Menahem Mendel Beilis - Murder of Andrei Yushchinsky

Murder of Andrei Yushchinsky

On March 12, 1911 (under the old Russian calendar), a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy Andrei Yushchinsky disappeared on his way to school. Eight days later his mutilated body was discovered in a cave near the Zaitsev brick factory.

Beilis was arrested on July 21, 1911, after a lamplighter testified that the boy had been kidnapped by a Jew. A report submitted to the Tsar by the judiciary regarded Beilis as the murderer of Yushchinsky.

Beilis spent more than two years in prison awaiting trial. Meanwhile, a vicious antisemitic campaign was launched in the Russian press against the Jewish community, with accusations of the blood libel and ritual murder.

Among those who wrote or spoke against false accusations of the Jews were Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Korolenko, Alexander Blok, Alexander Kuprin, Vladimir Vernadsky, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Pavel Milyukov, and Alexander Koni.

When Beilis had been in prison more than a year, a delegation led by a military officer came to his cell. In what might have been a ploy to get Beilis to incriminate himself or other Jews, the officer informed Beilis that he would soon be freed due to a manifesto pardoning all katorjniks (convicts at hard labor) on the tercentenary jubilee of the reign of the Romanov dynasty. As related in his memoir, Beilis refused this overture:

“That manifesto,” said I, “will be for katorjniks, not for me. I need no manifesto, I need a fair trial.”

“If you will be ordered to be released, you’ll have to go.”

“No – even if you open the doors of the prison, and threaten me with shooting, I shall not leave. I shall not go without a trial.”

(This is one of many incidents from Beilis’s memoir that Bernard Malamud incorporated in his novel The Fixer.)