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

8

“The Worst and Most Fearful Thing”

One evening, as the new year of 1913 approached, Mendel Beilis was sitting alone in his cell (in one of the intervals when he had no cellmate) when he heard the approach of footsteps and several voices, and then a woman outside his door saying, “It would be curious to see this rascal.” Immediately there followed the grinding of the thirteen locks on his door, as each was opened in turn. The sound always unnerved Beilis, making him feel obsessively as if someone were hitting him on the head from behind over and over.

A guard opened the door and the woman and a man in a general’s uniform stepped in. “What a terrible-looking creature,” the woman said. “How fierce he looks.”

The general was interested in Beilis as more than a sideshow attraction and started up a conversation. He began by telling Beilis that he might soon be set free. “On what grounds?” Beilis asked.

The general said that the tercentenary jubilee of the Romanov dynasty was approaching and, to demonstrate his mercy, the tsar would issue a broad pardon for convicts. If only Beilis would “tell the truth”—that is, confess—things would go well for him, he was sure.

Beilis answered that he didn’t need a pardon; he needed exoneration. He would not leave prison until he was declared innocent. Beilis grew enraged, though his impression was that the man was sincerely trying to give him some “good advice.” (The general and the lady, to all appearances, were a pair of curiosity seekers with no sinister motive—certainly the lady’s presence was no aid to any scheme.) However, even if his advice was well meaning, the general was quite wrong, as were hopes among the Jewish population that the tsar would soon set Beilis free. The impending festivities did not improve Beilis’s chances for release. In fact, his trial would serve as the climactic public spectacle of a year dedicated to the greater glory of the House of Romanov.

Tsar Nicholas was indeed looking forward to the tercentenary celebrations as he greeted New Year’s Day 1913 at the Grand Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, the “Tsar’s Village,” south of St. Petersburg, where he spent as much time as he could. He disliked the capital. “Peter’s City” was too modern for his taste and, he felt, inauthentic and inorganic to Russia. Tsar Peter had, as Nicholas once put it, recklessly uprooted “healthy shoots” of the Russian way of life along with the weeds. Nicholas belonged in Moscow, the true heart of the Russian Empire. Once a tiny medieval principality just six hundred square miles in size, Moscow had grown into the enormous realm over which he now ruled. Residing in Moscow was not a practical possibility for the Russian sovereign; the machinery of government had been established in St. Petersburg for some two centuries. But in Tsarskoe Selo, Nicholas erected a perfect replica of an old Russian town as the headquarters for the Cossack squadrons of his Personal Convoy and Imperial Rifles, who went about in seventeenth-century costume. Here Nicholas could commune with the glorious Muscovite past.

Dressed in the contemporary uniform of his Cossack guardsmen (Nicholas loved uniforms and had closetsful of many different kinds), he faced a New Year’s Day dominated by tiresome official duties, as he personally received official good wishes from scores of notables, including nearly every official of the foreign diplomatic corps all the way down the ranks to the third secretary of the Persian mission, Mr. Hassan Han-Gaffari. As a teenager, Nicholas had found this duty so painful the first time that he had virtually run away from it. Nicholas’s mother, the empress Maria Fyodorovna, had once scolded the young Nicholas to mind his manners in such situations, writing him in a letter, “Above all, never show you are bored.” Nicholas had since developed stoic endurance in the face of his tedious ceremonial responsibilities.

As the new year began, Nicholas had reason to worry about the condition of his realm. The years 1910 and 1911 had mostly been marked by domestic tranquillity, with the significant exception of Prime Minister Stolypin’s assassination. But 1912 had witnessed the revival of mass social unrest. In April 1912 soldiers had fired on a crowd of peaceful demonstrators at the Lena goldfields in southern Siberia, killing five hundred miners. The massacre sparked a relentless wave of strikes that had drawn in some seven hundred thousand workers to date and was only escalating.

However, if Nicholas found himself feeling worried or bored as one dignitary after another bowed before him, he could find relief in pleasanter thoughts. The year 1913 was to be a special year for him, his family, and all of Russia. It was to be a year of celebration, of deeply meaningful reflection on Russia’s past that would reaffirm the everlasting, mystical bond of tsar and people. In the coming months Nicholas and his family, together with all his subjects, would commemorate with the grandest of ceremonies the founding of the Romanov dynasty.

The coronation in 1613 of the current monarch’s ancestor Michael, the first Romanov tsar, had brought an end to the Time of Troubles, a calamitous fifteen-year period that had left Russia leaderless, beset by famine, ensnared in two wars (with Poland and Sweden), and combating numerous internal rebellions that left Moscow largely burned to the ground. Many observers had compared the Revolution of 1905 to the Time of Troubles; as for Nicholas, he seemed to draw spiritual inspiration from the challenge presented by the massive disorder. He saw himself as the heir to Michael and the other Romanov tsars, not just in lineage but in resolve and historic import; like them, he had faced wars and uprisings and would become one with the people as their God-given commander, leading Russia back on a course to greatness.

As recently as the late nineteenth century, Peter the Great, who ruled from 1682 to 1725, had been regarded as the indisputable founding figure of modern Russia. He was the great Westernizer, the giant of a man who had delighted in roughly shaving off the beards of the retrograde noble class of boyars, forcing them to cast off the old ways. Nicholas’s father, Alexander III, who took the throne in 1881, initiated a movement toward a nostalgic premodern vision of Russia, one that demoted Peter the Great and even disparaged him as un-Russian. (Alexander, quite conscious of the symbolism, was the first tsar in two centuries to wear a full beard.) Nicholas would now make the break with Peter even more explicit. The celebrations would proclaim: modern Russia was born not with Peter’s Westernizing reforms but with a uniquely and deeply Russian event: the divinely inspired decision of the Zemsky Sobor, or Assembly of the Land, to select Michael as the first Romanov tsar on February 21, 1613.

Leading up to the 1913 jubilee, the regime launched an unprecedented effort to burnish the cult of the past using modern means of publicity. The departures from tradition—even in the name of upholding it—caused consternation among some of its guardians. New Year’s Day 1913 saw the issuance of the first-ever postage stamps bearing portraits of the tsars, including the reigning one. Some befuddled postmasters balked at defacing Nicholas’s image with a cancellation stamp, which seemed a sacrilege. In the official organ of the Holy Synod, the soiling of the tsar’s image with a postmark so sickened one bishop that he was moved to despair. Was he still in Russia, he asked “or has the kike come and conquered our tsardom?” Some traditionalists were appalled as the imperial court for the first time authorized the mass production of various knickknacks—commemorative medallions, posters, decorative boxes, even pencil cases—bearing the tsar’s image. But progress, at least of this backward-looking sort, could not be stopped.

