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

5

“You Are a Second Dreyfus”

At nine o’clock in the morning on August 4, 1911, Mendel Beilis departed the police precinct for the provincial prison about two miles away where he would spend more than two years of his life. He was accompanied by a single officer. It was an act of remarkable negligence, for Beilis was now the most important prisoner in the Russian Empire. This ordinary man who had never pretended to be anything else had become an irreplaceable figure in a drama at the highest levels of the regime. Tsarist officials, moreover, were already realizing that this case was sure to draw the attention of the world. With the success of a show trial dependent on his continued survival, the authorities should have treated the health and safety of Mendel Beilis as a matter of high importance. Yet here he was, walking down the street, virtually unguarded, a target for any fanatical avenger of Andrei, the Boy Martyr, who had supposedly been killed by this Jew for his blood.

On the other hand, the negligence was perhaps not so remarkable; the lax security was just another symptom of a wider systemic disorder in the tsar’s realm. Strangely for a quasi-police state, the empire’s security organs never developed a true culture of professionalism; they were rife with incompetence. Before the month was out, this deficiency would bring about a deadly debacle in the very heart of Kiev that would shock all of Russia and profoundly affect the life of Mendel Beilis. But on this summer day, as he walked along, looking like anyone else in his own clothes, the disregard for his safety amounted to the small gift of a final human hour before the prison gates closed behind him.

The officer escorting him, unlike the gruff crew that had taken him from his home thirteen days earlier, was a kindly fellow who insisted they take the trolley. At some point Beilis’s neighbor Stepan Zakharchenko, who was Vera Cheberyak’s landlord, boarded the trolley car. He wore his Union of Russian People badge, with an image of Saint George slaying the dragon set beneath a cross and the imperial crown, over the motto, “For Faith in Tsar and Fatherland.” The badge marked him as a “true Russian,” a Black Hundred sympathizer. But when he noticed Beilis, he came over and embraced and kissed him. “Do not be scared,” Zakharchenko told his neighbor. “Have no fear, we will all take care of you … All of us in Lukianovka know that you are innocent. We will do anything that we can for you. We will not permit an innocent person to rot in prison. Have no fear, have no fear.” When Zakharchenko got off the trolley, the two men parted warmly.

Beilis and his guard disembarked at the Lukianovka market, and from there it was a brief walk to the prison. On the way, the officer bought ten pears from a fruit stand and, to Beilis’s surprise, offered them to him. Beilis tried to refuse, but the officer insisted, stuffing them into the prisoner’s pockets. “Don’t worry, I bought them for you,” the officer told him. “We know that you are innocent, that you are suffering for nothing.”

The compassion of these two Christians—Zakharchenko and this officer—gave Beilis hope and left him greatly moved. He could see the officer was moved as well. If such men could see he was innocent, he thought, then maybe he would soon be freed.

The feeling lasted only until he reached the prison.

In the waiting area he joined fifteen new arrivals. They knew exactly who he was. “They all surrounded me and looked at me as if looking at a wild animal,” he recalled. “I saw how they crossed themselves and heard them saying, ‘That is Yushchinsky’s murderer.’ ” Until now, Beilis had comforted himself with the thought that sometimes a mistaken accusation happens. Maybe someone had falsely denounced him. Whatever the case, the error would eventually be recognized and corrected. But now people were calling him a murderer to his face, and with such certainty, with such a look in their eyes.

Then came the moment he had so feared. In the police precinct he had been allowed to spend one last night in his own clothes. Now he was led off to a room where he had to strip naked and put on his prison garb. As he tried to take off his boots, he felt he was going to faint. A guard came over and took them off for him. The rough black shirt he put on chafed his skin. After he got dressed an old man approached him and told him to sit down. The old man turned out to be a barber who cut his hair and beard. Then Beilis was taken to the quarantine ward where new inmates spent their first month of imprisonment.

When the door to the quarantine ward was opened, Beilis was hit with a strong, dank, nauseating gust of wind that reeked of human filth. Before him was a large room with black tar-covered walls and barred windows. He stood at the door in a state of confusion, transfixed by the forty or so men in the room. “I see them pushing. They are shoving each other. They are hitting each other, they are cursing each other,” he recalled. One man was singing. Another was telling a dirty story. The room was bare of furniture, without a single chair or anything else to sit on.

Moments after he entered the room there was a great commotion as a voice cried, “Dinner!”

He had noticed four or five pails filled with slop lying on the floor—the men had been waiting for the cue to begin eating. The pails contained enough food for everyone, and each one was big enough for several prisoners at a time to eat from, but there were only three spoons. The meal call triggered a wild scuffle as the men fought over who was going to eat first. After some time, and not a few bruises, the winners emerged, a truce was agreed to, and the men, tired from the fighting, formed a line. Each took a set number of spoonfuls before passing the spoon to the next man. Sometimes a man tried to sneak an extra spoonful or two and another scuffle would break out. Beilis could not bring himself to eat the disgusting slop and watched the scene from a corner he had found to sit in. Mealtime only grew more unpleasant after a cellmate found a piece of a mouse in one of the pails, displaying it to all, not in complaint, Beilis later wrote, “but to deprive others of their appetite and get more for himself.”

After dinner came “tea,” which appeared to be just hot water. A prisoner who looked Jewish to Beilis came up to him, making signs with his hands. The man, who was apparently mute, offered him a dirty piece of sugar. Beilis thanked the man with words and gestures but managed to put aside the gift covertly without eating it.

