The Gates of November Read online

  In the early months of the war, with the German Army advancing upon Moscow, the city was at first chaotic, mobs of drunken and hysterical people roaming the streets looking for German spies, and then the streets were suddenly still, no traffic, no pedestrians, and nobody knowing what to do or where to run, and long lines at the bread stores. Masha waiting in a line one morning heard people say, “What are Jews doing here?” She was certain that if there were no bread or flour in the city the next day, all the Jews in Moscow would be killed. She waited in the cold for three hours, and someone pushed her out of the line and said, “Go to Palestine for bread.” She ran home, weeping.

  That October the family was evacuated from Moscow. A terrifying journey in a crowded freight car, one of more than ninety attached to two engines operated by men who seemed not to know their destination and took them at first south to the Caucasus and then east to the Urals, through vast fields and forests, the war sometimes nearby, the thump and crunch of artillery and German aircraft overhead.

  After six weeks of travel the train deposited them in the exotic world of Tashkent, the capital city of Uzbekistan in Central Asia, where they lived for a while in a shack. It was winter, the rainy season, and very cold. In a bazaar one morning they watched as soldiers loaded onto a truck the corpses of starved children recently arrived from the Ukraine, and some minutes later a hungry boy was beaten to death before their eyes by a raging crowd for stealing an apple from a stall. Masha’s mother decided they would not remain in Tashkent, and they traveled south and lived in a village not far from the border of Afghanistan. There they survived the winter through the grit and wits of Masha’s mother, who seemed to understand how to deal with the local people, bartered clothes for food, worked at odd jobs with Masha, who was fifteen years old, on a collective farm for a daily payment of a loaf of bread each, and nursed Masha’s sister through the measles that took the lives of all the other refugee children stricken with it.

  In the summer of 1942 they returned to Moscow—after months of a nightmarish journey on slow trains teeming with refugees, after bouts of serious illness along the way, after Masha and her little brother had been separated from their mother and sister as their train pulled out and left them behind, and they spent a week hopping rides on freight trains and army trucks, making their way to Moscow without papers or money, and found their mother in the apartment, beside herself with grief over her two lost children and overwhelmed with joy at the sight of them.

  Masha discovered to her dismay that much of her father’s precious library of leather-bound books had been stolen, some of it sold for food, some of it burned for warmth. The two elderly men who were their neighbors in the communal apartment stared at them icily when Masha’s mother asked about the books. What did she think was more important in wartime, her husbands books or Russian lives?

  They had been away from the city a long time and needed a new residence permit in order to obtain ration cards for food. There was no certainty the permit would be given them. Masha’s mother said to her, “You have to come with me to the militia station; you will bring me luck. You have that luck; it’s within you.” Masha did not understand. They went to the local precinct and were given their residence permit and papers to fill out. Her mother took her everywhere she needed to go to get the papers approved. She began to call Masha “my little amulet.” Whenever she had to go somewhere on a serious errand, she would say to Masha, “Come with me; you 11 bring me luck.”

  In 1943 they moved to another building because the walls of the old apartment, weakened by German bombing, began to crumble. The new apartment was enormous, with one sink, one toilet, nine rooms, nine families, about thirty people in all, among them ten children; nine tables in the kitchen, each with a kerosene burner; cooking, laundry, gossip, arguments in the kitchen, children running about; buckets, pails, clothes, a bicycle hanging from a wall, boxes filled with books. Quiet only when everyone slept.

  In Uzbekistan, Masha had not attended school and missed her seventh and eighth grades. When they returned to Moscow, she studied on her own, took the examination for ninth grade, and passed. Along with other young people, she became a member of Komsomol. In their first apartment her parents had spoken to each other in Yiddish and with the children in Russian; her mother sang songs and told stories in Yiddish and Russian. Now, in this apartment and on the street, the Rashkovsky family spoke only Russian. In school and around the neighborhood Masha had Jewish and Gentile friends. She distanced herself from anyone known to be even remotely anti-Semitic; she avoided trouble; she never spoke to anyone about politics.

  After high school she began to attend the Institute of Historical Archives because it was nearest her home, and at the end of her first semester she told her mother that she wanted to leave school, she was bored. Her mother said, “If that’s the case, then either you will study to become a doctor or you will go to work in a factory.” Her mother thought that the practice of medicine would be good for a woman.

  That was in 1947, before the kindling of Stalinist-style anti-Semitism. To attend medical school then, you needed to have graduated from high school and passed examinations in chemistry, physics, and Russian language. During the summer of 1947 Masha did whatever preparatory study was necessary and had no difficulty gaining acceptance into medical school.

