Vera Cheberyak

Vera Cheberyak, wife of a minor post-and-telegraph clerk, lived in Lukianivka, then a working-class outskirt of Kyiv. Police knew her as the keeper of a thieves’ den and a receiver of stolen goods; among the regulars at her flat was her half-brother, the professional thief Pyotr Singayevsky.

On 12 March 1911 (Old Style) 13-year-old Andriy Yushchynsky, a friend of her son Zhenya, disappeared. Eight days later his body, with dozens of stab wounds, was found in a cave near the Zaitsev brick works. Kyiv’s chief detective Mykola Krasovsky concluded that the killers came from Cheberyak’s circle, but the authorities, backed by far-right groups, accused the brickworks clerk Menahem Mendel Beilis of “ritual murder”. In summer 1911 Cheberyak’s own children Zhenya and Valentina died of dysentery.

At the sensational trial in Kyiv in autumn 1913 she appeared as a prosecution witness and was remarkably composed, but her attempts to pressure other witnesses were exposed in the courtroom. On 28 October (10 November) 1913 the jury acquitted Beilis. Cheberyak herself was never tried. In spring 1919 she was arrested and shot by the Kyiv Cheka.