Everyone here, too, knew what the charges were against him, but after his initial anxiety at the hostile reception in the waiting room, and the raucous antics that had greeted him here in the quarantine cell, he found that his fellow convicts actually treated him quite well—in fact, with a kind of rough-and-ready fair-mindedness. These men—many of them, no doubt, hardened criminals—did not assume that anyone was guilty as charged. They would judge for themselves, and in the ensuing days Beilis would undergo a kind of trial. The quarantine cell became an impromptu courthouse and jury room devoted to “the Beilis case,” as the matter came to be known, inside the prison walls and worldwide. The defendant watched as his fellow prisoners held conversations about the case and argued about it. Beilis seems to have stayed in his corner, not speaking up. But if the prisoners had read or been influenced by the debate in the lively local and national press (over what was then “the Yushchinsky case”), it would have given them plenty of ammunition for both sides. Kiev Opinion, the city’s leading liberal daily, with many Jewish staffers, was predictably anti-regime and opposed the blood accusation. Black Hundred papers like Russian Banner, on the other hand, railed against Jewish bloodsuckers, both figurative and literal, and would soon express great satisfaction at Beilis’s arrest. Most interesting was the Kievan, which, while anti-Semitic, stood for what it saw as principled conservatism, condemning the blood accusation as superstitious slander.

It is striking to think that the first considered public debate about Mendel Beilis’s guilt took place in this fetid quarantine cell, anticipating the scenes about to erupt in barrooms, at dinner tables, and in drawing rooms across the empire, as well as in the State Duma. Even if Beilis himself said little, the prisoners must have weighed the evidence as they remembered it from the press as well as from Kiev’s prolific rumor mill. Perhaps a Jewish inmate or two dared to contribute his expertise. Many of his fellow prisoners knew a thing or two about the darker side of human nature and how to sniff out a liar. Eventually, Beilis recounted, the prisoners reached their verdict:

They concluded that I am innocent, and that the entire story about blood in matzo is no more than a made-up story. One of the convicts came up to me and said: “You are a second Dreyfus!”

I asked him: “What is a Dreyfus?”

Beilis knew nothing of the world-famous case of the Jewish army officer in France who, based on fabricated evidence, had been falsely accused of treason in 1894 and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. The affair had deeply divided the French Republic, inspiring a whole movement of “Dreyfusards” devoted to freeing Dreyfus and exposing the conspiracy and cover-up at the highest levels of the French government. Dreyfus had been freed only in 1899, thanks largely to the efforts of the writer Émile Zola, and not officially exonerated until 1906. Beilis’s cellmate tried to explain to him who Dreyfus was:

“This,” he says to me, “was also a person who was arrested for nothing. The entire world, however, took up his cause. Do not be scared, your truth will also be revealed.”

“What do I care about this Dreyfus,” I say, “as I must suffer in the meantime?”

“Yes, yes,” he says to me, nodding his head, “in the meantime you must suffer.”

On August 25, around the same time as Beilis was receiving his informal exoneration from his cellmates, Vera Cheberyak answered a knock at her door. As the month drew to a close, Cheberyak had every right to expect breathing space in which to mourn for her son and daughter in peace. The pathologists’ report had shown the children had died of natural causes. The yellow press could insinuate whatever it wanted, but there was no chance she would be charged in their deaths. As for Andrei’s murder, she had been detained and questioned about it for nearly six weeks in total, but she had said nothing to harm herself—and neither, as much as she had distrusted him, had her late son. What was more, she had only recently been released on the order of the chief prosecutor, Grigory Chaplinsky, himself; she now had a network of high-level protectors who would not allow her to be held for the crime because it conflicted with their plan to charge a Jew. But when Cheberyak, dressed in black, opened her door, she was confronted by a police officer who declared the unthinkable: she was under arrest for the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky.

The arrest, it turned out, was the work of Evgeny Mishchuk, Kiev’s widely disrespected chief of detectives, who had been foisted on the city’s police department the previous year thanks to his St. Petersburg connections. Vasily Fenenko, the capable and fair-minded investigating magistrate, shared Mishchuk’s suspicions about Vera Cheberyak. But as a detective, he regarded Mishchuk to be totally inept. Fenenko was astonished to receive a telephone call around one p.m. informing him that Mishchuk was boasting of success where his detractors had failed: he was claiming to have literally unearthed proof that Cheberyak was behind Andrei’s murder. A cache of evidence had been found buried on Yurkovsky Hill in Lukianovka. Fenenko was to proceed there immediately.

Fenenko arrived to find Detective Mishchuk strutting the scene with an unbearably self-satisfied air, proclaiming that Andrei’s missing belongings had been found and the case solved. He had received a letter from an anonymous informant telling him the exact location where Andrei’s belongings were buried, along with evidence that, according to the anonymous letter writer, implicated Vera Cheberyak. Officers had dug up a package wrapped in yellow paper. So sure was Mishchuk of its contents that, even before having it opened, he had ordered Cheberyak and a member of her gang arrested.

The package now lay in the courtyard of a nearby building, ready to be opened in the presence of witnesses, including Fenenko. An officer peeled away the paper to reveal a white cloth sack. Wrapped in the sack were some burned remnants of clothing, including suspenders, and two metal spikes. The officer then reached into the bag and pulled out the torn pieces of a letter, the contents of which had nothing to do with the crime. But Vera Cheberyak’s name was mentioned in the letter, as was the name of a member of her gang. The incriminating evidence had, it seemed, been carelessly left in the sack by the perpetrators. With an arrogant and victorious look on his face that infuriated Fenenko, Mishchuk declared, “Ritual murder in the twentieth century doesn’t happen.” Mishchuk was correct. Jewish ritual murder did not occur in the twentieth century, or in any other century for that matter. But he had not succeeded in ensnaring the killers. Instead, he had fallen into a trap.

Mishchuk was not the most competent detective, but he was still a threat to the conspiracy to charge a Jew with Andrei’s murder. Though he had been shunted aside, he was still chief of the investigative division of the Kiev police force. He was unyielding in his opposition to the blood accusation (for which he must be given credit). The proponents of the blood accusation had to find a means to get him out of the way. Their plot would play on his arrogance, his unwarranted self-confidence, and his justifiable suspicions about the identities of the killers. In the weeks after Andrei’s murder, a petty criminal named Semyon Kushnir had offered his services to Mishchuk as an informer. It was Kushnir who had passed along the anonymous letter pointing to the location of the buried cache of supposed evidence. Since the letter confirmed what Mishchuk already believed to be true, he did not doubt its authenticity.

