This day occupies pages 17 through 67 of Volume I, part 1,
of the transcript.
This is the first of 33 grueling days of work for everybody
involved. The court sat on this case 7
days a week for between 12 and 14 hours each day.
The first order of business is reading the indictment. It takes up 20 pages at the start of the
trial. It was issued May 23, 1913;
Beilis was arrested July 23, 1911. It
was the second indictment issued; the first came out January 15, 1912.
The indictment governed the trial – or it was supposed
to. Rules of procedure prohibited the
defense from raising any issue not documented in the indictment, even if it was
new exonerating evidence. The exception
was if a witness raised an issue and the prosecution asked questions about it.
On this very day such a thing happens. Andrey’s preparatory tutor, Dmitry
Mochugovsky, volunteers the information that flyers were handed out at Andrey’s
funeral which accused the Jews of the murder, and the prosecution questions him
about it. It creates a crisis because it
shows that ritual murder was raised as an issue the day after the second of two
autopsies performed on Andrey, while the government theory pretends that the
charge of ritual murder developed out of the evidence. This crisis develops in stages throughout the
trial as other evidence about the flyers comes out.
In fact the ritual murder charge was illegal; in 1906 the
Duma repealed a law allowing a charge of “murder through motives of religious
fanaticism,” a cover term for ritual murder. The Russian Senate, a judiciary council, also
prohibited charges being leveled that weren’t in the criminal code, a concept
common to courts since 1813 when a Bavarian jurist reformed the Bavarian penal
code to include the rule: Nullum crimen, nulla poena sine praevia lege
poenali, there is no crime and should be no punishment without a
previously-adopted penal law.
A Russian trial was a court of inquiry that presented all
the evidence to the jury. As a result,
the Beilis jury heard hours of testimony that later turned out to be faked by
the government, or nonsense presented by members of the Black Hundreds like
Golubev, Rozmitalsky, Poznyakov, Akatsatov and Galkin. The trial basically proceeds through the
evidence in the order presented in the indictment. Information was not presented as a united
thread, but piece by piece as each witness was called to the stand.
You will find the testimony confusing in places. There are a number of reasons for that.
- This type of trial did not
sift information for truth. It was
completely up to the jury to decide who spoke the truth. You will come across rumor, gossip,
faked information, and perjury as you read.
- The questioning is often
disorganized. The prosecution does
not go through a person’s testimony in a specific order designed to bring
the story out clearly. I believe
this was a deliberate attempt to confuse the jury so that they would take
the path of least resistance and vote to convict.
- The judge is an examining
magistrate. He puts in questions
anywhere he feels like it, and often without reference to the last
question asked by an attorney or the last answer given by a witness. Combined with the prosecution’s tactics,
this probably had a goal of confusing the witness. Either that or the judge would literally
wake up and realize that he had missed something.
- The questions seem to
assume that the witness knows something he or she may not know, or
certainly may not remember. The
trial took place two years after some of them gave depositions to the
forensic investigator, and the depositions don’t necessarily contain the
information the prosecution wants to support its case.
- Up to about day 11, many
of the witnesses are illiterate.
You won’t find dates and times in their testimony because they
didn’t read calendars or newspapers or keep diaries. Most of what they know comes from rumor
or gossip, and most of what they personally did or saw they have forgotten
because the government didn’t bring the case into court in a timely way.
The boys who testify toward the end of today begin the
breakdown of the case against Mendel Beilis.
The boys who knew Andrey from Slobodka never played at the Zaitsev
factory with him; the boys who knew Andrey from school never played with him at
all; and the boys who played with Andrey in Lukyanovka hadn’t seen him for a
year before his death because that was when his family moved from Lukyanovka to
Nikolskaya Slobodka. The only person who
testified that Andrey was at the factory on the day of his murder was Lyudmila
Cheberyak on day 8.
Another problem introduced today that everybody ignores is
the absence journal from Andrey’s school.
The government theory says Andrey was in school on Friday March 11. The absence journal says he was absent. This is confirmed by a newspaper article read
at trial on day 15.
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
To Day 3, "The Finding"
Page
|
||||
Witness
|
Notes
|
Transcript
|
Translation
|
Statement
|
Aleksandra Prikhodko
|
Andrey’s mother
Introduces evidence tampering issue
|
40
|
76
|
127/128
|
Dmitry Mochugovsky
|
Andrey’s preparatory tutor
Introduces anti-Jewish flyer controversy
|
52
|
100
|
603
|
E. Bogdanov
|
Andrey’s school teacher
Introduces government theory problem; Andrey absent March
11
|
58
|
113
|
789
|
Rozov
|
At Andrey’s school
|
62
|
120
|
943
|
Pogulyansky
|
Andrey’s school doorkeeper
|
64
|
124
|
1019
|
Lyubchenko
|
Zaitsev factory laborer
Discusses factory arson
|
64
|
125
|
1036
|
Nikolay Zinin
|
Andrey’s friend from Slobodka
|
69
|
135
|
1164
|
Pavel Pushka
|
Andrey’s neighbor from Slobodka
|
69
|
136
|
1203
|
Maria (?) Pushka
|
Pavel’s sister (?)
|
72
|
142
|
1288
|
Konstantin Dobzhansky
|
From Lukyanovka
Nephew of Aleksandr Dobzhansky from day 4
|
74
|
144
|
1362
|
Konovalov
|
Andrey’s friend from Lukyanovka
|
75
|
147
|
1408
|
Levitsky
|
Andrey’s friend
|
76
|
149
|
1444
|
Ermolovich
|
Andrey’s friend from school
|
76
|
149
|
1452
|
Golovinsky
|
Andrey’s friend from school
|
76
|
150
|
1471
|
Berezovsky
|
Andrey’s friend from school
|
77
|
152
|
1515
|
Andrey Maistrenko
|
Andrey’s friend from Lukyanovka
|
78
|
153
|
1520
|
Artasevich
|
Andrey’s friend from school
|
78
|
153
|
1536
|
Markevich
|
Andrey’s friend from school
|
78
|
154
|
1562
|
Klepatsky
|
Andrey’s friend from Lukyanovka
|
80
|
157
|
1619
|
Lyubimtsev
|
Andrey’s friend from Lukyanovka
|
80
|
158
|
1628
|
© Patricia Jo
Heil, 2013-2018
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