A Child of Christian Blood

12

“The Smell of Burning, Blood, and Iron”

Who Killed Andrei Yushchinsky?

On November 27, 1913, in the town of Fastov, about fifty miles southwest of Kiev, the body of a boy, aged eleven or twelve, was found in a timber yard, lying across neatly stacked boards, stabbed to death. Beneath him was a pool of blood. On his neck, tracing a line from ear to ear, were thirteen puncture wounds.

The immediate, feverish response by the Black Hundreds and in the right-wing press was predictable. Here, without a doubt, they raged, was another Jewish ritual murder. The number of stab wounds was a kabbalistic one, they said, and proof that Jews were the killers. They made this claim in the face of a most inconvenient fact: the victim, Yossel Pashkov, was a Jew. Moreover, his apparent killer was a Christian. The authorities quickly apprehended a career criminal named Ivan Goncharuk, who had a lengthy record (the exact nature of his crimes is not clear) that included ten convictions. The local prosecutor’s office soon presented what it considered conclusive proof of Goncharuk’s guilt. But the Black Hundreds insisted that the supposed Jewishness of the victim was a fiendish deception. (That the victim was circumcised was seen as part of the plot.) They were convinced the body was that of a Christian child.

However implausibly, the case followed the Beilis template with remarkable faithfulness. Justice minister Ivan Shcheglovitov took an interest in the investigation. Grigory Chaplinsky had just stepped down as chief prosecutor in the Kiev region but had not yet left to take up his new post as a senator. Chaplinsky consulted with the justice minister on the Fastov case and the course it took undoubtedly reflected the two men’s wishes.

In December 1913, the acting chief prosecutor, a former Chaplinsky underling named Vodokovich, launched a new investigation, its mission to answer the question: Was the apparent victim in the Fastov case really Yossel Pashkov, or had his father, a tailor named Froim Pashkov, in fact killed a Christian child, contriving to pass off the body as that of his son? Proving the theory would require two elements: a missing Christian child and a hidden Jewish child, Yossel, who was still alive. That the authorities would entertain such an insane theory is a mark of their determination, or desperation, to instigate another ritual murder case and rescue their reputations in the wake of their defeat in the Beilis affair.

As in the Beilis case, police investigators resisted supporting the blood accusation. A detective in Fastov obstinately found no evidence of ritual murder. The prosecutor judged him to be “biased in favor of the Jews” and he was soon replaced. The right-wing press spun a story about how the Jewish boy Yossel had fled to America, or perhaps to some other country, “together with Beilis.” But for some time the state had trouble coming up with a suitable missing Christian child. By January 1914, however, it had made progress. The parents of a missing boy named Boris Taranenko were brought in to the morgue to view the badly decayed corpse of the Fastov victim. They swore it was their son. Yossel’s father and his clerk were charged in Boris’s murder and put in prison. (Boris had disappeared in Zhitomir, more than a hundred miles to the west; the authorities never attempted to explain how he ended up in Fastov.) Professor Ivan Sikorsky, reprising his role as expert on the Jews’ psychiatric profile, offered his opinion to the popular right-wing paper New Times that, although “committed in a crude fashion” (the boy’s blood had pooled wastefully below his body), this was clearly a ritual murder.

In mid-February, Nikolai Chebyshev, Chaplinsky’s designated replacement as the Kiev region’s chief prosecutor, finally assumed the post. Known for prosecuting the instigators of pogroms, Chebyshev had a reputation for courageous and unimpeachable integrity. He quickly corrected course in the Fastov case. An autopsy specialist positively identified the body as that of Yossel, the boy’s father and the clerk were freed, and Ivan Goncharuk was convicted of the boy’s murder. In June, the authorities found the missing Boris Taranenko—he had run away from home but was quite alive—and returned him to his parents.

Could Ivan Goncharuk have been Andrei Yushchinsky’s killer? Apparently no one asked that question for nearly a century. The authorities never investigated the possibility, or any other alternative hypothesis, for that matter. The first person to propose the idea, in 2005, was the noted Russian historian Sergei Stepanov. He correctly pointed out that, despite much suspicious behavior on the part of Vera Cheberyak and her gang, no direct evidence ever connected them to the murder. As for the revolutionaries/informers Karaev and Makhalin, it was entirely possible that they were lying when they claimed that Vera Cheberyak’s half brother, Peter Singaevsky, had confessed to them. Nothing but their testimony implicated Singaevsky.

There is only one obstacle to the lone-killer theory: experts for both the defense and prosecution agreed that Andrei’s murder was not the act of a single maniac but of several people. However, one prominent defense witness disagreed with this view, though he did not say so at the trial. Vladimir Bekhterev, a world-renowned neurologist and leading authority on the physiology of the brain, had testified as a psychiatric expert, after examining all the autopsy reports, photographs, and physical exhibits. In a lengthy article published not long after the trial, he wrote:

Although the other experts have argued that Yushchinsky’s murder was committed by at least two persons, because of the complexity of the murder, involving infliction of many wounds and suffocation, we think that it may be assumed that the murderer could well be a single individual, and that there is no need to postulate possible accomplices. After all, does it really require many people to knock out a boy in a surprise attack and, having inflicted a number of serious blows with an awl to the head and right side of the neck, finish him off by suffocating him and delivering more blows? Clearly not.

