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

10

“We Have Seen the Killer”

The eleventh day of the Mendel Beilis trial began unusually late, at twelve thirty in the afternoon, giving the jurors a welcome break. This session promised to feature two exotic witnesses subpoenaed by the prosecution—a pair of Jews from Western Europe hinted to be two of the “men with black beards”—unindicted accomplices in Andrei Yushchinsky’s murder. However, the essential player in the day’s proceedings was not a witness or even a human being, but Mendel Beilis’s cow. The trial, peculiar from the outset, was growing even stranger.

The cow, of course, could not testify for herself, but she had already been testified about in such detail that she had become a compelling, even pivotal character. She had been acquired by Beilis to provide milk for the family along with some excess he could sell to bring in a few rubles. She had fallen into a ravine and broken her leg. The leg had apparently healed (the extensive testimony on this score is, frankly, contradictory), but she became a money-losing burden to her owner. With the approaching winter, feed had become too expensive and Beilis insisted he had sold her off in September 1910 to pay off his debts. The prosecution sought to prove that assertion was a lie.

The astounding amount of time spent debating the fate of a cow was due entirely to Vera Cheberyak. She had claimed that, shortly before the murder, she had sent her son, Zhenya, to buy milk from Beilis and he reported that there he had seen two Jews, dressed “strangely” in long black garments. The prosecution asserted that these men were likely accomplices of Beilis in killing the boy. The story’s credibility hinged on the bovine’s whereabouts in March 1911. The prosecution was obsessed with proving the cow had still been part of the Beilis household.

The testimony was revolving more and more around Cheberyak—to bolster her credibility in accusing Beilis, prove her a liar or even culpable in Andrei’s death, or clear her of any involvement. As she sat in court day after day, her hat feathers fluttering, she increasingly overshadowed the defendant whose presence was becoming, as one observer remarked, “an annoying formality.” Even tangential matters related back to her, as was the case here.

The dispute over the cow started fittingly with a Mrs. Bykov, whose name derives from the Russian word for bull. The persistent questioning—“Mrs. Bull, what do you know about the cow”—caused some amusement. What she knew was that the Beilises did not have a cow by early 1911. In fact, she remembered having helped out Beilis’s wife, Esther, by buying milk for her.

State prosecutor Oskar Vipper was not pleased with her testimony. “What do you think happened to Beilis’s cow?”

“They probably sold it.”

“Was there ever a case when a cow of his died?”

“There was.”

“Now you say it died and earlier you said they sold it. There you go!” His sarcastic tone suggested this witness could not be trusted.

The next to take the stand was an old man named Vyshemirsky, who had lived two doors down from Beilis on Upper Yurkovskaya Street. Beilis was glad to see this familiar face. Vyshemirsky was a cattle trader from whom Beilis had bought livestock over the years and a freelance carter who often hauled bricks from the Zaitsev factory. Vyshemirsky was someone Beilis knew well, someone he trusted. The judge started off by asking him what he knew about the case.

“I don’t know anything. I only know from what people tell me,” Vyshemirsky answered.

The judge then asked, “From which people?”

Vyshemirsky took a long pause. He was someone from whom nothing unusual could be expected. But Beilis, knowing him so well, picked up on something unusual in his demeanor. He later recalled that he wondered why Vyshemirsky was taking so long to gather his thoughts, and felt a brief moment of unease.

From whom had Vyshemirsky heard things? “From Ravich,” he answered the judge. “He told me that his wife dropped by Vera Cheberyak’s and she saw a body there around the same time as the boy was killed.”

The story that Vyshemirsky said he had heard from his friend Amerik Ravich caused an immediate uproar. A body in Vera Cheberyak’s apartment? Where had this tale come from? It was nowhere mentioned in the reams of preliminary depositions. Outraged and suspicious, the prosecution demanded to know if this man’s testimony was truly a surprise to the defense. The defense insisted that it was indeed.

Adele Ravich had supposedly seen the body, wrapped in a carpet, in the Cheberyaks’ bathtub. Her husband confided the story to Vyshemirsky as the couple prepared to leave the country. Amerik Ravich said Vera was afraid the authorities would get him and his wife to talk about what they knew—and so she gave them the money for tickets to America.

While “the body in the carpet” seized the public’s imagination, it curiously did not much affect the trial. A Kiev Opinion reporter half-seriously suggested that Vyshemirsky’s story was not nearly inventive enough to galvanize a trial in which the bizarre had become routine. “In any normal trial, it would have brought the proceedings to a halt, occasioned a reassessment,” he wrote, but under the circumstances, both sides treated the revelation as a nuisance. Vyshemirsky—a plainspoken and reluctant witness—did appear to be telling the truth about what Ravich had told him. But had Ravich, or his wife, fabricated the story? The couple had indeed suddenly left for America the previous year.

Both sides willingly left the witness’s sensational story behind, and the questioning veered back toward the more comfortable territory of the cow and its whereabouts in March 1911. To civil prosecutor Zamyslovsky’s final question, “Was the cow black or spotted?” the witness pled ignorance.

The testimony about the cow was the prelude to the appearance of the two Jews from abroad, Yakov Etinger and Samuel Landau. The prosecution had strongly intimated that “Etinger and Landau”—they were invariably referred to in tandem—had been the two “strangely dressed” Jews that Zhenya had supposedly seen on the milk run to the Beilis household.

