A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel by Edmund Levin Page A

madness.
    Professor Emeritus Ivan Sikorsky of Kiev’s St. Vladimir University was one of Russia’s most eminent psychiatric researchers. While his achievements would soon be far outshone by those of his son, the aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky—already gaining fame in 1911 as the inventor of the helicopter—Ivan was so esteemed that he had once been honored by the greatLeo Tolstoy with an audience at his estate at Yasnaya Polyana. He was the author of works on generalpsychology, and numerous specialized studies on subjects ranging from child development to the effect of fatigue on intellectual function, which were widely published and cited abroad. He had started out his career as an anatomist-pathologist and was active in promoting the new science of criminalistics and the systematic use of psychiatric expertise in the courts. He was considered an expert on religious fanaticism and folk belief: his most popularly known work was a report on the horrific mass suicide in the town of Ternov, where twenty-five members of aChristian cult had themselves intentionally buried alive.
    Sikorsky could by all rights have been considered the ideal man to evaluate the evidence in a case centering on questions of human anatomy and the fanatical mind. But his arrogant devotion to the pseudoscience of his day inspired and reinforced in him a virulent racism and anti-Semitism that would prove profoundly destructive to the cause of justice he professed to support. Sikorsky emerged as a full-fledged anti-Semite only very late in life, not long before Andrei’s murder. An early indication of his noxious system of thinking can be found in his preoccupation with “sectology,” the study of religious sectarianism, a discipline that had an inevitably political slant.
    Russians at all levels of society were engaged in a scattershotspiritual awakening, with a proliferation of unconventional forms of belief, or “God-seeking,” a quest for meaning amid the turbulence and trauma of the modern age. The most renowned God-seeker, Leo Tolstoy, had died only a few months earlier in the fall of 1910: his search had led him to a Christian-anarchist, pacifist philosophy that rejected basic tenets of the Orthodox Church, resulting in his excommunication. The search for the transcendent drew God-seeking intellectuals and members of the upper class to mysticism, spiritualism, and Eastern religions and healing. TsarNicholas and the empress Alexandra, in their devotion to a spiritual guide, were in many ways typical God-seekers of their era. (In fact, beforeRasputin, in the years 1900–1902 the royal couple had formed a close bond with another mystic and faith healer, the Frenchman PhilippeNizier-Vachod, who was sent packing when his powers failed to help the empress conceive a male heir.) The lower classes were drawn to individual charismatic leaders in a popular religious revival that was rightly regarded by theRussian Orthodox Church as a threat to its authority. Some charismatic leaders were even imprisoned.
    Sikorsky’s worldview was largely constrained by the pseudosciencesof his day, from social Darwinism to physiognomy. (In his analysis of a photograph ofFyodor Kovalev, the young man who buried alive the twenty-five Ternov cultists, Sikorsky wrote, “The left eyebrow is a little higher than the right, while the muscle around the eye on the right side is contracted more strongly than on the left, as a consequence of which the right eye seems smaller than the left one. This irregularity of his expression … constitutes a sign of degeneration and indicates Kovalev’s belonging to a psychopathic family.”) Sikorsky idolized Herbert Spencer, the renowned British social Darwinist and, like Spencer, simultaneously believed in Darwinism and the very theory it had discredited, Lamarckism, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, including ancestors’ learned behavior. (Attributes could travel curious paths indeed: a widow, Sikorsky believed, could