mother’s home. The storekeeper’s wife began keeping an eye out for Cheberyak and, spying her a few days later, confronted her. Cheberyak of course denied any wrongdoing and, to demonstrate her unconcern, gave Mrs. Gusin another piece of jewelry for repair. Cheberyak, brashly overconfident, returned to the store on March 8. Mrs. Gusin called the police and Cheberyak was taken to the precinct. But Cheberyak somehow escaped and could not immediately be tracked down because she had given a false name, posing as the wife of a Colonel Ivanov.

On that very same day, Cheberyak was implicated in an entirely different crime. Some months earlier she had taken in a young woman who was down on her luck named Nadia Gaevskaya. Nadia at first believed that Cheberyak had befriended her out of kindness but to her irritation found herself treated as a servant. The relationship soured and, before the young woman left, Cheberyak sold Nadia a dress, saying it had become too small for her. On March 8, an outraged woman spotted Nadia on the street, recognizing the dress as her own—it had been stolen—and summoned the police. Nadia, in turn, accused Cheberyak, and the matter was turned over to a justice of the peace.

The next day, March 9, came the catastrophe: five members of her gang were arrested while entering a bathhouse, charged with the theft of two thousand rubles’ worth of revolvers. Cheberyak’s home was searched the following day, March 10, and though no evidence was found against her, her gang had been wrecked. She knew better than most that when the police targeted suspects, more often than not it was with the help of informers. Who had informed on her this time? Could it have been Pavel Mifle, at whose home she sometimes stashed stolen goods, or members of his family, whom she on more than one occasion complained “nursed a grudge against me”? Could it have been one of her beloved “lads”? Or could it been have been one of her son Zhenya’s lousy friends?

It was just two days after the police raid that Andrei disappeared. Another week would pass before the two boys looking for treasure discovered his corpse in the cave. A neighbor who was a close friend of Vasily Cheberyak’s noticed a striking change in Vera after Andrei’s body was found. Her demonic self-confidence had deserted her. “She looked somehow upset, as if she had been blindsided by something,” he recalled. “She walked around as if something had scalded her.”

Detective Mishchuk had come to believe the trail led to Vera Cheberyak’s doorstep. The sleuthing of Golubev, the right-wing hothead, had luckily uncovered one genuine witness: Zhenya Cheberyak. Vera’s son told Golubev that he’d seen Andrei on the morning of March 12, the day the boy disappeared, though he soon took back the story, and denied he’d seen or met Andrei that day. Zhenya was questioned by the authorities on May 11. This time the boy said he had seen Andrei about ten days to two weeks before his body was found, but he did not give an exact day. And he lied, saying Andrei had come by to play but that he had refused.

A theory of the case was assembling itself in Mishchuk’s mind. The boy, it was clear, had seen Zhenya on the day he disappeared. Vera Cheberyak, it had been rumored, had taken advantage of the 1905 pogrom to loot fabulous amounts of property during the chaos. He formulated a hypothesis that Andrei’s murder was committed “with the goal of simulating a ritual murder and inciting a pogrom.” That part of the scenario could be considered wild conjecture. But he rightly believed Cheberyak had to be considered a leading suspect and that intense attention should be focused on her and her gang. For better or worse in the Russia of 1911, detaining suspects in order to press them to confess was standard procedure. But when Mishchuk recommended arresting Vera Cheberyak, Chaplinsky, the chief prosecutor, scolded him: “Why are you torturing an innocent woman?”

At the same time, Mishchuk began scheming against Krasovsky, just as the other detective had feared. Mishchuk may have felt his intrigue was justified, however. In a letter to the Kiev police chief on June 13, he accused Krasovsky of attempting to suborn witnesses against Andrei’s stepfather. The chief of police forwarded the letter to the governor, who sent it to Chaplinsky, who scrawled on it, “Relations between Krasovsky and Mishchuk are very bad.” But no action was taken against Krasovsky who, strictly speaking, did not fabricate testimony, though he would come very close to the line.

Krasovsky was now free to turn his attention to Andrei’s family. He prepared to exhume their delusions and bitter rifts and turn them into his own theory of the case.