Landau, who was in his late twenties, was a cousin of Mark Zaitsev’s, son of Jonah, the founder of the family brick business that employed Beilis. Etinger, in his early thirties, was Zaitsev’s brother-in-law. Landau lived in Germany and Etinger in Austria-Hungary.

The pro-Beilis spectators greeted their appearance in the courtroom with a soft chorus of satisfied laughter: Could any pair have been more comically miscast for their supposed roles? These fashionably dressed young men were impossible to imagine as black-mantled, fanatical Hasids of the “noble” line, as the prosecution asserted. They were Jewish nobility but only in the sense of having been born into great wealth. Etinger, who knew no Russian and had to speak in German through an interpreter, was a landowner and merchant. Landau composed operettas. A commentator in Kiev Opinion wrote that the two men would be at home “on Paris boulevards, at a table with cigars in their mouths, flowers in their buttonholes, sipping aperitifs on the veranda at four in the afternoon.”

Indeed, “Etinger and Landau” were quintessential, even exaggerated specimens of Western European assimilated Jews. Out of their native habitat in Kiev, they were a strange species to be gawked at. In the Russia of Nicholas II, a Jew could be thoroughly “acculturated,” like Oskar Gruzenberg, but never truly “assimilated.” Jews were so excluded from major institutions—universities, the army, the government—and prohibited from physically even inhabiting vast parts of the empire, that they could never belong to the overall society. Etinger, on the other hand, had grown up in a country where the notion that a Jew could not live wherever he wished would seem bizarre and where Jews were highly integrated into the most prestigious state institutions. The Austro-Hungarian army had twenty-five thousand Jewish officers who would soon distinguish themselves in the Great War. (In its entire history, the Russian Imperial Army produced only nine Jewish officers and one general.) As for Landau, he had come to feel more at home in Berlin than in his native Kiev, where he was officially not even permitted to stay in his own mother’s house, located in a fashionable neighborhood where Jews, with few exceptions, could not legally reside. (His mother, as the widow of a wealthy merchant, was classified as an exception, while he was not.) Upon their arrival in Kiev in December 1910, Etinger and Landau registered falsely with the police as residing in approved “Jewish” areas. Both men, in fact, stayed with their families in forbidden neighborhoods. Gruzenberg, perhaps letting his emotions get the better of him, declared to the court that these farcical indignities were “not a comedy, but a tragedy.” Anti-Semitism was certainly a scourge in Western Europe, as it was in Russia, but such grotesque forms of state-sponsored discrimination were unthinkable in a civilized society, a point Gruzenberg left unspoken, but that was obvious enough to sophisticated spectators if not the jurors.

In the end, Etinger and Landau’s testimony and an examination of their passports and other documents clearly showed that, while each man had indeed visited Kiev in December 1910, they had both left in January 1911, weeks before Andrei’s murder. The prosecution was undone: the two men could never have crossed paths at the incriminating time with Beilis’s controversial cow.

Foundering, the prosecution cast about for other Etingers and Landaus. These men, perhaps, were not quite the right ones, but they had relatives. What of them? The defense objected: many Etingers and certainly endless Landaus could be produced at will. When the prosecution pointed to an Israel Landau mentioned in the court record, Gruzenberg asked that Samuel Landau be recalled to the stand.

“Are you the son of Israel Landau?” Gruzenberg asked.

“Yes.”

“Is your father dead?”

“Yes.”

“When did he die?”

“1903.”

“Where is he buried?”

“In Kiev, in the Jewish cemetery.”

The prosecution had been flummoxed yet again.

The trial’s twelfth day—October 6, 1913—was extraordinarily dull. Many a ticketholder, even quite a few reporters, deserted their prized seats for hours. But the testimony was remarkable in that it actually bore directly on Mendel Beilis’s guilt or innocence. One after the other, shaggy-haired workers from the Zaitsev factory testified that operations had been in full swing on the day of Andrei Yushchinsky’s disappearance. The factory grounds had been filled with men hauling bricks, shouting, cursing, and presenting their receipts to be signed by Beilis. If Andrei had been abducted there that day, it would not just have occurred in broad daylight, but before a large audience. And the dozens of signed receipts showed that the defendant had been quite busy with his work.

The same day that the jurors in Kiev were nodding off at the hours of mind-numbing testimony about brick deliveries, five thousand miles away, in the Chicago Loop, a tumultuous scene was unfolding. An uninformed bystander might have thought it the scene of an incipient riot. At around one p.m., thousands of people thronged the streets of the city’s commercial, cultural, and governmental center, massing on the intersection of Clark and Randolph Streets and blocking traffic. Reserve police officers had to be called in to keep the crowd under control and prevent people from being trampled. At first the crowd streamed toward a rally at the Garrick Theater. The first fifteen hundred people or so at the head of the crowd were admitted, with thousands remaining outside. The throng was unusually diverse—“Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant, white men and negroes”—as a Chicago Tribune reporter described it. But they were united in protest against the despicable mockery of justice in Russia.

America had lagged greatly behind Europe in coming to Beilis’s defense. The first open letters of protest, signed by scores of eminent persons, had been published in France and Germany a year and a half earlier, in the spring of 1912. Paris had been the scene of the first large protest after the trial began, in a gathering addressed by the great socialist leader Jean Jaures. In Germany, Zionist groups organized protests all over their country. Even Germany’s moderately conservative National Liberal Party, not regarded as terribly philo-Semitic, sent a representative to a pro-Beilis meeting to sign a petition.

