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

7

“Who Is a Hero?”

For Mendel Beilis the new year got off to a promising, if painful, start. On January 4, 1912, in his seventh week of solitary confinement, a guard opened the door and told him to get ready to leave his cell. The investigator wanted to see him. They were taking him to the courthouse.

Kiev was in the midst of a brutal cold spell, and during Beilis’s long walk down the city’s streets in tattered shoes with holes in the soles, his already badly ulcerated feet became frostbitten. He limped into Vasily Fenenko’s office in terrible pain but was elated to learn why he had been summoned: the investigation, Fenenko told him, was nearly complete. Beilis himself was the final witness. Upon hearing the news, he thanked God that his ordeal might soon be coming to an end. Five months earlier Fenenko had, with such heartfelt sorrow, sent him to prison, but assured him that his investigation would reveal the truth. Now Beilis was filled with hope. He understood that charging him, of all people, with “ritual” murder made no sense at all. “I am a completely unreligious Jew,” he told Fenenko in his brief deposition. “I always work on Saturdays … I only go to Synagogue once a year, on the Day of Atonement.” Regarding the one new substantive claim against him, he formally denied that he had ever told his former cellmate Kozachenko to poison any witnesses. Then he was led away on the long, agonizing walk back to the prison, returning to his cell, he later remembered, “with frozen feet … and a happy heart.”

Fenenko, though, was appalled that the end of his investigation had resulted not in the dropping of the case but in Beilis’s imminent indictment. The day after their meeting, he signed the final page of the sheaf of depositions and reports and sent it off to the prosecutor’s office. No rational or honest prosecutor would indict a man based on the material contained in those pages, but by now Fenenko knew he had lost his battle against the fomenters of the blood accusation and had no choice but to let the machine of the criminal justice system grind into its next gear. Beilis, however, was simply happy that the process had finally moved on to the next step.

When he returned to his cell Beilis removed his shoes and saw that his feet were badly swollen. He showed them to a guard, who told him to just wait until they got better, but his feet got worse by the minute. Finally, another guard barked at him to get up and hurry to the infirmary, in another building. But Beilis could not walk. The guard, annoyed, just kept shouting, “Move on!” Beilis was paralyzed by pain. Finally a prisoner found some rags and bound them around his knees: Beilis crawled on them across the snow and ice to the infirmary. There he was welcomed to a kind of heaven. A compassionate physician’s assistant gave him his first real bath in months and prepared a bed with fresh linens. Beilis slept thirty-six hours straight.

He awoke, unfortunately, to the ministrations of someone far less kind. Mendel Beilis would meet relatively few aggressive anti-Semites during his years in prison, but the doctor who operated on his feet was one of them. “Well, now you know for yourself what it feels like to be cut up,” the physician said as he punctured and drained the sores in what seemed to Beilis an intentionally leisurely fashion. “You can imagine how Andrusha felt when you were stabbing him and drawing his blood.” After the excruciating procedure, Beilis remained in the relative bliss of the infirmary for several days, but he was released before his feet were fully healed. Apparently an important person was coming from St. Petersburg to inspect the facility and it would not do to present the most infamous prisoner in the empire laid up in bed with bad feet.

On January 10, Beilis’s attorney, Arnold Margolin, received word from his sources that his client was to be indicted for the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky. Margolin believed that the defense had to launch an offensive against the prosecution’s case immediately—do anything possible to undermine or perhaps even forestall the indictment. But Kiev’s Jewish leaders were unwilling to take any action other than to print up some academic tracts arguing against claims of Jewish ritual murder. Margolin felt frustration and contempt for these timid men, so fearful of being accused of “meddling” or “provoking” the regime that they would do nothing to stop a case that threatened every Jew in the empire. “Under the circumstances,” Margolin wrote in his memoir of the case, “inactivity seemed to me to be nothing less than criminal.” With a certain arrogance, but not without justification, he complained that any necessary measures “involving not only real but merely imaginary personal risk were graciously left exclusively to myself.”

But what action could Margolin take? The young attorney had to admit that the available ammunition for an offensive was meager. He resorted to the only weapon he had: his bumbling journalist friend Stepan Brazul-Brushkovsky. Margolin encouraged Brazul to go to the authorities with his theory of the case, based on what Vera Cheberyak had told him, implicating her blinded former lover, Pavel Mifle, and others in Andrei’s murder. Margolin was certain that Brazul’s theory was wrong. Cheberyak, he believed, was not merely a helpful source, as Brazul thought, but was complicit in the crime. No matter. In deploying Brazul, he felt he was at least drawing attention to Cheberyak, with the potential result that someone would get spooked, something would shake loose, and the real killers would be revealed.

On January 18, Brazul submitted an affidavit to Investigator Fenenko and went public in the newspapers with his account of Vera Cheberyak’s accusation that Andrei had been killed by a “gang of thieves” that included Mifle, Andrei’s stepfather, his uncle Fyodor, and others, to keep him quiet about their supposed crimes. Brazul’s scenario seemed absurd to everyone but him and did nothing to slow down the process of indicting Beilis. But the blank shot did have an immediate effect of some consequence: it unleashed a mother’s rage. When Maria Mifle heard that that the woman who had maimed her son now dared to accuse him of murdering a child, she was determined to get revenge. She had information that could put Vera Cheberyak behind bars, and now she was going to use it.

Maria Mifle’s son Pavel had recently shared a secret with her. When his former paramour was escorting him to the French consulate to receive his invalid’s pension, he noticed she was taking a roundabout route. When he asked why, she confessed it had to do with the near disaster the previous March, when she had been arrested for selling a stolen watch and chain to a store and had barely managed to flee the police precinct after giving a false name. Fearful she would be recognized, she made sure to give the store a wide berth. Three days after Brazul’s story broke, Maria Mifle went to the police. (Only later did her son agree to testify.) They arrested Cheberyak on January 25 and called in Mrs. Gusin, proprietress of the Gusin watch store, who identified her as the “Mrs. Ivanov” who had sold stolen goods to her. A few weeks earlier, Cheberyak had also been charged with another crime—defrauding her local grocer. Now, for the first time since she had thrown sulfuric acid in Pavel Mifle’s face six years earlier, Vera Cheberyak was in serious danger of going to prison.

Margolin was pleased. Just as he had hoped, Brazul’s story put Cheberyak under the authorities’ further scrutiny. This, he believed, could only be to the good.

Meanwhile, on January 30, Beilis was again roused from his cell for another excruciating walk to the courthouse to receive his formal indictment. Beilis was overjoyed to catch a glimpse of his wife and children, who were in the courtroom—it was the first time in six months he had laid eyes on them, though he was not allowed to speak to them and was taken back to prison without being able to do more than turn his head and wave.