When Nikolai Krasovsky arrived, he pushed his way through the large crowd that had gathered around Mishchuk’s find. It took just one glance to relieve him of any concern that his despised rival had solved the case. The metal spikes were each the diameter of a small candle and nearly a foot long. Neither one, he was sure, could have served as the murder weapon, which had been thinner in diameter and far shorter. As for the burned clothes, among the shreds of quilted fabric supposedly from Andrei’s coat he noticed a piece that looked like a flounce from a woman’s garment.

Later that evening, Fenenko consulted the autopsy specialist who confirmed that the long spikes could have had nothing to do with the murder. As for the clothing, Andrei had never worn suspenders and the ones that were found were, in any case, those of an adult. What was more, the package was determined to have been in the ground only two or three days. This had all been a crude fabrication.

Mishchuk was dismissed from his post and he and three other officers were arrested on charges of falsifying evidence. Kushnir later confessed to drafting the supposedly anonymous letter. It was never established on whose orders he was acting, but the scheme may well have originated high up in the chain of command, possibly with Grigory Chaplinsky, though it is also possible that the hoax was perpetrated by criminals hoping for a reward and that the prosecutor merely exploited the opportunity to eliminate the troublesome detective. In any case, Chaplinsky took an extreme measure in indicting Mishchuk. Kiev’s governor, A. F. Giers, was against bringing charges, but Chaplinsky threatened to wage bureaucratic war against him by blocking appointments to key posts. There was never a genuine investigation as to who was behind the fabrication as the case against Mishchuk went forward.

Despite Chaplinsky’s efforts, Mishchuk and his codefendants would be acquitted of all charges a year later by a panel of independent-minded judges in Kiev, which took about ten minutes to come to a decision after hearing witnesses who contradicted themselves or were discredited on the stand. Under the Russian justice system, though, a not-guilty verdict could be appealed, and the prosecutor exercised his privilege, citing several dubious technicalities. The appeals court voided the guilty verdict, basing their decision on a discrepancy between the original panel’s summary verdict, which stated the defendants were “not guilty,” and the same panel’s explanatory opinion, which stated only that the charges were “not proven.” It then took the virtually unheard-of step of remanding the case to a court in a different city. The authorities were clearly counting on a more submissive panel of judges coming to an opposite decision. On retrial by the Kharkov court, Mishchuk was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison. His conviction would send a signal: this is what would happen to opponents of the blood accusation.

For the high officials determined to charge a Jew with the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky, Krasovsky was a far greater threat than Mishchuk. But Krasovsky was too clever to fall for a crude trap. His enemies would need to devise a different and even more brazen scheme to get him out of the way. But that lay months in the future.

Meanwhile, Krasovsky had regained his footing as an investigator. He had spent days meandering along Lukianovka’s streets, dressed in the clothes of a simple workingman, striking up conversations with anyone who might have seen or heard something about the case. From a night watchman he first heard a story circulating in the neighborhood that filled in the critical piece missing amid the suspicion surrounding Vera Cheberyak: a motive.

The story existed in two versions, differing about the timing, but with the same core. One day Andrei had decided to cut school and he, Zhenya, and a third boy had gone out near the caves to cut off some switches from the shrubs there. Andrei’s switch had been the best, longer and more flexible than Zhenya’s. Zhenya had demanded that Andrei give it to him. Andrei had refused, and the two boys had quarreled. Zhenya had told Andrei, “If you don’t give me yours, I’ll tell your aunt that you didn’t go to school, and you came here to play.” Andrei had supposedly answered, “And if you tell on me, I’ll write to the police that at your mother’s thieves are constantly hiding and bringing stolen things.” Zhenya, the story went, had gone home and told his mother.

In one version, the quarrel had taken place some days or weeks before Andrei’s disappearance. After hearing Zhenya’s story, two of Cheberyak’s cohorts had supposedly said that Andrei needed to be “quieted down,” so he wouldn’t blab and that if necessary, he needed to be “rubbed out.” Nothing had come of that, at first. Then, on March 9, came the arrest of four members of Cheberyak’s gang and, a day later, the search of Cheberyak’s home by the police. Now the hunt by the gang for the informer was on. Suspicion turned to Andrei. When he knocked on Zhenya’s door on March 12, Cheberyak and her gang took advantage of the opportunity to do away with him.

According to the other version of the story circulating in the neighborhood, the boys’ quarrel had taken place on the very morning Andrei had disappeared. In that case, the gang may have assumed that, if Andrei was talking about betraying them, then perhaps he had already done so. Panicked and angry, Cheberyak’s men had not needed a well-thought-out reason to take their revenge. After Zhenya ran off, Andrei had made his way back to his friend’s house, carrying his switch, perhaps to make up with his friend. There he’d been confronted. Then: shouted accusations, the boy’s frightened look, conclusions quickly drawn, and action taken.

Krasovsky had his men canvass Lukianovka for witnesses, attempting to trace the story back to its source, but the mysterious third boy proved elusive. Still, the essence of the story sounded plausible, though if Andrei was indeed killed for being a stool pigeon, his death was doubly tragic. Police records note the name of the informer behind the March 10 police search: it was not Andrei, but Evgeny Mifle, brother of Pavel, Vera Cheberyak’s blind lover. The Mifle family was determined to see Cheberyak put behind bars. In the end, the search had resulted in no charges against her for robbery or selling stolen goods. But her gang’s ensuing frenzy of suspicion may have led to a far more horrible crime.

Only a few hours after Cheberyak was arrested, she was just as suddenly released. Such outrageous treatment at the hands of Kiev’s chief detective must have made her even more determined to make a personal appeal to the tsar to restore her good name. Nicholas took with great seriousness the thousands of petitions he received from ordinary citizens requesting his mercy and intervention in matters large and small; he spent hours each week personally reviewing them. He treasured this duty because with each plea he took in his hands, he felt the age-old, mystical bond between tsar and people come to life.

In just four days Tsar Nicholas II was due to arrive in Kiev on an official visit. Cheberyak must have felt blessed that her appeal could be conveyed to the tsar here, in her native city, rather than having to forward it to the capital. Amid her endless misfortune, the tsar’s visit surely seemed an unearthly piece of good luck, and she intended to take advantage of it.

