Friday, October 25, 2013

Mendel Beilis -- The Barber: Rudzinsky confessed

This is the summary of the 18th day of the Mendel Beilis trial, which occurred on 12 October, 1913 on the Julian calendar, 25 October, 1913 on the Gregorian calendar.

This day occupies pages 44 through 94 of Volume II of the transcript.

See the translation of the transcript for day 18.
 
 

Kirichenko is still testifying.  Today he destroys Malitskaya’s credibility.   Kirichenko reveals that she did know who visited Cheberyak, something she denied on the witness stand, as well as changing her story about the noises she heard. 
 
If the government discredits Malitskaya, because her testimony points to Vera, the government theory of a morning murder loses one of its two props.  The evidence that people were popping in and out of the house all morning comes from two sources and nobody as cagy as Vera is going to allow a murder under those circumstances.  Unfortunately, none of the prosecutors raises the possibility that Malitskaya heard Vera getting help moving the carpet. 
 
Today Zamyslovsky asks Singaevsky, if you thought that the robbery was an alibi for the murder, you believed it was because you would have to hide the body as well as commit the murder, and hiding the body would have pushed back the timing of the robbery.  Singaevsky says yes, sir.  Why is he cooperating with the government? 

It’s a payback.  Somebody in the government convinced Singaevsky to confess to the robbery as an alibi, and he went to the investigator and did so in December, 1912.  In April 1912 Rudzinsky used the same alibi; the case was dismissed relative to him in May, 1912.  The confession Latyshev signed in March 1913 was the same one, and when he saw Mandzelevsky, he thought he would be betrayed to save Mandzelevsky.  Within a month of Latyshev’s death, the courts dismissed the Adamovich robbery case relative to Singaevsky, without even completing the investigation.  The whole stunt pretends that Vera’s gang were not the murderers and allows the government to focus on Beilis as their victim.

But what Zamyslovsky has forgotten, is that if the murder was committed close enough before the robbery that hiding the body would have interfered with the robbery, it would have happened while Vasily Cheberyak was home from his job, and that Zhenya was also around.  Vasily is still around; the judge has not released him yet.  Nobody calls Vasily back to the stand to testify about this, now that the prosecution has brought it up. 

Vipper makes a very good point fairly late in the day: that the police suspected a number of people in the crime at first, so the police had no reason to concentrate on Cheberyak and her three men.  Unfortunately Kirichenko is a simple, honest soul and he does not go through all the evidence pointing at them, or even all the dead ends reached in investigating other people.  Vipper’s point is that if there was more than one suspect, there have to be very good grounds for focusing attention away from some of them.

Vipper’s problem is that by this point in the trial, all the attention has been focused away from Beilis, and that happened because of the obvious lies told by the people who accused him – the Cheberyaks – and forging the Shakhovskys’ depositions, and so on.

Polishchuk is back.  If I was going to describe his appearance today, I would call it Kabuki in the sense of being an elaborate, stylized performance that means something only to initiates.  Shmakov seems to think Polishchuk is an initiate of all the ideas that obsess Shmakov.  Eventually Polishchuk gets tired of pretending to play along and says “I don’t know” or “Ask Col. Ivanov.”

Toward the end of the day Vipper does another of those standup routines that pretends that the government never takes anybody to jail except with reasonable suspicion or probable cause.  However, Vera’s gang of four was run in on no other cause than to check their papers.  The constant pretense at this trial is that the Tsarist legal system operated like the British one, if not the American one, but examples are rife throughout that it did not, Beilis’ trial itself being the most glaring example.

Judge:  Fyodor Boldyrev

Prosecution:
            Criminal Prosecutor, Oscar Vipper
            Civil Prosecutor Georgy Zamyslovsky
            Private Civil Prosecutor Aleksey Shmakov

Defense:
            Oscar Gruzenberg
Nikolay Karabchevsky
Dmitry Grigorevich-Barsky
Alexandr Zarudny
Vasily Maklakov


 
 
Page
 
Witness
Notes
Transcript
Translation
Statement
Evgeny Kirichenko
Krasovsky’s and Ivanov’s subordinate
44
90
1644
1746
1
2412
Adam Polishchuk
Requestioned
56
1667
495
Nikolay Aleksandrovich Krasovsky
Requestioned
64
1686
861
Pyotr Singaevsky
Murderer, brother of Vera Cheberyak
66
80
1689
1722
902
1828
Makhalin
Confrontation with Singaevsky
73
1706
1336
Boris Andronikovich Rudzinsky
Murderer, fiance of Vera’s sister
75
1708
1422
Nikolay Mandzelevsky
Part of Vera’s gang
80
1723
1867
Lenka Shvachko
Knew Karaev, heard Rudzinsky’s confession
82
1729
2011
Mrs. Zarutskaya
Mother of Nazar
Says Vera id’d the body
90
1747
2443
Mrs. Pimonenko
Knows the story of the quarrel between Zhenya and Andrey
91
1748
2460
Pilaev
Boy who knows about the quarrel
92
1751
2545
Fyodor Sinkevich
Priest; re-questioned
93
1754
2601



 
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved


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