A Child of Christian Blood

6

“Cheberyak Knows Everything”

In mid-September 1911, after spending a month in the squalid quarantine cell, Mendel Beilis was led off to his new quarters. Bidding good-bye to the men who had, in a manner of speaking, acquitted him of Andrei Yushchinsky’s murder, he was led to another large cell, which housed about thirty men. If the men of cell number five were like his previous cellmates, then things might still be tolerable, he hoped, at least in terms of human companionship. And at first some of the men were friendly toward him. Two of his fellow prisoners were Jews, one a robber, the other a merchant named Eisenberg who had been imprisoned due to an irregularity with a promissory note. Beilis had grown tired of talking about his predicament, so when Eisenberg asked what he was in for, he told him he was a horse thief.

Weighing on Beilis the most was that he had not seen or heard from his family for nearly two months. The prison authorities did not allow him to send or receive any letters, nor were they required to. Under the Russian legal system, until there was an indictment, a prisoner had very limited legal rights and could not even be represented by an attorney. Was anyone trying to help him? Beilis had no idea. Maybe there was nothing to be done and he would remain in prison forever. His only connection with his family came through the food packages he received every Sunday, but the strongest prisoners wrested the packages from him and left him little or nothing. Of the prison food, all he could bring himself to eat was the bread ration.

Beilis’s most immediate concern was his feet. As a former infantryman who had endured many a long march in the cold, he knew that scrupulous care of one’s feet—with good-fitting boots, and the regular changing and cleaning of foot wraps (socks were unknown)—had to be strictly observed. (The tsar’s army made it clear that a soldier’s feet were his own responsibility. On being drafted, he was issued a few pieces of leather and had to make his boots himself or, as most recruits did, take them to a cobbler at his own expense.)

But in his intense state of worry, Beilis couldn’t stop pacing the cell hour after hour, and the exposed nails inside the crudely made prison shoes dug into his soles. Walking became an agony. One day, about a week after his arrival in the cell, he noticed the lone chair across the room was empty. He crawled over to the chair and pulled himself onto it. The moment he sat down, a prisoner—one of the men who, until now, had treated him kindly—approached him and said sharply, “Stand up, let me sit down!” Beilis told him his feet hurt and he could not move. The man punched him hard in the face, drawing blood. Beilis screamed and the other prisoners gathered around him. On the verge of passing out, he heard some of the prisoners saying to each other that the assault was an “analysis.” An “analysis,” he was about to learn, was prison jargon for the testing of a new prisoner to see if he could be trusted. The men who had been nice to him had just been sizing him up. Would he take his blows and remain silent? Or would he turn informer? The greatest sin in jail was to complain to “the bosses.” If he held his tongue, he would be considered a “brother.” If he told, he was a traitor and might be killed unless the prison authorities removed him in time.

His cellmate Eisenberg, agitated, rushed up to him, and explained that he must say nothing. “You do indeed see,” he said softly yet firmly in Beilis’s ear, “what kind of people are here. They are convicted criminals, murderers. Act as if nothing happened,” he advised. “Stay silent, the pain will go away.” Beilis managed to stop crying from the pain. Someone brought him some water and he washed the blood off his face, but he could do nothing about the swelling.

Later, when a guard saw that Beilis had been punched and demanded to know the culprit, Beilis said nothing. But another prisoner, perhaps a naive new arrival, pointed to the man who had hit Beilis and said, “Him.”

“Why did you hit him?” the guard shouted.

“Why did he murder a Christian child?” the man retorted.

“And you yourself saw this?” the guard asked.

The guard led Beilis and his assailant toward the prison office, punching the man a few times. Along the way, other officers punched him and he was thrown down a flight of stairs. Despite what the man had done to him, Beilis worried that the man might break his neck.

Even though Beilis himself had, by all rights, passed his “analysis”—he had kept his silence—the warden considered it unsafe to leave him in cell number five. He was transferred to cell number nine, the “informers’ room”—known as “the monastery”—for prisoners who were in danger of being killed by their fellow inmates. In the monastery he would be safe from attempts on his life, but his new home would prove to hold other dangers.

If the Beilis family can be said to have been lucky in something, it was that fate had chosen the right brother to be sent to prison. Mendel and his older brother, Aaron, were opposite in physique and temperament. Aaron was a rangy and dapper six-footer. Mendel was of medium height and a little plump—at least before his arrest—and dressed shabbily. Aaron was in a turbulent and unhappy marriage, while Mendel had a placid and satisfying family life. Aaron was caustic, combative, worldly, and intensely interested in politics. (He likely had a better education than Mendel, with their father making the common choice to concentrate the family’s resources on one son.) Aaron worked on Kiev’s stock exchange—one of the strivers out of a Sholem Aleichem story. Mendel was an agreeable sort with no ambition other than to secure his children a good education and a better life. He could, as he was finding out, stoically endure hardship—harsh interrogation, near starvation, even a bloody “analysis.” Aaron, who never could hold his tongue, would likely not have lasted a day in prison. Aaron was not close to his brother. The two men inhabited different worlds and saw each other only a few times a year. But Aaron would prove the right man to fight for his brother’s freedom.

In mid-September, soon after the assassination of Prime Minister Stolypin, Aaron took Mendel’s wife, Esther, for a consultation with Arnold Davidovich Margolin, one of Kiev’s best-known defense attorneys. The thirty-four-year-old Margolin was famous for his work as an advocate for victims of pogroms and for defending Jews who had organized armed self-defense units to fight against the Black Hundred marauders. An ardent Zionist, he served as the president of the Russian branch of the Jewish Territorial Organization, devoted to creating a Jewish national home in a place other than Palestine. (The group believed a return to the ancestral homeland was an unrealistic goal and explored the possibility of settlement in, among other places, Uganda and Angola.) Margolin was also the son of one of Russia’s wealthiest men. His father, David Margolin, was a self-made multimillionaire who owned two shipping companies and a number of sugar refineries and factories in the Kiev region. The younger Margolin was as well connected as any Jew in the city. He was someone who could marshal the support of Kiev’s Jewish grandees.

