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with a ribbon, wearing his one spare pair of school uniform trousers, with ten one-kopeck coins in the right pocket—his mother and stepfather were at the local police precinct, under arrest.
    The story of the family’s three-month ordeal at the hands of the authorities, omitted or glossed over in the standard accounts of the case, is essential to understanding how the murder of a poor, troubled boy burgeoned from a family tragedy to a matter of state on the imperial agenda to a bizarretrial that would be followed the world over.The trajectory of the case is conventionally portrayed as a line leading from an investigation infused with official anti-Semitism straight to the Jew in the dock. But the path that led from “theYushchinsky murder” to “the Beilis affair” is as twisted as one ofKiev’s winding streets.
    Andrei’s family did seem to harbor the essential elements required of a routine domestic tragedy: an illegitimate child, a resentful stepfather, rumors of violent quarrels and abuse. As investigators talked to friends, neighbors, and relatives, their suspicions could only have grown. A teacher of Andrei’s had been sure something at home was wrong: “Thin, troubled … silent. Hewalked the halls alone.” Classmates knew that Andrei often came to school hungry. Many witnesses told the authorities that Andrei’s mother beat him. Zhenya Cheberyak said, “There were times when Andrusha’s mother would punish him, she would beat him sometimes with her hand, sometimes with a belt, for example when she’d send him somewhere and he didn’t go, and then she would thrash him for that. His mother never beat him badly, but a little, and never beat him so that he’d bleed.”
    But there were indications the beatings went beyond the routine. “I know that Alexandra … disliked Andrei very much,” an elderly neighbor testified, and claimed he saw her beat him several times. “What she beat him for, I don’t know, but through the fence I could see how awfully she treated him.” He reported that “as soon as his mother started beating him [Andrei] would run to his Aunt Natalia.” A classmate confirmed that “his mother punished him often, and … when his mother beat him he’d always run to his aunt.”
    Andrei’s maiden aunt Natalia was the boy’s savior and protector. “Since I had no children of my own, I very much loved my sister’s illegitimate son … Andrusha … and I decided to raise him and make something of him,” she said in a deposition after Andrei’s death, just months before she died of tuberculosis. A woman with a rare entrepreneurial streak, she ran a workshop out of her apartment, which made decorative boxes for a store on Kiev’s main street, Kreshchatik. Her income was modest, but it enabled her to pay for Andrei’s education.
    Natalia claimed to investigators that she had no idea who killed Andrei and did not suspect anyone. She insisted that Luka Prikhodko, Andrei’s stepfather, was by nature “quiet, sober, modest and hardworking.” But Natalia did not completely conceal from the authorities the family’s tensions, admitting that her sister sometimes resented the wayshe displaced her as the dominant figure in Andrei’s life. Natalia was loving, but she could be harsh as she tried to keep the boy on the right path. Sometimes, Natalia said, “I would scream at [Andrusha] and he’d burst out crying. Then Alexandra would say she didn’t want me to pay for Andrusha’s education and I shouldn’t dare insult him. There were frequent scenes like that.”
    Whatever suspicions Natalia had would have carried great weight with investigators because she was more a mother to Andrei than anyone else in the boy’s life. From his earliest years he called his mother “Sashka” (a diminutive of Alexandra)—never “mama.” Zhenya said, “When I asked Andrusha if he loved his stepfather and his mother, he always answered that he loved his aunt more than anyone.”