The gates of November (19 page)

Then his mother died of cancer, in 1959. A year later his father married a Russian woman and moved to her house on Mashkova Street, about three miles from the Gorky Street apartment, which he relinquished to Volodya and Masha, who now had two children; another son had been born to them in May 1959 and named Leonid, after no one in particular. Masha liked the name.

Astonishingly, in 1962, the institute where Volodya worked asked him to lead a laboratory; he was to be the chief designer of a special project. His new position needed to be confirmed by the Ministry of Radio Industry; the project was part of a contract between the Ministry of Radio Industry and the Ministry of Defense. Apparently the former ministry was less interested in his Jewishness than in his ability to fulfill the latter ministry’s contract.

Volodya Slepak was now involved in the development of the Soviet air-defense system.

The Soviet Union was girded by a dense network of radar stations that relayed their sightings to a central computer that in turn sent signals to antirocket and antiaircraft systems, as well as to airfields and to the air defense general staffs. General officers and their staffs needed to have the signals translated onto huge screens in situation rooms, where defense and attack positions could be read on maps that showed moving rockets and aircraft. Each aircraft and rocket on the screen had to be accompanied by its appropriate characteristics: type, speed, altitude.

It was the responsibility of Volodya and his laboratory to design the most up-to-date display screens. To obtain that position, it had been necessary for him to receive First Form security clearance, second only to the top security clearance known as State Secrets.

Volodya Slepak, son of Solomon Slepak, had risen to the very summit of nonpolitical life in the Soviet Union and now stood on the frontier of the Motherland’s national defense.

A year or so before he obtained that sensitive new job, Volodya had purchased for about eighty rubles in a Moscow shop a radio called a Spidola, a black-and-yellow plastic box, about twelve by eight by four inches. A radio powerful enough, after certain modifications, to receive the Russian-language broadcasts of the BBC, the German Wave, the Voice of America, the Voice of Israel. The voices of the enemies outside.

The Radio in the Forest

A
t first Masha had wanted to be a surgeon. But she quickly realized that surgery was not for her; she had a child and couldn’t put in a surgeon’s hours. And it would not be easy for a female surgeon to find employment in a good hospital.

She began to work as a general physician, traveling half of each day about the city to treat the sick and the injured in their homes and spending the remainder of the day tending to patients in the hospital. The regimen soon exhausted her.

She considered leaving medicine. Then she learned that the hospital sorely needed a qualified radiologist and was prepared to support any staff member willing to undertake that course of study. Masha applied and was accepted. Colleagues warned her against the dangers of radiation and talked about how radiologists were always retired early because of the X rays. But she found herself fascinated with radiology, became expert at it, and soon when there were doubts in the hospital about the reading of an X ray, it would be brought to her for review.

During her years in medical school, she had watched with growing bewilderment and dread as her country began to change before her eyes, had read in its heart the deepening fury against Jews. She knew there had always been many who hated Jews; but in the past, the Soviet authorities had reined in that hostility, especially during the war. Suddenly, in the late 1940s, came the torrent of abuse at “imperialists,” “bourgeois nationalists,” “cosmopolitans,” “Zionists,” “foreign influences,” “enemies of the people”—so blatant, so venomous, and so clearly organized from above—all openly aimed at the Jews.

She remembered hearing on a number of occasions during the years immediately after the war that Russian soldiers who had been captured by the Germans were, upon their release, transported directly to Siberia. That had seemed cruel to her, sending your own soldiers away to the labor camps, repaying them like that. But one said nothing about such matters in those days, not even to the members of one’s own family. And then there were rumors that those who had been released from the camps after serving ten-year sentences were being arrested again. And in 1948, there was that business about the three thousand biologists fired from their jobs for disagreeing with the genetic theories of Trofim Lysenko, who claimed that he had disproved the laws of heredity and that man could easily overthrow the laws of nature and control the environment. All of that, together with the articles in journals and newspapers endlessly attacking “cosmopolitans.” Somewhat fearfully Masha had begun to wonder what was happening in her country: Why the imprisonment of its captured soldiers, the persecution of its intellectuals, the attacks against its Jews?

