Economic conditions had improved somewhat in the years after the emergency period known as War Communism and the devastating famine of the early 1920s. When the guns of the Civil War finally went silent at the end of 1920, Lenin had gazed upon widespread rebellions, strikes, hunger, and the shambles of the Soviet economy-a declining harvest, rampant inflation, industrial production at 13 percent of the prewar level-and had begun a reluctant retreat from pure ideological communism. In the spring of 1921, after a number of stumbling moves, he instituted his New Economic Policy: Peasants were now subject to standard taxes rather than to cruel outright requisitions; small businessmen could hire workers and freely trade the goods they produced; one could buy and sell urban property, enter the field of publishing, establish and take part in privatized retail trade. Gradually rationing was abolished, and the economy began to recover. A photograph of an open market during the period of the New Economic Policy, from 1921 to 1928, shows stalls bulging with produce. Most Soviet citizens-workers, peasants, small businessmen-seemed to benefit from the new policy. Jews, about one-third of them “declassed” because they had been artisans, small merchants, and craftsmen, found the policy a boon to their broken lives. But Bolsheviks like Zinoviev worried that the reappearance of private enterprise might destabilize political control and made a point of declaring that the New Economic Policy was nothing more than “a temporary deviation, a tactical retreat.”
Lenin’s policy regarding the Jews-the destruction of their institutions and their total assimilation-was followed and intensified by Stalin. The Comintern’s failure to incite revolution throughout the capitalist world led Stalin to a new interpretation of communism: the continuing development of socialism in one country, the Soviet Union. Those who opposed him in his clash with the internationalist-minded Trotsky-Kamenev, Zinoviev, and others-he took to calling “rootless cosmopolitans”-that is, party members who cared more for socialism in other countries than in their own: Stalin’s way of calling someone a Jew without sounding like a tsarist anti-Semite. At the same time, Jews were among Stalin’s most loyal adherents; one among them, Lazar Kaganovich, headed the first Five-Year Plan’s pitiless effort to forcibly collectivize the peasants of the Ukraine. Thus the urban Russian hated Jews because they were “rootless cosmopolitans”; the rural peasant hated them because they were ruthless oppressors. Speculators, petty traders, parasites, Bolshevik overlords, made up the image of the Jew in the eyes of most Russians.
In 1928 Stalin initiated an effort to settle Jews inside their own autonomous province in distant Birobidzhan, 23,321 square miles of territory near Manchuria, 8,000 miles from Moscow, and near the region of Solomon Slepak’s forays into mainland Asia. It was a harsh, primitive land, ridden with disease, insects, rains. At its height, in the late 1930s, the Jewish autonomous region had 128 Jewish elementary schools with Yiddish as the language of instruction, a daily Yiddish newspaper, a medical school, a music school, and 27 Jewish state and collective farms. But little came of the effort. Crippled early on by the unwillingness of Jews to be concentrated in one area-particularly so distant from the centers of culture-it was further weakened by the purges of the 1930s, during which many of its leaders, accused of being Trotskyites, nationalists, and Zionists, were imprisoned, exiled, executed. By the end of the 1960s Jewish Birobidzhan was dead.
Stalin ended the New Economic Policy in 1928 with his first Five-Year Plan to industrialize Russia on a massive scale and collectivize its agriculture. For that enormous effort a vast pool of highly trained workers was necessary, Townlet Jews and village peasants poured into the cities and entered the work force.
A photograph shows a group of young Jews in a workshop for the training of metal laborers seated in front of a large portrait of Stalin, who is wearing a white army-style jacket and holding a cigarette in his left hand. By the end of that first Five-Year Plan, more than a million Jews had become wage earners who worked with their hands, and salaried bookkeepers, teachers, engineers. Gone were all the tsarist restrictions that had barred Jews from entering higher education and the professions. In 1934-1935, the Slepak family’s first year in Moscow after their return from China because of Volodya’s dysentery, fully 18 percent of the graduate student population of Russia was Jewish.
Russian Jewry was dissolving into the larger body of the land and its culture. Battered from without by the Communist Jews of the Evsektsia, weakened from within by Jews no longer willing to take on the burdens of an ancient tradition and fearful of being branded Trotskyites or Mensheviks, the Jewish religion and its institutions vanished or went underground. So successful did Stalin think the anti-Jewish program to have been that by the mid-1930s he was certain that the young generation of Jews knew nothing of Judaism. And he was in no small measure correct.
About a decade and a half had passed from the time of the initial promulgation of those anti-Jewish decrees to that day when young Volodya discovered his Jewishness. The family chronicles record his bewilderment on learning that he was a Jew, on being so defined by others, by those who clearly hated him. They tell of his anger and shame. And his sudden fear.
In school Volodya began to notice that some classmates would suddenly become strangely sad and withdrawn. They stood alone in the play yard; they were never called on in class; they sat silent and shriveled at their desks. After some time they disappeared. Somehow everyone in the school knew not to talk about them.
Volodya told his father about the vanishing students. Solomon Slepak explained that a new organization of secret political police had been established-the NKVD. It was made up of people who were cleverer and more talented than those in the previous political police forces, the Cheka and the GPU, and the NKVD was uncovering spies, enemies, and traitors who had not been discovered before. Those so uncovered were being arrested and sent away, together with their families.
One day Volodya saw his father remove some books from a shelf and toss them into the garbage; the authors had been arrested. Another time his father took down a history of the Russian Civil War and proceeded to ink out the photographs of Trotsky and others. In school Volodya’s teachers told the students to tear out the pictures of this or that person who had just been discovered to be an imperialist spy. At home one day his father expunged with India ink faces of friends and relatives in their family album-all had been arrested. The features of Ambassador Bogomolov, with whom Solomon Slepak had served in China-erased. Volodya thought it a good thing that all those spies and traitors were being uncovered; now Russia would live safely without enemies.
His uncle Konstantin Shur, once Yosef Shur, was a tall, strong, jolly man whom the Slepaks often visited in his apartment. He was a member of the Communist Party and the director of the Soviet government’s Department of Weights and Measures. Fanya Slepak’s brother. He would toss Volodya up in the air, catch him, toss him up again. He had a wife and children, and the families were together often. Once some weeks went by and Volodya asked, “Where is Uncle Konstantin?” His father said, “Uncle Konstantin was arrested. He was a member of a hostile conspiracy. Don’t ask about him; don’t talk about him.” Volodya, then about ten, obeyed and put his uncle out of mind and never saw him or his family again.
Fear hung in the air. People avoided looking into one another’s eyes. Deep silences lay heavily upon food lines in stores, crowds in trams, workers in office buildings, dwellers in apartment houses.