After returning to his cell, he spent entire days intensely studying the document he had been handed. “Menahem Mendel Tevyev Beilis,” he read, “is indicted for entering into an … agreement with other persons unknown to deprive Andrei Yushchinsky of life, and in a torturous manner.” He found the charge understandable enough, though horrible, but many of the words were unfamiliar to him. He knew what a “law” was, but what was an “article”? As Beilis would often say later, prison was a “good school.” Eventually he would feel himself to be quite a zakonnik—or man well versed in law. But he did understand the most important thing: the court had set a trial date—the seventeenth of May. It was a long time to wait, but he started to feel much better. He could count the days now with a sense of purpose. And, more good news, Margolin had arranged for him to have weekly visits with his family.

On February 12, Beilis was led into the visitors’ chamber at the prison and locked into one of its wire cages as his wife, children, and brother Aaron were brought in to see him. The noise and commotion in the large room were so intense that he and Esther could hardly hear each other. He was shocked at her appearance—now that he could see her up close, she appeared years older than when he had last looked in her eyes seven months earlier. They spoke little and could do little more than cry and touch each other’s hands through the small gaps in the wire mesh. Because their conversations were monitored, they were allowed to speak only in Russian, which made communication frustratingly awkward; Esther could barely speak the language and Beilis only imperfectly. Still, seeing his family greatly lifted his spirits. He ate and slept better and felt much healthier. He knew it was important that he maintain his strength as best he could in this hellish place where six or seven convicts a day died of typhoid fever. He viewed every day he survived as a victory.

Now that Beilis was officially an indicted prisoner, his lawyers were finally able to take action on his behalf, filing reams of petitions, motions, and lists of witnesses to be summoned. Margolin visited him in prison and reassured him that everyone knew he was innocent and that the indictment only reinforced that belief. Indeed, the indictment was pathetically feeble and unconvincing, at times even comic in its candor (“[The witness] Ulyana Shakhovskaya recounted her story in a drunken state …”). The document reads more like an exoneration until the point in the narrative where Vasily Cheberyak finally appears with his story of how Zhenya and Andrei were being chased by Beilis the clerk from the Zaitsev brickworks. Then the informer Kozachenko materializes with his tale of the defendant promising him untold Jewish lucre to poison the “Lamplighter” and “Frog.” No mention is made of Kozachenko’s admission to Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov that he had made everything up.

The indictment was most notable for a striking omission: nowhere in it was there a direct accusation of ritual murder. Margolin and his colleagues puzzled over why this might be so. Most likely, they concluded, the prosecution was acting out of strategic considerations; the skeleton, so to speak, of the ritual murder charge was undeniably there. While Professor Sikorsky’s pronouncement about “the revenge of the sons of Jacob” was nowhere mentioned, the indictment did quote his judgment that the crime was marked by “slow blood loss” and “the extraction of blood,” which were referred to together as a “goal” of the crime. Moreover, the indictment, with no pretext, notes Beilis’s role in preparing the Zaitsev family’s matzo and that Beilis’s father had been a pious Hasid. The inclusion of all this material made no sense unless the prosecution was planning to use the blood accusation, if only in an underhanded way. With such a weak case, Margolin guessed, the prosecution had decided that it was better to avoid direct mention of the ritual-murder charge and let the jury, as he put it, “read between the lines.” He was likely correct about the prosecution’s strategy at this point. In fact, in April the court even ruled against allowing expert testimony on Judaism on the grounds that the prosecution was not making religion an issue in the case. Within months, however, the state would change course, deciding to embrace the medieval myth fully and—although it would deny doing so—put the Jewish religion itself on trial.

As the first anniversary of Andrei Yushchinsky’s murder approached, Vladimir Golubev, head of the Kiev right-wing youth group Double Headed Eagle, found himself surprisingly frustrated. He had arguably done more than anyone to create the case against Mendel Beilis, having first brought the name of this Jew to the attention of the authorities. But he had ended up marginalized, his organization under close official supervision, unable to participate actively in the case. Now that Beilis was indicted, he could do little more than fret that the boy-martyr’s death was not being acknowledged with proper solemnity. On the day before the anniversary, as police officers stood close by, a small group of about thirty Black Hundreds gathered at Andrei’s grave. Aside from the chanting of prayers, the gathering was quiet—the authorities had forbidden any speeches for fear of provoking anti-Jewish violence. On March 12, the day of the anniversary, a requiem for Andrei was held at St. Sophia Cathedral without incident. All this left Golubev greatly distressed. The commemorations were perfunctory, he felt; the whole city should have joined in mourning. When he heard that a nationalist organization was holding a ball that very night, he grew enraged. He stalked into the ball, mounted the stage, and began loudly reproaching the dancing couples for enjoying themselves on such a sacred day. The revelers refused to be conscience-stricken and Golubev refused to break off his rant. The police had to be called, and he was escorted from the premises. Little more would be heard of him until Beilis’s trial, when the prosecution would welcome his amateur detective work and febrile rage.

When Margolin told Beilis that everyone believed him to be innocent, he himself had no idea just how right he was. At the upper levels of the empire’s security apparatus, the opinion was unanimous: the defendant was innocent and Tsar Nicholas’s regime was courting political disaster by pursuing the case. Astoundingly, no police official, of either high or low rank, ever even pretended to consider Mendel Beilis seriously as a suspect.

On January 28, two days before the indictment was handed down, Colonel Alexander Shredel, head of the Kiev office of the Corps of Gendarmes, wrote a report to his superior in St. Petersburg, a vice director of the national Department of Police. After dismissing Brazul’s outlandish scenario, Shredel let it be known that his office’s secret investigation “gives a firm basis to propose that the murder of the boy Yushchinsky occurred with the participation of [Vera] Cheberyak” and members of her gang. On February 14, in a follow-up report titled “Personal. Top Secret. Deliver Directly to Recipient’s Hands,” he wrote that in spite of Beilis’s indictment, the Kiev Gendarmes’ investigation was still continuing under the direction of his subordinate, Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov, and was still “chiefly concentrated around … Vera Vladimirovna Cheberyak and criminals directly connected to her.” He named seven of her gang members as suspects. Ivanov’s investigation would soon narrow down the list of perpetrators to three: Vera’s half brother Peter “Plis” (“Velveteen”) Singaevsky, Boris “Borka” Rudzinsky, and Ivan “Red Vanya” Latyshev. The investigation, Shredel declared, was operating on the assumption that Andrei “was the unwilling witness of a criminal act of this gang whom ‘it was necessary to do away with out of fear.’ ” The last phrase was in quotation marks, meaning it was apparently a verbatim quote from testimony by a witness cited in a previous report that has unfortunately been lost. The full range of the testimony on which Ivanov based his judgment will never be known, but it is clear he had little doubt about who the real killers were.