In explaining Mendel’s predicament to Margolin, Aaron likely communicated his somewhat condescending attitude toward his brother. He did not appreciate Mendel’s simple virtues. To Aaron, his brother was a person without much initiative, someone “who had always worked for others.” He more than once implied that Mendel had been taken advantage of by the Zaitsevs who, he felt, paid him poorly. Aaron was agitated. The main thing he wanted Margolin to know was that his brother was a simple man with little education who did not know his rights. He and Esther wanted action to speed Mendel’s release from prison.

Margolin did his best to calm them down. He shared the prevailing belief in Kiev’s elite circles that, despite the unpleasantness of the prime minister’s assassination by a Jew, the Yushchinsky matter would be cleared up in a few days and Mendel Beilis would soon be released. He sincerely could not believe that the regime would go forward with a trial for ritual murder. He also explained to Aaron and Esther that, at this point, there was little of a practical nature he could do. Under the Russian justice system, a defense lawyer had no role until the preliminary investigation was concluded, the indictment handed down, and the defendant bound over for trial.

Margolin did not share with Esther and Aaron that he still had some small concern that this strange case would go forward. In any event, he was not one for complacency. Beilis’s release could not be taken for granted and he set about organizing a defense, in the unlikely event that one should become necessary. He arranged a meeting with Vasily Fenenko, the investigating magistrate, whom he knew quite well. Fenenko was eager to talk, and what he told Margolin was at once reassuring and worrisome. Fenenko wanted it known that he believed Beilis to be innocent, and he asked Margolin to inform Jewish leaders privately of his view of the case. It was a matter of his honor, the magistrate implied. “The evidence against Beilis is laughable and absurd,” Fenenko emphatically told Margolin, according to the latter’s memoir. “I am convinced he will be released within a few days.” He told the defense attorney that he believed the murder was the work of a gang of professional thieves. Fenenko, reasonable man that he was, still could not believe the case would go forward.

Margolin found it troubling that Beilis had been arrested over Fenenko’s extreme objections. He quickly secured the consent of Kiev’s Jewish leaders to form a defense committee. Members included Rabbi Shlomo Ha-Cohen Aronson, Kiev’s leading “spiritual rabbi” (as opposed to the official “crown rabbi” whose salary was paid by the state); Mark Zaitsev, the son of Jonah Zaitsev, founder of the family’s sugar refining business; Dr. G. B. Bykhovsky, the senior physician of the Zaitsev hospital; and three lawyers, including Margolin. One of the committee’s first actions was to send a telegram to Russia’s leading Jewish defense attorney, Oskar Gruzenberg, asking him to come to Kiev as soon as possible. Gruzenberg was best known for his political cases. He had defended the revolutionary Leon Trotsky, a leader of the 1905 revolution (he was sentenced to internal exile, from which he easily escaped) and represented the writer Maxim Gorky when he was accused of inciting armed insurrection. Among his fellow attorneys, he was greatly respected for his courtroom skills in appeals cases, which required the most airtight arguments based on fine points of the law. For this new case, he had unmatched practical experience, having successfully defended the Vilna barber David Blondes, who had been accused of attempted ritual murder a decade earlier. Gruzenberg came to Kiev and met with the defense committee to discuss a course of action should Beilis be formally charged with murder. In the following weeks, in the fall of 1911, he traveled to Kiev periodically to consult on the case.

Gruzenberg and Margolin respected each other greatly but had a fundamental difference from the beginning over how to proceed. Margolin was chronically frustrated by what he regarded as the passivity of Jewish leaders in the face of threats from outside. They “were very honorable men,” he later wrote in his memoir, “but rather indecisive and timid whenever it was a question of showing some initiative in defending Jewish interests” against tsarist acts of repression. Margolin favored an active defense on all fronts—in public and behind the scenes. Gruzenberg, on the other hand, was confident that, if worse came to worst, no jury would convict a defendant, even a Jew, based on such preposterous evidence as existed. “In truth,” Gruzenberg later wrote in his own memoirs, “I was most concerned about the Jews doing something foolish.” In his book he refrained from mentioning his colleague’s name, but when it came to foolishness that could wreck the defense, it was Margolin who most worried him.

The deep differences between Gruzenberg and Margolin over the case may have stemmed from their different backgrounds and relationships toward their Jewishness. Gruzenberg was as Russified as a Jew could be without actually converting to Russian Orthodoxy. A decade older than Margolin, he was born in 1866 in the Ukrainian city of Ekaterinoslav (now Dniepropetrovsk) but grew up in Kiev before moving to St. Petersburg to practice law. He had an intense and lifelong love of the Russian language and culture. (The opening line of his memoirs, written decades after the trial: “The first word that reached my consciousness was Russian.”) He had no comparable affection for Jewish culture. Gruzenberg’s father, a well-to-do merchant, had been an ardent follower of the Haskalah, or movement for Jewish enlightenment, that sought to modernize Judaism and Jewish life. The son could not speak Yiddish and had little religious education. But his father also enjoined him never to abandon his Jewish heritage. By adulthood, the mixed imperative had left Gruzenberg spiritually stranded, conflicted, and bereft of a sense of belonging. He did not feel a connection to the Jewish people and expressed antipathy to religiosity in general, disliking its “theatrical character.”

It would take two traumatic experiences to awaken Gruzenberg’s sense of obligation to the Jewish people. When he was a student in Kiev, his home was raided in the middle of the night by policemen looking for Jews living in the city illegally, without residence permits. By the time of the raid, his father had died, the family had run out of money, and his mother was living in his household. Gruzenberg’s papers were in order, but his mother’s were not, or so the police insisted. The poor woman was led off to the police station and spent a night in jail. Gruzenberg managed to obtain her release and avert her deportation to the Pale of Settlement thanks only to the intervention of a wealthy acquaintance.

