A Child of Christian Blood

9

“Yes, a Jew!”

At around noon on October 25, 1913, Mendel Beilis, surrounded by guards, found himself in an oblong courtroom, with large windows on one side, big enough to seat two hundred people. Behind the judges’ bench, draped in crimson, sat four robed men, one of them with a magnificent gray beard parted in the middle to form two downy wings. Above, in the gallery, the four dozen Russian and foreign journalists fortunate enough to receive passes sat cramped together at tiny lecterns.

“A place can scarcely be found on the globe where people who know how to read are not aware of the Beilis case and do not have an opinion about it,” observed Vladimir D. Nabokov, a prominent liberal opponent of the regime (and the father of the novelist), who covered the trial for the newspaper Speech. Indeed, Mendel Beilis, dressed in his comforting old blue suit, approached the dock as the defendant in what was now undoubtedly the most notorious trial of the young century. In fact, the only legal case of the age to rival Beilis’s in worldwide attention and perceived significance had been that of another Jew, the French officer Alfred Dreyfus, who had been accused of passing secrets to the Germans, and whose identity as a Jew had been the primary source of contention around the justice he received.

Dreyfus’s two trials for treason, in 1894 and 1899, had occurred behind closed doors, but the proceedings against Beilis were public, attracting 150 news organizations, most of them foreign. At the main telegraph office, forty employees had been hired and extra lines installed to handle the increased traffic, but at the courthouse the facilities were inadequate. The acoustics were poor and, despite rumbling electric fans, the ventilation miserable. No matter the weather outside, the courtroom was oppressive and the air fetid. More than one witness would faint during the trial. Court was in session twelve to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, with a half-day break on Sundays the only respite.

Beilis exchanged a few words with his attorneys, men he had been told were the best lawyers in the land. Surely, he thought, they would not let him perish. Then he was seated in the dock, perpendicular to the right side of the judge’s bench, and looked at the jurors, directly opposite him, across the width of the room. His heart sank. He had imagined the twelve men who would judge him would be people like his attorneys—educated and respectable citizens. But before him he saw mostly simple peasants, with bowl haircuts, some even wearing caftans tied at the waist, the traditional village garb. These were the ones who would decide his fate? Even apart from any prejudices they might have, how could they possibly understand the learned testimony of university professors? In Russian courts, verdicts were decided by majority vote. (A tie would mean acquittal.) Just seven of these men could destroy his life.

The composition of the jury stunned the liberal press, too. All adult males were eligible for jury duty, but Kiev was a university center, and a jury this uneducated was unheard of. In all, seven of the jurors were officially classified as “peasants.” Two were “townsmen” or “petty bourgeois” (the estate to which Beilis himself belonged and which included ordinary working folk). Three were “officials,” a category that encompassed nearly anyone who worked in a government office and held a pen.

The jury had almost certainly been rigged, at least as much as was possible, primarily through restricting which citizens were allowed onto the panel from which the final twelve were chosen. The previous year, the justice minister had sent out a secret order that the regime’s opponents—“strangers to the high aims of justice”—should be expunged from the jury rolls. In practice, this meant excluding many educated citizens. For the Beilis trial, someone had apparently taken that directive to an extreme. The thirty-three-member panel had only four people of any education. No direct evidence of jury-rigging ever surfaced, but in other panels chosen in the courthouse at the same time, the educated contingent was about three times as great.

What is certain is that, after the panel was selected, interior minister Nikolai Maklakov made an illegal and risky move: he ordered the secret police to put all prospective jurors under surveillance. Eight days before the trial began, the chief of the imperial Department of Police, Stepan Beletsky, sent a coded telegram to the Kiev authorities ordering the Kiev Gendarmes to place the panel “under the closest, most careful, and most competent observation” and gather information “for judging [their] state of mind.” A senior agent in Kiev warned his superiors that the effort was futile and, if discovered, would surely cause a public scandal. He was ignored. The initial surveillance in fact yielded no useful material. But when the twelve final jurors were sequestered in courthouse apartments for the trial’s duration, the interior minister had twenty-three agents, some of them masquerading as court pages, keeping them under close watch and listening in on their conversations.

Mendel Beilis’s five-member defense team, which worked pro bono, were the greatest collection of Russian legal luminaries ever assembled to defend a single man. The head of the team, and its only Jewish member, was Oskar Gruzenberg. The leadership role was somewhat unsuited to his temperament. He admitted in his memoirs that “my bellicose character and my inability (or rather my unwillingness) to smooth off the sharp edges frequently made me unbearable.” He had often been threatened with disciplinary action after an altercation with prosecutors and judges and was so intemperate that he had once penned a grossly insulting letter about a minister of justice that was certain to be opened and read by the police (the letter was addressed to a prisoner). His colleagues in the bar emphatically agreed that he could be quarrelsome and domineering, but he was undoubtedly a great attorney and one of the few who had experience with a ritual murder accusation, having successfully defended the Vilna barber David Blondes a decade earlier.

Gruzenberg would share the greater part of the cross-examination duties with Nikolai Karabchevsky, who was not merely an eminent attorney but a national celebrity. At sixty-two, he was still an attractive man, carried himself like a romantic hero, and enjoyed a legion of female fans. The court enthusiasts known as “legal ladies” would take in his trials as they would the theater, so transporting did they find his orations. Gruzenberg thought Karabchevsky was overrated as an orator, but he had achieved some astounding victories, with a special genius for defending admittedly guilty clients in sensational murder cases: a man obsessed with a prostitute whom he killed in a rage when she refused his offer of marriage; a young woman who shot to death her sadistic lover; an Armenian who fatally stabbed the Turk who had massacred his family after running into him in a coffeehouse years later. (The two men were acquitted, and the woman got off with a token sentence.)

Karabchevsky loved receiving large fees but gave much of his money away, had a strong social conscience, and represented many clients pro bono, including Jewish victims of pogroms, in civil suits. He defended the most violent opponents of the regime. His most stirring moment was surely his summation in the 1904 trial of Egor Sazonov, who had assassinated the brutal and widely despised interior minister Viacheslav Plehve. Karabchevsky boldly attacked Sazonov’s victim, essentially arguing that killing a butcher such as Plehve could not properly be considered murder. “And grasping the bomb with trembling hands,” Karabchevsky declared, “[Sazonov] believed that it was not so much filled with dynamite and fulminate of mercury, as with the tears, sorrow, and calamity of his people. And when the shards of the bomb exploded and scattered, it seemed to him that it was the clanking and breaking of the chains which had been binding the Russian people.” That a political moderate like Karabchevsky could so passionately defend a terrorist is a striking indication of the progressive elite’s profound alienation from the regime. The court, which reacted to his speech with public hostility, may have been more like-minded than it let on. It spared Sazonov the noose, sentencing him to a life of hard labor.

Some of Karabchevsky’s gifts were, unfortunately, of limited use in the trial about to get under way in Division 10 of the Kiev Circuit Court. The great attorney was a virtuoso of melodramatic rhetoric that bewitched enlightened judges and cultured jurors steeped in Russian and world literature. (His summation in defense of the Armenian killer quoted Gibbon.) To win over this jury, he would have to adjust his natural style.

The third attorney, Alexander Zarudny, was a small, bearded man of fifty who appeared so unimposing that a friend once joked that one had to look closely to notice him. Yet he was renowned for his tireless work defending political prisoners. Gruzenberg likened him to a one-man rescue team who raced along icy and dangerous legal roads from one political case to another. The two men had defended members of the revolutionary 1905 St. Petersburg Soviet, including its leader, Leon Trotsky. Zarudny, though unprepossessing, was quite capable of making himself noticed. He would have a secondary role in the questioning in the Beilis case but would regularly explode with cries of “Objection!” and “I request this be noted in the record!” His objections were meant to keep the prosecution off balance and help lay the grounds for an appeal, should one become necessary, but his demeanor risked alienating the jury. Gruzenberg found him to be a brilliant orator at his best, but uneven, while Karabchevsky likened Zarudny’s arguments to moves in chess that skipped over squares, forcing the listener to strain to sort out the speaker’s logical steps.