Regarding the strength of the charges against the Jewish prisoner accused of killing Andrei, Shredel made a harsh and strikingly candid judgment. “The indictment of Mendel Beilis,” he wrote, “given the inadequacy of the evidence against him and the widespread interest in this case, which is becoming known throughout almost all of Europe, may occasion a great deal of unpleasant consequences for officials of the judicial branch and completely justified reproaches regarding the conduct of the investigation, the hastiness of the conclusions and even their one-sidedness.” On March 14, along similar lines, he warned: “The … evidence against Beilis, as is now becoming clear, will completely fall away in the course of trial testimony.”

As for the prosecutors (as opposed to police officials), a peculiar episode in the spring of 1912 casts light on their own private doubts about the defendant’s guilt. Among the local Black Hundred leaders offering to assist the prosecution was Grigory Opanasenko, chairman of the Railroad and Cabdrivers’ Division of the Russian National Union of the Archangel Michael, one of the larger far-right organizations. The prosecution paid his theories of the case serious attention, in particular the notion that the draining of Andrei’s blood was achieved with the help of highly insidious “special instruments” peculiar to the Jews. (The theory was, in the end, never adopted.) On April 29, Opanasenko sought out a key member of the prosecution team, A. A. Karbovsky, to inform him of an eerie rumor. “Yushchinsky’s ghost is appearing to the perpetrators of the crime and demands their clothing,” he had heard. “They do not sleep at night and are ready to confess.” Karbovsky, apparently in all seriousness, set about trying to confirm whether Andrei’s restless spirit had been seen calling upon anyone at the witching hour. Opanasenko did not name the haunted men but must have had in mind Beilis and his supposed black-bearded accomplices. But in a striking indication of his personal beliefs about the case, Karbovsky seemed to question everyone about this apparition except Mendel Beilis and, as far as is known, not a single Jew. Most tellingly, he paid a visit to a prison where he queried two members of Vera Cheberyak’s gang doing time there for robbery. One was Ivan Latyshev, whom the Kiev Gendarmes had identified as one of Andrei’s likely killers. Both convicts answered the prosecutor’s strange question in the negative, with Red Vanya declaring: “I have had no alarming dreams and suffer from no hallucinations.”

With the arrival of spring, both Kiev and Beilis’s spirits began to thaw. The poorly heated cell became a little more habitable. He no longer awoke, as he had sometimes, to find his hand frozen to the wall. He was given an occasional cellmate, which relieved his solitude. (One of them, a Russian peasant, was quite a decent fellow who Beilis decided, probably correctly, was not an informant.) Most of all, he was happy about the progress toward his May 17 trial. On April 7 a panel of prospective jurors was selected. When he was summoned a few days later to the prison office for a visit with Margolin, Beilis had no reason to expect any bad news. During their meetings, Margolin invariably said something to make him feel better. “You will be victorious,” he would say, and reassure him that he would not have to wait long. Now, when Beilis casually asked if there was anything new, Margolin got right to the point: the trial was being postponed, with no new date assigned. “I felt like a bullet was shot in my head,” Beilis recalled. “I thought that I would go insane.” He had been counting the days and the hours, and now the clock had stopped.

Margolin explained that an expert had fallen ill and the trial could not begin without him. An “expert”? Beilis had learned what an “investigator,” a “prosecutor,” and a “juror” were, but he was yet not enough of a zakonnik to know what an “expert” was. But he knew it sounded serious. Margolin tried to reassure him that this was a minor setback. The trial would still happen soon. Beilis began to cry and accused Margolin of not wanting to tell him that things were going badly. Margolin tried to calm him down. Professor Sikorsky, a key prosecution witness, had, in fact, taken ill. But Beilis returned to his isolation cell feeling “like a live body in a grave.”

Beilis recalled this as the very lowest moment of his years in prison. Adding to his torment, under the system’s absurd rules, as a prisoner without a trial date, he had his family visitation rights suspended. He was utterly alone again. For the first time he thought of suicide. “ ‘Rather than such a life,’ I thought to myself, ‘Death is better.’ And I certainly would have done it, as these were minutes when life became unbearable.” But as his thoughts darkened, he found unexpected comfort in his identity as a Jew and in the religion that had been a marginal presence in his life since the day he had left for the army some twenty years earlier. He had come to understand that his case was not just about him but about the Jewish people as a whole:

“Well, if this is so,” I said to myself, “then my death will leave a stain on the Jews. Because if I commit suicide, the Jew-haters will certainly say that I myself caused my death because I saw that I am not able to prove my innocence, or that the Jews did it to me in order that the truth would not be exposed.” And this truly did prevent me from taking this terrible step, and gave me strength and courage.

Comforting words from his youth, long dormant, came to him now:

I myself am not a great scholar of Jewish books. But from heder [primary school] I still remembered some verses and words which remained in my memory. I remembered the verse “eyzehu gibor ha’kovesh et yitsro” [Who is a hero? He that conquers his evil inclination]. And this verse constantly floated in front of my eyes when the terrible thought of suicide would arise. “One must be a hero,” I thought to myself, “by restraining the evil inclination and indeed live.”

Drawing on the power of that Talmudic saying, Beilis began to eat and sleep better; maintaining his own well-being was a way to spite his people’s enemies. He resolved to live to see the day when the truth would be revealed.

As Beilis sat alone in his jail cell, murmuring long-forgotten prayers, he could take solace from something else as well. Civilized opinion was rallying to his cause. He was indeed becoming “a second Dreyfus.”

The first mention in the West of Andrei Yushchinky’s murder came from Reuter’s news agency. At the end of April 1911, the agency—with no editorial comment—telegraphed to its subscribers a translation of a sensational article about the case from the Russian far-right press. (A sample: “In bygone days the Chassidim used to crucify their victim, but later they considered it sufficient to drive nails into various parts of his body …”) Credulous editors published the article in a half-dozen provincial newspapers in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and it also served as the basis for a few reports in American papers. The London-based Jewish Chronicle expressed outrage “that an agency of the reputation and standing of Reuter’s should aid in circulating these infamous slanders.” Dr. Herbert Friedenwald, secretary of the American Jewish Committee, accused the Russian government of ginning up the ritual murder charge “as a pretext for starting a pogrom” or, even more insidiously, with the goal of inciting the Russian populace in order to demonstrate that the regime had the power to prevent a pogrom if it so desired. (The speculation was off the mark—even at that early stage of the affair, the regime sought to avert anti-Jewish violence.) Friedenwald declared the case to be another reason to support the committee’s campaign for the abrogation of America’s commercial treaty with Russia.