America had taken its time, but now demonstrations held across the country dwarfed those in the Old World. Mass meetings were held in Cincinnati and in Canton, Ohio; in Fort Smith, Arkansas; in Kenosha, Wisconsin; in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Six thousand people took part in a protest organized by the Socialist Party in Detroit. But the most impressive mass protest, in the United States or the world, would occur this day in Chicago.

The Garrick Theater was supposed to have been the only venue that day, but the overflow stretched a block and a half to George M. Cohan’s Grand Opera House, which was quickly opened up to accommodate another fourteen hundred protesters. Hundreds more still thronged the streets. Impromptu speakers shuttled between the theaters to brief the crowd.

In the Grand Opera House, Judge Edward O. Brown of the Illinois Appellate Court presided, with a hundred dignitaries seated behind him onstage. He introduced the world-renowned settlement house pioneer and social reformer Jane Addams, founder of Chicago’s Hull House, who declared that outbreaks of racial and religious bigotry and superstition were a pestilence to be stamped out. “It seems to me,” Addams told a cheering audience, “that this question of persecution must be governed by the same social control that exterminated the black plague and cholera epidemic … Something of the same sort must be done in the moral world. Nations must come together and say that things once believed must no longer be tolerated.”

America’s most prominent black leader, Booker T. Washington, told of how inspiring he found it “to see hundreds of men and women struggling to get into a meeting for the purpose of seeing that justice is brought a great people.” He was joined by a local black pastor, the Reverend Archibald J. Cary, who said he was taking part in the protest as a member of a people who knew something about oppression; he went on to thank Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck, and Co., and one of the country’s great philanthropists, for looking beyond his own creed as a Jew in funding a Young Men’s Christian Association for the black community. (Rosenwald, a trustee and benefactor of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, later gave millions in matching grants for the education of black children throughout the South in so-called Rosenwald Schools.)

Illinois’s governor, Edward F. Dunne, wired a message to the gathering, branding anyone who advanced the blood accusation “as a malignant person or gullible fool.” Father P. J. O’Callaghan of the Paulist Fathers proclaimed, “The greatest glory of the Catholic Church is that it is Jewish and the greatest honor any man may have is that he may say in some sense that he is of the House of Israel. The greatest work we can do is stamp out the hatred of the Jews by men who call themselves Christians.”

The speakers’ attacks on the tsarist regime and the defense of the Jews implied no self-righteousness where America was concerned. Rabbi Emil Hirsch, Chicago’s most prominent Reform Jewish leader, closed the Grand Opera House event with “an appeal for justice for the American Negro” as well as a reprimand to Chicago clubs that excluded Jews and thereby fomented prejudice. For Rabbi Hirsch, as for Jane Addams and men like Julius Rosenwald, the Beilis case was part of a much larger cause. “The railroading of Beilis to the gallows is a grave attack on elemental justice,” Hirsch wrote soon afterward in the Reform Jewish journal the Advocate, “but so is every lynching of Negroes. The Pale of Russia is an insufferable hell. What about the attempt of certain states to create new ghettos for Negro families? The Talmudic admonition must not go unheeded…‘One who would reprove others should have a care to perfect himself first.’ ”

The first act of protest by a Washington politician had occurred two days earlier, with the introduction of a resolution by a Jewish member of the House of Representatives, Adolph J. Sabath of Illinois. Numerous other members of Congress soon proposed their own resolutions or otherwise spoke out. Speaker of the House Champ Clark of Missouri declared on the House floor, “The ritual murder prosecution … is the most preposterous performance of the age and finds no parallel since [trials for] witchcraft.” The pro-Beilis movement in Congress not only condemned the trial in Kiev but demanded action by the American government. Denouncing the “outrageous and unfounded charge” against the Jews, the Sabath resolution called on “the Secretary of State … to convey through our Ambassador at St. Petersburg the sentiments of the American people” about the trial. However, neither Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan nor the American ambassador to Russia, Charles S. Wilson, were inclined to do anything of the kind.

Their hesitancy had nothing to do with domestic politics. Unlike France or Great Britain, America had no significant pro-Russian interest group. The entire American press, both respectable and yellow, was solidly on the side of the defendant. The New York Times headlined its first editorial on the case, “The Czar on Trial.” William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers adopted Beilis as a cause. Hearst’s New York American headlined one article, “And Yet It Moves,” a reference to Galileo’s trial for heresy. But the American government would never criticize the prosecution of Beilis in public. Nor, it is nearly certain, did it ever do so in private. There were two reasons for the government’s reluctance. The first was straightforward: the administration was focused at the time on reinvigorating commercial ties with Russia (even though during his 1912 presidential campaign Woodrow Wilson had, for reasons of political expediency, spoken out in favor of abrogating the Russo-American commercial treaty). The second reason was less obvious: the State Department fretted that the national uproar over the Jewish defendant could ricochet in ways that would complicate the situation in, of all places, Mexico.

In a series of diplomatic cables between Washington and St. Petersburg, Secretary of State Bryan and Ambassador Wilson hashed out how to react to the trial in Kiev. Wilson cabled his first report on the case six days into the trial. It was remarkably ill-informed. “I have been much surprised to find that every Russian with whom I have talked, of every class of society, firmly believes Beilis guilty of the crime with which he is charged,” Wilson wrote. Moreover, he added, “the [Russian] Government feels itself backed up by the almost universal public opinion in taking any measures against the Jews in Russia.” The ambassador was apparently ignorant of widespread opposition to the tsarist regime, to anti-Jewish measures in particular, and, specifically, to the prosecution of Beilis.

