The gates of November (12 page)

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.