One uncontroversial innovation was the first-ever official biography of a living tsar. During the month of January, Nicholas took time personally to go over the proofs of The Reign of the Sovereign Emperor Nicholas Alexandrovich, authored by Andrei Elchaninov, a major general and military academy professor who was a member of the tsar’s suite or retinue. Nicholas must have been greatly pleased by the book’s central metaphor; it perfectly expressed his image of himself. “Thousands of invisible threads center on the Tsar’s heart,” Elchaninov wrote, “and these threads stretch to the huts of the poor and the palaces of the rich. And that is why the Russian people always acclaim its tsar with such fervent enthusiasm.”

The strongest of threads connected Nicholas to the Black Hundreds, which he knew to be fomenting the blood accusation and the case against the Jewish clerk. That bond was never on more exalted display than it was in St. Petersburg on February 21, 1913, as the tercentenary celebrations began. A thirteen-hundred-member contingent of the two largest far-right organizations, the Union of Russian People and the Russian National Union of the Archangel Michael, marched in official religious processions through the streets of the city, then massed in front of the Kazan Cathedral, waving their overtly political banners during an outdoor church service in honor of the anniversary. No one could doubt that these extremists enjoyed the favor of the tsar. Their causes were the tsar’s causes, including their intense anti-Semitism. Nicholas had become the first Russian ruler to convey clearly to the narod, the common people, his belief in the existence of Jewish ritual murder. He never articulated this message in words but conveyed it through unmistakable ceremonial symbolism—by so visibly supporting the Black Hundreds, as on this day—and through the actions of his officials in the notorious Kiev murder case.

Another invisible thread, of exactly the benign sort Nicholas’s biographer Elchaninov had in mind, had once connected Tsar Nicholas to Mendel Beilis. Beilis, a veteran of the tsar’s army, had labored in a factory whose profits supported a hospital founded in honor of Nicholas and Alexandra’s marriage and dedicated to doing good works. With Beilis’s arrest that thread had been severed. But his indictment represented a new sort of bond, indeed a strange sort of dependence, between the imperial sovereign and the lowly prisoner, as he lay in his cell, louse-ridden, shivering himself to sleep every night in his second winter in prison.

The ultimate cause of Beilis’s nightmare lay in Nicholas’s mystical self-image. This is why the historian Hans Rogger declared that “no purely rational explanation [of the Beilis case] seems to ‘make sense.’ ” Its “rationale” was intuitive and unconscious—nonrational, if not irrational. The true motive behind the prosecution of Mendel Beilis was the same as that of the freshly minted stamps, the mass-produced souvenirs, and General Elchaninov’s gaudily laudatory tome: to strengthen the bond between the ruler and his people. That effort, Nicholas believed, was the surest way of warding off a new Time of Troubles. In a sense, Mendel Beilis had once again been drafted into the service of the tsar.

Nicholas was abetted by his ministers, who acted out of careerism but, more deeply, by the need, in Rogger’s words, to “supply the ingredients for a missing faith.” Their staging of the affair was part of “the search for a principle, for a common belief that would rally and bind together the disheartened forces of unthinking monarchism.” Given Nicholas’s deficiencies as a ruler, “they had only anti-Semitism and the notion of universal evil, with the Jews as its carriers, to make sense of a world that was escaping their control and their intellectual grasp. To give visible proof that ritual murder had been committed would confirm such a version of events, give it body and reality.”

The jubilee gave Nicholas a welcome excuse to escape the capital on a pilgrimage into the heart of Russia that would conclude in his beloved Moscow. As for Mendel Beilis, during the first months of 1913 he felt himself going nearly out of his mind from the endless delays in his case. “Generally speaking, the life of a prisoner in jail is hell,” he wrote in his memoirs, and his seemed an all-too-genuine hell, a torment without end. He was plagued by nightmares. “The usual kind of nightmare,” he wrote, “was that I was either led to execution or being chased after, choked or beaten. I would awake, shuddering with fear.” He noted, in bitter irony, “I felt a sort of relief in finding upon awakening that I was still in jail—and not in the torture house of my dreams.” Six times a day he was roughly strip-searched by a team of five guards. Frequently the guards had to undress him because his fingers were so numb from cold that he could not unbutton his own clothes. The guards would taunt him, without much imagination, often repeating the same line, “You liked to stab the boy Andrusha, to draw his blood. We will do the same thing to you now.”

Beilis was not aware of it, but by the late winter of 1913, events were in fact moving forward toward his trial. The investigating magistrate, Nikolai Mashkevich, was close to completing the work that would serve as the basis for the second indictment of Beilis in the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky. The period of the late winter and early spring of 1913 was also crowded with other important developments that would influence Beilis’s fate: several court cases involving Nikolai Krasovsky and Vera Cheberyak, and the sudden deaths of two men, including one of Andrei’s suspected killers.

Krasovsky, a key witness for the defense, had spent the better part of a year under relentless judicial assault. He had been arrested in mid-July 1912; after his release six weeks later, he went through endless hearings and at least two trials. The state had pressed a total of five charges against him. (The original charge—that he stole a winning lottery ticket from someone during a search—appears to have been dropped.) On February 5, a court acquitted him of improperly destroying official correspondence regarding the assessment of an unpaid tax of sixteen kopeks. Krasovsky’s wife finally found the missing papers in a trunk they had packed for their journey back home from Kiev; they were duly forwarded to the proper authorities and Krasovsky was exonerated. He was also acquitted in the case of his alleged illegal detention of the peasant Kovbasa and on three other charges whose exact nature is not known. Over half a year’s time, the state had tried to destroy Krasovsky and it had failed.