Nikolai Krasovsky believed the evidence against Luka was accumulating. In June, a search of his workstation at the bookbinder turned up clippings from right-wing newspapers about ritual murder, along with a slip of paper tucked into a book with notes on the anatomy of the blood vessels in the temple—the area of the skull where Andrei was stabbed some thirteen times. Krasovsky ordered Luka arrested on June 26. Also arrested were Luka’s brother and, possibly to exert excruciating emotional leverage on the suspects, their blind father.

Krasovsky supervised as the police ordered Luka to dress in new clothes and try on various hats. A barber shaved Luka’s beard, gave him a haircut (Luka noticed the barber paid particular attention to shearing the right side), and dyed his hair and eyebrows black. One of Krasovsky’s deputies personally attended to curling Luka’s mustache. When tears rolled down his face, the police raised their hands threateningly and told him, “Don’t you dare cry, you so-and-so … your tears will make your mustaches unwind.” The suspect was brought to the exact spot on a street bordering the area of the caves where the stove repairman Yashchenko said he had seen the man he described as “dark” and “dressed like a gentleman” (a description that in itself made it improbable the man was Luka). Despite the rather drastic makeover, Yashchenko still did not positively identify Luka as the man he had seen. Looking at him from one angle, he thought Luka might be the same person, but some facial features, particularly the nose, he said, were different.

Krasovsky was not about to let himself be defeated. The truth that he so strongly suspected lay hidden in Luka’s guilt-ridden heart would be coaxed out into the open—with a small white lie easing its path. In Luka’s presence, two “witnesses” (actually officers in civilian clothes) positively “identified” Luka as being at the crime scene. Shaken, at this point Luka said something like, “I’m obviously not going to avoid the gallows, but at least let my sick father go.” These words were interpreted as a confession. Krasovsky believed he had his man.

The local prosecutor, Brandorf, was also a firm opponent of the “ritual” theory of the Yushchinsky murder. But he had reached a different and much more well-founded conclusion: that Andrei died at the instigation of Vera Cheberyak. Golubev, by identifying Zhenya Cheberyak as a witness, had unintentionally led the authorities to the mother. Everyone who had talked to Zhenya believed he lived in fear of his mother and that he knew more than he was telling. It was clear to all, even to Chaplinsky, that she must be investigated as a suspect.

In late May, Krasovsky and three other officers searched the Cheberyaks’ home. The presence of a citizen witness was a part of standard procedure and the long-suffering landlord, Stepan Zakharchenko, was summoned to fulfill that role. Zakharchenko wanted nothing more than to remove the whole Cheberyak family from his property. He was tired of harboring this villainous woman and had had enough of her raucous, drunken parties. He didn’t think much of her children either, who pilfered fruit from his orchard. What is more, he likely had recently learned Cheberyak had been chiseling money for years from his daughter, who ran a grocery store up the street, buying on credit and then paying back less than she had been charged. (His daughter inexplicably let Cheberyak maintain the account book.) His daughter had filed a complaint with the authorities, something Cheberyak probably did not yet know, and they were preparing to bring fraud charges against her. The landlord’s relationship with Cheberyak was also fraught in one more respect that would grow in importance: he was friendly with Mendel Beilis.

As Zakharchenko went up the stairs to the Cheberyaks’ apartment to join the police officers, Cheberyak’s downstairs neighbor Zinaida Malitskaya followed him. She and Cheberyak had once been great friends, but their relationship had gone bad, as evidenced by their violent public quarrel some weeks earlier. (Cheberyak said Malitskaya had taunted her with a rumor she’d “spent the night” somewhere—she didn’t appreciate the intimation that she was a loose woman.) Sensing trouble, Zakharchenko waved Malitskaya off, but she went up anyway, explaining that she wanted to witness the “big day.” Upon seeing her, Cheberyak said, “What do you want?” Malitskaya said, “I came to see your big day.” Cheberyak said, “Go away, you know I’m an anxious woman.” Then she threw herself on Malitskaya and slapped her in the face. An officer pulled Cheberyak off and the search got under way.

