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

collect children’s blood in cups and distributes this blood to the Jews—to feast on their Paschal lamb, to feast on their Passover, made of the blood of Christian infants,” Markov declaimed in the thundering bass voice that packed the galleries. He and his brethren had been told by the government not to worry, he said, that a fine investigator was on the case, that behind him was the prosecutorial apparatus, and that “we can just fall asleep”—but the judicialauthorities had betrayed his trust. He bluntly threatened a pogrom. “When the Russian people find that there is no possibility of exposing in court the Jew who cut up a child and drained the blood out of him, that neither the court, nor thepolice, nor the governors nor the ministers, nor the supreme legislative institutions would be of assistance—that day, gentlemen, there will be pogroms of Jews. But neither I … nor theUnion of Russian People will create the pogrom. You yourself will create the pogrom. That pogrom will not be the kind we’ve seen so far, it will not be a pogrom of Yid feather beds, but all the Yids, down to the very last one, will be wiped out.”
    The resolution provoked aboisterous floor fight. A Social Democratic deputy, according to one account, “amid yells of defiance from the Right benches, denounced the [so-called] ‘Real Russians’ as ‘a band of robbers and murderers.’ ” Liberals and mainstream conservatives deplored what they said was an incitement to violence and the promulgation of paranoid medieval fantasies that were bringing shame upon Russia. The resolution failed by a vote of 108 to 93. The narrow numerical loss was something of a moral victory for theBlack Hundreds.
    Markov’s genocidal histrionics led Kiev’s Jews to prepare for the worst. “Themost fearful two days”—Saturday, April 30, and Sunday, May 1, the two days after the Duma debate—“passed in an unusually oppressive mood on the part of the entire population,”
Haynt
’s Kiev correspondent wrote. In the Jewish neighborhoods “there was a kind of strange death-silence.” Jews who had the financial means checked into hotels, where they would be relatively safe. Hundreds of Jewish families packed their suitcases and began to flee the city.
    The Black Hundreds’ triple-pronged attack on the regime—in the press, in the Duma, and on the streets of Kiev—deeply unnerved the upper echelons of the tsar’s government. Thanks to the fecklessness of the local investigation into Andrei’s murder, this case could no longer be managed haphazardly at a distance, with a minister prodding a vice minister, who prodded a governor, who prodded a police official. The central government would now impose direct oversight on the investigation.
    On April 29, 1911, as the Duma debated the rightist resolution, the Justice Ministry official Alexander Liadov boarded a train in St. Petersburg bound for Kiev.Liadov—vice director of the ministry’s FirstDepartment, head of the Second Criminal Division—was the kind of bureaucrat often referred to as “colorless and faceless.” The impact of such a figure is easily underappreciated, especially in a drama like the Yushchinsky affair, with so many vivid characters contending for attention. But complex plots often require at least one such transparently functional character, and in his limited stage timeLiadov would set key plot mechanics into motion.
    Exactly what Liadov’s orders were from his boss, justice minister Ivan Shcheglovitov, is not known. If they were written down, they have been lost. Most likely they were given verbally, with things said or hinted at that no one wanted put to paper. But it can be deduced from subsequent events that, as he arrived in Kiev, Liadov had a threefold mission. Its first two aspects were straightforward, comprehensible, and expedient. Liadov was to defuse the explosive young Black Hundred leader, Golubev, who was conducting his own independent investigation of