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

4

“Andrusha, Don’t Scream”

At five o’clock in the morning, Mendel Beilis, escorted by a few gendarmes, arrived at the Kiev branch of the Okhrana. The rest of the contingent had stayed behind to search the home. After about an hour of waiting, Beilis heard the stomping of horses’ hooves, followed by the clatter of spurs in the corridor. When the door to the room opened, he recognized the gendarmes who had been searching his house and felt somehow reassured to see the men were done with their work. When Nikolai Kuliabko, the Kiev Okhrana chief, entered, Beilis hoped that he would finally be questioned and clear up the whole matter, whatever it was. But Kuliabko only led him to another room, asked that he be brought tea and a roll, and immediately left.

“Remaining alone, I began to calm down from the sudden fear that had so confused me,” Beilis later recalled. “I did not know what was happening or what they wanted from me.” Though his tongue was “dry as hot sand,” he could not drink the tea. The roll went untouched. “I was certain that as soon as they questioned me they would immediately see the mistake they had made, and would release me.”

After three hours, Kuliabko entered. He had no formal role in the murder investigation—he was only holding the prisoner for a few days until his transfer to the police. So the personal command he took of the case was striking. For one thing, the Kiev Okhrana chief was well-known for his laziness. Repeated requests for information from St. Petersburg would pile up on his desk before he would respond. His ineptitude, too, was well-known. An official review had found his operation riddled with administrative deficiencies and staffed by ignoramuses. (Among other things, his top investigator, responsible for tracking revolutionary groups, did not know the meaning of the word “anarchism.”) His brother-in-law was head of the imperial palace guard and Kuliabko had used that bureaucratic foothold to secure other influential patrons, including one whom he shared with the powerful deputy interior minister, General Kurlov, who blocked any attempt to demote him.

Within weeks Kuliabko’s incompetence would lead to fatal results that would shake the empire and land him on the other side of the interrogation table. But at this early stage he seems to have perceived that the regime—in some sense, even its future—was to be invested in this peculiar case. Kuliabko, who was rumored to have his eye on a high post in the capital, apparently understood the fantastic gains to be made if only he could force a confession out of this poor Jew sitting before him in a tattered waistcoat.

“Well, did you drink the tea?” he asked.

“What do I need the tea for,” Beilis said. “It would be better if you released me from jail, let me go to my wife and children. What do you want from me? I have committed no crime.”

Kuliabko, perhaps taken aback by the prisoner’s temerity, left the room without responding. When he returned, he handed Beilis a sheet of paper with questions written on it. Beilis was to write down his answers and then ring the bell. Kuliabko left Beilis alone with the large sheet of paper and a pen. Beilis made his way down the list:

Where are you from?

Who is your father?

What is your religion?

Do you have any relatives?

What do you know about Yushchinsky’s murder?

When Beilis came to the last question he felt “the knife at my throat.” He finally understood why he was there. He tried to console himself with the open-ended phrasing of the question. Perhaps he was only regarded as a possible witness. Because he was barely literate in Russian beyond the few words needed for the brick factory receipts, writing in the language came to him with difficulty. He wrote down his answers in Cyrillic letters whose gently curved pen strokes, like those of many a Russian Jew, bore a distinctly Semitic stamp. He wrote that he knew only what everybody knew, what he heard on the street. He rang the bell.

Kuliabko came in and examined the piece of paper, covered now with an alien scrawl. He told Beilis angrily that this would not do. The anger may have been feigned; he surely could not have expected an immediate written confession. The questionnaire was likely his idea of a psychological ploy.

“What do you know about Yushchinsky?”

Beilis shrugged. “What should I know? I only know that they found him dead.”

“And who killed him?”

“How can I know?”

Kuliabko asked him the question repeatedly. “What do you know about Yushchinsky?” Beilis kept giving the same answer—that he knew nothing.

“Tell the truth.”

“But this is the truth, that I do not know anything about it.”

“Well, we will soon see about this,” Kuliabko said. He left, slamming the door.

Beilis was again alone in the room.

You can understand how bitter my heart was. I sit and think about the tragedy that had so suddenly fallen on my head, when I hear a cry from the corridor, a child’s cry. I listen carefully, and my heart begins to tremble—I recognize the cry of my child Dovidke. Why is he here? What do they want from him? All of my limbs began to shake. I could not bear it and I began to bang on the wall.

Beilis’s youngest son David (Dovidke) barely eight years old, had also been taken in the raid. Kuliabko was personally interrogating him. About a quarter of an hour later, the Okhrana chief entered with another boy—Vera Cheberyak’s son, Zhenya.

“So you see,” Kuliabko said, “I caught your son telling a lie. He told me that he had never played with Andrusha Yushchinsky and Zhenochka says that he did play with him.” Beilis remained silent. He did not know what to say. Kuliabko then abruptly left the room with the boy, giving Beilis time alone for dark thoughts to gather.

I again remained for a few hours with my bitter heart. The feeling that my son was held in captivity tortured me terribly. He was a little boy, a pitsl…and moreover still very weak. His cries, which I heard, stabbed me like a knife, and I could not calm myself down. An even worse impression, that I will never forget, was made on me a little while later, when I saw him through the window of my room, which looked out to the corridor. I stood there and looked through the window; he was walking with one hand on the other, his head bent down. My heart shrunk terribly and again, even stronger, I began to bang on the wall.

Kuliabko reentered. “Why are you banging?”

“What do you want with my son?” Beilis said. He began, he recalled, “to cry and beg.”

“Have no fear, we will not let any harm come to him,” Kuliabko said, and then left Beilis alone to face his first night in prison.

The door opened and a woman brought in some food. “I do not want to eat,” he told her, and asked her to give the food to his boy. The woman, who was a Christian, had tears in her eyes and told him that the boy had already been given some food.

“What is he doing there?” Beilis asked.

“Nothing, he is sitting on the bed,” she answered, wiping the tears from her eyes.

Beilis reached into the torn pocket of his waistcoat for some loose change that he had neglected to hand over in the rush and confusion of the arrest. He tried to give the Christian woman the twenty kopeks, but she would not take them. He took comfort from this kind woman looking after his son, but he spent a sleepless night.