February 8 brought more good news for the defense. Vera Cheberyak, the prospective star witness for the prosecution, was convicted of forgery in a fraud case involving her local grocer and sentenced to eight months in prison, later reduced to five. The conviction was an indignity to her in three respects. For the first time in her life she had been found guilty of a crime: the infamous Cheberiachka was now, officially, a crook and a convict. Second, the crime of which she was convicted was unworthy of her reputation. This was the woman whose den of thieves reputedly organized spectacular robberies—the woman who, according to rumor, had so filled her apartment with plunder during the Kiev pogrom of 1905 that she fueled her hearth with bolts of silk fabric looted from Jewish stores. The charges that finally brought her down were pitiful: the jury found her guilty of making seventy-six erasures in an account book of money she owed, changing “1 ruble 73 kopeks to 1 ruble 19 kopeks; 2 rubles 13 kopeks to 13 kopeks … 70 kopeks to 10 kopeks,” and so forth. The swindle netted her only a few dozen rubles. And Vera Cheberyak suffered a third humiliation: she lost her name. In the course of the proceedings the court discovered her true origins. She was stripped of the patronymic “Vladimirovna,” to which she was legally not entitled. The woman sentenced to prison in court documents was recorded as “Vera Illegitimate Cheberyak.” She was now branded with the same middle name that had haunted Andrei Yushchinsky to the end of his life.

The death of a witness is almost invariably an inconvenience but, for the Beilis prosecution, the demise of Dr. Nikolai Alexandrovich Obolonsky represented an opportunity. Obolonsky, the dean of the medical department of the University of St. Vladimir in Kiev who had performed the second autopsy on Andrei, died suddenly from pneumonia on March 14. The doctor had always been less than satisfactory to the prosecution. He would not affirm—even, it appears, under some pressure—that the motive of Andrei’s murder was to extract blood. When he was asked leading questions, he complied by speculating what might have happened “if blood was collected” but would go no further. He was too distinguished a physician to be replaced as a witness without cause; this was, after all, the man who had been called upon to help try to save the life of Prime Minister Stolypin.

Now the prosecution was free to search for an expert who would say exactly what was necessary. On March 26, Chaplinsky, the chief prosecutor, directed Mashkevich, the investigating magistrate, to solicit the opinion of Dr. Dimitry Kosorotov. Kosorotov, who was a professor of medicine, rendered his opinion expeditiously just two days later. “The pattern of the wounds does not give a basis for concluding that the chief goal was the infliction of torture,” the doctor wrote. “The wounds are grouped mainly in those places where one could feel for the veins of the major arteries.” His conclusion: “The wounds were inflicted with the goal of collecting the greatest quantity of blood for purposes of some sort.” This was the first time that a pathologist had explicitly rendered such a judgment. The city coroner, Dr. A. M. Karpinsky, who had performed the original autopsy, had found no signs at all pointing to the extraction of blood. Dr. Obolonsky and his colleague, the anatomist Tufanov, had, at best, only hinted at such a motive. Dr. Kosorotov now obliged by forging a vital link in the case for the prosecution. Still, if the goal of the crime had been the extraction of blood, then why? The doctor made a show of scientific propriety by refraining from speculation. It would be left to other experts to explain to the jury exactly what constituted the “purposes of some sort.”

Toward the end of March, Mendel Beilis was summoned to the office of Mashkevich, the investigating magistrate, who told him that the investigation had been completed. Fourteen months had passed since Beilis had taken that excruciating walk across snow and ice to hear very similar news from Mashkevich’s predecessor, Vasily Fenenko. But where Fenenko was deeply ashamed of his involvement in the case, Mashkevich had no such qualms. The investigator read aloud portions of the record to familiarize the defendant with the evidence. For the first time Beilis heard about Brazul, the Diakonova sisters, Malitskaya, and others. “He reads and reads,” Beilis recalled of the investigator, “and my head simply began to swim.” Disoriented, he found himself casting his eyes about the room as if searching for answers. When Mashkevich finished his presentation, he told Beilis he was turning the material over to the prosecution. Beilis still did not fully understand the judicial process and again became overly optimistic that the whole case might soon be coming to an end. He looked forward to giving Esther the good news. But, while he was visiting with his wife, the assistant prosecutor, Karbovsky, who always monitored their conversations, interrupted Beilis to explain that the end of the investigation did not at all signal the conclusion of the case against him. The investigation would be followed by the indictment, which would take time to draw up; then, after more preparation, came the trial. Esther began to cry. As Beilis, crestfallen, prepared to return to his cell, Karbovsky offered him a cigarette. When Beilis accepted it, Karbovsky made a strange remark, asking with a smile, “Aren’t you afraid I might try to poison you?” Puzzled, Beilis responded, “Why would someone want to poison me?”

The meaning of the mysterious remark became clear a short while later when one of his attorneys, Dimitry Grigorovich-Barsky, came to visit. The attorney told Beilis he had an important request that he knew would be hard on him: he had to stop receiving food from home. The Black Hundred newspapers were claiming that the Jews planned to poison him out of fear that he might confess and reveal the truth of the blood accusation. The defense team was concerned that someone on the Far Right would actually try to poison him, to make the conspiracy theory about the Jews appear to be true, as well as to avert the embarrassment of a potential acquittal. Beilis immediately agreed to the request and, on his own initiative, tried to eliminate all chance that he would be poisoned. He had been receiving his food alone, in his isolation cell. Now he petitioned to take his meals with the other prisoners. The prison authorities refused the request, telling him, “If you want to eat, eat what you are given—if not, you can starve. No special privileges for you.”

Beilis feared angering his guards, who would kill a prisoner on the slightest provocation. In general, he tried to be as accommodating as possible. But now he responded with a courageous act of defiance: he declared a hunger strike. For three days, the guards slipped the tray with his meals through an aperture in the door of his cell and each time when they took it away the food was untouched. Prisoners who did not eat for three days had to be examined by a court officer, so on the third day Karbovsky appeared. He reiterated to Beilis that he could not get special treatment. To Beilis’s surprise, however, the authorities shortly relented and soon he was eating with his fellow prisoners again from a common pot. The food was nearly inedible and at mealtimes he could force down barely enough to keep himself alive. He was living his life half-starved, but he had won a small victory.

Later that month, though, Beilis failed to carry out one of his attorney’s other crucial instructions—causing a near disaster for the defense. Grigorovich-Barsky had asked him to request a copy of the entire preliminary investigation—hundreds of pages of reports and depositions. Under Russian law, only the defendant himself could submit the request. Beilis did so and the next morning Mashkevich called on him at the prison. He asked Beilis if he was sure he wanted to make this request, warning that it could delay the trial by several months. The idea of more delay was simply unbearable and threw Beilis into a panic. Of course, Mashkevich might be trying to scare him, but what if he was telling the truth? Beilis figured that if the defense really needed the documents, it would find a way to get them. So he told Mashkevich that he was changing his mind. He withdrew his request.