For well over a year, Friedenwald’s statement was the last of any note by an American public figure about the case. Once news of the accusation against Mendel Beilis seeped into the West, the worldwide protest movement in his defense began not in the United States or Great Britain, but in Germany. The realm of Kaiser Wilhelm II was initially the most hospitable soil for an effort to defend a Russian Jew. France and Great Britain were allies of Russia; together, the three countries constituted the Triple Entente, an alliance whose goal was to counter German power. The French and British foreign ministries avoided any issue that might unnecessarily upset the Russian government. Public opinion in France and Great Britain ran strongly against the kaiser’s regime; to press judgment unduly on Russia exposed a critic to the charge of undermining the entente and being pro-German. W. T. Stead, one of the greatest British journalists of the era, took Jewish anti-Russian activists to task for this very reason. “No one has ever accused me of anti-Semitism,” he wrote in one of his final articles before he boarded the RMS Titanic in April 1912, for a voyage in which he would be one of the 1,514 casualties. “I owe too much to the authors of the Old and New Testaments … I am all the more bound to warn my Jewish friends that they may give dangerous impetus to anti-Semitism if they persist in subordinating the interests of general peace to pursuit of their vendetta with Russia.” Stead, a renowned humanitarian and champion of civil rights, was no reactionary, but as the historian Maurice Samuel acerbically observed, “One cannot help wondering how he saw a vendetta of the Jews against the Russian government rather than the reverse.”

Launching the pro-Beilis movement, then, was a politically complex maneuver. Jewish leaders in Western Europe, much like their Russian counterparts, faced their own sensitive, tactical decisions when it came to defending their brethren. Fortunately, Western European Jews had two remarkable leaders—one German, one British—of superb sophistication in the ways of diplomacy, the press, and public opinion. Dr. Paul Nathan was a philanthropist and head of the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden, or Aid Society of German Jews. Lucien Wolf led the Conjoint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Anglo-Jewish Association. He was also a diplomatic correspondent for leading British newspapers and editor of Darkest Russia, a weekly chronicle of the plight of the Russian Jews. The two men, who were close friends, were sometimes referred to in jest, but not inaccurately, as “the ministers of foreign affairs” of German and British Jewry. No one could accuse Nathan and Wolf of timidity, but they were careful to formulate the pro-Beilis effort as a movement of outraged Gentiles. This was not to be seen as a “Jewish” protest. They solicited no Jews to sign the open letters they organized.

The public advocacy for Beilis took off following Beilis’s indictment in the spring of 1912. Nathan launched the effort, coordinating the first open letter, denouncing the “unscrupulous fiction” of the blood libel. Published on March 19, 1912, it was signed by German as well as Austrian and Danish religious leaders, scholars, politicians, and writers, including Gerhart Hauptmann, who would win the Nobel Prize in Literature that year, and novelist Thomas Mann. Ten days later an open letter in France condemned the “absurd” and “libelous” charge against Beilis, signed by 150 luminaries including the future Nobel literature laureate Anatole France. The text of each letter was diplomatically fine-tuned: the German version was addressed to humanity at large, making an appeal in the name of civilization, while the French signatories, taking the tone of colleagues counseling a valued ally, were careful to call themselves “friends of Russia.”

The ebullient Margolin would have enjoyed explaining to Beilis how the greatest men of the age were denouncing the Russian government because of what it was doing to him. Perhaps Beilis had heard of Sherlock Holmes, whose name had already entered the Russian and even Yiddish lexicon as a synonym for a great detective? His creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, had signed the open letter that had been published in the Times of London along with some 240 other notables. Among the luminaries signing the British letter were the archbishops of Canterbury and York; the primate of Ireland; the Speaker of the House of Commons and leading members of Parliament, including Labour Party leader J. Ramsay McDonald; numerous professors at Oxford and Cambridge universities; and eminent writers such as Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw.

Dated May 4, 1912, the Times letter declared, “The question is one of civilization, humanity and truth. The blood accusation is a relic of the days of Witchcraft and Black Magic, a cruel and utterly baseless libel on Judaism, an insult to Western culture and a dishonor to the Churches in whose name it has been formulated by ignorant fanatics.” The letter warned that there was “grave reason to fear” that the revival of the incendiary charge could provoke violence and “endanger many innocent lives.”

That the British signatories declared themselves to be “animated by the sincerest friendship for Russia” did nothing to mollify the Russian government. Baron Heyking, the Russian consul general in London, indignantly responded in a letter to the Times of London on May 10, 1912. “The accusation of ritual murder is not at all leveled against Judaism and the Jewish people as a whole,” Heyking wrote, “but only against the accused, who is believed to belong to a small secret sect carrying the Talmudian teaching to the extreme of ritual murder.” He insisted: “That secret sect must not be confounded with the Jews at large.” But the baron, in defending the honor of his government, unintentionally gave the game away. He was apparently unaware that, officially, the defendant was at this point not accused of ritual murder; in fact, the court had explicitly ruled to the opposite effect when it excluded the testimony of expert witnesses on the Jewish religion as irrelevant. But the baron, like everyone else, understood perfectly well that the heart of the case was the blood accusation. And, even as he denied it, he made it clear that “the Jews at large” stood accused. His letter clearly implied that if the horrific rite was inherent in “the Talmudian teaching,” then every Jew must share in the guilt.

Through an intense exercise of personal will, Mendel Beilis had retained his grip on his sanity, but his initial, sickening intuition about the delay in the trial was utterly correct. His stay in judicial purgatory would be longer than anyone anticipated—thanks in part to his obvious innocence, which was proving to be a serious nuisance to the government.

“The trial will undoubtedly end in the exoneration of the defendant due to the impossibility of factually proving his guilt,” Kiev governor A. F. Giers to wrote an Interior Ministry official on April 19. When the defendant was set free, he feared, “[it] would make an extremely distressing and unpleasant impression on the Russian population.” Among the Jews, his acquittal would “arouse indescribable jubilation and joy.” This was, in other words, a formula for disorder, violence, pogroms. The governor did not dare suggest dropping the case, however. He was worried exclusively about its timing. Elections to the Duma were taking place in the fall. Any disorder at that time would be most unfortunate. He respectfully recommended that the trial be postponed until after the elections. Informed of the request, justice minister Shcheglovitov immediately agreed. Beyond his recognition of the impact of the trial, what is notable about Shcheglovitov’s decision is that the man in charge of the imperial judicial system, the prime backer of the case, believed that Mendel Beilis would in all likelihood be acquitted.

The trial would ultimately be delayed far into the next year. The postponement transformed the case, providing all parties the gift of time. It gave the prosecution time to manufacture new evidence. It gave Vera Cheberyak time to scheme. And it gave Margolin and Brazul, aided now by Nikolai Krasovsky, formerly the chief detective on the case, time to take the offensive.