Bekhterev’s argument seems persuasive. But as the historian Stepanov acerbically points out, “no one had any use for a sadistic murderer.” Both sides in the case were interested only in the multiple-killer theory. The defense had postulated that Andrei had been killed by Cheberyak’s gang; the prosecution averred the murder had been committed by a band of fanatical Jews. It can never be proven whether Goncharuk or some other maniac was responsible for Andrei’s killing, but the possibility cannot be eliminated.

But what of Vera Cheberyak’s conduct after Andrei’s murder, which seemed so suspicious to people as to constitute virtual proof of her guilt? Why would she give false testimony against an innocent man, enlist her own daughter and husband in her perjury, as well as—infamously—beseech her dying son to exonerate her?

Cheberyak was, after all, a suspect in a murder. If she had nothing to do with the crime, she needed to find a way to convince the authorities of her innocence. She was a woman who, in any situation, knew no other way out than to lie, deceive, and manipulate. A deeper psychological explanation also suggests itself. Cheberyak, after spending her life consorting with the detritus of society, had finally found a stage that presented her talents to those she considered worthy of appreciating them. She discovered an opportunity to bend to her will prominent men—prosecutors, Duma members, government ministers. And whether she was guilty or innocent, she made sure to make the most of her role.

For all this speculation, the theory that Andrei was killed by Vera Cheberyak’s gang remains the most plausible one. After the trial, Nikolai Krasovsky immediately set about proving it beyond a doubt. In February 1914, Krasovsky boarded an ocean liner bound for New York. His mission was to locate Adele Ravich, the woman who had supposedly seen Andrei’s body in Vera Cheberyak’s apartment and fled to America. When Krasovsky arrived in New York he was treated as a celebrity, “entertained at the Café Boheme in Second Avenue,” the New York Times reported, “by a number of [the city’s] Russian residents.”

Living up to his reputation as “Russia’s Sherlock Holmes,” he soon found Adele Ravich and her husband, Amerik, possibly in Hoboken, New Jersey, where the 1930 U.S. census records them as living. Krasovsky claimed that he secured affidavits from the couple that would force the reopening of the case. “I am confident,” he told the Times, “that the outcome of the new trial will be the final destruction of popular faith in the old ritual-murder myth.” But when Krasovsky returned to Kiev, Arnold Margolin disagreed. Margolin writes in his memoirs that while the Raviches’ testimony was “highly interesting, tending to confirm that Vera Cheberyak had taken part in the murder,” it was not sufficient to reopen the case under Russian law. Margolin is frustratingly vague about the content of the affidavits, but it seems certain that the couple did not confirm seeing Andrei’s body in Vera Cheberyak’s apartment.

Krasovsky still hoped to prove his case. But within four months a new Time of Troubles threw Russia into chaos and brought an end to all hopes and efforts to bring the killers of Andrei Yushchinsky to justice.

1917

One day in early March 1917, Oskar Gruzenberg answered a telephone call in his apartment in St. Petersburg, where he had been watching a revolution unfold outside his window. The call was from a colleague who had been assigned by the new Provisional Government to secure the files of the Department of Police. “Would you like to look through the secret materials on the Beilis case?” he asked. Gruzenberg, needless to say, immediately agreed. The files would be brought over forthwith.

This moment had only been made possible by an unprecedented catastrophe for Russia. On August 1, 1914, just nine months after Mendel Beilis had left the Kiev courtroom a free man, Russia had been plunged into war. The “smell of burning, blood, and iron” that the poet Alexander Blok had sensed in the spring of 1911 had been a portent of the greatest carnage the world had yet seen, with Russia suffering more than nine million dead and wounded in its conflict with the Central Powers, Germany and Austria. Fate did not grant the empire the twenty-year breathing space that Prime Minister Peter Stolypin had known it must have if it was to reform and survive.

The outbreak of World War I had at first been accompanied by a patriotic upsurge, national unity, and hopes that Russia might prevail. The tsar’s army even attained a few victories, but by the fall of 1915, Nicholas II had become, in Vasily Maklakov’s famous allegory of the time, the “mad chauffeur,” driving Russia to “inescapable destruction.” As if to speed the disastrous course, Nicholas, over the extreme protests of his ministers, took personal command of the armed forces. The tsar’s decision, as one minister noted, was “fully in tune with his … mystical understanding of his imperial calling.” For Nicholas, Russia’s salvation lay in the dictates of his “inner voice” and the miraculous bond of Tsar and People. But Nicholas’s departure for the front left the empress Alexandra, advised by Rasputin, holding power in Petrograd (as the Germanic-sounding Petersburg had been patriotically renamed). The result was utter bureaucratic chaos as one minister after another was promoted in reward for his obsequiousness, or cast out for supposed disloyalty, in the farcical game known as “ministerial leapfrog.” Over its final seventeen months, the government ran through four prime ministers, five ministers of the interior, three foreign ministers, three ministers of war, three ministers of transport, and four ministers of agriculture.