Around this time, the Russian ambassador to the United States, Boris Bakhmetev, met with Secretary Bryan to discuss the case. Bryan struck him, he reported, as possessing “no knowledge of the issue.” He briefed Bryan on Russia’s position, reassuring him that the Jews as a people were most certainly not on trial. In his report to the foreign minister after the meeting, the ambassador complained that “American Yids have not passed up the convenient opportunity to quickly use the Kiev case to attempt to stir up new attacks on Russia” and singled out for scorn the irksome “Representative Sabath, himself a Yid.”

Bakhmetev need not have worried about pernicious Jewish influence on the American government. Two weeks later, Ambassador Wilson sent a telegram to Washington relaying his conversation with Russian foreign minister Sergei Sazonov—which had to do with the chaotic situation in Mexico. In February 1913, eight months before the Beilis trial began, General Victoriano Huerta had overthrown the Mexican revolutionary government in power since 1910, had the president and vice president killed, and established himself as dictator. President Woodrow Wilson wanted Huerta deposed but had few allies on this other than Russia. Sazonov informed Ambassador Wilson that Russia was “more than ready” to support the United States in regard to the Mexican situation. However Sazonov, insisting the trial “was entirely an internal matter,” warned that congressional action in the Beilis case “could result in the preclusion of Russian support.” Ambassador Wilson recommended to Bryan that the United States make no public protest regarding the Beilis case, given “the unfortunate effect such criticism may have … on important questions pending between [Russia and the United States].”

Secretary Bryan took the ambassador’s advice. He would not place the moral argument for lodging a protest against the trial, no matter its verdict, over what he saw as the interests of the United States.

Day Thirteen. Oskar Gruzenberg believed he was being proven right in a prediction he had made two years earlier, but he could derive no satisfaction from this. Until this point, the trial could not have gone better for the defense. The prosecution had suffered an unbroken run of fiascoes. But now the defense itself was to be put on trial. Gruzenberg had foreseen this turn of events in late 1911, when he had warned his colleague, Arnold Margolin, Beilis’s first attorney, not to pursue his covert investigation of Vera Cheberyak. No good could come of it, he had believed. Margolin, together with the bumbling journalist Stepan Brazul-Brushkovsky, had been duped by this villain, who had gone to the authorities with her wild story about being offered a forty-thousand-ruble bribe to confess to Andrei’s murder. Margolin soon found himself under investigation for tampering with a witness. Now, instead of defending Beilis in court, he sat as a soon-to-be disbarred attorney about to be called as a witness himself. Gruzenberg was still highly optimistic about the outcome of the trial, but Margolin’s testimony would give the prosecution the chance to counterattack.

To the end of their days, Gruzenberg and Margolin would disagree over the impact on the trial of what the newspapers called the “private investigation.” Margolin understood he had been taking a risk, but he believed his scheme had unmasked Vera Cheberyak as a likely accomplice to the crime, allowing her to become the focus of the trial, much to the defense’s benefit. In his view, thanks to himself, there would now be a six-day run of witnesses related to the question of Cheberyak’s role in Andrei’s disappearance, concluding with the two gang members who Gruzenberg himself agreed were the likely killers.

Gruzenberg disputed this view. In his memoir of the case, he exhibits such embarrassment over the episode that he refrains from ever mentioning Margolin in connection with it, calling him only a “talented lawyer, deeply devoted” to the case, who had made a serious mistake. Gruzenberg agreed that the chance to question and confront the two purported killers, Boris Rudzinsky and Vera Cheberyak’s half-brother Peter Singaevsky, was a tremendous opportunity for the defense. He would have had to concede that these disreputable figures would almost certainly not be taking the stand had it not been for Margolin’s efforts, which attracted massive public attention, making the two criminals infamous, with their pictures reproduced in newspapers across the empire. But the private investigation gave too many gifts to the prosecution. For who were the upcoming defense witnesses? They were, arguably: a fool of a journalist (Brazul), a disgraced attorney (Margolin), a disgraced detective (Krasovsky), a young woman who appeared to be mentally unbalanced (Ekaterina Diakonova), and a revolutionary fop (Makhalin). While these witnesses would certainly divert attention from the defendant, they might also give the prosecution the chance to make the defense look foolish and dishonest. Gruzenberg, from his point of view, had to make the best of it—limit the damage, exploit the opportunities.

The testimony of Brazul took up most of the day. He thoroughly agitated Vera Cheberyak, who repeatedly scurried to a windowsill to pour herself a glass of water. But observers agreed the journalist was an ineffective witness for the defense; civil prosecutor Shmakov caught him in a slew of inconsistencies. Vladimir D. Nabokov, who covered the trial for Speech, found that while Brazul was “undoubtedly sincere,” he came off as “unthoughtful, gullible,” someone easily bamboozled. The correspondent for the Jewish Chronicle was harsher, saying that Brazul came across as “an honest, thick-skinned busybody with an exaggerated opinion of his detective talents.”

Margolin took the stand next. As a professional advocate of the first rank, he conducted himself with immense skill. As the prosecution probed his dealings with Vera Cheberyak, along with Brazul and two or three other of Brazul’s colleagues in the city of Kharkov in December 1911, he was never trapped in contradictions. In fact, he himself came armed to point out errors in Vera Cheberyak’s account (what shirt he had been wearing, the layout of his hotel room, and so forth) that ate up time and neutralized the prosecution’s attacks. As Shmakov questioned him aggressively, Margolin responded in kind. When asked if he had offered Vera Cheberyak forty thousand rubles to admit to the crime, he answered, “I think that only a demented person could do such a thing.”