In the morning the Christian woman returned.

“Well, how is he?” Beilis asked her. “What did he do at night?”

“He slept with me,” she answered, “but neither of us could fall asleep.” Again she began to cry. After she left, hour after hour, Beilis jumped up at every creak in the corridor, running to the window, hoping to catch sight of his son. At around ten o’clock in the morning, Beilis heard voices through the wall. One said: “Do you know how to get home?” And immediately after that: “Take him away.” Beilis rushed to the window and saw his son walking with a guard. This time he was not walking with his head bent but held high, a smile on his face. They were letting Dovidke go home.

Kuliabko, though, was not quite done with Beilis’s family. The next day, Sunday, Beilis heard children’s voices outside his door. Dovidke had been brought in for more questioning, along with Beilis’s oldest child, Pinchas, who was thirteen. If the father did not confess, the Okhrana chief thought, then perhaps something useful could be extracted from the children. But though they must have been pressured to do so, the boys said nothing that would harm their father. Before they were allowed to leave, Beilis was given a few moments with them. He would not see any of his family again for many months.

“There is no insurance against prison or death.” Beilis would write that this saying made perfect sense to him, being a Jew of his time and place. (His apparent misremembering of the Russian original—substituting the word “death” for “beggar’s purse”—only made the saying more appropriately emphatic.) Until the moment of his arrest, he had thought himself quite secure in his adopted city. But as a Jew living in Kiev, part of him could not feel entirely surprised at being under lock and key.

The Russian Empire had been hostile to Jews for centuries. The first Cossack massacres of Jews had taken place in the mid-1600s, but the empire was home to few Jews until the end of the eighteenth century. Even the great Westernizer, Peter the Great, who was so open to new ways, could not bring himself to welcome the Jews. (Regarding their possible admission, he is reputed to have declared, “They are all rogues and cheats; I am trying to eradicate evil, not to increase it.”) In 1727, Peter’s successor, Tsarina Anna, issued a decree banishing the empire’s small Jewish population. Periodic expulsions were the norm until Catherine the Great took the throne in 1762. It was Catherine’s imperial hunger for large swaths of Polish land that made Russia home to the largest Jewish population of any country in the world. After the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, about a half-million Jews became Russian subjects. By 1900, that population had grown to more than five million, and Russia was the only country in Europe other than Romania that had not granted Jews equal rights. Jews were still almost entirely restricted to the Pale of Settlement, and even there they were barred from living in many towns, and in the countryside in general. Nor could they own land. But as Simon Dubnow, the pioneering chronicler of Russian Jewish life, wrote, “No place in the empire could vie, as regards hostility to the Jews, with the city of Kiev.”

The city Mendel Beilis had called home for fifteen years was, uniquely, located in the heart of the Pale but was not part of it. Jews were permitted to live in towns and cities within a radius of hundreds of miles in every direction. But they were forbidden to live within the boundaries of Kiev itself without special permission. Legally speaking, Kiev was as “beyond the Pale” as were Moscow and St. Petersburg. In some ways, it was even more exclusionary. As the medieval cradle of Russian civilization, the “mother of Russian cities,” Kiev occupied a special place in the Russian national consciousness, making Jewish “intrusion” seem all the more intolerable. Kiev was the only city in the empire that restricted its Jews to certain neighborhoods. These areas—not surprisingly, the city’s least desirable ones—were often described as the empire’s last existing “ghetto.” Many poor Jews had no choice but to live in the infernal Plossky district, an industrial wasteland with no sewage system or running water whose residents packed themselves into the minimal gaps between the noxious factories and workshops. Sholem Aleichem dubbed Kiev “Yehupets” or Egypt, where “from time immemorial Jews have been as welcome to the people of the city as a migraine.”

And yet, Kiev beckoned. For thousands of Jews like Beilis born in the poor shtetls, or Jewish towns, the city promised a better life. Here one might find employment, send one’s child to a gymnasium where he could become a truly Russian Jew with better prospects, or even dream of making a fortune on the stock exchange where, as Sholem Aleichem wrote, “somebody heard … they make cheese pies from snow and fill sacks with gold.”

A new life in Yehupets was often judged to be worth fearsome risks. For perhaps every ten or so Jews who lived there legally, there was at least one like the Sholem Aleichem character who “trembled like a thief, lay freezing in misery in an attic all night or curled up like a dog in a cellar.” Kiev police were notorious for their nighttime raids, rounding up Jews, often whole families, suspected of residing in the city illegally. Even Jews who had the right papers might run afoul of some rule or find themselves expelled at the police’s whim. “If they find the contraband, in other words Jews ‘without the right of residence,’ ” Sholem Aleichem wrote, “they herd them like cattle to the police station and send them out of the city with great pomp, deporting them under guard, together with thieves” back to the Pale.

The months leading up to Beilis’s arrest had been the most anxious time for Kiev’s Jews since the pogrom of 1905. Even before the Yushchinsky murder sparked fear of another Black Hundred massacre, the police raids had intensified. The Yiddish newspaper Haynt reported in the spring of 1911 that the Kiev police had come up with an innovation, the daytime raid. The correspondent noted with irony the “progress” that signified. “For what purpose should people be tortured there at night and chaos be caused when the same can be done in the best way possible in broad daylight?” Large squadrons of policemen on horseback and on foot would storm Jewish stores, detaining all clerks and other employees en masse, and march them off “to the nearest police station with great cheer.” Such scenes attracted little attention: “A few people gather in little circles, no larger than when a tailor displays a new suit and pants, or when a stray dog is captured.”

But Kiev still embodied more hope than fear, a feeling that Sholem Aleichem elegiacally evoked:

Where can a homeless young man go who dreams of achieving something in his life? Of course, to the big city. The big city is … a magnetic center for everybody who is looking for business, work, profession or position. A newly married man who has spent his wife’s dowry; a husband who is disgusted with his wife; a man who quarreled with his father-in-law or mother-in-law or with his parents; a merchant who broke with his companions—where will all of them go? To the big city.

In Sholem Aleichem’s grand, polyphonic drama of Jewish striving, Mendel Beilis’s story fit into the most mundane plotline. He came to Kiev not to escape anyone or anything or for riches. He was not ambitious. He could have stayed where he was. He wanted only to work and raise a family. But the city’s magnetic attraction was just strong enough to draw him into it after living his first two and a half decades in the Pale.