The system could not endure the strain of the war and its mismanagement. The end, when it came, came suddenly, triggered by random events. The death agony commenced in Petrograd on February 23, 1917, International Women’s Day, the occasion for a large demonstration of women in the center of the city demanding equal rights and protesting against bread shortages. Strikes by some two hundred thousand Petrograd workers followed. The weather was unseasonably warm, encouraging large crowds of all sorts of people to take to the streets either as demonstrators or as sympathetic bystanders. Cossack troops showed hesitance in controlling the crowds. Nicholas then issued an order for the Petrograd garrison to put down the disorder. On February 26, troops fired on demonstrators in the city center, killing dozens of them, but widespread mutinies in the armed forces followed. In the end, the troops would not fire upon the people. Nicholas had become a nonentity, his orders ignored by his senior generals, who unanimously agreed that he should abdicate. Within four days the tsarist regime had collapsed. On February 27, the Duma began forming a provisional government.

The revolution was perceived as utterly inevitable and yet, somehow, a surprise. “The most striking thing,” Blok wrote in his diary three months later, “was the utter unexpectedness of it, like a train crashing in the night, like a bridge crumbling beneath your feet, like a house falling down.”

Russia’s new leadership quickly moved to hold the enemies of the people, including Mendel Beilis’s prime persecutors, accountable for their crimes. The former justice minister, Ivan Shcheglovitov, was the first high official to be arrested, seized in his kitchen on the evening of February 27 by a student who had, on his own initiative, flagged down a few soldiers. The former minister was hustled into custody, wearing no topcoat in the freezing cold. Moments after the arrest, Nikolai Karabchevsky’s assistant in the Beilis trial, Boris Utevsky, happened to catch sight of the prisoner, who struck him as “pallid, unshaven, flabby, frightened, but angry and full of hate.” Shcheglovitov was marched to the Tauride Palace where the Duma convened. There he was confronted by the well-known attorney and Duma member Alexander Kerensky, who would soon become Russia’s justice minister (and later, briefly, the government’s leader). Shcheglovitov stood there, head bowed, his face still red from the cold, as Kerensky proclaimed, “Citizen Shcheglovitov, in the name of the people I declare you under arrest!”

He was held in the palace for some time until soldiers led him off to a large motorcar that inched along as crowds swarmed around it, the driver periodically calling out, “Automobile of the Provisional Government!,” to which the crowd responded with cries of “Hurrah!” and parted to make way. The scene was repeated again and again until the vehicle arrived at its destination, the gates of the Peter and Paul Fortress where the prisoner was locked in a cell.

Former interior minister Nikolai Maklakov, who was arrested the next day with two other officials, suffered rougher treatment. Maklakov related the experience to a fellow inmate who later set down his words:

Around us an enraged crowd snarled, cursing us, and sometimes hitting and pushing us to the complete indifference of our guards. Some huge fellow jumped on my back and squeezed me with his legs … Finally we came to the Peter and Paul Fortress. At the gates someone hit me on the head. I fell and, unconscious, was taken by the guards to my cell.

The former head of the Department of Police, Stepan Beletsky, was also arrested and locked up in the fortress. With his ministers imprisoned and his government in ruins, still to be dealt with was the sovereign emperor—stranded in his imperial train two hundred miles southwest of Petrograd, powerless, but still Tsar of all the Russias. The task of securing his abdication fell to Vasily Shulgin, the righteous anti-Semite and Duma member who had so famously opposed Beilis’s prosecution, and former Duma chairman Alexander Guchkov. By the time the two men sat down in the luxuriously appointed imperial railway car sitting room, outside the town of Pskov, the tsar had already reached the most difficult decision of his life. A few weeks earlier, Prime Minister Kokovtsov had thought Nicholas “on the verge of a mental breakdown.” But now the tsar was calm. His infamous fatalism, such a maddening quality to his advisers, a wellspring of obstinacy, now eased his path toward acceptance of the inevitable. He had always believed he was destined to rule Russia but also to endure “terrible trials” and go to his death unrewarded. Now his own prophecy was fulfilled. According to one witness, he expressed “his strong conviction that he had been born for misfortune, that he brought Russia great misfortune.” His advisers had persuaded him that he could not continue to rule. “If it is necessary for Russia’s welfare that I step aside,” he said, “I am prepared to do so.” He would abdicate for the good of the nation—in favor of his brother, the Grand Duke Michael, rather than his incurably ill son Alexis, explaining to Shulgin and Guchkov, “I hope you will understand the feelings of a father.”

Upon returning to Petrograd with the tsar’s signed abdication decree, Shulgin immediately proceeded to the house where the Grand Duke Michael was secretly residing. Vladimir D. Nabokov and another jurist were summoned there to draft Michael’s renunciation of the throne. Nicholas’s brother had no desire to be tsar. For some reason the business was conducted in a child’s study. The document that Nabokov wrote out at a small school desk, surrounded by toys, was one of the most consequential in Russia’s history. Signing it, the grand duke brought to a close three centuries of rule by the Romanov dynasty.