“I want a yes or no answer,” Shmakov retorted.

“I just answered no,” Margolin replied. “After all, no one has yet subjected my mental faculties to any doubt.”

The prosecution did make Margolin look less than candid around his efforts to keep the Kharkov meeting a secret. Margolin unconvincingly contended that he had done nothing to “hide” the meeting but had merely been “silent” about it. However, it was obvious that he had gone to some lengths to keep the meeting from being publicly known.

Margolin, though, made sure he would fire the final salvo at the most auspicious moment. When the judge summoned Vera Cheberyak to the stand for an eye-to-eye confrontation with the witness, she told the court she recognized Margolin, though “he was a lot fatter then.” She reaffirmed her tale about the forty-thousand-ruble bribe, and Margolin denied it.

Then, with Vera Cheberyak standing beside him, Margolin explained why her behavior made sense only if she had been an accomplice in Andrei’s murder. Why had this known criminal made such efforts to implicate others, while seeking no reward at all for herself? “Only someone who was defending herself against a threatening danger,” he argued, “who was trying to deflect suspicion from herself toward other persons, who wanted to lead astray the investigative authorities” would behave in such a way. When he finished, Vera Cheberyak remained silent.

On the morning of the fourteenth day, an unusually large crowd swarmed the court tearoom to fortify themselves before the session began. No one wanted to miss a single word of the day’s proceedings. The courtroom was going to be as packed as it had been six days earlier for Vera Cheberyak’s main testimony. Nikolai Krasovsky—former acting chief detective of the Kiev police force, former provincial police official, former lead investigator into the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky—was about to take the stand. His various “formers” had not been joined by any current position, the Beilis affair having provided him only with vilification in the far-right press, respect if not adulation in the liberal press, and worldwide fame. In Europe and the United States the reportage portrayed him as the Russian Sherlock Holmes who had cracked the case. But at home Krasovsky was unemployed and unemployable.

The detective had enjoyed a twenty-year career of successes followed by drastic disappointments. An intelligent man who had for some reason failed to finish his gymnasium education, he had entered the police force, risen by dint of his competence to the post of acting chief detective, only to be sent to the provinces when his rival, Evgeny Mishchuk, beat him out for the Kiev post. Then he had been specially recalled to Kiev to handle the politically sensitive murder case, with consequences that now made him hero, villain, and star witness.

The day had brought some welcome news for Beilis’s supporters. Prince A. D. Obolensky, former ober-procurator (or lay administrator) of the Russian Orthodox Holy Synod, the governing body of the Church, condemned as “blasphemy” the prosecution’s references to the Holy Bible. (He had earlier denounced the ritual-murder charge, in general, noting that “the use of blood is contrary to all the teachings of the Jewish religion.”) The day before, King Constantine of Greece had denounced the myth in an audience with the rabbis of Salonika and invited the chief rabbi to his yacht to tell him personally: “You may assure the entire Jewish population that the calumny will never be repeated in my kingdom.” (King Constantine seems to have been the only head of state to denounce the blood accusation in connection with the Beilis trial.) A number of Russian Orthodox clergymen had also publicly denounced the blood accusation in recent days. But in the courtroom the entire focus was on the former detective.

Krasovsky began by testifying for almost four and half hours, nearly uninterrupted, with only occasional questions by the judge, as he recounted his investigation of the Yushchinsky murder. He spoke calmly, precisely, and in an unhurried manner. The jurors, whose attention had understandably wandered at times, listened with unbroken attentiveness. As Krasovsky testified, Vera Cheberyak looked so nervous, it seemed to a reporter she might get up at any moment and scream. As it was, she merely began dashing to the window to gulp down repeated glasses of water.

Krasovsky told of his initial queasiness at the prospect of a case that would promise him nothing but “intrigues and trouble”; his initial suspicions that led him to arrest the dead boy’s stepfather and other family members; his realization that he had made a mistake, that the family was innocent, and that Vera Cheberyak was likely involved in the crime. Following this breakthrough came his struggles with the intrigues against him, as Kiev’s chief prosecutor, Grigory Chaplinsky, in league with the Black Hundreds, blocked his honest investigation. He told of his grateful return home to his provincial post, only to be cashiered from the police force on false charges. He then returned to Kiev with “the goal of restoring my reputation and seeing this case to its end,” that is, solving the crime.

From Krasovsky the jury first heard an account of two seemingly sensational pieces of evidence—or, from the prosecution’s point of view, unfounded speculations—that implicated Vera Cheberyak and her gang. These were the “story of the switches” and the “Christian letters.” Along with the “the body in the carpet,” and Zhenya Cheberyak’s deathbed scene, these completed the quartet of haunting tales that formed the core of the case’s legend.

Of the four different incidents, only Zhenya’s deathbed scene was undoubtedly true. It had been testified to by the most credible eye witnesses. But the veracity of the “story of the switches” and the “Christian letters,” as well as the “body in the carpet,” was more open to question.