Soon to arrive from St. Petersburg was perhaps the most intellectually brilliant member of Beilis’s legal team, Vasily Maklakov. A prominent advocate for revolutionary defendants, Maklakov was also a member the Duma, where he belonged to the Kadet or Constitutional Democratic faction that sought to transform Russia into a state based on the rule of law. Maklakov personified the extreme division rending the upper levels of Russian society: his younger brother, the reactionary and anti-Semitic Nikolai Maklakov, was the minster of the interior actively conspiring to convict Mendel Beilis. (The brothers lived on neighboring estates but, not surprisingly, had not spoken in nearly two decades.) At forty-four, Vasily Maklakov was one of a younger breed of attorneys who adopted a more plainspoken style than his elders. By the end of the trial some would think Beilis’s freedom hinged on the effectiveness of Maklakov’s summation.

Rounding out the team was the respected Kiev attorney Dimitry Grigorovich-Barsky, who had often visited Beilis in prison. He had something of a personal interest in the case. As a prosecutor, he had been involved in the failed effort to convict Vera Cheberyak in the blinding of her former lover, Pavel Mifle, seven years earlier. He would now have a chance to face her again and, if not convict her, then at least hold her accountable for an even more terrible crime.

The prosecution was composed of far less eminent figures. Technically, there was only one prosecutor, Oskar Vipper. A thin, tense greyhound of a man, Vipper was an assistant prosecutor of the St. Petersburg Judicial Chamber, the capital’s highest court. Why he had been especially selected for this case is not completely clear. Gruzenberg thought Vipper lacking talent, but the Kievan, which opposed the case, rated him as moderately competent.

Vipper was joined by Georgy Zamyslovsky, a far-right-wing member of the Duma, and Alexei Shmakov, a notoriously and proudly anti-Semitic attorney and Moscow city council member, who decorated his study with pictures of Jewish noses. Shmakov was the author of some of the most popular Russian works on the supposed global Jewish conspiracy, most recently The International Secret Government (Revised and Expanded Edition), in which he wrote, “In the world there exist not fifteen million Jews … but one Jew copied fifteen million times.” The two men were technically “attorneys for the civil plaintiff,” representing Andrei Yushchinsky’s mother, but they functioned as co-prosecutors (and will be referred to hereafter as the “civil prosecutors”). Under Russian law, a criminal trial and a civil suit for damages could be combined. The two attorneys were seeking five thousand rubles (about a decade’s worth of his old salary) from the virtually penniless defendant.

Surprisingly, both Gruzenberg and Beilis’s original attorney, Arnold Margolin, had something of a soft spot for Shmakov, whom they very generously credited with a misguided but genuine sort of integrity. For Margolin, the corpulent, elderly Shmakov “reminded one of a clumsy, sulky bear” who was “fair and honest in his fashion.” Gruzenberg wrote in his memoirs that Shmakov “was not by nature a malicious man … but rather one who had been completely possessed by a blind anti-Semitism.” As for Zamyslovsky, they simply found him “exceptionally vile,” a careerist and conniver who believed that he could turn fame from the Beilis case to his professional and material advantage.

As for the four members of the judicial panel, only its impressively bearded chairman, Judge Fyodor Boldyrev, was of any importance. Karabchevsky had a low opinion of him—in fact, he had been making fun of this very man for most of his life without realizing it. Decades earlier Karabchevsky had been faced in a case by an insecure and incompetent prosecutor whom he remembered only as “Fedya” (the diminutive of Fyodor—the equivalent of “Teddy”). Before that trial, Fedya’s wife had paid Karabchevsky an unexpected call, imploring him to go easy on her husband and perhaps even give him a few pointers so he could at least give a respectable performance against his already celebrated young opponent. After that, Fedya had entered the lexicon of Karabchevsky and his circle. As in, “Could you believe that Fedya today?” Or, “That fellow was quite a Fedya.” But he had lost track of the real fellow entirely until one day he realized that the chief judge in this strange case was, astonishingly, the Fedya of legend.

Boldyrev, somewhat inexplicably to outside observers, had been drafted for the case from a provincial court in the small city of Uman, about a hundred miles south of Kiev. His main qualification arose from a secret report assuring the authorities of his “firmly right-wing convictions.” Unbeknown to Karabchevsky and Gruzenberg, justice minister Ivan Shcheglovitov had promised Boldyrev the chairmanship of Kiev’s highest court, the Judicial Chamber. Boldyrev surely understood that the promotion was contingent upon his satisfactory conduct of the case. As the trial approached, a police agent reported that the judge was said to be in a highly anxious state “and had even undergone a special course of hydrotherapy.” Given the stakes for Boldyrev, his anxiety was understandable. The treatment seems to have been effective. Throughout the proceedings, Fyodor “Fedya” Boldyrev maintained his august judicial demeanor.

By the time Beilis sat himself down in the prisoner’s dock, hope had left him. He stayed motionless for quite a while, staring at the jury. Then he turned to his left, glancing at his wife, Esther, in the front row, dressed in black, her head wrapped in a black lace scarf. From time to time he lifted his spectacles to wipe away tears with a handkerchief.

The first two hours were taken up with maddening technicalities and bickering. The defense and prosecution teams argued over where they would sit. The defense objected when the prosecution was placed too close to the jury. The prosecution objected when it was seated next to the defense, complaining that the defense would overhear its conversations. Waving his hand contemptuously, Karabchevsky told them, “Your conversations interest us little.” The session could not begin until all witnesses were present, but Ulyana Shakhovskaya, the Lamplighter’s wife, was not to be found. The police tracked her down, roaming the streets drunk, and dragged her into court. At 2:28 p.m. a bailiff finally shouted, “Court is in session!”

The judge began by questioning Mendel Beilis.

“What is your name?”

“Menahem Mendel Tevyev Beilis.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-nine.”

“How many children do you have?”

“Five.”

“Your place of permanent residence is Kiev?”

“Kiev.”

“Are you a Jew?”

Observers remarked that Beilis now spoke up noticeably, answering the question more loudly than the judge had asked it. “I did not recognize my own voice when I answered,” Beilis wrote later. He felt himself almost shouting:

“Yes, a Jew!”

The question about religion betrayed no special prejudice. The judge questioned all the witnesses in similar fashion and each was sworn in by a clergyman of his or her faith—Jews by a rabbi, Catholics by a Catholic priest, and so forth. The judge reprimanded the rabbi for adding, after swearing in his first witness, “May your testimony shed light on the truth.” The words were not relevant to the oath, the judge admonished. Thereafter the rabbi hewed to the oath as written.

Vera Cheberyak, small and thin, wearing a fashionable hat with yellow feathers, attracted the most attention. Impressions of her vary. Some found her beautiful, some not. All found her compelling. Nabokov, writing in Speech, described her as “dark-complexioned, with thick sensuous lips and an energetic chin.” Hers was an ordinary face, one you might pass by without giving a second glance, yet somehow also one you would never forget. Many commented on her distinctive, sharp body movements and large, dark, constantly darting eyes (“beautiful, restlessly wandering” in one mesmerized reporter’s description). When she was called to the witness stand—literally a stand, as all witnesses, unless infirm, stood while testifying—the judge asked her, “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” For once, Cheberyak looked cowed. She lowered her head and said nothing. The judge took the gesture as an affirmative response and it was entered into the record that she had been convicted of defrauding her local grocer and sentenced to a prison term. From the defense’s point of view, it was a good start—at least the jury would know this witness was a criminal.

By the end of the session, which ran late into the evening, the proceedings were already taking a physical toll. Vera Cheberyak had fainted and several child witnesses had also collapsed, from hunger (the court had neglected to make provision to feed them). Beilis recalled that by the time he was led out of the courtroom, he himself was “near to fainting from boredom and exhaustion.”

Upon returning to his cell, he found it pleasantly altered. Instead of a dirty mattress on the floor, there was now a nice cot. Moreover, he recalled, “all the guards acted like old friends.” Apparently the order had been given to treat him better and ensure he presented himself as a robust defendant. The regime knew the world was watching.

