The gates of November (8 page)

To his surprise and delight, Solomon Slepak ran across his old friend Gregory Zarkhin at the Congress. The tall blond Bolshevik from White Russia was now head of the Press Department of the Comintern. Zarkhin—who had changed his name to Voitinsky when he became involved with the Bolshevik underground in Vladivostok and retained that name the rest of his life—invited Solomon to remain in Moscow as deputy head of the Press Department. Making the necessary official inquiries, Solomon was advised to vacate the editorship of the Far Eastern
Pravda
and accept the position with the Comintern. An astonishing rise into the heart of Moscow, into the very center of power.

He lived on Tverskaya Street, in the Hotel Lux (now the Hotel Tsentralnaya), which had been commandeered by the Comintern for its members. Two blocks away stood the site of the future statue of the founder of Moscow, Yuri Dolgoruky, erected in 1948 as part of the 8ooth-anniversary celebration of the city. Directly across the street from the statue was the Moscow Soviet, the municipal building. Less than a mile away was the Kremlin.

The family chronicles are without information regarding Solomon Slepaks daily activities. There are no details as to what crossed his desk; nor do we know to whom he reported, his contacts with the Central Committee, the Politburo, the Cheka, the Communist parties throughout the world.

With unrest everywhere following the end of World War I, much of the world appeared to be on the brink of revolution and class war. The abdication of the kaiser in Germany and the takeover of power by a shaky Social Democratic government was seen by Lenin as a repetition of the same events that had brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia. In Britain—labor unrest and a weak government. In France, Italy, Hungary—demonstrations, strikes. In America—near national hysteria over the Reds; strikes in major industries; even the police force of Boston out on strike. All over the world—new Communist parties of greater or lesser strength, splitting away from or capturing existing Socialist parties. Western intellectuals and liberals thrilled to the vision of power—armies, police, hosts of bureaucrats—in the hands of Russian intellectuals, and were enchanted by the prospect of a new social order and the destruction of the abhorrent bourgeois class. The Communists in America, Britain, Sweden, Australia remained small splinter organizations, but in France, Italy, Germany they became major parties. Nearly everywhere in the world, it seemed, Communists craved to join the Comintern, accept subservience to Lenin, participate in the coming world revolution.

But during the years that immediately followed the Third International, not a single trade union in the Western world fell to the Communists. The Communist putsch in Germany was smashed by the German government. The war with Poland ended soon after the close of the Second Congress with an astounding defeat suffered by the Red Army and with a treaty, signed in March 1921, that cost the Bolsheviks much coveted territory. Inside Russia there was domestic unrest: peasant uprisings, a stunning mutiny at the naval base in Kronstadt by sailors once fiercely loyal to the Bolsheviks, continuing economic collapse, agrarian failure, starvation. The labor strikes in Europe and America were broken or settled. The dream of world revolution, the very essence and postulate of Communism, had to be rethought. Lenin now needed to concern himself with the consolidation of socialism in his own country.

The Far East, though, appeared for a while a rich field for Bolshevik harvesting. Applying pure ideology to practical necessity in a region virtually empty of industrial workers or Communists, Lenin, during the Second Congress, had urged the formation of temporary working alliances of Communist parties and their erstwhile enemies, bourgeois national liberation movements. And evaluating the Politburo’s Far East strategy, he remarked, “The road to Paris lies through Peking.”

Gregory Voitinsky had earlier entered China in the spring of 1920, about two months before the convening of the Second Congress. Together with a Chinese named Yang Wing-chai, he traveled first to Peking and then to Shanghai, looking for Communists, and found a tiny leftist enclave in each city. He then returned to Russia.

In July 1921 thirteen young Chinese men, meeting first in a girls’ school in the French Concession in Shanghai and then on an excursion boat—secret police had been spotted near the school—founded the Communist Party of China. One of those present was a twenty-seven-year-old named Mao Tse-tung.