A few days later, Gruzenberg, after receiving the surprise telephone call from his colleague, was poring over the secret Beilis files. “By evening I had been furnished with five volumes,” he recalled in his memoirs. “I seized the materials greedily and spent the entire night reading them.” He learned of the illegal surveillance of the jurors, of the correspondence among high officials who believed Beilis to be innocent. He read letters that had been intercepted by the government, containing important information for the defense that had never been delivered. Also included were copies of letters Gruzenberg himself had written late at night to his son and daughter back in the capital after exhausting days at court. The files contained correspondence about placing under surveillance people who had written sympathetically to the defense. The whole disgusting business was laid bare. “When I finished reading the secret materials,” Gruzenberg recalled, “dawn was already breaking. I went to the window and looked at the empty street, then across from my apartment at a [regimental barracks], bedecked with red flags and I said to myself, ‘We can thank fate that a people in revolt has swept away the dishonorable tsarist regime like a cobweb.’ ”

Gruzenberg had some reason for optimism about the future of his country. The state apparatus was now in the hands of men like himself. In fact, members of Mendel Beilis’s defense team, as well as their prominent supporters, were playing a significant role in the just-established Provisional Government. The new justice minister, Kerensky, called Karabchevsky for advice on organizing the department. He appointed as his deputy Alexander Zarudny who, in four months, would become justice minister himself. Gruzenberg was made a senator, as Russia’s Supreme Court justices were called. Vasily Maklakov held a series of temporary posts in the government. Nabokov was appointed head of the chancellery, essentially the chief of staff. The government convened what it called an Extraordinary Commission to investigate the crimes of Tsar Nicholas’s regime, which included high officials’ perversion of justice and grossly corrupt actions in the Beilis affair. Shcheglovitov, Nikolai Maklakov, and Beletsky were subjected to harsh questioning about their actions in the case. The two former ministers defended their conduct, though Shcheglovitov admitted that some of the state’s actions had been illegal. But Beletsky repeatedly expressed deep shame over his involvement in the conspiracy to frame an innocent man. “My conscience is forcing me to speak,” he told the commission. “I want to confess and be of use.” Perhaps he was just trying to save himself, yet his condemnation of the blood accusation sounded sincere. “This legend lived, lives, and maybe will live,” he declared, “until it is expelled from people’s minds.”

Unfortunately, the red flags that gladdened Gruzenberg’s heart did not bode well for Russia’s future. At first, red was simply the color of joy at the tsarist regime’s fall. The entire city was festooned with red flags. But, beginning in April, Nabokov noted something ominous about the flags. Once pure red, they were now written over with slogans denouncing ministers and calling for the new government’s removal. On April 3, Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (b)—better known as the Bolsheviks—had returned to Russia from his decade-long exile in Switzerland. Within three weeks, the Provisional Government was facing Bolshevik-inspired demonstrations and riots. The Bolsheviks did not take power in April, but they would soon enough. “Strictly speaking,” Nabokov later wrote, the next six months “were one continual process of dying.” “Glorious February” would become an historical dead end. The victory of humane men like Nabokov, who wanted to turn Russia into a democratic state based on the rule of law, had been a chimera. Lenin’s October Revolution would sweep nearly all of them away.

Fates

Some prominent figures in the Mendel Beilis trial died amid the battles and privations of World War I. But Lenin’s revolution would decide the destinies of most of the players in the case, some of whom would die at the hands of Russia’s new leaders, while others would escape into exile.

Vladimir Golubev, who had first named Mendel Beilis as a suspect in Andrei Yushchinsky’s murder, was killed in 1915 while fighting in the First World War.

Alexei Shmakov, the attorney for Andrei’s mother, who was effectively Vipper’s co-prosecutor, died in 1916.

After the trial, Father Justin Pranaitis returned to Tashkent, where he was soon embroiled in a scandal, caught embezzling some fifteen hundred rubles in donations from a Catholic charity that he headed. He died just before the revolution, in January 1917.

Dr. Ivan Sikorsky died in 1917, as well, in time to escape any retribution for his role in the Beilis trial.

Shmakov’s cocounsel, Georgy Zamyslovsky, fled to the Caucasus region during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. He died of typhus in the city of Vladikavkaz in 1920.

Ivan Shcheglovitov, Nikolai Maklakov, and Stepan Beletsky were all executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.

Prosecutor Oskar Vipper fled to the city of Kaluga, about a hundred miles south of Moscow, keeping a low profile as a minor official in the Provincial Food Committee. He was eventually discovered, and in September 1919 he was tried for his role in the Beilis case by the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal. The prosecutor asked for the death penalty. The tribunal, deciding mercy was in order, sentenced him “to be confined in a concentration camp until the complete establishment in the Republic of the communist system.” Vipper did not survive the year.

Sergei Makhalin at first prospered after the revolution, serving in some sort of official post (exactly what is not known). But, according to a contemporary newspaper report, he soon found himself accused of having had connections to the tsarist secret police—which was true—and “to the well-known anti-Semite A. S. Shmakov,” which almost certainly was not. After the accusations were made, his execution quickly followed.

In January 1914, thanks in part to testimony from her blinded ex-lover Pavel Mifle, Vera Cheberyak was convicted of selling stolen property to the Gusin watch store. She was sentenced to two months in prison. No reliable information exists on her life over the next four years. What is certain is that she was executed by the Bolsheviks in Kiev in 1918. According to an agent of the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, who was captured and interrogated by the “White” forces that were battling the “Reds,” Cheberyak was shot along with a number of others as punishment for their connection to the Union of Russian People—the Black Hundreds—which had played such a prominent role in propagandizing for the blood accusation against the Jews. The most credible account of how she died was published in the early 1960s in the New York Yiddish newspaper Tog-Morgn Zhurnal (Day-Morning Journal). A longtime journalist for the paper, Chaim Shoshkess, reported that he was locked up in a Bolshevik prison in the city of Kharkov in 1920 when a prison overseer named Antizersky boasted to his Jewish prisoners that he had interrogated the infamous Vera Cheberyak in the Kiev Cheka headquarters and that he had ended the life of the “wonderful lady,” as he mockingly called her, with his own hand. “She was on her knees beating her head against the ground, begging everyone for her life,” he told the prisoners. “But after three days of ‘speaking’ with her I gave her a bullet in the neck.” Her half brother, Peter Singaevsky, was also said to have been shot by the Bolsheviks.