  There followed two years of lectures and class work and memorization. And sessions in Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, political economy, history of the Communist Party, dialectical materialism, historical materialism, little of which, according to the family chronicles, the medical students took seriously. They brought their notes to the examinations and immediately afterward forgot what they had memorized.

  Masha’s parents had observed no religious traditions; her mother did not light Sabbath candles. When Masha met Volodya, she was as indifferent to religion as he was. They considered themselves citizens of the Soviet Union, with the word “Jew” appearing routinely as a mark of identity after the word “nationality” on their internal passports.

  Masha was able to leave the medical institute in Ryazan for Moscow only on weekends. The fifth time she and Volodya met, he brought her to the apartment on Gorky Street and introduced her to his parents. Volodya’s sister, Rosa, no longer lived there; she had received her master’s degree in philology from Moscow University in 1948 and was married that same year. To Volodya’s parents, Masha seemed bright, engaging, thoroughly Russian, and suitable for their son. That was in the early spring of 1951.

  They went out together nine times in all before Volodya proposed marriage. Masha accepted. The marriage took place on the seventh of that June, a civil ceremony in the municipal registration office. Afterward there was a small party for them in the apartment of Masha’s family and another later in the Slepak apartment on Gorky Street.

  The next day Masha left Moscow to begin her summer internship in a hospital in the small town of Lebedyan in Ryazanskaya Province, about 220 miles southeast of Moscow. She returned in late August, moved into Volodya’s room in the Slepak apartment, then went back to the medical institute in Ryazan to continue her studies and soon discovered that she was pregnant.

  She did not want to have the baby in Ryazan and decided to apply to the Ministry of Health for a transfer to a medical institute in Moscow. She and Volodya proceeded, with much effort, to tread their way through the bureaucracy and the paperwork: numerous applications; documents that confirmed their marriage; papers from Masha’s physician verifying her pregnancy; an affidavit concerning Volodya’s workplace and position.

  On weekends she traveled to Moscow to be with Volodya in his little room with a balcony facing Gorky Street.

  Weeks passed while Masha’s request for transfer slowly wound its way through the bureaucracy. Finally, to her joy, the request was approved. At the end of the semester, after passing her exams, she was transferred to the Second Moscow Medical Institute. That May she entered the local maternity hospital on Stanislavsky Street to deliver her baby. Hours
of difficult labor, during which she remained largely unattended, reduced her to utter exhaustion and an ominous silence. The medical staff then labored long and hard to save her and the baby. She gave birth to a son, who was given the name Alexander and the nickname Sanya, after her father. Some weeks later Masha Slepak returned to the medical institute.

  All was tranquil in the Slepak household on Gorky Street during the summer and fall of 1952: Masha, in her final year of medical school; Volodya, working as a senior engineer in the Electro-Vacuum Factory in Moscow, a job he had obtained when the manager had chosen to ignore the fact that he was a Jew, because skilled specialists were now needed if the Soviet Union was to overtake the West in radar technology; and Solomon, the Old Bolshevik, approaching his sixtieth year and at peace with himself despite a recently diagnosed heart condition, his grandson embodying for him a sense of continuity and accomplishment, his lifelong dream of a new order to a great extent fulfilled. Adding to his feeling of personal achievement must have been the enormous satisfaction of having witnessed, in 1949, the termination of the Civil War in China and the creation of the Communist Chinese People’s Republic, under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung.

  Then, suddenly, in November 1952, Stalin ordered the arrest of his personal physician, A. N. Vinogradov. Arrested, too, were others on the medical staff in the Kremlin hospital-clinic that serviced the ruling class of the Soviet Union. The stunning accusation: involvement in a plot to poison the entire leadership of the country.

  Masha Slepak, attending her final year at the Second Moscow Medical Institute and, as part of her studies, working in Moscow City Hospital Number 4 as an intern, knew many of the arrested doctors. On an evening in November, after a day at the hospital, she returned to the apartment in a state of great agitation. She took Volodya aside and spoke to him. Then they went into the room of his parents.

  Fanya Slepak was out. Solomon Slepak sat alone, reading.

  “I just came from a meeting in my hospital,” Masha said.

  Solomon looked up from his newspaper.

  “It was terrible,” Masha said.

  Solomon asked what had happened.

  Masha said, “It was a meeting of the staff. Almost every day the authorities of the hospital organize such a meeting. All the students and doctors and professors must attend. Each time a party activist comes to the stage, and right after his speech they put on a Jewish doctor, who talks against Jewish traitors and the Jewish conspiracy and Jewish professors who are poisoners.”