The next morning Beilis’s journey from prison occasioned far less commotion than it had on the first day. Out of the small window of his carriage, unobstructed by crowds, Beilis could see the unreeling ribbon of pastel-painted plaster facades—yellow, blue, green, red, pink—of the low two- and three-story buildings so characteristic of Kiev and other cities in the empire. A final turn brought the conveyance back to the courthouse, an irregular pinkish brick polygon four stories high, occupying the better part of a city block. As if by an architect’s oversight, it lacked a grand entrance to impress the beholder with the power and authority of justice. The guards led Beilis in through one of its nondescript doorways and up stairs and down dimly lit corridors to the courtroom where, after more than two years of waiting for this moment, he would finally make his plea.

Beilis sat nervously in the dock, his back to the row of windows, so strangely incapable of providing ventilation, but offering a beautiful view of the “many-tiered honeycomb” of the city, as the writer Mikhail Bulgakov called it, with the leaves just turning color, against the clear blue sky. He didn’t know where to put his hands, kept wiping his sweaty palms, squinted frequently at the crowd, and could not restrain his tears. Russian trials provided for no opening statements by the prosecution and defense. Instead, the indictment was read aloud. One of the assistant judges read it slowly, in a strong, clear voice that overcame the bad acoustics. Beilis, though he had read the document many times, listened attentively.

Then chief judge Boldyrev turned to Beilis and asked him: “Do you admit your guilt in conspiring with other persons unknown, with the premeditated goal, out of motives of religious fanaticism, for ritual purposes, to deprive Andrei Yushchinsky of his life on March 12, 1911 … gagging him, and killing him … by inflicting forty-seven wounds on his head, neck and torso with a pointed instrument, causing injuries to veins in the brain and neck, arteries in the left temple and injuries to the dura mater [the outermost brain membrane], the liver, the right kidney, the lungs and heart—which injuries, accompanied by painful and prolonged suffering, resulted in the almost complete draining of blood from Yushchinsky’s body?”

Beilis responded, “No, I am not guilty. I was a soldier, then I earned my living by honest work and raised my children. Suddenly I was taken, arrested, held in prison. Why I do not know. Nothing was …” Boldryev interrupted him, saying explanations were not appropriate at this time but that he would be free to speak his piece later and even question witnesses.

Beilis had been able to control himself during his plea, but as his attorneys argued with the judge, he put his head to his knees and erupted in loud, deeply resonant sobs. The passionate wailing filtered through the still air all the way up to the gallery where it was heard as a dull room-filling drone. Beilis’s sobs would punctuate the proceedings every few days. The eruptions could come at any moment—during testimony by a witness for the defense or for the prosecution or a dispute over a procedural matter. The judge would ask the defendant if he needed some time. Beilis would invariably say no, to please let things proceed. His sobs visibly discomfited the judges and court officers. They brought tears to the eyes of some spectators. But the noted Yiddish writer S. Ansky, who covered the trial, wrote, “It is clear that Beilis is not a broken man.” He wore an “expression of suffering—but not of a timid or submissive person, but of an indignant one.”

The first witness was Andrei’s mother, Alexandra Prikhodko, a woman of about thirty-five, her long hair plaited in a braid. Given her mistreatment of her son, her testimony was poignantly double-edged, honest grief mixed with unspoken regret. “Andrei was illegitimate. Did you love him just as you did your other children?” the prosecution asked. “More than any of them,” she answered. Andrei’s maternal grandmother, Olympiada Nezhinskaya, notably refused to say anything against the Jews. It seemed Andrei had a Jewish friend, Gershik Arendar. “Did you take any notice of the fact that he was friends with a Jewish boy?” the prosecution asked. “No,” she answered. Had she asked the police if “maybe the Jews killed him?” Again, no.

The initial witnesses were wholly irrelevant to the question of Mendel Beilis’s guilt. After a few days, the left-wing activist Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, writing in Kiev Opinion, mockingly declared, “We must inform our readers of an exceptionally important and interesting piece of news: Beilis has ceased to be the defendant!” Beilis’s odd status as a nonentity at his own trial was one of the most widely commented on aspects of the proceedings. Nabokov’s colleague at Speech, Stepan Kondurushkin, noted that one could sit in the courtroom for hours on end, even a whole day, without knowing who was on trial. One of the two police officials filing daily reports noted: “The trial is making a strange impression: over the course of three days, no one is interested in Beilis.”

Also prominent in the first days was the testimony of a series of squirming police officers who tried to explain away their mishandling of the crime scene. It often seemed, many observers noted, as if the Kiev police were on trial. Andrei’s mother, stepfather, and grandmother recounted in detail their weeks of torment at the hands of detectives Mishchuk and Krasovsky. The prosecution broadly hinted that some sort of Jewish conspiracy was at work in misleading the police.

A series of Andrei’s friends and schoolmates, bashful, stammering boys tugging at their trousers and the hems of their jackets, spoke of their friend. Gershik testified how Andrei had shared his fantasies about his real father, who would surely call for him one day. He also told of how he had once given his friend the best possible present, a toy gun that used gunpowder and could shoot real bullets (ones you had to cast yourself out of melted lead). When cross-examining Gershik’s father, Gruzenberg brought up that Russian children often played with Jewish ones on the streets of the Slobodka suburb. “And none of them disappeared?” he asked. To which the man replied, of course not.

The prosecution made much of an old Jew named Tartakovsky who roomed with the Arendars and was said to be devastated by Andrei’s death. An old man with no family took a shine to a young boy and was stricken with grief at his murder—something was suspicious here. As for the poor man’s subsequent death from choking on a bone during a meal, the prosecution hinted at a Jewish cabal.

Zarudny popped up with continual objections, which had their intended effect. Vipper, the state prosecutor, would try to adopt a sarcastic and haughty air but often looked jumpy, unnerved, and even disoriented. Shmakov, on the other hand—fat, slow-moving, with an old man’s muttering tone—maintained his sarcastic composure. “Every time I say something about Jews Mr. Zarudny asks for it to be entered into the record,” he cracked at one point. “So the whole record is going to be scribbled over entirely with Jews!”

On the morning of the third day, people swarmed Kiev’s newspaper stalls. The most sensational event of the trial’s opening phase had occurred not inside the courtroom but outside it, in the form of the lead article on the front page of the Kievan by the paper’s editor, Vasily Shulgin—a full-blown attack on the prosecution. Demand for copies colossally outstripped supply. Newspaper sellers made a killing as customers paid a ruble just to read the issue while standing at the stall. The defense bought an early copy for three rubles. The price quickly went up to five. By evening the issue had been confiscated by the government and copies were going for fifteen rubles.

Shulgin was one of the most intriguing figures in the entire Beilis affair: a brilliant journalist, a member of the Duma, an uncompromising opponent of the blood accusation, a convinced monarchist, and a die-hard anti-Semite who believed the Jews were a pernicious, exploitative force that needed to remain suppressed. He also thought the trial was an offense to anyone’s sense of justice. He thundered:

The Beilis indictment is not simply an indictment of one man, but an indictment of an entire people for one of the most heinous of crimes, the indictment of an entire religion for one of the most infamous superstitions…

One doesn’t have to be a lawyer, but need only have some common sense, to understand that the Beilis indictment is mere prattle which any defense attorney could break down without even trying.

Shulgin attacked chief Kiev prosecutor Grigory Chaplinsky for removing Detectives Mishchuk and Krasovsky from the case for their refusal to hunt down a man merely because he was a Jew. “The entire police force,” he wrote, “terrorized by the actions of the judicial chamber’s prosecutor, realized that anyone who uttered a word … other than what the authorities wanted to hear … would immediately be thrown in prison.” Risking prosecution for criminal libel, he concluded, “We assert that the prosecutor of the judicial chamber, Privy Councillor Grigory Gavrilovich Chaplinsky, intimidated his subordinates and choked off all attempts to cast light on the case.”

Shulgin had shockingly accused the regime of conspiring to convict an innocent man. Accounts of the article, though not the full text, were printed in papers across the empire. This was the “J’accuse” moment of the Beilis case. Unlike Émile Zola’s famous broadside in the Dreyfus case in France, it did not exactly fuel a movement. But it did have an enormous impact on educated public opinion. “Look at what Shulgin says …” was a trump argument for those trying to convince their friends that the prosecution of the brick-factory clerk was a travesty of justice.

