The gates of November (6 page)

In New York, Solomon Slepak washed skyscraper windows and studied medicine.

It requires little effort of the imagination to conjure the elation, debates, speeches, and general tumult among the New York revolutionaries at their meetings during the period of the Kerensky government. Friction between radicals and liberals; concern over every bit of news from Petrograd and Moscow—and the Russian Army: Would it continue to support Kerensky or stand aside, thereby enabling the Bolsheviks to make their move?

There is no way of knowing if it was Gregory Zarkhin or Solomon Slepak who came up with the idea that they return to Russia and take part in the coming struggle. It was unusual at that time for immigrant Jews to leave America and go back to their country of origin, though many had left earlier. Applying for visas, Solomon and Zarkhin were closely questioned by Russian consular officials in New York: the Provisional Government saw it as not in its best interest to augment the domestic ranks of the Bolsheviks. Because the two men were suspected of revolutionary sympathies, their request for visas was turned down.

It is not at all clear why they did not then attempt to enter Russia illegally. In New York at that time were the Bolshevik Nicholas Bukharin and the soon-to-be Bolsheviks Leon Trotsky and Volodarsky. All quickly returned to Russia via England and the North Atlantic. Then, on November 7 of that year, by the Western world’s Gregorian calendar, which the Bolsheviks adopted in 1918—October 25, according to Russia’s old Julian calendar—the benign revolution of March was taken over by Lenin, and Russia set out upon the path of international revolution. It appeared that a quarrel had erupted between the head of the army and Kerensky, a jockeying for power, and now the army stood aside as the Bolsheviks took control.

It was, at first, the most bloodless of revolutions. Hardly a weapon was fired in the Winter Palace, and Petrograd fell into Bolshevik hands, so inept was the Provisional Government. “We found the power lying in the streets,” Lenin later said, “and we picked it up.”

In New York, Solomon Slepak quit his window-washing job, dropped out of medical school, and began making arrangements to return to Russia by way of the Far East. Gregory Zarkhin had left for Canada shortly after their requests for Russian visas had been refused, and Solomon planned to meet him there. Together they would take a cargo ship to Vladivostok, which was then under anti-Bolshevik control. As soon as they arrived, they would contact the Bolshevik underground.

Solomon rode by train to the American-Canadian border and was stopped by the Canadians because his documents were not in order: He was not an American citizen and had no entry visa for Canada. The Canadians did not especially want to admit anyone who was a recent immigrant to the United States from Russia, which was then in an increasingly violent revolution. They sent Solomon back to New York by train, and to make certain he got there, they transported him in the custody of an immigration officer, who gave him a dollar bill when they arrived and let him go. Solomon promptly took the next train back to Canada, this time disembarking before he reached the border and crossing on foot through fields. In the distance stood a farmhouse. He knocked on the door. French Canadians. He had not forgotten the French he had learned in the technical school in Orsha. He spent some weeks on the farm as a seasonal laborer.

Then he began to travel westward through Canada, working on farms, fixing this, hauling that. His English was good enough to get him by. No one asked for his identity papers. He worked; he was paid; he left. Accumulating travel money.

He met Gregory Zarkhin in Vancouver, which at the time had a fairly sizable Russian immigrant population. And a Russian dockworkers’ trade union of about a thousand men, organized and led by Zarkhin, who was chairman of the union. Solomon Slepak began to work on the docks and was soon the deputy chairman. Awhile later Zarkhin left for Vladivostok alone; they had decided it was unwise to travel and arrive together. With Zarkhin gone, Solomon Slepak assumed leadership of the union.

While the young revolutionary labored on the docks of Vancouver, Lenin set about organizing a Communist state. One of his earliest acts, in December 1917, was the creation of a political secret police force, the Cheka—the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Counterrevolution, Sabotage, and Speculation—under the leadership of a Polish nobleman turned Bolshevik, Felix Dzerzhinsky.

In January 1918, aided by sailors from the Baltic Fleet, Lenin dispersed the legitimately elected Constituent Assembly which had assembled in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks had only 24 percent of the vote, but Lenin argued that a soviet democracy of the working class was a higher principle than a bourgeois democracy of one man, one vote. The Assembly had no soldiery it could rally to its side. That single act by Lenin was the death of the parliamentary democracy that had been evolving in Russia over the previous twelve years.

After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the process began of seeking out the Socialist Revolutionaries, Constitutional Democrats, and Mensheviks—all who had opposed the new regime and were still unwilling to repent and join the Bolshevik cause. Those arrested were exiled to prison camps or executed. In addition, Lenin soon permitted peasants to seize land, gave over control of many factories to committees of workers, nationalized all the banks, impounded private bank accounts, made foreign trade a state monopoly, abolished the judicial system and replaced it with people’s courts and revolutionary tribunals. Members of the upper and middle classes lost their property. Religious education was ended, church property appropriated. All titles and ranks vanished.

On March 3, 1918, the Germans and Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. By then civil war had broken out in the cities and industrial regions of central Russia.

That same March, Solomon Slepak left Vancouver and began his journey across the Pacific to Vladivostok. He was twenty-five years old, and about to enter an Asian world of extreme political complexity and conflict, a landscape with a tortured history.

In 1858 a nearly prostrate China, beset by rebellion and at war with Britain and France, had yielded to Russia the left bank of the Amur River, a region rich in coal, tin, iron, and gold. Two years later the hapless Chinese ceded to the Russians the region of the Ussuri River on the Pacific coast: wild and wooded country; towering, round-shouldered hills and deep shadowy valleys dense with undergrowth and ribboned with torrential streams.

The town of Vladivostok was established by the Russians in 1860; it lay about five hundred miles southeast of the city of Harbin, and was Russia’s gateway to the Pacific. In 1875 Russia transferred the Kurile Islands to Japan in exchange for the southern half of Sakhalin Island, which the Japanese took back and annexed in 1905. That entire region, from Lake Baikal to Vladivostok—more than twelve hundred miles from east to west, and at one point eight hundred miles and at another, four hundred miles, from north to south—was occupied after the 1917 revolution by various armed forces, all enemies of the Bolsheviks: 72,000 Japanese, 7,000 Americans, 6,400 British, 4,400 Canadians. It had a population of more than 1,500,000 Russians, 300,000 Japanese and Chinese, 250,000 Mongols, and 25,000 Jews.

The region was governed by an administration headed by Admiral Alexander Kolchak, commander of the White armies in the east. (“White” was the term of opprobrium which the Bolsheviks applied to their opponents, white having been the emblematic color of nineteenth-century French monarchists.) Kolchak was a taciturn man, given to dark moods and politically naïve. His favorite reading was, reportedly, the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
a document forged by Russian secret police during the reign of Tsar Nicholas II, which purports to be the secret plans for the takeover of the world by the Jews.

Sometime in April 1918 Solomon Slepak sailed into Vladivostok on board a cargo ship. He saw the ships of many nations—Japanese, British, American, French—at anchor in the bay. The city had a broad, partly paved main street, was thronged with office buildings, hotels, stores. On some streets he saw all manner of livestock; on others, soldiers from France, Italy, Japan, Canada, Great Britain, America. The harbor, calm as a lake, sat locked in by gently rolling hills. The population—Russians, Cossacks, Chinese, Koreans—numbered around 50,000; in a year it would surge to 180,000: refugees from the raging Civil War, hungry and dirty, many sick with typhus.

The city was suffering a shortage of living space; there seemed to be no vacant rooms anywhere. Still, Solomon Slepak found a place to stay and managed to locate his friend Zarkhin. Quickly they organized an underground council and set up a Bolshevik press, which they operated in the very heart of the city, printing pamphlets, broadsides, newsletters for the cause of the revolution. One of Solomon’s main tasks was to translate the material into English so it could be read by the American troops, who seemed not as averse to the Bolsheviks as were the British and the French. After some months, they were discovered by the police, arrested, tried, convicted as revolutionaries, and sentenced to death.

They spent two weeks in prison, waiting to be executed. A cellmate went mad and hanged himself. Solomon was told he had one day to live.

It was now one year after the November 1917 Revolution. In mid-1918 the Bolsheviks had changed their name to the Communist Party and moved the capital of Russia from Petrograd to Moscow. During those first years of the Civil War, 1917-1918, the cities and industrial regions of central Russia had been won over to the Revolution, through propaganda, terror, and blood. But the Bolshevik armies were hastily organized and made up largely of ill-trained peasants and the urban underclass. Battles were still being fought all along the periphery of central Russia, and the borderlands, including Siberia and the Far Eastern Province, had set themselves on a course of separation and independence, and would have to be reconquered.

The Civil War lasted three years, from the end of 1917 to the end of 1920. Millions perished from combat, famine, and disease, including Tsar Nicholas II and his family, executed in July 1918 on the orders of Lenin himself, who wished no tsar or would-be tsar left alive around whom monarchists might rally.

In the fall of 1918, in his cell in Vladivostok, Solomon Slepak awaited execution.

Something then occurred in the Siberian city of Omsk—an event connected with Admiral Kolchak—that saved Solomons life. As a result of that event, an amnesty was declared, and the death sentences of political prisoners were commuted to life imprisonment at hard labor on Sakhalin Island.

The family chronicles are at a loss to explain the sudden amnesty. But because it coincides with the period in November 1918 when the Council of Ministers of Russia’s Far Eastern Province granted Kolchak dictatorial powers, it is possible that it was he who declared the amnesty to mark his assumption of the office of Supreme Ruler of Eastern Russia and Siberia. “I shall take neither the path of reaction nor the ruinous course of party politics,” he stated on the day he took power. “My principal objective is to create an army capable of combat, victory over Bolshevism, and the introduction of legality and the rule of law.…”

Whatever the reasons for the amnesty, Solomon Slepak was abruptly spared on the day of his appointed death. Together with his friend Zarkhin and the other political prisoners, he began the long trek to Sakhalin Island.

They went on foot to the city of Nikolayevsk, some 750 miles to the north. It was winter. Sakhalin Island lay north of Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. Fierce Siberian winds blew across the seas. The Tatar Strait between the mainland and Sakhalin Island was frozen. They crossed to the island over the ice.

The island, bitter-cold and damp, had dense forests and steep mountain ranges, was rich in coal and iron deposits, and was originally barren of people. The region south of the fiftieth parallel belonged to Japan. The Russians populated their part of the island with convicts and exiles.

There is a photograph, taken in 1915, of a Jewish woman thief being placed in irons on Sakhalin. Three guards and two leather-aproned smiths stand, all stiffly posing. The woman appears to be in her forties—hands shackled, features rigid, defiant. “Sonka of the Golden Hands” she was called. The building in the background is made of logs; one of the windows lies awkwardly off its frame. From the visible presence of the ground and the obvious absence of winter garb—no fur caps, no gloves, no coats—the photograph appears to have been taken in weather a good deal warmer than that which greeted Solomon Slepak when, early in 1919, he stepped onto the island where the anti-Bolshevik Kolchak regime intended him to spend the rest of his life at hard labor.

The labor camp was in the town of Aleksandrovsk some thirty miles north of the fiftieth parallel. Camp and town seethed with Bolshevik activity. The political prisoners lived apart from the criminals, the thieves and murderers, an arrangement that made it easier for Gregory Zarkhin and Solomon Slepak to smuggle letters out to the Bolsheviks in Aleksandrovsk and Nikolayevsk, to continue to direct underground activities on the mainland from their cells on Sakhalin, and ultimately to stage their own revolution. They organized the Bolshevik prisoners, about two hundred men, into a tightly disciplined fighting unit, and in April 1919 they rose up against the guards and gained control of the labor camp and the town of Aleksandrovsk. Solomon and Zarkhin ordered the release of the criminals in the camp. The fact that they were criminals was not their fault, Solomon and Zarkhin declared at a meeting of the prisoners; the blame lay with the tsarist society that had forced them into an outlaw life by not providing them with a decent education and the economic means to fulfill their goals. They were not criminals in their hearts. They should help overthrow the regime that turned good men into criminals. Most of the criminals joined them.

Gregory Zarkhin now decided to leave Sakhalin and return to the mainland; he vanishes from this narrative until his abrupt reappearance some years later. Solomon remained and was elected first chairman of the Soviet of People’s Commissars of Sakhalin. He was now the head Bolshevik on the Russian part of the island.