Mendel Beilis was born in 1873 or 1874, probably in the small village of Neshcherov, about twenty-five miles south of Kiev. His father, Tevye, was a pious, learned Hasid whom he revered. Mendel could not mention him without noting that the son was the lesser man. Beilis himself had little education, only a few years in a heder, or Jewish primary school. The first years of his life, during the reign of the “Tsar Liberator” Alexander II, who had freed the serfs in 1861, were a time of relative prosperity for Jews, who hoped the regime might grant them equal rights. Although emancipation never occurred, the government did relax residence restrictions and expand admission to secondary schools and universities. Alexander II’s assassination by a bomb-throwing terrorist in 1881 abruptly ended any policy of accommodation. When his son, the reactionary Alexander III, took the throne, a wave of pogroms swept Ukraine. The number of victims by the next century’s standards was small, no more than a couple of hundred. But as the first massacres of Jews in the Russian Empire in nearly 150 years, the pogroms traumatized the Jewish population.

Even more shocking than the massacres themselves was the official reaction to them. The government viewed violence against the Jews as evidence that the Russian people needed to be protected from the Jews. The “Temporary Rules” of May 3, 1882, known as the May Laws, imposed stricter limits on Jews’ movement and commerce, marking the onset of a long-term decline in Jewish living standards. But the main effect, in historian Salo Baron’s phrase, was to give local officials the ability to subject Jews to “administrative persecutions.” (Most spectacularly, on the first day of Passover in 1891, all of Moscow’s Jews, except for a few highly privileged ones, were expelled.) The labyrinth of anti-Jewish measures came to embrace some fourteen hundred statutes and regulations, supplemented by thousands of additional decrees and judicial rulings. The “Temporary Rules” would remain in effect until the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1917.

Although Jews lacked equal civil rights, they bore equal civic responsibilities. Alexander III demanded of a foreign Jewish delegation, “Why do they [Russian Jews] evade military service?” In fact, contrary to legend (including, to some degree, Jewish legend), Jews did not evade the tsar’s conscription any more than Russians did. And around the age of eighteen, Mendel Beilis was drafted into the Imperial Army.

He was sent some six hundred miles northeast to the city of Tver where, like 97 percent of Jewish recruits, he served in the infantry for the ludicrous salary of approximately twenty rubles a year. Life for all recruits was harsh. But Jews were more ruthlessly punished for minor infractions than their Russian comrades. All Jews were seen as potential deserters and closely watched.

Still, military service was not the catastrophe for a Jew it had once been. Alexander II had abolished the horrific “cantonist” system under which Jewish boys—officially no younger than twelve, but sometimes as young as eight or nine years old—were impressed into the army, often undergoing forced conversions to Russian Orthodoxy. The original twenty-five-year term of service had been reduced to about five, followed by nine years in the reserves. No attempts were made to convert Jewish recruits. It was impossible to keep kosher, but Jewish soldiers were allowed to gather in the regimental canteens and barracks to celebrate major Jewish holidays and were granted leave to attend seders and services in nearby Jewish communities. The more pragmatic Russian commanders even actively encouraged religious observance, sensibly seeing it as preferable to the traditional soldierly pastimes of whoring and drinking.

Military service did not strip Jewish recruits of their religion, but it did change the kind of Jews they were. For Mendel Beilis, as for thousands of other Jewish soldiers, the army was a kind of school. “The Jewish soldier underwent training, served, fought, and ate alongside the Russian Orthodox soldier,” the historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern has written. “His Judaism metamorphosed from a way of life into a creed, sustained by randomly observed rituals.” In the melting pot of the army, Beilis’s command of the Russian language improved. His social interaction with Russians increased his self-assurance. The degree of his religious observance relaxed. The army had prepared him for the big city.

Unlike Sholem Aleichem’s parade of strivers, though, he did not rush there. He ended up in the profane domain of Yehupets only thanks to an unlikely chain of circumstances that hinged on his revered father’s renowned piety.

A man of solid virtues, Mendel Beilis was never one to exert his will to shape his life. A current swept him into the army, and then to a woman named Esther, whom he married a year after his discharge. Her uncle owned a brickmaking kiln in a town about eight miles from Kiev, where he went to work. And, one day in 1896, opportunity came to him in the form of a letter from one of his cousins, who worked for the “sugar king” Jonah Zaitsev, offering him a job at the brick factory he was building in Kiev.

Before he was conscripted, Beilis had worked in a brandy distillery Zaitsev owned in another town. He had secured the job thanks to his father, Tevye, who, improbably, had been on friendly terms with Zaitsev, one of the region’s wealthiest men, and had even been invited a number of times to the rich man’s home. Years later, Zaitsev again took an interest in the son of his poor and pious friend, now dead, and must have felt it a good deed to give a decent job in the city to this young man starting a family.

Fifteen years later, Beilis was satisfied with his job as the factory’s clerk and dispatcher. The pay was just forty-five rubles a month, plus rent-free lodging, and he worked at it six days a week. But he could pay for his oldest child, Pinchas, to attend a Russian gymnasium to which the boy had been admitted under the 5 percent quota for Jews. (Jews as a whole, by this time, amounted to about 15 percent of Kiev’s population of 450,000.) David, just turning eight, studied in a heder. Out of six children, they had lost only one, the twin of their two-year-old daughter’s. “I thanked the Lord for what I had,” Beilis later wrote. “Everything pointed to a peaceful future.”

Beilis’s arrest on July 22 was supposed to have been kept secret until his formal transfer to the regular police, but the news soon leaked out. “Finally, it seems, the case is on the right path,” the far-right newspaper Zemshchina reported approvingly days later. “The Yid Mendel Beilis, arrested in proposed connection to the crime, was subjected to a second interrogation by Investigator Fenenko.” The report was overly optimistic. Vasily Fenenko, the investigating magistrate, had in fact refused to interrogate or arrest Beilis. A resolute opponent of the blood accusation, he believed Beilis to be innocent. Behind the scenes an intense battle was taking place over the prisoner’s fate.