The incident ingrained in Gruzenberg a determination to fight autocratic tyranny—but it took the funeral of his first child, who died in infancy, to bring him to a feeling of special responsibility toward his people. Years later he still recalled with distaste the pious Jews, his supposed brethren, who descended on his home after his son’s death and took possession of the body. “Strangers,” he called them, “wearing long sidelocks and dressed in long robes, dirty with grease.” He found these men, and the ritual they imposed on him and on his son’s body, unnerving and almost grotesque. Yet, to his confusion, he was struck with a profound sense that these men had a claim on him that could not be denied. “Along with my child,” he wrote, “they had also taken my soul.” He asked himself why it was he felt these religious men had a claim on him. He began to read books about Judaism and at first decided that while the Jews have suffered, so have all peoples. He considered himself to be an enlightened man, above national feeling, but then found himself asking whether such an attitude was not a kind of egoism. In this moment of self-examination he came to understand a simple truth: Jews needed to help their fellow Jews. If they did not, then very likely no one else would, and they would be lost.

Margolin, too, struggled with his religious and national identity. He later summed up his early years: “Jewish background and synagogue; Russian [native] language and school; Ukrainian village and song … I was tossing in pain for a long time, trying to find a synthesis of these impressions and feelings.” But Margolin’s father—who, like Gruzenberg’s, was one of the maskilim, adherents of the Haskalah—more successfully balanced enlightenment and religion. The son attended a Russian gymnasium, but the household was strictly observant; Margolin studied Hebrew and at the age of thirteen read from the Torah in his synagogue as a bar mitzvah. At the same time his affection for his city and for Ukraine ran deep. “I loved my native city Kiev, from my earliest days,” he recalled, “loved the Dnieper, the Ukrainian village with its housetops of straw, the cherry trees, and the golden yellow fields of the country.” By adulthood he had resolved his inner contradictions, and his various cultural attachments lived in harmony. Unlike Gruzenberg, he was entirely comfortable in his modern Jewishness. Though a thoroughly secular man, he maintained a lifelong affection for his religion, the sight of any synagogue always stirring in him a deep feeling of connection.

No one could say that Gruzenberg did not fight for Jewish rights, but he did so strictly within the conventional bounds of his profession. His weapon was his mastery, as he put it, of “the iron whip of the law.” Margolin, on the other hand, was by nature an activist. Law was just one weapon in his arsenal. He was coming to the conclusion that Mendel Beilis needed more than an ordinary defense. It was not enough to show that the defendant was not the culprit. “It was necessary,” he later explained, “to respond to the prosecution not with a defense, but with an offensive.” Margolin decided he must turn detective and find the real killers.

Vera Cheberyak did not know of Margolin’s plan, but she had reason enough to feel cornered. The sneering references to her in the pro-Beilis press had not abated; her name had become a byword for villainy. (“Vera Cheberyak, a woman of a certain reputation,” the Kievan referred to her with delicate scorn.) Now that her gang was mostly in jail or under police surveillance, she had been deprived of her capacity to intimidate. People were willing to testify against her. She was under investigation for at least four crimes, including robbery, fencing stolen goods, and fraud, and she was fearful that her friends—if they ever truly were her friends—would go to the police and inform on her about more of her crimes. When she learned that an acquaintance was going to be questioned by the police, she tested the woman’s reliability in an unusual way. She took her to a store and asked her to pick out a pair of gloves. Then she asked her: “If I took those gloves, if I stole them, would you tell on me?” The woman said no, she wouldn’t. “And if they beat you?” Cheberyak asked. The woman admitted that then, yes, she might. “You,” Cheberyak told her, “are a bad friend.”

Above all, Cheberyak was concerned that some way would be found to tie her to Andrei’s murder. Of some comfort was the fact that her archenemy, Nikolai Krasovsky, was gone from the scene. His temporary assignment in Kiev had been allowed to lapse on September 8, and he returned to his post in the city of Khodorkov. Krasovsky did not fight to stay on the case. He did not want to see an innocent man in jail but had lost the heart to deal with the case any longer, having proved all too correct in his original prediction that the case would cause him nothing but trouble. But he was mistaken in believing that his departure from Kiev would bring an end to the intrigues against him. Within a few months he would be drawn into the case again, as he was compelled to struggle for his own freedom as well as that of Mendel Beilis. But for now he savored the relief of returning home to his quiet provincial post.

Krasovsky’s able protégé, Officer Evtikhy Kirichenko, was still on the case in Kiev and actively pursuing Cheberyak. Kirichenko could not get out of his mind the chilling image of Cheberyak possessed by rage and fear at the mention of Andrei’s name as he questioned her dying son, Zhenya. Kirichenko went back over ground that he and Krasovsky had previously covered, reinterviewing people who might spark fresh leads. Within a few weeks he turned up the piece of the case against Cheberyak that had been missing: a witness to the crime.

Or at least a witness of sorts. Zinaida Malitskaya lived directly below Vera Cheberyak at no. 40 Upper Yurkovskaya Street. She and Cheberyak had once been friends, but their relationship had devolved into intense mutual hatred. Kirichenko had witnessed the two women’s antagonism in May when Cheberyak assaulted Malitskaya for taunting her when her home was searched. At the time, he had talked to Malitskaya briefly and she had told him she had something to say about Cheberyak, but she ended up being questioned by another investigator, to whom she only said that Cheberyak was “a dubious person” and that she had little doubt she would end up at hard labor. Kirichenko was nagged by a sense that Malitskaya might know more than she was telling. On November 10, he questioned her again. This time she revealed that, on a morning some days before Andrei’s body was discovered, she had heard suspicious noises overhead. Kirichenko immediately arranged for a formal deposition of her to be taken by Investigator Fenenko.

The layout of Malitskaya’s ground-floor apartment, which adjoined the state liquor store she ran, was exactly the same as that of the Cheberyaks’—a vestibule with a kitchen and a small room on the left, another small room on the right, and a large room at the back. She had no difficulty pinpointing the location of every footstep above her, she said. On the morning in question in March, at around eleven a.m., when her store was empty of customers, she took a moment to step into her apartment. Overhead, she heard Vera’s front door slam and then a few footsteps resound near the door. She claimed she could recognize the footsteps of all the Cheberyaks and she was confident the woman at the door was Vera Cheberyak. Then, she said:

I clearly heard the quick, light steps of a child going from the door of the large room in the direction of the small room on the right side of the vestibule. Then I heard the quick steps of a number of adults going in the direction of the same door [of the small room] where I heard a child’s steps going. At the beginning I clearly heard a child crying, then a child’s squeak, and finally some kind of commotion. I thought then that something unusual and strange had happened in Vera Cheberyak’s apartment.

