The Gates of November

1 The Fire Bringer

Shortly after the turn of the century, a thirteen-year-old boy in a small town in White Russia fled from the impoverished home of his mother, his father having died five years earlier. In the years that followed, he went on moving, across oceans and continents. By the time he reached the mainland of Asia nearly two decades later, he had been remarkably metamorphosed from a harmless small-town Russian Jewish boy into a cultured and dedicated Bolshevik killer.

The small town was Kopys, about fifteen kilometers from the town of his birth, Dubrovno, on the Dnieper River.

In 1766 there were 801 Jewish taxpayers in Dubrovno and its environs. One hundred years later it had become the center of a textile industry that manufactured and distributed prayer shawls throughout Russia and Europe and as far away as America. By the end of the eighteenth century Dubrovno also had a tile factory and a community of religious scribes, who wrote phylacteries, Torah scrolls, and mezuzahs, the little containers with passages of the Torah that Jews affix to the doorposts of their homes.

The weavers of Dubrovno labored on antiquated handlooms and were brutally exploited by the merchants, who sold them yarn at high profit and purchased finished products at low prices. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, big-city competition from machine-woven prayer shawls crippled the textile industry of Dubrovno. The weavers began to leave. In 1897, four years after Solomon Slepak was born, there were 4,364 Jews in Dubrovno, constituting about 57 percent of the total population. The town was so inconsequential that it did not even have its own railway station.

Photographs offer us images of Jewish life in Dubrovno.

A portrait of Solomon Slepaks father shows a man with a long black beard and a tall dark skullcap. He had migrated to Dubrovno from somewhere in the Ukraine. Family lore relates that he was physically very strong; that his life’s dream was to send his son, Solomon, to a yeshiva, an academy of higher Jewish learning, where he would study for the rabbinate; and that in a certain Ukrainian town about one-third of the Jews were named Slepak, which in Ukrainian means “blind.”

There is a full-length photograph of an elderly man named Munya, who was a sexton in a Dubrovno synagogue. He also wears a tall dark skullcap and a long dark coat that hangs slightly open, revealing knee-high boots and ritual fringes. He stares at us through shadowed, melancholy eyes. His lips are thin, unsmiling. A flowing white beard reaches nearly to his chest. There is a stoic grace about his poverty, a quiet dignity to his burdened life. Though there is no evidence that he was related to the Slepaks, it takes no prodigious leap of the imagination to envision him as similar in look and garb to Solomon Slepak’s father, who was a melamed, a poor teacher of children.

And there is a photograph of a synagogue celebration in Dubrovno. An extraordinary occasion, one of enormous joy: A scribe has completed the writing of a Torah scroll, a lengthy and demanding sacred enterprise, a year or more of the most painstaking labor. In the photograph we see the Holy Ark, which is richly ornamented with a bevy of animals and birds and a delicately filigreed facade. A crowd of about sixty men, women, and children stand in a loose semicircle behind a bearded man in a cap, knee breeches, and boots, who appears to be doing some sort of dance. Two young-looking men, a fiddler and a clarinetist, play their instruments. The clarinetist has no beard and is wearing a derby; perhaps he is a professional musician, an outsider, hired for the occasion. A bearded elder carries the Torah scroll, which is suitably adorned with a silver crown. In the background, near the Ark and the wall of the synagogue, stand women and children in neatly arranged rows. In the foreground are men and boys. And once again it is no great feat of the imagination to envision one of those boys as young Solomon Slepak, who was a student in his father’s little school and certainly attended synagogue.

No face in that photograph wears a smile. This was, after all, a picture for posterity, marking a high moment of public celebration.

Other photographs mark suffering and death. There is an intriguing photograph that invites us to contemplate the miracle of a pogrom mysteriously averted: The synagogue in Mstislavl, built in the first half of the seventeenth century, stands tall and boldly peaked against a whitish sky, its destruction suddenly halted by Tsar Peter the Great, who, on entering the city with troops in 1708, visited the synagogue and mysteriously and abruptly ordered his soldiers to cease their plundering and killing of Jews. “Only with the help of God did the tsar save us,” comments the record book of that Jewish community. But the hand of God seemed unable to save others. And so we have photographs of a different sort: pogroms consummated with singular barbarousness.

Pictures of pogroms are difficult to bear. The head wounds are what shock one most. The Russians, wielding sabers and axes, seemed to go for the Jewish head. One photograph of the wounded shows nearly every head bandaged, thirty or so heads, assembled to record and display the event to the world, most of them the heads of elderly men and women. And there are photographs of rows and rows of bodies with heads fearsome to behold. City after city in Russia, from 1881 to 1917, witnessed fractured Jewish heads and rows of Jewish bodies: Mogilev, Minsk, Gomel, Bialystok, Lodz, Kiev, Zhitomir, Vologda, Simbirsk, Balta, Smela, Odessa. And Kishinev.

Solomon Slepak was about three years old when his family moved from Dubrovno to nearby Kopys. They lived with a family of rabbis friendly to Solomon’s father. The Jews in and near Dubrovno would certainly have heard of the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, a city not far from Odessa near the Black Sea; it attracted the attention of the world. More than three hundred dead, thousands wounded, six hundred children orphaned, fifteen hundred homes and shops plundered, forty thousand people left without property or means of work. The Kishinev pogrom occurred when Solomon Slepak was ten years old. His father had been dead about two years.

In October 1905, there was one week in which three hundred pogroms took place in cities throughout Russia. Five months later young Solomon Slepak became a bar mitzvah and entered adulthood. Soon afterward he was told by his mother, Basheva, that she wished him to enter an academy of traditional Jewish learning, become a rabbi, and carry on the tradition of his late father, Israel, by linking his fate to the generations of rabbis and teachers in the father’s family. Either that or-the implied threat, though unstated, was quite clear-leave the house. Slepak family history reverberates with echoes of furious quarrels between mother and son, the mother defending her dead husband’s dream, the son weighing his own future.

The chronicles tell us that at the age of thirteen, Solomon Slepak left home.

Other young Jews were leaving then, too, fleeing from their religious homes, living with fellow runaways in vile rooms, sharing food and clothes, attending or watting to be accepted into Russian schools, barely eking out livelihoods by tutoring the children of well-to-do Jewish families or working at odd jobs. Many died of hunger and disease.

Solomon Slepak fled to his older brother, Aaron, who still lived in nearby Dubrovno and worked in the textile factory. Aaron was then twenty-seven, devout, married, and with children. Solomon sought his brother’s support, but his brother thought it a fine idea that Solomon become a rabbi and urged him to return home.

Solomon moved on once again, to the town of Orsha, some twenty kilometers north of Dubrovno, to the home of a Dr. Zarkhi, an old friend of his family’s. The doctor, who was not an observant Jew, took the boy in and gave him a room in the attic.

No one seems to know why this Dr. Zarkhi accepted the thirteen-year-old Solomon into his home and what his precise connection was to the Slepak family. But it was not uncommon in those days for people to take in the runaway children of friends rather than abandon them to a bed in a reeking cellar or tenement, to streets and hooligans and the specter of disease, starvation, death.

Solomon Slepak intended to enter a technical school, but he was too young and unprepared for the qualifying entrance examinations. He helped himself by getting his date of birth changed on his official documents from March 6, 1893, to March 6, 1892-no details are available as to how that feat was accomplished; probably a small bribe was slipped to some low-level official-making himself a year older and, he hoped, thereby gaining earlier admission to the school. He began to study for the examinations.

About ten thousand Jews lived in Orsha; they were a little over 50 percent of the total population. Like Dubrovno, Orsha was situated on the Dnieper River; unlike Dubrovno, it had a railroad station. More than thirty Orsha Jews lost their lives in the pogroms that swept through the cities of Russia in October 1905.

That was a time of upheaval not only for Jews but also for Russians. In January 1905 workers had demonstrated in the streets of St. Petersburg, urged on by an Orthodox priest, Father Georgy Gapon. They asked to meet with their beloved tsar in the Winter Palace and present him with a petition of grievances; they were met instead by a hail of bullets from the tsar’s troops. Estimates of the slain ran from 130 to nearly 1,000. Regarded until then with profound reverence by most Russians, the tsar now became an object of loathing and fury. “Nicholas the Bloody,” the Russians began to call him.

It is hardly likely that Solomon Slepak was unaware of the events then taking place in Russia. The sophisticated, secularist family of Dr. Zarkhi no doubt contained avid readers. More than two thousand periodicals of all opinions were being published in Russia in those years; tsarist censorship of the press was lax. Between 1906 and 1914 the different factions of the Social Democratic Party that were calling for revolution published legally more than three thousand titles. Surely some of those publications found their way into Dr. Zarkhi’s home and were read by Solomon Slepak.

After passing his entrance examinations, Solomon entered the technical school, where he studied mathematics, physics, accounting, German, and French, among other subjects. Not part of the curriculum was the everyday talk among students about contemporary events: the tsar’s reluctant agreement to transform the country into a constitutional monarchy; the election of the first parliament in 1906, its dissolution by the tsar, and the three parliamentary elections that followed; the more than forty political parties that were represented, including delegates from Jewish parties; the stratagems and maneuverings of the revolutionaries. In the corridors and classrooms of the school, and while swimming in the waters of the Dnieper and lounging along the riverbank, older students quickly radicalized younger ones.

The family chronicles tell us that Solomon was introduced to radical ideas during his years in the technical school, and attended meetings of the Social Democratic Party. But there is no indication that he had yet turned into a revolutionary.

He was graduated in 1913, intending to continue his studies in a university. He was twenty, short, stocky, with thick, curly hair black like the wing of a crow, a somewhat too-large nose, thickish lips, and slanted dark brown eyes that gave him a slightly Mongol look. He had short arms and legs, was broad-shouldered, very strong, and in excellent health. Splendid material for the army of Tsar Nicholas II.

Solomon Slepak completed his studies in a year rife with rumors of impending war. He applied to the High Technological Institute in Moscow and was rejected; the institute’s quota system admitted a low and fixed number of Jews. The rage in the hearts of young Russian Jews because of that quota system!

The country was preparing for war. Solomon Slepak, now supporting himself by tutoring, was a relative newcomer to Orsha and still unmarried. And regarded as somewhat unstable politically, not an actual member of a revolutionary party, to be sure, but a participant in meetings of a suspicious nature. The police seemed to be watching him. His name was near the top in the recruitment lists the Orsha community was required to submit to the army. But he had no intention of joining the army of Russia. Instead he fled, crossing the border on foot into Russian Poland. It is not known if he had somehow obtained the necessary passport from local officials or if he crossed illegally; the only document it is certain he had with him was his school diploma. Carrying few clothes and very little money, he made his way across Poland into Germany, somehow avoiding the numerous control points along Germany’s eastern border. For a while he worked at odd jobs, fixing this, lugging that, accumulating the necessary thirty dollars-about one hundred rubles, a great deal of money in those days-for his travel ticket and the additional thirty dollars he would need to show the American immigration officials at Ellis Island in order to be admitted into the country.

In Hamburg he obtained a United States visa from the consular office and boarded a ship that sailed to England and America. He traveled steerage class in one of the three enclosed lower decks of the ship with more than a thousand other passengers, in a crowded room that was about seven feet high and extended the entire breadth of the ship and to about one-third its length. The air was unutterably foul, reeking of dirty bodies, tobacco, garlic, disinfectants, and the stench of the nearby toilet rooms; the floor slippery with the vomit of the seasick.

One sailed in steerage-so named because it was originally located near the rudder-to the noise of the stirring screws, the roll and thud of waves, the staccato of hawsers, and the trembling of steel railings. At times, when the weather grew calm, there might be cardplaying and even music and dancing on the decks, but nearly always the journey, lasting about ten days, was a hell that some thought cleansed them of sins and prepared them as if newly born for the land of Columbus.

At the end of that dreadful voyage, as the ship made its way through the Narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island, Solomon Slepak gazed spellbound at the Statue of Liberty, utterly mesmerized by the sight of the tip of Manhattan Island. And when the ship docked at one of the piers on the New York shore, he watched as those who had sailed in first and second class disembarked and entered customs directly to have their papers and baggage checked; then he and all the others who had traveled in steerage, save American citizens, left by walking down a gangplank at the stern and assembled on the pier in groups of thirty. From there they were loaded onto barges, together with their baggage, for the brief journey across the water to the red buildings on Ellis Island.

In 1913, the year Solomon Slepak arrived in the United States, nearly nine hundred thousand immigrants came through Ellis Island. The immigration procedures on the island were a fearful experience. Faces in photographs reveal the fright in immigrant hearts.

Solomon passed through the preliminary medical inspection in the second-floor registry room-no hernia, no TB, no heart ailments, no mental defects-and then stood on numerous lines and sat on clean wooden benches and went through further examinations: the genitalia for venereal disease, the skin for a “loathsome or dangerous contagious disease.” Light streamed into the vast room from tall side windows, and the air was fresh. One doctor examined his scalp, another his fingernails; a third painfully probed his eyes. He was asked his age, his destination. Was he an anarchist, a polygamist, had he ever been in prison, who had paid his passage, could he read and write, did he have a job waiting for him? To the last question he replied that he did not have a job, and displayed his school diploma to verify his employability and usefulness to America. An interpreter translated his responses to the examiners and the immigration inspector. To the inspectors final query, “Do you have thirty dollars? If less, how much?” he responded by showing the equivalent of thirty dollars in foreign money he had earned as an itinerant fixer in Poland and Germany and received his “Admitted” card. Together with other new immigrants he left the building and walked to the ferry.

A mile-long ride over the waters of Upper New York Bay brought him to the terminal at the Battery. Behind the wire netting that entirely encapsulated the walk from the boats waited the anxious and eager crowd of relatives and friends. He looked around for his older sister, Bayla.

Bayla was an outcast, a virtual excommunicate from her family, a daughter whose name was never spoken by her mother. Before departing for America some years earlier, she had committed a heinous act. One of her children, a daughter, had been born retarded. As conditions in Russia worsened into deepening nightmare, Bayla became determined to take her family to America. Aware that the retarded child would be turned away by the immigration authorities and thereby jeopardize the entry of the entire family, she did the unspeakable: She decided to deliver the child into the care of her grandmother, Bayla’s mother.

Violent quarrels rocked the family over that decision. It was unheard of, scandalous, to leave behind forever one child while taking the others. What kind of mother did such a thing-deserted a disabled child? One had to have a heart of stone! And what would happen to the poor creature when her grandmother passed on to the True World? Who would care for her then?

Bayla turned away from her child and left her mother and older brother and sailed with her family to America, and was waiting on the dock when her younger brother disembarked from the ferry with his few belongings, his thirty dollars, and his diploma. They took the subway to her family in Brooklyn.

It was during his years in New York that Solomon Slepak became a revolutionary. He lived with his sister’s family on Division Avenue in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The streets were a mix of Jews from Eastern Europe, Italians from Sicily and the region around Naples, and Ukrainians and Poles. Dirty, noisy, crowded streets. Old nineteenth-century brownstones with bay windows and ironwork fences; and walk-up apartments; and wood-frame row houses later to become firetraps and slums. A steel bridge, completed in 1903, spanned the East River. It became known as the Jews’ Bridge; the New York Herald called it “the Jews’ Highway.” It linked the newly arrived immigrant Jews on the once-elegant streets of Williamsburg to the Jews who lived on Delancey Street in the heart of the teeming Lower East Side of Manhattan, the “miserably darkened Hebrews” with whom “the thoroughly acclimated American Jew… has no religious, social or intellectual ties,” in the words of the Hebrew Standard in 1894. Riding or walking across the bridge on a warm, clear day, one could see the Manhattan skyline, gaze into the heart of capitalism. Did Solomon Slepak, recently come to Marxism and the Social Democratic Party, marvel at the power of this purported enemy of the proletariat? Did he see class struggle in the swarm and crush of people on the streets, the Jews pushing their carts, the filthy sidewalks, the dark tenements; or in his first job in a factory that made men’s and women’s belts, wallets, and purses, where he labored at a hot press stamping out leather patterns? In capitalist fashion, the leather company soon went broke, there being scant demand for its goods. He took a job selling dishes, peddling his wares before the Passover festival, when dishes used all year long must be stored away and dishes used only for the festival brought out or acquired. And he caught on to a common scam: Start across the street with your cart of dishes, step into the path of an oncoming truck, and then jump adroitly out of the way while letting the truck smash into and destroy the dishes. And claim the insurance. Learning quickly the seamy side of America.

About his sister, Bayla, there are no further details in the chronicles, and nothing at all about her husband. But a fascinating tableau has been handed down through the years: The four children and their uncle are seated on the floor around a daily English newspaper; the uncle reads, and the children correct him. Month after month he sat on the floor with the children and the newspapers, reading aloud and being corrected. He was learning English.

And, at the same time, reading about sweatshop bosses exploiting workers; about the efforts to pass child labor laws; about new laws governing factory safety, workmen’s compensation, maximum hours for women. And he would surely have read accounts of the assassinations of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, and the editorial surmise that the archduke’s removal would probably make for greater tranquillity in Europe.

And he must have read about the war and the slaughter that began in Europe in August 1914. And about the Battle of Tannenberg, fought by German and Russian troops in the last days of August at a cost of thirteen thousand German and thirty thousand Russian dead. On the western front, the Germans advanced toward Paris. During the early days of September, French and British troops halted the Germans at the Marne in a series of battles that cost each side about a quarter of a million casualties and forever changed the nature of war. In mid-September the first trenches of the war were dug, and the nightmare of deadlocked warfare began.

All this Solomon read in English on the floor with his sister Bayla’s children, and certainly a good deal more on his own in Yiddish. And doubtless discussed at length with his newfound friend, a man named Gregory Zarkhin, about whom the family chronicles tell us little: a Jew from a small town in White Russia, tall, blond-haired, chiseled face, aquiline nose. The chronicles do note that it was Gregory Zarkhin who introduced Solomon Slepak into New Yorks revolutionary circles. But how and where they met; the precise nature of their relationship; the ideas they embraced, the conversations they shared, the strategies planned and the dreams held in common-not a word.

