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the Antichrist will spring from Jewish stock, the Jew is accused by God, the Jew is the source of all evil in the world.” The Mad Monk was so charismatic that he could reduce his female followers to a “tearful hysteria.” A contemporary observer was struck by the curious combination of his “delicate, beautiful, feminine face” and “powerful will” that held his enthusiasts spellbound as he preached sermons vowing to drown every last Jew in the Black Sea.
    Iliodor’s moniker was no exaggeration. The Mad Monk was a genuinely unbalanced demagogue. He once slandered the wife of a wealthy timber merchant for supposedly wearing a low-cut dress and singing “filthy” songs at a charitable event (a fund-raiser for a temperance society, no less). The affair was taken up by the prime minister himself—an unavoidable intervention, given that Iliodor was a revered leader of a movement esteemed by the tsar. Such absurdities were routine in the end-time of the Romanovs, when a culture of intrigue mixed with operetta-style lunacy had deeply infected the Russian imperial court and government. Prime Minister Peter Stolypin, in fact, dared to side with the offended lady, ordering “rapid and decisive measures to protect the citizens of Tsaritsyn from public insults” of the kind inflicted by the Mad Monk. But the government was hesitant to the point of paralysis when it came to dealing with Iliodor’s more serious and even murderous threats to public order. Stolypin privately called Iliodor a “fanatic” and spreader of “Black Hundred propaganda” who weakened the government’s authority. But Iliodor had insinuated himself into the court’s inner circle. He had secured the patronage of the powerful, and no less mad, “holy man” Grigory Rasputin, who was then at the height of his legendary and hypnotic influence over the royal family. The Church had tried to exile Iliodor to a remote parish, but Tsar Nicholas intervened to save him—“out of pity,” he said, for the holy man’s followers. The Mad Monk was untouchable.
    Iliodor’s story lays bare the strange and paradoxical rules of the gamein end-stage tsaristRussia. Iliodor targeted not just what he called the Jewish-led “Satan’s band,” but rich capitalists and landowners as well; he even called for the prime minister to be put to death. He was truly a subversive force. Tsar Nicholas, however, saw in him not an enemy bent on undermining the state but a kindred spirit, one of the “mass of loyal people” who defended him from the “insolence” of his enemies, “nine tenths” of whom he believed were Jews. And for Nicholas, the supposed archaic purity of Iliodor’s Russianness—his closeness to the
narod,
the people—trumped any concerns about his effect on the polity. The tsar’s obsession with a pure Russia foretold a monarchy that waslosing all sense of reality and becoming susceptible to fantasies of the darkest kind.
    As it turned out, a few months after the death of AndreiYushchinsky, Iliodor wouldself-destruct before he could put his talents to work in a case that might well have given him the ultimate pulpit for his anti-Semitic screeds. He betrayed his protector Rasputin, threatening to reveal the holy man’s debauchery, but was outmaneuvered, and ended up exiled and defrocked. It would fall to others to exploit the boy’s murder for their own ends.
    At Andrei’s grave site, the mourners and provocateurs must have noticed a strange circumstance. While the deaths of children were tragically common in Russia, one aspect of the service surely distinguished it from any other child’s funeral the mourners may have attended: the parents were not present. Andrei’s schoolmates and teachers were there. His aunt Natalia, in the final stages of tuberculosis, stood there in the cold. VeraCheberyak was there with Zhenya and her two daughters. But as Andrei lay in his open coffin—his wounds covered by makeup, a cypress cross tied around his neck