The Beilis case had become a dangerous rallying point for opponents of the regime. After Shulgin’s article came out, the security apparatus stepped up efforts to harass the press, ultimately punishing 102 papers. Six editors were arrested, thirty-six issues of various papers were confiscated, three papers were closed for the duration of the trial, and forty-three were fined a total of 12,850 rubles. The punishments, invariably “for an attempt to inflammatorily influence the public,” were all illegal because none of the material targeted was inflammatory, a fact tsarist officials admitted in secret communications. Moreover, the punishments inflicted were haphazard and ineffectual. (What, really, could be achieved by fining Nabokov, coeditor of Speech, a hundred rubles?) The attacks on the press were part of a larger—and largely futile—attempt to maintain public order. Russia was in the middle of an escalating wave of strikes, which would continue for another eleven months until the first shots of the Great War. Countless groups of striking workers adopted pro-Beilis resolutions. A demonstration of several thousand workers in Warsaw—Poland was then part of the Russian Empire—had to be broken up by the police. Strikes of Jewish workers in support of Beilis broke out in Vilnius, Riga, and Minsk. University students across Russia held one-day protest strikes. At St. Petersburg University, following Shulgin’s example, right-wing students posted a letter declaring that, although they considered the Jews to be “a harmful nation,” they could not support “the unjust charge of ritual murder.”

As for violent attacks on Jews, there were scattered incidents, but the regime—greatly concerned, in general, with suppressing all violence—was quite successful in preventing anti-Jewish retribution. The trial was a moral assault on the Jewish people, but Jews were relatively safe from bodily harm—for the time being.

The trial of Mendel Beilis was, both literally and figuratively, a messy and disorderly affair. With the passing days, cigarette butts, spittle stains, and other rubbish accumulated in the hallways. (Visitors ignored the numerous “Please Do Not …” signs staring reproachfully from the walls.) Inside the courtroom, witnesses for the defense and prosecution were often mixed together in no sensible pattern, called in no particular order, and even for no apparent reason. (In the Russian system, witnesses were called by the judge, who did the initial questioning, and were not identified to the jury as testifying for one side or the other.) Quite a few prosecution witnesses were asked only, “Do you know anything about this case,” said no, and were excused. On the evening of the fourth day, September 28, amid a run of wholly irrelevant witnesses, the judge called to the stand Mikhail Nakonechny. The erratic course of the trial had abruptly brought it to one of the strongest witnesses for the defense and perhaps the only one whom Beilis’s supporters could rightly call a hero.

Nakonechny, nicknamed “Frog,” was a shoemaker with seven children who lived not far from Beilis, at the opposite end of the same courtyard as Vera Cheberyak. He more than anyone else had done his part to exonerate Beilis. Two years earlier, when he had heard that the lamplighter Kazimir Shakhovsky was incriminating Beilis, he immediately informed the authorities that he had heard this man vow to “pin the crime on Mendel.” Shakhovsky himself admitted that this damning account was truthful. Tall and neatly dressed, Nakonechny looked nothing like a frog; he had a side business as a kind of poor man’s attorney, filling out legal petitions for the illiterate and giving them advice in the bargain. All who saw him testify commented on the righteousness and sincerity that he projected.

Zamyslovsky, the prosecutor and esteemed Duma member, tried hard to confuse the poor Lukianovka shoemaker into a contradiction or at least unsettle him, but Nakonechny could not be intimidated. When his opponent said accusingly, “So you are a professional petitioner”—implying he was the clever sort who made up stories to fit the occasion—Nakonechny replied humbly that professionals appear in court, whereas “I consider myself a craftsman.” When Zamyslovsky tried to interrupt him, Nakonechny cut him off. “Let me finish,” he said. “My heart is anxious, and I want to make sure to keep nothing from the court.” When Zamyslovsky did speak, the shoemaker batted back his sneering insinuations. “So it seems you greatly troubled yourself to inform the investigator about everything regarding this case?” Zamyslovsky said sarcastically. “I didn’t ‘trouble myself,’ ” Nakonechny responded. “But I have a grain of decency and I considered it my obligation to say what I knew because an innocent man might suffer.” At the words “innocent man,” Beilis broke down, but the questioning continued.

Nakonechny performed a great service to the defense by explaining clearly for the first time why the story of Beilis dragging off Andrei defied all common sense—something the defense had not yet had an opportunity to do. After Zamyslovsky mentioned the scenario, Nakonechny, almost screaming, said, “If that had happened, all the children would have raised such a cry that not an hour would have passed before we, the whole street, would have known about the boy’s disappearance.”

The prosecution should have objected, and the judge should have cut him off; this was merely the witness’s opinion, however well founded. But his dignity and passion cowed the court into letting him speak. Leaving the witness stand, Nakonechny fell on his fourteen-year-old daughter Dunya’s shoulder and cried. She, too, would be an important witness, coming face-to-face with Vera Cheberyak’s daughter in one of the most dramatic moments of the trial.

Her own testimony was several days off, but toward the end of the fourth day Vera Cheberyak managed to enter the trial in the most unexpected manner. Amid a run of useless prosecution witnesses, a woman named Daria Chekhovskaya stood to testify to the good character of Andrei’s mother. Asked the general question, “What do you know about this case?,” the woman stunned the courtroom. In the waiting room, she said, she had heard Vera Cheberyak trying to intimidate a young witness. The two women had been sitting on the same bench, back-to-back, when she heard Cheberyak call over one of Zhenya’s old playmates. “She started to coach him,” Chekhovskaya testified. “She told him: You tell the court, ‘All three of us went to the factory—Zhenya, and Andrusha and me. They chased us. We ran away and they grabbed Andrusha’…Say that you broke free from Beilis’s arms, and Andrusha was left behind. Say that he [Beilis] grabbed him and dragged him off.” According to Chekhovskaya, the boy told Cheberyak he wouldn’t say any of that. The prosecution tried to insinuate that the woman was lying. “You were called to testify about the mother and now you offer us this bit of news!” Vipper snapped. But he could not shake her testimony.

The stage was set for an “eye-to-eye” confrontation, a provision of Russian trials when witnesses contradicted each other directly. The judge would give Vera Cheberyak a chance to call the boy a liar to his face.

The fifth day, according to Speech correspondent Stepan Kondurushkin, “could justifiably be called ‘the day of the black beards.’ ” To prove that Beilis and various other dark-bearded men were responsible for Andrei’s murder, the prosecution first turned to Kazimir and Ulyana Shakhovskaya, the Lamplighters. The hard-drinking couple had already given half a dozen different versions of their stories to investigators, contradicting themselves and each other, and finally recanting most of their testimony. Kazimir, an alcoholic wreck of a man, spoke haltingly and frequently got tied up in his own words. Attorneys for both sides had trouble getting sense out of him. He stuck by part of his story—that Zhenya had told him that someone had chased the boys away from the Zaitsev factory. But otherwise his testimony was less than helpful to the prosecution.

“Did the detectives tell you to testify against Beilis?” the judge asked.

“The detectives gave me vodka to drink. They took us and told us to say this and that.”

“Did they ask you to testify against Beilis?”

“Yes.” […]

“Why were there so many changes in your testimony? Did they coach you?”

“Of course.”

“Did [the detectives] give you both [him and his wife] liquor until you were drunk?”

“Yes, until we were drunk.”

Ulyana, a woman with watery eyes and a perpetually confused smile, simply gave the impression, the Kievan reported, “that she was not playing with a full deck.” Did the derelict Anna the Wolf really tell her she saw a man in a black beard carrying off Andrei? “Yes,” she whispered. But pressed on what Anna had really told her, she said, “I don’t remember, she was too drunk, and I couldn’t make out what she said.” Did the detectives tell her to testify against Mendel? “Yes, yes.” Did she say anything against him? “No, I didn’t.”

The day’s final witness was Vladimir Golubev, the volatile leader of the right-wing Kiev youth group Double Headed Eagle. It was he who had first brought the man he called “the Yid Mendel” to the attention of the authorities as a suspect in May 1911. If not for him, it was nearly certain, the defendant would not be sitting in the dock. Golubev impressed Beilis as looking like some sort of outlaw, which was a more correct intuition than he probably realized.

