Mendel Beilis -- The Colonel and the Investigator

This is the summary of the 19^th day of the Mendel Beilis trial, which occurred on 13 October, 1913 on the Julian calendar, 20 October, 1913 on the Gregorian calendar.  It is the last day when witnesses will testify to facts about the murder.  From here to day 28 is all expert testimony.

This day occupies pages 95 through 142 of Volume II of the transcript.

See the translation of the transcript for day 19.

Today the two officials who worked the case from beginning to end testify.   They are also the only survivors from among all those who rejected the ritual murder theory.

A witness with information about Kozachenko and the forged letter fails to show up, although he took the oath.  Vipper disingenuously pretends that because the name is spelled Kazachenko, it is about somebody completely unknown to the court.  This is false. 

• The indictment spells Kozachenko’s name Kazachenko and from the text, it is clear that this is the man who helped forge Beilis’ name to the letter. 
• In the indictment both spellings are used. 
• The Kazachenko spelling is used on day 4 with direct reference to the letter. 
• The deposition of Kozachenko was read on day 7, and in the transcript his name is spelled Kazachenko. 
• This same individual, with the name spelled the same way, is discussed with Dudman on day 10. 

Later today Grigorevich-Barsky does a shrewd thing.  He asks Ivanov about Kozachenko’s information.  Ivanov doesn’t ask “who’s that,” he says that Kozachenko’s information varied in reliability.  Grigorevich-Barsky pronounces the name in such a way that the stenographer writes down both spellings.  So Ivanov simultaneously hands Vipper a slap in the face, and confirms that Kozachenko was a government spy.  That sheds a whole new light on him offering to carry the letter for Beilis.

Ivanov says an interesting thing while Grigorevich-Barsky is questioning him.  Grigorevich-Barsky points out that at the time Rudzinsky confessed to Shechko about the murder, Brazul-Brushkovsky’s article accusing him had not yet come out, so that there were no public accusations against him yet.  Ivanov says, “but the prisoners knew.”  What did they know?  That there were accusations against him?  Krasovsky could have told him that in 1911.  Did the prisoners know that he had committed the murder – like Krymovsky – or did they only know about accusations?

Today Ivanov puts the flyers to bed.  They were distributed at the funeral, showing that the anti-Semites wanted Jewish blood before there could be any proof of ritual murder.  Ivanov was brought a copy by a policeman, and authenticated a copy shown him by the defense.  He identified Nikolay Andreevich Pavlovich, a member of the Black Hundreds, as the distributor.

Yablonsky summarizes Vera: “When she tells the truth she lies and if she talks in her sleep, she’s probably lying then, too.”  He gets a laugh by saying that Brazul shouldn’t have set the meeting with Vera for a restaurant, because it could have compromised her (spoiled her reputation) in the eyes of the world.  But this is day 19 and if Yablonsky missed her testimony, he wouldn’t have known about all her lies or how she attacked that little cat Chernyakova in the middle of the courtroom.

Late in the day Maklakov points out that the government has mismanaged the entire case, without putting it exactly in those words.  If nothing about Cheberyak has anything to do with Yushchinsky’s murder, then no testimony about Cheberyak should have been allowed in the case.  And since the government has admitted that information, and also that Cheberyak was associated with a gang of thieves, in fact with a large one, then it is pertinent to the case how gangs of thieves act.  The question Boldyrev is trying to keep out is whether Krasovsky has knowledge of any given case – any set of facts – associated with how thieves deal with betrayal.  Boldyrev pretends that this is a case of expertise and should be asked of the forensic physicians, but what he is trying to do is salvage some last shred of pretense that the case has anything to do with Beilis at all, which the preceding 18 days of testimony have gradually reduced to simply having him in the courtroom.

Vipper has certificate trouble today.  The judge rejects attaching an improperly filled-out certificate about an Israel Landau living in Kiev to the case.  Vipper pretends that it is the father of Samoil Landau and the latter lied in saying his father was dead.  This is the second time the judge has turned down this certificate.  But he authorizes reading out a certificate showing that Fyodor Nazarenko was in jail when Andrey was murdered.  The other day Vipper castigated Kirichenko, suggesting the only reason Kirichenko focused on Cheberyak’s gang was that they were out of jail at the time.  Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.  If Nazarenko couldn't have committed the murder because he was in jail, Cheberyak’s gang could have committed the murder since they were out of jail.  The testimony has shown that the case against Beilis was faked by police agents like Kozachenko and Polishchuk, so Cheberyak’s gang are the only valid suspects.

Today the prosecution tries to claim that Margolin was lying about being in Kharkov at all by deliberately misreading the hotel register.  If Margolin wasn’t in Kharkov, then he couldn’t have been involved in any offer of 40,000 to Vera, which would have discredited both him and Gruzenberg whom Margolin helped bring in as the lead attorney in Beilis’ defense. 

Ivanov gets caught with his certificates down.  First he weasel-words an answer to suggest that he didn’t find something he was looking for, when he never claimed he looked for it.  Then he admits he asked the police for certificates as to whether Brazul’s, Vygranov’s, and Cheberyak’s presence in Kharkov was registered with the police, but he didn’t ask about Margolin, so his claim that he didn’t get that information also falls to the ground.

