And so the land lay atomized, all in fear of all, in a miasma of dread, with no possibility of organized resistance because the terror struck at individuals, each instance of it a separate and personal experience-the knock on the door, the abrupt arrest, the sense of shocked disbelief, the certainty that an error had been made and would soon be corrected-and everyone thinking, Don’t look, don’t listen, don’t ask, how do I know, maybe he really was a spy, I’m not doing anything wrong, it won’t touch me. People were terrified of intriguers, provocateurs, denouncers, even of their closest relatives and friends, who could be arrested, jailed, threatened, turned into informers.
It is believed that between 1929 and 1940 seventeen million Russians perished, seven million of them peasants who died in the 1932-1933 famine, and three million from forced collectivization. An additional nine million were in the Gulag, which is the Russian acronym for a department of the secret police called The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps, the system of imprisonment of the “enemies of the people” begun by the Cheka under Lenin. Stalin probably killed more Russians during the 1930s than Hitler did during the Second World War.
Yet some survived: Maxim Litvinov, who slept with a revolver under his pillow so that he could shoot himself if arrested. Vyacheslav Molotov. Lazar Kaganovich. Nikita Khrushchev.
And Solomon Slepak.
One might gaze with a certain smugness upon the slaughter of Communist kingpins at the hands of their own leader were it not for the suffering the terror brought to so many innocent Russians-the blameless family members and nonparty people slain; the many tens of thousands of ordinary people who perished; the hell-on-earth of the Gulag; the unmarked mass burial sites recently uncovered near Minsk, Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk, Kiev. Power was what Stalin wanted; vengeance for real and imagined opposition. And power over a terrified and anguished people was what he got-and held to the day he died.
Yet not everyone suffered. To enable Stalin to accomplish what he did required the cooperation of millions of Soviet citizens: from those in the Politburo to the NKVD to the legal system to the bureaucrats to the prison and labor camp guards. A photograph of a Leningrad café, taken in 1937, brings us into a sunny scene: Men in shirtsleeves and women in summer dresses sit about on wicker chairs along a riverbank, probably the Neva. Cloth-covered tables. Bottles of fruit juice, mineral water, beer, glasses of tea. A waiter in a white jacket and bow tie, a woman wearing a necklace, men bareheaded or with walking caps. Only three men out of the more than thirty people present are wearing soldier’s uniforms. Trees and boats and riverfront homes along the opposite shore. A Russian idyll, a languorous moment in a Chekhovian landscape, a green calm surrounded by a bleeding land.
For many Russians the 1930s under Stalin was a time when life was actually improving. The two Five-Year Plans had wrenched the country out of its crippling illiteracy and agrarian backwardness and turned it into a largely literate, urban, industrial society. Millions of citizens worked very hard, received an education, sacrificed willingly for the Motherland-they were calling it that after 1934-and felt themselves economically well rewarded.
One day Solomon Slepak read in Pravda of the arrest and trial and sentencing of Karl Radek, one of the members of the original Politburo, and expressed astonishment to his family that the man he had known personally for years had all along been a spy. How fortunate the country was that he had been found out. He never talked of Radek again.
His major responsibility at Tass was to present daily to Stalin and the Politburo a digest of the foreign press. As well as to gather press information from all over the world, censor it, and disseminate it to the Russian people.
In 1938 Tass acquired a new director, a man named Khavinson, with whom Solomon Slepak soon found himself embroiled in endless quarrels. After some while he requested from the Central Committee a transfer out of Tass. A dangerous step: No one had the right then to quit a job; the punishment could be arrest and years in a labor camp. Mysteriously, permission was granted.
He left Tass and took a job as senior editor-that is, head censor-of a publishing house specializing in literary and nonfiction works designated for translation. He knew eleven languages well and was fluent in eight: Russian, Yiddish, English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish. His was the decision which Russian books would be translated into foreign languages, and which books written by foreign writers would be published in the Soviet Union in the original languages. He supervised the publication in the USSR of the works of Theodore Dreiser.
Late one night in the winter of 1938, after Solomon had left Tass, he suddenly woke and, wearing his pajamas and robe, went to the door of the apartment, where he stood listening. (The apartment building was occupied entirely by those who worked for Tass; soon thereafter the Slepaks would leave it for their permanent home on Gorky Street.) That night, as Solomon stood at the door, Volodya woke and came out of his room and saw his father. When the boy asked what was wrong, Solomon silenced him, and Volodya, then ten years old, realized with astonishment that his father was frightened. After a while, Solomon told his son to go back to bed. Minutes later, Volodya heard his father return to his room.
Years later, his father explained that he had been afraid of being arrested. “But you were a member of the party!” Volodya said. “Sometimes,” his father replied, “a disease requires that healthy tissue also be cut away.” In order to be sure that all the enemies of the state were removed, Solomon Slepak quietly told his son, the NKVD would arrest all those close to the enemies. He himself, he said, had been very close to many who were later seen to be enemies; the NKVD might think he was involved with them. Even individuals who had once served with the secret police were arrested.
Solomon Slepak, loyal Old Bolshevik, waiting nights at his apartment door for the knock of the NKVD and the words “You are under arrest.”
When Nicholas Yezhov, a dwarfish man who was living proof of the Russian proverb “Out of filth you can make a prince,” replaced Genrikh Yagoda as head of the NKVD in 1936, he gave a talk to a number of his top officers and spoke of the many innocent victims who were bound to be caught up in their great effort to rid the country of spies and traitors. “Better that ten innocent people should suffer,” he said, “than one spy get away. When you cut down the forest, woodchips fly.”
Why wasn’t Solomon Slepak one of the savaged trees?
Walking with his grandson one day in the late 1950s, he ran into the former secretary of the party organization at Tass, who seemed surprised to see him.
He asked Solomon, “When were you released?”
“I wasn’t arrested,” Solomon replied.
The man looked astonished. “I saw a list of Tass people who were to be arrested. You were on the list.”
It turned out that the list had been drawn up soon after Solomon Slepak had left Tass. The man in Tass responsible for the addresses of those on the list had telephoned the NKVD and reported that Slepak no longer worked there. He was told to write “No longer works here” after Slepak’s name. All the others on the list were arrested and shot.
Was he spared only through bureaucratic ineptness, sheer chance, repeated fortuitous slippings through the cracks? Did he have a sixth, saving, sense of danger that kept him always a step ahead of the secret police, staying one level below those in visible power, knowing when to leave a post? Was he perhaps in possession of ruinous information about those in power?