General Pavel Kurlov, assistant minister of the interior and head of the Corps of Gendarmes, was already in Kiev to supervise the extensive security precautions in advance of the tsar’s arrival. A few months earlier, from his desk in the capital, he had saved the Jews of Kiev from a pogrom in the aftermath of Andrei’s murder by dispatching a timely order to protect them. His mission remained the prevention of disorder of any sort in the city, with the supremely important priority of ensuring the safety of the sovereign emperor. Unfortunately Kurlov, at the worst possible time, was in an impaired state, laid up in his hotel suite with back pain. Desperate for relief, he summoned the fashionable doctor of Tibetan medicine Peter Badmaev, who treated much of St. Petersburg high society, including members of the court and Duma leaders, for all manner of complaints (in particular, venereal diseases and impotence) with exotic herbal infusions and “arousing powders.” Typically for the era, even such a trivial thing as being treated for an aching back was bound up with court intrigue. Badmaev was a would-be rival of the imperial couple’s beloved, madly charismatic holy man, Grigory Rasputin.

Rasputin himself would be present in Kiev during the tsar’s visit and available to come to the aid of the royal heir, the sickly seven-year-old Alexis, should he be stricken with one of his hemophilic episodes. Nicholas and Alexandra regarded Rasputin as a gift from God. The court physicians had proven powerless to stop their son’s excruciating bouts of internal bleeding; the desperate parents had no doubt that only the man they referred to as “Our Friend” had the power to relieve the boy’s suffering. For his part, Prime Minister Peter Stolypin, who also served as interior minister, viewed Rasputin as a mountebank and a threat to the reputation of the monarchy. During the past year, the press had published article after sensational article about the “semi-literate” and “depraved” Siberian peasant and “spiritual quack” who had become a favorite in “certain court circles”; the newspapers had even featured lurid stories of innocent women he had defiled. After compromising pictures of him were brought to the tsar’s attention, Rasputin left the country in March 1911, at Nicholas’s prodding, on a long pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Stolypin had tried, unsuccessfully, to banish him from the capital permanently. But by August Rasputin had returned home and was again in the imperial couple’s embrace. Theirs was a deep emotional and spiritual bond that could not be broken. During the years of their intense relationship, Rasputin addressed Nicholas and Alexandra as “Papa” and “Mama” (ostensibly because they were the mother and father of the Russian people). To the tsar, Rasputin was a “good, religious, simple-minded Russian” and the sovereign treasured their frequent and lengthy conversations. “When in trouble and assailed by doubts,” he once confided, “I like to have a talk with him and invariably feel at peace with myself afterward.” Their dialogues could combine the spiritual with the political, which surely worried Stolypin. In fact, just two weeks before coming to Kiev, Nicholas had entrusted “Our Friend” with a mission of state importance: to evaluate a possible candidate to relieve Stolypin of his secondary post as minister of the interior. Rasputin told the gentleman that the tsar had sent him “to look into your soul.” While the story sounds implausible—that this poorly educated, physically filthy, licentious “holy man” would be entrusted with such vital government business—Rasputin was almost certainly telling the truth.

The two charlatans, Rasputin and Dr. Badmaev, would later form a partnership, helping install one of the doctor’s patients, Alexander Protopopov, who was rumored to suffer from advanced syphilis, as the empire’s final, half-mad, interior minister. But in August 1911 the two men were at odds. Badmaev schemed in vain to supplant Rasputin as healer to the tsarevich Alexis. Rasputin reputedly mocked Badmaev, saying, “He has two infusions. You drink a little glass of one, and your cock gets hard; but there’s still the other: you drink a really tiny glass of it, and it makes you good-natured and kind of stupid, and you don’t care about anything.” Perhaps the bedridden general Kurlov ingested one that made him “kind of stupid”—there were rumors that Badmaev’s potions contained substances stronger than herbs. A more serious impairment to his security efforts in Kiev, however, was Kurlov’s near-total lack of previous experience in police work. Owing his ascent largely to the patronage of the empress, Kurlov, like so many other tsarist officials, could himself be counted as a kind of charlatan.

Still, the security preparations for the imperial visit appeared impressive. The authorities in Kiev had made a massive effort to round up undesirables. Large numbers of people deemed suspicious had been arrested, with the police invoking the government’s emergency powers to keep them in custody. Along parts of the tsar’s route to and from the city, security officers were stationed every dozen yards. Three hundred buildings along critical routes within the city had been searched “from roof to cellar.”

The imperial train, with its eleven dark blue, gilt-trimmed cars, arrived in Kiev on August 29. The tsar was accompanied by the empress Alexandra and the couple’s “most august” children: their four daughters—Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia (OTMA as they dubbed themselves)—and their youngest child, the tsarevich Alexis. Prime Minister Stolypin and members of the cabinet had arrived earlier and were there on the platform, along with local dignitaries, to greet the imperial family.

Among those at the station was Father Fyodor Sinkevich, the priest who had been present at Zhenya Cheberyak’s deathbed. He delivered a few words welcoming the tsar in the name of Kiev’s monarchist organizations such as Double Headed Eagle. As he addressed the tsar he may have already had in his possession the “most humble petition” from Vera Cheberyak and been looking for an opportunity to pass it on to the sovereign. The suspicious scene the priest had witnessed three weeks earlier as Zhenya lay dying had done nothing to undermine his belief that a Jew had killed Andrei for his blood. Cheberyak’s plan to enlist Father Sinkevich as her protector had succeeded. In the petition, Cheberyak expressed bewilderment as to why suspicion fell on her in the matter of Andrei Yushchinsky’s murder. As one who had led an “irreproachable life of toil” and “in the name of the sufferings of a mother deprived of two of her children,” she pleaded with the tsar to reveal the names of the people persecuting her, so that she could “once and for all be rid of this matter.”

