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

 

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