Read Online A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel by Edmund Levin - Free Book Online Page A

“boy martyr” were clearly the work of Jews who were part of a powerful cabal that had duped inept investigators or, more likely, bought them off.
    The government and the extreme right both contended for control over the case.On April 18, the minister of justice,Ivan Shcheglovitov, asked Prime Minister Stolypin to pay it special attention; he also met with the tsar, possibly briefing him on it for the first time. On the same day, the justice minister also sent a telegram to Kiev, removing the case from the purview of the local police and prosecutor and putting it under the personal supervision ofGrigory Chaplinsky, prosecutor of the Kiev Judicial Chamber (a post somewhat analogous to that of a U.S. state attorney general). The justice minister instructed Chaplinsky to deliver regular, detailed reports; the local murder case would now be followed in its minutest details at the highest levels of the government.
    Also on April 18, the extreme right proceeded with a plan to shame and threaten the government in the most public forum: the State Duma. The right-wing deputies met secretly to discuss passing a resolution that would demand the government explain why it was not treating Andrei’s killing as aritual murder.
    On the afternoon of Saturday, April 23, came the first serious acts of anti-Jewish violence connected with the Yushchinsky murder.Black Hundred thugs began attacking Jews on the street at random in the largely Jewish suburb of Nikolskaya Slobodka on the left bank of the Dnieper, where Andrei had lived. “The entire Sabbath day … the ‘Unionists’ [members of theUnion of Russian People] took a ‘stroll’…pulling ‘pranks’ on all the Jews that they encountered,” reported the Kiev correspondent of the Yiddish newspaper
Haynt
. “These ‘jokes’often ended sadly, many Jews ending up bandaged … Many Jews … hide in their attics or even escape over the Dnieper to Kiev.” But the city of Kiev itself soon felt unsafe. “Various dark rumors have begun to spread,”
Haynt
reported, “one worse than the other” about impending revenge being taken on the Jews for Andrei’s murder. Kiev’s Jews—at least “those who take an interest in other things besides sugar and the stock exchange,” sniped the reporter—were seized by fear of a full-fledged pogrom.
    The jibe was directed at the Jewish denizens of the city’s famous stock exchange, who remained preoccupied with their furious buying and selling of sugar-backed notes and securities (Kiev, despite much poverty, was something of a beet boomtown) before heading off to relax at the card tables, the one place whereJews and Gentiles could mix easily. But even the stock traders must have paused to take notice when, on April 29, the far-right faction introduced its resolution on the Duma floor charging the Kiev administration with obstructing the Yushchinsky investigation. The authorities were wasting time going down false paths, persecuting the poor boy’s mother, the resolution declared, “instead of addressing the question of the fanatical Jewish sect whose members committed the murder.” By Black Hundred standards, the tone of the document was measured.N. E.Markov, the Black Hundred leader who commissioned the “Ritual Murder” article, mounted the Duma rostrum to make his group’s demands, and threats, entirely clear. Markov was in every sense an outsize figure. Enormously tall, with dark, curly hair, he was said to bear a resemblance to the six-foot-eight-inch tsar Peter the Great, earning him the nickname “theBronze Horseman,” after the statue of Peter inSt. Petersburg immortalized in Alexander Pushkin’s poem. Even compared with his fellow rightists, hisviews were extreme: he was among a minority that seriously raised the question of expelling all of Russia’s Jews.
    “We mustpursue the whole malignant sect, the Jewish sect, which sends its butchers to collect the blood of Christian children, which prepares these butchers who