Later that year the Comintern sent Voitinsky back into China. His task: to establish contact with the new Chinese Communist Party and open communications between Lenin and Sun Yat-sen, the president of China, who had headed the revolutionary movement that, in February 1912, had brought about the abdication of the last Manchu emperor. Earlier in 1921, as director of the Kuomintang, the Nationalist People’s Party, Sun had organized a revolt against the government in Peking headed by Yüan Shih-kai, the increasingly dictatorial president of China, and set himself up as president of a self-proclaimed national government in Canton. He would need allies in his effort to liberate northern China. The Comintern had ordered Voitinsky to explore the feasibility of joining the Communists to the Kuomintang, a union of Russian-style Communism and Chinese-style nationalism. After all, hadn’t Sun Yat-sen sent a telegram of congratulations to Lenin soon after the Revolution?

According to the family chronicles, Voitinsky arrived in China—and shortly thereafter disappeared.

Word came back some while later: He had been arrested and imprisoned, probably by Whites still operating in Manchuria. The Comintern then resolved to send Solomon Slepak into China. He was to ransom Voitinsky, get him out of China, and complete his mission. Solomon traveled with a false American passport and a great deal of money to use for bribes, money probably acquired through the sale abroad of tsarist jewels, a method employed by Lenin to finance covert operations of Communist cells and newspapers.

The family chronicles tell us nothing of his travels. But there were no choices then in the way one journeyed from Russia to China. One took the two-week journey across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. From the Manchuria station on the border one traveled to Harbin via the Chinese Eastern Railroad, which was still held by White Russians. Then from Harbin on the South Manchurian Railroad, which was operated by the Japanese, to Mukden. From there one journeyed to Peking on the railroad run by the British. Then the Chinese Railroad to Shanghai and the boat to Swatow and by foot into Kwangtung Province and by train to Canton, where lived Sun Yat-sen.

This was a period of appalling turmoil in China. The imperial regime was dead, along with the idea of a constitutional monarchy. Educated Chinese, many of whom had studied in universities in Japan and Europe, sought to establish some kind of republican government to unify the land and build a nation. In the meantime, the land lay in fragments, ruled by militarist regimes, feuding warlords, a half dozen or so predatory foreign armies, and missionaries.

Somehow, in this roiling land, Solomon Slepak found and rescued his friend Gregory Voitinsky. And made contact with Sun Yat-sen. Strangely, in none of the books I have read on this period in Chinese history is there any mention of Sun Yat-sen in connection with a mysterious Russian bearing an American name and passport. Indeed, it is Voitinsky who is credited with making the first contact with Sun Yat-sen. And mention is often made of two important Comintern agents of that period in China: S. A. Dalin and Michael Borodin. But there is the evidence of a photograph of Sun Yat-sen that bears his signature beneath these words in Russian: “To dear Comrade Slepak, in memory of our meeting.” The Slepak family chronicles insist that it was Solomon who persuaded Sun Yat-sen to admit Communists into the Kuomintang, a fateful decision taken in August 1922, while Solomon Slepak was still in China. Opening the Kuomintang to the Communists also opened China to Michael Borodin, the Comintern agent who arrived in Canton in October 1923 to aid in the creation of a Chinese Communist Party along the lines of the party in the Soviet Union. That first success of Solomon Slepak’s, if the chronicles are correct, dramatically altered human history.

Why is there no mention of Slepak in the numerous books I’ve combed on this period of Russian-Chinese history? Was he only a low-echelon bureaucrat? But would Zinoviev and the Central Committee of the Comintern have sent a minor figure on a major mission to rescue a Comintern agent and open relations with Sun Yat-sen, who held the future of China in his hands? And would they have let him return later to China for two more years? Not very likely. Was Solomon Slepak, then, a full-fledged Comintern agent? With Cheka connections? Surely he was being kept up-to-date by Cheka agents on events in China.

These are not the only questions left us by the family chronicles.

Shortly after he returned from China, Slepak was called to the office of Georgi Chicherin, the people’s commissar of foreign affairs. There he met with Deputy Commissar Maxim Litvinov, who informed him that the Foreign Ministry had decided to send him to Japan as the correspondent for Rosta, the Russian Telegraphic Agency, founded in 1918 and forerunner of Tass, the telegraphic agency of the Soviet Union.

The Japanese had no diplomatic relations with Bolshevik Russia. Solomon Slepak would be the first Russian in any official capacity in Japan since the Revolution. It would be a mission of some delicacy, having to do with a good deal more than journalism, and involving meetings with ministers of state, perhaps with the emperor himself.