There was no American Communist movement in the United States until September 1919, when the first manifesto of the Communist Party of America prematurely proclaimed the demise of capitalism. But there were circles where one could talk about the war and the tsar, about capitalism and Marxism, about the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, about the strikes of previous years-cloakmakers’ strikes, cigar makers’ and hatmakers’ strikes, children’s strikes, bakery strikes, meat and rent strikes-and engage in heated debates with anarchists and socialists, plan a union meeting, a demonstration, a strike, a parade, and anticipate the revolution in America. Persuasive to many in those troubled days were Karl Marx’s theory of surplus value and forms of production and his iron conviction of the inevitability of communism, as if ordained by inexorable laws of history.

What goes into the making of a revolutionary, a man or woman who breaks with the legal systems and protocols of his or her world, renounces past ties of friendship and blood, becomes contemptuous of the society in which he or she lives, showing it no mercy and expecting no mercy from it in return, and sets out to intensify the suffering of people by any means available so as to accelerate the coming of revolution? Surely one begins by being partial to revolution, accepting of its consequences, perhaps because of a deep initial disillusionment with the codes of one’s own people or class. Appalled by social injustice. A growing awareness of the illusory nature of genteel surface appearances; certainty that beneath the civilized facade lay the real world of power, money, and greed. Rage at the insurmountable obstacles put in the path of one’s career and dreams by the entrenched laws of the powers-that-be. Years of recurrent anger and hate, which finally begin to burn with a steady flame. One becomes obsessed by a single goal: Redeem the despicable past with blood; cleanse away its evils; create the world anew. No more theorizing, no more observing as a bystander. The weak talked, dreamed, idealized. The strong accepted the bitter realities of life, and acted.

The chronicles contain no record of the growth of Solomon Slepaks political consciousness during those wartime years in New York. One imagines a dedicated revolutionary traveling from one clandestine meeting to another, carrying messages through all sorts of weather, passed from comrade to comrade, fed behind counters in railway eating houses and the kitchens of union halls, arrested, thrown into jail. But Solomon took a job as a window washer on skyscrapers during the day, and in the evenings he began to attend medical school. Which leads one to believe that he was precariously balanced between two different futures: full-time dedicated revolutionary or member of the bourgeoisie.

Imperial Russia, too, seemed suspended between futures.

For the tsar and his armies, the war went disastrously in 1915. There were rumors that the Russian Army had run out of ammunition and weapons and that one-fourth of its soldiers were being sent to the front lines unarmed and with orders to pick up the weapons of the dead. A bungling bureaucracy; a policy of oppression against religious and ethnic minorities; shortsighted ministers; the vast territorial losses and casualties of the war; a tsar who would not cooperate with even the most moderate of progressive groups and was too often dependent upon his witless wife, Alexandra, and her adviser, the bizarre and depraved holy man Gregory Rasputin: that was Russia in 1915 and 1916.

Acting against the advice of most of his ministers, the tsar took personal command of the armed forces and left for the front. Empress Alexandra, politically a reactionary, emotionally a near-hysteric, remained in the capital (its name now changed to Petrograd from the original German, Petersburg, because of the war with Germany). Together with her Siberian peasant, Rasputin, she virtually controlled the capital. She began to change ministers repeatedly, often on the advice of Rasputin. The two of them, a half-mad empress and a diabolic holy man, held in their hands the fate of Russia.

On the night of December 17, 1916, a member of the royal family, along with an aristocrat related to the family by marriage, carried out a messy murder of Rasputin; he proved difficult to kill and had to be shot a number of times. His body was thrown off a bridge into the water and was not found until the following day. It was a desperate attempt to save imperial Russia and the Romanov dynasty.

On March 8 (February 23 by the old Russian calendar), word spread that there was not enough bread in the city. Housewives and women factory workers took to the streets in demonstrations. By evening one hundred thousand workers were on strike. Lines of hungry people began to form outside the bakeries. Riots broke out. A bakery was looted, and Cossack troops were called in, but they refused to fire on the people and instead drove the police away. Then the Petrograd military garrison, made up of pensioned peasant conscripts, mutinied. Crowds surged through the city, shouting, “Long live the republic!”

The tsar wrote in his diary: “Riots began in Petrograd several days ago. To my regret, troops have begun to take part in them. It is a hateful feeling to be so far away and receive such poor, fragmentary news!” And he added, “In the afternoon took a walk down the road to Orsha…”

One day in March 1917, Solomon Slepak opened his New York newspaper and read that the monarch of his native land, Tsar Nicholas II, had abdicated the throne.

There is a photograph of the parlor car on the imperial train where the tsar signed the instrument of abdication. A sofa, an easy chair, a coffee table, sconces, a wooden side bar with an unclear framed photograph-of the empress, very likely-and a round clock on the silk-covered walls, with one hand on the eight and the other on the twelve. He had abdicated in favor of his brother: “We transfer our legacy to our brother Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich and bless him on his ascension to the Throne of the Russian State.”

But the next day, after being told by Alexander Kerensky, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the only socialist in the cabinet, that he could not conceal from the new tsar “the dangers that taking power would subject you to personally,” Michael, in tears, abdicated in favor of the Provisional Government.

The regime of the Romanovs was over.

Almost immediately the state bureaucracy disintegrated.

The tsar and his family were arrested.

Workers roamed about Petrograd in a delirium of joy. The centuries under the tsarist yoke had crumbled astonishingly in only a few days. Factory laborers, clerks, drivers, peasants with red armbands walked the streets, assembled to hear speeches, and thought themselves the freest citizens in the world.

The crowd had been victorious; now it wanted to rule.

Moderate socialist members of the parliament found it necessary to negotiate with members of the soviets, councils of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies run by radical socialist intellectuals. It was a shaky arrangement.

The Provisional Government chose to ignore the prevailing pacifist atmosphere and to continue the war against Germany. It made all citizens equal before the law; it granted freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly; it proclaimed strikes to be permissible. It officially abolished the Jewish Pale of Settlement-though in actuality, the Pale had already ceased to exist because hundreds of thousands of Jews had been driven into the heartland of Russia before the advancing German and Austrian armies. But the government was helpless before an upward-spiraling inflation; it could not increase industrial production or halt the disintegration of the economy. Peasants were appropriating land; ethnic minorities began to assert their rights to self-rule; workers’ committees controlled factory management; debating committees ran the army’s chain of command. Incompetent intellectuals stepped into the vacuum left by the vanished bureaucracy. Alexander Kerensky, now the prime minister, proved powerless in his attempts to maneuver between the moderates and the radicals. By the early fall of 1917 Russia was on the brink of anarchy.

In Petrograd and Moscow waited the leaders of the Bolsheviks, once the majority wing of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party-the Mensheviks had constituted the minority wing-for the appropriate moment to overthrow the Provisional Government.

The Bolshevik Party was a unique organization directed from above by an intellectual elite and created for the explicit goals of conspiracy, taking power, and launching a revolution. It is estimated that it had in its ranks about two hundred thousand members, of whom five to ten thousand constituted a highly disciplined core, one-third of them intellectuals. Motivated by ideology and the realization that failure meant, at best, their return to an underground existence and, at worst, their annihilation, they composed a substantial force in a country approaching anarchy.

Vladimir Lenin, leader of the party, intended to seize power in Russia, reconquer the borderlands that had declared their independence, as well as Siberia, and make the party the master not only of Russia but of all the world.

In New York, Solomon Slepak washed skyscraper windows and studied medicine.

It requires little effort of the imagination to conjure the elation, debates, speeches, and general tumult among the New York revolutionaries at their meetings during the period of the Kerensky government. Friction between radicals and liberals; concern over every bit of news from Petrograd and Moscow-and the Russian Army: Would it continue to support Kerensky or stand aside, thereby enabling the Bolsheviks to make their move?

There is no way of knowing if it was Gregory Zarkhin or Solomon Slepak who came up with the idea that they return to Russia and take part in the coming struggle. It was unusual at that time for immigrant Jews to leave America and go back to their country of origin, though many had left earlier. Applying for visas, Solomon and Zarkhin were closely questioned by Russian consular officials in New York: the Provisional Government saw it as not in its best interest to augment the domestic ranks of the Bolsheviks. Because the two men were suspected of revolutionary sympathies, their request for visas was turned down.

It is not at all clear why they did not then attempt to enter Russia illegally. In New York at that time were the Bolshevik Nicholas Bukharin and the soon-to-be Bolsheviks Leon Trotsky and Volodarsky. All quickly returned to Russia via England and the North Atlantic. Then, on November 7 of that year, by the Western world’s Gregorian calendar, which the Bolsheviks adopted in 1918-October 25, according to Russia’s old Julian calendar-the benign revolution of March was taken over by Lenin, and Russia set out upon the path of international revolution. It appeared that a quarrel had erupted between the head of the army and Kerensky, a jockeying for power, and now the army stood aside as the Bolsheviks took control.

It was, at first, the most bloodless of revolutions. Hardly a weapon was fired in the Winter Palace, and Petrograd fell into Bolshevik hands, so inept was the Provisional Government. “We found the power lying in the streets,” Lenin later said, “and we picked it up.”

In New York, Solomon Slepak quit his window-washing job, dropped out of medical school, and began making arrangements to return to Russia by way of the Far East. Gregory Zarkhin had left for Canada shortly after their requests for Russian visas had been refused, and Solomon planned to meet him there. Together they would take a cargo ship to Vladivostok, which was then under anti-Bolshevik control. As soon as they arrived, they would contact the Bolshevik underground.

Solomon rode by train to the American-Canadian border and was stopped by the Canadians because his documents were not in order: He was not an American citizen and had no entry visa for Canada. The Canadians did not especially want to admit anyone who was a recent immigrant to the United States from Russia, which was then in an increasingly violent revolution. They sent Solomon back to New York by train, and to make certain he got there, they transported him in the custody of an immigration officer, who gave him a dollar bill when they arrived and let him go. Solomon promptly took the next train back to Canada, this time disembarking before he reached the border and crossing on foot through fields. In the distance stood a farmhouse. He knocked on the door. French Canadians. He had not forgotten the French he had learned in the technical school in Orsha. He spent some weeks on the farm as a seasonal laborer.

Then he began to travel westward through Canada, working on farms, fixing this, hauling that. His English was good enough to get him by. No one asked for his identity papers. He worked; he was paid; he left. Accumulating travel money.

He met Gregory Zarkhin in Vancouver, which at the time had a fairly sizable Russian immigrant population. And a Russian dockworkers’ trade union of about a thousand men, organized and led by Zarkhin, who was chairman of the union. Solomon Slepak began to work on the docks and was soon the deputy chairman. Awhile later Zarkhin left for Vladivostok alone; they had decided it was unwise to travel and arrive together. With Zarkhin gone, Solomon Slepak assumed leadership of the union.

While the young revolutionary labored on the docks of Vancouver, Lenin set about organizing a Communist state. One of his earliest acts, in December 1917, was the creation of a political secret police force, the Cheka-the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Counterrevolution, Sabotage, and Speculation-under the leadership of a Polish nobleman turned Bolshevik, Felix Dzerzhinsky.

In January 1918, aided by sailors from the Baltic Fleet, Lenin dispersed the legitimately elected Constituent Assembly which had assembled in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks had only 24 percent of the vote, but Lenin argued that a soviet democracy of the working class was a higher principle than a bourgeois democracy of one man, one vote. The Assembly had no soldiery it could rally to its side. That single act by Lenin was the death of the parliamentary democracy that had been evolving in Russia over the previous twelve years.

After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the process began of seeking out the Socialist Revolutionaries, Constitutional Democrats, and Mensheviks-all who had opposed the new regime and were still unwilling to repent and join the Bolshevik cause. Those arrested were exiled to prison camps or executed. In addition, Lenin soon permitted peasants to seize land, gave over control of many factories to committees of workers, nationalized all the banks, impounded private bank accounts, made foreign trade a state monopoly, abolished the judicial system and replaced it with people’s courts and revolutionary tribunals. Members of the upper and middle classes lost their property. Religious education was ended, church property appropriated. All titles and ranks vanished.

On March 3, 1918, the Germans and Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. By then civil war had broken out in the cities and industrial regions of central Russia.

That same March, Solomon Slepak left Vancouver and began his journey across the Pacific to Vladivostok. He was twenty-five years old, and about to enter an Asian world of extreme political complexity and conflict, a landscape with a tortured history.

In 1858 a nearly prostrate China, beset by rebellion and at war with Britain and France, had yielded to Russia the left bank of the Amur River, a region rich in coal, tin, iron, and gold. Two years later the hapless Chinese ceded to the Russians the region of the Ussuri River on the Pacific coast: wild and wooded country; towering, round-shouldered hills and deep shadowy valleys dense with undergrowth and ribboned with torrential streams.

The town of Vladivostok was established by the Russians in 1860; it lay about five hundred miles southeast of the city of Harbin, and was Russia’s gateway to the Pacific. In 1875 Russia transferred the Kurile Islands to Japan in exchange for the southern half of Sakhalin Island, which the Japanese took back and annexed in 1905. That entire region, from Lake Baikal to Vladivostok-more than twelve hundred miles from east to west, and at one point eight hundred miles and at another, four hundred miles, from north to south-was occupied after the 1917 revolution by various armed forces, all enemies of the Bolsheviks: 72,000 Japanese, 7,000 Americans, 6,400 British, 4,400 Canadians. It had a population of more than 1,500,000 Russians, 300,000 Japanese and Chinese, 250,000 Mongols, and 25,000 Jews.

The region was governed by an administration headed by Admiral Alexander Kolchak, commander of the White armies in the east. (“White” was the term of opprobrium which the Bolsheviks applied to their opponents, white having been the emblematic color of nineteenth-century French monarchists.) Kolchak was a taciturn man, given to dark moods and politically naïve. His favorite reading was, reportedly, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document forged by Russian secret police during the reign of Tsar Nicholas II, which purports to be the secret plans for the takeover of the world by the Jews.

Sometime in April 1918 Solomon Slepak sailed into Vladivostok on board a cargo ship. He saw the ships of many nations-Japanese, British, American, French-at anchor in the bay. The city had a broad, partly paved main street, was thronged with office buildings, hotels, stores. On some streets he saw all manner of livestock; on others, soldiers from France, Italy, Japan, Canada, Great Britain, America. The harbor, calm as a lake, sat locked in by gently rolling hills. The population-Russians, Cossacks, Chinese, Koreans-numbered around 50,000; in a year it would surge to 180,000: refugees from the raging Civil War, hungry and dirty, many sick with typhus.

The city was suffering a shortage of living space; there seemed to be no vacant rooms anywhere. Still, Solomon Slepak found a place to stay and managed to locate his friend Zarkhin. Quickly they organized an underground council and set up a Bolshevik press, which they operated in the very heart of the city, printing pamphlets, broadsides, newsletters for the cause of the revolution. One of Solomon’s main tasks was to translate the material into English so it could be read by the American troops, who seemed not as averse to the Bolsheviks as were the British and the French. After some months, they were discovered by the police, arrested, tried, convicted as revolutionaries, and sentenced to death.

They spent two weeks in prison, waiting to be executed. A cellmate went mad and hanged himself. Solomon was told he had one day to live.

It was now one year after the November 1917 Revolution. In mid-1918 the Bolsheviks had changed their name to the Communist Party and moved the capital of Russia from Petrograd to Moscow. During those first years of the Civil War, 1917-1918, the cities and industrial regions of central Russia had been won over to the Revolution, through propaganda, terror, and blood. But the Bolshevik armies were hastily organized and made up largely of ill-trained peasants and the urban underclass. Battles were still being fought all along the periphery of central Russia, and the borderlands, including Siberia and the Far Eastern Province, had set themselves on a course of separation and independence, and would have to be reconquered.

The Civil War lasted three years, from the end of 1917 to the end of 1920. Millions perished from combat, famine, and disease, including Tsar Nicholas II and his family, executed in July 1918 on the orders of Lenin himself, who wished no tsar or would-be tsar left alive around whom monarchists might rally.

In the fall of 1918, in his cell in Vladivostok, Solomon Slepak awaited execution.

Something then occurred in the Siberian city of Omsk-an event connected with Admiral Kolchak-that saved Solomons life. As a result of that event, an amnesty was declared, and the death sentences of political prisoners were commuted to life imprisonment at hard labor on Sakhalin Island.

The family chronicles are at a loss to explain the sudden amnesty. But because it coincides with the period in November 1918 when the Council of Ministers of Russia’s Far Eastern Province granted Kolchak dictatorial powers, it is possible that it was he who declared the amnesty to mark his assumption of the office of Supreme Ruler of Eastern Russia and Siberia. “I shall take neither the path of reaction nor the ruinous course of party politics,” he stated on the day he took power. “My principal objective is to create an army capable of combat, victory over Bolshevism, and the introduction of legality and the rule of law…”

Whatever the reasons for the amnesty, Solomon Slepak was abruptly spared on the day of his appointed death. Together with his friend Zarkhin and the other political prisoners, he began the long trek to Sakhalin Island.

They went on foot to the city of Nikolayevsk, some 750 miles to the north. It was winter. Sakhalin Island lay north of Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. Fierce Siberian winds blew across the seas. The Tatar Strait between the mainland and Sakhalin Island was frozen. They crossed to the island over the ice.

The island, bitter-cold and damp, had dense forests and steep mountain ranges, was rich in coal and iron deposits, and was originally barren of people. The region south of the fiftieth parallel belonged to Japan. The Russians populated their part of the island with convicts and exiles.