While Krasovsky and two officers examined the premises, the third officer struck up a conversation with Zhenya and asked him about the murder. “He wanted to tell me something,” the officer, a police supervisor named Evtikhy Kirichenko, recalled, “but suddenly stammered and said that he didn’t remember.” Kirichenko talked to the boy while sitting in a chair at the threshold between two rooms. Cheberyak was standing in the same room as Zhenya, across the threshold, off to the side but out of view. “When I asked Zhenya who killed [Andrei] I noticed that his face convulsed,” Kirichenko reported. Leaning down in his chair, Kirichenko managed to catch sight of Cheberyak “standing and with her hand and with her whole body making threatening gestures.” He and Zhenya caught the gestures at the same moment. Kirichenko, an experienced officer, was so overwhelmed that he broke his professional composure. It was as if he had come in touch with the “evil force,” the woman the neighborhood children believed could cast spells. He immediately halted the conversation with Zhenya and rushed to a fellow officer to share his powerful intuition that this woman must have been involved in the crime. Nothing else, he felt, could explain the vision of sheer malevolence he had witnessed at the mention of the dead boy’s name.

Brandorf had argued to Chaplinsky a number of times that Vera Cheberyak should be arrested but Chaplinsky had refused his request, as he had Mishchuk’s. Brandorf felt he had no choice but to maneuver behind Chaplinsky’s back to have Vera Cheberyak detained. He tried to convince investigating magistrate Fenenko, who shared his views, to act. But in the face of the opposition of his superior, Chaplinsky, and in the absence of clear evidence, the hypercorrect Fenenko would not take the risk.

As a last resort, Brandorf schemed to have Cheberyak detained by the Corps of Gendarmes, which had the power to take practically anyone into custody if he or she was deemed a possible threat to “state security.” The powers of the Kiev Gendarmes had been further enhanced in anticipation of the upcoming official visit of Tsar Nicholas, along with Prime Minister Stolypin, at the end of August to unveil a statue of Nicholas’s grandfather, Alexander II. The authorities were determined to clear the city of troublemakers. The deputy interior minister, General Pavel Kurlov, who had so decisively intervened to stop a pogrom in the wake of Andrei’s murder, personally headed security for the visit. Nothing would be allowed to disrupt the majestic honor of the sovereign’s presence in Kiev.

Therefore it attracted little attention when, on June 9, gendarmes led away one more potential troublemaker on the pretext that “suspicious persons, taking part in a political movement, gather at her home.” In fact, the only people gathering at Vera Cheberyak’s home were her young lovers and other assorted criminals. Brandorf had high hopes that he had the killer. “I firmly expected that if she sat in jail for a few days,” he later testified, “the whole case would be solved.”

Vera Cheberyak’s husband, Vasily, also had high hopes—that Vera’s arrest would finally change his luck for the better. His life with Vera—the long overnight shifts at the telegraph office, punctuated by the humiliating oblivion of drinking binges among her lovers, and now the constant fear of police raids—had made him a desperate man. The appearance of the gendarmes at his doorstep must have seemed like a deus ex machina. “I’ll be free of her,” he told a friend after his wife was arrested, “and I’ll be able to start living a normal life.”

But the hopes of both husband and prosecutor depended on an event that had not yet happened: a confession, or at least some slip, however small, under the pressure of hour after hour of questioning, which would implicate Cheberyak and her gang. Cheberyak possessed a fantastic and frightening capacity to intimidate, dominate, manipulate, and evade her accusers. (In her most recent such feat, she had beaten the rap in the matter of the stolen dress she had sold to her sometime boarder by somehow producing three witnesses—two female friends and a baker named Abramov—who swore she had come by it honestly.) But Brandorf and the senior gendarme officer, Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov, believed that Cheberyak would be a different, more vulnerable woman now that she was under arrest “as a matter of state security,” a limbo where there were no lawyers and no means of appeal. While in confinement and under intense interrogation—something she had never experienced—they were confident she would crack.