Without realizing it, Zamyslovsky points out that it was an error to let Golubev testify at all relative to the record of examination of the locality.  The record is an official document and cannot be questioned without evidence of its incorrectness.  The only evidence Golubev had was his own unwitnessed examination at a different point in time, which is irrelevant.  The judge told Gruzenberg he could ask Fenenko about it.  Zamyslovsky is out of order and the judge eventually says so. 

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 "The Doctors"

		Page
Witness	Notes	Transcript	Translation	Statement
Ekaterina Maslash	Defends Beilis’ character	95	1757	1
A.A. Yablonsky	Writer At Rootsa with Vera	97	1761	92
Voitenko	Non-appearing, illegal Would have helped prove Kozachenko’s letter a forgery	104	1772	280
Pavel A. Ivanov	Lt. Col. of Gendarmes (secret police) Verifies Kozachenko police agent Authenticates Pavlovich’s flyers	104 119	1773 1806	291 958
Arnold Davidovich Margolin	Recalled about Kharkov trip	118	1804	934
Vasily Ivanovich Fenenko	Forensic investigator In 1911	120	1807	983
Lashkarev	Deputy prosecutor	127	1822	1210
Nikolay Aleksandrovich Krasovsky	Re-called Testifies about tree carving	132	1832	1301

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

 

Mendel Beilis -- The Barber: Rudzinsky confessed

This is the summary of the 18^th 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

To "The Colonel and the Investigator"
 

		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

Mendel Beilis -- "I could hear everything"

This is the summary of the 17^th day of the Mendel Beilis trial, which occurred on 11 October, 1913 on the Julian calendar, 24 October, 1913 on the Gregorian calendar.

This day occupies pages 1 through 44 of Volume II of the transcript.

 See the translation of the transcript for day 17.

 

 

Now we hear Amzor Karaev’s deposition.  The government has deliberately kept him in a labor camp so that he cannot testify first-hand about Singaevsky’s confession but, however, Makhalin’s testimony to first-hand knowledge about the confession makes this useless.  What’s more, having kept him out of court, the government can’t cross-question him and rip him the way they tried to rip Makhalin.  This would not have mattered if the case had gone the way the government wanted it to, but the bulk of evidence for the last 12 days has tended to destroy the government theory of the case and show that everybody who testified against Beilis lied on the witness stand and in their depositions.  So the prosecution had to present evidence that supports the story about the confession, and can’t cross-question the person who deposed to it.

Today the Malitskys come to the stand.  Zinaida Malitskaya supposedly heard the murder take place -- but when?  She told her husband it was in the morning, but that was in August, 1911 when he came home from his bee-keeping and buried his nose in the newspapers.  In November, 1911, she tried to tell Fenenko that it was in the evening, and her husband was with her and made her change the story to agree with what she told him.  The question is, when did the theory of a morning murder develop?  Adele Ravich's story of the body rolled up in the carpet was urban legend.  Vera's sister came over after Adele and never testified, so we don't know if she saw the carpet.  Ekaterina (and, we now know, Ksenya) were in the house from noon to three.  Singaevsky made Karaev think the murder happened after the Adamovich robbery.  See Kirichenko's testimony tomorrow.

Vipper puts Balavin on the stand with a number of purposes in mind.  One is to support Vasily Cheberyak’s contention that his children ate green pears and thus got dysentery.  The ones on the trees are not green enough in August to cause dysentery. 

Vipper tries to establish that the house on the Zakharchenko property, like the Prikhodkos’ house, made it possible to hear everything and so nobody could have been murdered there.  But on day 6 during the tour he tried to argue just the opposite.

Vipper tries to establish at the Zakharchenko property where the Cheberyaks lived, what has already been proven at the Zaitsev property; there were lots of people around who could hear what happened.  The problems are two.  One is that Beilis would have to be outside to drag Andrey to the kiln, and that’s why all those people would have seen him.  The other is Vipper’s argument on day 6 that nothing could be heard inside.  Finally, he ignores the fact that the gag required for ritual murder, and represented by the bloody scrap in Andrey's jacket pocket, would have made it impossible for any sounds to be heard outside.  

Vipper makes a point of bringing up the name of Nazar Zarutsky, whom Vera tried to suborn to say he was at the pugger the day Andrey was grabbed.  If Nazar was probably in the Zakharchenko court playing, he wasn’t on the Zaitsev property.  This time it’s Vipper who is ruining Vera’s credibility.