Vladimir D. Nabokov was shot to death in Berlin in 1922 while trying to defend his friend, the former Kadet Party leader Paul Miliukov, from an assassination attempt by right-wing Russian émigrés. His son, Vladimir Vladimirovich, went on to write such classic novels as Lolita and The Gift.

After his abdication, Nicholas Romanov, his wife, Alexandra, and their five children became captives, first of the Provisional Government, then of the Bolsheviks. Nicholas and his family were executed—shot and bayoneted to death—by their Bolshevik guards in July 1918 in the Russian city of Ekaterinburg, twelve hundred miles east of Moscow, in the basement of the mansion where they were being held. In August 2000 Nicholas and his family were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church.

All of Beilis’s attorneys but one immigrated to Western Europe.

Just before the October 1917 revolution, Vasily Maklakov was appointed the Provisional Government’s ambassador to France and remained there for most of his life. He died in Switzerland in 1957.

Nikolai Karabchevsky also immigrated to France, dying in Paris in 1925.

Oskar Gruzenberg died in Nice, France, in December 1940. When he was dying, a Christian colleague volunteered to give his blood for a transfusion. After the procedure, Gruzenberg found the strength to joke, “Well, how can anyone say now that Jews do not use Christian blood.” He died that night. In 1950, in accordance with his last wishes, his remains were reinterred in Israel.

Alexander Zarudny, who was a member of a small socialist party, made his peace with the Bolsheviks and remained in the Soviet Union until his death in 1934.

Stepan Brazul-Brushkovsky also remained in the Soviet Union, but had the misfortune of living until the bloodiest year of Stalin’s Great Terror. He was arrested and shot in 1937.

After the Bolshevik Revolution, Nikolai Krasovsky moved to the Polish city of Rovno. (The city, called Rivne, is now part of Ukraine.) He was last heard from in 1927 when he wrote a letter to a French Zionist activist, attempting to secure payment for his memoirs, the publication of which, he maintained, would eliminate all doubt about who had killed Andrei Yushchinsky. “Having emigrated and therefore having endured all possible material privations,” he wrote, “these material benefits would finally extricate me from this difficult situation which, in any case, I did not deserve.” Krasovsky, as far as is known, received no help. His memoirs, it can be hoped, survive in some archive, waiting to be found.

Arnold Margolin was unusual, though not unique among elite Jews, in his strong identification with the Ukrainian culture and nation and in his belief that both the Ukrainians and the Jews should have their own homeland. He served as a supreme court justice and vice minister of foreign affairs in the short-lived independent Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1918–1919, before the country was reconquered by the Bolsheviks. In 1922, Margolin immigrated to the United States. Within a few years he had passed the state bar exams in Massachusetts and New York and was a practicing attorney again, specializing in Russian law. During and after World War II he advocated for settlement of Jewish refugees in Palestine and in other countries. Margolin, who died in Washington in 1956, lived to see the creation of the state of Israel. His vision of an independent Ukraine only came to pass with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 2000, the U.S. Department of State established the annual Fulbright-Margolin Prize for Ukrainian writers, named for Senator J. William Fulbright and Arnold D. Margolin, “the outstanding Ukrainian lawyer and diplomat.”

The strangest fate belonged to Vasily Shulgin. He fled Russia after the revolution, ending up in Yugoslavia. In 1944, during World War II, he was captured by Soviet forces, taken back to Russia, and sentenced to a long prison term for his anti-Soviet activity. Upon being freed in 1956 he, at least outwardly, became a Soviet patriot, penning an ardently pro-communist piece of propaganda, Letters to Russian Emigres. In 1965, he appeared in a fascinating documentary, Before the Court of History, in which he recounted the story of the abdication of Tsar Nicholas in the very railway car where the historic event occurred. Shulgin died in 1976 in the city of Vladimir at the age of ninety-eight.

As for the trial’s exonerated defendant, within weeks of the verdict Mendel Beilis came to realize that his notoriety would make life in Russia impossible. No one could guarantee his safety or that of his family. In the spring of 1914, the Beilises immigrated to Palestine, where, to Mendel’s delight, he immediately felt at home. “The land of Israel had an invigorating effect on me,” he wrote in his memoirs. “It gave me new life and new hope.” He loved the hills and the fields and just breathing the air. And he felt something new: a sense of freedom. “I saw for the first time a race of proud, uncringing Jews,” he wrote, “who lived life openly and unafraid.” His first few months in Palestine may have been the happiest of his life.