Just as important, police could now question Zhenya Cheberyak out of his mother’s earshot. In previous interrogations, the boy had clearly betrayed a desire to reveal the truth. With his mother safely behind bars, gentle questioning might loosen the bonds of the boy’s fear. Indeed Zhenya, questioned a week after his mother’s detention, did let slip some details that converged with what other witnesses were saying. He now admitted that Andrei had come by the Cheberyaks’ house for some gunpowder. “I was afraid to tell you about the gunpowder in the last questioning because I thought that you would beat me for that,” he admitted, “but now, when you explained that investigators can’t beat anyone, I’m telling you the truth.” And he confirmed that the last time he saw Andrei, the boy was without his coat, which was never found (a circumstantial detail that would grow in importance later in the investigation). But while he admitted that Andrei had visited him, he insisted that it was at two p.m., not in the morning, and denied that the day could have been March 12, the day his friend disappeared. The investigators were frustrated that Zhenya could not seem to break his mother’s spell.

Zhenya, moreover, suddenly and suspiciously claimed to remember something that he had failed to mention in previous interrogations—and that implicated Andrei’s uncle Fyodor. On the evening of March 12, he said he had been sent by his father to the beer hall to fetch two bottles and had encountered a “very drunk” Fyodor who, “seeing me, bent over and quietly said, ‘Andrusha is no more, he’s been stabbed to death.’ ” Questioned separately, his mother told a slightly different version of the story. Investigators found Zhenya’s testimony to be contradicted by many witnesses. Cheberyak had probably planned for this testimony when mother and son would be separated. It was likely the story was a well-crafted but imperfectly coordinated lie to divert suspicion away from her.

A pattern had emerged: Vera Cheberyak invariably pointed the finger at the leading or most convenient suspect of the moment. After Andrei’s mother was arrested, she was said to have spread stories about her abusive treatment of her son. When attention focused on the Jews, she avowed that they were the perpetrators. Now, when she believed Fyodor to be a prime suspect, she did what she could to pin the crime on him. The pattern would persist.

Cheberyak was held from June 9 to July 9 as a matter of “state security.” But the security organs could hold her no longer without formal charges. On July 9 Brandorf found it necessary to have Officer Krasovsky arrest her formally for suspicion in Andrei’s death. Her confinement could be kept secret no longer. Just five days later, she was released at the insistence of Chaplinsky after an indignant Golubev, greatly outraged that no Jew had yet been charged, demanded she be freed.

Little else is known about Cheberyak’s five-week confinement. But the break the prosecutor and her husband both hoped for never came. She did not crack, and she returned home to her hapless husband who, far from being rid of her, would now be drawn further into her machinations.

Krasovsky had been on the scene when Officer Kirichenko had his unnerving encounter with Vera Cheberyak and must have been briefed about it. But he ignored it, even though Kirichenko was one of his protégés. He continued to prosecute his investigation of Luka Prikhodko with ruthless zeal. The tsarist justice system was not without checks and balances, and Luka could have complained about any mistreatment he had suffered when he was brought in to be interviewed by Investigator Fenenko. Asked later why he did not protest, Luka said, “If they had asked me that night what my name was I couldn’t have told them.”

The liberal press rejoiced at the discovery of the culprit—or rather culprits, because it was assumed everyone in custody was guilty. “All the information that the murderers have been found is now revealed,” Russia’s Morning opined. “Five [relatives] have been arrested … Two of them belong to the most active ranks of the Union of Russian People.” The Kadet newspaper Speech expressed the opinion that the relatives had imitated a ritual killing. The “whole fanatical gang” that had “shamed the Russian people” had to be brought to justice.

But the case against Luka, if it ever can be said to have truly existed, quickly fell apart. Alexandra had not been indifferent to her son’s disappearance, as some witnesses claimed; she had fallen into faints and frantically searched for Andrei throughout the city. The promissory note did not exist. Andrei’s father had given Alexandra seventy-five rubles from the sale of the estate (including twenty-five for Andrei’s education); she filed suit in court for more but lost. Luka’s alibi was confirmed by his boss’s neighbors. As for the slip of paper with the description of blood vessels in the skull, Luka had tried to explain that it fell out of a medical handbook given him for binding. The owner of the book was found and confirmed the note had been written by him—largely in Latin.