Golubev, while useful to the prosecution, was also dangerous. He had spent the past year and a half under the authorities’ watch—alternately coddled and scolded. The chief prosecutor, Grigory Chaplinsky, would consult with him about the case. But Golubev also had to suffer what he must have considered continual petty indignities. The police fined him ten rubles for placing an unapproved notice in his group’s newspaper announcing a public requiem for Andrei. Another issue was confiscated due to an inflammatory article about the case and a poem seen as calling for a pogrom. All this was humiliating. Had he not kept his word—for more than two years—not to incite a pogrom? The authorities, however, were right to be concerned. By the late summer of 1912 his desire to shed Jewish blood had begun to overwhelm him. Until then, Golubev seems to have been more a talker than a doer. But on the night of September 5, 1912, he and about ten of his comrades set out for the largely Jewish Podol neighborhood armed with iron bars and rubber truncheons. They shouted, “Beat the Jews,” and “Take that for Stolypin”—it was the first anniversary of the assassinated prime minister’s death—as they struck several Jews (as well as one Russian student, apparently by mistake). Pursued by police, they rushed off to the vicinity of the Choral Synagogue, where they beat a few more Jews. Just after midnight, Golubev hit a Jewish student on the head. There the police caught up with him and his crew and they were arrested. But he was never charged with a crime and so, when he gave his oath to the court, he could honestly claim a spotless record.

Testifying ought to have been the greatest moment of his young life. He had been waiting for it for so long. No one could censor him. His every word would be taken down and published in full in the morning papers—even the liberal papers. But his gait was shaky, his face pale. The witness did not at all live up to the grand role of instigator of the case that now gripped the world. He looked so ill that the judge told him he could postpone his testimony until the next day if he wished. “No, I can talk,” Golubev said, and then promptly fainted and fell to the ground.

A refreshed Golubev testified the next morning. He mainly restated his reasons for suspecting the brick-factory clerk, while sprinkling his remarks with the word “Yid” (zhid) and its adjectival variant (zhidovskii). Guided by the writings of the pseudo-scholar Hippolyte Liutostansky, he had quickly concluded that the crime followed the pattern of “Yid ritual murders.” He canvassed the Lukianovka neighborhood to find out “whether the boy Yushchinsky had any relationships with Yids.” He implied that Detectives Krasovsky and Mishchuk must have been in the pay of the Jews. With his confident manner, he was probably the best prosecution witness so far. But under cross-examination by Gruzenberg, he let slip one item of great significance for the defense. A few weeks after Andrei’s murder Golubev had been the first person to question Zhenya Cheberyak about the last time he had seen his friend Andrei. At that time, Golubev admitted, Zhenya had said nothing about playing with him on the clay grinders at the Zaitsev factory or about being chased by men with black beards. According to Golubev, Zhenya had told him that he and Andrei had played in a field, bought lard at a store, then dropped by Zhenya’s house and—here is the key detail—Andrei left without his coat. Andrei, this account clearly suggests, had left his coat in the Cheberyaks’ apartment. It was never found. The defense did its best to hint at the obvious conclusion: whoever knew what had happened to Andrei’s coat knew what had happened to Andrei.

Golubev also offered some unintended comic relief. At one point he assured the court that the defendant came from a line of tzaddiks, or wise men, and “was respected because he was a tzaddik” himself. Beilis, for once, erupted in laughter.

Around one p.m. on this, the sixth day of the trial—September 30, 1913—the judges, the jury, the attorneys, and selected witnesses, including Golubev, exited the courthouse and piled into twenty-five carriages and automobiles. Accompanied by policemen on horseback, the vehicles snaked toward Lukianovka to survey sites relevant to the case. As a safety precaution, the defendant traveled in his coach along quiet side streets. Two years, two months, and eight days after his arrest in the middle of the night, Mendel Beilis was going home.

The day was cold and windy. Overhead, storm clouds threatened. As the convoy arrived in Lukianovka, the smell of smoke pervaded the air—somewhere nearby a building was on fire. But nothing could keep away the curious. A reporter noted that they loitered “by houses, in doorways and in windows … children, women, workers and prostitutes.” Shooed away by the police, they would reappear minutes later a few steps down the street.

Beilis observed everything through the tiny window of his carriage. When the judge asked if he wished to be present during the examination of the various sites to be visited, he said, “Yes, yes,” and stepped onto the ground of his old neighborhood. Seeing some familiar faces, he doffed his cap and bowed.

At Vera Cheberyak’s old building, two boys were recruited to perform a test. They went up to her apartment on the second floor with a policeman and re-created Andrei’s supposed screams. One could indeed hear what was going on upstairs, which meant that the Cheberyaks’ downstairs neighbor, Zinaida Malitskaya, could have discerned Andrei’s final cries and the shuffling of feet overhead. (“They were like a dancing couple,” she testified in court, “as if they were doing a step, first in one direction and then in the other.”)

As Beilis walked the familiar streets, the crowd grew larger and noisier. The police could not keep the people away. Beilis was bowing often now. People shouted excitedly, “Beilis! Beilis!” He smiled, with tears coming to his eyes. The procession stopped at his former home at the edge of the Zaitsev factory. Did Beilis want to go into his old apartment? “I want to, I want to,” he said, tearing up again. After examining the premises, where his family no longer lived, the party proceeded to the factory, surveying the famous clay grinders and the kiln into which the “men with black beards” had supposedly dragged their victim. “Everything is the same!” Beilis exclaimed.

In fact, however, one thing had changed. Two years earlier, when Detective Mishchuk had visited Lukianovka in search of witnesses, he had been disappointed that Andrei’s playmates had refused to talk about their dead friend. They had seemed to want to forget him. But Vladimir Korolenko, who covered the trial for the national newspaper the Russian Gazette, had found it easy to strike up a conversation with some children, evoking a flood of memories. “Of course, we knew him!” they said. “How many times we played with him on the clay grinders together!” “When we played with toy soldiers, he always returned everything, never stole any.” (Unlike Vera Cheberyak’s Zhenya, who would steal and then say, “That’s mine.”) “He was very handy. He knew how to cast toy cannons in sand molds.” “He was such a good boy!” Now, everyone wanted to talk about Andrei.

At the cave where the boy’s body had been found, the shrub-strewn incline was so steep that weaker members of the party had to link arms with a steadier partner. The cave was lit by a flashlight, which observers said cast a spooky glow. The jurors entered it one at a time, each shaking the dust off his clothes as he came out. Now it was raining, and by the time they reboarded their vehicles, the court procession was drenched. Vipper the prosecutor fretted he might fall ill and cause a delay in the trial. Beilis got into his coach for the ride back to prison, his homecoming at an end.

On the morning of the trial’s seventh day, the judge summoned Anna “the Wolf” Zakharova, and a flabby barrel of an old woman dressed in rags shambled toward the bench. Anna, according to Shakhovskaya (in at least one version of her story), had said she’d seen Andrei dragged off by a man with a black beard. In a sworn deposition, the old woman had denied she’d seen or said any such thing. Yet as she reached the witness stand, the prosecutor rose to his feet with an air of hopeful confidence.

The testimony reads like a cross-examination by the defense, even though the prosecutor asked all but the first question, which was posed by the judge.

“What do you know about this case?”

“I don’t know anything.”

“Did you tell Ulyana Shakhovskaya that on the 12th of March you saw how a boy at the Zaitsev factory was grabbed by a man with a black beard?”

“No, I didn’t tell her that.”

“Where do you sleep at night?”

“Wherever I can.”

“Do you drink?”

“I drink a little.” (Laughter in the hall)

“Did the detectives question you?”

“Yes. I said that I didn’t say anything, I didn’t know anything.”

“So Ulyana [Shakhovskaya] made up everything?”

“Yes, she made it up herself.”

“And do you like to babble when you drink?”

“No, I don’t like to.”

Twice during her testimony, to the laughter of the audience, Anna started wandering away from the stand, only to be steered back by a bailiff. Vipper, irritated, wrapped up his examination.

“Do you prefer to be silent or to speak?” he asked.

“I like to be silent more,” she said.