A few days later, on March 31, Beilis’s wife and brother came to visit him. Even though the visits were monitored, Aaron remained true to his abrasive self. Karbovsky noted with indignation in one report that Aaron “allows himself ironic comments about the investigation” and cited one of Aaron’s sarcastic witticisms. “They are looking for a Jew with a black beard,” Aaron told his brother, “and you grew yourself a beard, didn’t you?”

During this visit, Aaron asked his brother if he’d ordered the copies. When Mendel said no, Aaron started screaming at him. “Mashkevich says something to you and you refuse the copies?!” Aaron told him he shouldn’t listen to anybody’s stories. A copy of the preliminary investigation was the basis for preparing the defense. “The devil knows what’s in it!” he shouted. The defense had to find out soon. And did his brother understand that this was not an ordinary case but a “political” one? Aaron would not stop screaming. Karbovsky summoned a guard and had the man escorted from the prison. He noted that further visits by Aaron would be “undesirable.”

Aaron had been somewhat unfair to his brother, who well understood his was no ordinary case, but in his anxiety had let himself be tricked. When Beilis finally ordered the copies, it caused no delay in the case. But he would have to wait six more months for his day in court.

In these eventful weeks, the prosecution lost one witness, Dr. Obolonsky, and came out the better for it. The defense also lost a witness, albeit a hostile one, for whom there was unfortunately no replacement. On the night of March 28, 1913, Ivan “Red Vanya” Latyshev was caught after breaking into the fabric store of the brothers Gorenstein on Konstantinovskaya Street, trying to make off with six hundred rubles’ worth of silk. Latyshev, who had been in and out of jail for the past two years, was known to the police as a breaking-and-entering specialist and a member of Vera Cheberyak’s gang. He was also, according to Krasovsky and Brazul’s investigation, one of Andrei’s three killers. When Latyshev was brought into a precinct office on the robbery charge, it seemed like a routine arrest. But when an investigator mentioned that he recognized his picture from newspaper stories about the Yushchinsky case, Latyshev apparently grew spooked. He dashed for a window, opened the shutters, and stepped out onto a drainpipe. Whether he was trying to escape or kill himself cannot be known for certain, but he managed to land on the roadway headfirst, as if in a dive. He died of his injuries hours later at the hospital. Latyshev had once insisted he had had “no alarming dreams” and “no hallucinations” about Andrei. But he was the one who reputedly had thrown up after the murder, lacking the stomach for a “wet job.” Perhaps he had been hounded by guilt, or was pursued by fear of the boy nicknamed Domovoi, after the creature known to haunt people’s nights.

On May 24, a mild spring day, guards took Beilis to the courthouse where he was handed his new indictment, which was some forty-two pages long. He rolled it up into a cylinder and clutched it in his hand as he was taken back to prison. By now he understood that this was only the beginning of a lengthy process that would lead to his trial.

After Beilis received the indictment, Oskar Gruzenberg, now his primary attorney, came to visit him for the first time. Beilis asked Gruzenberg to just tell him the truth. He was already used to disappointments, he said. What were his chances at his trial? Beilis’s first attorney, Arnold Margolin, had always tried to rally Beilis’s spirits with optimistic talk during their visits, assuring him he would eventually be freed. Gruzenberg was given to speaking more straightforwardly. “Certainly it is not going badly,” he told Beilis. “Everyone does indeed see that you are innocent. However, one cannot know what can happen.” Gruzenberg then related a story about one of his brothers, who had been perfectly healthy but had come down with some sort of illness. The doctors had laughed it off, telling him it was nothing, but he never got better and eventually he died from the illness. “It is the same with trials,” he told Beilis. “No one can know how it can sometimes turn. There is no basis at all on which to convict you, and we can all certainly hope that you will be freed. However, no lawyer can say with certainty that the sick man will get better. That is the truth.”

Gruzenberg was careful not to raise his client’s hopes, but the new indictment did give the defense reason for optimism. The document was four times longer than the previous indictment, but the case against Beilis, in the attorneys’ opinion, was still ridiculously weak. The most significant change had nothing to do with the evidence against the defendant. In the first indictment, Jewish blood lust was hinted at but not overtly mentioned as a motive—the prosecution, as Margolin put it, made you play a game of “blind man’s buff.” In the new indictment, the prosecution played no games. No ambiguity remained: the state had fully embraced the blood accusation.

The prosecution made two assertions. First, it averred that Jewish ritual murder was a reality, not a myth. Second, it claimed that the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky was a hideous example of this diabolical practice. The indictment cited two witnesses in support of both assertions. The first witness was Dr. Ivan Sikorsky. The new indictment now quoted his judgment, made in May 1911, that Andrei’s murder showed all the signs of the “vendetta of the sons of Jacob.” Sikorsky, whatever one thought of his racial or religious views, was unquestionably an eminent and respectable figure. The other witness affirming the blood accusation, Father Justin Pranaitis, was, most assuredly, not respectable in the least.

That the prosecution was relying on Pranaitis was an indicator of its desperation. Pranaitis was a Catholic priest from Lithuania who lived in the Uzbek city of Tashkent, in Central Asia. The lead prosecutor, Oskar Vipper, told a newspaper after the trial that Pranaitis had been chosen “because among the Russian Orthodox clergy there were no such resolute, steadfast men.” The state, in fact, could not find a single suitable expert among the Russian Orthodox clergy or lay scholars of religion to testify to the reality of ritual murder by the Jews.

This disappointment was foreseeable. While the regime was highly anti-Semitic, the religious and cultural roots of the blood accusation in Russia were, in fact, rather shallow. The myth sprang preeminently out of the Catholic tradition; it was, as the noted historian John Klier put it, a Catholic “import” to Russia, amounting to “learned behavior” on the part of Russians. Certainly, many ordinary Russians believed in it and many Russian Orthodox priests expressed their belief in it in their sermons and even in church publications. Moreover, rumors of ritual murder had played a role in instigating some pogroms. But the Russian Orthodox Church, as such, had never advocated for the myth; its theologians did little to spread it and, on occasion, even denounced it.

