This day occupies pages 433 through 476 of Volume I of the
transcript.
Today’s opening testimony was supposed to help the
prosecution prove that there weren’t enough people on the Zaitsev factory
grounds to catch Beilis grabbing Andrey, except for Jews like the Duboviks and
Zaslavsky, who of course would lie to protect Beilis. It didn’t work, in spades. This table shows the relevant information.
Sila
(Vasily?) Zelensky
|
can’t remember the date or day of the week, says no repairs at the
kiln. Judge calculates what day it
was, 12th March.
|
Bobrovsky
|
“We arrived together the night of the 12th March.” Started kiln repairs
7th or 8th then went back to Grebenki for the other men.
|
Andrey
Yermak
|
“I was told to come from Chernigov the 12th March and that’s what I
did. Workers from Kiev were in the
basement when I got there.”
|
Andrey
Kalitenko
|
“We arrived together the morning of the 11th March and workers from
Chernigov already lived in the basement.”
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Mina
Kalitenko
|
“We arrived together on the 12th March and Yermak was already living in
the basement.”
|
Makar
Kalitenko
|
“we arrived together the 10th March.
Nobody else lived in the basement then.”
|
Makar contradicts his own deposition and also the
depositions and in-court testimony of five other men, two of whom are literate,
when they all admit traveling together from the same village. Their testimony has to jibe if it’s
true.
But it underlines a fundamental problem with how the
government managed the case. The reason
some countries have a requirement for a speedy trial is exactly what happened
in the Beilis case. People died and
couldn’t be cross-questioned. People
forgot their deposed testimony and contradicted it. When the government futzed around for two
years before actually starting the trial, using excuses like the Tsar’s visit
to Kiev or Sikorsky’s cowardice or the 1912 elections, it increased the
probability of losing the case without gaining tangible benefits.
Today the accountant for Ginzburg’s is questioned about how
his construction company tracks their finances and makes sure they aren’t
getting charged for bricks that weren’t delivered. Vipper asks questions aimed at discovering
whether the dates on the records can be forged and Gruzenberg battles back that
there wasn’t time to do it and besides, the concern would go under if it didn’t
use good accounting practices. Finally,
says Gruzenberg, at the time when the witness would have been aware that his
records were to be used in the Beilis case, they had already been taken into
custody by the police and the investigator.
The prosecution never challenges this by bringing in a certificate
showing when the police took the records into custody.
Another thing that happens in this part is that the
Kalitenkos get discredited. The
signature of one of them is on a stub in the office books from the Zaitsev
factory for 8 March and they said they didn’t get to the factory until 12
March. The same for Yermak. Anything the prosecutors thought they proved
in the earlier part of the day about the number of workers on site goes down
the tubes. There were plenty of people
around and nobody drags a kicking, screaming boy 100 meters when it’s likely he
will get caught, besides the fact that Beilis is the one who wrote down
drivers’ names when they couldn’t sign the stubs themselves because they were illiterate. Like Zamyslovsky, Vipper then has to take the
illogical position that the Grebenki workers’ faulty memories and inconsistent
stories are more believable than signatures in records which cannot have been
fabricated because the police had custody of them.
The prosecution stages two little farces to try and pretend
that Samoil Landau is lying when he says his father is dead. They present a certificate from railway
secret police about an Izrael Landau now living in Kiev. The railways in Russia were run by a man
named Opanasenko who had Polishchuk as a paid agent, according to a letter he
sent to Chaplinsky in April 1912, and which turned up in the Tsarist
archives. In the preceding 18 hours or
so since the team of Ettinger and Landau crashed and burned, he has helped whip
up this certificate. The prosecution
also presents a certificate about people passing through the border between
Austria and Russia. Several are named
Ettinger; several others are named Landau.
When a member of the court reads the certificate, the stenographer
clearly records that it says nothing about tsadiqs.
The prosecution will try this same tactic again in several
days when Landau presents the certificate of his father’s death. The fact that it takes Landau several days
discredits the prosecution’s ability to produce their certificate in less than
24 hours. It was a forgery.
We also get another example of poor case-planning by the
prosecution. Vipper asks Kholin, who
controls construction sites for Ginzburg, about the paperwork. These are things Vipper should have asked
Grintsevich while the accountant was on the stand. The prosecution keeps asking questions of the
wrong people, because they didn’t do their homework ahead of time and align
questions with the people or read the depositions to find out what gaps they
needed to fill in from in-court testimony.
Mitrofan Petrov was a little over half Cheberyak’s age when
they had an affair. While Petrov seems
to be unintelligent and besotted with Vera, he gives a telling piece of
information. Vygranov offered him 40,000
rubles to get a notebook from Vera. One
of Andrey’s notebooks. In December 1911.
Either Andrey left it with her by accident -- or she kept it
after putting the others in the grotto so the body could be identified. Back on day 2 the prosecution showed Andrey’s
teacher a book full of pictures that he didn’t recognize, and it didn’t have
any of his usual correction notes.
Vera’s brother, as will turn out from later testimony, knew she had kept
some of Andrey’s things. The bribe,
therefore, didn’t work. This is a
stunner and you will see how fast the prosecution tries to get rid of the
subject, because the only way Vera would have anything or Vygranov know about
it, is they were in cahoots.
A classic problem in the case turns up with the questioning
of Gaevskaya. She claims she told a
certain thing to the investigator but it isn’t in her deposition, and Boldyrev
makes her responsible for knowing why it’s not there. We saw on day 4 that the defense considers it
a normal proceeding for an investigator to omit information from the
deposition, if the investigator feels the information is not important. It is nonsense to expect a witness to know
how an investigator exercised his judgment, and abusive to imply that she is
lying when she was not the cause of the omission.
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
Page
|
||||
Witness
|
Notes
|
Transcript
|
Translation
|
Statement
|
Bobrovsky
|
Brick firing expert from Grebenko
|
433
|
993
|
1
|
Andrey Yermak
|
Hauler; very confusing
|
439
|
1007
|
291
|
Andrey Kalitenko
|
Grebenki laborer
|
440
|
1009
|
367
|
Mina Kalitenko
|
Grebenki laborer
|
443
|
1017
|
538
|
Makar Kalitenko
|
Grebenki laborer
|
444
|
1019
|
609
|
Ivan Zelensky
|
Lives in Kiev
|
446
|
1024
|
704
|
Grintsevich
|
Accountant for Ginzburg’s contractors
|
446
|
1025
|
718
|
Chaim Dubovik
|
Manager of factory, testifies about accounting practices
|
449
|
1031
|
851
|
Barukh Zaitsev
|
Questioned about Landau
|
452
|
1036
|
951
|
Khazin
|
Ginzburg overseer
|
452
|
1037
|
991
|
Arkhip Shidlovsky
|
Lived in basement apartment at Zaitsev property
|
453
|
1038
|
1001
|
Kholin
|
Ginzburg site boss
|
453
|
1039
|
1073
|
“Ettinger” and “Landau” certificates
|
458
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1051
|
1309
|
|
Arkhip Ryba
|
Testifies about receipts at Zaitsev factory
|
460
|
1055
|
1334
|
Mitrofan Petrov
|
Vera’s lover; tries to substantiate her “Mifle” story
|
461
|
1057
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1380
|
Gaevskaya
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Vera’s lodger/servant
|
467
|
1072
|
1804
|
Akatsatov
|
Black Hundreds member.
Almost incoherent
|
472
|
1086
|
2147
|
© Patricia Jo
Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
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