“There you go!” he said, pouncing as if she had betrayed the truth. The witness, he implied, had been pressured into silence. The defense declined to ask any questions, considering it unnecessary. The judge called Shakhovskaya to the stand for an “eye-to-eye” confrontation with “the Wolf.” The two women started heatedly gibbering at each other, again to titters from the crowd. When the court was done with her, Anna shuffled off, crossing herself with great relief. In the wake of Anna the Wolf’s testimony, the correspondent for the Times of London wrote, “The last of the prosecution’s patchwork evidence against Beilis, derived admittedly from thieves and drunkards, has thus disappeared and it seems incredible that the imperial authorities will allow this nauseous case to proceed further.”

At this point in the trial, the incredulous spectator could rightfully ask not only how the case could go on, but how the prosecution could conduct the case in such a way as to inevitably attract ridicule. The prosecutors were reasonably intelligent men. The case was closely supervised by justice minister Shcheglovitov who, whatever his flaws, was a highly sophisticated jurist. In its discovery procedures, the Russian judicial system was fairly thorough; all the key witnesses had been deposed in advance, sometimes on multiple occasions. The prosecution knew what Anna the Wolf and the Lamplighters would say, yet relied on them nonetheless.

In the history of the blood accusation, the prosecutors of Mendel Beilis stand out for their fumbling inability to craft a convincing narrative of guilt. Critics invariably called the Beilis case “medieval,” but the comparison was misleading. Ritual-murder prosecutions of centuries past often achieved a kind of persuasive power. The twelfth-century monk Thomas of Monmouth, the originator of the ritual-murder myth, set a high standard; in The Life and Miracles of Saint William of Norwich he builds his case against the Jews quite compellingly. In its narrative art, the work is something of a masterpiece. For pure storytelling, the 1475 trial of twenty-three Jews for the murder of little Simon of Trent overwhelms with its brutal logic, as the prosecutors extract ever more detailed confessions from the accused. (The torture inflicted upon each defendant—hoisting by the arms tied behind the back with a device called a strappado—was legally sanctioned and noted in the transcript.) In the Tiszaeszlar trial of 1882–1883 in Hungary—the first ritualmurder case of the modern era in a Western country—interrogators coerced a detailed account of the crime out of a supposed eyewitness, the thirteen-year-old son of a synagogue sexton; the boy’s narrative of the killing of a fourteen-year-old girl was so convincing that an honest deputy prosecutor, Ede Szeyffer, concluded that it was a lie only a full month into the trial, at which point he convinced the court to free the fifteen defendants.

As for the Beilis case, minister of justice Shcheglovitov confidentially acknowledged its flimsiness to more than one person. But there was never any question of dropping the case. The minister looked upon the thinness of the evidence against the defendant as but a challenge to be overcome. Conversations he had in the year or so leading up to the trial document how he groped toward a novel and cunning solution.

A meeting with an old acquaintance in mid- to late 1912 captures Shcheglovitov when he was at his most uncertain and even pathetic. When the acquaintance, a government official named Vladimir Talberg, scolded him for backing a case that rested on such a “shaky foundation,” he did not dispute the assessment. But he insisted that “long experience” had taught him that even in a “hopeless” case, “the talent of the chief judge,” as well as the prosecutor, aided by “unexpected turns of events,” could result in a conviction. He was, in other words, counting largely on biased conduct from the bench and blind luck.

By the summer of 1913—that is, two or three months before the trial—Shcheglovitov seized on the hope that the problem lay not in the evidence but the failure of the prosecution to make the most of it. He complained that Kiev’s chief prosecutor, Grigory Chaplinsky, had let him down. Surely, he thought, a competent investigator could firm up the case. To that end, he summoned Arkady Koshko, the chief of detectives of the Moscow police, to St. Petersburg to review the entire case file.

After a full month of work, Koshko met with the minister again to brief him on his conclusions. Koshko’s memoir sheds unusual light on the minister’s thinking. “The investigation was conducted improperly, one-sidedly and, I would say, in a biased manner,” Koshko recalled telling the minister, to his extreme irritation. The detective saw no evidence that Beilis was guilty, nor any convincing reason to believe the crime was ritual in character.

After listening to Koshko’s presentation for a few minutes, the minister interjected, “I can see that at the impending trial the Jews will have no better defender than you!”

“I am not at all defending the Jews,” Koshko replied. “I am just reporting to Your Excellency my completely objective opinion.”

Shcheglovitov then took another tack, whose significance Koshko did not fully understand at the time. “Let us assume for a moment that Beilis is innocent,” he said. “Isn’t it obvious to you that this was ritual crime?”

“No, it is not at all obvious,” Koshko replied.

The minister told Koshko, “I have never doubted it [the crime’s ritual character] for a minute, based on the irrefutable conclusions of the great authority, Father Pranaitis,” the prosecution’s expert witness on the Jewish religion. For some time the detective and the minister argued over this point—whether the evidence pointed toward a ritual murder, irrespective of Beilis’s guilt. As they sparred, the minister demonstrated great familiarity with the work of the Tashkent priest.

“I hope that the verdict of the jurors will shake your philo-Semitic views,” the minister said, concluding the conversation, pointedly without extending his hand: “Good day, sir!”

Shcheglovitov’s remarks to Koshko were the first hints that the state had come up with an innovative insurance policy against the failure to convict the defendant. The minister’s attempt to separate the issue of Beilis’s guilt from that of the ritual nature of the crime would become the heart of the prosecution’s strategy. Judge Boldyrev, it was decided, would ask the jury to consider two questions separately. The first question would be straightforward: Was the defendant innocent or guilty of the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky? The second question would, in effect, ask the jury to decide whether Andrei Yushchinsky had been killed as part of a Jewish ritual. (The exact wording of the question, which had yet to be worked out, would be indirect, but unmistakable in its implication.) The jury would be free to find Mendel Beilis not guilty, but the prosecution’s argument would lead it to answer the second question affirmatively. Treating the issue of the blood accusation separately from the guilt of the defendant appears to have been historically unprecedented. Whoever thought of it, perhaps Shcheglovitov himself, had hit upon an ingenious maneuver.

The prosecution, then, felt an unusual level of comfort in putting on a case against Beilis that it understood was highly flawed. It knew that it would still have a chance at a favorable verdict, even if the jury found the defendant not guilty. On this matter the prosecution was surprisingly candid. Not long before the trial began, Beilis’s attorney Vasily Maklakov ran into civil prosecutor Georgy Zamyslovsky in the halls of the Duma, the parliamentary body in which they both served. Maklakov told Zamyslovsky that he thought the prosecution’s case was weak. “Let him [Beilis] be acquitted,” Zamyslovsky replied. “What’s important to us is to prove that this was a ritual murder.”

Still, the prosecution had hardly given up on getting a murder conviction against Mendel Beilis and condemning him to a life of hard labor. It knew that it had two illicit advantages over the defense: it was receiving daily intelligence reports on the sequestered jurors, and it had an active ally in Judge Boldyrev. For the first five days of the trial, the judge, perhaps out of concern for his reputation, had conducted the trial in an impartial manner, repeatedly admonishing prosecutor Vipper for his procedural infractions. “The judge often interrupts the prosecutor,” a police agent telegraphed in a report to St. Petersburg at the end of the fifth day, “That severely unnerves him.” The judge’s conduct of the trial, the agent noted, greatly dissatisfied Kiev’s chief prosecutor, Grigory Chaplinsky. Someone, probably Chaplinsky himself, must have had a talk with Boldryev because the next day the agent reported that the judge and Vipper had “made up.” By the eleventh day, another agent noted approvingly that “the judge skillfully directs the attention of the jurors to the details [of the prosecution’s case]…and subtly but unmistakably guides witnesses who become confused to the right path.”

Boldyrev was aware of the illegal surveillance of the jurors, approved of it, and, with Vipper and Zamyslovsky, avidly listened to reports of their private conversations. His bias in favor of the prosecution would become more and more apparent. But only at the end of the trial would it become clear to what extreme lengths Judge Boldyrev would go to maximize the chances of a conviction.