Krasovsky had heard from a number of witnesses that Andrei, Zhenya, and another boy had gone out one day to cut switches from some shrubs. They had quarreled over who would keep the best one. (Zhenya: “If you don’t give me yours, I’ll tell your aunt that you didn’t go to school, and you came here to play.” Andrusha: “And if you tell on me, I’ll write to the police that at your mother’s thieves are constantly hiding and bringing stolen things.”) The argument had supposedly led to suspicions that Andrei had betrayed Cheberyak’s gang. The prosecution forced Krasovsky to admit that story was at best thirdhand—he had heard it from a watchman with whom he’d struck up a conversation near a water main outlet, who had heard it from someone else, who said she had heard it from a boy known only as Sasha F., who had supposedly witnessed Zhenya and Andrei’s argument. Neither Krasovsky nor any other investigator could find that boy. This did not mean the story was not true, just that it was not proven. But perhaps the efficient Lukianovka rumor mill had simply fabricated a scene that would explain the killing, just has it had when Andrei’s mother and stepfather had been under suspicion and within days the story spread of their being seen loading into a cab, carrying a sack with Andrei’s body.

The “Christian letters” were the two missives anonymously sent to Andrei’s mother and to the city coroner days after the body was discovered. Their author recounted how he had supposedly seen the boy in the company of an “old Jew” around the time of his murder and pointed to the Jews as the culprits. The judge did not allow the letters into evidence but permitted Krasovsky to describe them. Krasovsky claimed that the letters’ author described the wounds with great accuracy, even though the missives were posted before the coroner’s autopsy had been completed. He and Brazul also contended that the letter had been written by one of Vera Cheberyak’s gang members, Nikolai “Nicky the Sailor” Mandzelevsky, “at her dictation.”

Unfortunately, only one of the letters, the one addressed to Andrei’s mother, survives in the archives. It does not mention the specific number of his wounds. The handwriting does not match that of Nicky the Sailor or that of several other Cheberyak gang members for whom there are handwriting samples. Perhaps the letter to the coroner did describe the wounds. But even if the description were accurate, the prosecution pointed out, an early newspaper account gave a fairly accurate sense of the number of wounds on the body, which had, in any event, been on public view for hours after being removed from the cave. The letters’ contents were spooky (“What if … the Jews need blood for the Passover holiday and a thin boy will be their victim”), but it could not be proved that either one had any connection to the killers.

The bulk of the prosecution’s brutal cross-examination focused on Krasovsky’s decision to arrest Andrei’s family. Why had he arrested the boy’s stepfather, Luka Prikhodko, even though the man had a credible alibi? Why did Krasovsky arrest not only him but also his elderly father and even the brother of Andrei’s biological father? The prosecutor sarcastically asked Krasovsky if he had ever considered arresting Andrei’s elderly grandmother, too. (Krasovsky, in one of his less adept answers, responded, “There was no need.”) Why had the detective ordered that Luka Prikhodko’s hair be cut and dyed, so as to maximize his resemblance to a man that a witness had seen near the scene of the crime? How could he justify such chicanery? Krasovsky looked evasive and unconvincing and at times stumbled under the prosecution’s furious assault.

Vladimir D. Nabokov, always the most morally subtle and clear-eyed of observers, did not so much defend Krasovsky as explain him. This old police hand, he admitted, was an imperfect hero. But it was not fair to judge him outside the context of his time and place. “Of course his methods were reprehensible,” Nabokov wrote in Speech, but, as a man who had served his whole career in the Russian police force, “where could he have been expected to glean the principles of respect for human dignity?” Krasovsky, overall, came across as a man who had, whatever his flaws, tried to correct his mistakes after he recognized them and who always pursued the truth as he saw it.

For two years Oskar Gruzenberg had feared the consequences of what he viewed as Arnold Margolin’s reckless investigation of the case. So far the defense had weathered the prosecution’s assault. However, with the appearance of the young seamstress Ekaterina Diakonova, the defense would find its case veering into the hallucinatory.

Diakonova was Vera Cheberyak’s onetime friend who Krasovsky had wooed by taking her out dozens of times to restaurants on the hunch that she knew more than she was telling about the crime. Eventually, she had appeared to provide useful information. She claimed to have dropped by Cheberyak’s on the day Andrei had disappeared and seen the three suspected gang members scurrying around suspiciously and hurriedly covering something with a coat in the corner as she entered the apartment. She and her sister Ksenia identified pieces of perforated paper found near Andrei’s body as being very similar to ones used at Cheberyak’s for a game called Post Office. It also appeared that she could identify a piece of embroidered pillowcase found in Andrei’s pocket as coming from the Cheberyaks’ apartment.

Testimony over the paper and pillowcase went on at great length. If the items could have been established as coming from the Cheberyaks’ apartment, they would have constituted the first physical evidence linking Cheberyak to the crime. The testimony, though, while suggestive of a connection, was frustratingly inconclusive. The defense objected that Ekaterina Diakonova was unfairly forced to try to draw the pillowcase design from memory. Rare is the person, they said, who could draw from memory the pattern of a piece of clothing he or she was actually wearing, let alone a pattern unseen for years. Still, the defense could not come close to proving the origin of the items.

But Ekaterina Diakonova had much, much else to say. From the pretrial depositions, Gruzenberg knew what was coming, which is why he must have been worried.