The most active propagators of the blood accusation in the Russian Empire were Roman Catholics or Eastern Rite Catholics, also called Uniates. The most notorious and influential of these was the flamboyant charlatan Hippolyte Liutostansky, a Polish Catholic priest who had been defrocked for sexual misconduct (he had ended up contracting syphilis), and then converted to Russian Orthodoxy, taking vows as an Orthodox monk before leaving religious orders to write such works as The Question of the Use by Jewish-Sectarians of Christian Blood for Religious Purposes in Connection with Questions of the General Attitudes of Jewry to Christianity. Quite literally a buffoon, he performed comical “Jewish sketches” in a St. Petersburg tavern, fabricated claims that prominent Jews had offered him a hundred thousand rubles to suppress his work, was sued by his own publisher for defamation, publicly renounced his anti-Semitic views and denounced pogroms, then later claimed that the Jews had intimidated him into his renunciation, and resumed his anti-Semitic career.

Liutostansky seems a figure impossible to take seriously, yet many respectable people embraced his lurid pseudo-scholarship unblinkingly. He was likely an influence on Pranaitis, who was of the same ilk, if not quite as colorful. Pranaitis had written a pamphlet in 1892, in Latin, entitled, Christianus in Talmude Iudaeorum sive Rabbinicae Doctrinae de Christianis Secreta (The Christian in the Jewish Talmud, or the Secret Rabbinical Teachings Concerning Christians, published in English as The Talmud Unmasked). The work attracted little notice at first, but by the time of Andrei’s death it had been translated into Russian, and leading far-right figures were citing it in support of the ritual murder charge. Pranaitis had written that he was sure he would be murdered by the Jews for revealing the truth about them, but in the intervening twenty years no one had obliged by fulfilling the prophecy. He was in fine health in December 1912 when he was invited to testify for the prosecution.

Pranaitis, a graduate of the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary, had once even been considered for an appointment as a bishop. Still, despite his credentials, the prosecution had reason to be uneasy about him. In December 1912, after Pranaitis had been deposed in the Beilis case, the government’s Department of Religious Affairs circulated a memorandum advertising “disagreeable” information about his past. In 1894, Pranaitis took a painting to the St. Petersburg workshop of a craftsman named Avanzo to have its frame gilded. After the painting suffered accidental damage, Pranaitis claimed it was the work of the Spanish master Murillo and the property of a Roman Catholic cardinal; he demanded three thousand rubles as compensation. He and the trusting Avanzo settled on a payment of a thousand rubles. But it soon was exposed that Pranaitis had made up the story. The painting was no Old Master, and Pranaitis was going to pocket the money himself. He was apparently not criminally charged, but he was banished from the capital to a provincial parish. In 1902 he ended up in Tashkent, in the Central Asian region then called Turkestan, where he angered the authorities with what they regarded as unlawful proselytizing using “rather cunning methods.” The regional governor-general’s office found that his “fanaticism could incite religious and national enmity between Russians and Poles in Turkestan.”

Pranaitis was a flawed choice for testifying to the truth of the blood accusation, but the state could find no better alternative. Liutostansky, then in his late seventies, was still alive, but the prosecution must have judged him too seedy. It had no choice but to overlook the sins of the priest from Tashkent.

In the indictment, the prosecution was careful to limit the blood accusation to Jewish “fanatics” and unenlightened Jews, and not seek to condemn the entire Jewish people outright. The conventional line of sophisticated Russian anti-Semites, this distinction was transparently deceptive. Judeophobes most often pointed their finger at the Hasids, from whose supposedly backward ranks the bloodthirsty fanatics came. But accusing the Hasids was little different from condemning Jews as a group. The Hasids were not merely a sect of Judaism; they constituted one of its two major branches in Eastern Europe, with millions of adherents. Moreover, if such a large portion of Jewry was inclined toward ritual murder, the question naturally arose: How could the so-called sophisticated Jews not know about it? As much as the state would deny it, at the Beilis trial all Jews would stand in the dock.

As for the remainder of the indictment, the defense could feel somewhat relieved. The prosecution was still relying on the contradictory, admittedly drunken testimony of the Lamplighter couple, the Shakhovskys. The major new contributions to the prosecution’s case were the testimony of a notorious criminal, Vera Cheberyak; her daughter, Ludmila; and Beilis’s ex-cellmate, the informer Kozachenko—which is to say, a sociopath, her frightened child who had obviously been coached into providing a false eyewitness account, and a lowlife police informer. All three would surely be vulnerable on examination in court.

But the defense had its own vulnerabilities. The major one, in Gruzenberg’s view, had been entirely avoidable—namely, Margolin’s decision to meet secretly with Vera Cheberyak. He had always believed that, in doing this, Margolin had acted foolishly and recklessly. Now his opinion was confirmed by the vigor of their opponents’ attacks upon Margolin. The prosecution devoted a whole section of the indictment to the disastrous Kharkov adventure and Vera Cheberyak’s charge that, during a meeting at which Margolin was present, she had been offered forty thousand rubles to confess to Andrei’s murder. Margolin, having been forced to resign as defense counsel, would have to testify as a witness, which in a sense would put the defense itself on trial. Margolin had given the prosecution raw material it could use to spin stories about a Jewish conspiracy dedicated to shrouding the truth.

Gruzenberg might have felt a bit heartened had he known that two members of the judicial panel that approved the indictment wrote a minority opinion, not made public at the time, arguing that the case should be quashed. N. Kamentsev was the chairman of the panel, composed of members of the Kiev Judicial Chamber, the region’s highest court. L. Ryzhov was the panel’s rapporteur, assigned to examine the evidence and deliver a report to the panel. Thus, the two members most familiar with the record of the investigation had found the case laid out in the indictment “unconvincing in its totality,” its supposed facts “hardly trustworthy,” and had contended that no reasonable jury could base a guilty verdict upon it. In conclusion, they wrote: “The investigation of Mendel Beilis should be terminated.” But these courageous jurists were outvoted seven to two.

On May 25, the day after the indictment of Mendel Beilis became public, Tsar Nicholas made his gala entrance into Moscow, parading down Tverskoy Boulevard on horseback. He rode alone, twenty yards in advance of his Cossack guardsmen, dismounted on reaching Red Square, and strode across it, passing through the Spassky or Savior’s Gate into the Kremlin. He had reached the final destination of his pilgrimage in honor of his ancestor Michael, the first Romanov tsar.

