"The Gates of November" - читать интересную книгу автора (Potok Chaim)

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.