Krasovsky’s instincts, for once, had failed him. He had fallen into the trap that the great Hans Gross, the Austrian founder of the discipline of criminalistics, had cautioned about in his pioneering treatise of the era, Criminal Investigation. The detective had resorted to “heaping testimony on testimony,” a path that invariably “will excite the babbler to babble still more … encourage the impudent, confuse the timid, and let the right moment slip past.”

With the falseness of the accusation against the family exposed—for the second time in three months—the Far Right was handed a tremendous propaganda advantage. (This is why a reconstruction of the largely ignored prehistory of the Beilis case is critical to understanding how it unfolded.) The credibility of the official investigation was shattered, and the liberal press—regarded as the Jewish press—made to look foolish. (It played into the Right’s hands that some of the purveyors of misleading information, like the newspaper employee who claimed Alexandra and Luka had behaved suspiciously, were Jews.) How could anyone believe a simple artisan could write a note in Latin? Who could not have sympathy for the poor Christian mother who had been forced to miss her son’s funeral and now had nearly lost her husband and brother?

Luka was released on July 14, after nearly three weeks in custody. Krasovsky had wasted his invaluable respite from right-wing agitation. Other investigators, lacking any concern whatever for the truth, were closing in on their preferred suspect.

By mid-July, Chaplinsky must have despaired of finding a way to charge a Jew with Andrei’s murder and surely feared for his future advancement as he again came under sneering personal assault in the right-wing press. “Unfortunately, one cannot count on the Kiev prosecutor,” an editorial in Zemshchina declared. “It is apparent that the interests of the Jews are dearer to him than justice.” The Russian Banner slapped him indirectly, demanding that “the minister of Justice take a personal interest in the Yushchinsky case,” implying that the chief prosecutor should be relieved of the matter. Chaplinsky, who was of Polish descent, had converted from Catholicism to Orthodoxy in his eagerness to prove himself a true Russian. For a man of such great, if hollow, ambition, his eye on a seat on the empire’s highest court, the Far Right’s attacks must have been distressing beyond measure. But fortune was about to provide him with an unlikely trio of saviors.

The first of them to appear—Kazimir “the Lamplighter” Shakhovsky and his wife, Ulyana Shakhovskaya—came to the authorities’ attention in early July. The Russian writer Vladimir Korolenko described the couple as “poor, wasted shells.” Ulyana was hardly ever sober. Kazimir was also a heavy drinker. They worked together, though it was a common sight in Lukianovka to see Ulyana staggering alone down the street in the evening, ladder over her shoulder, as neighborhood boys trailed behind, eager to help her light the 140 lamps on the couple’s route.

The Lamplighters, as the couple was called, were the first witnesses to place Andrei in the vicinity of the cave on March 12, the day he disappeared. This made them the most important witnesses who had been discovered so far, though, for Chaplinsky’s purposes, their initial testimony was of little use.

In his first deposition on July 9, Kazimir revealed how he had seen Andrei around eight in the morning on March 12, standing with Zhenya near the state liquor store, above which the Cheberyak family lived. He told of his last encounter with Andrei, how the boy had struck him playfully, but painfully, and how he had dispatched him with a crude insult. Ulyana had caught sight of Andrei with Zhenya slightly earlier but did not speak to him. Kazimir was emphatic that he had no idea what had happened to Andrei: “Where Zhenya and Andrusha went I don’t know, only that since then I never saw Andrusha again.”

Kazimir quite believably explained why he had avoided talking to the authorities for four months: “I myself am illiterate, I don’t read the newspapers … I was afraid to get involved in this case because I have to walk the streets at night and early in the morning and people who didn’t like my testimony might knife me.” He hinted of whom specifically he might be afraid, saying, “You would be better off questioning Vera Cheberyak’s neighbors. Those witnesses would know more than I do. They’ll tell you what kind of person Cheberyak is. I myself heard she was a thief, but I can’t tell you any more about her. For now I have nothing further to say.”

In that “for now,” leaving the door ajar, there was perhaps a hint of the pressure applied by Kazimir’s lead questioner. Adam Polishchuk was one of two former Kiev police detectives Krasovsky had inexplicably retained as his assistants. Both of them had recently been cashiered from the force for assorted misconduct, including “consorting with criminals.” Unbeknown to Krasovsky, Polishchuk was, in a sense, a double agent working undercover; he was cooperating with Golubev. He may have perceived in the case a path to rehabilitating himself through influential people. (He would, in fact, later be hired by one of the imperial security services and the Union of Russian People would arrange for his material reward.)