From the train station the imperial carriages proceeded along the three-mile route to the physical and spiritual heart of the city, the magnificent St. Sophia Cathedral, dark green and white, its thirteen golden domes shining. The streets, brightly decorated with banners welcoming the sovereign, were lined with worshipful, cheering crowds. Such demonstrations of affection were expected and encouraged; Nicholas took deep satisfaction in public displays of adoration by the common people. But Kievans had been warned not to throw flowers in the path of the tsar’s carriage: any flying object had to be treated as a bomb. A contingent of students who had been deemed reliable had strewn a token stretch of one thoroughfare with blossoms. When Nicholas and his family arrived at the cathedral, where Andrei Yushchinsky had once studied at the religious school, they were anointed with holy water by the metropolitan, and the tsar’s week of official activities began.

At some point in the next two days, Tsar Nicholas was briefed on the Yushchinsky investigation. The tsar had likely received his first briefing on the case from justice minister Ivan Shcheglovitov in St. Petersburg on May 18, probably a summation of the results of his deputy Liadov’s mission to Kiev. It was then that Nicholas may have first heard mention of the poor Jewish brick factory clerk. There is no record of any other briefing on the case between May and the tsar’s arrival in Kiev. While the tsar was an ardent reader of the right-wing press, during the languid days of August he may not have paid close attention to news of the investigation and not known of the purported break in the case.

For Grigory Chaplinsky, the chief prosecutor, the meeting with the tsar was surely one of the greatest moments of his life. He had only a few minutes with the sovereign, but he required just a few words to sum up his progress. Dimitry Grigorovich-Barsky, at the time a senior prosecutor, who later became an attorney for Beilis, witnessed this key meeting. He later gave an account that might seem to stretch credulity but was confirmed decades later in a document from the archives of the Ministry of Justice. Chaplinsky told the tsar, “Your majesty, I am happy to report that the true culprit in the murder of Yushchinsky has been found. It is the Yid Beilis.”

If Nicholas responded verbally, it was not recorded; but upon hearing this news Nicholas bowed his head and crossed himself.

Nicholas did not like Jews. He believed they were exploiters of poor and vulnerable Russians and fomenters of revolution and likely agreed with this father, Alexander III, who wrote in the margin of a report on the wretched state of Russian Jewry, “We must not forget that it was the Jews who crucified our Lord and spilled his precious blood.” While he did not directly provoke violence against the Jews, he sympathized with the Black Hundreds and was grateful for their support in suppressing “bad elements” in the populace during the 1905 revolution. In December 1905, he not only gratefully accepted the badges presented to him and his son by a delegation of the Union of Russian People, both he and Alexis wore them for years. (On one occasion, when Nicholas gave an audience to the editor of a Black Hundred newspaper, the man dandled the tsarevich on his knee. Seeing the badge on the man’s chest, the little boy pointed to his own and said, “I’m a Unionist too!”)

On the one hand, Nicholas’s attitude toward the Jews was unremarkable for his time and among his circle. Even his most forward-looking officials, like former prime minister Sergei Witte, believed Jews to be either revolutionaries or capitalist bloodsuckers. Or, strangely enough, both. As the eminent historian Hans Rogger pointed out, an odd feature of tsarist anti-Semitism was that both the most reactionary and progressive officials shared the assumption that “Jewish money … would join with Jewish misery for a common assault on the regime.” The striking aspect of the regime’s policy, according to Rogger, was “the way reality and delusion combined to shape action.” Even such sophisticated men as Witte, and perhaps even Stolypin, sincerely believed that the all-powerful “leaders” of Russian Jewry could manipulate their five million coreligionists into doing their bidding. The oft-expressed notion that the regime cynically used anti-Semitism as a means of deflecting popular anger is largely a misconception. In fact, tsarist officials truly saw the Jews as a monstrous, multi-tentacled threat. The “Jewish question” was for them a real and pressing problem, not a political ploy.

On the other hand, Nicholas’s hostility toward the Jews had an especially extreme aspect that confounded even his closest advisers.

While many officials shared a belief in the worldwide Jewish conspiracy and the mythical union of Jewish capital and the revolutionary movement, most of them understood the reality of Jewish poverty in the Pale of Settlement and the counterproductive nature of many anti-Jewish governmental restrictions. Many people in authority shared the understanding that Jewish discontent was a threat to public order that needed to be defused. A reasonable policy, in their view, would require some harsh measures to deal with the “Jewish threat” but would also involve significant accommodations.

In October 1906, when the horrific year of revolutionary violence had abated, Prime Minister Stolypin felt the time had come to alleviate or eliminate some of the hundreds of anti-Jewish measures established by the government. Many of the edicts, he believed, were merely irritants that could even inflame Jews, especially Jewish youth, toward revolution. In a private conversation he told a journalist, “The Jews throw bombs. And do you know the conditions under which they live in the Western parts [of the empire]? Have you seen the poverty of the Jews? If I lived under such circumstances perhaps I too would start to throw bombs.”

Stolypin was no liberal. During and after the revolution of 1905, he had thousands of alleged revolutionaries and opponents of the regime summarily executed by field courts-martial without due process of law. The nooses from which they were hanged were dubbed “Stolypin’s neckties,” and decades later railway cars for transporting prisoners were still called “Stolypins” in Russia. But he was an ambitious reformer who famously declared that, given twenty years of peace, he would transform the country. His mission was to create a state based on the rule of law, which would remain an autocracy, to be sure, but with a well-educated populace and a thriving new class of independent farmers. “I am fighting on two fronts,” Stolypin confided to the renowned British historian of Russia Bernard Pares. “I am fighting against revolution, but for reform. You may say that such a position is beyond human strength and you might be right.” Part of his plan to create a law-based state was, to a degree, normalizing the situation of the Jews.

After a series of contentious meetings in the early fall of 1906, the Council of Ministers sent a very modest packet of reforms to Tsar Nicholas for his approval. One measure, for example, would grant to Jews who had worked as artisans or merchants for a certain period of time outside the Pale of Settlement the permanent right to live there. Another called for special fines on families of Jewish draft evaders to be abolished. In a report to the tsar, Stolypin laid out at length the pragmatic arguments for improving the lot of the Jews. He clearly had every expectation that the tsar would approve of the measures because he noted in his report that only those who have “a general feeling of intransigent hostility toward Jewry” could oppose them.