There is a photograph, taken in 1915, of a Jewish woman thief being placed in irons on Sakhalin. Three guards and two leather-aproned smiths stand, all stiffly posing. The woman appears to be in her forties-hands shackled, features rigid, defiant. “Sonka of the Golden Hands” she was called. The building in the background is made of logs; one of the windows lies awkwardly off its frame. From the visible presence of the ground and the obvious absence of winter garb-no fur caps, no gloves, no coats-the photograph appears to have been taken in weather a good deal warmer than that which greeted Solomon Slepak when, early in 1919, he stepped onto the island where the anti-Bolshevik Kolchak regime intended him to spend the rest of his life at hard labor.

The labor camp was in the town of Aleksandrovsk some thirty miles north of the fiftieth parallel. Camp and town seethed with Bolshevik activity. The political prisoners lived apart from the criminals, the thieves and murderers, an arrangement that made it easier for Gregory Zarkhin and Solomon Slepak to smuggle letters out to the Bolsheviks in Aleksandrovsk and Nikolayevsk, to continue to direct underground activities on the mainland from their cells on Sakhalin, and ultimately to stage their own revolution. They organized the Bolshevik prisoners, about two hundred men, into a tightly disciplined fighting unit, and in April 1919 they rose up against the guards and gained control of the labor camp and the town of Aleksandrovsk. Solomon and Zarkhin ordered the release of the criminals in the camp. The fact that they were criminals was not their fault, Solomon and Zarkhin declared at a meeting of the prisoners; the blame lay with the tsarist society that had forced them into an outlaw life by not providing them with a decent education and the economic means to fulfill their goals. They were not criminals in their hearts. They should help overthrow the regime that turned good men into criminals. Most of the criminals joined them.

Gregory Zarkhin now decided to leave Sakhalin and return to the mainland; he vanishes from this narrative until his abrupt reappearance some years later. Solomon remained and was elected first chairman of the Soviet of People’s Commissars of Sakhalin. He was now the head Bolshevik on the Russian part of the island.

In the south, the Japanese, who had no love for Russians and abhorred Bolsheviks, advanced on Aleksandrovsk, with the intention of taking the entire island.

Solomon organized his men, the original two hundred political prisoners and the many criminals who had joined them, into a small army. (Where had the son of a small-town Russian Jewish teacher learned the skills of weapons and war? The chronicles are silent on that.) But, though disciplined and dedicated, Solomons force knew itself to be outnumbered and outgunned by the Japanese, whose rapid advance into the north it could not hope to stop. Solomon decided to move his men to the mainland and link up with Bolshevik partisans operating there under the command of a man named Nicholas Triapitsin. By now, however, the ice had thawed, and there were no boats large enough to take all his men across the Tatar Strait, some fifteen miles at the narrowest point.

He crossed to the mainland with three other men in a small boat and found the captain of a large boat, who refused to help. Solomon put a gun to the captain’s head and commandeered both him and his boat. It took several back-and-forth crossings to bring all his men to the mainland. They managed somehow to avoid the patrolling Japanese warships. On the mainland they began to make their way to the partisan army led by Triapitsin. Solomon Slepaks army now numbered close to three thousand men.

Nicholas Triapitsin commanded a division of partisans. In those chaotic years of the Russian Civil War, a division meant anything from five thousand to fifteen thousand men. Bands of brigands and partisans roamed everywhere, taking advantage of the absence of order to loot and kill. Whites plundered and killed Reds and Red sympathizers; Reds plundered and killed Whites and White sympathizers.

The seven-month period between May and November 1919 was the bloodiest time of the Civil War; the fiercest and most decisive battles, resulting in the final defeat of the Whites, were fought then by a newly organized Red army of three million men. Its field units were commanded by tens of thousands of former tsarist officers: men who had once been hunted and imprisoned pariahs, but whom the Bolsheviks had reluctantly, out of dire need, rehabilitated and recruited. Anti-Bolshevik foreign troops on Russian soil-the hesitant British, French, and American forces who failed to engage in any consequential combat, and even the more aggressive Czechoslovak Legion, made up of soldiers who had been captured by the tsar’s army during the war, and who had subsequently broken out and taken up arms against the Reds-played no significant role in the outcome of the Civil War.

Somewhere on the mainland of Asia, between the Sea of Okhotsk and Lake Baikal, Solomon Slepak and his army linked up with the partisan division of Nicholas Triapitsin. It was the spring of 1919. Triapitsin had heard of the deeds of Solomon Slepak on Sakhalin Island and greeted him warmly as “Sam,” the name by which the latter was then popularly known. He welcomed “Sam” and his men into the ranks of the partisans. There would be a party that night, he said, to celebrate the birthday of the woman he loved.

There was a party that night, but not the one planned by Triapitsin.

Once again the family chronicles blur and details become unclear, perhaps because of what is about to ensue. Triapitsin and his lover, a woman known only as Sonya, became drunk, as did many of his officers. Possibly they spoke too boldly in their drunkenness, began to make anarchist noises. Doubts about the Revolution? Slurs against Trotsky, who was then organizing the new Red Army into a fighting machine that would bring an end to any need for partisan forces? An unwillingness to accept the verbal orders “Sam” claimed he brought from the Bolshevik center in Russia? What seems clear is that Solomon Slepak ordered his core of two hundred loyal men to surround the building where the party was taking place, drew his gun, and arrested an astonished Triapitsin and his staff officers. There then followed a swift trial, with no defense and no appeal, before a military troika, a court of three men appointed by Solomon Slepak. All the defendants, including Triapitsin’s lover, were found guilty of counterrevolutionary activities-and shot. Their bodies were thrown into a nearby river.

Solomon contacted the Bolshevik political head of the Far Eastern Province and informed him of the executions. He received in response the gratitude of the official and an immediate appointment to the positions of deputy minister of the Far Eastern Province, commander of the Bolshevik Far Eastern Army, and head of the Amur-Argun front, the region where the Shilka and Argun rivers join to form the Amur River. His orders were to suppress the Ussuri Cossacks, who were rampaging in the region between Lake Baikal and the city of Khabarovsk, hijacking trains, plundering, killing. And to halt the advance of the Japanese Army in Siberia.

Solomon Slepak now had under his command an army of about ten thousand men.

Decades later, in Moscow, in the presence of his son, Volodya, he would meet an Old Bolshevik named Abram Kamzel, a lean gray-haired man in his early eighties, tall, with blue eyes. Solomon was then in his seventies.

“Slepak?” said the Old Bolshevik in astonishment. “You are still alive?”

“You see I am alive,” said Solomon.

Kamzel stared at Solomon in disbelief. Then, recovering himself, he said, “You murdered so many of Triapitsin’s partisans with your troika courts. Do you remember how Sonya begged you to spare her and her lover? Triapitsin was a good Bolshevik. Did you think he was an anarchist? Do you remember his last words? ‘It’s a pity to die on such a beautiful morning.’ Did you kill him so you could take over his command?”

Solomon’s face turned to stone.

The old man went on talking, as if to himself. “Whenever people heard the name Sam, they thought only about cruelty to the enemies of the Revolution, about wiping out opponents without mercy. The waters of the river turned red from the blood of the corpses…”

Solomon Slepak. Fiery convert to a new faith. Bringer of fire and death to the enemies of Bolshevik Russia and the Communist Party.

The Russian Jews who gave themselves heart and mind to the Bolshevik cause were, like Solomon Slepak, men and women who inhabited a cruel between-world: no longer part of the world of their Jewish beginnings, which they had long since abandoned, and not yet fully a part of the world of Russia, which loathed and feared Jews. During the Civil War, anti-Semitism was so rife among Russians of all ages, parties, classes, and nationalities as virtually to border on national psychosis. Reinforcing the traditional picture of the Jews promulgated by church and state for a thousand years was the fact of their sudden appearance throughout Russia. The Pale of Settlement, where Jews had been forced to live under the tsars, had virtually emptied of Jews during the war, and now they were to be found in cities in the very heart of the country. Their presence at the highest levels of government and in places where Jews had never before been seen came at the same time as the Revolution: Leon Trotsky, second only to Lenin; Yakov Sverdlov, who ran the day-to-day affairs of the Communist Party; Kamenev, Zinoviev, Radek; so many others-all of Jewish descent, all unable to return to their own people, all loathing the monarchist and anti-Semitic ranks of the Whites. The Communist Party, a seeming haven for the radical intelligentsia and apparently uninterested in the ethnic and religious origins of its members, became the sole refuge of certain marginal Jews, who believed it would bring a great and true salvation to the world, a revolutionary universalism in which the destructive differences that divided humankind would once and for all be forever dissolved. It mattered little to most Russians that these Jews were no more Jewish than their non-Jewish atheist party comrades; that they did not speak for or identify with Jews, and indeed were often the enemies of Jews. Further, because many Jews stepped into the vacuum created by the disintegration of the tsarist bureaucracy, it now seemed to many Russians that Jewish government officials were everywhere. Their sudden appearance, concurrent as it was with the Revolution and the Civil War, forever linked those events in the minds of Russians, for whom the Jew now became the evil cause of the Fatherland’s unutterable misery.

Not since the massacres during the Cossack uprising against Poland in the middle of the seventeenth century was the slaughter of Jews on so vast a scale. Prelates of the Orthodox Church saw the Civil War as a struggle of biblical proportions against godless Jews who were attempting to conquer Holy Russia. White and Red armies, bands of brigands, marauding Cossacks, roaming gangs of thieves-everyone plundered and killed Jews in obscene and brutal ways, though the Red Army officially forbade its troops from staging pogroms and at times punished the perpetrators. Photographs of pogrom victims show hideous head and face wounds, amputees, corpses, children weeping over the bodies of parents. About 150,000 Jews died in the pogroms of the Russian Civil War.

Small wonder the dread of the Jews and the reaction by the chief rabbi of Moscow, Jacob Mazeh, who, hearing Trotsky say that he was not a Jew and would not help Jews, stated that it was the Trotskys who made the Revolution and the Bronsteins-Trotsky’s original Jewish name-who paid the bills for it. Small wonder the story about the Jewish Red Army soldier who, half crazed, ran about executing wounded Ukrainians abandoned by the retreating Whites. “He would wipe his bayonet in the grass to remove the blood,” relates the chronicle of that event, “and with every head he cut off he screamed, ‘This is my payment for my murdered sister, this is my retribution for my murdered mother!’ The Jewish crowd,” concludes the story, “held its breath and kept silent.”

And in the Far East, Solomon Slepak headed a division of partisans that fought Japanese troops and anarchic Cossack bands and moved to link up with the Red Army’s advance upon the city of Omsk, where Admiral Kolchak ruled as head of the Whites of Siberia and the Far Eastern Province.

There were about twenty-five thousand Jews in the Far Eastern Province at that time. The family chronicles are silent about whether or not Solomon Slepak, as commanding officer of a Red partisan division, attempted to establish any sort of contact with that community. It is known that he had a Jewish girlfriend named Zlata.

In November 1919 the Red Army defeated the army of Admiral Kolchak, and shortly afterward the city of Omsk fell without a battle. Accounts of the flight of Whites eastward describe a nightmare of typhus and death. Kolchak was taken by the Bolsheviks, who executed him in February 1920 on the orders of Lenin.

Some while later Solomon linked up with the Red Army and turned over to it command of his division. The Civil War dragged on some additional months; the last effective White army, fighting in the Crimea under the command of Peter Wrangel, was evacuated in November by British, French, and Russian ships. The Whites not captured by the Reds slipped out of the country and vanished.

Then came famine. Twenty million Russians died in the years that followed the Revolution. The Russian economy was in utter ruins. Still, Lenin and his band of revolutionaries had triumphed.

But Lenin did not regard the success of the Revolution as his only goal; it was, rather, a means to the more essential end of world revolution. All of Russia was to serve as a wedge into the West and global capitalism. His program was to divide existing Social Democratic parties, separate and organize their most radical members, and wherever possible, incite revolution.

To these ends, Lenin created in March 1919 the First Communist International, known as the Comintern or the Third International. And in the midst of the Civil War there took place the First Congress of the Comintern, a gathering of foreign revolutionary socialists, most of them in Moscow by chance and with no authority from their home parties to represent them. “Our task,” Trotsky announced at that milestone event, “is to generalize the revolutionary experience of the working class… and hasten the victory of the Communist Revolution throughout the world.”

The Second Congress of the Comintern opened in Petrograd in July 1920, with everyone sensing that the end of the Civil War was near.

There was some concern about a threat against the life of Lenin; hence the location of the Congress in Petrograd rather than Moscow. Indeed, Lenin had nearly lost his life on August 30, 1918, when, after addressing an assembly of factory workers in Moscow, he was shot twice by a Right Social Revolutionary named Fanny Kaplan (some think she took the blame to shield someone else). One bullet broke his left shoulder and wounded his left arm; the other pierced his left lung. Had the second bullet penetrated one millimeter to the right or left, Lenin would have died.

Attending the Second Congress were 217 delegates from thirty-six countries. The Russians had 69 delegates, one of whom was Solomon Slepak, who lived then in the Siberian city of Chita and was editor in chief of the Far Eastern Pravda, a position given to him because he was educated, had spent four years in America, knew English, and was deemed reliable. The role of editor was one of considerable importance, because Bolsheviks regarded their newspapers and propaganda activity as the very heart of revolutionary organizations; Molotov would serve as the editor of Pravda, as would Bukharin. Solomon attended the Congress as the deputy from Sakhalin Island.

Four days after it opened in Petrograd, the congress moved to Moscow, where it remained until early August. Deputy Solomon Slepak attended its sessions in the city whose High Technological Institute had rejected him seven years earlier because he was a Jew.

2 The Wildcat in the Garden

What a triumphant time, that summer of 1920 in Petrograd and Moscow, when the Comintern convened to plan the conquest of the world! Solomon Slepak voted eagerly with the others in favor of the twenty-one points set down by Lenin, among which were: Enter no alliances anywhere with reformists and centrists; propagandize the armed forces of all nations so they will in due course join the side of revolutionaries; take over trade unions; organize Communist cells everywhere; follow strict party discipline; stage armed insurrections… Never mind the war cripples on Moscow’s streets, the grimy look of the city, its horrendous living conditions, the famine raging in the countryside, the people standing on line for potatoes and bread, the streets virtually empty of traffic save for the long black cars of the secret police. Never mind all that! The Civil War was nearly over. And the Red Army, engaged in a border war with Poland, was rapidly approaching Warsaw, its advances posted daily on the large map in the main hall in full view of the deputies. “The struggle for Communism shall be transferred to America, and perhaps also to Asia and other parts of the world,” Gregory Zinoviev, who had been appointed chairman of the Comintern by Lenin, had written during the summer of 1919 before the First Congress. Many in that Second Congress were certain that at the third anniversary of the Revolution, all in the Comintern would celebrate the worldwide triumph of communism.

To his surprise and delight, Solomon Slepak ran across his old friend Gregory Zarkhin at the Congress. The tall blond Bolshevik from White Russia was now head of the Press Department of the Comintern. Zarkhin-who had changed his name to Voitinsky when he became involved with the Bolshevik underground in Vladivostok and retained that name the rest of his life-invited Solomon to remain in Moscow as deputy head of the Press Department. Making the necessary official inquiries, Solomon was advised to vacate the editorship of the Far Eastern Pravda and accept the position with the Comintern. An astonishing rise into the heart of Moscow, into the very center of power.

He lived on Tverskaya Street, in the Hotel Lux (now the Hotel Tsentralnaya), which had been commandeered by the Comintern for its members. Two blocks away stood the site of the future statue of the founder of Moscow, Yuri Dolgoruky, erected in 1948 as part of the 8ooth-anniversary celebration of the city. Directly across the street from the statue was the Moscow Soviet, the municipal building. Less than a mile away was the Kremlin.

The family chronicles are without information regarding Solomon Slepaks daily activities. There are no details as to what crossed his desk; nor do we know to whom he reported, his contacts with the Central Committee, the Politburo, the Cheka, the Communist parties throughout the world.

With unrest everywhere following the end of World War I, much of the world appeared to be on the brink of revolution and class war. The abdication of the kaiser in Germany and the takeover of power by a shaky Social Democratic government was seen by Lenin as a repetition of the same events that had brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia. In Britain -labor unrest and a weak government. In France, Italy, Hungary -demonstrations, strikes. In America-near national hysteria over the Reds; strikes in major industries; even the police force of Boston out on strike. All over the world-new Communist parties of greater or lesser strength, splitting away from or capturing existing Socialist parties. Western intellectuals and liberals thrilled to the vision of power-armies, police, hosts of bureaucrats-in the hands of Russian intellectuals, and were enchanted by the prospect of a new social order and the destruction of the abhorrent bourgeois class. The Communists in America, Britain, Sweden, Australia remained small splinter organizations, but in France, Italy, Germany they became major parties. Nearly everywhere in the world, it seemed, Communists craved to join the Comintern, accept subservience to Lenin, participate in the coming world revolution.

But during the years that immediately followed the Third International, not a single trade union in the Western world fell to the Communists. The Communist putsch in Germany was smashed by the German government. The war with Poland ended soon after the close of the Second Congress with an astounding defeat suffered by the Red Army and with a treaty, signed in March 1921, that cost the Bolsheviks much coveted territory. Inside Russia there was domestic unrest: peasant uprisings, a stunning mutiny at the naval base in Kronstadt by sailors once fiercely loyal to the Bolsheviks, continuing economic collapse, agrarian failure, starvation. The labor strikes in Europe and America were broken or settled. The dream of world revolution, the very essence and postulate of Communism, had to be rethought. Lenin now needed to concern himself with the consolidation of socialism in his own country.

The Far East, though, appeared for a while a rich field for Bolshevik harvesting. Applying pure ideology to practical necessity in a region virtually empty of industrial workers or Communists, Lenin, during the Second Congress, had urged the formation of temporary working alliances of Communist parties and their erstwhile enemies, bourgeois national liberation movements. And evaluating the Politburo’s Far East strategy, he remarked, “The road to Paris lies through Peking.”