But the outbreak of World War I disrupted this idyll, as Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire fought for control of the Holy Land. The Beilis family was forced to move from the town of Petah Tikva when Ottoman forces drove them out and destroyed their home. To his parents’ great distress, their son Pinchas, barely seventeen, joined the Ottoman army because it was fighting the Russians. He soon deserted, putting himself at risk of execution. Beilis, meanwhile, grew short of money as he failed to find a way to make a decent living in wartime Palestine, and promises of help from the Jewish community always seemed to fall through. The Beilises were struck by personal tragedy when Pinchas, having survived the war, committed suicide. In 1922, hoping to improve his fortunes, Beilis reluctantly decided to move to America. The family settled in the Bronx. People in America still remembered him. He was feted in Chicago by social reformer Jane Addams and in Cincinnati by a “Mr. Manischewitz”—one of the five Manischewitz brothers, the most famous matzo makers in the world. But in America, too, he could not thrive. He was willing to do any kind of work, but people were reluctant to give the famous Beilis too menial a job. He found himself all but unemployable. He tried his hand in a printing business and at selling life insurance but failed. His memoirs, The Story of My Sufferings, self-published in 1925 with the help of Arnold Margolin and others in the American Jewish community, sold reasonably well, bringing in some money. Beilis could have made a fortune had he moved to America in 1913 and taken up offers to capitalize on his renown (for example, a $40,000 offer from Hearst’s New York American for a twenty-week speaking tour). He had no regrets, though, telling the Jewish Daily Bulletin in 1933 that he could never do anything that “involved my exploiting myself as a Jew and as a Jewish victim of an unjust and cruel persecution. So I refused. And I would still refuse today.” Yet twenty years of struggle did wear him down. By the early 1930s his main means of support was peddling his book door to door, which exhausted him. “I am not yet sixty,” he told an interviewer the year before his death, “but it’s as though I’ve lived through a thousand years.” When he died in 1934, four thousand people attended his funeral, a final manifestation of the fame that he had tried to avoid and had found such an awful burden.

Echoes

In Russia, for a few years after the verdict, “Beilis” became a derogatory epithet for “Jew.” Somewhat more strangely, during World War I some Russians nicknamed German zeppelins “Beilises,” because Jews were supposedly pro-German traitors. (Jews were also sometimes called “Vilyush,” a mocking diminutive of Kaiser Wilhelm.)

Within a decade or so, however, Mendel Beilis, once one of the most famous people on earth, had largely faded from memory in Russia and in the world. But the blood accusation did not disappear. It lived on—predominantly outside of Russia.

Its survival in the West should not have been surprising. In the Western condemnation of the Beilis trial there had arguably been no small element of hypocrisy. During the trial, prosecutor Oskar Vipper had complained to the jury:

Some foreign newspapers refer to our Russia as a barbarous country where such indictments, where such cruel blood accusations are permitted … But it turns out that abroad such indictments are brought as well … Consequently attacks on Russia, from this point of view, are incorrect and unfounded.

Vipper’s complaint was defensible. The Beilis affair could be seen as the climax of a wave of ritual murder cases in Eastern and Central Europe, the majority of which, as noted earlier, arose in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Between the early 1880s and 1913 there were at least as many recorded cases—approximately a hundred—as there had been in the previous seven hundred years (“cases” being defined here as accusations that were investigated or at least received considerable popular attention).

The last actual ritual-murder trial outside of Eastern Europe occurred in the Prussian town of Konitz, in 1900. The victim was an eighteen-year-old student, Ernst Winter, who had been neatly dismembered, his body parts scattered throughout the town, wrapped in packing paper. The case sparked anti-Semitic riots—the town’s synagogue was set on fire and Jewish homes vandalized—though thankfully no one was killed. A Jewish butcher and his son, Adolph and Moritz Lewy, were charged in the murder. They turned out to have solid alibis and the charge was dismissed. A third Jew was tried and acquitted. (Moritz Lewy, however, was convicted of perjury for denying that he knew the victim, based on extremely flimsy evidence. The kaiser, in his mercy, cut the four-year sentence in half.)

Historians have reached no consensus on the precise reasons for the revival of the blood accusation with a half-dozen full-fledged trials in Europe in the latter part of the nineteenth century. But the wave was undoubtedly linked to the rise of modern anti-Semitism that culminated in some of the worst horrors of the twentieth century. Jew-hatred was now the province of “experts” who could testify in court. As the historian David Biale writes, “a folkloric belief that had remained relatively underground in central Europe after the Reformation was now given a certain bogus dignity as ‘scientific.’ ” The blood accusation’s revival, then, was arguably a warning sign. In reaction to the Beilis affair, Russia’s European critics might have done well to look inward, for the trial could be seen as a symptom, to borrow Vasily Maklakov’s words, of a “dangerous internal illness” afflicting the heart of Europe itself. During the trial, in fact, Vipper was quite explicit in confessing that he had been inspired by certain recent European trials.

In the decades after his trial, Mendel Beilis never entirely lost his place in history. He was reliably mentioned in any tract on Jewish ritual murder or its refutation. In 1926, the official newspaper of Germany’s rising Nazi Party, Volkischer Beobachter, devoted a six-part series to the Beilis affair, calling it a “test of strength between the Russian state and people and the Jews.” In the 1930s, Julius Streicher, editor of the infamous Nazi weekly Der Sturmer, energetically propagandized for the ritual-murder charge, devoting special issues to the subject that listed Beilis in the pantheon of Jewish child-killers. “Look at the path which the Jewish people has traversed for millennia,” Streicher declared at a Nazi rally. “Everywhere murder, everywhere mass murder!” The Nazi regime itself, it is true, never adopted the blood accusation as a major part of its official propaganda. There were no Nazi versions of the Beilis trial. Still, as Biale has argued, the blood accusation was more important to the Nazi cause than it might initially appear. Thanks to the efforts of Streicher and others, the charge “lurked in the background, providing additional mythic ammunition” that aided in “the demonization of the Jews…[making] it easier for the Nazis to isolate their victims and then deport them to their deaths.” As the most notorious example of its kind, the Beilis case surely helped the ritual-murder myth maintain its vitality. Of note is that in May 1943, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, sent several hundred copies of a book on Jewish ritual murder, which included an entire chapter on the Beilis trial, for distribution to the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile death squads that killed more than a million Jews in Eastern Europe. The tomes, Himmler explained to a top lieutenant, were important reading “above all to the men who are busy with the Jewish question.”