Nicholas took nearly two months to reply. On December 10, 1906, Stolypin received the tsar’s extraordinary response. The tsar had decided to reject the contents of this ministerial “journal,” as it was called, in its entirety:

I am returning to you the journal on the Jewish Question without my confirmation. Long before its submission to me, I thought about this day and night. Despite the most convincing argument in favor…an inner voice more and more firmly repeats to me that I do not take this decision upon myself. So far my conscience has never deceived me. Therefore, I intend in this case to follow its dictates. I know that you, too, believe that “the heart of the Tsar is in the hands of God.” So be it. For all those whom I have placed in authority I bear awesome responsibility before God and am ready at any time to account to him.

The emphasis on “never” is in the original. The tsar believed his “inner voice” was infallible. And, in this instance, the voice dictated that he should take no action to alleviate Jewish suffering, even though his ministers believed the situation undermined the stability of the regime. Stolypin’s personal reaction went unrecorded, but he was surely shocked. The moderately conservative Vladimir Kokovtsov, an ally of Stolypin who was finance minister at the time, wrote in his memoirs: “None of the documents in my possession shows so clearly the Tsar’s mystical attitude toward the nature of his imperial power as this letter.” The “inner voice” episode also provides a kind of key to the regime’s mysterious decision to pursue the case against Mendel Beilis.

The decision to prosecute Beilis was the product of two mentalities or sets of perceptions: the generally held belief in the menace presented by the Jews combined with Tsar Nicholas’s personal belief in the divine nature of his power and his mission on earth. Nicholas was a true believer in the myth of the Tsar-Batiushka, or saintly “Little Father Tsar.” Fundamental to the myth was the precept that the tsar’s authority came from God and from the personal bond between tsar and people. Nicholas’s recent predecessors had believed in this spiritual dictum, in principle, but Nicholas lived it out with unique intensity and relied on it as a guide to action. Nicholas more than once expressed his aversion to his rationalist ancestor Peter the Great, the legendary Westernizer who, in his view, heedlessly “stamped out all the pure Russian customs.” Nicholas had an abiding nostalgia for an idealized Russia, before Peter’s reign began in 1682, when the connection between tsar and people was thought to have been close and pure. A part of that bond, for Nicholas, was shared hatred of the Jews.

It has been argued that the Beilis case was part of a political agenda by certain officials. It was, supposedly, a way of derailing a bill in the Duma to abolish the Pale of Settlement or, more generally, as the historian Orlando Figes put it, “to exploit xenophobia for monarchical ends … to mobilize the ‘loyal Russian people’ behind the defense of the tsar and the traditional social order.” But the bill on the Pale had died in committee several months earlier, in February 1911, before Andrei’s disappearance; it never had any chance of passing. Nor did the regime ever actively use the Beilis case to rouse the population on behalf of Mother Russia. In fact, the record shows that the government was fearful of popular involvement straight through to the end of the trial. Another motive explaining the prosecution of the case, pressure from the Far Right, is also unconvincing; the Far Right was a creature of the regime, heavily dependent on it for secret funding and, in any case, divided by vicious infighting, with the Union of Russian People having split into three rival organizations. The government was quite able to defy the Far Right when it desired.

In pursuing this mad venture, then, the tsar’s personal ideology, not politics, was the necessary condition, the indispensable factor. Left to themselves and their generic anti-Semitic prejudice, the tsar’s ministers would have somewhat moderated the regime’s anti-Jewish policy. The tsar, however, had demonstrated his belief that his divine mission dictated the Jews’ unrelieved oppression. Thus the high officials who backed the Beilis case were motivated not by the desire to mobilize the people or to pursue a political agenda but to please the tsar and so advance themselves.

For political expediency in service to the tsar’s beliefs, there is no better example than the career of Ivan Shcheglovitov, the justice minister throughout the Beilis case. A former chief prosecutor of the State Senate, as the Russian supreme court was called, he had been one of the empire’s most distinguished jurists. He was regarded by none other than Oskar Gruzenberg, Russia’s most prominent Jewish defense attorney (and future head of Beilis’s defense team), as a man of unimpeachable integrity. Shcheglovitov, during his years as a prosecutor, law professor, and major architect of judicial regulations, was known as something of a progressive, even interceding more than once to commute the sentences of people convicted of political crimes. In his forties, however, Shcheglovitov was suddenly infected with an overpowering case of political ambition. He set his sights on becoming the minister of justice and left the Senate for a lesser position in the Justice Ministry, calculating that he would succeed in rising to the top post, which he did in 1906—whereupon, as former prime minister Witte succinctly put it in his memoirs, he “destroyed the courts.” Shcheglovitov did his best to obliterate the hard-won independence of the judiciary—the one institution that Russians could point to with pride as striving toward Western standards, forcing out judges and prosecutors deemed politically unreliable and sending out his minions to harass and intimidate officers of the court into producing verdicts the regime desired. Gruzenberg was shocked, writing in his memoirs that “Shcheglovitov’s moral transformation was not so much a decline as a roaring avalanche.” Shcheglovitov became known by the nickname “Vanka Cain” (“Johnny Cain”) after a legendary eighteenth-century brigand who duped the state into making him a powerful police official but used his post to unleash a massive crime wave.

A man of great intellectual sophistication, Shcheglovitov was probably no more anti-Semitic than the average Russian official and had even helped Gruzenberg win a lenient sentence for a Jewish vigilante convicted of trying to kill a notorious instigator of pogroms. Now, in 1911, only one motive could explain why such a man would support a ritual murder trial: self-interest. This, in turn, could only mean that he believed he was doing what the tsar wished him to do.

