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

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.