Unaware of these machinations, after a long court day was over, the exhausted defendant looked forward to laying himself down on his nice new cot; but as he slumbered his trial went on. All over America Mendel Beilises were taking to the stage, putting themselves in the dock with great flair, lending the proceedings the fine dramatic form they lacked in real life. “The Mendel Beilis epidemic,” anticipated with such distaste by a dyspeptic critic, was intensifying. The Yiddish productions played to packed houses of spectators who cheered Gruzenberg, hooted at the prosecution, and cried at the woes of the defendant, who was invariably tortured without mercy. The Yiddish press expressed outrage and embarrassment at the plays, denouncing them as “shund”—trash, cheap melodrama. “The audience sheds rivers of tears,” one dismissive critic wrote of a New York production. “Every woman soaks seven handkerchiefs … and every man three.”

But the plays spread the news. Many productions left the denouement unresolved, adapting to events as they developed, amounting, in the words of one historian, to “three-dimensional newsreels.” And they were precocious expressions of a wave of public protest only now gaining momentum in the country.

One of the few to grasp this point was an editorial writer in the New York–based Zionist newspaper Dos Yiddishe Folk (The Jewish People). The popularity of the plays, the author argued, “shows once more the nationalism and deep Jewishness of most of our people … It is this feeling that has given us sufficient strength to withstand the many enemies who rise up in every generation to annihilate us.” The author was far more perceptive than the ostentatiously high-minded critics. They failed to pick up on what the popularity of the vulgar plays said about American Jews: their sense of solidarity, their commitment to justice, and their potential for collective action.

With the Yiddish theater acting as a kind of raucous chorus, a massive grassroots movement in support of Beilis had belatedly begun sweeping the United States. The American Jewish Committee, America’s leading Jewish lobbying organization, remained wary of public protests as possibly counterproductive. (So, too, establishment leaders in Europe. In Germany, the Jewish Chronicle reported the assimilationists to be “furious” at the Zionists for organizing pro-Beilis rallies. In Great Britain, Lucien Wolf, known as the Jewish community’s “minister of foreign affairs,” wrote that he favored “discreet diplomacy,” arguing in a private letter that the “protest meetings or other Jewish agitation on the Blood Accusation will only play into the hand of the anti-Semites.”)

The American Jewish Committee organized a letter of protest from prominent Christian clergymen, which it hoped the State Department would deliver to St. Petersburg through proper channels. But around the nation, countless Jewish congregations and local Jewish organizations began taking action on their own, spontaneously holding rallies and petitioning the White House. They were joined by many local and state governments and a variety of Christian and other groups. The New York and Wisconsin state legislatures passed resolutions condemning the trial. The House of Deputies of the Episcopal Church called on the Russian Orthodox leaders to declare the ritual-murder charge against the Jews to be false. The New York Esperantists pledged to instigate a worldwide protest movement and drafted an open letter, in Esperanto, for distribution throughout Europe. The success of the Esperantists was rather limited, but in America the pro-Beilis movement would culminate in some of the largest mass protests of Jews and greatest upsurge of Jewish-Christian solidarity the country had yet seen.

As the eighth day of the trial began, the courtroom was overflowing, the seats filled with “elegant women and girls of Kiev society, clergymen, military men, officials,” the Kiev Opinion contributor Bonch-Bruevich said in a dispatch. “Lorgnettes, binoculars (though forbidden)…and a sea of feathers in women’s hats, flutter, shake and obstruct one’s view.” Every court officer with an excuse to be present sat in a row behind the judges’ bench, their gold buttons gleaming. The crowd was not simply excited, according to one Kievan reporter, it was ravenous. All the spectators wanted to be able to say that they had been there for the testimony of the notorious Vera Cheberyak.

As opening acts, the witnesses preceding her that day were cast to perfection, maintaining the interest of the audience but not upstaging the dark diva herself. Mendel Beilis made one of his periodic cameo appearances. He never took the stand during the trial, but he did exercise his right under Russian court procedure to give an “explanation” on a specific matter, describing how he had supervised the baking and delivery of matzo for his employer Jonah Zaitsev, an activity that the prosecution presented in the most sinister light. Beilis explained there was no ritual for the production of matzo, just a rabbi present to ensure that the crew observed the rules of kosher baking. “These are just illiterate Jews,” he told the court. “They roll out the matzo, and then might start eating bread and drinking tea. And that’s strictly forbidden. So [the rabbi] is watching so that … they don’t do that.” A reporter noted that Beilis spoke more loudly than he had on previous occasions and “with a great deal of gesticulation.” He would still weep from time to time but was becoming more comfortable in the courtroom.

Then Detective Krasovsky’s former assistant, Adam Polishchuk, an elegantly dressed young man with a crew cut and short beard, took the stand. Krasovsky had once trusted him, but now Polishchuk was a full-fledged participant in the effort to convict Beilis. Asked his profession, he told the court that he worked for the secret police. When Krasovsky had hired him, he had been an unemployed police officer; presumably his new job was a reward for the service he was about to provide.

Polishchuk, startlingly, proceeded to accuse Krasovsky of murdering Vera Cheberyak’s two children with poisoned pastries, in contradiction to the pathologists’ report that conclusively proved that they had died natural deaths of dysentery. As for the defendant, Polishchuk suggested that Mendel Beilis had murdered Andrei in league with the hay and straw dealer Faivel Shneyerson, who took his meals at the Beilises’ home. (The prosecution, in essence, made an unindicted coconspirator out of Shneyerson, a young man who was supposedly of the noble line of Lubavitcher Hasidic wise men.)

But Polishchuk, prodded by the defense, made his greatest impression with his description of Zhenya Cheberyak’s deathbed scene. In August 1912, while still working for Krasovsky, he had been assigned to watch over the gravely ill boy. Because his original deposition was part of the record, he could not lie about this key episode. He said nothing willingly, forcing the defense to dig for every detail. But even in his halting rendition, the story was chilling. Nothing could blunt the eeriness of how Zhenya’s final thoughts turned to his dead friend, or the attempt by his mother to persuade her dying boy to exonerate her (“Tell them, little one, that I had nothing to do with it”) and her apparent fear that he would say something to incriminate her, as she silenced him by covering his mouth with kisses.

Eleven-year-old Ludmila Cheberyak, Vera’s only surviving child, her chestnut hair divided in two braids that reached nearly to her waist, directly preceded her mother on the stand. She possessed not only her mother’s large eyes, dark brows, and long eyelashes, but the same ability to spin tales. She struck observers as having unnatural poise for one so young, yet somehow maintaining an air of childish innocence as she told the nightmarish story of the children’s jaunt to the Zaitsev factory and how Beilis and two other Jews had supposedly chased them.

The defense had earlier argued the whole story had to be false because, in the fall of 1910, the Zaitsev factory management had put a complete stop to the children’s visits to the clay grinders by erecting an impassable wooden fence. The fence was the subject of endless testimony. The defense probably got the better of the argument, but negatives are notoriously hard to prove and it was a challenge to rule out the possibility that the children had ever found a way through the fence, which made Ludmila’s testimony crucial.

“We were playing on the clay grinders,” the girl told the court. “After a while the factory manager Mendel”—prosecution witnesses always seemed to give Beilis a promotion—“started chasing us and the others chased us as well.” Her story was well wrought (undoubtedly with the help of her mother and perhaps the prosecution), as if to insulate her from cross-examination. She did not assert that she herself had seen Beilis grab Andrei. Such an account would have opened her to an aggressive line of questioning from the defense. She said she had only heard Andrei scream as she and the other children were chased off. However, she said her younger sister, Valia, now conveniently deceased, had seen Mendel grab Andrei: “She screamed and told me, ‘Andrusha, Andrusha, they dragged him off.’ ”

The judge then called for an eye-to-eye confrontation between Ludmila and the shoemaker Nakonechny’s daughter Dunya. Ludmila claimed that Dunya had been playing with her and the boys when the Jews chased after them. When Dunya took her place beside her former friend at the witness stand, she lost no time calling her a liar.

Judge: “Did you play with that girl on the clay grinder … did Beilis chase you away?”

Dunya: “That never happened.”

Ludmila: “We were chased then.”

Dunya: “Who ever chased us? Think again, and then let’s see you lie.”

Ludmila started to cry. “Girl, why are you crying?” the judge asked. She answered, “I am afraid.” The prosecutor asked for it to be entered into the record that the girl cried and said she was afraid. He was setting up a main argument of his summation—that a Jewish conspiracy had bribed witnesses to support Beilis, or else had intimidated witnesses into retracting incriminating testimony or maintaining their silence.