Prosecutor Grigory Chaplinsky was absent from the city when the arrest took place, having traveled two hundred miles to the estate of the minister of justice, Ivan Shcheglovitov, to confer about the case, which was taking on imperial importance. His conversion from Catholicism to Russian Orthodoxy and Russian nationalism seemed to be yielding the rewards to his career that he had hoped for. He had surely expected to spend the weekend basking in the minister’s congratulations over his success in holding a Jew accountable for the Kiev boy’s murder. But on July 23, Chaplinsky was handed a small slip of paper covered with numbers—a coded telegram from his office. Decoded, it read:

MENDEL CHEBERYAK ARRESTED MATTER OF SECURITY SHAKHOVSKYS DENY TESTIMONY OF AGENT TOMORROW WILL QUESTION WOLF.

The message’s form—unpunctuated, run-on, fevered—suited its alarming content. Mendel Beilis and Vera Cheberyak had been arrested as a “matter of state security.” The Shakhovskys—the Lamplighters—were now denying or recanting what they had told “agent” Adam Polishchuk about the man with the dark beard, who was supposedly “Mendel.” This meant the case, such as it was, had ceased to exist. The proponents of the anti-Semitic theory of the case were pinning their hopes on the forthcoming interrogation of the drunken derelict Anna the Wolf. The heavy-drinking Shakhovskys had not been formally deposed. Their stories had only been relayed in reports by Polishchuk, the renegade former police officer Krasovsky thought was working for him but who was actually doing the bidding of Golubev and the far-right Union of Russian People. The couple had indeed said the words Polishchuk had written down, but their stories were wildly contradictory and unreliable. And now the couple was being questioned in what was, for the prosecution, their most dangerous state: sober.

Hours after Beilis’s arrest, Kazimir “the Lamplighter” Shakhovsky was formally questioned for the first time. He was confronted with the shoemaker Nakonechny’s accusation that he had decided to “pin” the murder on Beilis because the clerk had accused him of stealing wood from the Zaitsev factory. Though he denied actually intending to frame Beilis, Shakhovsky admitted that Nakonechy’s account of their conversation was essentially true. But more important, in this deposition he definitively denied his wife’s claim that he had been an eyewitness to the crime. He declared, “I never told my wife that I saw Mendel drag Andrusha Yushchinsky toward the kiln since I did not see that.”

Bibulous pilferer though he was, Shakhovsky sounds truthful in insisting that he had no desire to frame his neighbor. Under pressure to implicate Beilis, he had done something he knew to be wrong; now, step by step, he was going to make it right. Questioned again the next day, Shakhovsky went on to retract the story he had earlier told. He still maintained that he had run into Zhenya and that the boy had told him that he, Andrei, and some other children had gone to the factory to play on the clay grinders and had been chased off. But he retracted the essential part of his early claim: “About the man with a black beard, Zhenya didn’t tell me anything, I added that myself. I said that about the man with the black beard because I assumed that no one but Mendel could have been there to scare them off.” He implied he had been pressured to say what investigators wanted: “The detectives [meaning, primarily, Polishchuk] were telling me about Mendel all the time … They talked about that so many times that I decided to add a little myself in my testimony … I have no grudge against Mendel. I only stated my supposition that he could have taken part in the crime.” He then added, “You should ask Zhenya Cheberyak who probably knows about the whole thing but for some reason doesn’t want to tell you the truth.”

From the beginning, Shakhovsky had hinted at his belief that Vera Cheberyak was involved in the crime. Oddly, the hard-drinking Lamplighter, rather than any of the investigators, was apparently the first person to note an important circumstantial detail. When his wife had caught sight of the boy, she recalled him as holding his books. But when he had seen Andrei, a little later, on that street corner, the boy had no books and no coat. “I personally have no doubt that he left his books and coat at Cheberyak’s apartment,” Shakhovsky told investigators. “Where else could he have put [them]?” It took some courage for Shakhovsky to share his suspicions. Two days earlier the Lamplighter had run into Cheberyak on the street and she had threatened, according to a police report, to “deal with him in her own way.”

Ulyana Shakhovskaya was formally questioned for the first time on July 22 or July 23, with similar results. She retracted most of her previous testimony, while revealing something of Polishchuk’s interrogation methods. “To my previous testimony, I am adding the following: The day before yesterday … I, with Polishchuk, my husband and an agent drank vodka. From the vodka I drank I got so drunk that I definitely don’t remember anything of what I told agent Polishchuk … My husband never told me that he himself saw Mendel and his son [Dovidke] drag Andrei toward the kiln.” She still insisted that Anna the Wolf told her she saw “Mendel” carry Andrei off under his arm toward the kiln. But Ulyana allowed as how “telling me about this, Wolfie was a little tipsy.” It later transpired that Polishchuk had sat drinking with the Shakhovskys from the time she got off work until three in the morning.

Ulyana also raised suspicions about Vera Cheberyak. She had run into her on the street on her way to give her deposition. Cheberyak complained that she, too, was under scrutiny and spat out, “Because of a shit like Zhenya, I am going to have to answer.” The phrasing in Russian is ambiguous, with two possible meanings. “I am going to have to answer questions.” Or: “I am going to have to answer for the crime.”

Chaplinsky, the chief prosecutor, returned to Kiev around July 25. Had he been panicked by the telegram from headquarters? Had he at any point contemplated abandoning the tottering case and letting the prisoner go? Perhaps he hesitated for a few hours or a day. But when he sat down with Brandorf, the local prosecutor in direct charge of the case, and Fenenko, the investigating magistrate, he betrayed no doubt or indecision. He had settled upon a brilliantly simple tactic to deal with the Shakhovskys’ inconvenient recantations: ignore them. Given enough time, he must have calculated, the prosecution would surely secure, in one way or another, the ballast of more “evidence.” People would be found to fill the archetypal roles, especially that of the vivid and ingenuous eyewitness, successor to Thomas of Monmouth’s maidservant who “saw the boy through a chink in the door.” (In this calculation, Chaplinsky would prove correct, if only after an uncomfortably long interval.) The important thing was to keep in custody the only Jew on whom there was any chance of pinning the crime. Chaplinsky must have understood the flimsiness of the case. But he knew pursuing it was in the interests of his career, and he knew he had the backing of the justice minister, Shcheglovitov; in their meeting at his estate, Chaplinsky had surely conferred with him about how to proceed. The murder of a thirteen-year-old boy was now a priority of the imperial government.