Prime Minister Vladimir Kokovtsov was struck by “the absence of any real enthusiasm and the comparatively small crowds” that had greeted the tsar during his journey around Russia. The same impression of public apathy troubled others as well. Anna Vyrubova, the empress Alexandra’s closest confidante, remarked on “the undemonstrative masses of people” at the opening festivities in St. Petersburg. “No enthusiasm was evident anywhere,” lamented a senior court official in a personal letter. “We clearly live in those times when faith and love for the Tsar and fatherland have died out.”

Nicholas, however, expressed only satisfaction at the popular response he received. He had been inspired by his journey through the real Russia that he so deeply loved. The tour had first taken him and Alexandra to the medieval towns of Vladimir and Suzdal, wellsprings of Russian civilization, east of Moscow, and then north to the upper Volga region. There they had sailed down the river to Kostroma, the city where the sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov had learned of his selection by the Assembly of the Land as the new tsar. At the Kostroma monastery, the abbess Martha blessed Nicholas using the very same Mother-of-God icon with which Michael had been blessed in 1613.

Notwithstanding any apathy his ministers and courtiers might have perceived, the celebrations reinforced Nicholas’s belief in his divine mission. “Now you can see what cowards those state ministers are,” Alexandra told a lady-in-waiting after her husband had bowed his head to the final, massive gathering at the Kremlin. “They are constantly frightening the emperor with threats of revolution and here—you see it yourself—we need merely to show ourselves and at once their hearts are ours.” Prime Minster Kokovtsov recalled in his memoirs that from this time forward Nicholas became more and more convinced that he could do everything by himself “because the people were with Him, knew and understood Him, and were blindly devoted to Him.”

In this jubilee year, Nicholas had resolved to reestablish the full measure of his autocratic power. The public adulation that he perceived only bolstered his confidence in his mystic mission. He regretted the democratic concessions he had made in 1905. He would do his best to take them back and restore the natural order. Nicholas now considered dissolving the Duma or stripping it permanently of its very modest legislative power. That fall he wrote his interior minister that a bold move to emasculate the Duma would be “in the Russian spirit.” In the end, Nicholas’s wiser advisers prevented him from taking these extreme measures. But the tsar was still bent on demonstrating, in every way possible, his rejection of Western democratic and legal norms that he believed were alien to his people.

Given the open and zealous chauvinism of the monarch himself, the prosecution of Mendel Beilis amounted to a powerfully symbolic act. “The belief or non-belief in ritual murder,” the historian Richard Wortman argues, “drew a clear line between those who shared [the tsar’s] views and those who hoped to set the Russian monarchy on a Western course”—the course he had rejected. Moreover, as the trial would make clear, the case served to undermine the courts, the one Russian institution that, in principle, fully conformed to Western standards (thanks to reforms introduced by his grandfather Alexander II) and for which Nicholas therefore felt contempt. And, finally, the case signaled the tsar’s belief that the Black Hundreds, and the officials allied with them against the upstart Jews, were in harmony with the “Russian spirit.”

The tsar had resolved to rule exclusively according to the divine, purely Russian dictates of what he called his “inner voice.” The cult of the seventeenth century, and the imperative to purify the autocracy of any Western taint, would obsess Nicholas until the final day of his reign as Russia’s last tsar.

By the spring of 1913, the European movement in support of Mendel Beilis was gathering strength. The previous year had seen petitions signed by illustrious men who were filled with moral indignation but offered little factual evidence to refute the ritual murder charge. Now some of the world’s most eminent physicians were taking up Beilis’s cause.

The new season saw the publication in Germany of a book of medical opinions by fourteen specialists from across Western Europe who would go on to present their conclusions at an international conference in London at the end of July. Their prime target was their once respected colleague, now a star witness for the prosecution, Professor Ivan Sikorsky. One after the other, the doctors vented their ridicule. Professor Ernst Ziemke, dean of the College of Medical Jurisprudence in Kiel, Germany, declared, “He without a doubt … is governed by considerations arising from unbridled fantasy …” “One does not know what to be more surprised by, the naivete or the tendentiousness,” said Professor August Forel of Zurich. Professors Julius Wagner-Jauregg (a future Nobel laureate in medicine) and Heinrich Obersteiner of Vienna wrote, “On becoming acquainted with his conclusions it even seems doubtful that the author is a psychiatrist at all.” All were outraged that Sikorsky had exploited his legitimate scientific reputation for despicable ends. Sikorsky was rebuked by the London conference as well as by congresses of physicians in Vienna and St. Petersburg in the fall.

Perhaps the most valuable report supporting Beilis’s cause was delivered by three British physicians who focused not so much on Sikorsky or the mythical nature of the charge as on a simple question: What story did the four dozen wounds on Andrei’s body tell? Drs. Augustus J. Pepper, William Henry Willcox, and Charles A. Mercier forcefully made a key anatomical point: “The wounds inflicted by the killers were not of the sort that would cause strong external bleeding.” If such bleeding were the goal, “a completely different kind of weapon would have been used.” A killer who wanted to drain a body of blood and collect it in a vessel would hardly go about it with an awl that could inflict only puncture wounds. The obvious weapon of choice would be a knife that could neatly open up a vein or an artery. (Such a method, they pointed out, was, after all, well known to the Jews: the Jewish butcher, or shoket, severed vessels in the neck with an extremely sharp blade.) “It appears to us quite impossible that the boy was killed for the purpose of collecting blood,” the doctors concluded. The crime was nothing more than a “coarse, brutal murder, committed by a person of unsound mind.”

In the United States, the effort in support of Mendel Beilis got off to an oddly slow start. With nearly three million Jews, America was second only to Russia in Jewish population. The American Jewish community, by all rights, should have been the natural leader in the worldwide movement to free Beilis. The country’s most influential Jewish organization, the American Jewish Committee, had been founded in the wake of the pogroms of 1905–1906 out of concern for the plight of Russian Jewry. In January 1911, the committee had undertaken its unprecedented public campaign, led by the financier Jacob Schiff, to persuade the U.S. government to abrogate the Russo-American Treaty of 1832 governing commercial relations between the two countries. The pretext of the campaign was that American Jews were subject to discrimination by Russia in the issuance of visas, but it was clear to all that its real purpose was to punish Russia for the way it treated its own Jews and pressure the imperial government to grant them equal rights. Within a year, the effort succeeded in convincing a reluctant President William Howard Taft to abrogate the treaty, over the objections of the State Department. The victory heralded the arrival of American Jews as an effective interest group that, when it chose to, could compete on an equal footing with other ethnic lobbies at the highest levels.