Gregory Voitinsky had earlier entered China in the spring of 1920, about two months before the convening of the Second Congress. Together with a Chinese named Yang Wing-chai, he traveled first to Peking and then to Shanghai, looking for Communists, and found a tiny leftist enclave in each city. He then returned to Russia.

In July 1921 thirteen young Chinese men, meeting first in a girls’ school in the French Concession in Shanghai and then on an excursion boat-secret police had been spotted near the school-founded the Communist Party of China. One of those present was a twenty-seven-year-old named Mao Tse-tung.

Later that year the Comintern sent Voitinsky back into China. His task: to establish contact with the new Chinese Communist Party and open communications between Lenin and Sun Yat-sen, the president of China, who had headed the revolutionary movement that, in February 1912, had brought about the abdication of the last Manchu emperor. Earlier in 1921, as director of the Kuomintang, the Nationalist People’s Party, Sun had organized a revolt against the government in Peking headed by Yüan Shih-kai, the increasingly dictatorial president of China, and set himself up as president of a self-proclaimed national government in Canton. He would need allies in his effort to liberate northern China. The Comintern had ordered Voitinsky to explore the feasibility of joining the Communists to the Kuomintang, a union of Russian-style Communism and Chinese-style nationalism. After all, hadn’t Sun Yat-sen sent a telegram of congratulations to Lenin soon after the Revolution?

According to the family chronicles, Voitinsky arrived in China-and shortly thereafter disappeared.

Word came back some while later: He had been arrested and imprisoned, probably by Whites still operating in Manchuria. The Comintern then resolved to send Solomon Slepak into China. He was to ransom Voitinsky, get him out of China, and complete his mission. Solomon traveled with a false American passport and a great deal of money to use for bribes, money probably acquired through the sale abroad of tsarist jewels, a method employed by Lenin to finance covert operations of Communist cells and newspapers.

The family chronicles tell us nothing of his travels. But there were no choices then in the way one journeyed from Russia to China. One took the two-week journey across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. From the Manchuria station on the border one traveled to Harbin via the Chinese Eastern Railroad, which was still held by White Russians. Then from Harbin on the South Manchurian Railroad, which was operated by the Japanese, to Mukden. From there one journeyed to Peking on the railroad run by the British. Then the Chinese Railroad to Shanghai and the boat to Swatow and by foot into Kwangtung Province and by train to Canton, where lived Sun Yat-sen.

This was a period of appalling turmoil in China. The imperial regime was dead, along with the idea of a constitutional monarchy. Educated Chinese, many of whom had studied in universities in Japan and Europe, sought to establish some kind of republican government to unify the land and build a nation. In the meantime, the land lay in fragments, ruled by militarist regimes, feuding warlords, a half dozen or so predatory foreign armies, and missionaries.

Somehow, in this roiling land, Solomon Slepak found and rescued his friend Gregory Voitinsky. And made contact with Sun Yat-sen. Strangely, in none of the books I have read on this period in Chinese history is there any mention of Sun Yat-sen in connection with a mysterious Russian bearing an American name and passport. Indeed, it is Voitinsky who is credited with making the first contact with Sun Yat-sen. And mention is often made of two important Comintern agents of that period in China: S. A. Dalin and Michael Borodin. But there is the evidence of a photograph of Sun Yat-sen that bears his signature beneath these words in Russian: “To dear Comrade Slepak, in memory of our meeting.” The Slepak family chronicles insist that it was Solomon who persuaded Sun Yat-sen to admit Communists into the Kuomintang, a fateful decision taken in August 1922, while Solomon Slepak was still in China. Opening the Kuomintang to the Communists also opened China to Michael Borodin, the Comintern agent who arrived in Canton in October 1923 to aid in the creation of a Chinese Communist Party along the lines of the party in the Soviet Union. That first success of Solomon Slepak’s, if the chronicles are correct, dramatically altered human history.

Why is there no mention of Slepak in the numerous books I’ve combed on this period of Russian-Chinese history? Was he only a low-echelon bureaucrat? But would Zinoviev and the Central Committee of the Comintern have sent a minor figure on a major mission to rescue a Comintern agent and open relations with Sun Yat-sen, who held the future of China in his hands? And would they have let him return later to China for two more years? Not very likely. Was Solomon Slepak, then, a full-fledged Comintern agent? With Cheka connections? Surely he was being kept up-to-date by Cheka agents on events in China.

These are not the only questions left us by the family chronicles.

Shortly after he returned from China, Slepak was called to the office of Georgi Chicherin, the people’s commissar of foreign affairs. There he met with Deputy Commissar Maxim Litvinov, who informed him that the Foreign Ministry had decided to send him to Japan as the correspondent for Rosta, the Russian Telegraphic Agency, founded in 1918 and forerunner of Tass, the telegraphic agency of the Soviet Union.

The Japanese had no diplomatic relations with Bolshevik Russia. Solomon Slepak would be the first Russian in any official capacity in Japan since the Revolution. It would be a mission of some delicacy, having to do with a good deal more than journalism, and involving meetings with ministers of state, perhaps with the emperor himself.

He would need to change his obviously Jewish name. After all, he was now representing the new Russia. “In all the world they are saying the Jews have taken power in Russia,” Litvinov remarked. “It’s not good for you to go as Solomon Izrailevich Slepak. Change your name to Semion Ignatievich. A good Russian name.” Litvinov himself was of Jewish origin.

And as it was against the policy of the Foreign Ministry to send on an extended foreign diplomatic mission anyone who was unmarried, he would need to find a wife, and quickly.

Solomon Slepak remembered a girl he had known during his childhood and made immediate arrangements to visit his mother, who had survived the war and the Revolution. He had not been home since he had run away seventeen years before. His mother still lived in Kopys, some miles from Dubrovno, the small town of his Jewish beginnings.

Nothing of that journey home is recorded in the family chronicles: no conversations, no memories, no account of who was alive and who dead, of conditions in little Dubrovno and larger Kopys, about three miles away, of the consequences of the war and the Revolution on the region. And not a word about his mother.

All we are told is that he found the girl who had been his childhood friend. Black hair, brown eyes, and half a head taller than the short, stocky Solomon Slepak. She could read, was notably talkative, had no formal advanced education. Her name was Fanya. He asked her to marry him, and she accepted.

He returned with her to Moscow.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Foreign Ministry, while trying to obtain the required diplomatic documents for Solomon Slepak’s-or, more accurately, Semion Ignatievich’s-entry into Japan, had run into unexpected difficulties.

The Japanese, it turned out, knew precisely who he was and were decidedly unhappy about his coming. They had not forgotten the Bolshevik known as Sam, who had organized the uprising on Sakhalin Island and commanded the Red partisans on the mainland and slaughtered Ussuri Cossacks, allies of the Japanese in Siberia during the Russian Civil War. Clearly, the Japanese would not welcome a man who had been responsible for the defeat of their former allies and the deaths of so many of their own soldiers.

The Office of the People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs informed the Japanese Foreign Ministry that if the journalist Semion Ignatievich was not given proper credentials to enter Japan as a foreign correspondent, the three Japanese foreign correspondents then in Russia would be expelled immediately. The Japanese yielded.

Solomon Slepak and his wife traveled to Japan and arrived in Tokyo in late 1922. At first they lived in a hotel in Tokyo; then they moved to an apartment. As the sole representative in Japan of Soviet Russia, Solomon Slepak was treated as a quasi ambassador of the new Bolshevik country and invited to diplomatic functions. He received an audience with the emperor. Though ostensibly a journalist, he was nevertheless being accorded high diplomatic status. Was he permitted to transmit coded messages to Chicherin and Litvinov? Could he send and receive sealed mail?

The following year Fanya Slepak gave birth to a girl in a Japanese hospital. A difficult forceps delivery. The child was born dead.

On Monday, January 21, 1924, Vladimir Lenin died after the last of a series of strokes, without designating a successor. Trotsky had refused Lenin’s earlier offer of deputyship, in part out of concern that his taking such a high position would give the Soviet Union’s enemies a final justification for claiming that the country was controlled by Jews.

A war of succession broke out among Stalin, Trotsky, and others in the Politburo. At Stalin’s initiative, Lenin was embalmed and placed on permanent public display in a mausoleum on Red Square, an echo of the Russian Orthodox folk belief that the bodies of saints never decay, and a sign of proper continuity between Lenin and those who would succeed him in governing the Soviet state he had founded.

A small number of specialists in the art of embalming were formed into a group named the Immortalization Commission and given the task of preserving the mummified corpse. The city of Petrograd, once St. Petersburg, was renamed Leningrad.

That same year, 1924, Fanya Slepak gave birth to a second baby girl, whom the Slepaks named Rosa, after the German Communist leader Rosa Luxemburg. The delivery, which took place in a Japanese hospital, was again by forceps, marks of which the child bore until the age of three. The following year Fanya gave birth to twin boys. Both were delivered by forceps and born dead. Fanya told her husband that she thought the Japanese had tried to kill their second child and had successfully murdered the first child and the twins because of what Solomon and his army of partisans had done to them during the Civil War. When she became pregnant again, she insisted that the baby be born in the Soviet Union.

Solomon and Fanya Slepak and their little daughter, Rosa, returned to Moscow, where, on October 29, 1927, Fanya gave birth to a healthy boy, without the aid of forceps. They named the child Vladimir, after Vladimir Lenin, and called him Volodya.

Two months later, on December 27, 1927, the Fifteenth All-Union Congress of the Communist Party, meeting in Moscow, condemned deviation from the party line and removed Trotsky and his supporters from positions of importance-its way of acknowledging the power of a unified party and stifling all opposition to Stalin. Stalin’s rivals quickly recanted.

Solomon Slepak, living in Moscow at the time of the Fifteenth Congress and still working as a correspondent for Rosta, attended the sessions and witnessed Stalin’s ascent to power.

Some while later he was reassigned to China, again as a foreign correspondent. In mid-January 1928 the Slepak family boarded a train for the long journey from Moscow to Peking. And during that trip, little Volodya, two and a half months old, saved their lives.

It was a journey of nearly five thousand miles along the sweep of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, running from Moscow to Vladivostok. South of Chita the railway branched into two lines. Travelers could continue north and east through Russian territory to the city of Khabarovsk and then south on the single-track railbed to Vladivostok, or take the Russian-run Eastern Chinese Railroad through Manchuria east to Harbin and south to Peking.

Solomon and Fanya Slepak, with their little daughter and infant son, were taking the train through thousands of miles of snow-covered wasteland and winter forests and isolated villages to Harbin and Peking.

Harbin lay in the midst of vast swamps and grasslands-a grant of Manchurian land ceded by the Chinese to the Russians in 1896. Many who lived there had come from Russia to work on the railroad. Its population increased after the Revolution and in the twenties numbered about one hundred thousand. Relations between the Kremlin and Chiang Kai-shek were bad. Russian Whites and Chinese bands roamed the steppes, looting Soviet trains.

The train in which the Slepaks were riding came to a sudden stop some miles before Harbin. Armed Whites went through the cars, ordering everyone off. The passengers-Russians, Europeans, Chinese-stood in the cold, waiting for their papers to be checked. Bolsheviks and Jews were told to stand aside. Solomon Slepak, traveling under the name of Semion Ignatievich and carrying a Soviet passport and Tass credentials, was informed by the officer in command that he was a filthy Bolshevik whose party had brought ruin to Russia and was now trying to destroy China. The commander then ordered a young officer to take this Bolshevik filth and his family a distance from the train and shoot them.

The Slepaks began to move past the crowd of passengers, followed by the officer. The infant Volodya started crying. Fanya held him to her, keeping him warm, but his crying grew shrill, piercing. Some of the women among the passengers murmured at the officer. What sort of human being was he, killing an infant in the arms of its mother? Would such an inhuman act advance their cause and the nationalist cause of China? The murmurings grew louder, as did the shrill screams of the infant. The officer, some distance now from his commander, looked distraught. Somewhere weapons were fired: executions, no doubt. Near the Slepak family the crowd was turning restless, its murmurings louder, menacing. Abruptly the officer holstered his weapon, pushed Solomon Slepak and his wife and children into the crowd, and walked away. The crowd swallowed them, and soon they were back aboard the train and traveled without further incident to Harbin and Peking.

In Peking they lived in a brick cottage behind the brick walls of the Soviet compound, a large parklike area of private houses and office buildings set among trees and bushes. Near their cottage was a pavilion with Ping-Pong tables, a short distance behind the pavilion lay the tennis court, and not far from the front of the cottage were the gates to the compound. At the far end of the compound near the wall opposite those gates stood the main building containing the embassy offices and the apartments of the ambassador and other diplomats.

Front stairs brought one up to the veranda of the Slepak home; it in turn led to the living room into which opened the bedroom of Solomon and Fanya, as well as Solomons study. Each of the children had a private bedroom, and their two nannies slept in a room nearby. The staff, all Chinese, consisted of a cook, a maid, Solomons secretary-translator, whose Russian was perfect, and a courier. The courier rode a bicycle to deliver press releases from Solomon to Chinese and foreign press bureaus and to pick up newspapers and releases for Solomon. A stairway led from the rear hallway off the living room down to the basement, where there were storage rooms, the kitchen, and a room that contained a rotary press.

The apparent serenity inside the Soviet compound was a false mirror of events outside. China was experiencing its own savage civil war. Sun Yatsen had died in 1925, his dream of a united and Westernized China unfulfilled. Chiang Kai-shek, appointed by Sun to head the new Whampoa Military Academy set up to train the officer corps of the Kuomintang army, was now commander in chief of a military force that had begun to move north from Canton, subduing the countryside and predatory private armies. Chiang’s initial goals were the reunification of China and the birth of a new Western-oriented government led by the Kuomintang Party, which was at the time still dominated by Chinese Communists whose instructions issued from agents of the Comintern-Borodin and Dalin, among others.

Early in April 1927, about ten months before the arrival of the Slepak family, police had forcibly entered the Soviet Embassy in Peking and discovered documents that revealed the degree of Soviet infiltration into Chinese affairs under Borodin’s direction. Arrested on the premises were nineteen Chinese Communists, all of them later strangled to death for treason.

Some days later Chiang Kai-shek set out to break the hold of the Chinese Communists on the Kuomintang Party through a series of anti-Communist actions in many cities and a coup in Shanghai, where the first revolutionary Marxist cell-the nucleus of the future Chinese Communist Party-had been organized in May 1920. Chiang’s loyalties lay not with the Kremlin but with the bankers, merchants, and landlord families whose loans and revenue he needed. Communist unions and organizations were outlawed, hundreds of Chinese Communist leaders executed.

Among the Kremlin’s Chinese followers shot during this period of purging was Solomon Slepak’s personal secretary, the husband of Volodya’s nanny. That nanny saved Volodya from serious injury-indeed may have saved his life.

That is Volodya Slepak’s earliest memory: his life being saved. He is not quite three years old. His nanny is walking down the wooden stairs from the veranda of the cottage with little Volodya in her arms, he prattling in Chinese, when one of the steps suddenly gives way beneath her feet. She begins to tumble forward. Instinctively she raises the child over her head and plunges her foot deep into the splintering wood to steady herself and keep the child from falling headlong down the stairs to the ground. Her leg snaps.

His very first clear memory: swaying precariously in the air over the head of his Chinese nanny, and her muted cry.

The fabric of the years that follow is woven from little clues, from flashes of remembrance. Soon after the incident on the veranda, the family moved to the city of Mukden, some 350 miles northeast of Peking, where they lived in a large house with a flat roof inside a walled compound amid an expanse of flowers and trees. There were many servants. And Volodya’s nanny had come with them from Peking.

A community of Jews, dating from the twelfth century and made up mostly of merchants from Iran, had once existed in the Chinese city of K’ai-feng. The Chinese, lacking Christendoms perception of the Jew as the killer of Christ and the servant of Satan, lived on cordial terms with the Jews of K’ai-feng, whom they regarded as belonging to “the religion that extracts the sinews”-an allusion to one of the Jewish dietary laws which requires the removal of the network of blood vessels from the thigh of an animal before its meat may be eaten. Jews served in the Ming and Ch’ing dynasties as physicians, officials, and army officers, but in time they vanished, and by the end of the nineteenth century there were virtually none in China save for the small community in Shanghai led by the prosperous Sassoon and Hardoon and Kadoorie families, who made fortunes in transportation, construction, and banking. Then a new migration commenced after the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War. Many Jewish soldiers mustering out of the Russian Army chose to live in Harbin rather than return to tsarist Russia. The Chinese Eastern Railroad, built by the Russians, brought to Harbin European and Russian Jews as well as Jews from Siberia who had engaged in dairy production and cattle raising.

About ten thousand Jews lived in Harbin after 1917, and there were significant numbers of Jews in Tientsin, Mukden, and Shanghai. In photographs, we can see the staff of Bernstein and Sons in Tientsin, a company which exported furs from China to Europe and the United States; and teachers and students in the Skidelsky Talmud Torah in Harbin: skullcapped children, bearded elders, and on the blackboard, in Hebrew, the words “The study of Torah is good when accompanied by civility.”

The kindergarten Volodya attended in Mukden had probably been established by Russian Jews who had fled pogroms and the Revolution. Volodya recalls a Purim party he attended; the holiday celebrates the foiling of an ancient persecution of Jews planned by a Persian minister of state. An intriguing image: a Bolshevik sending his son to a Jewish kindergartens Purim revelry. Hadn’t Solomon Slepak left religion behind in Dubrovno and Kopys when he fled from home nearly thirty years before? Perhaps it was simply a good school for little children, and he regarded Purim as emblematic of his Bolshevik vision of universal equality and the end to bigotry.

One day in Mukden, Fanya Slepak and her children climbed to the roof of their house and stood looking out over the city. For a long time the streets were eerily silent and empty. Suddenly khaki-uniformed troops appeared everywhere and military police were directing army vehicles. In the distance a shell exploded, and there came the firecracker sounds of shooting. Bullets whistled past their heads. Fanya scooped up the children and ran with them down into the cellar of the house.