In March 1912, Krasovsky returned to Kiev unemployed, disgraced, and determined to regain his reputation. The previous fall, with sorrow and relief, he had washed his hands in frustration of this cursed case. Then on New Year’s Eve 1911, he had been shocked to be summarily dismissed from his post as a provincial police officer. Now it seemed that his fate, like that of Mendel Beilis himself, depended on unmasking the real killers of Andrei Yushchinsky.

Krasovsky had held from the beginning that, in the absence of physical evidence, the only way to crack the case was to coax someone into confessing. Exactly how he was going to accomplish this he had no idea. He was no longer a police officer; he could not arrest a suspect, bring him in, and interrogate him in the hope the person would break. He would have to find a way to penetrate Vera Cheberyak’s gang and trick one or more of the perpetrators into confessing.

Arnold Margolin was glad to have the renowned detective working on his side. But now that he was officially Beilis’s attorney, he acted more cautiously than he had previously, keeping himself one step removed from the investigative work and using two of his liberal lawyer colleagues as intermediaries, even as he stayed deeply involved in Krasovsky’s efforts. With Margolin’s covert help, Krasovsky and Brazul formed a somewhat uneasy partnership. The detective had his doubts about the journalist. When they met, Krasovsky berated Brazul for failing to consult with him before going public with his preposterous theory that the blind Mifle was behind the crime. (Perhaps Krasovsky had forgotten that he had brushed off Brazul’s first offer of collaboration some months earlier.) But now Brazul had finally come to the conclusion—correctly, in Krasovsky’s view—that Vera Cheberyak was not merely someone who had information about the murder but was herself complicit in the crime.

Over the next several weeks, Krasovsky formulated a plan that at first blush seems outlandish: they would penetrate the gang with help from the treacherous Russian revolutionary underground. Krasovsky and Brazul quickly settled on two young revolutionaries they thought they could recruit to their cause. Amzor Karaev was a twenty-five-year-old anarchist-communist of noble birth. By nationality an Ossetian from the Caucasus, he had served four prison sentences, including three and half years for possession of explosives. Flamboyant, violent, and mercurial, he has been described as a character straight out of Dostoyevsky. His fellow radical, Sergei Makhalin, was a twenty-one-year-old aspiring opera singer and agricultural college dropout who had been arrested three times for political crimes, including for an “expropriation”—as revolutionaries called their robberies—when he was just sixteen years old. He belonged to no party and had no ideology other than hatred of the regime and a desire to enlighten the masses; he gave free classes on urgent questions of the day, with the hope of imbuing in the common folk, as he put it, “the spark of truth.”

It might seem absurd to turn to two such figures to exonerate a Jew wrongly accused of a murder believed to have been committed by professional criminals. But while Krasovsky’s plan was audacious and risky, it had a cunningly persuasive rationale. The Russian revolutionary underground and the criminal underworld overlapped. In fact, one so shaded into the other that it was sometimes difficult to know who was a radical and who was a criminal. Contemporaries called it “the seamy side of revolution.” As one anarchist leader lamented, too often “the bomb-thrower expropriators … were no better than the bandits of southern Italy.” The revolutionary movement, of course, had a strong intellectual contingent, which included men such as Stolypin’s assassin Dimitry Bogrov or, to name two much better-known figures, the future leaders of the Bolshevik revolution, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. The “seamy” and intellectual contingents converged as well, but the criminal crew did much of the dirty work, especially the armed robberies that funded the movement. In this period the future Soviet supreme leader Joseph Stalin was the pistol-packing, bandit revolutionary par excellence, organizing and taking part in numerous bank robberies and holdups in his native Georgia. Karaev, like Stalin, was from the Caucasus, where revolutionary cells were most likely to act like traditional bandit gangs.

But not just any revolutionary figure would do for the task that Krasovsky had in mind. He needed a man who was both in good standing in the underworld and would be taken seriously by the public and, possibly, a jury. In the spring of 1912, this was not an easy brief to fill; being a revolutionary no longer had the righteous glamour it previously possessed. Just a few years earlier, in 1905 and 1906, throwing a bomb or stealing from the state or the plutocrats earned one a halo of romantic allure. Assassinations of tsarist officials—an average of about ten per day in those years—earned the sympathy, if not open approval, of respectable liberals. By 1912, however, disillusion had set in. The regime had collected itself and crushed the revolutionaries. Revelations that leading radicals had secretly been police informers tarnished their popular appeal. The recent assassination of Prime Minister Stolypin struck even liberals who detested him as a senseless atrocity.

In Amzor Karaev, Krasovsky and Margolin believed they had a rare man who retained the charisma of the revolutionary outlaw. Karaev was idolized by his fellow convicts for his bravery and brazenness in standing up to prison authorities. He was famous, in particular, for one extraordinary incident. One day, several years earlier, he had complained to a prison guard of a toothache and asked to see a doctor. The guard mocked him and refused his request. In protest, Karaev emptied the contents of a kerosene lamp on the floor. For this offense he was convicted, unjustly, on charges of attempting to escape. When Karaev saw the guard again he stabbed him to death. Karaev was charged with murder, but a jury acquitted him, and he returned to prison a hero. The verdict might seem like a surprise, and little is known about how the jury reached its conclusion, but until about 1907 much of the Russian public, and even quite a few officials, were highly sympathetic to the revolutionaries, which sometimes allowed liberal lawyers to obtain surprisingly lenient sentences if not outright acquittals. With his radical swagger and lawbreaking reputation, Karaev certainly seemed like the kind of man who could gain the confidence of Vera Cheberyak’s confederates. The question was how to persuade him to come to Kiev and take part in the emerging plan.

Brazul approached Makhalin, an acquaintance of his, and told him of the scheme. Like Krasovsky, Makhalin had his doubts about Brazul, whom he considered a “frivolous” person, but he signed on to the plan. He had known Karaev in prison and he sent him a cryptic letter to his home in his native Ossetia, saying he had an important matter to discuss and it had to be in person. Karaev agreed to come to Kiev.