He would need to change his obviously Jewish name. After all, he was now representing the new Russia. “In all the world they are saying the Jews have taken power in Russia,” Litvinov remarked. “It’s not good for you to go as Solomon Izrailevich Slepak. Change your name to Semion Ignatievich. A good Russian name.” Litvinov himself was of Jewish origin.

And as it was against the policy of the Foreign Ministry to send on an extended foreign diplomatic mission anyone who was unmarried, he would need to find a wife, and quickly.

Solomon Slepak remembered a girl he had known during his childhood and made immediate arrangements to visit his mother, who had survived the war and the Revolution. He had not been home since he had run away seventeen years before. His mother still lived in Kopys, some miles from Dubrovno, the small town of his Jewish beginnings.

Nothing of that journey home is recorded in the family chronicles: no conversations, no memories, no account of who was alive and who dead, of conditions in little Dubrovno and larger Kopys, about three miles away, of the consequences of the war and the Revolution on the region. And not a word about his mother.

All we are told is that he found the girl who had been his childhood friend. Black hair, brown eyes, and half a head taller than the short, stocky Solomon Slepak. She could read, was notably talkative, had no formal advanced education. Her name was Fanya. He asked her to marry him, and she accepted.

He returned with her to Moscow.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Foreign Ministry, while trying to obtain the required diplomatic documents for Solomon Slepak’s—or, more accurately, Semion Ignatievich’s—entry into Japan, had run into unexpected difficulties.

The Japanese, it turned out, knew precisely who he was and were decidedly unhappy about his coming. They had not forgotten the Bolshevik known as Sam, who had organized the uprising on Sakhalin Island and commanded the Red partisans on the mainland and slaughtered Ussuri Cossacks, allies of the Japanese in Siberia during the Russian Civil War. Clearly, the Japanese would not welcome a man who had been responsible for the defeat of their former allies and the deaths of so many of their own soldiers.

The Office of the People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs informed the Japanese Foreign Ministry that if the journalist Semion Ignatievich was not given proper credentials to enter Japan as a foreign correspondent, the three Japanese foreign correspondents then in Russia would be expelled immediately. The Japanese yielded.

Solomon Slepak and his wife traveled to Japan and arrived in Tokyo in late 1922. At first they lived in a hotel in Tokyo; then they moved to an apartment. As the sole representative in Japan of Soviet Russia, Solomon Slepak was treated as a quasi ambassador of the new Bolshevik country and invited to diplomatic functions. He received an audience with the emperor. Though ostensibly a journalist, he was nevertheless being accorded high diplomatic status. Was he permitted to transmit coded messages to Chicherin and Litvinov? Could he send and receive sealed mail?

The following year Fanya Slepak gave birth to a girl in a Japanese hospital. A difficult forceps delivery. The child was born dead.

On Monday, January 21, 1924, Vladimir Lenin died after the last of a series of strokes, without designating a successor. Trotsky had refused Lenin’s earlier offer of deputyship, in part out of concern that his taking such a high position would give the Soviet Union’s enemies a final justification for claiming that the country was controlled by Jews.

A war of succession broke out among Stalin, Trotsky, and others in the Politburo. At Stalin’s initiative, Lenin was embalmed and placed on permanent public display in a mausoleum on Red Square, an echo of the Russian Orthodox folk belief that the bodies of saints never decay, and a sign of proper continuity between Lenin and those who would succeed him in governing the Soviet state he had founded.

A small number of specialists in the art of embalming were formed into a group named the Immortalization Commission and given the task of preserving the mummified corpse. The city of Petrograd, once St. Petersburg, was renamed Leningrad.

That same year, 1924, Fanya Slepak gave birth to a second baby girl, whom the Slepaks named Rosa, after the German Communist leader Rosa Luxemburg. The delivery, which took place in a Japanese hospital, was again by forceps, marks of which the child bore until the age of three. The following year Fanya gave birth to twin boys. Both were delivered by forceps and born dead. Fanya told her husband that she thought the Japanese had tried to kill their second child and had successfully murdered the first child and the twins because of what Solomon and his army of partisans had done to them during the Civil War. When she became pregnant again, she insisted that the baby be born in the Soviet Union.