It was September 1931. On the pretext of protecting the tracks of their South Manchurian Railroad, the Japanese had invaded Manchuria and seized Mukden. They proclaimed the new state of Manchukuo in February 1932, and one month later, Solomon Slepak traveled to Harbin as a correspondent for Tass to attend the installation, as regent, of the last remaining member of the Manchu dynasty, Henry Pu Yi, a puppet of the Japanese. And that December, Solomon returned to Moscow to make his required two-year report to his chiefs. He visited his mother and remained in Russia through the following summer while his family enjoyed the beach at Pey-Tay-Ho near Port Arthur. The fair-skinned little Volodya came down with a bad case of sun poisoning. When Solomon returned to Mukden after the summer, he told the children he had been away so long because his mother had been ill and died and he had attended her funeral. Shortly after his return he and his family were ordered back to Peking, where they moved into the same house they had lived in before. At that time the Communists in China were being relentlessly rooted out and exterminated by Chiang Kai-shek. Young Volodya, attentive to his surroundings now, was aware of odd goings-on in the house: night meetings in his father’s study; doors and windows closed; hushed voices.

His nanny taught him Chinese songs. His sister, three years older than he, with curly brown hair and brown eyes, had her own circle of friends and saw little of her brother. He had a tricycle. In the pavilion were tables, chairs, a pool table, and he would watch the adults play. There were mulberry trees in the compound, and he would gather the berries and eat them. How his mother scolded him once when he smeared his shirt blue with berries! One day a wildcat got into the garden, and that evening he and his sister, while strolling through the compound, suddenly spotted it and watched with spine-tingling fear its swift leapings and glidings through the shadows. They raced back into the house. A wildcat in their garden! The thrill and dread of sharing a frightful secret.

His father enrolled Volodya in the American school for the children of diplomats, which his sister attended. There were some Chinese students in the school, but most were American. It was a good school, his father said. The best.

Volodya, who spoke Chinese as well as Russian, now began to learn English. And arithmetic. In school all morning. Home for lunch. More school in the afternoon. Classes, sports. Happy days.

In the spring of 1934 he suddenly fell ill. The doctors in the German hospital in Peking diagnosed the illness as amoebic dysentery. A swastika flew from the hospital flagpole, and a picture of Adolf Hitler hung on the wall behind the desk of the head nurse. The doctors spoke German.

Frightened by the hospital, Volodya told his father, “I don’t want to be here with fascists!”

His father said it was the best hospital in China.

That summer Solomon Slepak returned to Moscow. Volodya was in and out of the hospital, the German doctors unable to cure him. One of the doctors, Professor Krieg, a tall, grayish-blond man, with blue eyes behind gilded-frame glasses, told Fanya there was something in the food or water that was affecting the boy. He said he did not think the child would live and suggested that they consider leaving China.

In his hospital room, the seven-year-old Volodya lay very ill: diarrhea, blood and mucus in his feces, exhaustion. His nanny slept next to him on a narrow bed.

Fanya Slepak cabled her husband to inform him of Professor Kriegs advice. After a few days, Solomon cabled back: They were being transferred to Moscow.

Fanya cabled that she would not travel by train alone with the children through China. Solomon cabled that they were to go by boat to Kobe in Japan and from there by train to Tsuruga. A boat would then take them to Vladivostok, where they were to take the train to Moscow. The train traveled only through Russian territory. He would meet them when they arrived in Moscow.

Volodya vaguely recalls his parents’ large trunks filled with ivory sculptures, paintings, silks, Chinese kimonos, books. The trunks were sealed. In Kobe, Fanya Slepak, claiming diplomatic immunity, refused to open them for the Japanese customs inspectors. The stevedores dropped the trunks into the water and then fished them out. Still Fanya Slepak would not open them. As they left Kobe, the ships captain offered to clear a deck of all passengers so she could spread out the objects and let them dry. Politely she refused-embarrassed, perhaps, by the number of objects inside, their immense worth. The trunks traveled wet all the way to the Soviet Union. Many of the objects bore water marks all the years afterward.

After sailing from Japan, the boat docked in Vladivostok, where Volodya said good-bye to his Chinese nanny. Decades later he wrote: “My nanny was with me all my life in China-in Peking, Mukden, once more in Peking, at all seashores where we went every summer. She accompanied us on our way home to Russia through Japan, until we came to Vladivostok. We parted with her in Vladivostok. From there we went to Moscow and she went back to Peking. From that moment, I never heard from her or about her.”

Many years later Volodya asked his father why he had always been given diplomatic status in Asia when all the while he was only a correspondent. His father turned away and would not respond.

In Moscow, they moved into two rooms in a rented communal apartment on Petrovka Street, not far from the Hotel Lux. Four other families lived in the apartment. All shared a bathroom, kitchen, toilet. In the communal kitchen there were frequent quarrels among the women. Slowly, over the course of the next year, Volodya’s health improved.

Solomon Slepak, who had reclaimed his original name and was no longer Semion Ignatievich, was now working at Tass.

The agency had two departments: International Tass and Internal Tass. The former, the larger of the two, dealt with news and information concerning countries outside the Soviet Union; the latter, with domestic matters.

Solomon Slepak was deputy chief of International Tass. In 1936 Beriozov, the head of that department, was arrested by the secret police. Solomon became acting head. Beriozov was later shot.

The office had to be covered around the clock. Solomon worked twelve-hour shifts, alternating with his deputy, Kotsin, and reporting to the head of the Press Department of the Central Committee. Soon after Solomon became acting head, Daletsky, the director of Tass, who was a Jew, learned from his close friend Karakhan, also a Jew and a deputy minister of foreign affairs, that they were both about to be arrested. Daletsky shot himself in his office. Karakhan too committed suicide. The great purge had begun.

Decades later Solomon told Volodya that three years after the family left Peking, members of the Russian diplomatic staff who had served there began to be ordered back to Moscow. One by one, summoned for reassignment; and once back in Moscow, all were arrested, including Ambassador Bogomolov. Prolonged contact with foreigners, for whatever reason, had by then been made to carry an automatic presumption of guilt. Accused of counterrevolutionary activity and of spying for the Japanese, they were all shot.

That might have been the fate of Solomon Slepak as well had he and his family remained in Peking. But now, in Moscow, he went on working as acting head of International Tass, his many years in China inexplicably overlooked by Stalin and the secret police.

3 Cutting Down the Forest

There were uprisings in Spanish Morocco and parts of Spain in 1936, and the British Labour Party expressed its support of the JL faltering Spanish Republic while the British government remained uncommitted. With Hitler’s approval, twenty German transport planes flew to Spanish Morocco to airlift General Franco’s Army of Africa into Seville. It had been Franco’s idea, the first such use of aircraft in history. Granada fell to Franco, and the Comintern agreed to help the Republic. The Spanish Civil War began in earnest.

That summer a Spanish soccer team arrived in Moscow to play a Russian team called Spartak. Solomon Slepak took nine-year-old Volodya to the game. In the stadium before the start of the game, a party leader spoke of the menace of fascism and General Franco, and a worker representative praised the courage of the Republican forces. The Soviet team won. That was the only time Solomon Slepak took his son to a sports event.

The Slepak family lived then on Petroverigsky Pereulok, having moved in the spring of 1935 from their rooms on Petrovka Street. The city still bore a gray and grimy look; many of its buildings stood half crumbled. There were few automobiles on the streets; people traveled mostly by tram. Many streets were being paved over with asphalt. The first line of the Metro had been completed the previous year. Only in the center of the city was there electricity. Most people cooked their food on kerosene stoves. Many homes were heated with firewood taken from torn-down wooden houses, but the apartments in which the Slepak family lived had central heating and hot water. There were no landlords in the Soviet Union; one obtained an apartment from the government and paid rent to the government. The Slepaks occupied rooms assigned to people who were working abroad for Tass for a year or two. Thus they moved five times during the decade of the thirties until, in 1940, they settled into an apartment on Gorky Street-as of 1936, the new name of Tverskaya Street. (In 1992 it again became Tverskaya.) There they lived until 1986.

The family often went to the movies. Volodya remembers seeing, among numerous other films, Zlatie Gory (“ Golden Mountains ”), Tzirk (“Circus”), Iskateli Shastia (“Seekers of Good Luck”), Vratar (“Goalkeeper”). They attended the Bolshoi Theater. Bolshoi tickets were difficult to obtain, but Solomon Slepak had connections and tickets were somehow always available to him, and the family saw with much pleasure the operas Carmen, Rigoletto, Eugene Onegin, and Snow Maiden and the ballets Swan Lake and Nutcracker. They visited the city zoo and went several times to the Moscow Circus, where they delighted in the clowns, gymnasts, jugglers, lions, tigers, elephants, and Russian bears.

From the time he became acting head of International Tass and began to work twelve-hour days, Solomon Slepak seldom saw his family on weekdays. He and his wife woke around six-thirty in the morning; Volodya and his sister, Rosa, a half hour later. Breakfast consisted of eggs or porridge, on occasion sausages, cheese, salad, tea. Solomon especially liked wild strawberry jam. Volodya and Rosa ate lunch in school, where they bought salad and tea and ate the sandwiches they brought from home. For dinner Fanya served soup and then meat or fish with potatoes and cooked grains. Food rationing had ended in 1934, but there was barely enough food in the regular city shops; people were happy to obtain bread and potatoes. The Slepaks ate better than most Russians did because they had returned from China with American dollars. Soviet citizens who worked abroad in the 1930s received part of their salary in rubles, deposited to their savings accounts in Russia, and part in American dollars, which they used abroad; they were permitted to bring back their savings in American dollars and shop in special stores that sold food to foreigners and Russians for hard currency. On most weekdays Solomon ate supper in the Tass cafeteria. “Your father is very busy,” Fanya told the children. “He is doing important work.”

Even in the summers he was busy. But sometimes the family rented a dacha outside Moscow, and Volodya and Rosa would swim in a nearby lake and walk through the forests of pines, firs, birches, and mountain ashes and pick berries with their parents. Solomon would swim, too, and take long walks alone in the forests and fields. Sometimes after a meal he relaxed in an armchair with a book. At times friends would visit.

For two years they rented a dacha very close to the dacha of Gregory Voitinsky and his family, whom they saw every day Two middle-aged Bolsheviks talking quietly about-what? Old times in China? And guardedly, and only when absolutely certain they were alone, about the current nightmarish time in their homeland? Voitinsky was teaching then in the Department of Far Eastern Studies at Moscow University. Good memories, those weeks of summer in the dachas away from Moscow.

In the fall of 1936 the Slepaks moved to Neopalimovsky Pereulok, and a year later they moved again, to Bolshaya Serpukhovskaya Street. One of the apartments in which they rented rooms was occupied by two women who, because their husbands had been arrested, were suddenly bereft of all economic support; their own incomes left them with far less than they needed to survive. They had decided to rent part of their apartment, and the Slepaks were their first tenants. The women could often be heard crying in their room.

Volodya’s first school was on Starosadsky Pereulok, not far from where he lived on Petroverigsky Pereulok. Schools had no names, only numbers: his was number 329. Because of a citywide shortage of school buildings, there were two shifts for the school’s total student body of about eight hundred. When a school building was completed nearby, half the students of school 329, including Volodya but not his sister, were sent to the new building, number 617. It was a four-story brick building located on Spasoglinishchevsky Pereulok (now Arkhipova Street) opposite the Moscow synagogue, the city’s only remaining Jewish house of worship. For Volodya the synagogue was connected “not with Jewishness but with religion,” and as he had no interest at the time in anything religious, he has no recollection of ever seeing anyone entering or leaving it. Today school 617 is a hospital.

Most of the teachers in the schools Volodya attended were the sons and daughters of illiterate peasants, the very first educated peasant generation. He studied arithmetic, Russian language, Russian literature, geography, natural science, history There were about thirty to forty students in each classroom. The walls were painted a light color; a blackboard covered the wall behind the teacher’s chair and table. In almost every room there was a photograph of Stalin above the blackboard, and in some rooms, of Lenin too. Every student was required to join the Young Pioneers at the age of ten. They wore red ties and marched with red flags and attended meetings at which one of the teachers, a party member, spoke about events in the Soviet Union; about the international bourgeoisie who were the enemies of the people; about the fascists in Hitler’s Germany who persecuted the Communists, arrested them, sent them off to concentration camps, shot them. No one ever mentioned the Jews.

Two of the apartments into which the Slepaks moved-on Neopalimovsky Pereulok and Bolshaya Serpukhovskaya Street-were quite far from the schools Volodya and Rosa attended. Solomon Slepak took them along every day in the Tass car that brought him to and from his office, at that time on Armiansky Pereulok. From there the children would walk the rest of the way to school so no one would spot them using the car. Solomon insisted that they continue to attend those schools despite their distance from where the family now lived; they were among the best schools in Moscow, he said.

On occasion Volodya caught the word zhid directed at him by certain students, and ignored it. The first time he had heard the word, he asked his father what it meant, and his father explained that it was a bad word used by ignorant and misguided persons as a nasty and crude description of the Jews, an ancient and honorable Mediterranean people who had been persecuted all through history and to whom their family belonged, and, his father went on, when the dream of a perfect Communist state came true, that persecution would end and all the peoples of the Soviet Union would live in harmony as one great nation and as a sign to the entire world that Comrade Stalin and the Communist Party had finally put an end to religious hatred and bigotry.

Volodya was about eight or nine at the time. A Jew! He was a Jew! Apparently he had forgotten the Purim celebration he had attended in Mukden years before. Then again, perhaps there was nothing especially Jewish about that event; it may have been merely another party, unremarkable save for the costumes and the clamor.

There was no organized Jewish community in Moscow when Volodya discovered that he was a Jew.

Lenin had detested anti-Semitism. He thought it contrary to the socialist ideal of equality and believed, with Karl Marx, that the Jews would have assimilated and disappeared long since had it not been for the persecutions to which they were endlessly subjected. Indeed, he had approved the decree of the July 1918 Council of People’s Commissars condemning anti-Semitism as “fatal to the interests of the workers’ and the peasants’ revolution” and instructing all Soviet deputies “to take uncompromising measures to tear the anti-Semitic movement out by the roots.”

But Jewish Communists had other notions about the future of Judaism in revolutionary Russia. At the June 1918 Second Conference of the Jewish Communist Sections, the Evsektsia, in Moscow, they resolved that the “Zionist Party plays a counterrevolutionary role” by hindering the penetration of Communist ideas among the toiling Jewish masses. They urged “the promulgation of a decree suspending all activities of the Zionist Party” and concluded that the “communal organs, which are the mainstay of all reactionary forces within the Jewish people, must be suppressed.”

Lenin’s government immediately adopted the resolution. Two leaders of the Jewish Commissariat, Simon Dimanstein and Samuel Agursky-the former a onetime yeshiva student, rabbi, and Lubavitcher Hasid-were appointed to the task of tearing down the Jewish community.

In June 1919 the government issued a decree closing all Jewish establishments. The decree carried the signatures of Samuel Agursky and Joseph Stalin. Most synagogues were padlocked or turned into Communist clubs, schools, dining halls; their possessions became the property of the Soviet state. There is a photograph of a pile of Torah scrolls from desecrated Russian synagogues, and it is difficult not to wonder if somewhere in that heap there might be the scroll whose completion was once celebrated with music and recorded in the photograph of Dubrovno Jews assembled before the Ark in their synagogue. Youngsters under the age of eighteen were forbidden to receive religious education outside their homes and required to attend classes in which communism would be taught. The Zionist movement, which had once numbered about three hundred thousand Jews, was banned. Religious officials-now regarded as “declassed members of society,” individuals without civil rights-found it difficult to secure housing, jobs, food rations, and the admission of their children to schools. Circumcision-illegal. Marriage and divorce laws-repealed. The Hebrew language-suppressed. Jews were even warned against kissing the Torah; it was unhygienic. A secular Yiddish culture was what the Jewish Communists wanted for the Jews of Soviet Russia. Yiddish elementary schools; Yiddish newspapers and journals; Yiddish to be spoken at the meetings of the Jewish soviets. The Jews were to be a nationality culture, with Yiddish as their language, socialism as their secular religion.

The campaign to cripple Judaism and assimilate the Jews into Communist culture was waged by Communist Jews; non-Jews did not participate in it. It was a Jewish civil war, brutal and unrelenting.

Hastening the process of assimilation was the breakup of cohesive Jewish townlets and the displacement of Jews into Moscow and Leningrad as a result of the World War, the Civil War, and the pogroms in the Ukraine and White Russia. It is estimated that in the 1930s more than 3 percent of Moscow’s population of four to five million people was Jewish. To accelerate the process even further, Lenin urged the Jews to colonize certain areas of Russia, and thousands went. Some of the colonies were funded in part by the American Joint Distribution Committee, which had been established during World War I to bring aid to distressed European Jews. There are many photographs of Jews in those agricultural colonies: They shear sheep near Odessa; they eat breakfast in the fields of the Ukraine; they are on their way to a meeting in the Crimea; they live in temporary barracks; they raise pigs, as a way of demonstrating their rupture with the Jewish religion; they drive a John Deere tractor; they celebrate May Day.

But few Jews seemed interested in becoming part of a Yiddish-speaking nationality or in colonizing Russian land. Most secular Jews preferred assimilation into Russian high culture. In only a few years the intermarriage rate of Jews in the heart of the Soviet Union reached 25 percent. Zionists and religious Jews quickly came to regard Communist rule as a grim continuation of the repressive regime of the tsars. Indeed, many Jews believed themselves worse off under the Communists than they had been under the cruelest of the tsars.

