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.
Solomon and Fanya Slepak and their little daughter, Rosa, returned to Moscow, where, on October 29, 1927, Fanya gave birth to a healthy boy, without the aid of forceps. They named the child Vladimir, after Vladimir Lenin, and called him Volodya.
Two months later, on December 27, 1927, the Fifteenth All-Union Congress of the Communist Party, meeting in Moscow, condemned deviation from the party line and removed Trotsky and his supporters from positions of importance-its way of acknowledging the power of a unified party and stifling all opposition to Stalin. Stalin’s rivals quickly recanted.
Solomon Slepak, living in Moscow at the time of the Fifteenth Congress and still working as a correspondent for Rosta, attended the sessions and witnessed Stalin’s ascent to power.
Some while later he was reassigned to China, again as a foreign correspondent. In mid-January 1928 the Slepak family boarded a train for the long journey from Moscow to Peking. And during that trip, little Volodya, two and a half months old, saved their lives.
It was a journey of nearly five thousand miles along the sweep of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, running from Moscow to Vladivostok. South of Chita the railway branched into two lines. Travelers could continue north and east through Russian territory to the city of Khabarovsk and then south on the single-track railbed to Vladivostok, or take the Russian-run Eastern Chinese Railroad through Manchuria east to Harbin and south to Peking.
Solomon and Fanya Slepak, with their little daughter and infant son, were taking the train through thousands of miles of snow-covered wasteland and winter forests and isolated villages to Harbin and Peking.
Harbin lay in the midst of vast swamps and grasslands-a grant of Manchurian land ceded by the Chinese to the Russians in 1896. Many who lived there had come from Russia to work on the railroad. Its population increased after the Revolution and in the twenties numbered about one hundred thousand. Relations between the Kremlin and Chiang Kai-shek were bad. Russian Whites and Chinese bands roamed the steppes, looting Soviet trains.
The train in which the Slepaks were riding came to a sudden stop some miles before Harbin. Armed Whites went through the cars, ordering everyone off. The passengers-Russians, Europeans, Chinese-stood in the cold, waiting for their papers to be checked. Bolsheviks and Jews were told to stand aside. Solomon Slepak, traveling under the name of Semion Ignatievich and carrying a Soviet passport and Tass credentials, was informed by the officer in command that he was a filthy Bolshevik whose party had brought ruin to Russia and was now trying to destroy China. The commander then ordered a young officer to take this Bolshevik filth and his family a distance from the train and shoot them.
The Slepaks began to move past the crowd of passengers, followed by the officer. The infant Volodya started crying. Fanya held him to her, keeping him warm, but his crying grew shrill, piercing. Some of the women among the passengers murmured at the officer. What sort of human being was he, killing an infant in the arms of its mother? Would such an inhuman act advance their cause and the nationalist cause of China? The murmurings grew louder, as did the shrill screams of the infant. The officer, some distance now from his commander, looked distraught. Somewhere weapons were fired: executions, no doubt. Near the Slepak family the crowd was turning restless, its murmurings louder, menacing. Abruptly the officer holstered his weapon, pushed Solomon Slepak and his wife and children into the crowd, and walked away. The crowd swallowed them, and soon they were back aboard the train and traveled without further incident to Harbin and Peking.
In Peking they lived in a brick cottage behind the brick walls of the Soviet compound, a large parklike area of private houses and office buildings set among trees and bushes. Near their cottage was a pavilion with Ping-Pong tables, a short distance behind the pavilion lay the tennis court, and not far from the front of the cottage were the gates to the compound. At the far end of the compound near the wall opposite those gates stood the main building containing the embassy offices and the apartments of the ambassador and other diplomats.
Front stairs brought one up to the veranda of the Slepak home; it in turn led to the living room into which opened the bedroom of Solomon and Fanya, as well as Solomons study. Each of the children had a private bedroom, and their two nannies slept in a room nearby. The staff, all Chinese, consisted of a cook, a maid, Solomons secretary-translator, whose Russian was perfect, and a courier. The courier rode a bicycle to deliver press releases from Solomon to Chinese and foreign press bureaus and to pick up newspapers and releases for Solomon. A stairway led from the rear hallway off the living room down to the basement, where there were storage rooms, the kitchen, and a room that contained a rotary press.
The apparent serenity inside the Soviet compound was a false mirror of events outside. China was experiencing its own savage civil war. Sun Yatsen had died in 1925, his dream of a united and Westernized China unfulfilled. Chiang Kai-shek, appointed by Sun to head the new Whampoa Military Academy set up to train the officer corps of the Kuomintang army, was now commander in chief of a military force that had begun to move north from Canton, subduing the countryside and predatory private armies. Chiang’s initial goals were the reunification of China and the birth of a new Western-oriented government led by the Kuomintang Party, which was at the time still dominated by Chinese Communists whose instructions issued from agents of the Comintern-Borodin and Dalin, among others.
Early in April 1927, about ten months before the arrival of the Slepak family, police had forcibly entered the Soviet Embassy in Peking and discovered documents that revealed the degree of Soviet infiltration into Chinese affairs under Borodin’s direction. Arrested on the premises were nineteen Chinese Communists, all of them later strangled to death for treason.
Some days later Chiang Kai-shek set out to break the hold of the Chinese Communists on the Kuomintang Party through a series of anti-Communist actions in many cities and a coup in Shanghai, where the first revolutionary Marxist cell-the nucleus of the future Chinese Communist Party-had been organized in May 1920. Chiang’s loyalties lay not with the Kremlin but with the bankers, merchants, and landlord families whose loans and revenue he needed. Communist unions and organizations were outlawed, hundreds of Chinese Communist leaders executed.
Among the Kremlin’s Chinese followers shot during this period of purging was Solomon Slepak’s personal secretary, the husband of Volodya’s nanny. That nanny saved Volodya from serious injury-indeed may have saved his life.
That is Volodya Slepak’s earliest memory: his life being saved. He is not quite three years old. His nanny is walking down the wooden stairs from the veranda of the cottage with little Volodya in her arms, he prattling in Chinese, when one of the steps suddenly gives way beneath her feet. She begins to tumble forward. Instinctively she raises the child over her head and plunges her foot deep into the splintering wood to steady herself and keep the child from falling headlong down the stairs to the ground. Her leg snaps.