Diakonova, a thin woman of twenty-four, with her hair done up in a massive chignon, told the court that on three occasions she had had long conversations about the case with a mysterious masked man. The exchanges had lasted hours and had supposedly taken place while she and the man stood in the street. At one of the meetings, the man had supposedly told her that they needed to kill Krasovsky, Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov of the Gendarmes, and Investigator Fenenko. Why the masked man would talk to her of all people, she could not explain. Karabchevsky gamely attempted to mitigate the story’s incredibility. “Have you ever seen people who fly on airplanes, or ride on motorcycles?” he asked hopefully. Perhaps the man had on that kind of mask? No, she answered, it was a smooth black mask that clung closely to his face, held in place by a hat with earflaps fastened under his chin.

Diakonova went on to tell a tale of how, the day after Andrei’s murder, a fearful Vera Cheberyak asked Ekaterina to stay overnight. They slept together in the same room and, in the middle of the night, Ekaterina poked her stockinged foot through the grate of the bed. She felt an object, wrapped up in cloth, standing in the corner. It felt to her like a body and it was deathly cold.

“When I was sleeping, it seemed to me that someone was standing there,” she told the court. “I woke up. Cheberyak said to me, ‘Why did you wake up? Sleep.’ I don’t know what was standing, but near the wardrobe, there was something, I don’t know what, but when I pushed it with my foot, it seemed to me that something was standing there. She again told me: ‘Don’t pay it any attention, sleep.’ I fell asleep. And then in the morning, she said, ‘Let’s drink tea.’ ” By that time, whatever had been standing in the corner had disappeared.

On the stand, Diakonova also asserted that Adele Ravich had told her, too, about seeing a body wrapped in a carpet. This story had not been in her original deposition and subjected her to the suspicion that she was merely mimicking the old man Vyshemirsky’s account. But she added her own embroidery, asserting that before Adele Ravich had ever told her the story, she herself had seen the boy’s body lying in a carpet in a dream. Moreover, she had told Cheberyak herself of her vision. “I tell her: ‘You know, I had a dream that I saw Andrusha lying in a carpet in your big room.’ She says: ‘Please don’t tell the detectives that’…and she started to threaten me, what would happen to me if I told about that.”

Diakonova’s stories were not believable. And yet—could they be believed? Observers repeatedly used the word “sincerity” to describe her demeanor, as she told her tales in a “crystalline” voice that projected to the back of the courtroom. She looked humanly nervous on the stand, but the prosecution could not rattle her. And if the prosecution had its Jews in strange black garments, and secret Semitic rites, why could the defense not have a mysterious masked man, objects appearing in the night, or reality first seen in a dream? As the young woman testified hour after hour, sober-minded journalists found themselves softening and suspending their disbelief. “The more you hear her testimony, the more convincing it seems,” one wrote. It all might be “in the realm of psychosis or hallucination,” one commentator wrote sympathetically, “but had definitely made a sincere impression.” With her “sincerity and naive mixture of fantasy and reality,” in one reporter’s assessment, she had blunted the prosecution’s attacks. This was the most the defense could have hoped for.

And if the young woman had a certain enchanting effect on sophisticated correspondents, what of her effect on the peasant jurors, the sort who might consider the stuff of supernatural folklore—domovois (goblins) and ghostly emanations—to constitute part of everyday reality? Perhaps they, too, would be swayed by her tales. And who, really, was to say that they were not true?

Day sixteen. Beilis sat in the dock, wholly expressionless, wholly motionless, with an occasional glance at the jurors the only movement a patient observer could detect. All around him, people tensed with anticipation at the testimony of the young revolutionary Sergei Makhalin. Makhalin had teamed up with the anarchist-communist Amzor Karaev to lure Vera Cheberyak’s half brother, Peter Singaevsky, into confessing to Andrei’s murder. Both Karaev and Makhalin claimed to have witnessed the confession, but only Makhalin would testify at the trial. The state had connived to prevent the court appearance of Karaev, then in Siberian exile. Karaev’s deposition would be read aloud to the jury, but the credibility of the radicals’ story would essentially rest on Makhalin alone.

Gruzenberg, the defense team’s leader, had no idea of just how disastrously vulnerable a witness Makhalin was. Unknown to him, the revolutionary had been an informer, code-named “Deputy” and “Vasilevsky,” in the pay of two branches of the secret police. If this fact was revealed, the prosecution could easily portray him as an unprincipled mercenary. As Makhalin prepared to take the stand, officials at the highest levels of the government were debating whether to unmask him, thereby improving the prosecution’s chances.

The intentional public exposure of an agent was nearly unthinkable. But civil prosecutor and Duma member Georgy Zamyslovsky, having somehow learned of Makhalin’s past employment, angrily insisted that the information so helpful to the prosecution had to be made public. Moreover, he threatened to embarrass the secret police if his demand was not met. He relayed a message to Stepan Beletsky, head of the national Department of Police, that if the prosecution lost, he would go to the floor of the Duma to hold the secret police responsible, accusing it of corruption. The minister of the interior, Nikolai Maklakov, the archconservative brother of Beilis’s attorney Vasily Maklakov, acceded to a plan to reveal in court that Makhalin had been an informer who had been terminated the previous year for fraudulent use of expense money. (The fraud charge was likely false, concocted for the purposes of destroying Makhalin at the trial—no evidence in the archives supports it.) Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Ivanov of the Gendarmes, due to testify in three days, would unmask Makhalin as an informer before the jury.

