When I translated the transcript of the
Beilis trial in 2013, it was obvious that Krasovsky’s aide Vygranov played a role in almost everything that happened between March 20, 1911, and September 24, 1913. However, he never testified, either in person or by deposition. The reason is obvious; he had information that could blow the case wide open and reveal that Cheberyak and her gang murdered Andrey. You would think that a government operative could be trusted to stay on script and avoid that sort of catastrophe, but the government decided not to let him onto the ballfield. There’s one more witness they suppressed; I didn’t realize it until I read a story by Sholem Aleichem.
I have been reading through Aleichem’s collected works, which are available
free online in Yiddish. A story in volume 2 involves some nice Jewish kids playing at revolutionaries in St. Petersburg in 1905. One character is betrayed to the police by the records of the
dvornik at the property where she lives. When she learns of this, she flees.
Dvorniks were more than just janitors. Their record books were a primary resource for the police, who could view the records on demand. This was one way, for example, that police checked up on the pravozhitelstvo, the requirement that Jews only live in certain parts of the city or conform to the exceptions. Knowing all the residents, a dvornik was the first person for the police to talk to about what non-resident had been on the property, when, and when the person had left.
At the Beilis trial, one dvornik testified, the one from the Zaitsev factory grounds. He spoke about the brick hauling in March, 1911, from the kiln to the site “down on Kirillovskaya” (the modern Frunze Street) where a hospice was being built. The prosecution did not ask him about anything else on day seven of the trial. Tsarist legal procedure, therefore, prevented the defense from bringing up the issue of what non-residents had been on the factory grounds where, the government claimed, the murder had been committed.
Cheberyak lived on the Zakharchenko property, next door to the factory. Zakharchenko was a member of the Black Hundreds; Beilis was a pet of his, the sort of person bigots like to point to when they say, “I’m not a bigot”. Zakharchenko himself never testified. His son had an affidavit saying that a mental breakdown had produced progressive paralysis.
Most of the people from Zakharchenko’s property who testified gave exculpatory evidence for Beilis, such as Mikhail Nakonechny, the shoemaker who always believed Beilis was innocent, and Nazary Zarutsky, whom Cheberyak nagged in the pre-trial phase, trying to get him to commit perjury.
In fact Cheberyak committed perjury herself. By the time she first testified, on day eight, most of the previous testimony had discredited her depositions. Both prosecution and defense ripped her to shreds and finally Judge Boldyrev told her “You’d better tell the truth.” Not Vera. The only thing she had to fear was the government would try her for perjury and, as one of the attorneys remarked during trial, the government didn’t have to take up any case it didn’t want to. The material I used never says she was tried for perjury. The same is true for her daughter, and for her husband who couldn’t put together two sentences in a row without contradicting himself.
Everybody admitted that Andrey was on the Zakharchenko property on that March weekend in 1911. The government claimed he left on the afternoon of Friday, March 11; one of Vera’s friends, ditsy Ekaterina Diakonova, said he was there on the afternoon of March 12. Nobody knows for sure how late Andrey stayed and what condition he was in when he left, since the Zakharchenko dvornik never testified.
The transcript from day one of the trial lists about 35 people who were not present to testify. Some are understandable: Andrey’s aunt, his best friend Zhenya Cheberyak, and one of the murderers were dead.
Some absences can only be explained as obstruction of justice. Cheberyak’s lover Mifle was absent despite having the murder blamed on him in print in January 1912. Inspector Mishchuk, who ran the police work up to August 1911, was absent. Vygranov took a diligence out of Kiev the day before the trial.
In Tsarist legal procedure, it was perfectly appropriate to read a deposition of somebody not available for cross-examination. Zhenya’s three depositions, all with conflicting information, were read.
For about 20 of the absent witnesses, all I had from any source were their initials and names. I can’t tell which, if any, of them was the Zakharchenko dvornik. His deposition was not read and not referred to. The government might not have taken one – one step toward suppressing his evidence, and for the same reason as they would suppress Vygranov’s – but that doesn’t square with Krasovsky’s moniker “the Russian Sherlock Holmes.”
The defense would not have had to ask the dvornik specific questions to get the crucial information. One of their witnesses, old man Vyshemirsky, partly blew the case by revealing voluntarily and without prompting, that Vera Cheberyak’s best friend believed Vera’s apartment was the site of the murder. (Vera helped Adele Ravich and her husband get out of the country in 1911 and the government refused to search for them in the next two years leading up to the trial.) Likewise, the Zakharchenko dvornik could have provided unsolicited testimony, and partly corroborated other witnesses, about Andrey being on the property at night on March 12, instead of leaving on the afternoon of March 11, 1911.
On a city property like that of Zakharchenko, it’s almost impossible that there wasn’t a dvornik. Zinaida Malitskaya ran a government-licensed shop on the ground floor; she must have needed somebody to clean it, to unload shipments, to repair broken fixtures, to get out boxes so she could re-stock the shelves. There were at least two other floors of residents, including Vera's family, and at least one other tenanted building on the property, needing similar services. But the dvornik never testified and apparently nobody paid attention to that.
Probably part of the reason is that people tend not to realize the importance of the things they are used to. Benzion Katz, who assisted the defense in destroying the testimony of Justinas Pranaitis, lived in the Tsarist culture, but his memoirs never discussed the importance of testimony from a dvornik. The memoirs of three of the defense attorneys don’t discuss it. Sholem Aleichem wrote about the Beilis trial, in “A Bloody Joke”, which I haven't read. He never meant for this other story that I did read, to shine a light on one of the many mysteries of the Beilis case.
With all the forgeries, perjuries, and other fakery that was going on, perhaps the government had no time to drill one more person on a false story to tell the jury. Maybe the dvornik died before they could depose him, or maybe they kept his deposition out of the records as some kind of favor to Vera or Zakharchenko. But to have no testimony from a person that Tsarist culture couldn’t get along without, is just more oil on the fire of suspicion that the government knew Vera was the murderer, and that they never should have arrested Beilis.