The tsarist regime was not entirely lawless; a man could not be held by the Okhrana “as a matter of state security” for more than two weeks, which under certain circumstances was extendable to one month. When the time limit expired, the prisoner had to be handed over to the regular police and charged with a crime or set free. Chaplinsky, in any case, saw nothing to be gained by keeping Beilis locked up as a political prisoner. The whole point was to very publicly charge him with the bloodthirsty killing of a Christian child.

As Fenenko and Brandorf sat down with Chaplinsky to discuss what should be done with the prisoner, they knew that they had one point of leverage. Chaplinsky did not have the power to directly order Beilis officially arrested and criminally charged. Only Fenenko, as the investigating magistrate, could do that. Chaplinsky could dismiss Fenenko, of course, but that would cause a scandal, which he surely wanted to avoid.

Fenenko, true to his straightforward nature, simply told Chaplinsky that, in view of the clearly false nature of the testimony, it amounted to slander against an innocent man, and he would not order the arrest. Brandorf, more diplomatic and canny, tried to reason with Chaplinsky. He later recalled the scene:

In order to prove the insufficiency of the basis for charging Beilis, I scribbled down on a piece of paper all the arguments laid out by Chaplinsky, and it added up to some kind of unbelievable assortment of suppositions and guesses, but no kind of logical framework of a pattern of evidence. When I read aloud this shameful, from my point of view, “indictment” and expected that it would … convince him of the impossibility of charging a person with murder on the basis of such information—let alone for a “ritual” purpose—the effect was the opposite … Chaplinsky found that on paper “it came out even better.”

At this point, Brandorf stopped arguing. He did threaten to draw up a memo making the case for charging Vera Cheberyak that would be much more well-founded than the one against Beilis. But Chaplinsky, recalled Brandorf, “told me that he couldn’t allow an Orthodox Christian woman to be charged in a ‘Jewish’ case.” In this way, he let it be known that he was abandoning the outlandish theory linking Beilis and Cheberyak as partners in crime. Only the Jew would stand accused. The “Christian woman” would soon be released.

Nikolai Krasovsky had been marginalized in the case due to his unnecessary and disastrous detour into investigating Andrei’s family. But he was belatedly regaining the form that had made him one of Russia’s most respected detectives. Fenenko now brought him in to refute the allegations against Beilis. Krasovsky laid out the results of his investigation with complete objectivity. In a deposition on July 26, Krasovsky expressed his opinion that Pinchas Beilis was not telling the truth when he (for what would have been understandable reasons) denied knowing Andrei, finding that he had, in fact, played with Andrei and Zhenya a number of times. (There is no testimony in the record confirming they knew each other, though Andrei had a number of Jewish playmates.) He duly reported the unfounded rumors that Beilis and Cheberyak had been on intimate terms. More important, he reported that another search of Beilis’s home and surrounding premises had turned up a bag of tools belonging to the factory harness maker, including several awls; Krasovsky had shown them to autopsy specialist Tufanov, who categorically determined that none of them could have inflicted Andrei’s wounds. Krasovsky concluded: “I can present no information pointing toward the participation of Mendel Beilis” in the crime.

Though utterly convinced of Beilis’s innocence, under pressure from Chaplinsky Fenenko did partially relent. He agreed to order Beilis’s arrest by the police, but only on the condition that Chaplinsky give him a direct order in writing. Fenenko could have resigned—he was a man of some means, had no family to support, and could have managed without the government salary. But he decided the only result would be his replacement by a servile tool of the prosecution, and justice would be better served if he stayed on. At least, this was the explanation he gave later. But perhaps it was a rationalization; his very probity ultimately made him uncomfortable with an extreme act of defiance.

Chaplinsky did not immediately agree to Fenenko’s condition. The investigating magistrate’s pristine reputation meant his stamp of approval would add immensely to the case’s credibility. This was something too valuable to give up without a fight. But Fenenko would not give in. The confrontation played out over four days. On July 29, Chaplinsky relented, informing the minister of justice that he was personally recommending Beilis’s arrest. On August 3, with two days remaining in the two-week time limit for holding Beilis at the Okhrana, Chaplinsky gave Fenenko the formal written order he had demanded.

Fenenko had heard Chaplinsky argue his case, but he still may have been shocked at the written order’s incoherence, twisted logic, and brazen fabrications.

Chaplinsky’s order to Fenenko was nearly identical to his report to minister of justice Shcheglovitov. “The murder of Andrei Yushchinsky,” the prosecutor informed the minister, “was committed by Jews for the purpose of obtaining Christian blood for the fulfillment of Jewish religious rituals.” This judgment, he continued, “finds full confirmation in the conclusions of the Archimandrite Ambrosius and the distinguished professor in the department of psychiatry Ivan Alexeevich Sikorsky.” (The contrary opinion of the distinguished theologian Father Glagolev goes unmentioned.)

In a parody of deductive reasoning, the order to Fenenko leads to the preordained result step by shaky step. The body was found near the Zaitsev factory, which was “under the supervision of the Jew Mendel Beilis.” The factory contained “capacious kilns,” which could serve as a “convenient place for commission of the crime.” (No matter that Krasovsky and Fenenko examined the premises and concluded that the crime could not have been committed there.) The brick factory was “the only place in the area” with clay matching that found on the boy’s clothing (contradicted by Krasovsky’s analysis). Awls found at a Zaitsev factory workshop were “of the kind that inflicted all of the wounds” on the boy (already definitively dismissed by the pathologist). The security of the crime scene would have had to be ensured by someone. “Therefore”—the fatal word—“it stands to reason that the Zaitsev factory manager would have been in on the plan.”

In both his report to the justice minister and in his order to Fenenko, Chaplinsky then slips in an astonishingly candid admission. Taken as a whole, the prosecutor concludes, “all the not completely firm testimony pointing toward Mendel Beilis … of Kazimir and Ulyana Shakhovsky, Adam Polishchuk and other witnesses, acquires the character of serious evidence against him.” The only eyewitness testimony against Beilis, he is conceding, is “not completely firm”—a euphemism for untrustworthy, coerced, and recanted. (What he meant by “other witnesses” is a mystery, since there were none.)

Chaplinsky hides nothing. He admits the story that Kazimir Shakhovsky saw Beilis and his son dragging Andrei to the kiln was “not confirmed.” He reveals that Anna “the Wolf” Zakharova had failed in her audition for the archetypal role of eyewitness to the terrible deed; she had “categorically declared under questioning that she told nothing to Ulyana Shakhovskaya and did not have any conversations about Yushchinsky’s murder.” And yet, he insists, “one cannot but come to the conclusion that Mendel Beilis took part in commission of the murder.”

Fenenko, having received the order to charge Beilis, requested that the prisoner be brought to the courthouse. Unfortunately for the investigator, the arrest would not be merely a matter of signing an arrest warrant. His sense of duty required that he personally inform the prisoner he was being charged with a murder that both of them knew he did not commit.

Kuliabko did not question Beilis again after that first day at the Okhrana. He had, unsurprisingly, turned out to be an inept interrogator. Forcing a confession out of Beilis would have required genuine inquisitorial ability—the kind of guile and instinct for a prisoner’s psychological vulnerability of a Krasovsky. Moreover, Beilis was discovering in himself a new kind of strength that Kuliabko’s simplistic bullying, however agonizing, could not overcome.

Beilis was left alone, except when he was brought his meals, which he could not touch. He lost weight, and by the time Kuliabko appeared on the seventh day of his confinement he could barely stand.

“Well,” Kuliabko said, “have you already considered your situation?” It was a final, feeble invitation to confess.

“I have nothing to consider,” Beilis replied, “because I do not know anything.”

That was their last exchange. That day, July 28, Beilis was transferred to a police precinct house. The mechanism for his criminal arrest and charging was being set in motion.

The premises in his new jail cell were a little brighter. A few Jews who had been detained in the regular police raids were held there and one of them, a tailor named Berkowitz, tried to comfort Beilis. Berkowitz had been brought in a month earlier when the police found one of his grown sons living with him, having come to the city to recuperate from an illness. The son was deported back to the Pale. Berkowitz was arrested for harboring an “illegal.”

Every day the tailor’s wife would bring him food and drink, and when she arrived Berkowitz persuaded Beilis to partake. Berkowitz told him he should remain strong and not lose hope. “Let us make a toast,” he said, pouring them both some brandy. “L’Chaim. You will see that the Almighty will help.” Beilis had no appetite, but he ate and drank one little glass of brandy and then another. He felt stronger and his mood lightened a bit, but then he remembered that he had had no word from home and no visits since that day when he had seen his children. He wondered if his bosses or anyone from the factory was trying to help him. He got a piece of paper and wrote a letter to Dubovik, the factory manager, and sent it off with Berkowitz’s wife. At least he could now be sure people would know of his situation.

Suddenly, Beilis was informed by a police officer that he was being summoned to meet with the “investigator.” He was unfamiliar with the exact meaning of the word, but at the district court he was led into a large room where he recognized Investigator Fenenko as the man who had visited the factory a number of times after Andrei was murdered. Also present was A. A. Karbovsky, who had replaced Brandorf as the prosecutor in charge of the case.

Fenenko began by asking, “Did you know Andrei Yushchinsky?” Beilis responded that while he may have seen him on the street, he did not know him.

Fenenko and Karbovsky bandied about Jewish religious terms that he did not know. Karbovsky, in particular, would consult a notebook and ask him questions with words like pidyon (a ritual fee paid a rabbi on behalf of a firstborn son) and aphikomon (the piece of matzo hidden at the Passover seder) and misnagid (non-Hasidic Jew) to which Beilis could only shake his head. His ignorance was unfeigned. (Questioned after her husband’s arrest, Esther Beilis told the authorities, “My husband is not at all religious … He even works very often on Saturday and doesn’t observe Jewish holidays since he’s a poor man and we have no time to celebrate anything, but have to work for our daily bread to support the family.”)

So when Fenenko asked, “Was your father a Hasid?” Beilis could not understand why he was being asked the question, and it also somewhat confounded him. He later confessed: “I must also tell you that I really did not know, and it is still not entirely clear to me what a ‘Hasid’ is. In my understanding, a ‘Hasid’ is a religious Jew who strictly abides by all the laws, and dresses in long clothing. According to this understanding, all Jews in my opinion were divided into two types—‘Hasidim,’ meaning, all religious Jews who wear long clothing, and non-Hasidim, meaning today’s Jews who wear short clothing, and do not abide by the laws. And so, because my father, may he rest in peace, was very religious, wore long clothing, and strictly abided by all the laws—I considered him a Hasid.”

So to Fenenko’s question, Beilis answered, “Yes.”

“And you yourself?” Fenenko asked, “Are you also a Hasid?”

“This, as bad as I felt, caused me to smile,” Beilis recalled. “Me a ‘Hasid’?!” he thought. He replied that he was a simple God-fearing man but no Hasid by any measure.

A reluctant Fenenko was likely given his list of questions by Chaplinsky, whose line of inquiry was focusing on the supposedly nefarious Hasids or Hasidim. Hasidism had originated as an ecstatic, mystical Jewish movement in mid-eighteenth-century Poland and now constituted a large plurality of the region’s Jews. The region’s other main Jewish strain consisted of the misnagdim or mitnagdim—literally “opponents” of Hasidism—who propounded a more traditional form of the faith. By Beilis’s time, the acrimony between the two groups had subsided, and in matters of religious observance their distinctions were minor. But the Hasidim would be portrayed by the prosecution as a sinister and secretive sect, “the men with black beards,” who conducted the bloody and barbaric ritual.

Fenenko then asked him about a letter that had been found during the search of his home. The letter, which surely encouraged and relieved the prosecution, was from Jonah Zaitsev concerning the preparation of Zaitsev’s yearly batch of Passover matzo. It turned out that for many years Beilis had overseen the production of Passover matzo for Zaitsev’s family. At last, here was a direct connection between the suspect and the Jews’ diabolical parody of the host made with Christian blood. Much would be made of this connection at the trial.

