Day after day, in the pages of Izvestia, Trud, Pravda, and the popular satirical magazine Krokodil, appeared savage lampoons of Jews and a torrent of furious articles attacking the “despicable gang of killer doctors.” Anti-Semitic hysteria increased, distended to proportions never before known in the Soviet Union. The entire nation was being readied for pogroms, a bloodbath.
Then new rumors swept through the bitter-cold winter air of Moscow. Secret meetings were taking piace in the Kremlin. A carefully prepared scenario was being arranged by Stalin for the Jews. Versions of his plans floated about like insidious poisons. One version-later confirmed by MGB Major Alexei Rybin, who was present at two meetings where the details were worked out-had it that there was soon to be a public trial of the doctors, who would all be found guilty and sentenced to be hanged from scaffolds on Red Square. Then, as the sentences were about to be carried out, the prisoners would be torn away by a raging crowd and lynched, despite the heroic efforts of the guards. Nationwide pogroms would then follow, the Soviet people venting uncontrollable rage against the Jews. Added to these rumors were accounts about barracks being constructed in Siberia on a stupendous scale that made sense only in the face of an impending mass deportation of Jews; about the appearance of freight trains in marshaling yards near Moscow; about lists of Jews being prepared in police precincts. Jews in the major cities of Soviet Russia would be given two hours to pack, allowed one bag per person. All who perished on the tortuous journey were to be thrown from the trains into the frozen fields and forests in the thirty-below-zero air of the Siberian winter.
Chilling confirmation of these rumors came by chance to Masha Slepak. At six o’clock one morning a Russian woman named Nadezhda Naumovna, an old and close friend of Masha’s mother, showed up suddenly in the mother’s apartment. She had been orphaned in her early years and taken in by a Jewish family in the city of Gomel in White Russia. Her Yiddish was fluent. She lived in Davidkovo, a village very near Moscow that has since been swallowed by the western part of the city and no longer exists. Agitatedly she told Masha’s mother what she had witnessed that night, a clear, moonlit night: Trucks suddenly appearing and rumbling up to the houses where Jews lived, and people emerging from the houses with children and small bundles and climbing into the trucks. And the trucks rumbling away. And silence. In the morning all the Jews of Davidkovo were gone.
The frightened woman finished her tale and quickly left. Masha’s mother immediately called Masha and asked her to come to the apartment, where she told her daughter what she had just heard. Masha related it to Volodya. Both saw the events of the night as a rehearsal for things yet to come. They said nothing to Solomon, who, they felt certain, would have called it a wild and baseless story, a slander against the party.
The truth was, however, that the deportation of the Jews, when it was finally to take place, would not be concealed from public view. On the contrary, it would be accomplished in the open-as a magnanimous act by Stalin, as the only possible way of saving the Jews from the wrath of the people, and in the wake of an urgent, importuning letter to the editor of Pravda signed by leading Soviet Jews. We Jews who live in the Soviet Union, the letter would say, are privileged to enjoy fully all the rights guaranteed by our constitution. We participate willingly as workers in the factories and institutions and scientific institutes of our land. But a militant bourgeois nationalism has infected the entire Soviet Jewish people. And in order for that people to atone properly for its murderous doctors and corrupt nationalist sentiments, in order for it to be protected from the righteous wrath of the Soviet people, the Jews whose signatures appear on this letter ask Comrade Stalin to send the Jews of the Soviet Union to the farthest corner of the land for reeducation.
The letter was composed by historian Isaak Mintz and philosopher Mark Mitin, along with the Pravda journalist Yakov Khavinson. Perhaps they believed their act might save them from being added to the lists of deportees. In the offices of Pravda, Khavinson and another staff member, David Zaslavsky, Jews slavishly obedient to Stalin, worked the switchboard, contacting Jews all over the country and requesting that they come to Moscow to sign the letter that was to save Soviet Jewry.
Many yielded and signed; many, despite the clear personal danger, refused. Outlines of the letter were later traced from memory by some who were asked to sign it; the letter itself has yet to be found in the Kremlin archives. It would have had to be approved by Stalin, but most likely did not go through the normal bureaucratic chain that required its being registered and numbered at each level, hence is not in its proper file. No doubt it will surface one day.
During the time signatures to the letter were being collected, Solomon Slepak, loyal Bolshevik and chairman of the house committee of the apartment building in which he lived, walked one day into the building office. In the Soviet Union all apartment houses belonged to the state; in each there was an office responsible for the building’s plumbing, electrical network, gas, heating, rent collection. Salaried government clerks ran those offices, aided by house committees of volunteers, who were usually pensioners. The clerks were in close contact with the local militia, who in turn reported to the security police. Inside the office that day, Solomon Slepak found himself looking at a list of the Jewish residents in the building. His name was on the list.
All through the night of February 28-March 1, 1953, Stalin caroused in the Kremlin with his closest comrades: Georgi Malenkov, Lavrenti Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, and Nicholas Bulganin. He was in a good mood and became quite drunk. The party ended at six o clock in the morning. He summoned no one all that day, and thus his apartment door remained closed. In the early hours of the second of March his maid entered and found him collapsed on the floor. Guards immediately summoned Beria. Soon Malenkov arrived, followed by the others of the inner group. They remained a long time, gathered around the sofa on which Stalin had been placed. Then they left-without calling a doctor.
The next day they returned with a doctor, who diagnosed a stroke. Stalin lay bereft of speech and partially paralyzed. They stood around, watching him die.
He lay there for three and a half days, in agony, slowly strangling to death, his face turning black.
He died on March 5, 1953. Three days later his death was announced over the radio.
Solomon Slepak was stunned and wept openly. Even in the labor camps, many cried. What would now be the future of the Motherland? Masha and Volodya admit that they were frightened. Who would rule the country, hold it together?
Volodya made his way to the Hall of Columns near Red Square, where the coffin with Stalin’s body had been placed for public viewing. People poured from side streets onto Petrovsky Boulevard. A solid jam on Pushkin Square. Gorky Street closed off. A tumultuous crush of humanity moving slowly toward the Hall of Columns at the House of the Trade Unions. The despot lay dead in his coffin, walrus mustache looking stiffly waxed, heavy-lidded eyes forever closed. An armed soldier stood guard nearby Stalin dead! How astonishingly small and helpless he appeared now, slightly ludicrous even, unseemly, with his dyed red hair and pocked face. The uniformed corpse lay wreathed in flowers; lavish bouquets encased the coffin.
On March 9 the body was borne to the mausoleum on Red Square by his son, Vassily, a chronic alcoholic, and by Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev, Molotov, and Voroshilov. The mummified corpse was placed alongside the figure of Lenin. On the streets men and women wept, even though he may have sent their loved ones to a labor camp. Many privately celebrated his death, but most feared that someonen worse might soon rule-the dreaded Beria, perhaps. In Moscow from time to time the vast crowds grew suddenly frenzied, and distant screams could be heard as many among the mourners were crushed to death. Even when dead, Stalin took life. Some murmured that had he been able to, he would have taken all of Russia with him to the grave.