On July 18, Shakhovsky was questioned again, and his responses suggest he was trying to please his interrogators. “The place where Cheberyak lives is located next to the Zaitsev factory and is separated from it by a high fence. On March 12, you could pass from where she lived to the factory because the fence was badly damaged and parts of the fence were even missing … The factory grounds were managed by the clerk Mendel … I know that Mendel is on good terms with Cheberyak and would visit her home. For now I have nothing further to add.”

At this point, the thinking of the would-be prosecution was taking a turn both logical and preposterous. Vera Cheberyak, they had reasonably concluded, could not be ignored as a suspect, and the Lamplighter himself was of the belief that she had something to do with the crime. Therefore, if the objective was to implicate the Jewish clerk, why not simply tie the two of them together? (This peculiar theory, unsupported by any evidence, would rise and then fade from view but strangely resurface during the trial as the prosecution became desperate to persuade jurors of their case.)

Shakhovsky was hinting at a criminal partnership of Beilis and Vera Cheberyak, but a conjecture would not be enough to implicate them in the murder. What was needed was an eyewitness, not mere circumstantial testimony. On July 19, Polishchuk paid a visit to the Shakhovskys’ home, a bottle of vodka in hand. He worked on Ulyana as she drank herself into a near stupor. Polishchuk recognized he could not fabricate testimony outright. A witness was needed who would testify in court. He had to maneuver Ulyana into creating her own story. Surely she knew something? Surely she had heard something about Mendel? The operation was a delicate one, calibrating the dose of alcohol and the psychological pressure so that she would say the necessary words while drunk enough to be suggestible but not too drunk to speak. At a certain point, Ulyana uttered the desired words. Polishchuk reported, “Shakhovskaya told me directly that her husband knows everything and saw how Mendel, together with his son Davidka [actually Dovidke] led and dragged Andrei to the kiln.”

At last Chaplinsky was close to obtaining the eyewitness testimony he needed. The next step was for formal depositions to be taken. But getting the alcohol-addled couple to agree on a single, consistent story soon proved to be beyond reach.

On July 20, Kazimir Shakhovsky was questioned a third time in the presence of Chaplinsky. He now came up with an entirely new and different tale. He himself had not witnessed Andrei’s abduction by Mendel, he said, but he knew that Zhenya had:

I forgot to mention one important circumstance. Around the Tuesday after Saturday March 12, when I saw Andrei Yushchinsky together with Zhenya Cheberyak … I ran into Zhenya near my aunt’s house … I asked Zhenya if he’d had a good time with Andrusha. He told me that it didn’t work out with Andrusha because they were scared off the Zaitsev factory, not far from the kiln, by some man with a black beard who had shouted at them … after which they ran off in different directions … I have almost no doubt that the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky took place in a kiln of the Zaitsev factory … There lived there at that time one man with a black beard, specifically Mendel, the factory clerk … that’s why this same Mendel must have taken part in the murder.

It was true that Zhenya, Andrei, and their friends liked to sneak onto the Zaitsev factory grounds to play on the clay grinders, carousel-like contraptions with a central pillar from whose apex extended a long rod attached at the other end to a pair of old carriage wheels. The children would take turns precariously riding astride the rod, while the others played the part of the draft horse, pulling the contraption round and round. But it was suspicious, to say the least, that Shakhovsky suddenly recalled this incriminating conversation.

Questioned separately the same day, Ulyana Shakhovskaya presented her own new and different story. No longer did she claim that her husband had witnessed the abduction. Instead, she declared she had an acquaintance—Anna “Volkivna,” or Anna “the Wolf”—who told her she had witnessed the crime. Volkivna, whose real last name was Zakharova, was an alcoholic derelict whose moniker derived from her custom of sleeping outdoors in a place called Wolf’s Ravine. She completes the drunken trio on which the initial case against Mendel Beilis was based. Ulyana’s revamped testimony amounts to one drunk’s retelling of another drunk’s tall tale:

The day before yesterday I went out to light the lamps before evening and on the street I met my acquaintance Anna, nicknamed Volkivna. Volkivna, I remember, asked whether I knew anything about the boy’s murder. I told her I saw … Andrusha on March 12 in the morning and didn’t know anything else. Then Volkivna … told me that when Zhenya and Andrusha and a third boy went to play in the morning at the Zaitsev factory, they were frightened off by a man with a black beard who lived there, and what’s more, grabbing him … he carried Andrei into the brick kiln. Zhenya and the other boy ran away.