Economic conditions had improved somewhat in the years after the emergency period known as War Communism and the devastating famine of the early 1920s. When the guns of the Civil War finally went silent at the end of 1920, Lenin had gazed upon widespread rebellions, strikes, hunger, and the shambles of the Soviet economy-a declining harvest, rampant inflation, industrial production at 13 percent of the prewar level-and had begun a reluctant retreat from pure ideological communism. In the spring of 1921, after a number of stumbling moves, he instituted his New Economic Policy: Peasants were now subject to standard taxes rather than to cruel outright requisitions; small businessmen could hire workers and freely trade the goods they produced; one could buy and sell urban property, enter the field of publishing, establish and take part in privatized retail trade. Gradually rationing was abolished, and the economy began to recover. A photograph of an open market during the period of the New Economic Policy, from 1921 to 1928, shows stalls bulging with produce. Most Soviet citizens-workers, peasants, small businessmen-seemed to benefit from the new policy. Jews, about one-third of them “declassed” because they had been artisans, small merchants, and craftsmen, found the policy a boon to their broken lives. But Bolsheviks like Zinoviev worried that the reappearance of private enterprise might destabilize political control and made a point of declaring that the New Economic Policy was nothing more than “a temporary deviation, a tactical retreat.”

Lenin’s policy regarding the Jews-the destruction of their institutions and their total assimilation-was followed and intensified by Stalin. The Comintern’s failure to incite revolution throughout the capitalist world led Stalin to a new interpretation of communism: the continuing development of socialism in one country, the Soviet Union. Those who opposed him in his clash with the internationalist-minded Trotsky-Kamenev, Zinoviev, and others-he took to calling “rootless cosmopolitans”-that is, party members who cared more for socialism in other countries than in their own: Stalin’s way of calling someone a Jew without sounding like a tsarist anti-Semite. At the same time, Jews were among Stalin’s most loyal adherents; one among them, Lazar Kaganovich, headed the first Five-Year Plan’s pitiless effort to forcibly collectivize the peasants of the Ukraine. Thus the urban Russian hated Jews because they were “rootless cosmopolitans”; the rural peasant hated them because they were ruthless oppressors. Speculators, petty traders, parasites, Bolshevik overlords, made up the image of the Jew in the eyes of most Russians.

In 1928 Stalin initiated an effort to settle Jews inside their own autonomous province in distant Birobidzhan, 23,321 square miles of territory near Manchuria, 8,000 miles from Moscow, and near the region of Solomon Slepak’s forays into mainland Asia. It was a harsh, primitive land, ridden with disease, insects, rains. At its height, in the late 1930s, the Jewish autonomous region had 128 Jewish elementary schools with Yiddish as the language of instruction, a daily Yiddish newspaper, a medical school, a music school, and 27 Jewish state and collective farms. But little came of the effort. Crippled early on by the unwillingness of Jews to be concentrated in one area-particularly so distant from the centers of culture-it was further weakened by the purges of the 1930s, during which many of its leaders, accused of being Trotskyites, nationalists, and Zionists, were imprisoned, exiled, executed. By the end of the 1960s Jewish Birobidzhan was dead.

Stalin ended the New Economic Policy in 1928 with his first Five-Year Plan to industrialize Russia on a massive scale and collectivize its agriculture. For that enormous effort a vast pool of highly trained workers was necessary, Townlet Jews and village peasants poured into the cities and entered the work force.

A photograph shows a group of young Jews in a workshop for the training of metal laborers seated in front of a large portrait of Stalin, who is wearing a white army-style jacket and holding a cigarette in his left hand. By the end of that first Five-Year Plan, more than a million Jews had become wage earners who worked with their hands, and salaried bookkeepers, teachers, engineers. Gone were all the tsarist restrictions that had barred Jews from entering higher education and the professions. In 1934-1935, the Slepak family’s first year in Moscow after their return from China because of Volodya’s dysentery, fully 18 percent of the graduate student population of Russia was Jewish.

Russian Jewry was dissolving into the larger body of the land and its culture. Battered from without by the Communist Jews of the Evsektsia, weakened from within by Jews no longer willing to take on the burdens of an ancient tradition and fearful of being branded Trotskyites or Mensheviks, the Jewish religion and its institutions vanished or went underground. So successful did Stalin think the anti-Jewish program to have been that by the mid-1930s he was certain that the young generation of Jews knew nothing of Judaism. And he was in no small measure correct.

About a decade and a half had passed from the time of the initial promulgation of those anti-Jewish decrees to that day when young Volodya discovered his Jewishness. The family chronicles record his bewilderment on learning that he was a Jew, on being so defined by others, by those who clearly hated him. They tell of his anger and shame. And his sudden fear.

In school Volodya began to notice that some classmates would suddenly become strangely sad and withdrawn. They stood alone in the play yard; they were never called on in class; they sat silent and shriveled at their desks. After some time they disappeared. Somehow everyone in the school knew not to talk about them.

Volodya told his father about the vanishing students. Solomon Slepak explained that a new organization of secret political police had been established-the NKVD. It was made up of people who were cleverer and more talented than those in the previous political police forces, the Cheka and the GPU, and the NKVD was uncovering spies, enemies, and traitors who had not been discovered before. Those so uncovered were being arrested and sent away, together with their families.

One day Volodya saw his father remove some books from a shelf and toss them into the garbage; the authors had been arrested. Another time his father took down a history of the Russian Civil War and proceeded to ink out the photographs of Trotsky and others. In school Volodya’s teachers told the students to tear out the pictures of this or that person who had just been discovered to be an imperialist spy. At home one day his father expunged with India ink faces of friends and relatives in their family album-all had been arrested. The features of Ambassador Bogomolov, with whom Solomon Slepak had served in China-erased. Volodya thought it a good thing that all those spies and traitors were being uncovered; now Russia would live safely without enemies.

His uncle Konstantin Shur, once Yosef Shur, was a tall, strong, jolly man whom the Slepaks often visited in his apartment. He was a member of the Communist Party and the director of the Soviet government’s Department of Weights and Measures. Fanya Slepak’s brother. He would toss Volodya up in the air, catch him, toss him up again. He had a wife and children, and the families were together often. Once some weeks went by and Volodya asked, “Where is Uncle Konstantin?” His father said, “Uncle Konstantin was arrested. He was a member of a hostile conspiracy. Don’t ask about him; don’t talk about him.” Volodya, then about ten, obeyed and put his uncle out of mind and never saw him or his family again.

Fear hung in the air. People avoided looking into one another’s eyes. Deep silences lay heavily upon food lines in stores, crowds in trams, workers in office buildings, dwellers in apartment houses.

The first time Volodya saw a photograph of Stalin was in the Russian Embassy building on the compound in Peking where he spent much of his early childhood. Almost all photographs of Stalin portrayed him in a khaki or white army-style jacket. Sometimes he was shown holding a smiling little girl. Volodya knew, of course, that Stalin was the leader of Russia, but he was five or six at the time and has no memory of how he reacted to his first look at the leader’s face.

During his early school years in Moscow, Volodya read regularly the newspaper for youth, Pionerskaya Pravda, with its stories about Young Pioneers who helped catch spies, aided the old and sick, took part in harvesting. Many photographs of Stalin appeared in the pages of the paper, especially on occasions that marked Soviet or Communist Party anniversaries. The face in the photographs was never truly that of the leader, whose features were marked with smallpox scars always skillfully touched up by the photographers. And never actually shown was his withered left arm, the result of blood poisoning from a serious childhood injury. He had come from a life of terrible poverty in eastern Georgia. His father was a cobbler and a violent drunk, who often beat his wife and son; his mother was a peasant. In his youth he attended a seminary where he encountered, among the students, Georgian nationalism and a hatred of tsarist authority. An assiduous reader with a good memory, he was introduced by fellow students to the writings of Darwin and Lenin, as well as to the work of Plekhanov, who had insinuated the thought of Karl Marx into Russia. Stalin left the seminary in 1899 at the age of twenty and entered the ranks of professional revolutionaries. Into his blood and bones had penetrated a bitterness at the oppressions of the tsar, the capitalist, the landlord. He organized strikes and demonstrations, planned a number of bank robberies to help finance the Revolution, and wrote articles in which he agreed with Lenin’s view that among the party’s tasks was the need to “arm the people locally… to organize workshops for the manufacture of different kinds of explosives, to draw up plans for seizing state and private stores of arms and arsenals.” The articles brought him to the attention of Lenin, who had urged the use of plundered funds in the waging of the Revolution. Eight times arrested and seven times exiled, Stalin managed to escape from each exile except the last-from which he was released soon after the abdication of Nicholas II. Together with Trotsky, he stood at Lenin’s side during the early years of the Revolution, then outmaneuvered Trotsky in the struggle for leadership of the party after Lenin died in 1924. He was now ruler of a tumultuous and suffering Russia, which he was attempting to subdue to his own vision of communism and a centralized party.

Much of that vision involved crushing all opposition to his plans for collectivization, industrialization, and total control of the party. In this he followed closely the path set by Lenin-with a singular exception. No matter how bitter the quarrels within the inner circle, Lenin had never turned against those inside the party, especially his old comrades, the Bolsheviks who had created the Revolution. But Stalin saw in those very Bolsheviks-Ryutin, Radek, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, and others -his most dangerous enemies, who had often aligned themselves against him in heated inner party debates. From 1930 to 1933 three attempts by high party officials to remove him failed. Most in the inner circle saw him as the only one who could lead the country and preferred the possibility of despotism under his rule to the probability of anarchy and the collapse of the Revolution were he to be ousted from power. Stalin failed in his effort to have Ryutin, who had instigated the second and third attempts to remove him, sentenced to death for political offenses. The Politburo hesitated, resisted, shied away from the arrests and executions of loyal party members. Sergei Kirov, a popular party leader, an excellent speaker, and the boss of the Leningrad party, argued strongly against the death penalty for Ryutin and persuaded others in the Politburo to oppose Stalin. Only Kaganovich sided with Stalin.

That reluctance dissolved with the December 1, 1934, murder of Kirov-a deed, it is now believed, Stalin himself arranged through the head of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda. The assassination of Kirov at the hands of a lone gunman in the offices of the Leningrad Soviet provided Stalin with all the weapons he needed against his actual and perceived enemies in the party. When news of the assassination reached the Kremlin, Stalin, together with Molotov and Yagoda, took the overnight train from Moscow to Leningrad. A blizzard of edicts and arrest orders issued forth from Stalin, with the swift and automatic approval of the Politburo-among them, an immediate death penalty for terrorists, with no possibility of pardon.

There took place in the wake of the Kirov assassination a paroxysm of shootings, as well as deportations to Siberia and the Arctic: from Leningrad alone, between thirty and forty thousand men and women in only a few months. The assassin, Nikolayev, a misfit who had been unable to find a job and bore a deep personal grudge against Kirov and the Leningrad party, was tried and executed. Also arrested were former leaders of the Leningrad party, among them Zinoviev and Kamenev, Stalin’s opponents. The two Old Bolsheviks, makers of the Revolution and leaders of the party, were sent to prison.

In March 1935, death with no possibility of pardon became the penalty for espionage or for flight abroad. All the members of a family were now to be held responsible for the crime of any one of them; even those who had been entirely unaware of a crime could be sent into exile. And in April 1935 children from the age of twelve were made subject to the death penalty.

Kamenev and Zinoviev were brought back from prison in 1936 to stand trial, and were then shot. In 1938, it was the turn of Bukharin, Rykov, Radek, and eighteen others-of the sixteen condemned to death, twelve were Jews. Among those shot in 1938 was the NKVD head, Yagoda, who had suddenly been arrested in 1936 and replaced by Nicholas Yezhov, one of the most repellent officials in all of Russian history, who was himself removed from his post in 1938 and replaced by Lavrenti Beria. From 1937 to 1940 there took place the trials and executions of eight commanders of the armed forces. One was Marshal Michael Tukhachevsky, who had denounced Stalin for a tactical blunder in 1920 that had cost the Bolsheviks the chance of victory in the war against Poland; Stalin seemed never to forget his detractors, bore his grudges against them forever. And on the very eve of the Second World War came the NKVD shootings of about forty thousand officers accused of plotting against Stalin.

Like a ponderous black glacier, the terror moved across the Soviet landscape, through cities and countryside, through every organization and branch of the party and government; the heads of industries, leaders in the republics, scientists and engineers, writers like Maxim Gorky and Isaac Babel among numerous others, poets like Osip Mandelstam, to the families of the accused, their distant relatives, friends, associates. Millions were arrested. Most of those who ended up in the labor camps were utterly confounded by the evil destiny that had shattered their lives; many believed that Stalin was unaware of what was going on, that it was all the doing of the sinister officials who ran the NKVD. For Stalin had cleverly distanced himself from the terror. He moved his offices from the building of the Central Committee on Staraya Square to new quarters behind the walls of the Kremlin; he ceased delivering major speeches; from 1937 to 1939 he did not appear in public save on rare occasions. Few were aware of his regular meetings with Yezhov, and that the terror was of his making.

And so the land lay atomized, all in fear of all, in a miasma of dread, with no possibility of organized resistance because the terror struck at individuals, each instance of it a separate and personal experience-the knock on the door, the abrupt arrest, the sense of shocked disbelief, the certainty that an error had been made and would soon be corrected-and everyone thinking, Don’t look, don’t listen, don’t ask, how do I know, maybe he really was a spy, I’m not doing anything wrong, it won’t touch me. People were terrified of intriguers, provocateurs, denouncers, even of their closest relatives and friends, who could be arrested, jailed, threatened, turned into informers.

It is believed that between 1929 and 1940 seventeen million Russians perished, seven million of them peasants who died in the 1932-1933 famine, and three million from forced collectivization. An additional nine million were in the Gulag, which is the Russian acronym for a department of the secret police called The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps, the system of imprisonment of the “enemies of the people” begun by the Cheka under Lenin. Stalin probably killed more Russians during the 1930s than Hitler did during the Second World War.

Yet some survived: Maxim Litvinov, who slept with a revolver under his pillow so that he could shoot himself if arrested. Vyacheslav Molotov. Lazar Kaganovich. Nikita Khrushchev.

And Solomon Slepak.

One might gaze with a certain smugness upon the slaughter of Communist kingpins at the hands of their own leader were it not for the suffering the terror brought to so many innocent Russians-the blameless family members and nonparty people slain; the many tens of thousands of ordinary people who perished; the hell-on-earth of the Gulag; the unmarked mass burial sites recently uncovered near Minsk, Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk, Kiev. Power was what Stalin wanted; vengeance for real and imagined opposition. And power over a terrified and anguished people was what he got-and held to the day he died.

Yet not everyone suffered. To enable Stalin to accomplish what he did required the cooperation of millions of Soviet citizens: from those in the Politburo to the NKVD to the legal system to the bureaucrats to the prison and labor camp guards. A photograph of a Leningrad café, taken in 1937, brings us into a sunny scene: Men in shirtsleeves and women in summer dresses sit about on wicker chairs along a riverbank, probably the Neva. Cloth-covered tables. Bottles of fruit juice, mineral water, beer, glasses of tea. A waiter in a white jacket and bow tie, a woman wearing a necklace, men bareheaded or with walking caps. Only three men out of the more than thirty people present are wearing soldier’s uniforms. Trees and boats and riverfront homes along the opposite shore. A Russian idyll, a languorous moment in a Chekhovian landscape, a green calm surrounded by a bleeding land.

For many Russians the 1930s under Stalin was a time when life was actually improving. The two Five-Year Plans had wrenched the country out of its crippling illiteracy and agrarian backwardness and turned it into a largely literate, urban, industrial society. Millions of citizens worked very hard, received an education, sacrificed willingly for the Motherland-they were calling it that after 1934-and felt themselves economically well rewarded.

One day Solomon Slepak read in Pravda of the arrest and trial and sentencing of Karl Radek, one of the members of the original Politburo, and expressed astonishment to his family that the man he had known personally for years had all along been a spy. How fortunate the country was that he had been found out. He never talked of Radek again.

His major responsibility at Tass was to present daily to Stalin and the Politburo a digest of the foreign press. As well as to gather press information from all over the world, censor it, and disseminate it to the Russian people.

In 1938 Tass acquired a new director, a man named Khavinson, with whom Solomon Slepak soon found himself embroiled in endless quarrels. After some while he requested from the Central Committee a transfer out of Tass. A dangerous step: No one had the right then to quit a job; the punishment could be arrest and years in a labor camp. Mysteriously, permission was granted.

He left Tass and took a job as senior editor-that is, head censor-of a publishing house specializing in literary and nonfiction works designated for translation. He knew eleven languages well and was fluent in eight: Russian, Yiddish, English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish. His was the decision which Russian books would be translated into foreign languages, and which books written by foreign writers would be published in the Soviet Union in the original languages. He supervised the publication in the USSR of the works of Theodore Dreiser.

Late one night in the winter of 1938, after Solomon had left Tass, he suddenly woke and, wearing his pajamas and robe, went to the door of the apartment, where he stood listening. (The apartment building was occupied entirely by those who worked for Tass; soon thereafter the Slepaks would leave it for their permanent home on Gorky Street.) That night, as Solomon stood at the door, Volodya woke and came out of his room and saw his father. When the boy asked what was wrong, Solomon silenced him, and Volodya, then ten years old, realized with astonishment that his father was frightened. After a while, Solomon told his son to go back to bed. Minutes later, Volodya heard his father return to his room.

Years later, his father explained that he had been afraid of being arrested. “But you were a member of the party!” Volodya said. “Sometimes,” his father replied, “a disease requires that healthy tissue also be cut away.” In order to be sure that all the enemies of the state were removed, Solomon Slepak quietly told his son, the NKVD would arrest all those close to the enemies. He himself, he said, had been very close to many who were later seen to be enemies; the NKVD might think he was involved with them. Even individuals who had once served with the secret police were arrested.

Solomon Slepak, loyal Old Bolshevik, waiting nights at his apartment door for the knock of the NKVD and the words “You are under arrest.”

When Nicholas Yezhov, a dwarfish man who was living proof of the Russian proverb “Out of filth you can make a prince,” replaced Genrikh Yagoda as head of the NKVD in 1936, he gave a talk to a number of his top officers and spoke of the many innocent victims who were bound to be caught up in their great effort to rid the country of spies and traitors. “Better that ten innocent people should suffer,” he said, “than one spy get away. When you cut down the forest, woodchips fly.”

