Two fundamental legal rules that applied in Russia at the time were violated in the Beilis trial.
First, nobody should be tried or punished for something that
isn’t on the books as a crime. This was
explicitly adopted by the Tsarist judicial council, the Senate, before Andrey
Yushchinsky was murdered. It has been
adopted by every country trying to run its legal system Western style since it
was first explicitly included in the reform of the Bavarian penal code in 1813.
Second, a Russian law penalizing “murder on motives of
religious fanaticism” (ritual murder) was repealed in 1906. In 1911, there was no such crime to try
Beilis on.
The defense made two motions in court to dismiss this charge,
one at the start of testimony about it, and one at the start of closing
arguments, based on both issues. The
judge rejected both motions.
Why? Because Russia
was an autocracy; the only way to advance was to make the Tsar feel good. There was no constitution. There were no checks and balances between the
executive, legislative, and judiciary branches of government. It was a monolith with the Tsar at the
top. He hated the reforms forced on him
after the 1905 revolution. The powers of
the national Duma legislature depended on the Tsar’s will, and Nikolay II
weakened the powers of each successive session of the national Duma on his way
to repealing the reforms. In 1910 and
1911, the plan was to get rid of the remaining reforms, and eliminate the
Jewish Pale of Settlement as a step toward eliminating Jews from the country. Getting back the crime of “murder due to
religious superstition” would have helped justify that. One step toward that was to try a Jew on that
charge so that the law could be reinstated as a protection against such crimes
in future.
The Minister of Justice, Shcheglovitov, and his protégés, believed
they could gain the Tsar’s favor by prosecuting Beilis for ritual murder, due
to the life-long anti-Semitism of Nikolay II, which is documented online with a
substantial bibliography.
http://www.kingandwilson.com/AtlantisArticles/Inheritance.htm
Andrey’s body was found March 20, 1911, and identified no
later than March 21. The agitation to accuse
a Jew of Andrey Yushchinsky’s murder began with a speech in the Duma on March
22, 1911 that called it “ritual murder”.
The prosector assigned to perform the autopsy on Andrey, Karpinsky, finished
his work about 4 in the afternoon on March 22, while 1200 miles away in St.
Petersburg, a Duma member was fully prepared to speak on the murder as “ritual”
in nature, if he hadn’t already started speaking. The fastest way to get information from Kiev
to St. Petersburg was the telegraph, and that could take hours. From the beginning, Andrey’s murder was
co-opted to inflict harm on the Jews.
When I was translating the transcript of the trial, I came
across a problem with the Russian legal system.
The prosecution of the case seemed to believe they were operating on
principles similar to American or British law, while at the same time the
history of the case ran counter to such principles.
For example, the Russian and British systems ostensibly were
alike in that the police could take people into custody on suspicions that are
much less pronounced than in the American system. People who seemed to be answering legitimate
questions falsely, for example, could be taken into custody long enough to get
the truth. In America, police have to
follow a stricter standard; they have to see the infraction or have reason to
believe the person they arrest was involved.
The prosecution in the Beilis trial asked questions which suggest that
they believed the witnesses had been treated according to the American system. It was either witness abuse to get an admission
in court, or it was ignorant, or it was disingenuous.
The prosecution seemed to understand the concept that nobody
should be tried until the bulk of the evidence weighed against that person and
nobody else. Five different
investigations, three of them official, pointed at Vera Cheberyak and three
members of her gang as the murderers, but it didn’t stop the government from
arresting Beilis or cause them to drop the charges. None of the officials involved in the case, who
were in Kiev when Andrey was murdered, believed that Beilis was guilty; they
all suspected Vera and her gang. This
includes Krasovsky, a Kievite who was working outside of Kiev when Andrey was
murdered.
The prosecution behaved as if the evidence against Beilis
was genuine. Chaplinsky, a protégée of
the Minister of Justice, orchestrated not only Beilis’ arrest, but also the
faking of evidence against him, which was all the evidence there was against
him. I mean what I say. Documents were forged; physical evidence was
planted by the government; false alibi claims were coerced; the Cheberyaks
committed perjury using tales created by the government. Tsarist archives contained evidence
supporting these conclusions, and were used in A.S. Tager’s book from 1934.
I have been around a few blocks in my time and have watched
bigots crash and burn, with more or less glare, both in the history books and
the newspapers. Sometimes one gets into
a position giving the opportunity to destroy a nation, such as Hitler. The Jew-haters who forced the arrest and
trial of Beilis abused every class of the Russian people they came in contact
with, from the criminal world through the day laborers and small shopkeepers,
to the police and city officials, through academe to the top of the business
world. Famines may only affect the poor;
what Rasputin gets up to inside the palace is the Tsar’s business. But when the entire judiciary machinery is
perverted to falsify criminal charges and evidence, that threatens everybody
because it means the government is not operating rationally. For the Russians, that was underlined by the
waste of lives and resources in World War I, and that is why Russia was so
divided at the time of the revolution, that even the addition of foreign forces
could not save the Romanovs or their government.The Investigation
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