Yet right up to the trial in the fall of 1913, the American Jewish leadership failed to take action in the Beilis affair. An editorial in America’s oldest Yiddish paper, Yidishes Tageblat (Yiddish Daily News), lamented, “The blood libel in Kiev is shocking in and of itself; however, in addition, it has also emphasized our powerlessness and to what extent we lack real leadership and an acceptable plan of action.” It was indeed true that Jewish political power in America was still nascent, with the treaty abrogation campaign an exceptional effort and singular success. A few Jews served in the House of Representatives in 1913, but the country had no Jewish politicians of national stature. In the first decades of the twentieth century American Jewish leaders were still wary of acting as an ethnic interest group and rarely lobbied for specific legislation. America’s Jews sought to be seen as Americans first. Jewish leaders were highly ambivalent, for example, about Zionism—the ideal of creating a Jewish state. Schiff was especially adamant that participation in the Zionist movement was irreconcilable with being a good American. (His attitude and that of other Jewish leaders would begin to change by the end of World War I.) Louis Marshall, the committee’s president and a prominent attorney, was cautious about taking up Jewish causes without profound and prolonged consideration. He was often heard to say about his fellow Jews something of this sort: “We are always talking too much about Jews, Jews, Jews, and we are making a Jewish question of almost everything that occurs.”

Jewish leaders were just as wary, or perhaps even more so, of being perceived as interfering in domestic affairs as in foreign ones. By remarkable coincidence, in fact, in the summer and fall of 1913, the American Jewish community was coming to grips with a homegrown case of a Jew wrongly accused of a child’s murder. The case of Leo Frank was a study in the committee’s hesitancy to intervene.

Leo Frank was sometimes called the “American Dreyfus,” but a Russian observer perhaps more aptly called him the “American Beilis.” The superintendent of an Atlanta pencil factory, Frank was accused of murdering a thirteen-year-old employee, Mary Phagan. Unlike Beilis, Frank was from a well-to-do family and, as a prominent member of the Jewish community, served as the president of the Atlanta chapter of the B’nai B’rith. Beyond the difference in their socioeconomic status, the cases of the two men were quite similar, even eerily so: flimsy circumstantial evidence, unreliable witnesses, outrageously prejudicial state conduct, fear of mob violence, and a star witness for the prosecution who was a leading suspect in the murder. (The case even had its own Krasovsky in the world-famous private detective William Burns.) In August 1913, after a monthlong trial, Frank was convicted and sentenced to death. Anti-Semitism was only one factor in the conviction. Class and regional resentment also played a role. The prosecution portrayed Frank, a New Yorker with an Ivy League education, as a rich northerner who preyed on poor southern womanhood. Anti-Semitism came to the fore after the verdict was handed down when a rabble-rousing Georgia politician, Tom Watson, organized a bigoted campaign against Frank’s appeal, demanding that “the filthy, perverted Jew of New York” be put to death. The Frank case shocked America’s Jews and led to the formation of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

The American Jewish Committee turned its attention to the Frank case only after the verdict was delivered. Jacob Schiff was in favor of involving the group in the case and starting a defense fund for the appeal. Louis Marshall was opposed to public action on the not unreasonable grounds that perceived Jewish interference could only harm Frank’s chances in court. In the fall of 1913, the committee decided for the time being to work behind the scenes, soliciting contributions for the defense and attempting to persuade southern newspaper editors to run articles questioning Frank’s guilt. The next year, Marshall changed his mind and took charge of the defense, arguing Frank’s case, unsuccessfully, before the Supreme Court. In August 1915, after Georgia governor John Slaton commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment, Frank was kidnapped from prison and lynched by a group of vigilantes among whom were many prominent Georgia citizens, including a former governor.

In the fall of 1913, that horrific final act lay two years in the future. As committee members pondered the Beilis and Frank cases, they were similarly hesitant about how to handle them. The record of the one committee leadership meeting devoted to the Beilis case, held only when the trial was nearly over, captures the scattered state of their thinking. Judge Mayer Sulzberger, the committee’s first president, argued against casting any campaign as rallying to the support of an individual. “The entire issue,” he held, “was one between the Russian government and the Jewish nation.” The only correct strategy, in his view, was to “leave Beilis out of the picture altogether.” Beilis the man must be completely absent from any campaign to save him. (Exactly what he meant by this in practice is not clear.) He cautioned that the tsarist regime’s enemies were not necessarily allies in this matter. “The Russian Revolutionists,” in his view, “would undoubtedly prefer that Beilis should be convicted,” as it would allow them to accuse the regime of “a new crime.” All present thought it advisable to lay the groundwork for public action in the event Beilis was convicted. But only Rabbi Judah Magnes, one of the era’s great Jewish organizers, expressed the opinion that the broad mass of American Jews should be more outspoken about the Beilis case. The Jews ought to be given a chance to express themselves,” he argued. “In this country, the Jews have been very quiet in this matter.” By which he appeared to mean, too quiet.

Ordinary Jews, in fact, were deeply interested in the case, as evidenced by the rush of numerous Yiddish theater troupes, including Kramer’s Comedy Theater, to stage plays about it in time for the trial. “It seems that we can expect a theatrical Mendel Beilis epidemic,” the New York–based Yiddish newspaper, Di Varhayt (The Truth) reported disapprovingly two weeks before the trial began. The eruption of dramas started with the smaller theaters, vaudeville houses, and music halls, where spectators might be treated to a Beilis performing a duet with Gruzenberg in jail, and by a Vera Cheberyak who broke out into a song and dance routine. At least two dramatizations of the Beilis story included a romantic subplot involving Beilis’s daughter and one of his attorneys (though in real life the eldest daughter was only five years old).

The “epidemic” quickly infected the most prominent Yiddish actors and producers, with six major productions announced in New York alone, and with others scheduled in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, and other cities. The shows competed in their presumption, each one contending that it had the “true” or “real” Beilis rendition. The People’s Theater in Chicago boasted that its Mendl Beylis, der idisher martirer (Mendel Beilis, the Jewish Martyr) was “the greatest sensation, the greatest drama of the twentieth century.” Jacob Adler, known as “the Great Eagle” and the most celebrated Yiddish actor of his generation (and father of the famous method-acting coach, Stella Adler) also betrayed no modesty. “The voice of the people is the voice of God,” the advertisement for his theater declared. “The people want me, Jacob Adler, to play Mendel Beilis.”