Why wasn’t Solomon Slepak one of the savaged trees?

Walking with his grandson one day in the late 1950s, he ran into the former secretary of the party organization at Tass, who seemed surprised to see him.

He asked Solomon, “When were you released?”

“I wasn’t arrested,” Solomon replied.

The man looked astonished. “I saw a list of Tass people who were to be arrested. You were on the list.”

It turned out that the list had been drawn up soon after Solomon Slepak had left Tass. The man in Tass responsible for the addresses of those on the list had telephoned the NKVD and reported that Slepak no longer worked there. He was told to write “No longer works here” after Slepak’s name. All the others on the list were arrested and shot.

Was he spared only through bureaucratic ineptness, sheer chance, repeated fortuitous slippings through the cracks? Did he have a sixth, saving, sense of danger that kept him always a step ahead of the secret police, staying one level below those in visible power, knowing when to leave a post? Was he perhaps in possession of ruinous information about those in power?

One of Solomon Slepak’s closest friends was a man named Vassily Gorshkov, who had fought under him in the Lake Baikal region of Asia during the Civil War. He was a tall, strong man, with a deep scar across his head from a war wound. Life-loving, uneducated, always laughing. He often played with Volodya. Suddenly he disappeared, and was no longer talked of by the family.

One day in the mid-1950s there was a knock on the door to the apartment, and Volodya’s mother went to open it. In the doorway stood a white-haired man, bent, leaning heavily on a cane. He peered intently at Fanya Slepak.

“Dont you recognize me?”

“No.”

“I’m Vassily.” He seemed a broken old man.

“Vassily? Come in.”

He entered and stood a moment, gazing around. He asked quietly, “Are you receiving a pension for your husband? When was his reputation restored?”

“There is no pension. My husband is alive.”

“Sam is alive?” He looked bewildered.

“Yes.”

“Where is he?”

“He went out to buy bread.”

“When was he released?”

“He wasn’t arrested.”

“But how is that possible? The main accusation against me was my link to the Japanese spy Slepak. I was sure Sam was in the next cell.”

No one seemed to know why Solomon Slepak was not arrested in the purges of the thirties.

In August 1939 Soviet Russia’s Foreign Minister Molotov and Nazi Germany’s Foreign Minister Ribbentrop signed the German-Soviet non-aggression pact in Moscow, stunning the world. Each party to the treaty was to remain neutral should the other be attacked by a third party.

The two countries also secretly carved out spheres of influence in Central and Eastern Europe. The eastern half of Poland would go to the Russians, as would Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and Bessarabia. Now Germans could travel to Moscow as tourists, saunter about on Soviet streets, take in the sights.

How explain to twelve-year-old Volodya this sudden peace with the hated fascist enemy?

Solomon Slepak told his son that the Germans had begun to change in the direction of socialism and were now good enough to live with in peace. He spoke with wholehearted earnestness, and his son believed him.

On June 22, 1941, the Slepak family woke late, their custom on a Sunday morning. They sat around the table, eating breakfast, and did not turn on the radio. The doorbell rang. It was Volodya’s cousin Israel Dag-man, his father’s nephew, in Moscow on a business trip. He was invited to have breakfast with the family, and Solomon asked him casually about his life, his plans. Israel Dagman said that the family was fine, but what kind of plans could he make after today’s events? What events? Solomon asked. Looking very surprised, Israel Dagman said that early in the morning German planes had begun to bomb Russian towns and cities, and German troops had crossed the frontier and were inside Russian territory. Solomon Slepak’s face darkened. He switched on the radio, and they sat listening to the news of the war between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.

Believing the assurances that emanated day after day from the radio, Volodya was convinced that the war would be over in two or three weeks, with the Red Army victorious. But soon Leningrad was nearly entirely encircled by one German army, while a second was advancing on Moscow, and a third was swallowing up the Ukraine and the Crimea and approaching the Caucasus. And then, a few weeks after the start of the war, there came the startling announcement that the children of Moscow were to be evacuated.

On a sunny day in August, Volodya went with his sister, Rosa, and his parents to the railway station, which was crowded with children and parents. He and Rosa parted from their parents and boarded a special train for the students of the Krasnogvardeysky district of Moscow. To the children aboard the train it all felt like an outing, a trip to a summer camp for Young Pioneers; they would all be back in one, at most two, months. All the parents waving to their children from the station platform seemed oddly serious.

The train was soon out of Moscow. Many hours of travel went by until it arrived in the town of Shilovo in Ryazanskaya Province, where the children boarded trucks that distributed them among several nearby villages.

The truck that carried Volodya and his sister and other children, together with some parents and teachers from the Moscow school, took them to the small village of Iritzy, about fifty houses along the sides of a dirt road that was a ribbon of dust in dry days and mud in the rain. Behind every house was a little vegetable garden. Some of the children were placed in empty houses; others, with peasant families. A dining room was organized, as well as a medical aid station staffed by a Dr. Abram Bogorad and a nurse. There was no shortage of food. The children worked in the fields, gathering hay, harvesting.

In September they all moved to the larger village of Timoshkino, where there was a high school in which they attended classes. In October they began to hear artillery fire. The German Army was suddenly only a short distance away! Urgently the children were moved back to the town of Shilovo, which had a landing stage on the Oka River. They were quickly put on a boat.

More than three thousand people were on the boat, which normally carried no more than a few hundred. Younger children like Volodya were placed in the hold; older ones like Rosa slept on the open deck. Rosa had contracted malaria. There was little fresh water on board and no one could bathe, and soon there was an outbreak of lice. Twice a day the children were served hot tea; all the other food was cold. The boat took them down the Oka and then east along the Volga and northeast on the Kama. For most of the journey dense forests lined the riverbanks, broken at times by flat fields that extended to the distant horizons. Volodya kept wondering why the war wasn’t over yet, how the Germans had advanced so deep into Russia; the radio had spoken with such confidence about the power of the Red Army! The adults, when questioned by the children, explained that the attack had been very sudden, that all of Europe was helping the Germans.

As they approached the city of Gorky, there came word that a boat on the Oka River carrying parents of children evacuated to the Ryazanskaya Province had been bombed by the Germans and had sunk with all its passengers. Volodya and Rosa feared that their parents might have been on board.

After about ten days, they arrived in the town of Okhansk in the Ural Mountains. They climbed onto horse-drawn carts and rode for hours on dirt roads to Bolshaya Sosnova, a town of some three thousand houses located on the Sosnovka River and surrounded by wide fields and dense forests.

That was October 1941.

The distant artillery fire the children had heard in the village of Timoshkino had come from the German Army moving through the Russian heartland. The Germans had advanced more than 1,000 miles in three months. In Moscow, factories were being disassembled for evacuation to the east. The Soviet government left for the city of Kuibyshev, 525 miles to the east. Stalin chose to remain behind.

By October 20 forward elements of the German Army were five miles from Moscow. There was panic in the streets and looting of shops. Solomon Slepak was given a shovel and, together with hundreds of others, told to dig trenches. Near the end of the month, mud and rain stalled the German advance on the city.

As Solomon Slepak dug trenches, German chiefs of staff of all the major units in Russia gathered for a conference in Orsha, the city to which Solomon had fled from the home of his mother at the age of thirteen. With temperatures around minus four degrees Fahrenheit, they decided to resume the offensive against Moscow.

By the end of November combat units of the SS were within seven miles of the Kremlin. Leningrad remained under tight land siege, and eleven thousand Russians died there of hunger that November. A number of German tanks came close to the heart of Moscow; their crews could see the spires of the Kremlin. That was the farthest point of the German advance on the city. The temperature suddenly dropped to minus 25.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

In the suburbs of Moscow some civilians who were digging trenches, Solomon Slepak among them, suddenly found themselves surrounded by German troops. They fought their way out, using their shovels as weapons.

On December 3, with the temperature at minus 36.4 degrees Fahrenheit, the Germans began to withdraw from the suburbs of Moscow. By then Solomon Slepak and the staff of the publishing house where he worked had been ordered to evacuate the city. A train brought him and Fanya southward to Engels, a city near the Volga River north of the Caspian Sea. About two hundred miles to the south lay Stalingrad, which remained under siege by the German Army until February 1943. Nearly nine hundred thousand Russians perished in that siege.

Solomon and Fanya Slepak knew nothing of the whereabouts of their children. And Volodya and Rosa, having written home repeatedly and received no reply, were certain by now that their parents were dead. It took Solomon several months of trying, through the office of the Supreme Soviet, before he learned where his children were. More months passed. Then, in April 1942, a letter from him arrived at the town of Bolshaya Sosnova, and Volodya and Rosa discovered that their parents were alive.

Rosa at the time was working in the munitions plant in the nearby city of Molotov (now Perm), making shells for guns. That winter the temperature in the village plummeted to minus fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Volodya fell ill with rheumatic fever. He lay in bed for a month and survived only because of the care given him by Dr. Bogorad. Able to walk once again, he worked in the dining room, collecting and washing dirty dishes, then some weeks later in the kitchen, carrying water from the well, sawing and chopping firewood, and eating all he wanted. His health improved; he returned to school. During the summer he worked in the fields with the other children.

The months went by; the war raged on. Everyone knew by now about the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad. War news came to them from radio speakers that carried broadcasts twice a day from the Central Moscow Radio Station. There were no private transmitters; they had always been prohibited, even in peacetime. In the early days of the war the government had ordered that all radio receivers be turned in, to prevent the population from listening to enemy propaganda. You had to bring your receiver to a special store or you faced immediate arrest. Speakers were then distributed throughout the country; usually they were hung from a nail in a wall and connected to a special socket. Every town and village had a radio-receiving station that broadcast news from Moscow to speakers in houses and apartments and offices.

When the news arrived in the village of Bolshaya Sosnova that the German Army threatening Moscow had been defeated by the Red Army, one of Volodya’s teachers, speaking to a group of children, expressed doubt about the victory. A day or two later he vanished and was not seen again.

Then rumors began to come-not over the speakers but by word of mouth-of the killing of Jews by the Germans. It was said that many thousands had been murdered near Kiev. But not until 1944, when Kiev was liberated, did the Russians learn of the slaughter of ninety thousand Jews in the ravine called Babi Yar.

In late January 1943, his health much improved, Volodya joined many others from his school who enlisted in a training course given in Moscow for munitions workers. That March they were informed that they would soon be going to Moscow, and some days later they climbed aboard horse-drawn carts and began a twenty-eight-mile journey to the town of Vereshchagino, which held the nearest railway station.

The air was glacial, the road frozen. They could not sit on the carts for any length of time but had to walk or run alongside to keep themselves warm. In the town of Ocher, they were given a brief respite and hot food. They waited two hours in the cold in Vereshchagino for the train that was to bring them to Moscow. It arrived at night and was crowded with children. All were traveling to Moscow from the region east of the Urals; all were enlisted in training courses for the munitions factories.

Volodya found a third-level upper bunk, normally used for trunks, and lay there trying to sleep. The train moved slowly and stopped often, taking on passengers. At some stations there were dining rooms for the children; at others, only bowls of soup or cereal. They were all hungry. At one stop Volodya exchanged his jacket for a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk. The train began to leave, and he raced after it and leaped from the platform to the step of the last car but could not push his way through the dense mass of passengers to get to his car. He rode outside in the arctic night until the next stop, when he made it to his friends, cold and blue as ice but with the food. They thought he had been left behind.

The trip from Bolshaya Sosnova to Moscow took four days. Volodya arrived in Moscow on the first day of April 1943. He had been unable to inform his parents of his time of arrival-not enough money for a telegram; a letter would not have arrived in time-so no one met him at the train station. He took the Metro home.

His father, who had been back in Moscow since the fall of the previous year, opened the apartment door and stood there a moment, dumbfounded. Then they embraced. Volodya’s sister, Rosa, had returned home earlier that year and now came running out of a room and clung to her brother. Fanya had gone out to shop for food, and when she returned and saw her son, she began to weep. He was fifteen years old and had been away from home twenty months.

Their apartment on Gorky Street was the same as when he had left it. The wallpaper looked a little older. The city, too, was the same. Some additional broken-down houses; here and there an area fenced off because of bomb damage. At night there were no lights in the streets.

The apartment building had been completed in 1940, half a year before the Germans invaded the Soviet Union and at a time when the Stalin terror was coming to an end. The front of the building, which looked out on Gorky Street, was of light-gray stone; the rear, facing the yard, of plaster painted a grayish yellow. The Moscow Soviet-the city hall-down the street was of a reddish color. All the other buildings were white, gray, and yellow; nearly all had stores and restaurants on the first floors.

The building in which the Slepaks lived was clean save for the cockroaches that cascaded across floors and walls and against which one fought endless and futile battles. One entered from the rear, because the Gorky Street side was entirely occupied by shops. The building had eleven entrances, with nine floors in its vast center section and seven in each of its two side sections. Each of the approximately two hundred apartments, in which there lived, all told, some twelve hundred people, opened onto an elevator and a stairwell; there were no hallways. The radiator on the wall near the stairwell always gave off ample heat, save during the years of the war. The inhabitants of the building were actors, musicians, journalists, architects, engineers, and a few workers. Rarely did friendships develop among the occupants.

The Slepaks lived on the eighth floor in two rooms of a three-room apartment that faced Gorky Street. The third room was always rented to another family, because Solomon Slepak thought it wrong for one family to occupy more rooms than it needed, especially during a housing shortage. The third room changed hands five times during the years Volodya lived there: a Tass clerk, a noted violinist, a retired colonel, a militia officer, a postal clerk.

In the next apartment lived the noted filmmaker Michael Slutsky, the producer of the remarkable documentary Day of War, and his wife, Mimi. The documentary had been shot on June 13, 1943, by hundreds of cameramen, and then edited by Slutsky. One night in the autumn of 1943-Volodya is uncertain of the time-the KGB came to the Slutsky apartment and arrested him. Some days later Mimi Slutsky knocked on the door to the Slepak apartment and showed the Slepaks the order she had received to appear at the office of the KGB. She returned some time afterward with the news that the KGB had informed her that because she had been born in Vienna, she would be interned as a German citizen. (All German nationals were imprisoned in special concentration camps during the war.) She produced the necessary documents to prove she was not German but Jewish, and was told she would not be interned but had twenty-four hours to leave Moscow. She gave the Slepaks her jewelry and some other possessions and asked that they all be handed over to her husband’s brother, whose name Volodya does not recall. They never saw her again. Michael Slutsky’s brother was ordered by the KGB to remove all the furniture from the apartment. Not long afterward a KGB colonel moved in.

About three years later Michael Slutsky returned from prison entirely exonerated. To this day no one seems to know why he was arrested. The KGB colonel and his family remained in the apartment.

Gorky Street had six lanes of traffic, a center lane, and wide sidewalks. Cars, trolleys, buses. No trucks save on days when military parades took place. On those days tanks, motorized artillery, and trucks carrying rocket launchers and soldiers assembled on the street on their way to Red Square. Most of the apartment buildings were seven to eight stories high. People crowded the balconies to watch the parades assemble and pass by below.

There were few parades during the war and few moments of celebration. The troops that paraded past the reviewing stand in Red Square on November 7, 1941, in commemoration of the Bolshevik Revolution, marched straight from the celebration to the front lines. And there were no speeches from Stalin save the one he delivered about ten days after the start of the war, when he was sufficiently recovered from the shock and depression that had all but paralyzed him in the early days of the German invasion: “Comrades! Citizens! Fighting men of our army and navy! Brothers and sisters, I turn to you, my friends…”

In the Slepaks’ apartment building on Gorky Street, there were never any public announcements of private grief. The notice that a soldier had been killed in action would come by mail from the local office of the military. Upon receiving the notice, the family might apply for a pension if the one killed was the breadwinner and request to be moved up on the list of those waiting for a new room or apartment. Inside the room or apartment there were tears for the dead. But very rarely were flowers or wreaths placed on doors or in windows. The Communist regime had done away with the old customs. Visible displays of grief were frowned upon by the authorities.

Volodya does not know how many families in his apartment building lost relatives in the war.

During the war years, universities and institutes found themselves hard pressed for students; most eligible young people were in the armed forces. Special courses were organized for those who had completed eighth or ninth grade to prepare them for their high school graduation exams.

The same month Volodya returned to Moscow, he underwent a medical examination and was informed, to his dismay, that the rheumatic fever he had contracted in Bolshaya Sosnova had damaged his heart. As a result, he was disqualified for the demanding toil required of munitions workers.

There was much discussion then between Volodya and his father about the future. Volodya began to study for his eighth-grade exams-the equivalent of tenth grade in America-which he took and passed in July. Passing meant acceptance into the institute of ones choice, where one could attend special courses toward a high school diploma. Volodya had selected the Aviation Institute, which was purported to offer highly specialized engineering courses in aviation engines, navigational equipment, radio electronics, aircraft armament. He chose radio electronics. It was, he thought, the most interesting area of aviation engineering. And the faculty was reputed to be excellent.

In September 1943 Volodya began the special course of study in the Aviation Institute, and the following August he passed his exams. He and his parents appeared in the large auditorium of the institute, together with hundreds of others. One after the other, the students were called to the podium, where the rector of the institute shook their hands and presented to each a certificate of graduation. A student then delivered a brief talk, thanking the party and the government on behalf of all the students.

One easily imagines Solomon Slepak in that auditorium, recalling the year 1913, when he was refused acceptance by the High Technological Institute of Moscow because he was a Jew. Now, one generation later, his pride in his son’s achievement! And in that of his daughter, Rosa, a student in the faculty of philology at Moscow University. How vindicated, all the blood spilled in the cause of his Bolshevik dream of a new world for Jews and all humankind.

