On April 22, 1823 (Orthodox Easter Sunday, according to the Julian calendar), in a small town of Velizh, some fifty miles east of Vitebsk, a three-year old boy left home and never returned. For days his parents tried to find him, even utilizing fortune-telling sorcery to get clues about the boy. Though at the beginning Jews were not suspected, when the fortune-telling beggar woman pointed to a Jewish family, rumors quickly began to circulate. Finally on May 2, the boy's highly-mutilated body was recovered in “a swampy forest less than half a mile from the center of town and no more than half a mile from the parent's home” (18). Since rumors pointed to Jews, especially the wealthy family of Mirka Aronson, the government investigator thoroughly searched their house, including cellars, but found “absolutely nothing in them” (19). Still, the investigators could not outright dismiss the case—two Christian women, Anna Eremeeva and Maria Terenteeva, testified against Jews, Terenteeva claiming she saw a Jewish woman, Khanna Tsetlina, lead the boy into her house, where “four Jewish women were waiting for her” (23). A full investigation continued for many months, with tens of people, Jews and Christians, interviewed in the process. Though the authorities were inclined to accept the accusations, they “did not rush to judgment” and “maintained a policy of restraint” (27). After fourteen months since the boy's disappearance, the authorities—having considered precedents, especially an accusation in Grodno in 1817, and the evidence collected—acquitted Tsetlina and cleared Aronson's family, and in the final review of the case, in November 1824, the province court in Vitebsk concluded that the boy's death was “the will of God” (29). But this relatively felicitous ending would not be be the end of “the Velizh Affair,” which ended formally in January 1835, nearly twelve years after the boy's disappearance and death, with—spoiler alert—an acquittal of the Jews and punishment of the accusers. But this favorable, on the surface, ending is deceptive—in the years in between the accused Jews suffered indefinite imprisonment, torture, and even death.

This gripping “Velizh affair” is a subject of Eugene Avrutin's most recent book under the same title. Based on a massive amount of documentation collected over years of investigation, the vividly- written book captures the human toll of such spurious accusations and confinement, including crippling, sometimes fatal, illness and mental breakdown. Aside from revealing the human story, this microhistory throws light on the workings of the tsarist state bureaucracy; the parts of it rife with potential for abuse and the “boundaries of law” it created. It also demonstrates the Jews’ ability and right to interact with the state and their belief in the justice the state can provide. For example, the families of the accused felt free to petition higher authorities against what they saw as the blatant abuses of local investigators, believing that authorities in St. Petersburg would bring justice to their plight. Although for years this hope seemed misguided, in the end, they were right. When the case reached its final stage, the evidence “did not stand the test of legal scrutiny” from an official committed to “a spirit of juridical rationalism” (152). And yet, the case also reveals the extent to which bureaucracies are dependent on the people who are part of it and the way they perceive the evidence before their eyes. The same evidence collected by Vasilii Ivanovich Strakhov, the main investigator obsessively working on the case until his death in 1830, was deemed inadequate and contradictory in the final review in 1835 in St. Petersburg.

Avrutin's book makes clear how deeply ingrained in Christian society beliefs about Jews and blood were, and heavily weighs the historical analysis of attitudes toward Jews and blood libel usually focused on Catholicism. The book would have benefitted, however, from making a clearer distinction about eastern and western Christianity. Velizh, after all, was majority Orthodox Christian, with only a handful of Roman Catholics. It would have been beneficial to explain both the religious affiliation of the Christians involved in the affair and how Catholic stories, which make little sense in the Orthodox context, were transmitted to find resonance in this largely Orthodox society. Explanation of the relevance of these Catholic tales and their road to the Orthodox society would have strengthened the book and helped explain the shifting back and forth between Tsarist Russia and premodern Poland-Lithuania.

The book's tremendous strength and pitfalls lie in the enormous documentation collected during the Velizh affair. The fifty thousand pages seem the historian's paradise. Yet, this enormity presents difficulties as well. Court and trial records are generally exciting but difficult to work with, especially trials conducted by obsessive investigators who wanted to shape the narrative and the story. They wanted to prove their case, not to discover the truth. The difficulty for the historian lies not just in sieving through the evidence and biases, but also in writing about it. The story wants to pull us along, making it easy to slip into writing about what is said in the sources as if it happened. Though Avrutin is generally careful about such historical distance, he nonetheless at times slips. For example, discussing Maria Terenteeva's testimony, he uses active verbs as if what she claimed to have happened actually happened: “What happened next Maria observed with her own eyes… . Even if Maria could not recall the precise date, she distinctly remembered Khanna asking for a ‘good Christian boy.’ … Maria went down to the basement and saw the boy on the ground wrapped in linen” (62–63). If caution may sometimes lead to clunky language at the expense of otherwise elegant prose, it is a cost worth paying.

These quibbles notwithstanding, The Velizh Affair is a noteworthy example of microhistory that sheds light onto broader issues of the history of Nicholaevan Russia and its Jewish past, paradoxically both reinforcing and challenging common stereotypes about this expansive state, its bureaucracy, and its culture.