Peasants from the Russian village of Chulya found a headless body in the forest — the corpse missing several internal organs. A rushed investigation quickly concluded that the victim, a factory worker named Konon Matyunin, had likely been murdered by residents of the nearby Udmurt (then called “Votyak”) village of Stary Multan.

Because the body lacked organs, local police leapt to a sensational conclusion: this was a ritual murder.

For weeks, officers interrogated Udmurts and neighboring Russian villagers about supposed Votyak “beliefs.” They heard — mostly folklore, rumor and hearsay — that once every forty years, the Udmurts allegedly offered blood sacrifices to appease their gods. Typically, the stories went, the victims were livestock, but perhaps — police speculated — humans as well.

These rituals, they were told, took place in a wooden shrine called a kuala, maintained by a village priest. Nothing mystical about the priest — he was just another peasant.

If investigators had spent less time collecting ghost stories and more time actually searching the forest, they would have found not only signs of a murder there, but also Matyunin’s missing head. The crime-scene search had been so sloppy that the head was discovered months later, lying only a few meters beyond the original perimeter.

Twelve were arrested; two died during interrogation — almost certainly under torture aimed at extracting confessions.

The kuala, where the “ritual murder” supposedly occurred, wasn’t even examined until two years after the crime. When it finally was, the investigator, a man named Shmelyov, claimed to have found “traces” of Matyunin’s killing and filed a report saying so.

By the time the trial began in December 1894, the entire region believed the Udmurts were guilty. The presiding judge was equally convinced — despite the careful work of defense attorney Mikhail Dryagin, who had pointed out the investigation’s countless flaws.

A jury convicted seven Udmurts of ritual murder and sentenced them to eight or ten years of hard labor in Siberia.

The story could have ended there — a cruel local tragedy — if two Vyatka journalists hadn’t intervened.

Against the expectations of the era, their editors allowed them to publish critical pieces — questioning the investigation, the court, and the police. Their reporting brought the story from rural courtrooms to the broader public.

Meanwhile, defense attorney Dryagin appealed to one of the most influential legal minds in Russia: Anatoly Koni, the Senate’s chief prosecutor, who ordered the case to be reviewed.

Baranov and Zhirnov, determined to deepen the investigation, invited a rising star of Russian journalism to Vyatka: Vladimir Korolenko.

But in the 1890s, he was far more than a writer of fiction: he was one of Russia’s fiercest public voices.

He had already survived exile in Siberia; soon he would become a key figure in exposing famine in the Volga region, police brutality during the 1905 Sorochinsk uprising, and — years later — would help dismantle the notorious anti-Semitic blood libel in the Beilis case.

But before all this, Korolenko’s first major battle for justice would be the forgotten tragedy of Stary Multan.

Korolenko was present in the courtroom — and now the details of the case were not confined to Malmyzh’s dusty chambers. They were broadcast across Russia.

He was appalled:

“Again the prosecution lined up two police chiefs, three constables, a village elder, dozens of witnesses — but not a single one requested by the defense.

Again jurors were fed the same one-sided accusations, the same rumors of unknown origin, the same ignorant, defenseless Udmurts.”

His articles went further than arguing innocence — they called out the absurdity of the charges in the eyes of the world:

“If this ‘truth’ were accepted, we must admit that at the dawn of the twentieth century our homeland alone has preserved, in Europe, the custom of human sacrifice joined with cannibalism… I want to cry out: No! This never was!”

He walked the forest trail, examined the spot where Matyunin’s body was found, photographed the kuala, and studied Udmurt life first-hand — their beliefs, customs, economy.

His observations became a multi-part series, “The Multan Sacrifice,” which captivated readers across the empire.

He also rallied notable intellectuals to the cause. Thanks to him, Leo Tolstoy wrote a letter defending the accused Udmurts. Korolenko even persuaded one of Russia’s most brilliant lawyers, Nikolai Karabchevsky, to join the case.

Using the latest forensic science, he debunked each piece of “evidence.”

Then he called a key expert: ethnographer Grigory Vereshchagin, who testified that neither Udmurts nor any neighboring people practiced human sacrifice. And even among cultures that had historically engaged in such rituals, none removed the lungs of a victim — as had been done to Matyunin.

In other words, the murder had been staged to resemble a ritual — by someone who didn’t actually know how rituals worked.

Karabchevsky went further, condemning the investigation itself:

“A crime is a grief and misfortune — but immoral methods of investigation are a far greater misfortune.”

The jury needed less than an hour to acquit the Udmurts.

After years in prison, they were finally freed.

Using his own funds, he continued investigating and discovered a motive: a wealthy Russian landowner from the nearby village of Anyk wanted to seize the fertile lands of Stary Multan.

His plan, investigators later concluded, was simple: hire killers, stage a “ritual murder,” and wait for the authorities to remove the Udmurts.

In 1897, Professor Feodosy Patenko of Kharkiv University identified the actual murderers. He did not publicize the names — but historian Mikhail Khudyakov later did.

After interviewing locals in 1932, he named Timofei Vasyukin and Yakov Koneshin as the killers. Both were already dead, but a former priest confirmed that Vasyukin had confessed on his deathbed.

Ten years later, Korolenko drew on everything he had learned in the Multan affair when he plunged into the infamous Beilis case — the blood libel that accused a Jewish factory worker in Kyiv of ritual murder.

That case would become internationally known as one of the most poisonous antisemitic fabrications in late imperial Russia.

But the first such “blood libel” in the empire wasn’t against Jews — it was against the Udmurts of Stary Multan.

His work remains one of the clearest answers to the question journalists still ask each other today:

Can writing change anything?

Sometimes — rarely, painfully — yes.

Because once, in a forgotten province, a writer refused to let a lie stand. And because he didn’t look away, innocent people walked out of prison alive.