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 "The Barber: Rudzinsky confessed"

Transcript page numbers restart because this is the start of Volume II of the transcript

 

		Page
Witness	Notes	Transcript	Translation	Statement
Amzor Elmurzaevich Karaev	Heard Pyotr Singaevsky confess to Andrey’s murder Testified by deposition	3	1554	3
Makhalin	Returns for more questioning	9	1566	54
Nikolay Aleksandrovich Krasovsky	Returns for more questioning	11	1568	127
Aleksey Feofilaktov	Letter to Karaev partly read in court	15	1584	241
Krakhmalyuk	Very short testimony about Vera	19	1587	279
Balavin	Neighbor of Vera	19	1587	291
Zinaida Malitskaya	Origin of “morning murder” part of theory	27	1608	749
Malitsky	Zinaida’s husband	35	1626	1181
Evgeny Kirichenko	Krasovsky’s/Ivanov’s subordinate	41	1637	1464

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018

Mendel Beilis -- Singaevsky's confession

This is the summary of the 16^th day of the Mendel Beilis trial, which occurred on 10 October, 1913 on the Julian calendar, 23 October, 1913 on the Gregorian calendar.

This day occupies pages 650 through 696 of Volume I of the transcript.

See the translation of the transcript for day 16.

 

Today we hear from Makhalin about “the ministerial head” of Rudzinsky.  Krasovsky seemed to think it had to do with his intelligence and that it was why Andrey was stabbed so many times.  Makhalin seems to think there were lots of ways of getting rid of Andrey’s body, such as burning it up, but Rudzinsky was the one who decided on planting it so that people would think the Jews murdered him.  So this was not a compliment, rather it relates to the ministerial foulups of a bureaucracy, including doing exactly what most risks ruin to a project.

Makhalin also heard first-hand when Pyotr Singaevsky confessed that he, Rudzinsky and Latyshev were involved in the murder, although Latyshev was no good at “wet work” and threw up. 

Toward the start of the day Zamyslovsky makes a remark which shows that all the witnesses were in the courtroom at the same time, until the judge released them with the agreement of the parties.  For example, a number of days ago the Prikhodko clan was released, and today they have to telephone to the police station there and get somebody to bring Aleksandra back to testify about the pillowcases.

Today’s significance is that Ekaterina and Ksenya Dyakon heard each other’s testimony.  Yesterday when questioned about what she told the investigator about her sister’s activities, Ksenya said “I didn’t answer for my sister, I answered for me.”

Today Zamyslovsky asks her if she heard what her sister testified to and she says yes.

So two witnesses to the same set of facts got to hear what the other said.  The one scheduled to testify later was now under pressure to change her testimony to coordinate with what the earlier witness said, depending on how badly the earlier witness was treated on the stand.  What’s more, the calling back of Aleksandra shows that witnesses were retained in the courtroom in case later testimony made it important to re-question them.  So they had the chance in the re-appearance to say what they thought the attorneys or judge wanted to hear. 

It all depended on how seriously they took their oath to tell the truth, and we know that some witnesses didn’t care about the oath. 

When you put this together with the power that investigators had to leave things out of depositions, it makes nonsense out of challenging in-court testimony compared to the depositions.  There’s also evidence of forged depositions or parts of depositions, which may create situations when the in-court testimony doesn’t match the deposition.

I want you to notice that the prosecution takes it upon themselves to criticize Makhalin for “betraying” Singaevsky the criminal.  In any other case, the prosecution would reward somebody who gave up somebody who committed a crime.  They were going to reward Vasily Cheberyak for giving Beilis up to the law, when it was Vasily’s wife who committed the crime. 

Not only that but Zamyslovsky was contemptuous of the non-crime for which Makhalin was jailed, at the very moment when Zamyslovsky was doing all he could to please the Tsar by convicting Beilis of ritual murder, a non-crime which had been removed from the statute books in 1906.  This is a situation I call “the right half of the brain is not talking to the left half of the brain.”  Words are coming out of people’s mouths without ever being analyzed through the logic center of the brain.  It’s worse than hypocrisy, it’s mindless verbalizing of a set of phrases that are supposed to mean something, but which the situation contradicts.

When Zamyslovsky pounds Makhalin about who the shmari were that Singaevsky referred to, it shows that the prosecution believed that Adele and Ekaterina both were in Vera’s house on March 12.  The only significance of those visits is that Vera had to cover things up if Andrey was murdered in the morning as the government theory states.  In her apartment.  In other words the prosecution tacitly accepts that Vera was involved in the murder, and over the next three days more evidence will come out that they don’t really believe the government theory they’re trying to defend, not even Vipper who came in without any of the backstory.

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 "I could hear everything"

 

		Page
Witness	Notes	Transcript	Translation	Statement
Ksenya Afanasievna Dyakon	Vera’s friend, identified her pillow and the murderers	650	1461	14
Ekaterina Afanasievna Dyakon	More about the “papers with punctures”	655	1470	189
Gaevskaya	Vera’s friend/servant	656	1472	251
Chernyakova	Vera’s former friend Testifies about the sleepover	658	1475	303
Sergey Makhalin	Testifies to Singaevsky’s confession of murdering Andrey at Vera’s	666	1493	731
Evgeniya Voloshchenko	Lyuda’s little friend, Tells the true “chase” story	694	1548	1569
Sofia Voloshcheenko	Lyuda’s little friend Too young to tell the story	695	1551	1611
Timofey Ignatyuk-Maistrenko	Cab driver, father of Andrey’s friend Andrey Maistrenko	695	1552	1648

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved