The gates of November (5 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imperial Russia, too, seemed suspended between futures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The regime of the Romanovs was over.

Almost immediately the state bureaucracy disintegrated.

The tsar and his family were arrested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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