Beilis explained that one day, years ago, Zaitsev had offered him the opportunity to earn a few extra rubles by supervising this annual tradition—the baking and delivery of a ton of matzo for his large extended family and friends. He needed someone dependable and honest. For two weeks every year, Beilis supervised the baking of the matzo at Zaitsev’s estate outside of Kiev, and its delivery on Passover eve, until the old man’s death in 1907, when the tradition ceased. (Zaitsev’s heirs were modern Jews in “short clothing,” content to buy their matzo in a store.)

Fenenko asked whether he ever had to chase neighborhood children, in particular Andrei, away from the clay grinders. Beilis told him he had not. Over the next few days Beilis was questioned again a number of more times. “On the one hand, I felt encouraged [each time],” he would later write in his memoirs, “for if they desired to question me it was a sign that they wanted to know the truth. On the other hand I would become frightened of the wild questions they were putting, questions designed to confuse and entangle me.”

On August 3, Beilis was brought in to meet with Fenenko alone at the courthouse. Fenenko, who must have been greatly distressed, looked lost in thought.

“I must send you to prison,” he said. Beilis began to cry.

“Do not cry, Beilis,” he said. Beilis recalled Fenenko saying the words “in a soft and heartfelt voice in which I felt compassion.”

Beilis asked Fenenko why he would send an innocent man to prison. Fenenko said his investigation, still in progress, would reveal the truth, but in the meantime he was “obligated” to imprison him. He repeated again that “this is what the prosecutor ordered.”

“Will I have to wear prison clothing?” Beilis asked.

Until now he had worn his own clothes. He later recalled the question with embarrassment: “Foolishness. That this is what I feared most of all at that moment. As long as I was in my own clothes, I saw myself as a free person who was arrested accidentally, and would soon be freed.” On his last night at the police precinct, a veteran convict tried to comfort him. “In prison,” he said, “it is much better. There at least you get some cooked food, while at the precinct you only get dry food.” Uncomforted, Beilis spent a sleepless night.

As for Vera Cheberyak, who was also detained on July 22, little is known about her time as an Okhrana prisoner except for one exemplary episode. Cheberyak was probably held first at the Okhrana headquarters, but by the end of July she was transferred to a police precinct jail. On July 31, she had a new cellmate, Anna Darofeyeva, who had just killed her husband. Cheberyak might have seen in the forty-year-old Anna a kindred spirit or a woman in need of consolation (after all, in so many such cases, it was the man who had provoked the ultimate and decisive act). But instead, Cheberyak saw in Anna yet another potential mark.

Cheberyak struck up a conversation with Anna, telling her it had been her bad luck that her son, Zhenya, had known Andrei Yushchinsky, which had led her to come under suspicion in his murder. Cheberyak drew out the vulnerable woman about her own situation. She told Cheberyak she had no children, no family, no one to look out for her. As people often do when confronted by misfortune too immense to comprehend, Anna fixated on trivialities. The police had taken some things of hers and she was worried about what would happen to them. Cheberyak said she would help. She was sure she would be released soon, and she would take care of Anna’s affairs. On a scrap of paper, Cheberyak had Anna draw up a document in her own hand. Anna, who must have been in a radical state of mental distress, thought she was giving Cheberyak permission only to take her things from the police station for safekeeping. In fact, in signing the paper, Anna apparently transferred to Cheberyak the right to dispose of all her worldly goods, such as they were.

Cheberyak was right to believe she would soon be released. Although nearly everyone involved in the case—from the upright shoemaker Nakonechny to the unscrupulous prosecutor Chaplinsky—sensed she was somehow involved in Andrei’s murder, Cheberyak had never incriminated herself. As for that “shit Zhenya,” as she had called her son, while she was locked up he had said nothing to harm her.

Cheberyak, though, still did not feel she was out of danger. It was about to become evident that the mother was in mortal fear of her son, and she would soon come under plausible suspicion of wanting him dead.

Knowing Cheberyak would have to be released in a few days, Detective Krasovsky set about wooing Zhenya while it was possible to question him outside of his mother’s influence. He went to a bakery to buy some pastries and had them delivered to the Cheberyaks’ home in the hope of putting the grateful boy in the right mood to open up when an officer paid a call.

The treats were surely welcome. By the time that Vera Cheberyak was whisked off to the Okhrana, the neighbors were becoming concerned about her children. They were growing thin. Their father, Vasily, had dearly hoped for his wife’s removal from the family by the police, but the attention of the authorities had resulted in nothing but disaster. The destruction of Vera’s criminal gang had deprived the family of much of its livelihood. Vasily was on his way to losing his job at the telegraph office. (He ascribed this to Krasovsky’s machinations, later testifying that the detective had threatened, “I will ruin you,” if he did not tell what he knew.) Zakharchenko, the landlord, had evicted the family from their apartment, forcing them to move. The children still sneaked into Zakharchenko’s yard and stole fruit from his pear trees, no longer as a childish game but to stave off hunger.

In the first days of August, all three children fell ill. Vasily at first thought it was from eating green pears, but their symptoms quickly grew worse. Zhenya was taken to the hospital with dysentery. The boy was growing weaker with each passing hour; the doctor had almost no hope of saving him. Vera Cheberyak was released from jail on August 7 and, after signing for her cellmate’s possessions on the way out, made her way to the hospital. It is not clear if the doctor told her that her son was, in all likelihood, dying, but he did tell her it would be better for her boy to stay where he was. She brought him home.

The eerie and unnerving scene that then unfolded would become part of the case’s legend. It would become the focus of the wildest conspiracy theories and speculation. It would transfix the nation and serve as a linchpin of the defense. Though it may seem too contrived in its dramatic convenience to be credible, and as histrionic as a scene in a silent film (as indeed it would become in just a few months), it was witnessed by two men whose motives were unimpeachable, for neither wanted to undermine the blood accusation.