Makhalin turned out to be an unnervingly fantastic witness. Although he had lately come into a modest inheritance, and was attired in a foppish costume, he testified, as Nabokov wrote, with “deadly simplicity, resourcefulness,” and common sense. The prosecution failed to trip him up. Moreover, Makhalin made a powerful moral impression. He recounted how, as a fourteen-year-old boy, he had witnessed a pogrom in the town of Smela, south of Kiev, that had radicalized him. When the Yushchinsky case emerged, he understood the forces of hatred it could unleash. He resolved to discover the real killers, exonerate an innocent man, and prevent acts of mass murder.

As Makhalin spoke, Nabokov thought to himself that by now everyone had surely forgotten about Beilis except his family. “But suddenly, completely unexpectedly, into Makhalin’s rapid, well-crafted stream of words, there intruded distracting sounds. I turned and saw the defendant had completely bent over, and was covering his face in his hands, as convulsive, uncontrollable sobbing shook his entire body. Beilis had reminded us he was there.”

One commentator noted that, at this trial, one had to make an unusual distinction: Mendel Beilis was merely the “defendant,” while Peter Singaevsky was “the accused.” Singaevsky testified on the eighteenth day of the trial, the day after Makhalin had completed his testimony, along with his fellow suspect in Andrei’s murder, Cheberyak gang member Boris Rudzinsky. Both men had been transported to Kiev from Siberia, where they had been serving sentences for armed robbery. Singaevsky was by far the more important witness, as he had supposedly confessed to the crime in Makhalin’s presence.

He was led into the courtroom and up to the witness stand by four guards, two in front and two behind. Observers describe him as looking utterly dim-witted. Drawings depict a normal-looking fellow, although, had he been a fugitive, the police could have described him as having a right ear noticeably higher than his left.

Vera Cheberyak bent over and cried softly, whether out of true feeling for her half brother or out of fear for herself. People had noted a change in her dress and demeanor. Her self-confidence seemed to be deserting her. In court she cast her eyes downward. Gone were her jaunty velvet hats with brilliantly colored feathers. Her head was now covered with a plain black scarf. As she listened to her brother testify, she grew more agitated than ever, her trips to the windowsill for water increasing in frequency.

Beilis stared intently at Singaevsky. The witness, of course, denied having confessed to the crime. The prosecution argued that it was ridiculous to think that two young revolutionaries could gain the confidence of an experienced criminal. But except for the matter of his purported confession, Singaevsky’s account almost perfectly matched Makhalin’s, even in the most seemingly far-fetched details. Singaevsky, for example, confirmed that, at his request, Karaev attempted to send a message to Rudzinsky, then in jail, using sign language. If one thing was certain, it was that Makhalin and Karaev had won Singaevsky’s confidence.

Singaevsky had no alibi for the time of Andrei’s murder but had made comic attempts to concoct one. The previous year he and Rudzinsky had confessed to the robbery of an optical goods store in Kiev on the night of March 12, 1911, the day of Andrei’s disappearance. They freely admitted they were confessing to the robbery to prove they could not have committed the murder. But Andrei had been killed in the morning, which would have left them plenty of time for another crime. Some early reports had erroneously placed the time of the murder in the evening, apparently misleading the pair into believing the robbery would exonerate them. (In any event, they were very likely lying about being involved in the robbery, as they were never charged.)

Zamyslovsky attempted to contort the story into something that would exculpate his witness. Surely, he asked Singaevsky, it would be impossible to commit two such complex crimes in the same day? Robbery was, after all, an all-consuming endeavor. You had to spend days planning the crime. And, of course, even if he had committed a murder in the morning, he would not have had time to hide a body in the evening if he were committing a robbery? “Exactly right,” Singaevsky replied.

On cross-examination, Gruzenberg adopted a restrained, nonaccusatory manner. He asked with brutal simplicity, “Why do you think that, if on the night of the twelfth … you were committing a robbery, then at 10 or 11 in the morning you couldn’t have committed a murder?” Without Zamyslovsky to prompt him, Singaevsky was helpless. At first, he could not answer. Then he responded that in the morning he had been at home with his confederate, Ivan “Red Vanya” Latyshev, who was, of course, dead, having jumped or fallen out of a window at a police station earlier in the year. Singaevsky clearly had no alibi. And why had Singaevsky, Latyshev, and Rudzinsky all left Kiev for Moscow the day after the murder? Singaevsky admitted they were penniless and had to borrow money for train tickets.

“So, you have no money,” Gruzenberg asked, “the three of you have committed a burglary, and you put the [stolen] things in one suitcase. Why would all three of you go to Moscow?”

Singaevsky responded, “I wanted to see Moscow because I’d never been there.”

When the defense was finished, Judge Boldyrev said, gesturing to the space beside Singaevsky, “Makhalin, come here.” The courtroom fell silent for the eye-to-eye confrontation. The judge asked Singaevsky if he knew the man now standing beside him. After a very long pause, he said, “Yes.”

It was not so much what Singaevsky said as how he looked while standing next to his accuser that made such an unforgettable impression on those present. Looking like a guilty man, of course, is not in itself evidence. Still, the visceral reaction of people who witnessed the confrontation, as reported in the press, was striking:

“When Makhalin went up to stand next to Singaevsky, the latter flinched. When Singaevsky’s and Makhalin’s eyes met, Singaevsky seemed close to giving himself away. He looked lost and on his face was an expression of horror.”

“On Singaevsky’s face … one could see pure mortal fear.”

“When Singaevsky saw Makhalin … his face transformed to such a degree, and on his face was written so much horror that it was chilling.”

When the spectators left the courtroom during the break, many were heard to say, “We have seen the killer.”