At that time Solomon Slepak still worked as chief editor of foreign books in a major publishing house and was also a member of the Jewish AntiFascist Committee, which had been created by Stalin in April 1942 as a means of influencing what he assumed to be the wealthy and influential Jewish community of the United States. The idea had originally been conceived by two Polish Jews, Victor Alter, an engineer, and Henryk Erlich, a lawyer, both of them leaders of the Jewish Labor Bund, who had fled from the advancing Germans in 1939, entered Soviet territory, and been arrested by the NKVD. Accused of being spies and counterrevolutionaries, they were sentenced to death, only to be set free about two years later. The Soviets had promised the Polish government-in-exile, which was in England, that all arrested Poles would be released.

In September 1941 the two Bundist leaders, who were then living in the Hotel Metropol in Moscow, received a request from Beria to submit a list of Jews who might serve on the committee. The list, which included the celebrated Russian Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels, was approved by Beria, who then asked that the two men write a memorandum to Stalin outlining the committee’s tasks.

In the memorandum they urged that the Soviet government create a Jewish anti-Hitlerite committee to include members from Nazi-occupied countries, the Soviet Union, the United States (which had not yet entered the war), and Britain; that the committee mobilize the support of world Jewry in the war against the Nazis; that it undertake to care for Polish Jewish refugees inside the Soviet Union; that a Jewish Legion be established inside the United States to join the Red Army.

The memorandum, dated in the early days of October 1941, was duly delivered to Stalin.

With the German Army rapidly advancing on Moscow, the two Bundists then left for the city of Kuibyshev near the Urals, along with all the other Soviet leaders except Stalin. In the office of the Grand Hotel in Kuibyshev, on the night of December 3, 1941, a phone call summoned the two men to a meeting with Beria. They left the hotel and were never heard from again. Years later it was discovered that Stalin had penned on their memorandum the words Rasstrieliat’ oboikh (“Shoot both of them”).

A few days after the disappearance of the two Bundists, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Hitler declared war on the United States. The idea of a Jewish antifascist committee was not forgotten; a number of Soviet Jewish leaders began to discuss it openly. With America in the war, it seemed all the more imperative that the influence of Jews throughout the world, who had heretofore been cold to the idea of providing aid to Bolshevik Russia, now be mobilized to propagandize for the Soviet Union, raise funds for the war effort, and lobby for the speedy opening of a second front that would ease the appalling losses being suffered by the Red Army.

And so, in April 1942, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee came into existence, with Stalin’s approval. It was the only Jewish institution in the entire Soviet Union officially recognized by the Soviet government, and it had in its ranks, among others, the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, the Yiddish poet Itzik Fefer, the Central Committee member Solomon Lozovsky, the actor Solomon Mikhoels, who was its chairman-and the Old Bolshevik Solomon Slepak.

At the request of Stalin, two members of the committee, Solomon Mikhoels and Itzik Fefer, traveled to the United States in May 1943. Stalin himself saw them off. Arriving in New York, they were greeted by Evgeni Kisselev, the consul-general of the Soviet Union. There is a photograph of Mikhoels at the grave of Sholem Aleichem, the beloved Russian writer in Yiddish, who is buried in New York, and one of Mikhoels and Fefer with Albert Einstein in Princeton. All in this latter photograph are smiling; all seem relaxed. Einstein, in his sweater and flowing hair and shaggy mustache; Mikhoels and Fefer in jackets, shirts, ties; trees in the background; sunlight. Mikhoels and Fefer met with Senator Herbert Lehman, who had been governor of New York State; with President Roosevelt’s noted friend Rabbi Stephen Wise; with Marc Chagall, who had painted sets for the Jewish State Theater in Moscow during the years following the Revolution, when Mikhoels had been the director.

That summer the two members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee traveled throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico and spoke to many Jews whose ties with Russia had been severed for more than two decades. They talked of future political and cultural links with their Soviet brothers and sisters, of the heroic role being played by Jews in the Red Army. At public and private meetings in Washington, Chicago, and Los Angeles, they recounted the valiant struggle of the Red Army against the Nazis and emphasized the need for Jewish support. The two men seemed to complement each other: Fefer was a colonel in the Red Army, an impassioned Communist; Mikhoels, astonishingly, was not even a member of the Communist Party. In the Polo Grounds in New York City, at a rally attended by nearly fifty thousand people, Fefer and Mikhoels spoke first; the writer Sholem Asch then lauded the Soviet Union for doing away with anti-Semitism; Ben Zion Goldberg, the Yiddish journalist and a son-in-law of Sholem Aleichem, spoke of Marshal Stalin as a great leader. And the actor-singer Paul Robeson sang Yiddish and Russian songs.

Mikhoels and Fefer returned home after two months, having raised more than two million dollars for the armed forces of the Soviet Union.

During the time they were away, about seven thousand tanks and self-propelled guns fought the largest land battle in history near the Russian city of Kursk, some 250 miles south of Moscow. In Moscow, where Solomon Slepak was working for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and for a publishing house, and Volodya was studying for and then taking his eighth-grade exams, the Slepak family read the newspaper accounts of the nearly weeklong battle and heard it reported over the radio in their apartment. In the end the German Army lost more than ninety thousand soldiers and two thousand tanks; its attack along the central front was crushed. As with Stalingrad that previous February, where Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus had surrendered his armies, Kursk was a turning point in the war, the last major German offensive on the eastern front.

The family chronicles offer no details concerning Solomon Slepaks participation in the work of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee other than the bare fact that he worked in its press office. At the height of its activities, the committee had a membership of about one hundred individuals. It published its own Yiddish-language periodical, Eynikayt (Unity). The membership was not of one voice regarding the committee’s goals. Some wanted to limit the committee’s efforts to foreign propaganda, others hoped to make it a force for the revival of Jewish institutions and culture in the Soviet Union, and still others began to urge that the committee persuade Stalin to permit the creation of a Jewish republic in the Crimea in place of Birobidzhan. The Crimean Tatars had been permanently exiled in May 1943 for collaborating with the Germans-loaded onto cattle wagons by the NKVD and sent on a four-month journey across the barren steppes to Central Asia-thereby opening the Crimea to the possibility of colonization by others.

There seems to be no way of determining what Solomon Slepak’s position was on any of those issues. No record of his views, if indeed he had any, can be found anywhere. His name does not appear in the only scholarly book known to me on the activities of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. And at home he never talked about his work.

By March 1944 the Red Army had pushed the Germans back to nearly the western border of pre-1939 Russia. In White Russia the German lines extended to a few miles beyond Orsha on the eastern side of the Dnieper. In the fall of 1944, with the Red Army in the suburbs of Warsaw and the American Army assaulting the Siegfried Line in Germany, Volodya was attending the Aviation Institute as a first-year student in radio electronics. Daily he traveled by trolley bus to the Sverdlova Square Metro station and from there to the Sokol station. Classes were from eight-thirty in the morning to, at times, five in the evening. In addition to his classes in engineering, Volodya was required to attend three weekly lectures or seminars on Marxist ideology: the principles of Marxism-Leninism; Marxist philosophy; Marxist political economy. Absences from three or more such seminars without valid reason, or failure in the exams, meant expulsion from the institute.

The Aviation Institute was at the corner of Leningradskoye Shosse and Volokolamskoye Shosse, wide asphalt-paved streets with large office and apartment buildings and many shops. Like the compound of the Russian Embassy in Peking, where Volodya had spent the early years of his life, a wall surrounded the institute, with a guarded security entrance at one end and gates at the other. Behind the gates ran the railroad to Riga. Inside the compound were the buildings that contained the classrooms, auditorium, and administrative offices, the hangar and wind tunnel, the machine shops and student club. At the entrance to the administration building stood a heroic-style bust of Stalin. As with almost all the buildings in Moscow, those of the institute were made of brick and covered in part with either plaster or stone or concrete blocks. There were also volleyball, basketball, and tennis courts and a soccer field.

In each of the five classes Volodya attended there were thirty to forty students, about 65 percent of them men. Fewer than 10 percent of the faculty were women. Around one-fourth of the students and faculty were Jewish. The student body of the institute numbered about seven thousand.

Volodya’s only close friend was Valery Voitinsky, whom he had known for years, the son of his father’s old friend from New York and China. They attended the Aviation Institute together, talked about the movies they saw, the books they read, their school problems. In summer they vacationed together; in winter they went ice-skating and to the theater. But after about six months in the Aviation institute, Valery decided to drop out, and enlisted in the Red Army. The friendship grew cool, slowly dissolved, came to an end.

Volodya was five feet seven inches tall, and slim; his hair dark brown, almost black; his eyes were grayish green. He favored sports jackets and sweaters, but food and clothes were rationed, and he wore whatever he could. He had no overcoat and would have gone about cold were it not for a cousin who served in the Red Army and somehow procured for him a military greatcoat. His taste in music ran to the classics: Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Brahms. He attended concerts in the Moscow Philharmonic Hall, listened to music on the radio, owned a phonograph and Russian records. He liked Russian and Gypsy tunes and on occasion went to a jazz concert. He read in Russian the novels of Balzac, Hugo, and Dreiser, the poetry of Pushkin and Lermontov. He had little interest in sports.

One late afternoon in May 1945 came the announcement over the radio that the Germans had surrendered. The Great Patriotic War was over; the hated fascist enemy crushed! In the Slepak apartment-jubilation! Two of Volodya’s friends were visiting at the time, and Volodya hurried out with them. His parents remained at home. In the streets strangers embraced. Volodya and his friends were swept up in the crowds surging through Gorky Street to Red Square. Music and dancing and fireworks. Red Square was packed with joyous people until morning.

Not long afterward Solomon Slepak learned of the fate of his brother, Aaron, whom he had left behind in Dubrovno and had last seen in 1936. Volodya’s cousin Anatoly, one of Aaron’s sons, who was in the Red Army, returned to Dubrovno soon after the war and discovered that his father, along with three of his seven siblings and his stepmother, had been killed by the Germans.

The Germans murdered one and a half million Russian Jews. Most were killed by the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units of the German security police that accompanied the army. The Slepaks read nothing of this in the newspapers, though it was known by March 1944, when a special government commission of inquiry into German crimes reported the killings and detailed the events at Babi Yar but made no mention of Jews. It was Soviet policy then not to single out the Jews as the primary victims in this Nazi drama of death but simply to state that those killed were noncombatants, slain with so many other innocents. A monument to the Jews slaughtered and buried in Babi Yar was put up only recently, after the demise of the Soviet Union.

Volodya did not attend the victory parade in Red Square on June 24 of that year. From the balcony of the apartment he and his family observed tanks and trucks and troops and rocket launchers rumbling along Gorky Street. For some while he kept seeing newsreels of the parade in movie theaters: Stalin, flanked by members of the Politburo, watching expressionlessly as units of the victorious Red Army marched by and placed on the ground before him flags of the destroyed German Army. The flags formed a tall mound. Stalin seemed a triumphant Caesar.

At the end of the war the borders of the Soviet empire extended from Vladivostok in the east to Berlin, Prague, and Budapest in the west. Never had Russia been stronger; never had the Communist specter it cast across the world appeared more menacing. All that despite the astonishing losses it had suffered in the war: more than twenty million dead and tremendous destruction of land and cities.

Inside the Kremlin, Stalin once again began to turn his attention to matters of internal Communist Party discipline and personal power. Not that his iron hand had relaxed during the war: Millions among the national groups under Soviet rule had been expelled to Central Asia, Siberia, and the Arctic to forestall their possible collaboration with the Germans; after the Russian occupation of Eastern Europe in 1944-1945, half a million Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Bulgars, and Romanians were deported to Siberia; and even at the height of the war, anyone reported to have uttered or written a wrong word faced arrest and a labor camp. But the conflict had initiated an easing of cultural control inside the Soviet Union, as well as contacts with the West that now seemed especially menacing to Stalin and to Andrei Zhdanov, the man many thought would one day take the aging dictator’s place.

Stalin had taken careful note of the work of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and its inner discussions. The war over, he determined that he no longer needed the committee. It was an annoyance and a possible threat-all that talk about establishing cultural relations between Russian and Western Jews, about the renewal of Jewish national and cultural life in the Soviet Union, and the brazen proposal that the Crimea become a Jewish republic in place of the failed Birobidzhan.

Some claim that the actor Solomon Mikhoels often appeared before Stalin in the Kremlin as Shakespeare’s King Lear, one of his most brilliant roles. Did he act the part in Russian or Yiddish? The sources do not tell us, but the image of Stalin listening to Mikhoels performing King Lear in Yiddish boggles the mind. Indeed, Volodya doubts that Stalin and Mikhoels ever met and regards as fanciful the various sources that claim otherwise. In any event, it is clear that Stalin had begun to detest the spirited activities of Mikhoels as head of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and his self-assumed position as leader of the Jews, and finally came to regard the actor as a potential enemy.

On the night of January 13, 1948, Solomon Mikhoels was on the way back from Minsk, the capital of White Russia, where he had been reviewing plays for government prizes. He was hit by a truck and killed. That, at least, was the official account, briefly reported in the back pages of newspapers, where it was read and accepted as sorrowful truth by the Slepak family.

It soon became clear, however, that Mikhoels had been murdered, no doubt at Stalin’s order. Some reported that he had been beaten. One eyewitness stated that a truck had repeatedly smashed him against a wall. There was even the grisly rumor that his head had been severed from his body. But at least two individuals who saw the body as it was being prepared for its coffin insisted that it bore no more injuries than one would expect from so severe an accident. Clearly, someone was not telling the truth, and it is likely that the details of the odd circumstances surrounding the death of Solomon Mikhoels will never be uncovered. But I have come across no one familiar with that event who today doubts that Mikhoels, like Kirov, was murdered at Stalin’s behest.

Stalin accorded the revered Jewish actor a state funeral. The body was prepared for public viewing by Professor Zbarsky (aided, possibly, by his older son), the same man who had once attended to Lenin’s corpse. For three days crowds moved silently past the dead actor in the building of the Moscow Jewish Theater to pay their final respects. Stalin, learning of the thousands of Jews filing past the casket, no doubt felt vindicated in his suspicion that Mikhoels had been a dangerous nerve center of Jewish national identity.

The subsequent brutal effort by Stalin once and for all to eradicate Jewish culture inside the Soviet Union was the absolute reverse of-and, ironically, was to a large extent fueled by-the foreign policy of the Soviet Union toward the new state of Israel.

Official Soviet policy after the war was heavily in favor of the nascent Jewish state and opposed to the presence of the British in the Middle East-even to the point of helping the new state acquire weapons it desperately needed in its war against invading Arab armies. In September 1948, Golda Meir, Israel’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union, traveled to Russia and appeared in Moscow on the Jewish New Year. A vast crowd of Jews greeted her outside the synagogue, across the street from the school Volodya had once attended. She was surrounded and applauded. Militiamen ringed the crowd, and security police were everywhere, but they did not interfere. Astonishingly, from the crowd came a sudden cry in Hebrew: “The Jewish people lives!” Men and women wept with joy.

Stalin was confounded by that crowd, and raged at the Jewish nationalism he had thought long dead, perceiving it as an open threat to his power. Let one national group rear its head, others would soon follow, and anarchy ensue.

In November of that year, security police agents burst into the printing plant of the last Yiddish publishing house in the Soviet Union and disconnected the new linotype machines while they were running. Strongin, the director, and Belenky, the chief editor, were present, along with workers. A terrible silence suddenly filled the plant. “Your publishing house is closed down!” shouted one of the agents.

And at the end of 1948 the government ended the life of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Nearly all its leaders, including Itzik Fefer, ardent Communist and colonel in the Red Army, were arrested.

Arrested too were the poets Peretz Markish and Itzik Kipnis, the writers David Bergelson, Borukh Veisman, Moshe Notovich, Leib Kvitko. Articles began to appear in Pravda condemning “cosmopolitanism” in literature, the arts, music, scholarship. Of the writers, artists, and scholars singled out for criticism in the press, 70 percent were Jews.

Newspapers in all the Soviet republics trumpeted against “men with no background,” “rootless cosmopolitans,” “vagabonds without passports,” “renegades foreign to Russia,” individuals who had no grasp of the history and poetry of Russia, of the Russian soul-and everyone understood that these epithets were directed against the Jews, who were purported to lack deep feelings for the land of Russia and the Soviet way of life. Members of the erstwhile Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were now declared to have been agents of American Zionism, plotting to create a Jewish state in the Crimea with the intent of using it to establish a bridgehead for American imperialism, a threat to the very heart of the Soviet Union. Jewish schools were closed. A tense incipient pogrom atmosphere pervaded much of the land. Jewish children were attacked in Russian schools. It became dangerous for Jews to walk the streets. Jews began to lose their jobs. To protect themselves, some Jews burned their Jewish books and broke off all contact with Jewish relatives and friends overseas.

In all, about four hundred Jewish writers and artists were arrested and exiled. One could never say with certainty that Stalin’s fury was directed only against the Jews; always a few non-Jews, too, would be arrested, exiled, shot. With the termination of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the wholesale loss of Jewish writers and artists, there came to an end any open and effective Jewish culture in the Soviet Union.

Mysteriously, as in the purges of the thirties, Solomon Slepak escaped arrest. But this time he did not slip away entirely unscathed. Close friends in the Regional Party Committee and the Moscow Party Committee informed him that he would soon be dismissed from the publishing house. The reason? He was a Jew. And if that weren’t grounds enough, his having lived so many years abroad was now of itself sufficiently strong cause for job termination. There was nothing they could do for him, his friends said, except request that he be given a party pension because of his service in the Bolshevik cause during the Civil War, even though he was not yet of pension age.

In October 1950, Solomon Slepak-dedicated Old Bolshevik, esteemed editor and translator, noted writer of articles for Izvestia and Pravda under the pseudonym M. Osipov, lecturer on international affairs of the Moscow Party Committee-was abruptly discharged from his position at the publishing house.

He received the pension and lived for nearly three more decades, writing, lecturing, translating. But his effective role as a player in the center of power had come to an end.