As y'all may know, Solzhenitsyn's seemingly never-to-be-translated book on the history of Russian-Jewish relations contains an epilogue to the 1913 Beilis blood libel trial which has gotten him accused of anti-Semitism. I think it's a load of crap, but now you can decide for yourselves, because courtesy of me, Anglophones can actually read what he wrote. I translated the offending few paragraphs (in a book of several hundred pages) for a couple of correspondents and figured I might as well post them here. It's totally ripped out of context, unfortunately.
The Beilis affair had an epilogue.
"Under the threat of revenge from the side of the Black Hundreds, Beilis left Russia and went with his family to Palestine. In 1920 he resettled to the US." He died his death, at the age of 60, near New York.(1)
Justice Minister Shcheglovitiv (according to one source, it was he who "gave the order to investigate the case as a ritual murder"(2)) was shot by the Bolsheviks.
In 1919 a trial took place of Vera Cheberyak. It did not take place according to the old standards of hated tsarism, but had no jury, and lasted all of 40 minutes -- in the Kiev Chrezvychaika. A chekist arrested in that year in Kiev told the Whites that "Vera Cheberyak was interrogated by all the Jewish chekists, beginning with Sorin" [representative of the ChK Bluvshtein]. During this, commandant of the ChK Faerman "mocked her, tearing her outer dress off of her and hitting her with the muzzle of a revolver... She answered: 'you can do with me what you wish, but I said what I said... I will not now renounce my words... I myself was speaking at the Beilis trial... nobody told me to do anything and I was not bought'." And she was shot. (3)
In 1919 prosecutor Vipper was discovered in the role of a Soviet bureaucrat in Kiev and was tried by the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal. The Bolshevik prosecutor Krylenko said the following: "proceding from his proven danger to the Republic... let there be one less Vipper among us." (This black joke had in mind that an R. Vipper, a professor of the history of the Middle Ages, remained.) However, the Tribunal only sentenced Vipper "to a concentration camp... until the complete strengthening of a Communist structure in the Republic." (4) Vipper's further tracks have been effaced.
Belis was found not guilty by peasants -- the same Ukrainian peasants that had participated in the pogroms of the turn of the century and who would soon learn of the collectivization and extermination of 1932-33 -- an extermination that was not reflected by all the world's journalists and not held up as a crime of the regime.
These are also steps of History.
(1) Short Jewish Encyclopedia, v. 1, pp. 317, 318. (Russian edition)
(2) Ibid., p. 317.
(3) A Chekist about the ChK (from the archive "Special Inv. Commission" in South Russia)/ From the Alien Side: Historical-Literary Collections/ ed. S.P. Mel'gunova. V. IX, Berlin, 1925, pp. 118, 135.
(4) Krylenko, pp. 367-368.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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