In Poland, during and after World War II, there were signs that the Kiev case had survived in the collective memory. Residents of German-occupied Poland called the product rumored to be made from human fat in the Auschwitz concentration camp “Beilis Soap.” (Poles therefore took care to avoid the soap cakes distributed by the German authorities.)

After the war, as the historian Jan T. Gross has documented in horrifying detail, Poles perpetrated pogroms that killed hundreds of the Jews who had managed to survive German extermination. In many cases, the violence was sparked by rumors of ritual murder. The first postwar pogrom was in the city of Rzeszow on June 12, 1945. No one was killed but a large number of Jews were beaten, Jewish property was vandalized, and two hundred Jews fled the city. According to a local newspaper account, the public was enraged by “the wildest rumors” of a ritual murder committed “by Jews who needed blood [transfusions, to fortify themselves] after returning from the camps.”

The most notorious postwar pogrom in Poland took place on July 4, 1946, in the town of Kielce, where a mob killed forty-two Jews and left some eighty wounded. A Jewish delegation attempted to secure a statement condemning anti-Semitism from the bishop of Lublin, Stefan Wyszinski, later named a cardinal and primate of Poland. According to a report on the meeting, Wyszinski declined to issue a special condemnation of anti-Semitism and “during the discussion of how the crowd was agitated by the myth that Christian blood is necessary to make matzo, the bishop clarified that during the Beilis trial a lot of old and new Jewish books were assembled and the matter of blood was not definitively settled.” (It should be noted that another bishop, Teodor Kubina of Czestochowa, together with local officials, issued an uncompromising proclamation that began: “All statements about ritual murders are lies. Nobody … has ever been harmed by Jews for ritual purposes.”)

In Russia, Jewish ritual murder reared up once more as a highly public issue—almost exactly eight decades after Mendel Beilis’s arrest in the middle of the night. The occasion was the discovery in a forest outside Sverdlovsk (as Ekaterinburg had been renamed) of several sets of buried skeletal remains, believed to be those of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. The excavation that commenced in mid-July 1991 was reminiscent of the botched handling of the Yuschinsky crime scene. Over the protests of a forensic archaeologist, ready with her brushes and tools, untrained investigators hurriedly grabbed at the hundreds of bones, many of which splintered or disintegrated entirely as they were stuffed into bags.

After the Soviet Union collapsed a few months later, the new Russian government created a commission to establish the identities of the victims and plan an appropriate interment. DNA samples were taken from the remains and compared to samples from several living relatives of the imperial couple. In September 1995, the commission’s lead investigator announced his conclusion: the remains were, beyond all doubt, those of Nicholas and Alexandra, and three of their daughters, as well four others in their retinue who had been murdered along with them. (One of the two younger daughters—either Maria or Anastasia—and the boy Alexis were unaccounted for, fueling speculation they had escaped, though the evidence strongly suggested that the perpetrators had burned these bodies.)

After the bodies were identified, the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church shocked authorities and the public by declaring that it could not accept the accuracy of the commission’s report. The Church asked for clarification on ten questions, two of which attracted widespread attention. The synod wanted to know: Had the tsar been decapitated after his death? And could the commission “confirm or refute the ritual character of the murder”?

The notion that the massacre of the imperial family was a Jewish ritual crime had persisted since the early 1920s when it was propagated by anticommunist Russian propagandists and popularized in the West by the Times of London’s Russia correspondent, Robert Wilton, who wrote a lurid book on the subject. In this scenario, Jews were solely responsible for killing the tsar, his wife, and their children. They had cut off the head of the tsar and sent it to the Kremlin, and they had left behind, in Wilton’s words, “mysterious inscriptions in the death chamber.” When the White forces briefly captured the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg where the Romanovs had been killed, they found scrawled on the basement walls some runic-looking marks and two garbled lines of poetry in German by the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine. The quotation was from a poem about the death of King Balthazar, the biblical figure who sees “the writing on the wall.” Belsazar—the correct rendering of Balthazar in German—was misspelled “Belsatzar.” Some might see the work, at worst, of a punning executioner and some idle doodling. But in the eyes of the Far Right, all the scribblings were “kabbalistic signs” pointing to the murders’ ritual character.

The Holy Synod’s ghoulish inquiries in 1995 testified to the abiding obsession of extreme Russian nationalists with what one historian has called the “gothic version” of the murders. Critics argued that for the commission to address the ritual scenario was to dignify it. But the commission’s chairman, the noted democratic reformer Boris Nemtsov, opted to deal with it matter-of-factly. In January 1998, the commission’s chief investigator, V. N. Solovev, informed the synod of his unequivocal conclusion, which he later summed up in a newspaper interview: “The motives [for the murders] were of a political character and were in no way connected with secret religious cults.” Unsurprisingly, latter-day Black Hundreds, a rising force in postcommunist Russia, would not accept this conclusion; they insisted that the investigation was “fraudulent” and designed “to conceal the ritual character of the crime.” As for the Russian Orthodox Church, it merely refused to accept the identification of the remains, calling the results inconclusive. The Church’s position did not change even after additional tests reckoned that the odds of a coincidental match with Romanov DNA were more than a billion to one.