True, the tsar’s wishes were often hard to discern. And, at this point, officials may have relied merely on his single brief gesture of crossing himself at the mention of the suspect or a meaningful nod to a minister during one or another briefing. But it stood to reason that a man who believed a divine whisper urged him to persecute the Jews was likely to welcome an endeavor that sought to prove their fanatical malevolence. Nicholas’s “inner voice” had not changed its counsel since his 1906 veto of the pro-Jewish measures. Just two weeks before his visit to Kiev, the tsar had signed yet another anti-Jewish restriction, one that limited trade by Jews east of the Urals, sternly instructing his ministers, “Everything needs to be done to prevent the Jews from taking over Siberia.”

One powerful figure, however, was unquestionably appalled and unsettled by the Beilis case. In early September, as the brick-factory clerk neared the end of his stay in the quarantine cell, his best hope of avoiding prosecution lay in the possibility of intervention by the prime minister, Peter Stolypin. Stolypin was a fervent Russian nationalist. Like all senior tsarist officials, he was an anti-Semite, but he was not a racist. That is, he did not see the Jews as an irredeemably evil race. Rather, he saw the Jews as a political and social problem, one that could be dealt with, if only the tsar allowed it, by political means. No record exists of Stolypin’s opinion of the Beilis case, but it is inconceivable that he believed that putting a Jew on trial for killing a Christian boy would be in the interests of the regime. Such a public spectacle could only needlessly alienate the Jews even further. Stolypin, moreover, was greatly worried about the impact of Russia’s anti-Semitic excesses on the empire’s image abroad and on its foreign economic interests. He was specifically concerned in the fall of 1911 about an intense lobbying campaign—the first of its kind in history—led by the American financier Jacob Schiff calling for the abrogation of the Russo-American commercial treaty of 1832 as punishment for Russia’s anti-Jewish policies. A ritual murder case could only give the backers of this campaign more ammunition.

A pragmatic anti-Semitic supporter of Stolypin’s later said the prime minister would never have let the Beilis case go forward. During the past year, Stolypin had shown his political fortitude by attempting to banish the “Mad Monk” Iliodor as well as Rasputin, both favorites of the tsar’s. He had stood up to the Far Right in a major confrontation dealing with the organization of local governments in the western provinces, so he may well have succeeded in thwarting a foolish endeavor that the tsar had not explicitly endorsed.

When he was briefed on the case in Kiev, Stolypin could only have grown more alarmed. But any action to forestall the prosecution of Beilis would have to await his return to St. Petersburg, an event that depended on his continued existence, which in turn depended upon the efforts of his subordinate and political enemy, General Kurlov, who was in charge of all security precautions, as well as the Kiev Okhrana chief, Nikolai Kuliabko. Stolypin needed around-the-clock protection to stay alive. In his five years in office, he had survived some seventeen attempts on his life, including a spectacular bombing of his home that killed twenty-seven people and wounded two of his children. Kurlov arranged for Stolypin to be protected by a twenty-two-man security detail, but an aura of impending tragedy would overtake the prime minister’s visit to Kiev, thanks to an outburst by his nemesis Rasputin.

The erratic and charismatic holy man was said to have a gift for prophecy, supposedly predicting the calamitous sinking of the Russian fleet in the war with Japan in 1905. He could also, it was said, predict the fates of individuals, whether they would fall ill, and how their lives would unfold. Seldom were his prognostications riddles to be unraveled; they were direct and verifiable. On the day the tsar and his entourage arrived in Kiev, his prophetic urge concerned the prime minister.

Barred by Stolypin from appearing in public with the tsar, Rasputin stood among the crowd of ordinary people on the street, watching the imperial family and the attending dignitaries pass by on the way to the cathedral. As Stolypin’s carriage passed, Rasputin exclaimed, “Death is following him! Death is riding behind him!” Rasputin reputedly spent the night tortured by the vision and was heard muttering about it over and over as he tossed in his bed. It was an eerie omen, though one that Stolypin, had he known about it, would certainly have shrugged off. No one was more fatalistic about his future than the prime minister himself. The first line of his last will and testament, drafted years earlier, read, “I want to be buried where I am assassinated.”

The main event of the tsar’s visit to Kiev, the unveiling of a monument to his grandfather Alexander II, took place without incident. So did a number of other outdoor events, which were thought to present the greatest security risk. The command performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tale of the Tsar Saltan at Kiev’s Municipal Theater on September 1 was deemed to be thoroughly secure. The identities of all the guests were vetted. Only those possessing a special pass—the rarest of the twenty-six types issued for the Kiev events—were allowed to enter the theater. The Kiev Okhrana chief, Kuliabko, the man who had arrested Mendel Beilis six weeks earlier, was present to supervise security.

The tsar and two of his daughters, accompanied by the Bulgarian crown prince, occupied the Kiev governor-general’s parterre box, the closest one to the stage. (That evening the empress Alexandra, as was so often the case, was indisposed and did not attend.) The first row of the orchestra was reserved for the highest officials, and Stolypin sat in seat number five, between the governor-general, F. F. Trepov, and the minister of the imperial court, Baron V. B. Fredericks. When the lights went up during the intermission, the prime minister stood up and leaned on the barrier of the orchestra pit. As he conversed with Baron Fredericks and another dignitary, a slim young man slipped into his row, stopping within five or six feet of him. The young man pulled a pistol out of his pocket and fired two shots. One bullet hit Stolypin in the hand and the other found its mark in the right side of his chest, shattering one of the orders hanging from a ribbon on his jacket. Kiev’s governor, A. F. Giers, described the scene:

At first he did not seem to know what happened … With slow and deliberate movements he placed his hat and gloves on the barrier, opened his jacket and, seeing his vest heavily soaked with blood, waved his hand, as if wanting to say, “It is all over.” Then he sank heavily into his seat and said clearly and distinctly…“I am happy to die for the Tsar.”

Nicholas had been in the drawing room with his children and immediately returned to his box when he heard the shots. Before being taken to the hospital, Stolypin, Nicholas later wrote his mother, “slowly turned toward me and crossed himself with his left arm.”

The prime minister had been left totally unguarded. Not an officer was to be found within a hundred paces of him. Before the assassin could get off a third shot, he was set upon by a crowd of four dozen gentlemen in evening clothes who pushed him to the ground and beat him in the face with their opera glasses, egged on by the spectators’ cries of “Kill him!” Nicholas expressed regret, apparently with utter sincerity, that the police did not allow the crowd to beat the man to death.