The steps of the adults around the boy, after they had caught up with him, were clearly audible. The boy’s steps whispered only a brief while on the floor before fading out. She had the impression that a child had been grabbed and something had been done with him, but she had not seen any reason to be especially alarmed. Malitskaya said she then went back to her store and complained to a woman customer about the noise upstairs. The Cheberyaks were always making noise, she said. The woman told her that she saw the children leaving the house earlier, so she thought Malitskaya might get some peace. Malitskaya was puzzled about why, then, she had heard a child upstairs.

Fenenko knew there were problems with Malitskaya as a witness. She hated Cheberyak and fought with her, but then it was hard to find anyone in Lukianovka who knew Cheberyak and had not. She had waited months to come forward with her story. She explained she had been afraid of Cheberyak and guessed the police would eventually figure everything out, but her husband told her she had an obligation to tell what she knew. Her husband, Fyodor, backed up her story, telling Fenenko he had told her weeks earlier to reveal what she had heard. Fenenko went to Cheberyak’s old apartment with another officer and verified that footsteps and muffled voices really could be heard downstairs. Malitskaya seemed credible to Fenenko, which strengthened his conviction that Cheberyak and her gang were behind Andrei’s murder.

Beilis’s path to “the monastery,” cell number nine, had been harrowing, but if the price was being punched in the face, then it was almost worth it. With only fourteen men, the cell was less crowded, his fellows were of a less crude sort, and the living conditions were somewhat better than in cell number five. The sense of menace was gone and Beilis even made a friend. Ivan Kozachenko was a gaunt fellow of thirty with whom he appeared to have quite a bit in common. Kozachenko told Beilis that he, too, was an army veteran and an innocent man, though his alleged crime—robbery and assault—was of a conventional sort. Before he had fallen on hard times, he said, he had for two years been an officer in the Kiev police force’s investigative division. Over the next two months, Beilis and Kozachenko spoke often. Beilis told him of his unbearable anxiety that nothing was being done to gain his freedom. Kozachenko listened sympathetically. If it weren’t for this kind man, Beilis was sure, he would be losing his mind.

Kozachenko had fair hope of an acquittal, which meant Beilis now had someone who might be able to help him on the outside. Kozachenko agreed to contact Beilis’s family if he was released. For now, Kozachenko volunteered to help Beilis smuggle out letters. He knew that one of the guards took letters for a few kopeks and offered to act as a go-between. Beilis could not believe his good fortune and, indeed, should not have believed it: Kozachenko was a police informer.

Kozachenko had been placed in Beilis’s cell at the request of Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Ivanov, deputy chief of the Kiev Gendarmes, who was in charge of the agency’s investigation into the Yushchinsky murder. An acquaintance described Kozachenko as a swindler who would pick your pocket as soon as look at you. But Kozachenko was not an especially successful crook. Before landing in prison he was homeless and went about in tattered clothing, eking out the occasional ruble by selling wild game birds.

Later, not without reason, some observers and historians would assume that from the beginning Ivanov’s intent was to manufacture evidence against Beilis. The truth was more haphazard. Ivanov was, at this point, pursuing the investigation honestly. He did not believe that Beilis was guilty. The planting of an informer might, if anything, have aided in Beilis’s exoneration (though that was not Ivanov’s goal). But this was not how matters worked out. In mid-November, after Kozachenko obtained a slip of paper and a pencil, Beilis dictated a brief note to his wife in his broken Russian while another prisoner wrote it down, correcting the grammatical mistakes. (Presumably Kozachenko demanded the letter be written in Russian, rather than have Beilis write it himself in Yiddish, so that he would know what was in it.) In the note Beilis inquired after Esther’s health and that of the children. Then he asks “whether anyone is doing anything for me” and pleads, “How long will I have to suffer unjustly?”

Kozachenko took the letter to the guard who, after receiving permission from the deputy warden, changed into civilian clothes and delivered it to Esther Beilis. Esther was overjoyed to hear from her husband. She was illiterate so she ran to get a neighbor to have the note read to her and to dictate a letter in response. She gave it to the prison guard along with fifty kopeks for his trouble. The deputy warden deposited the fifty kopeks in a collection box for the prisoners, examined Esther’s letter, and gave the guard permission to give it to Beilis. The guard handed it to Kozachenko who, no doubt desiring to keep his “friend” in a state of nervousness, did not pass it on to him.

Having received no response, Beilis sank into despair. (If he had gotten Esther’s brief note, it would not have brought him much comfort. She said nothing about any efforts to help him. “Do not worry,” she wrote, “God will provide and you will be freed. God knows the truth that you are in prison for no reason.”) By November 22, the four-month anniversary of his arrest, he had not received a single communication from anyone in the outside world. But Beilis still felt hopeful because Kozachenko had been acquitted and was about to be released. Beilis hastened to dictate another letter, a longer one, this time transcribed by a helpful nobleman who had been jailed on fraud charges. The letter read:

My dear wife, the person who will give you this note served in prison with me … I ask you to welcome him as one of our own. If it weren’t for him I would have been lost long ago. Do not be afraid of this man, he can help you a great deal in my case. Tell him who is testifying falsely against me. Go with him to Mr. Dubovik [the factory manager]. Why is no one doing anything to help me?…I’ve been suffering here for four months, and it is clear no one is doing anything. Everyone knows I am here unjustly as if I am a thief or a murderer. Everyone knows I am an honest person … I feel that I cannot endure it anymore if I have to stay in prison any longer. If this man asks you for any money, give him some for expenses … Is anyone doing anything to get me out on bail? These enemies of mine who testify falsely against me are getting revenge on me because I didn’t give them firewood … All the best to you and the children.

