See the transcript translation for this first day.
See the chronology of the entire case.
The trial ran 34 days.
The transcript is 1436 double-column pages long in three volumes, two of
testimony and one of closing speeches.
The translation is about 3000 pages long. There are two reasons for that.
One is that, to help scholars, I obsessively recorded what
transcript page material came from, and I started a new translation page with
every new transcript page. Some
translation pages have only one line at the top.
I also took up space on some pages with obsessive footnotes on the results of research I did to make sure I transliterated and translated terms correctly, and recorded information I found on forensic issues and works cited to during the testimony. And I footnoted cross-references between confirming and contradictory testimony from day to day.
This day occupies pages 3 through 16 of Volume I of the transcript.
No witnesses testified.
The first order of business was establishing what witnesses had actually
showed up after receiving a summons.
See the list of almost 200 people who testified at trial. The transcript shows that some 215 witnesses
were summonsed.
Some of them would never show up. E.V. Cheberyak and I.D. Latyshev were dead.
The former was Andrey Yushchinsky’s best friend Zhenya; he died August 9,
1911. The latter was one of the
murderers; he died March 29, 1913. N.V.
Yushchinskaya was Andrey’s aunt Natalya, his mother’s full sister; she died in
1911 but I don’t know the date. Zhenya
and Natalya’s depositions were read in court, which was legal in Tsarist
law. Latyshev left no deposition and
even the confession he signed moments before his death was not read in court.
Some of those who would never show up had been lost track of
by the authorities. They included E.F.
Mishchuk, former chief of detectives in Kiev; I.P. Kozachenko, a government
agent who sometimes was assigned to a jail cell to play informer; A.A.
Pukhalsky who was in jail with Beilis; A.E. Karaev, who trapped one of the
murderers into a confession and was sent to Siberia; and Aleksey Vygranov, a
detective who worked on the Yushchinsky case with Nikolay Aleksandrovich
Krasovsky and left Kiev on September 24 (Julian), never to be seen or heard
from again.
Footnotes to the translation identify these and other
important witnesses – or non-witnesses.
Tsarist archives discussed in A.S. Tager’s Tsarist Regime and the
Beilis Case from 1934, and Oskar Gruzenberg’s Memoirs, showed that
some of those who were still alive were helped to get out of Dodge by the
government. All of them could have blown
the government case, mostly because they knew about falsified evidence.
Next there is a discussion of jurors. In 1913, Russia passed a law changing how
prospective jurors were selected. It
weighted selection in favor of peasants and owners of small businesses. Why such a law wasn’t passed immediately
after the 1905 revolution that prompted so many reforms, and was reserved for
1913 when so many reforms had been repealed, is unknown. Viktor Korolenko and Vasily Shulgin (the
latter was editor of the Kievlyanin, a newspaper that supported the
monarchy) both believed it was aimed at packing the Beilis jury with obedient muzhiks,
which did indeed happen. On this day,
the only remaining juror with a higher education asked to be excused and the
judge allowed it over the defense’s protests.
Third, Judge Boldyrev ruled to excuse the expert witnesses
from attending the trial until 10 October (Julian). Witnesses were divided into those who
testified to facts, and those with expertise.
(The judge strictly enforced who could testify to what.) The defense strongly objected to excusing the
expert witnesses. Some of them had been
deposed very early in the investigation, and had no idea of subsequent
developments, and while they had to listen to the indictment (read on day 2),
volumes of material had been condensed into it after their last contact with
the facts of the case. If the experts
don’t know the facts of the trial, two things will happen. One is they won’t know on what the indictment
was based, including things that might invalidate what they deposed to. The other is that they will have to rely for
this information on summaries presented to them while they are being
questioned, and the summaries may be skewed based on the party asking the
question. In fact, as the trial
proceeded, Criminal Prosecutor Oskar Vipper increasingly asked questions that
misrepresented previously established facts, including facts on which the
prosecution case relied.
The defense protested about excusing the experts on the
first day, on the grounds that quoting out of context is always prone to
misrepresenting the full context.
About two thirds of the way through the first-day
proceedings the prosecution makes a startling turnaround. They argue strenuously that jurors have a
duty to serve, but in the first phase of the day’s proceedings they dismissed
the concept that witnesses have an absolute duty to appear. This will not be the last time they argue
opposite concepts; it always depends on the expediency of the moment.
Judge: Fyodor Boldyrev
Prosecution:
Criminal
Prosecutor, Oscar VipperCivil Prosecutor Georgy Zamyslovsky
Private Civil Prosecutor Aleksey Shmakov
Defense:
Oscar
GruzenbergNikolay Karabchevsky
Dmitry Grigorevich-Barsky
Alexandr Zarudny
Vasily Maklakov
Vipper was a hired gun from St. Petersburg who was not
appointed to the trial until March, 1913.
Zamyslovsky was a powerful member of the Duma; he had to take the title
Civil Prosecutor because he had never been admitted to the bar. Shmakov was allowed to play a prosecutorial
role after filing a lawsuit against Beilis as a private citizen, seeking
damages in relation to Yushchinsky’s death, according to Beilis’ autobiography.
Gruzenberg was hired in October or November 1911 by Arnold Margolin,
head of Beilis’ defense committee, along with Grigorevich-Barsky. Karabchevsky, one of the deans of the Russian
legal system, joined the team by the time Beilis was arraigned. I’m not sure when or how Zarudny got
involved, but Vasily Maklakov had the interesting history that his full brother
was a rabid supporter of the Black Hundreds who eagerly promoted using Beilis
as the victim in this trial. Nikolay
Maklakov signed off on a bribe to one of the prosecution witnesses.
To Day 2, "Indictment"
To Day 2, "Indictment"
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
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