Stolypin was, of course, attended to by the best physicians in the city, including Dr. Nikolai Obolonsky, dean of the medical department of the Kiev’s St. Vladimir University, who had performed an autopsy on Andrei Yushchinsky. At first the doctors had a good deal of hope that the prime minister might survive. After three days, though, he took a turn for the worse, and he died on September 5, 1911. Damage to his liver had turned out to be more severe than first believed. The main damage to the organ, it was determined, had been done mostly not by the bullet but by fragments of the Order of St. Vladimir of the Third Degree awarded him by Nicholas, which had been driven into his body. Prime Minister Stolypin had truly died for his service to the tsar.

The shooting of Stolypin triggered new fears of a pogrom: the prime minister’s assassin—a twenty-four-year-old anarchist, law school graduate, and sometime secret police informer named Dimitry Bogrov—turned out to be a Jew. (In an act of staggering gullibility, Kuliabko had let Bogrov, whom he believed to be his agent, talk his way into the theater by claiming that he could prevent an attempt on the prime minister’s life.) Born into a prosperous and highly assimilated family, Bogrov was Jewish only in the ethnic sense, but in the aftermath of the assassination, that indisputable identity was all that mattered. Black Hundred agitators riled up crowds with incendiary speeches. The day after Stolypin’s death, a gang of twenty thugs threw stones at Jewish students and assaulted Jewish merchants on Alexander Street with knives. Thousands of Jews jammed into Kiev’s train station hoping to flee the city.

As it happened, investigating magistrate Vasily Fenenko, temporarily putting aside the Beilis case, was called upon to interrogate the assassin. Bogrov’s motives are not entirely clear, but his primary intention was likely to restore his honor after having been unmasked as a police informer. His anarchist comrades had recently discovered his treachery and confronted him, demanding that he prove his loyalty. (Such dramatic scenes were not uncommon: the revolutionaries’ ranks were riddled with informers.) Only a spectacular terrorist act that put his own life at risk would do. Bogrov had killed Stolypin, in part, to expiate his guilt over betraying his comrades, knowing that they would surely kill him if he did not follow their instructions. Bogrov also spoke bitterly to his interrogators of the regime’s intolerable treatment of the Jews, so his ethnic roots may have played a role in the assassination, as well. On a deeper psychological level, though, Bogrov—who was executed just eleven days after firing the fatal shot—may be judged one of the era’s numerous romantic suicides. During the last anxious years of the Romanov dynasty, the self-inflicted deaths of disillusioned young men and women had become an epidemic, a fashion, and a fixation, with morbidly curious readers opening their morning papers to find news of the most creative final expressions of despair, often cast as acts of social protest. (“Let my drop of blood fall so that the moment will draw nearer when the sea floods its banks and compels you to come to your senses,” read a precocious fifteen-year-old boy’s famous letter.) Bogrov was of this affectedly world-weary ilk. In a letter to a friend some months earlier he declared himself to be “depressed, bored, and lonely” and with “no interest in life,” which he saw as “nothing more than an endless series of cutlets” he would have to consume. After being exposed as an informer, he could have fled abroad but chose not to. He entered the Kiev theater of his own free will, knowing there would be no escape. At least his chosen path to self-annihilation would ensure that the entire society felt a disorienting shudder.

Russia’s new prime minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, was determined to stop any anti-Jewish violence. He assured a delegation of concerned Jews that “the most decisive measures” would be taken to stop a pogrom. He made good on his promise. Three Cossack regiments were dispatched to predominantly Jewish neighborhoods in Kiev, and nearby governors were ordered to use force if necessary to stop pogroms in their regions. Tsar Nicholas approved all of the new prime minister’s actions; he, too, wanted no disorder. Within a few days, the threat of violence had passed.

The country was left to ponder a scandal. How could it be that Dimitry Bogrov had been able to enter the theater, armed, and with a valid pass, and shoot the prime minister at virtually point-blank range? Rumors immediately began that Stolypin had been killed by a right-wing conspiracy with the collusion of the secret police. Colonel Kuliabko was sentenced to a prison term for negligence, but he was the only official punished. General Kurlov was known to have schemed extravagantly against Stolypin, even having the prime minister’s mail opened in the hope of finding compromising material. But the tsar terminated an investigation of Kurlov, ensuring that speculation about a conspiracy to assassinate the prime minister would never be laid to rest.

Mendel Beilis knew nothing of politics, assassinations, and fatal blunders, or worse, among men with important titles. To him, all powerful men were simply part of the undifferentiated class of “the bosses.” Beilis did not understand what a personal disaster the death of Russia’s most powerful boss was for him. Stolypin was likely the only man in the empire who could have helped him. His successor, Kokovtsov, was a decent enough man but not nearly of the same stature; he was a caretaker, not someone to fight political battles. It was bad enough for Beilis that Stolypin was dead, but Stolypin had met his end at the hands of a Jew. The right-wing press, which had vilified Stolypin during his lifetime, deified him now. The newspaper of the Union of Russian People, Russian Banner, even asserted that Stolypin had been killed by a Jewish conspiracy because he had refused all attempts to bribe him to cover up the ritual murder and leave Mendel Beilis unpunished. If it had ever been possible for the government to drop the case, it was unthinkable now. Bogrov’s fatal shot all but assured that Mendel Beilis was going to stand trial.

The world of revolutionaries was as far removed as could be imagined from that of Mendel Beilis, as he awaited his imminent transfer from the quarantine cell to the general prison population. But with Stolypin’s death, help would have to come from the most unexpected places. It was from the shadowy and treacherous realm inhabited by men such as Bogrov that two prospective saviors would, astonishingly, emerge.

As for Vera Cheberyak, her “most humble petition” to the tsar, pleading with him to help clear her of suspicion in Andrei’s murder, was passed on to the sovereign on September 4, before his return to St. Petersburg. No record exists of any response. Cheberyak, bereaved and besieged, set about gathering all her wiles to deflect suspicion from her door.