The despot had died around the holiday of Purim, when Jews celebrate the deliverance of an ancient Persian Jewish community from annihilation at the hands of a minister of state named Haman. No one in the Slepak family, however, knew enough about anything Jewish to make such a connection.
On April 4, one month after the death of Stalin, came an announcement over the radio concerning the “Doctors’ Plot”: “The people guilty of perverting the inquiry have been arrested and summoned to trial to bear the responsibility for their criminal guilt.” And, added the announcer, the Order of Lenin was being taken away from the chief prosecution witness, Dr. Lidia Timashuk.
April 4 was the third day of Passover, the festival that marks the Israelites’ deliverance from slavery in Egypt, an occasion no doubt overlooked by Solomon Slepak, who by that time must have read in Pravda that those accused in the “Doctors’ Plot” had been imprisoned “without any lawful basis” and were being released. A Pravda editorial declared Solomon Mikhoels innocent and referred to him as “an upright communal worker.”
Some years later Volodya wondered aloud in the presence of his father if there had ever been a deportation list of the Jews in their apartment building during the time of the “Doctors’ Plot.” His father would not respond. Masha said that she had heard of the lists and that each apartment house had one. Volodya said to his father, “How was it possible you didn’t know, you were the chairman of the house committee?” Masha said to Solomon, “You must have known.” Solomon then admitted to having seen the list in the apartment building’s office. Volodya said, “You saw the list and you said nothing to us?” Solomon glanced at his wristwatch. Volodya said, “Were you on the list?” Solomon said, “Yes, I was on the list.” Volodya said, “You had to be crazy to help them do this against yourself.” Solomon got to his feet and walked out of the room without another word.
Behind the thick walls of the Kremlin, a raging war of succession was being fought among the contentious heirs of Stalin: Malenkov, Beria, Molotov, Khrushchev. In Asia the Korean War was still dragging on. Along the western border Soviet satellite states were growing restive with the end of Stalinist rule.
At first Malenkov and Beria and Khrushchev appeared to be ruling together, an ungainly troika: Malenkov as chief of state, Beria as head of security, and Khrushchev as apparent leader of the party. Then, at the end of June 1953, after strikes and demonstrations in Czechoslovakia and a surprise workers’ uprising in East Berlin, Beria, whose job it was to anticipate such events, seemed to vanish, his name stricken from the Pravda list of the party hierarchy present one night at the Bolshoi Theater. In July the Korean War came to a negotiated end. In September, Khrushchev gained the position of general secretary of the party. And on Christmas Day 1953 there appeared in Pravda the announcement that Beria and seven of his closest collaborators had been brought to trial and shot earlier that month. Sometime afterward the Great Soviet Encyclopedia asked its subscribers to remove with a razor the article on Beria and his photograph and to replace it with an entry on the Bering Sea.
By then Solomon Slepak and his son rarely talked about politics. But the family chronicles add, in Volodya’s voice, that had his father been asked to explain the demise of Beria, he would have responded with an exultant “You see how honest the party is, how it cleans its own house. Beria, not Stalin, must have caused the doctors to be arrested. Beria, that imperialist agent, was all the time deceiving Stalin.”
In 1954 the MGB, Ministry of State Security, which had replaced the NKVD in 1946, was reorganized and renamed the KGB, Committee for State Security. One year later Malenkov, whose economic policies had proved disastrous, was abruptly removed from his position and replaced by Nicholas Bulganin. He and Khrushchev now ruled the Soviet Union.
In the labor camps lived close to ten million prisoners. Slowly they began to be released, and their reputations and pensions were restored. The “crimes” of many who had perished were erased from the record, and their families sent back from exile.
The danger to the physical existence of Soviet Jewry appeared to have ended. In 1959, following eleven years of silence for Yiddish books, three works in Yiddish suddenly appeared, the selected writings of the greatest of the Yiddish writers in the tsarist period: Mendele Mocher Seforim, I. L. Peretz, and Sholem Aleichem. Books in Yiddish by surviving writers were published sporadically during the years that followed, but no Jewish institution or school was reestablished, no professional theater returned to life.
On Gorky Street the Slepak family seemed to be enjoying a comfortable and serene Soviet life.
Little Sanya Slepak attended Special English School Number 31 on Stanislavsky Street, one block from where he lived. The school, which was designated as an English school in 1963 (there were other schools that specialized in French and Spanish), serviced many of the children and grandchildren of the Soviet ruling class. It was named after the Scottish poet Robert Burns and had a brother school in Glasgow, named after the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. It had an excellent faculty and began the teaching of English in the second grade rather than in the fifth, as was typical of regular schools. It gave more hours to English than did other schools and possessed the most up-to-date language-teaching equipment. English was studied in small groups, five or six students to a teacher; some subjects, such as geography and history, were taught entirely in English.
Why, one might ask, was English so eagerly sought and openly taught among the Soviet elite at a time when public policy at the highest levels was so belligerently opposed to foreign cultural influences? In fact, the school was a training ground for children of the elite, their beginning preparation for contact with the world outside the Motherland, where the international language was English. About one-third of the students were from families in the diplomatic corps and would end up in English-language institutes or the Institute of International Relations. Others would one day work as interpreters and translators in Soviet radio and television. There were only two or three English schools of that caliber in Moscow, all of them near the Kremlin.
Among those in Special English School Number 31 around that time were the grandson of Khrushchev, the grandchildren of Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan, the daughter of Minister of Culture Demichev, the daughter of Beria, and the children and grandchildren of many high-level bureaucrats. It was nearly impossible for an average Russian family to have a child admitted into that school. When Sanya Slepak reached school age, Solomon Slepak went to the school and had a talk with the headmaster, Gregory Suvorov, reputed to be a decent and honest man, a man of high principle. The details of Solomon’s conversation with Suvorov are unknown, but afterward Sanya Slepak was permitted to take the entrance examination, which he passed.
Masha, after five years of additional medical training, was a radiologist in City Hospital Number 30 on Krestyanskaya Zastava and later worked in a polyclinic named after Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of Lenin’s secret police; the clinic was in Kitaysky Proezd (“Chinese Way”), in the center of Moscow.
A sudden change in fortune occurred to Volodya in 1957: The Moscow TV Research and Development Institute invited him to work as a senior engineer in a laboratory where experiments were being conducted with measuring and control equipment for television transmitters.
Then his mother died of cancer, in 1959. A year later his father married a Russian woman and moved to her house on Mashkova Street, about three miles from the Gorky Street apartment, which he relinquished to Volodya and Masha, who now had two children; another son had been born to them in May 1959 and named Leonid, after no one in particular. Masha liked the name.