This day occupies pages 81 through
121 of Volume I, part 1, of the transcript.
When you start today’s transcript,
you see prosecutor Vipper declaiming against stenographic accounts of the
proceedings in newspapers. Remember,
this is 1913. Reporters have to take information
down in shorthand or longhand. They have
to get it to the office. Somebody there
writes it out longhand. The editor fixes
it for space and match to editorial policy.
It goes to typesetting; a full-size page of newspaper takes up to 16
hours to typeset by hand, a tabloid half that time. A galley is printed to check up on the
typesetting and a proofreader has to go over it and all the mistakes have to be
fixed in the set type. Only then can it
be turned into a newsstand edition.
But on day 3 of the trial, the
morning newspaper had the previous day’s testimony printed, exactly as it
occurred, except possibly with notes for gestures and raised or lowered voices.
Now understand this. The jury was sequestered but the witnesses
were not. What’s more, the witnesses
were crowded into one area of a packed courtroom. They were there from the start of day 1 until
the judge specifically released them, with the agreement of the parties. The witnesses had the opportunity to see the
newspaper accounts and discuss them in the streets although they weren’t
supposed to talk about them in the witness room where they gathered before
being marshalled to their seats.
Maybe you thought Vipper was talking
about censoring the newspapers. In fact,
journalist Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, who
covered the trial, said in the 1919 edition of his book that the statutes
Vipper referred to deal with witness tampering, not the government right to
censor the news.
In reality, it was a case of sour
grapes. Newspapers that supported the
Tsar, like Kievlyanin, might be printing material about the trial that
the government handed to them – although Dmitry Pikhno, the editor, fought the
ritual murder charge. Newspapers with a
centrist or left slant, like Kievan Thought, Latest News, and Pravda (which
started publishing in 1903 and evolved into the main paper of the Communists),
published what they wanted. Probably
they were the papers Vipper was complaining about. This sour grapes issue will pervade the case,
getting worse and worse as the government theory disintegrates.
The prosecution’s image of the
Prikhodko/Nezhinsky/Yushchinsky clan as a close-knit family that takes care of
each other crumbles a bit. The mother
said on the first day of testimony that Andrey was never out of sight of one of
the family for more than a few minutes. Her
sister Natalya’s deposition (she has died in the interim) says that Andrey
liked to stroll among the monuments and memorials on the west bank of the
Dnepr, and that clearly is at least 15 minutes’ walk from Slobodka where he
lived. From the time Andrey supposedly went
to school at 6 in the morning on 12 March until 8 that night, none of his
family knew where he was or worried about him.
Everybody assumed that he was at the other person’s home.
On the other hand, we begin to get a
picture of the sort of abuse the police inflicted on the family, their first
suspects in the murder. If Fyodor
Nezhinsky’s testimony about the furnace repairman seems to be disjointed,
remember a couple of things. It has been
two years since the murder. He has
forgotten most of what he knew then.
Second, he is suffering under a certain amount of guilt. The furnace repairman, Yashchenko, gave a
description of a man he saw in Kiev early on the morning of March 12, that
could have fit numbers of Christians as well as Jews in Kiev. In fact, it will turn out about day 15 that
it could actually have been one of the murderers. But the police arrested Fyodor’s
brother-in-law, subjected him to forced shaving of his beard and head, blacked
and curled his moustache, and presented him to Yashchenko to see if the
description matched. If Fyodor hadn’t
gone chasing after the furnace repairman, maybe none of that would have
happened and the real murderers would have been arrested earlier. It doesn’t mean Beilis would have escaped
trial. But at least Luka Prikhodko
wouldn’t have suffered police abuse.
The government’s attempted
identification of all Jews as having black beards begins to break down
today. Fyodor Nezhinsky is questioned by
Durasevich, Shmakov’s subordinate, in an attempt to move to this topic, but he
says “black moustache” which is the exact translation of the Russian, when it
should have been “black beard.” Further,
either he wasn’t in court the night before or he didn’t read the newspapers
reporting on the trial from stenographic records (he is probably illiterate),
and he didn’t realize that the schoolboys have given Beilis an alibi.
Vipper’s taunting of Nezhinsky is
distastefully disingenuous; it proves that Vipper has no concept that
historical class differences in the way he and the rest of the system deal with
people involved in the legal system has produced the attitude Nezhinsky
displays on the stand. And then,
hypocritically, the judge criticizes Nezhinsky for lying when the government
theory of the murder is a lie from beginning to end.
The “papers with punctures” issue
will turn up over and over during testimony.
The answer will come on day 15, but for now, the important thing is that
Ehlansky is one of two boys who found Andrey’s body – and Ehlansky says the papers were not at the
crime scene when he found the body.
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
|
Hershke Arender
|
Andrey’s friend in Slobodka
|
82
|
162
|
6
|
Moishe Arender
|
Hershke’s father
|
82
|
163
|
34
|
Olimpiada Nezhinskaya
|
Andrey’s grandmother,
Aleksandra Prikhodko’s mother
|
83
|
164
|
69
|
Natalya Yushchinskaya
|
Andrey’s aunt,
Sister of his mother
|
87
|
173
|
279
|
Fyodor Nezhinsky
|
Andrey’s uncle,
Half-brother of his mother
|
93
|
185
|
317
|
Vasily Simak
|
Held bill of debt
To Andrey’s biological father
|
102
|
204
|
636
|
A. Nezhinskaya
|
Fyodor’s wife
|
106
|
211
|
738
|
Luka Prikhodko
|
Andrey’s stepfather
Twice suspected of the murder
|
110
|
221
|
963
|
Ehlansky
|
One of two boys who found Andrey’s
body.
Note the “papers with punctures”
issue
|
115
|
231
|
1118
|
Sinitsky
|
Reported the body to
Lukyanovka Police Station, medic
at that station
|
117
|
237
|
1300
|
© Patricia Jo Heil,
2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
No comments:
Post a Comment