Vera Cheberyak strode to the stand in an eye-catching black velvet hat with a wide brim, trimmed all around in yellowish-orange faux ostrich feathers, from which rose a sort of feather pom-pom that bobbed distractingly as she moved. Beilis looked at her intently, maintaining his gaze the entire time she testified. Witnesses were supposed to face the judges at all times so, seated where he was, about a dozen feet directly to the right of the stand, Beilis could stare only at her profile, perhaps focusing on her nose with its small bump and its slight but definite bend to one side. As more than one observer noted, it seemed at this moment as if there were two defendants in the courtroom. Was the real perpetrator sitting in the dock or standing before the judges? Or, a skeptical reporter asked, was he perhaps somewhere else, laughing at the whole farce?

Cheberyak began with a request to the judge that betrayed both her self-awareness and her anxiety. “Would you be so kind as to read aloud my previous testimony?” she asked, meaning her prior statements to investigators. “After all,” she said, “I cannot remember everything.” She clearly was hoping for assistance in her effort to avoid contradicting herself or to smooth over her inconsistencies as best she could. But the judge had no choice but to say no. Previous statements could be read back only after the witness had begun testifying and if one side or the other pointed to a possible discrepancy between different versions. “Whatever you remember,” Judge Boldyrev said, “that is what you will tell the court.”

She started off well enough, though, the words pouring out of her in a steady and forceful stream. After the judge’s usual opening question, her testimony fills seven columns of small print in the transcript, save for one brief interruption. As with her physical appearance, descriptions of her voice are contradictory—it was said to sound both “metallic” and “melodic,” with an unusual range, hitting high notes and then descending so low the sounds seemed to growl from deep in her chest. (One correspondent compared her to the famed mezzo-soprano Anastasia Vialtseva, beloved for her virtuoso renditions of gypsy songs.)

She spoke well, but perhaps too well, too fluidly. To one correspondent, she seemed to speak “as if she were running away.” She described the key scene vividly—how Beilis and the other Jews ran after the children at the brick factory, how Zhenya barely escaped, leaving Andrei behind. It was all very compelling, but suspiciously well-performed for a secondhand account. (She was supposedly only relating Zhenya’s story, after all.). It struck one reporter that only two kinds of people describe scenes so vividly: eyewitnesses and liars.

Cheberyak recounted her story of the trip with the journalist Stepan Brazul to Kharkov in December 1911 and how Arnold Margolin, or one of his confederates, offered her the enormous sum of forty thousand rubles to confess to Andrei’s murder, and how she would be spirited out of the country or defended by the best lawyers in the land who would secure her acquittal. Nearly as important for the prosecution was another story she told: how she had sent Zhenya to buy milk from Beilis not long before Andrei disappeared, and how the boy supposedly returned, pale with fear, saying two Jews dressed in strange black garments had run after him, but he had gotten away. One of the Jews was old, the other tall and young. According to Cheberyak, her son said one looked like the hay and straw dealer, Shneyerson, the supposed Hasid of the noble line, and the other could have been Shneyerson’s father. (When Shneyerson testified, he turned out to be a rather surly, self-confident, and clean-shaven young man who did not at all look the part of a nefarious Hasid.)

After the prosecution was done, Gruzenberg began an orderly cross-examination, addressing this potentially most dangerous witness with no hint of confrontation in his voice and in an almost soothing tone. Vera Cheberyak was an impressive witness as long as no one asked her any real questions. Gruzenberg began with a very simple one.

“Were you questioned many times by the investigators?”

“Yes, many times,” she said, though she couldn’t remember how many.

From that one exchange everything followed. Gruzenberg was leading her step by step until she stood over a trapdoor.

So she had been questioned a number of times. When, Gruzenberg asked her, had she first told the authorities Zhenya’s story about Jews grabbing Andrei at the factory? She insisted that she had first told investigating magistrate Fenenko the story in June 1911, even though there was no record of that.

But in that deposition of June 24, he calmly asked, “did you not tell the investigator that Zhenya did not go [out with Andrusha to play]?”

“I don’t remember,” she said.

“And didn’t the investigator question you again, in July?” Gruzenberg asked. In fact, he asked, hadn’t the investigator questioned her several more times?

Again: “I don’t remember.”

Gruzenberg then asked the judge to corroborate the dates on which Vera had been questioned by Investigator Fenenko. After some shuffling of papers, the judge responded: “On April 22, June 24, July 11, July 26, and December 3, 1911.” Gruzenberg interrupted, “Excuse me, your honor, but she was also questioned September 13.”

“Absolutely correct,” the judge said, “September 13,” making a total of six times.

Then Gruzenberg had the judge confirm the devastating fact: in every one of her six depositions in 1911, Vera Cheberyak had said that Andrei had come to ask Zhenya to go out and play but Zhenya had refused. The records showed that the first time she asserted the two boys had gone out to the Zaitsev factory and that Beilis had chased after them was in her deposition of July 10, 1912, fourteen months after the murder. It seemed no coincidence that her new story came only a few weeks after Brazul had accused her of being involved in the crime.

But had she ever mentioned Mendel Beilis in any of those depositions in 1911?

The record showed she did do so once, on July 26, four days after they had both been arrested simultaneously. (It will be recalled that prosecutors at first seriously considered charging them as a tandem, but Vera Cheberyak was released two weeks later.) She had told investigators that, come to think of it, there was reason to suspect the Jewish clerk. She herself had no firsthand information, she said, but Andrei’s aunt Natalia had told her she had had a dream in which Andrei was stabbed to death by Jews!

Did the witness remember telling the investigator this rather odd story, which notably made no mention of Zhenya, clay grinders, or Jews with black beards? “It seems maybe I did,” Cheberyak said, “but I don’t remember exactly.”

The trapdoor had been sprung. Taking his turn at questioning the witness, Karabchevsky made sure Cheberyak would find no way to climb back out. His cross-examinations, unlike his flowery summations, were elegantly simple. Her husband, Vasily, had testified that Zhenya had told him about the Jews who had chased and grabbed him and Andrei at the Zaitsev factory immediately after it happened, on March 12, 1911. Zhenya had supposedly run in panting and in terror. Did her husband tell her about that? Yes, she said. But she didn’t react in any way, share it with anyone? “I didn’t pay it any attention,” she responded. “I didn’t attach any significance to it.”

Karabchevsky wisely refrained from following up, letting the absurdity of the answer speak for itself. Even the simplest peasant juror would wonder: How could any mother possibly be so indifferent to the attempted kidnapping of her own child and the disappearance of his friend?

It would be unfair to Vera Cheberyak to allow her disastrous performance to impair her reputation as a virtuoso liar. The courtroom was not her natural habitat, and she had simply told too many contradictory stories over too long a period of time, all of which were in writing, with every page of every deposition signed by her. She had no explanations for her shifting accounts, other than saying “That’s what Zhenya told me” at a particular time, or “I don’t remember.”

The public may have felt cheated at the diminished and intimidated Cheberyak it had witnessed. But it got a glimpse of the real Vera Cheberyak two days later, when she was put into the eye-to-eye confrontation with the boy Nazary Zarutsky, whom she had allegedly tried to coach in the waiting room. The boy confirmed the earlier witness’s story that Cheberyak had told him to say he had been with Andrei and Zhenya, even though it was not true. “Look me in the eyes. How dare you lie!” Cheberyak shrieked.

“The boy suddenly shrank,” a reporter wrote. “His face, small like an apple, winked and twitched in fright.” Finally the crowd could see the woman who dominated, who bullied, who terrorized. The defense was about to erupt in an objection, but Judge Boldyrev beat them to it. However favorable he was toward the prosecution, this display was too much for him. “Don’t you dare intimidate the witness!” he barked at Cheberyak.

In one of his daily reports to St. Petersburg, a secret police agent inexplicably struck an optimistic note about this damning turn of events. “Although the testimony of Cheberyak herself is of dubious reliability,” he wrote, “the chances for the prosecution have slightly increased.” But civil prosecutor Alexei Shmakov scribbled down a harsher verdict in his notebook: “She has given herself away, the lying bitch. And that is all there is to it.”