Then came the strange order to efface all foreign names from medical school textbooks. In one of Masha’s classes the professor lectured one day about the Blumberg Symptom in cases of painless appendicitis and said that it had really been discovered by a Professor Shchyotkin and was from now on to be known as the Shchyotkin Symptom. When, two years later, someone stumbled upon the fact that Blumberg, a professor of medicine in Odessa, was actually a Russian and not a Jew, they took to calling it the Blumberg-Shchyotkin Symptom.

The reaction of the students to the various rewritings of medical history ranged from docility to concealed contempt to anger they suppressed because it was believed there were MGB agents attending classes.

One day in April 1951, while interning in Ryazan, Masha was arrested by the secret police. The charge against her: possession of a concealed weapon. Two agents interrogated her for eight hours. “With whom are you friendly?” they wanted to know. Dismayed by the arrest and frightened by the interrogation, she still had the wits to answer, “With everyone.” “We mean among the students,” they said. “With all the students,” she said, and mentioned no names. Apparently, two students in her class had been arrested for anti-Soviet activity, and the agents wanted from Masha names they might use as witnesses against them. She was released after signing a paper that she would not leave Ryazan without MGB permission, and she spoke to no one about her arrest.

She kept away from groups, felt there was danger in being part of any coalition. Indeed, Soviet law made membership in a clandestine group a worse crime than acting alone. She had at the time only one close friend and said nothing of her arrest even to him.

The arrest had followed an MGB search of her mother’s apartment in Moscow. The agents, looking for concealed weapons, had found nothing. When Masha returned to Moscow for her June marriage to Volodya, her frightened mother told her of the search, and Masha informed her mother of the arrest and interrogation. They said nothing to Volodya.

The two students who had been arrested were tried, found guilty, and sent to a labor camp.

The summer of 1952, when Masha returned to medical school some months after giving birth, she was startled by a sudden message from her very close friend, who asked urgently to meet her alone. This friend was a fellow student, a non-Jew, who lived in Siberia. His father was an interrogator in a procurator’s office. They met on August 20 of that year, months before the arrest of the doctors, and he told her he had information that there was to be an action against the Jews in the near future, all the Jews would be transferred to Siberia from central Russia, and the conditions of transport would be such that half would not survive the journey. He said, “I can save you and the child. Your son is blond, and I will give him my name and take the two of you to Siberia far away from all cities,” and Masha said, “No, I will go with my own people, with my brothers and sisters.” She trusted him completely and told no one, not even Volodya. In February 1953 he came to her again and said that the final decision had been made and very soon the action against the Jews would take place, and Masha said, “I haven’t changed my mind, I can’t save myself this way,” and he said, “At least you can save your child,” and she said, “No.” She had known him for years, he was a completely honest person, and she believed him. He had come from Siberia to study medicine, was a very good student, determined to do well. He said to her angrily, “You are a weak people, spoiled by civilization, and in forty years I will be a professor.” Today he is a member of the Academy of Sciences and holds the august rank of Academician. The family chronicles do not reveal his name.

Masha Slepak then witnessed the staged meetings at the medical institute and the hospital, the cruel fulminations against Jewish doctors, the crude admissions of Jewish guilt, and asked Volodya to talk to his father, solicit from him an explanation for what was happening; after all, he was a party member, he seemed to know high party people. Why were innocent Jewish doctors the target of official rage and persecution? And then the fierce quarrel took place in the Slepak apartment. And weeks later the nine doctors were arrested and trains stood waiting and lists were being readied. The predictions of Masha’s friend from Siberia were proving true. The Soviet Union was about to rid itself of the Jews.

Using the figures in official Soviet censuses and taking into consideration the enormous difficulties in defining who precisely was a Jew in the Soviet system, we can estimate that there were a little more than two million Jews in the Soviet Union at the time of the “Doctors’ Plot.”