Kozachenko asked Beilis to sign the letter himself and write a few words to make it clear the letter was from him. Taking the pencil, Beilis squeezed in at the bottom of the page a postscript in his ungrammatical Russian: “I am Mendel Beilis don’t worries you can depends on this person as on me.” Beilis read over the letter several times before turning it over to Kozachenko who folded it, wrapped it in a handkerchief, and placed it in a side pocket of his jacket. When it was time for Kozachenko to go, Beilis started crying and pleaded with him to “do something” to help get him out of prison. Kozachenko promised that he would and told him not to worry, that in two or three weeks he would be free.

Kozachenko had no intention of turning over this letter to the authorities, likely because he was hoping to extract money from the Beilis family for his supposed assistance. Desperate to secure his help, Beilis, according to a cellmate’s later testimony, had impulsively offered to pay his friend’s hundred-ruble legal bill. Being an independent con man was looking to be more lucrative than being a police informer. But as Kozachenko was being processed for release, a guard asked him if he was taking any notes from prisoners. He told Kozachenko he would frisk him, so there was no point in hiding anything. As Kozachenko reached into his pocket and turned over the letter, his imagination began working.

Why Kozachenko did what he did next is not entirely clear. He liked to make up stories and was a convincing liar; even the criminals in cell number nine believed him when he said he had been a policeman. He may have been afraid that attempting to smuggle out the letter would get him into trouble, so to turn the situation to his advantage he would say what he thought the authorities wanted him to say. Moreover, he was of a type that Beilis in fact would encounter fairly rarely in prison: a visceral Jew-hater. A longtime acquaintance later recalled going on a walk a few years earlier with a very drunk Kozachenko in their home village when they came upon a Jewish wedding where children were running around. Kozachenko started hitting them. Then he started going after the adults, threatening that the Christian villagers would soon “stir up a riot against them.” Both fear and hatred must have swirled in his mind as his way to the prison exit was blocked and he was led off to explain the presence of the contraband letter.

By the time he reached the warden’s office Kozachenko had concocted the core of his story. The missive might seem harmless, he explained, but it was in fact a letter of introduction to the Jewish cabal whose mission was to obstruct the investigation. He was then delivered immediately for questioning by Investigator Fenenko. Kozachenko explained how the letter had come to be written and how Beilis had entrusted him to deliver it to his wife. Then he made a horrifying claim: Beilis had enlisted him to poison two witnesses in the case, “the Lamplighter,” Shakhovsky, and a man who went by the nickname of “Frog,” whose name he did not know. “I expressed my agreement,” Kozachenko said, “but, of course, I would not have done that since I don’t want a Yid to drink Russian blood.” Beilis had instructed him to dispatch the two men using vodka laced with strychnine, Kozachenko declared. The strychnine would come from the Jewish Hospital adjoining the factory grounds. He said that Beilis had told him that the Lamplighter had to be eliminated because he had seen him with Andrei Yushchinsky. Beilis had not explained what he had against “Frog.” Kozachenko would initially be given three hundred or four hundred or even five hundred rubles for his expenses, but if he succeeded in his deadly mission, “they would give me money enough to last for my entire life, and the money would be given to me by the entire Jewish nation.”

One part of his wild statement did ring true. Beilis, he said, had told him he was sure “that if he were convicted, then the whole Jewish nation would suffer.” Beilis was indeed coming to understand the larger importance of his case and that the honor of the Jewish people depended on what happened to him and how he conducted himself. It was a thought that would sustain him in prison and, it is no exaggeration to say, save his life. And the first time he expressed it may have been to this false friend.

Kozachenko was then questioned by Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov, who headed the Corps of Gendarmes’ independent investigation into the murder. Ivanov undertook to check the veracity of Kozachenko’s story. He deputized Kozachenko as a “colleague” and sent him out to the Zaitsev factory, where he could present himself as Beilis’s former cellmate and gather information. Ivanov had Kozachenko followed, and he questioned him upon his return from each of his forays. Eventually, Ivanov caught Kozachenko in a clear lie: he had invented a meeting with Aaron Beilis that had not happened. Ivanov brought in the agents who had tailed him and confronted him. “I screamed at Kozachenko,” Ivanov later testified, “and said that I would immediately send him to prison. Kozachenko fell onto his knees, started crying, and said, ‘Forgive me, I made it all up.’ ” In conversations with others about the incident, Ivanov explicitly declared that Kozachenko confessed that his whole story about Beilis had been a fabrication.

Ivanov immediately called Fenenko and told him that Kozachenko’s testimony was false. He asked if he should deliver a report, but the chief prosecutor, Chaplinsky, intervened, saying no report was needed, that everything would be sorted out during the investigation. In fact, Chaplinsky had no intention of disregarding Kozachenko’s accusations. The deposition remained in the record, never formally retracted. This testimony was, of course, as Chaplinsky had said about the alcoholic Shakhovskys’, “not completely firm.” But that was not a serious problem in the mind of the prosecutor. Chaplinsky believed that a solid case could be made out of less-than-firm building blocks if enough of them could be found. It did not matter that one part of the story made no sense—“Frog” (the shoemaker Nakonechny) had given testimony that was favorable to Beilis. He reported to justice minister Shcheglovitov that if the Shakhovskys’ testimony gave sufficient cause for Beilis’s arrest, then Kozachenko’s strengthened the case enough to proceed with the indictment.

Kozachenko was never punished for his perjury, but Beilis suffered severely for trying to smuggle out the letters. Two days after he bade Kozachenko farewell, the door of his cell opened and a guard called his name. Beilis was told to get his things. He felt a surge of hope. Was he finally being freed? Maybe his friend had managed to help him already. “I thought perhaps God Almighty was having mercy,” he recalled, “but wait, it was too good to be true.” Instead, he was summoned to the prison office, where he was confronted with the letters he had written. For the violation of prison rules, he was punished with solitary confinement. His new cell, as he recalled in his lengthy interview after the trial in the Yiddish newspaper Haynt, was “simply a grave for living people,” dark, cold, and totally bare:

A cold shiver ran through me. I began to walk around, back and forth—in order to warm up a little. But it did not help. I felt the tips of my fingers freezing. What saved me a little was only the small lamp which stood on the iron-forged table, with which I warmed my hands the entire night. And just imagine that in such a room, better said a grave, I would have to stay for the entire winter. They did bring me a mattress the next day; however, the cold and darkness were unbearable. I felt just like an animal in a cage. Entire days I paced from one corner to another. I longed for some nice light. I literally climbed the walls and managed to reach the tiny little window which was high up and took a look at the light of the world.

In November, the attorney Arnold Margolin made what small steps he could toward helping Beilis. He had Aaron write a letter to his brother instructing him to file a motion for dismissal of the case and request testimony from expert witnesses—including pathologists and a noted Hebraist—who could refute the case against him. (The authorities never delivered the letter, but it was unlikely that Beilis would have been capable of acting on the advice in any event.) Margolin and Gruzenberg drafted a petition on behalf of Beilis’s wife, Esther, requesting a prompt conclusion to the preliminary investigation. But the investigation dragged on, an indictment grew more likely, and, for Margolin, the need to identify the real killers grew more urgent. The ever-cautious Fenenko, who had already taken an uncharacteristic risk by secretly talking to Margolin, could offer no concrete assistance. Margolin knew he had to venture somehow into the criminal underworld. But he was stymied about finding a way in.

The attorney’s unlikely entrée to the criminal lower depths appeared in the somewhat absurd figure of a journalist named Stepan Brazul-Brushkovsky. For some weeks Brazul (as he was usually called) had been conducting his own private investigation into the Yushchinsky murder. He was, in a way, the mirror image of the young right-wing leader Vladimir Golubev, who had first proposed Mendel Beilis as a suspect. Brazul, too, was an amateur for whom the case had become an obsession. His colleagues at Kiev Opinion mocked him for it. But he was a liberal and, being married to a Jewish woman, quite literally a philo-Semite. As a journalist, he was a journeyman of modest reputation. As a detective, he was inept and laughably gullible. But his investigation would improbably, even farcically, lurch toward revealing a plausible scenario for Andrei’s murder.

Brazul knew Krasovsky from his days as Kiev’s chief detective. He had approached him over the summer and tried to persuade him they should work together on the Yushchinsky case, but Krasovsky was, not surprisingly, uninterested. They remained in touch, however, and Krasovsky confided to Brazul his frustration at the arrest of an innocent man. He could not share any specific information, but he gave Brazul one piece of advice. “I’ll put it simply,” he told him. “The whole case, the whole riddle lies with Vera Cheberyak. Focus yourself on Vera Cheberyak, and the case will be cracked.” Brazul, who could be dense, apparently failed to understand what Krasovsky was trying to tell him: that he believed Cheberyak was behind the crime. Brazul understood him to mean only that Cheberyak had useful information. Still, on that assumption, he began to focus on her with single-minded intensity.

Brazul took the opportunity to introduce himself to Cheberyak at Zhenya’s funeral and express his condolences. When the young journalist contacted Cheberyak again sometime in mid-September, she did not know quite what to make of him—or how to take advantage of him. That would take time to figure out. Meanwhile, she accepted his invitations to go out to eat and drink with his friends, which would at least allow her to enjoy some fine free meals. As they met over the next few weeks, she talked a great deal about her dead children, who she was sure had been poisoned by someone. Her husband had been let go from his job at the telegraph office, and she had to work, picking up the odd client as a midwife and “healer.” (She had taken some classes in midwifery as a young woman but never completed the course.) The rest of her time was taken up by the endless summonings of investigators. She was being persecuted, she said, by Fenenko and Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov, who unjustly suspected her of involvement in Andrei’s murder. She complained of feeling hounded and harassed. She was exhausted. “I’m a woman,” she told him. “I have a little girl, I need to be home.” Blind to her scheming nature, Brazul may have been unduly moved by her plight.

For two months, Cheberyak continued to deny her involvement in the crime and said nothing of what she might know about who had killed Andrei. Then, on November 29, according to Brazul, she told him that, while she didn’t know who the culprit was, she was in a position to find out. She suggested that there was truth to the original theory that Andrei’s stepfather and uncle had been involved. Brazul believed her. A colleague who joined Brazul for one of these evenings told him bluntly, “This is a woman who always lies. She lies even when she’s telling the truth. And if she’s talking in her sleep, then while she’s talking she probably also lies.” Brazul ignored the warning. He continued to insist Cheberyak was not involved in the crime but could find the killer.

On December 1, Brazul dropped by Vera Cheberyak’s house and was surprised to find her lying in bed, “half dead,” as he recalled, her head wrapped in bandages. “That’s it,” she told him, “yesterday I really got it good.” Cheberyak said that she had been coming home at night when two men assaulted her, one of them beating her with an iron “chocolate bar.” (Cheberyak’s speech was always peppered with criminal slang.) Bandaged and bloody, she now revealed to Brazul what she said were her true suspicions regarding who had killed Andrei. The night that she was ambushed, it had been too dark for her to see her attackers, but she was sure that one of them had been Pavel Mifle, the lover she had blinded six years earlier by throwing sulfuric acid in his face. She was certain he had organized the vicious assault because he knew that she was trying to find out who had killed Andrei. Cheberyak said she had told Mifle she was going out to buy candles that she would use to divine the murderer’s identity—the villain’s face, she told him, would appear before her in the candles’ glow. Upon hearing that, she claimed Mifle said, “Don’t you start divining.” Mifle had to have been involved in Andrei’s murder, she claimed to Brazul, along with Andrei’s stepfather, Luka, and others, including Mifle’s brother and mother, but she explained that she had to go to a prison in the city of Kharkov to talk to a convict who had more information. To Brazul, this all made perfect sense.

Brazul felt he was in possession of valuable, sensational information. As it happened, he also knew Margolin well. They had worked together at two of Kiev’s progressive newspapers. Margolin regarded Brazul with a mixture of admiration and condescension, remarking that “his work was notable for its quixotic character, in the best sense of the term.” When his friend told him that he was on the trail of Andrei’s killer, Margolin was skeptical. Brazul was honest and well intentioned, but he was no detective. So Margolin at first refused when Brazul suggested setting up a meeting with Cheberyak, but Margolin did visit Fenenko to share what Brazul had told him. “No sooner than I had mentioned the name of Cheberyak,” Margolin recalled, “than Fenenko repeated literally the same words I had heard from [Brazul]: ‘Cheberyak knows everything about this case.’ ” Fenenko was still tight-lipped about specifics, but Margolin correctly understood that he meant Cheberyak was not just a witness who “knew” things but rather was an accomplice to the crime.

Fenenko’s office was in the building of the Kiev Circuit Court and Margolin had some other business to take care of at the court that day, December 3. As he passed Fenenko’s office again, someone pointed out “a small, thin restless figure” waiting to be interrogated. It was Vera Cheberyak. “The upper portion of her head and one eye were bandaged,” Margolin recalled in his memoir of the case. “It was sufficient, however, to see only that one eye to gain an idea that she was a dangerous woman. She was casting feverish, hateful looks in every direction, scrutinizing everybody suspiciously.” Margolin, like so many people who crossed Cheberyak’s path, appears to have been overwhelmed at the mere sight of her, by the malevolence her physical presence conveyed. Margolin had not intended to get personally involved in the investigation. In the event that Beilis was indicted, he would be one of the defendant’s attorneys, so it would only be prudent to keep his distance from potential witnesses. But now his fascination with Cheberyak was beginning to overpower his caution.

The next day Margolin told Brazul that he would meet with Cheberyak, though only if measures were taken to protect his identity. As it happened, he was going on business to Kharkov, about three hundred miles east of Kiev, and could meet with Cheberyak there. Margolin later claimed, unconvincingly, that he merely wanted to avoid having Cheberyak find him in Kiev and pester him, but he must have known that what he was about to do carried tremendous risks: it could lead to the unmasking of Andrei’s killers and exonerate Beilis. Or it could end in catastrophe for the defense, lending credence to the idea that cunning Jews were secretly conniving to pin the case on a Christian woman.

Kiev’s Jewish leaders maintained their wariness, as Fenenko found when he officially deposed Margolin’s father, David, who was the vice chairman of a group known as the Representation for Jewish Welfare of the Kiev Executive Authority. (The very name of this body, as cumbersome in Russian as it is in English, suggested that Jews were an alien presence, requiring something in the nature of a foreign mission to their own government. Indeed, Jews were officially classified by the regime as an “alien” people.) Rumors had apparently reached the authorities that certain Jews might be meddling in the case. Fenenko, almost certainly on orders from above, questioned the elder Margolin about whether this allegation had any basis in fact. The industrialist, in all sincerity, assured Fenenko that no such unofficial investigation was being conducted and that he himself would oppose such an effort because the matter was the responsibility of the proper authorities. But Fenenko himself had by this time lost faith in the authorities, felt powerless to resolve the cases, and was, in fact, encouraging the elder Margolin’s son to do whatever he could to push the investigation forward and prevent an innocent man from being indicted.

Arnold Margolin arrived in Kharkov by express train on December 7 and checked into a suite at the luxurious Grand Hotel where he presented his internal passport, which all citizens needed for travel, copying down the requisite information in the register, including that he was “of the Jewish faith.” Brazul arrived on a different train with Cheberyak, having treated her to a first-class compartment, and secured her a room in the somewhat less-grand Hotel Hermitage. Accompanying them was a former police officer, Alexei Vygranov, disguised in a university student’s uniform, who had been Krasovsky’s assistant and was now helping Brazul with his investigation.

Margolin was given to mocking Brazul’s pretensions to be a detective, but his own efforts to conceal his identity were remarkably clumsy. He received Cheberyak in his own rooms at a hotel where he had registered under his own name. Brazul presented the esteemed gentleman to Cheberyak as a member of the Kharkov city Duma, failing to explain why a resident of the city would be staying in a hotel.

The meeting lasted a little less than an hour. Cheberyak, according to Margolin, immediately took charge of the conversation. She removed her bandage, displaying to all the gash on her head, and claimed she had been beaten by Pavel Mifle, who had poisoned her children, and declared her determination to get revenge on him. (Her story varied—she had also told Brazul that Mifle’s mother, Maria, had poisoned the children.) She presented herself, in Margolin’s words, as a “noble avenger,” declaring, “I am prepared to let myself perish but I will destroy Mifle.” She repeated what Margolin had already heard from Brazul—that Andrei had been killed by his stepfather, his uncle, Mifle, and others, and that she was planning to meet with a prisoner in Kharkov who had more information about the crime.

On their return to Kiev, Margolin and Brazul compared their impressions. Brazul believed that Cheberyak’s story, if not entirely true, had a great deal of truth in it. True, she never met with her supposed informant in Kharkov, about whom she had been frustratingly vague, but that did not necessarily undermine her story. Margolin, on the other hand, was emphatic in his conviction that Cheberyak’s story was a total lie. He came away from the Kharkov trip confident that Cheberyak had been directly involved in Andrei’s murder. Cheberyak, he felt, had the demeanor of “a person who was being hunted, who sensed danger” because investigators were on her trail. But in concocting a convoluted lie, had Vera Cheberyak possibly let slip part of the truth about Andrei’s murder? During their meeting, Margolin had mostly kept his silence, but he did probe Cheberyak about the supposed motive behind Andrei’s death. Why, he asked, had Andrei been killed? Andrei, Cheberyak claimed, had been eliminated by Mifle’s villainous “gang of thieves.” But why, Margolin pressed. Because, she said, the boy knew what they were up to: he was a “dangerous witness.”

During a visit to Kiev around this time, Gruzenberg got wind of Margolin’s involvement with Brazul and was greatly displeased. He told Margolin that he was taking unnecessary risks. “Why place our untarnished case in jeopardy?” he argued. The accusers lacked credible evidence. They “would welcome the opportunity” Margolin was affording them to declare that the witnesses for the defense were tainted and their testimony the product of a Jewish lawyer’s conspiracy. The trial would not settle their argument. Decades later Margolin would still be insisting that his “offensive” tactics had been a boon to the defense, while Gruzenberg continued to maintain that the consequences of the amateurish investigation had been disastrous.

What is indisputable is that the courtroom confrontation between Arnold Margolin and Vera Cheberyak would become a sensational highlight of the trial. Cheberyak, of course, could not have known that the clandestine meeting in Kharkov would lead to a headline-making moment around the world some two years hence. But before she returned to Kiev, she had taken steps toward turning the secret trip to her advantage. She was not going to give the important gentleman she had met any chance to deny their encounter. She removed a poster from the wall of her Kharkov hotel room and wrote her name on the wallpaper. She also mailed a postcard to her husband to prove the date she had been there. The rare missive to Vasily Cheberyak from his despised and dreaded wife read, “Thank God, everything is fine.”

Toward the end of December, it became clear to a despairing Fenenko that he had failed to thwart the effort to indict Beilis for the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky. He had been confident that, in the course of his investigation, the absurdity of the charges would become so overwhelmingly self-evident that the case would be dropped. But now Chaplinsky stepped up the pressure on him to declare his investigation complete, a legal requirement before an indictment could be drafted. The prosecutor undoubtedly desired to start off the new year with a case that would gain him national renown.

Chaplinsky, however, was still concerned by the scantiness of the evidence, which he himself had more than once admitted was “not completely firm.” More evidence quickly had to be found—or fabricated. To this end, there now emerged the strange partnership that would shape the entire case. Grigory Chaplinsky, chief prosecutor of the Kiev Judicial Chamber, would work in concert with Vera Cheberyak, the terror of Lukianovka and leading suspect in Andrei’s murder. Later they would meet and conspire. At this point, though, the collaboration was unspoken, arising naturally to fulfill the needs of the ambitious official and the criminal sociopath. In these days, the week before Christmas 1911, each of them executed a separate and mutually reinforcing plan to firm up the case.

On December 20, Vera Cheberyak sent off her hapless husband, Vasily, to Investigator Fenenko with a new story to tell. Vasily was now completely in Cheberyak’s thrall. He would do whatever she wanted. Just a few months earlier he had longed to see her arrested. Now he was prepared to relate whatever lies she instructed him to tell in order to deflect suspicion away from her.

As he sat down in front of the investigator, Vasily did not rush to tell his new story. He was of noble stock and, though poorly paid (46 rubles 50 kopeks a month), he was proud of being a civil servant, which gave him elevated standing among the meaner denizens of Lukianovka. His self-esteem, dependent on such minuscule differences in status, was in need of shoring up. Even with Zhenya and Andrei in their graves, it was important to him to express his disdain for his son’s friend. His Zhenya, he said, had indeed played regularly with Andrei Yushchinsky, but the friendship, he wanted it known, was “a state of affairs that I did not like at all.” Andrei’s family were “simple people,” he explained, “and I did not want my boy to go around with that kind of boy.” Having made sure to place his dead son on a higher plane than the boy’s dead friend, he proceeded to recount the tale his wife had given him.

In the preceding nine months, questioned repeatedly by investigators, none of the Cheberyaks—not Vasily, not Vera, not any of their three children—had mentioned Mendel Beilis. Now, however, Vasily made a dramatic claim. Several days before the discovery of Andrei’s body, he said,

Zhenya came running into the apartment … and he told me that he had been playing with Andrusha Yushchinsky on the clay grinder in the Zaitsev brick factory and that Mendel Beilis had seen them there and chased after them.

Mendel Beilis’s sons, he said, were standing nearby, laughing. Zhenya, in this new account, did not say he saw what happened to Andrei but, thanks to Vasily Cheberyak’s new assertion, the prosecution would now be able to argue that while Zhenya had escaped the clutches of the Jew, Andrei had not. Chaplinsky could feel relieved that he at last had a relatively respectable-looking witness who ensnared Beilis in a story that put him under suspicion.

Chaplinsky still faced a nagging problem in the autopsy reports, which lent little support to the ritual-murder theory. The first autopsy, performed by the city coroner, A. M. Karpinsky, failed to confirm the ritual-murder scenario in any way; its results were consistent with a brutal, senseless murder. A report on the second autopsy, which was delivered on April 25, found that the primary cause of death was “the body’s almost complete exsanguination,” or loss of blood (a dubious conclusion, as noted earlier, likely reflecting pressure from Chaplinsky, and one that would be vigorously contested by the defense). Still, in the report there was no definitive confirmation that the goal of the crime had been to drain the body of blood.

Fenenko was almost surely ordered by Chaplinsky to bring in for questioning Dr. Nikolai Obolonsky and the anatomist N. N. Tufanov, who had performed the second autopsy. Fenenko was compelled to ask both men an entirely unwarranted and speculative question: “If blood was extracted from Yushchinsky’s body, from what wounds would it have been most convenient to gather it?” On December 23, the specialists obliged by responding: “Given that the most profuse bleeding was in the left temple region … and also from the right side of the neck … one must assume that it would have been most convenient to collect blood from Yushchinsky’s body from these wounds, if blood actually was collected.” This was rather flimsy stuff, but better than nothing. At least the experts had been coaxed into considering the draining of blood as if it were a possible scenario.

The year closed with an event that would change the course of case. On December 31, 1911, Nikolai Krasovsky found himself disgraced, when he was suddenly and summarily dismissed from his position for supposed misconduct as a police official in Khodorkov. Some years earlier, it was alleged, he had detained a peasant named Kovbasa without sufficient cause. (Suddenly the tsarist authorities were getting finicky about improper detentions.) Krasovsky’s enemies had not been content to let the detective quietly resume his former life; the officials fomenting the blood accusation had decided to exact their revenge, stripping him of his livelihood and reputation. Yet as acts of revenge go, this one was remarkably counterproductive. Krasovsky previously had no intention of resuming his involvement in the most frustrating case of his career, but he now felt himself compelled to do so. He set about planning his return to Kiev to reclaim his good name by proving the case against Andrei’s killers.