When Krasovsky heard that Zhenya had been taken home, he immediately sent Polishchuk and another officer to watch over him. “In his delirium he kept saying Andrusha’s name,” Polishchuk reported, in an account recorded three days later. “Sometimes it seemed to Zhenya that Andrusha was catching him, and he cried, ’Oh, Andrusha, don’t catch, don’t catch; at other times [it seemed to him] that Andrusha was firing [from his gun], and then he began to cry: ‘Andrusha is firing, firing,’ and then … he cried: ‘Andrusha, don’t scream.’ ”

Polishchuk’s account continues: “When Zhenya occasionally came to, his mother took him in her arms and gestured to the detectives: ‘Tell them, dear son, so that they won’t harm either your mother or you, since we both don’t know anything about the Andrei Yushchinsky case,’ to which Zhenya answered: ‘Leave me alone, mama, it’s painful for me to remember that.’ ” His mother prodded him: “Tell them, little one, that I have nothing to do with it.”

Polishchuk also noticed a contradictory impulse. When Zhenya started to say something, his mother did something strange and disturbing: she bent over him and covered his mouth with kisses. It seemed clear to Polishchuk that she wanted to prevent him from talking. When he questioned her about this, she said it was difficult for her son to talk and she didn’t want him troubled.

Present to administer the final sacraments was Father Fyodor Sinkevich, a leader of the right-wing youth organization Double Headed Eagle who would soon become its chairman. Cheberyak later claimed that Zhenya had requested that she summon him, but Sinkevich did not know Zhenya. It is all but certain that inviting Sinkevich was Cheberyak’s idea. She must have nurtured a hope that this leading right-wing clergyman would bear witness as her son offered her a dying exoneration.

Sinkevich could see that the boy was near death. “I gave him communion, then made to leave, when the boy called out to me, ‘Father,’ ” Sinkevich later testified. “I approached him with a tender feeling and asked, ‘What is it, my child.’ He didn’t say anything. Then he called out ‘Father’ again. I again asked ‘What is it, my child.’ He again said nothing, and however hard I tried with soothing words to encourage him to say what he wanted to, he didn’t say anything.” Sinkevich later shared his impression with the court: “It seemed to me that he wanted to say something but for some reason couldn’t bring himself to. It made the impression of some kind of complicated psychological process going on.”

Cheberyak had followed the young priest into the room, so quietly he did not notice her until he happened to turn around. He formed a sense that Cheberyak, standing behind him and facing the bed, was trying to communicate something to the boy wordlessly.

After he left the boy’s bedside, Sinkevich had a conversation with Cheberyak in which she said something quite striking. They talked about the Beilis case and, while he could not remember everything she said, he did recall her saying, “They are wrongly accusing the Jews.” Cheberyak was clearly in the midst of her own “complex psychological process.” Just a few months earlier she had told the authorities she believed the Jews had something to do with the crime. Now, she inscrutably needed to tell a leader of the city’s anti-Semites that her previous avowal was not true. Perhaps it was a momentary pang of conscience seeping through her twisted and tormented psyche under the unbearable stress of the moment. She would change her mind one final time about whom to implicate in the murder—with dramatic consequences—in time for the trial.

Zhenya died on August 8, the day after he was brought home from the hospital. A few days later his eight-year-old sister, Valentina, died. Only nine-year-old Ludmila survived. Andrei had been in Zhenya’s thoughts in his final moments but, if the dying boy knew anything about the identity of the killer, he took it with him to the grave.

Did Vera Cheberyak have something to do with her son’s death? Polishchuk told Fenenko he suspected her. Of course, she was locked up at the Okhrana when the boy fell ill, but perhaps she had somehow gotten the message out and had the deed done.

Others also believed the children had been poisoned but, depending upon their political beliefs, they singled out different culprits. The liberal paper Contemporary Word pointed the accusing finger at the Far Right: “It is well-known that the Union of Russian People has taken this matter in hand. Is it any wonder that, as a result, there has occurred a new crime?” The far-right paper Zemshchina implicated the Jews, noting that “during the investigation of Dreyfus, that lowly traitor, eleven witnesses in turn, one after the other, fell victim to sudden death.” The “elimination” of a witness, the paper said, “constitutes the usual method of the bloodthirsty [Jewish] tribe.” Although the coroner’s official microscopic analysis found the bacteria causing dysentery in Zhenya’s body—clear evidence of a natural death—the accusations persisted willy-nilly. It was said that “a large amount of cuprous poisons” had been found in the boy’s bowel—or that death came from one of those insidious toxins that leave no trace.

In the aftermath of her children’s deaths, Cheberyak’s emotional and financial circumstances could not have been more desperate. She raised what money she could. She sold the things she had filched from Anna Darofeyeva, the murderess she had duped. (A dismayed Anna received a postcard from Cheberyak in jail informing her that her things had been sold for three rubles, of which she never saw a kopek.) Meanwhile, with the children just a few days in their graves, Cheberyak suddenly emerged as everyone’s favorite villain. Cozying up to Father Sinkevich had bought her no immediate goodwill on the right. The Black Hundred press had begun to implicate her in Andrei’s murder, a collaboration that they may have felt their Jewish murder conspiracy logically required. Cheberyak had conspired with the Jews to kill Andrei, and now they had killed Zhenya as well. “It turns out she was close to a certain Yid,” Zemshchina noted, apparently with Beilis in mind. “How could Zhenya remain among the living? After all, he could let something slip out.” Certainly, a reporter of any political stripe knew Vera Cheberyak made fantastic copy. Zemshchina dramatically reported on August 17: “[Zhenya’s] death was not an unexpected event for his neighbors, for they often heard how the mother threatened the boy: ‘If you let your tongue go loose I’ll kill you like a dog. I’ll strangle you with my own hands, if you let out so much as a squeak.’ ” (Whether true or not, to anyone who knew her the quotation sounded utterly believable.) The focus on Cheberyak as a Jewish accomplice would turn out to be a brief detour. Right-wing reporters would soon opt for a more streamlined version of events, as the prosecution had, with both Andrei and Zhenya the victims of the Jews alone, ceding the lurid fascinations of Lukianovka’s evil presence to the progressive press.

But now Cheberyak prepared to take steps to defend her honor. As a grieving and slandered mother, she readied herself to make a personal appeal to the very highest authority in the empire. For in a few days, as if by divine coincidence, the imperial sovereign, Tsar Nicholas II, was arriving in Kiev.