This story still did not fully satisfy her questioners. After the deposition was read to her—Ulyana was illiterate—the record shows she spoke up again, with startling specificity. “I want to add,” she said, “that Volkivna … told me that this person [the man with the black beard] was none other than the clerk of the Zaitsev brick factory Mendel.”

Over the course of two days, then, the Shakhovskys had given three different stories implicating Beilis. First, Ulyana had claimed that her husband, Kazimir, had himself seen Andrei dragged off by a man with a dark beard. Second, Kazimir testified that Zhenya Cheberyak had told him he had witnessed the abduction by Beilis. Third, Ulyana asserted that her drunken friend Anna the Wolf had witnessed the crime—adding, doubtlessly under pressure, that the perpetrator was “Mendel.”

That two witnesses had given three different and contradictory versions of events little troubled Chaplinsky, so eager was he for grounds to arrest Beilis. Chaplinsky allowed as how the testimony, taken piece by piece, was “not completely firm,” but astonishingly found the stories taken together to be mutually reinforcing. Vladimir Korolenko the writer would point out the irony that initially the case would stand on the testimony of witnesses who could barely stand on their two feet.

Investigator Fenenko now found his prized integrity threatened, when Chaplinsky requested that he have Beilis arrested. Fenenko found the case against Beilis to be preposterous. But he could not defy orders—that would be insubordination, something his ethical code did not countenance. Fortunately, because Chaplinsky had given him what was formally not an order, but merely a request, he did his best to delay, telling Chaplinsky he needed three or four days to get the paperwork organized.

It is at this point that “Student Golubev,” as he was invariably called, reenters the narrative. He had been the first one to identify Mendel Beilis as a suspect. Now he would make certain that the Jew was arrested. Chaplinsky recalled later that “an agitated Golubev came into my office and declared that all of Lukianovka knew about Shakhovsky’s testimony and … that the people are preparing to deal with Beilis and Zaitsev on their own and organize a pogrom.” Golubev was, more than likely, using this threat as a means of speeding up the arrest. But it was true that, while Mendel Beilis was unaware of it, word of Shakhovsky’s testimony had quickly spread in Lukianovka, where nothing could be kept secret.

One of those who heard of it was a shoemaker named Mikhail Nakonechny, a mainstay of the local gossip mill who, because he could read and write, had a side business filling out documents for local residents. Nakonechny would be one of the few heroes of the Beilis case. (His young daughter, as a star witness for the defense, would become its great heroine.) He could not have wanted to get involved in the entire affair because he knew Vera Cheberyak all too well—his wife had once had a violent confrontation with her. But he knew something that he could not keep it to himself: Shakhovsky had a grudge against Beilis.

By this time, Krasovsky’s common sense and investigative abilities were returning to him. He had belatedly come to realize that the weight of the evidence indeed pointed to Vera Cheberyak and her gang. When he found out about Shakhovsky’s testimony, and Beilis’s impending arrest, he headed for Lukianovka to see what he could find out. There he ran into the distraught shoemaker.

“He came up to me, looking very upset,” Krasovsky recalled. Nakonechny told him: “What filth … it’s an absolute lie. Shakhovsky lives near the Zaitsev factory and has the habit of swiping firewood from [there]…He was called to account for the theft … and since it was Beilis who turned him in, he harbored a grudge against him.”