In 1939 the Jews had numbered about three million. One out of every three Jews perished in the war, thereby reducing them from 2¼ to around 1 percent of the total population. Jewish losses in the war were proportionately four times higher than those of the population as a whole.

Stalin’s intention was to rid the major population centers of Jews and bring to an end his perceived troubles with that arrogant people. Instead he died.

In February 1956 Khrushchev stood for about three hours before the Twentieth Party Congress and delivered a twenty-thousand-word speech, carefully prepared in advance, that exposed many of the horrors of Stalin’s rule and stunned the Communist world. There is a photograph of Khrushchev speaking behind the podium, a phalanx of microphones like blackbirds before him, and the rows of deputies, some staring, some with eyes averted, some whispering to one another. Delivered in closed session, the speech was to have remained secret—notes could not be taken; questions could not be asked; no one was permitted to leave during the reading—but it made its way to Communist parties in the West and to the CIA and the American State Department and into the offices of party officials throughout the Soviet Union. Accounts of the speech tell of dense, shocked silence in the vast meeting hall of the congress, an icy silence punctured from time to time by cries of outrage, buzzes of anger, waves of disquiet, and applause. Stalin, said Khrushchev, had moved far away from Leninist principles, had been guilty of despotism, mass terror, brutal violence, and the cult of personality. Upon his head lay the guilt of the country’s lack of military preparedness and its costly defeats in the Great Patriotic War. Kirov’s murder in Leningrad in 1934 should be looked into again, for Stalin may well have had a hand in it. A full 70 percent of the members of the Central Committee elected at the Seventeenth Congress in 1934, as well as over half the deputies, had been executed on Stalin’s order. He was a cruel, bloodthirsty, and sickly-suspicious tyrant, who had slaughtered the innocent along with the guilty in his purges of the party and the army. He had deported the Volga Germans and other loyal nationalities. The “Doctors’ Plot” had been a fabrication initiated by Dr. Lidia Timashuk, and Stalin had personally advised concerning the conduct of the investigation and the method of interrogation, himself calling the investigating judge and telling him he was to “Beat, beat, and, once again, beat,” until confessions were obtained. It was not the party that had been at fault, said Khrushchev, but one man, its leader, Stalin, whose aberrations the party now needed to correct so that the country could once again be ruled with the same vision and effectiveness it had known in the time of Lenin. He said nothing about the party before 1934; about the innumerable peasants and nonparty people starved and slain; about the Ukrainian intelligentsia he himself had ordered killed; about his own participation in Stalin’s brutal endeavors; about the millions of prisoners still in labor camps; about the plan to climax the “Doctors’ Plot” with mass deportations of Soviet Jews.

To this day there is no generally accepted explanation of why Khrushchev gave that speech. To consolidate his position in the party by openly opposing the Stalinist faction: Malenkov, Kaganovich, Molotov, Shepilov? To put an end to the terror and the secret police that were stifling Soviet art and culture? To make some sort of restitution to the innocent victims of Stalin’s paranoia?

About one month after the Twentieth Congress, Volodya’s superior at the Electro-Vacuum Factory asked him if he wanted to read Khrushchev’s secret speech. Volodya said, “Yes, of course.” The man said, “Go to my office. It’s on the desk. I took it from the office of the party committee.” At about that same time, the speech was read aloud to the medical staff during a meeting in Masha’s hospital. She and Volodya had known in outline much of the history related in the speech but were astonished by the details and by the fact that party leaders were now talking openly of the horrors perpetrated by Stalin.

The family chronicles relate the calm reaction of Solomon Slepak when he learned of the speech: “Stalin was certainly a great person. He did many positive things for our socialist state. Yes, he made mistakes. The party will correct them.” But one wonders about that response. The speech and the furious reaction of the Communist Chinese to Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization and liberalization of Soviet life, a reaction that by 1963 was to become an irreparable rift between the two centers of world communism, could hardly have brought much joy to the Old Bolshevik’s ailing heart.