When Karaev arrived in the city, and Makhalin dropped by his hotel room to explain why he had summoned him, Karaev’s initial reaction was apoplectic. He was enraged that Makhalin had made him travel thousands of miles to hear such a proposal. “You want me to conduct an investigation?” he said, in Makhalin’s recollection. “How dare you!” He was offended at what he took to be an enticement to violate his criminal code of honor. Karaev took out his pistol and started waving it around—a gesture he resorted to when he felt a point needed emphasis. Makhalin tried to calm him, telling him that they should just sit down and have a sensible talk. Karaev put away the gun and listened as Makhalin assumed the earnest tone he employed when teaching his free classes to the poor. He explained to Karaev that, in his view, the Beilis case was “introducing poisonous anger in the masses” and it was necessary to do something about it. Makhalin understood the powerful hatred underlying this case; as a boy, he later testified, he had witnessed a pogrom, an experience that had helped turn him into a revolutionary. Karaev felt himself being persuaded by Makhalin’s appeal to his conscience. As an anarchist-communist, he could only despise all discrimination based on race or religion. The pair then met with Krasovsky, who at first concealed his identity, presenting himself as “Mr. Karasev,” a gentleman who had taken an interest in the Beilis case and was helping with the investigation (an assertion that was more or less true). Karaev took three days to think things over and then informed Makhalin he would take part in the plan to prove the innocence of the poor Jewish brick-factory clerk.

Karaev, Makhalin, and Krasovsky would all later provide accounts of how the plan was executed, with all of them agreeing on all important details. Their versions would closely correspond to the one offered by Vera Cheberyak’s half brother, Peter Singaevsky, except for those details that incriminate him. Those discrepancies would set the stage for a dramatic confrontation at Beilis’s trial, as Cheberyak and Singaevsky faced their accusers in open court.

Singaevsky was key to the plan because he was the only one of Andrei’s suspected killers not in jail at the moment, except for Cheberyak herself. Karaev quickly turned to his vast network of criminal connections to find a way of meeting Singaevsky and gaining his confidence. It turned out the two men had a mutual acquaintance, someone Singaevsky trusted: Lenka, nicknamed Ferdydudel, a barber with underworld ties. On April 19, Ferdydudel tracked down Singaevsky in a bar and told him that the notorious outlaw Karaev wished to meet him. The small-time crook must have been awed by Karaev’s interest in him, and over the next several days Karaev loosened him up, taking him to restaurants to eat and, especially, drink. As a pretext for their meetings, he invented a story about needing some “good men” for a big robbery, a “wet job”—Russian criminal slang for murder—that involved killing as many as ten people for a prize of forty thousand rubles in loot. Would his new friend be able to help? Singaevsky was interested and lamented that his good comrades “Red Vanya” Latyshev and Boris Rudzinsky were in jail on robbery charges. In passing, he mentioned that some people were trying to “pin” the murder of the boy Yushchinsky on them.

Karaev felt he was getting somewhere, but Singaevsky still acted as if he knew nothing about Andrei’s murder. He was an utterly dim-witted fellow, and disappointingly cautious. After four days Karaev met with Krasovsky and Brazul to brief them and discuss how to proceed. They devised a clever ruse to pressure Singaevsky to open up about the crime. Karaev would warn him that he and his half sister, Vera, were going to be arrested for Andrei’s murder. On the afternoon of April 24, he took Singaevsky out to a criminal haunt, the restaurant Versailles, and broke the bad news: he had learned from “his man” in the Gendarmes that Singaevsky and Vera were about to be charged with Andrei’s murder. In fact, he said, the warrants had already been drawn up.

According to Karaev, Singaevsky panicked and began to talk. His first reaction was that the two shmary, “floozies,” who had seen something had to be rubbed out. “Measures” had to be taken. The “floozies” Singaevsky had in mind were two sisters, Ekaterina and Ksenia Diakonova, who would go on to play a dramatic and at times bizarre role at the Beilis trial. They were good friends of Vera Cheberyak’s who, Krasovsky had long suspected, knew more than they were telling. For weeks, he had been conducting his own parallel covert operation, patiently working to win the women’s confidence. He had managed to secure an introduction to them through an acquaintance and, posing as a Moscow gentleman, took them out almost daily to restaurants and the theater, talking at first of everything but the Beilis case. Finally, when they felt comfortable enough to open up to him, Ekaterina revealed that she had knocked on Cheberyak’s door on the day Andrei had disappeared, sometime in the morning or perhaps early afternoon. When the door opened she said she saw Singaevsky and Rudzinsky running from one room to another while Red Vanya covered something with a coat in the corner. Ekaterina asked what that pile in the corner was. Cheberyak said it was just some “junk,” slang for stolen goods. Ekaterina had a sense something was not right. The sisters also revealed an important material fact. They told Krasovsky that at Cheberyak’s they would often play a game called Post Office that involved writing little notes to one another. The game was played with pieces of perforated paper—very much like ones found near Andrei’s body.

If Singaevsky was about to confess, Karaev wanted there to be another witness. Karaev took him back to his hotel room, where they met with Makhalin, whom he introduced as a trustworthy criminal comrade. Karaev pretended to be desperately upset about his new friend’s situation, at one point pulling out his gun and beating himself on the head with it in feigned frustration. Singaevsky again cursed the “floozies” who had figured out that he had something to do with the crime. His mind veered from one desperate measure to another. They should kill the Diakonova sisters, Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov, and Officer Kirichenko, Singaevsky said, or break into the Gendarmes’ office and steal the case files. Karaev picked his moment and, gesturing to Singaevsky, said, “There’s the real killer of Yushchinsky.”

Singaevsky replied, “Yes, that was our job.” The gang’s business had been ruined, he said, “because of the bastard.”

Makhalin had to quickly decide the best way to get as detailed a confession as possible. He told Singaevsky that he wanted to help him, and it would be good if he told as much as possible about the circumstances of the crime.

“There’s nothing to tell,” Singaevsky said. “We grabbed him and dragged him to my sister’s apartment.”

“Who do you mean by ‘we’?” Makhalin asked.

“Me, Borka, and Red Vanya,” Singaevsky replied, He added that Vanya was a good guy but wasn’t good for a wet job; he’d thrown up after the murder.

Why had the job had been so messy? Karaev asked. Why hadn’t they gotten rid of the body?

Singaevsky answered derisively, “That was dictated by Rudzinsky’s ministerial brain.” He told them now it had been a bad idea to leave the body so close to his sister’s house. They should have dumped it in the Dnieper, Singaevsky said, or put it in a basket and disposed of it somewhere on their way to Moscow, where they had fled the day after the crime.

Singaevsky, quieting down, stopped talking about desperate “measures” and said he needed to send a message to Boris Rudzinsky. He did not specify what the message was, but presumably it concerned Andrei’s murder. There would be an opportunity to get word to him, Singaevsky said, when Borka was escorted from prison to the investigator’s office at the courthouse on April 27. The only way to communicate with him would be through the secret sign language Russian convicts had developed to talk among themselves. Karaev was fluent in it, and now Singaevsky asked him to sign a message to his friend. He would tell Rudzinsky that Singaevsky would leave a note for Borka in the outdoor latrine at the courthouse. This scheme pleased Krasovsky and his partners; they now had the chance of obtaining an incriminating piece of written evidence in the perpetrator’s own hand. On the appointed day they stationed themselves near the building’s entrance. Krasovsky and Brazul lurked near the outhouse ready to grab the note. Karaev managed to catch Rudzinsky’s eye, and they began conversing in signs, but the guards, sensing something was up, hustled the prisoner away before Karaev could get his message across, and Singaevsky departed without leaving the note.

Still, the operation as a whole had been a tremendous success. Margolin and members of the Beilis Defense Committee decided that Brazul should deliver a written affidavit relating Singaevsky’s confession and the revelations of the Diakonova sisters to Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov, the head of the Gendarmes’ investigation. Brazul would make a further claim in the affidavit—that the mysterious letters implicating the Jews and signed by “a Christian,” which were sent to Andrei’s mother and the pathologist days after the body was discovered, were written “at the dictation of Vera Cheberyak” and that the handwriting matched that of a member of her gang. The affidavit was delivered into Ivanov’s hands on May 6. On May 30, the results of Brazul’s investigation were revealed in the Kiev newspapers and reprinted in papers across the empire. The stories created an unbelievable sensation. “Brazul’s Declaration,” as it was called, threw the prosecution into a state of chaos.

The defense demanded that the indictment be thrown out and the case remanded to the magistrate for a new investigation. Chaplinsky, the chief prosecutor, passionately resisted at first. His communications that May reveal a man in a deep state of anger, even emotional crisis. The case that was to make his reputation was falling apart. The high post in the capital that he craved was slipping from his grasp. He complained that his refusal to reopen the investigation in the face of new evidence was “arousing an outcry in the Yid press.” Yet he had to concede that it was not just the Jews who were against him. “Many influential people at the present time,” he noted with disapproval in a letter to an official, “are unfavorably disposed to the staging of a ritual murder case in court.”

He was dismayed to hear such an opinion expressed even by people he might otherwise respect. On May 23, Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov recommended to Chaplinsky that Vera Cheberyak be arrested and asked his approval to move ahead and bring her in. Chaplinsky reported to the justice minister that Ivanov “regarded [the evidence] as completely sufficient material for the indictment in the murder not of Mendel Beilis but Vera Cheberyak, Latyshev, Rudzinsky and Singaevsky.” Chaplinsky added, without any explanation or justification, that he had denied Ivanov’s request. On May 28, Chaplinsky wrote in unusually personal terms to deputy justice minister Liadov, the man whose mission to Kiev had signaled the regime’s backing of the case a year earlier. “An onslaught is being conducted [on me] from all sides,” he complained, seeking to convince him to terminate the Beilis case. “I, of course, am not going to take this bait,” he concluded defiantly, “and chase my well-wishers away.”

In resisting the “well-wishers” pushing him to quash the case, he had the full backing of justice minister Shcheglovitov. On June 8, the minister summoned Chaplinsky to St. Petersburg to consult over how to deal with the disastrous turn that the Beilis affair was taking. The two men reconsidered their strategy and decided that delay would work in their favor. They would take the opportunity to rid themselves of the pathetically weak indictment and begin the investigation afresh in the hope of strengthening the case against the accused.

On his return to Kiev, Chaplinsky announced that he was dropping his opposition to withdrawing the original indictment and agreed to have the case remanded back for reinvestigation. On June 19 the Kiev Judicial Chamber acceded to the request. The case was now back to where it had been almost exactly eleven months earlier when Beilis had been dragged from his home in the middle of the night. The court rejected a defense motion for Beilis to be freed on his own recognizance. He remained in prison, in a state of legal limbo, again an unindicted prisoner with limited legal rights.

Chaplinsky had great hopes for the new investigation. He had pushed aside the troublesome Vasily Fenenko, who had fought him at every step, and appointed a new, compliant investigating magistrate who was enthusiastic about making the case against a Jewish suspect. The chief prosecutor was heartened by two important developments that he knew about and the defense did not. First, Vera Cheberyak had formulated a promising new scheme to impugn the integrity of the defense and incriminate Mendel Beilis. Second, he knew that Brazul’s vaunted “independent investigation” was booby-trapped like an anarchist’s bomb: for Karaev and Makhalin, those supposed star witnesses for the defense, were not what they appeared to be.

Makhalin and Karaev were indeed revolutionaries. They presented themselves as classic specimens of the genre: Makhalin, the leftist of the high-minded sort, and Karaev, the radical outlaw. Yet these young men were also commonplace among the denizens of the revolutionary world in one other respect. Makhalin was registered in the files of the Okhrana or secret police under the code name “Deputy.” Karaev was known to the secret police under the rather obvious “Caucasian.” The two men had been—inevitably, one is tempted to say—informers.

The previous fall, Karaev had come under suspicion by his anarchist comrades of working for the Okhrana. His friend Makhalin, whose treachery was still undiscovered by his fellow radicals, organized an internal investigation that assuaged the cadre’s suspicions—raising enough doubts about Karaev’s alleged perfidy that no one felt confident enough of his guilt to kill him.

Karaev, smarting from the mistrust of his fellow revolutionaries, reacted much like Stolypin’s doomed assassin Dimitry Bogrov, who had been exposed by his comrades as an informer. He was looking for a way to cleanse his reputation. In the Beilis investigation he believed that he had found what he needed—except his would not be a suicidal act like Bogrov’s but instead one of regeneration. He would emerge alive, his honor restored, ready to bask in renewed adulation.

At the time Karaev had nearly been unmasked, he was in fact no longer working for the Okhrana. Although he had been receiving one hundred rubles a month for his services and appeared to earn his pay by supplying reliable information, he was let go for behavior judged too unseemly even by Okhrana standards. According to a department report, the information he provided was of serious interest but turned out to be the product of “the methods of the agent provocateur and his inclination to blackmail.” In other words, Karaev had not just tipped off the police about crimes that others had planned; he had entrapped his comrades, luring or coercing them into criminal schemes and setting them up to be arrested.

The prosecution thus had information that could destroy the credibility of these two key defense witnesses. Who would believe the story of two professional informers who had every incentive to lie, who indeed had lied for a living, at least one of whom had been dismissed in disgrace? But would the prosecution be able to use this top secret information in court? It was a question that would be debated intensely behind the scenes and resolved only at the last moment, as the witnesses took the stand.

Vera Cheberyak, in the wake of Brazul’s devastating declaration, decided to cast her lot definitively with the prosecution. Chaplinsky may have wanted to build a case without relying on the notorious villain of Lukianovka, but now he needed her. When it came to credibility in court, Cheberyak surely had her shortcomings, but compared to the witnesses he had, which at present numbered three well-known drunks, she amounted to a gift.