When the imperial family’s remains were interred in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg in July 1998, Patriarch Aleksy and other high Church officials refused to attend. The priests presiding over the service did not utter the victims’ names; the ceremony was treated as a ritual that would be performed for unknowns. The refusal of the Church to acknowledge the identity of the remains could, of course, only encourage speculation about the nature of the murders, which continues in the far-right-wing media to this day. In the post-Soviet era, the sensational accounts of Wilton and the White Russians from the 1920s have been republished and embellished in new versions. One especially popular one, marketed as scholarly nonfiction, features a mysterious rabbi who supervises the ritual.

Then there is the strange case of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the anticommunist hero and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature who died in 2008. Though a deeply conservative Russian nationalist, he in no way advocated for the truthfulness of the blood accusation. Yet, in one of his final works, Two Hundred Years Together, about the Russians’ relationship with the Jews, he struggles with the Beilis case. He begins with the right question: “How was it possible in the twentieth century, without a factually based indictment, to instigate such a trial that threatened an entire people?” But, as the Russian journalist and historian Semyon Reznik writes, while Solzhenitsyn makes it clear he “does not approve of those who conducted the Beilis case, he tries in every way he can to shield them, to obscure the clarity of the picture.”

Solzhenitsyn writes that “Beilis was indicted, on the basis of dubious evidence, because he was a Jew.” The evidence, of course, was not “dubious” but better said to have been nonexistent or fabricated by the state. Solzhenitsyn’s account contains numerous other inaccuracies that invariably cast Beilis’s defenders in a bad light and make his prosecution seem, if not defensible, then a less evil act than it was. On major points he accepts the prosecution’s view of the evidence. Andrei Yushchinsky, he writes, “was killed in an unusual manner: forty-seven wounds were inflicted on him, with apparent knowledge of anatomy,” with wounds whose “apparent goal was to drain his blood while alive.” All those allegations, of course, were contradicted by the defense experts—and in the matter of the perpetrators’ supposed anatomical knowledge, by an expert for the prosecution. It is surely indicative of the modern-day persistence of the blood accusation that one of the greatest Russian literary, political, and moral figures of the last century could not honestly come to terms with the case of Mendel Beilis.

A Well-Tended Grave

For decades, the grave in Section 34, Row 11, Plot No. 4 of the Lukianovka Cemetery in Kiev had been abandoned, lacking even a proper grave marker. The first sign of renewed interest in the site came in 2003 when a group of about fifteen men dressed in facsimiles of tsarist officers’ uniforms came from St. Petersburg, along with two Russian Orthodox priests, to pay their respects at the final resting place of Andrei Yushchinsky.

Soon after that visit—without official permission, according to the cemetery’s director—neat new shrubbery appeared on the plot, as well as a new cross with two metal plates bearing inscriptions. In the decrepit cemetery, where many graves had turned into weed-filled sinkholes, Andrei’s plot now stood out as unusually well tended.

The inscription on the first plate read:

Here lie the remains of the saintly boy-martyr Andrei (Yushchinsky).

Crowned with the martyr’s wreath in his thirteenth year, on 12 March 1911.

Sainted, martyred, Andrei, pray to God for us.

In calling Andrei a “martyr,” the inscription was inappropriate, since the poor boy’s murder, horrible though it was, had nothing to do with his faith. Beneath the first plate someone had affixed another one, bearing a much more plainspoken and provocative inscription:

Andrei Yushchinsky, martyred by the Yids in 1911.

In February 2004, after reports of this anti-Semitic act incited an uproar, the cemetery sought a court order to remove the plate—a legal necessity, according to the director—but within days someone had made off with the offensive plaque, rendering legal action unnecessary.

Andrei’s grave site continued to attract the attention of the Russian and Ukrainian Far Right. In February 2006, the grave was renovated again, thanks to the efforts of a group from a large private Ukrainian university, the Inter-Regional Academy of Personnel Management, known by its Ukrainian acronym MAUP, which has been cited by the U.S. State Department and the Anti-Defamation League as a disseminator of anti-Semitic propaganda. The major addition was a rectangular marble tablet placed over the grave, inscribed with the text of the first question to the jury—about the forty-seven wounds and five glasses of blood—which, given the affirmative verdict, supposedly confirmed the existence of ritual murder. Local Jewish groups were outraged by the inscription, but because it was a quote from a court proceeding that was not overtly inflammatory, no legal basis could be found to have it removed. It remains there today.

It would be mistaken to exaggerate the extent of anti-Semitism in Ukraine. Ukraine does not sponsor official anti-Semitism. When anti-Semitic incidents have occurred, the government has condemned them. Nonetheless, Andrei Yushchinsky’s grave site has become a place of pilgrimage for far-right true believers. Every year, on the anniversary of the murder, a sizeable and organized group comes to pay its respects to the Boy Martyr, a thirteen-year-old child whose memory is both celebrated and abused. Smaller groups of mourners make their way there as well. In springtime a visitor will find Andrei’s grave covered with fresh flowers.