Di Varhayt, dismayed at all the tastelessness, tut-tutted at the “sin of trying to make a few dollars” off serious events that should not be staged. In the coming weeks, that sentiment would be expressed dozens of times over in the Yiddish press, which was virtually unanimous in expressing horror and shame at what it saw as the exploitation of a tragedy for the Jewish people. But however crude and crass the Beilis shows were, they amounted to the first mass expressions of outrage in America against the barbarous spectacle in Kiev. It would take some time for any Jewish leaders to match the interest and sense of urgency of the common folk.

In July, Beilis received word that after more than a year of delays, the court had finally set a new trial date: the twenty-fifth of September. He had a wait of more than two months ahead of him, but having a definite day to look forward to settled his mind. “It is this not knowing why, when and what that is the worst and most fearful thing, the thinking and waiting every day, every minute for liberation, and the same thing for entire years, day after day, one night after another—this is terrible, this is unbearable, one can simply become insane,” he recalled. In the weeks before the trial, he felt better physically. He ate better, somehow swallowing more of the prison food. Even on the nights leading up to the trial, when he might have been nervous, he slept soundly.

Beilis might have slept less well had he known of the ordeals that his quartet of would-be saviors—all of them key witnesses for the defense—were enduring in those same weeks. Nikolai Krasovsky was unemployed, with no means of supporting his family. Though the persistent detective had been exonerated of all of the criminal charges against him, he was still reprimanded for “failure to observe formalities” in the matter of detaining the peasant Kovbasa. His arrest of that fellow, for belonging to an illegal political organization, had been justified, at least according to the standards of Russian law at that time. That the police later saw fit to rearrest Kovbasa did nothing to help Krasovsky, who remained banned from serving on the force.

Still hanging over the head of the journalist Stepan Brazul-Brushkovsky was an accusation of criminal libel by Vera Cheberyak, which threatened to land him in prison. However, the state had wisely moved to postpone the libel proceedings until after Beilis’s trial. After all, what if Brazul won? A victory would strengthen his credibility and tarnish a star prosecution witness. It apparently took some time to find a suitably absurd charge to lay Brazul low in time for the trial. In July, an army officer lodged a complaint with the authorities, swearing that he had witnessed Brazul in a Kiev public park rising to his feet the first two times the national anthem was played and remaining seated for the third. Brazul was charged with lèse-majesté—affronting the dignity of the emperor—and sentenced to a year in a fortress, standard punishment venue for political prisoners, where strict solitary confinement was the rule.

After his arrest in July 1912, the anarchist Amzor Karaev had been sentenced to five years of exile in a remote village in south-central Siberia thirty-five hundred miles from Kiev. He had sworn in an affidavit that Vera Cheberyak’s half brother, Peter Singaevsky, had confessed to him his role in the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky. As a witness duly subpoenaed by the defense, the state was duty bound to deliver him to the courtroom. But on August 30, Karaev wrote a letter to Krasovsky informing him that he was convinced the prosecution would make every effort to keep him from testifying. He was determined to come to Kiev on his own: in other words, to leave illegally. Escape from exile was relatively easy in tsarist Russia. It would have been much easier had he not written a letter to a man who he should have realized was almost surely under police surveillance. (Sometimes it seems as if Karaev was not completely sane.) The letter to Krasovsky was, of course, intercepted and the secret police had Karaev arrested for planning to escape.

Only Sergei Makhalin, Karaev’s partner in attempting to hoodwink a confession out of Singaevsky, had a relatively easy time of it, having made himself scarce by leaving Kiev. He had come into a modest legacy from his grandfather, enabling him to give up tutoring. He devoted himself now to his operatic training and indulging his taste for dandyish getups, which would attract much attention at the trial.

Very early on the morning of September 25, the racket of the thirteen locks came as sweet sounds to Mendel Beilis’s ears. A guard opened the cell door and took him to the prison office. There laid out for him was his old blue suit, which he had not seen for two and a half years. He was taken aback by the powerful effect the sight of it had on him. In the worn pieces of cloth he saw his freedom. A guard told him to don the suit, which he did gladly. Everyone was suddenly friendly toward him. The guard helped him on with his clothes and the prison officials escorted him to his carriage, Beilis recalled, “as if they were accompanying a groom.” It felt as if something magical had happened.

“Mr. Beilis,” the warden told him, “go in good health, and do not forget us.” The prison officials were calling him “Mister,” treating him like a human being. This was unexpected. Perhaps, he thought, this was a good sign. He was led to a coach surrounded by a dozen policemen on horseback. Beilis joked that anyone else would have to pay two hundred rubles for such royal treatment, but they were giving it to him for nothing. Everyone laughed.

Once inside the coach he looked out the window. Large numbers of people lined the streets the entire way to the courthouse. At first the crowds frightened him, but he was soon moved to tears. People cheered, doffed their hats, and waved handkerchiefs. Most were university students, but there were hundreds of others—men, women, children. He had heard that people supported him, but this was the first time he had seen it with his own eyes. They were everywhere straining to catch sight of him, looking out of their windows, even on rooftops. Some, it was true, were not well-wishers: he could recognize a good number of Black Hundreds by their badges. The entire route was lined with mounted Cossacks, to ensure that there was no disorder. When the crowds surged too close to the coach, the Cossacks drove them back, snapping their whips.

The carriage drew up to the courthouse on St. Sophia Square, across from the thirteen-domed cathedral where Andrei Yushchinsky had once studied, hoping to become a priest. Beilis jumped out, telling the driver, “I will pay you on my way back.” Again, people laughed. He was led through long corridors to a room that he was disappointed to find was only a waiting area for prisoners.

After a short while, a tall man with a beautiful head of gray hair, theatrically swept back, entered the room. Nikolai Karabchevsky was widely regarded as Russia’s foremost defense attorney. He had joined the defense team the year before, but Beilis was meeting him for the first time. Like everyone who met Karabchevsky, Beilis was struck by his imposing physical appearance. “It was as if a strong light had penetrated the room,” Beilis would say. Karabchevsky introduced himself but did not move to shake his hand, explaining that the authorities had ordered the defense team to stay at least three steps away from the defendant. It was outrageous, but they had to obey the rule for now. The attorney made sure Beilis was brought cigarettes and a meal from the court restaurant. Greatly fortified, Beilis remained in the waiting room for three hours until a small door opened and his guards led him into the courtroom. The trial was at last about to begin.