The investigation in the Mendel Beilis case fell into three
basic sections. All three were driven by
government influences for government purposes, not by a search for the truth of
who committed the murder. Quite the
contrary.
The first stage in the investigation opened in Kiev with
operatives of the Kiev authorities.
These were Evgeny Mishchuk, chief of detectives; Vasily Fenenko,
forensic investigator; and Pavel Ivanov, Lt. Col. of the Gendarmes (who performed secret
investigations). The initial theory in the case
was that Andrey’s relatives believed that Andrey was heir to 300 rubles in the
form of a bill of indebtedness, and the relatives murdered him to become next
in line to inherit.
Because there were no checks and balances in the Russian
form of government, what the police did had no redress. Even if no orders came down for committing
abuse, no theory of government said there was a way to get the government to
pay damages for ruined property.
Another issue is that Tsarist Russia operated by the principle
“guilty until proven innocent”. One
official involved in the case explicitly told a journalist, “once there is
suspicion, there is no such thing as an illegal arrest.” And the transcripts show that “suspicion”
might rest on rumor or the spleen of a friendship or love affair gone bad.
Between March 21 when they knew who the boy was, and March
27, the day of his funeral, the police swarmed into the homes of Andrey’s
relatives – his mother, his aunt, and his uncle Fyodor – and literally tore the
places apart looking for evidence of the murder. They put Andrey’s mother in jail. It was common in Russia to put people in jail
while checking out their papers, to see if they really lived at the claimed
address. In this case, the government
wanted Alexandra where they could find her while they checked into the rumors about
the inheritance. These turned out to be
false. Andrey, who was illegitimate,
could not automatically inherit under Russian law from his biological father. Second, the father had explicitly willed the
money to his own brother. Third, the
father had gotten the sum paid out to him in dribs and drabs over time, and
then stopped writing to the debtor when the whole debt had been paid. There was nothing to inherit.
Nevertheless, a detective relied on claims of a man about
seeing one of the possible murderers on the street on the morning of March 12,
1911. The detective arrested Andrey’s
stepfather, had him shaved and his hair dyed to match the description, and
showed this man to the witness, who denied a resemblance. Then the stepfather
was left to wash up the best he could in cold water with no soap. When he cried under this abuse, he got verbal
abuse including threats of sending him to Siberia. Nobody in the police force was disciplined for
this farce. At trial in 1913, testimony
showed that two of the actual murderers matched the description, but when they
fell under suspicion in 1911, they were not presented to the witness for
identification.
I already said that as soon as Andrey’s body was identified,
anti-Semites in the government began talking about ritual murder. The only possible murderer, therefore, had to
be one of the 5,000 Jews of Kiev, a city of over 500,000. At Andrey’s funeral, flyers were distributed
which directly blamed his murder on the Jews.
A man was held in this case, but released for insufficient evidence.
At trial there were arguments about who this man was and
whether he was part of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds organization. The parties also discussed official police
information suggesting that Vera Cheberyak helped distribute the flyers. There are hints in Tager’s work, based on
Tsarist archives, that Vera herself was a member in good standing of the Black
Hundreds. But although his name and
address were supplied in court, the man suspected of distributing the flyers
was not the prime mover in bringing Beilis to trial.
From March 22 on, the Black Hundreds exerted more and more
energy to bring a Jew to trial. The
investigation at one point was put into the hands of a St. Petersburg detective
named Kuntsevich, who had solved crimes in Russia and abroad. The Black Hundreds were not happy with his work. It went in all directions, a phrase that
occurs more than once in the transcript.
It didn’t concentrate on the Jews.
Finally, the Minister of Justice, Shcheglovitov, decided he
needed somebody in place to make sure things went the right way. He sent Georgy Chaplinsky to Kiev to take
over the case from prosecutor Nikolay Brandorf, who was allowing Mishchuk to fritter
away his time on the relatives and other unsatisfactory suspects. Chaplinsky arrived and went to work on April
18, 1911. Lt. Col. Ivanov had under
arrest a man named Ivan Latyshev.
Chaplinsky made Ivanov release him.
Remember the name Latyshev.
Chaplinsky went to the prosectors who had performed the
second autopsy on Andrey’s body. Yes,
there were two autopsies. The results of
the first one were unsatisfactory to the government because they were
unsatisfactory to the Black Hundreds. Andrey’s
body had been prepared for his funeral, but on March 26, the day before, two
new prosectors were assigned to a do-over on the autopsy. The report on this second autopsy suggested a
murder out of revenge; still not good enough.
When Chaplinsky arrived, he brought the satisfactory text of the autopsy
report, and by April 25 he had the prosectors’ signatures on it. This report did not directly say “ritual
murder,” but it emphasized features of the injuries which could be so
interpreted by the right person.
The Black Hundreds published the medical report Chaplinsky
brought with him, in an edition of the newspaper Zemshchina that hit the
newsstands April 9. Look back at
Chaplinsky’s arrival date. There is no
mistake. The dates are documented in the
Tsarist archives. The government wrote
the medical report and its details were leaked to the press before the
prosectors even signed it.
Now Chaplinsky selected a representative from among the Kiev
Black Hundreds members, who could be counted on to know what Jew to offer up
for a victim. The man: Golubev, a
student. In his autobiography, Beilis
says that Golubev was an embarrassment to his father, a well-respected
university professor, who told Beilis personally that he didn’t know why his
son had taken such a wrong turn.
Mishchuk and Kuntsevich wouldn’t listen to anything Golubev said. They called him “unreliable.” They had good reason. At trial, Golubev testified to impossible
things and contradicted himself more than once.
But Golubev had contacts with Georgy Zamyslovsky, a powerful
rightist Duma member, who was in solid with the Black Hundreds. When Chaplinsky got to Kiev, he found Golubev
agitating for pogroms. That would involve
the national police department.
Chaplinsky had his mentor, Shcheglovitov, send in the vice-director of
the police department, a man named Lyadov.
Lyadov stroked Golubev’s ego by sharing with him information that not
everybody had yet: the Tsar was planning a trip to Kiev at the end of August. A pogrom would embarrass the city and the
Tsar, even if it took place months before the trip. Golubev was flattered and impressed and
promised to stop agitating.
Before Lyadov went back to St. Petersburg, Golubev had
dropped in his ear the fatal name: there was a Jew, Mendel, who lived on the
grounds of the Zaitsev factory, close to where Andrey’s body was found. Golubev himself, as he said on the witness
stand, had surveyed the location and found places in the fence around the
Zaitsev factory grounds where new boards had been put in, suggesting that a
body could have been dragged from the factory to the place where Andrey’s body
was found. Golubev gave this same
information to Chaplinsky, who put it into his next report. Shcheglovitov read the report to the Tsar; it
was in the archives docketed with a note about the reading.
Rumor was the way Beilis’ name first came up as the suspect
in Andrey’s murder. © Patricia Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
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