Reacting to Brazul’s report, Chaplinsky’s chief deputy, A. A. Karbovsky, searched frenetically for some way to strengthen the case, reinterviewing key witnesses. On May 14 he questioned Cheberyak. In seven previous depositions to Investigator Fenenko, she had never mentioned Mendel Beilis or said anything about Zhenya and Andrei visiting the Zaitsev factory. In December, her husband, Vasily, had suddenly recalled that Zhenya told him that he and Andrei had been chased away by Beilis, but Vasily did not clearly implicate him. Now, fourteen months after Andrei’s death, Vera suddenly recalled that her son had directly accused Mendel Beilis of the crime. She told Karbovsky:

About a week after Andrusha’s funeral Zhenya told me that he and Andrusha … and other children … on March 12, 1911, played at the Zaitsev factory … At that time Mendel Beilis jumped out with his sons and other Jews. Beilis’s sons ran after Zhenya and Mendel himself chased Andrusha. Zhenya ran away … and saw, in his words, that Mendel Beilis grabbed Andrusha … and dragged him to the [brick] kiln.”

The role of the prosecution in sculpting Cheberyak’s testimony remains a matter of speculation. On June 2, in an unusual step for a man of his position, Chaplinsky had a personal conversation with the witness and had her questioned again by another prosecutor. The historian Alexander Tager, who reviewed three of her depositions in which she recounted her new story, noted substantial inconsistencies among them, suggesting that the prosecution helped shaped her account. Only the final version was made public.

On May 30, Vera Cheberyak came to prosecutors with another striking story. She revealed that, in December of the previous year, the journalist Brazul had taken her to Kharkov to meet with some sort of gentleman for a strange talk about the Yushchinsky case. She described the man as “a Jew, very plump, slightly balding, with bulging eyes and a slight lisp.” It did not take long for the authorities to figure out that this was Arnold Margolin. In her telling, during the meeting she was offered a forty-thousand-ruble bribe to admit to Andrei’s murder. (She was never clear on whether it was Margolin or another participant in the meeting who made the offer.) She was told she could be spirited out of the country to enjoy her new wealth, but even if she had to stand trial, the best lawyers in the empire would have no difficulty securing her acquittal. Thanks to Cheberyak’s allegation, Margolin now had to admit to his meeting with her, which he had wanted to keep secret. He denied the fantastic story of the bribe, but with the state moving to disbar him for his alleged interference in an official investigation, he had no alternative except to resign as Beilis’s attorney. Gruzenberg was livid at his colleague’s recklessness. The Black Hundreds, not to mention the prosecution, could point to Margolin’s escapade as proof of a Jewish conspiracy to cover up the hideous ritual. This was a disaster for the defense.

The authorities’ next target for harassment was Brazul. In early July, Vera Cheberyak slapped Brazul with a lawsuit claiming injury to her reputation. She also filed libel suits against several newspaper editors who had printed his charges against her. Given the volume of the paperwork and the rapidity with which it was filed, it is inconceivable that Cheberyak mounted this effort on her own; the suits were undoubtedly organized by Chaplinsky’s office to bolster her credibility as a witness.

The prosecutor and his superiors then turned their attention toward neutralizing Nikolai Krasovsky, who had for so long been such a nuisance. Krasovsky was unemployed, but he was a free man and a threat. In the eyes of the public he was still the great detective who had cracked so many unsolvable cases and was now receiving encomiums in the liberal and enlightened conservative press for revealing the true killers of Andrei Yushchinsky. This could not stand. On July 17 he was confronted by police officers and read a list of charges against him. He was now criminally accused of improperly arresting the peasant Kovbasa, the purported offense that had gotten him fired from the police force. He was charged with destroying official paperwork regarding his assessment of an unpaid tax in the amount of sixteen kopeks from a citizen in 1903. (The implication was that he had pocketed the money.) Most absurdly, he was being investigated for stealing a winning lottery ticket while conducting a search (whether of a person or someone’s premises is not clear). The man who people were calling the Sherlock Holmes of Russia was under arrest.

As Krasovsky spent his first night in jail, his coinvestigators knew they, too, were in danger. Sergei Makhalin had the good sense to flee the city. Amzor Karaev, never one to flinch, rashly remained in Kiev and on August 13 the police arrested him as well. The exact pretext is unknown but, like Krasovsky, his true crime was undoubtedly that of challenging the blood accusation.

By the end of the summer, the prosecution acquired one more exciting addition to its case: a self-proclaimed eyewitness to the crime—nine-year-old Ludmila Cheberyak. Almost exactly a year earlier Vera Cheberyak had pleaded with her dying son Zhenya to absolve her of Andrei’s murder, but the boy had failed her, with his last words earning her only more suspicion. Now the mother offered up her one surviving child to the prosecution to exonerate her by condemning another. Perhaps the girl would succeed.

Vera Cheberyak must have been sufficiently self-aware to realize that her testimony alone would likely not be enough to convict Mendel Beilis. She was a notorious figure. People recognized her from her picture in the paper and harassed her on the street. On one occasion in mid-July of 1912, a passerby pointed her out, one thing led to another, and soon a large crowd of people was screaming, “Yushchinsky’s murderer!” as it chased after her. She had to duck into a courtyard and hide there until the mob dispersed.

Unlike her mother, Ludmila could play the archetypal role of the virginal eyewitness. Unlike the pure maidservant in Thomas of Monmouth’s twelfth-century account, she would not claim to have seen the evil deed “through a chink in the door” but rather to have witnessed the crime in broad daylight. The case would be much the stronger with an innocent girl prepared to point her finger at the bestial Jew in the dock as the man who had killed her young friend.

Ludmila had been questioned on May 14, 1912, separately from her mother. In that affidavit, which was kept secret from the defense, she said nothing to incriminate Beilis. But when she was questioned by the new investigating magistrate, Nikolai Mashkevich, three months later, on August 13, she suddenly told the story that made her the prosecution’s dream witness. She now claimed to have gone with Zhenya, Andrei, and other children to play on the clay grinders at the Zaitsev factory on March 12, 1911, the day Andrei disappeared. Mendel Beilis and two other Jews had chased after the children. (In this tale, unlike her mother’s account of Zhenya’s story, Beilis’s sons go unmentioned.) Beilis, she testified, “caught Zhenya and Andrusha by the hands and started dragging them away, but Zhenya broke away and ran away with the rest of us, but Andrusha was dragged away by the Jews somewhere.” That, she said, was the last she saw of him.

The case against Menahem Mendel Tevyev Beilis, such as it was, was now complete. Beilis would have to maintain the patience and restraint of a hero for far longer than his attorneys had ever expected. If he thought of every day he survived in prison as a victory, then his victories would be many. He would have to wait more than a year for his chance to stand before the court and tell the judge, the jurors, and the world: “I am not guilty.”