By this point, though, the drive to take Beilis into custody was unstoppable. After Golubev raised the threat of a mob taking matters into its own hands, the histrionic head of the Kiev Okhrana, or secret police, Nikolai Kuliabko, contacted Chaplinsky, offering his help. Kuliabko appeared in the prosecutor’s office and, “making a conspiratorial expression,” as Chaplinsky described it, declared that he could detain Beilis using the enhanced powers granted him in connection with the tsar’s impending visit. Chaplinsky told him that Vera Cheberyak should also be arrested, as Beilis’s accomplice; at this point, he believed he could make a stronger case by treating them as a tandem. He confided that he was happy to have a pretext for Kuliabko’s assistance. As the Okhrana chief recollected this critical meeting, the prosecutor urgently wanted him to arrest the pair as soon as possible in part because he was suspicious that the regular police were in the pay of the Jews:

[Chaplinsky] explained to me that … Mendel Beilis and Vera Cheberyak were involved [in the crime]…It was being proposed to charge Beilis and Cheberyak, but in order to “prepare” the warrant, the investigative authorities needed two or three days, and there was information that Beilis and Cheberyak might flee, and therefore it was necessary to promptly detain them. Chaplinsky went on to tell me that he did not consider it possible to entrust the detaining of Beilis and Cheberyak to the police … since it was bought off and therefore was entrusting [the arrests]…to me.

Chaplinsky reported to the minister of justice on July 21 that Vera Cheberyak was a suspect in the murder and that she should be detained. She “manifest[ed] exceptional interest in the course of the investigation,” he wrote, “was collecting information about the facts the witnesses had related and there were rumors that she restrained witnesses from giving honest testimony, frightening them with the threat of reprisal.” In particular, “her influence on the case was evident in how she constantly watched over her son Zhenya … apparently fearful that he might let something slip out,” adding, “the boy gave the impression of knowing more than he told.” Chaplinsky concluded: “Her detention might aid in the discovery of the truth.”

Chaplinsky’s report indicates he fully understood that Vera Cheberyak was, by all rights, the prime suspect in Andrei’s murder. Yet he dearly wanted to charge a Jew with the crime. Unfortunately, the only halfway suitable Jew that could be found was a modest, hardworking, not terribly religious family man. Chaplinsky’s initial solution—one that perhaps he thought ingenious—was to fasten the case against the Jew to Lukianovka’s infamous Cheberiachka. Such was the strange beginning of what would soon become known as the Beilis affair.

At three o’clock in the morning, on July 22, 1911, a large detachment of police and fifteen gendarme officers under the command of Kiev Okhrana chief Kuliabko stormed the home of Mendel Beilis. The scale of the operation, suitable to the capture of an armed and dangerous underworld overlord, was risibly out of proportion to its humble and defenseless target. An immature and melodramatic Kuliabko was playing with his toy soldiers.

“Suddenly I heard knocking on the door—such knocking that I thought that there was, God forbid, a fire at the factory,” Beilis recalled. “I jumped out of bed and ran barefoot to open the door. As soon as the door opened, approximately twelve men stormed in screaming loudly, ‘Are you Beilis? You are arrested, arrested!’ And they surrounded me from all sides. Stood themselves so firmly, exactly as if they were scared that I would break away from their hold and escape. I tried to ask, ‘Why? What?’ ” A policeman told him he would find out soon enough and to move faster and get dressed.

Beilis was asked to account for all the money in his possession, presumably so the officers could not be accused later of stealing any of it. He had seventy-five kopeks. He was asked if he wanted to take the money with him or leave it with his wife. He said he wanted to leave it with Esther, who would need it more than he would, but he was not allowed to hand her the money himself. He had to give the coins to an officer, who then handed them to his wife. He was a prisoner now, subject to all the absurdities of “procedure.”

The children had awakened and Beilis wanted to say good-bye to them, but the gendarmes forbade it. “ ‘Come!’ They yelled at me, and led me out of the home,” he recalled. As he walked out of his house, he was handed over to four officers. Beilis did not know that procedure called for an arrested person to be marched down the street, not on the sidewalk. When he asked to walk on the sidewalk, an officer pushed him. “You walk here!” he sneered, “On the sidewalk he wants to go!” He was led on a winding route for nearly two miles down Kiev’s nearly deserted streets until they reached the headquarters of the dread Okhrana where he entered into a nightmare that would destroy the life he had known and arouse the indignation of the world.