  Solomon said calmly, “It’s true that among Jews, and especially Jewish doctors, there are traitors.”

  Masha said, “But many of the professors who were arrested are my teachers. I know them. They’re honest people.”

  “Perhaps they are,” said Solomon.

  “They can’t be traitors or spies.”

  “Perhaps they are entirely innocent.”

  “Then how can they be arrested?” asked Masha.

  Solomon explained patiently. “The class struggle is now in its fiercest and most dangerous stage. Look at us, we are surrounded by capitalist enemies. Isn’t it better to arrest and prosecute a hundred innocent people and catch among them one spy than to let the spy go free?”

  “I can’t accept that,” Volodya suddenly said.

  “‘Whenever you cut down trees, chips will fly in all directions.’

  “Solomon Slepak quoted the old Russian proverb.

  “I will never accept such a philosophy,” said Volodya.

  “You understand very little,” said Solomon, his voice rising. “I understand enough.”

  “What do you understand?”

  “I understand enough to know that I will never join your party!”

  For Solomon Slepak, the Communist Party possessed the power of a church, the authority of an order, the force of a communion of faith. It had given him self-respect, a dream to strive for, a strong and revered leader. One imagines his raging thoughts: your party! Such disrespect and ingratitude! And what dangerous talk. Your party! His face flushed, Solomon shouted at his son, “You understand nothing!”

  “I understand plenty,” said Volodya.

  “I risked my life fighting for your future, and you are talking to me this way!”

  “I understand there is too much blood on your hands,” replied Volodya. “That I understand!”

  Volodya and Masha left the room. Minutes later Volodya saw his father enter the kitchen and pour some of his cardiac medicine into a glass and with trembling hands raise it to his lips and drink it down.

  In July of that year, 1952, twenty-five distinguished Jewish writers and public figures had been put on trial, and in August many were summarily executed, among them David Bergelson, Binyamin Zuskin, Peretz Markish. Also shot was the poet Itzik Fefer, Stalin’s passionate admirer. All charged with being spies, Zionists, traitors.

  Then, according to many sources, a young radiologist named Lidia Timashuk, who was an informer for the secret police, wrote to Stalin accusing certain doctors of plotting to assassinate him and others through poison and improper medical treatment. No one seems to know why she wrote that letter, if indeed there ever was a letter; it may have been concocted by the secret police from an earlier report she had sent concerning her suspicions about the doctors who treated party leader Andrei Zhdanov when he suffered a serious and subsequently fatal heart attack in August 1948. In any event, that November a number of leading Kremlin doctors were abruptly arrested, directed to confess, beaten when they refused, ordered to name other conspirators in the plot.

  On January 13, 1953, a portentous article appeared in Pravda, announcing the arrest of nine doctors—six of them with obviously Jewish names, and purportedly connected with the Joint Distribution Committee, the philanthropic organization founded during the First World War to aid Russian Jews and, according to Pravda, a known arm of American intelligence. The three remaining doctors were said to be British agents. All the Soviet people, proclaimed Pravda, now condemned those nine doctors, who had confessed to having poisoned Andrei Zhdanov in 1948 and before him Alexander Shcherbakov, a secretary of the Central Committee; condemned, too, were their foreign masters and “the well-known Jewish bourgeois nationalist, Mikhoels.” Western agents were everywhere, the paper warned, even inside the heart of the Soviet Union. It was necessary to be vigilant against sabotage and to be wary of Jews, whose links with Western powers enabled them to take on the work of imperialist spies and collaborators; it was necessary to crush such “loathsome vermin,” destroy the “enemies of the people.”

  For bravely exposing the insidious doctors and helping alert the country to the Jewish “enemy within,” Lidia Timashuk was awarded the coveted Order of Lenin.

  Rumors proliferated: Jews were putting poison into medicines, infiltrating vacation areas and homes of the aged to carry out nefarious schemes, establishing nests of Zionist spies in the government and in universities. On buses and in classrooms people shouted at Jews, “You poisoners! You poisoned all our great leaders!” Russians stopped going to their Jewish doctors. In many regions of the country, demonstrations took place against Jews. Mid-twentieth-century industrial Russia had resurrected the medieval image of the Jew as demonic poisoner.

  As in the past, it was not only the Jews who were the targets of Stalin’s denunciatory campaign. Old Mensheviks, Trotskyites, various Soviet minorities, writers, and artists influenced by the West, Russian intellectuals from economists to physicians, anyone suspected of even marginal contact with foreigners—the people were urged to denounce them all.

  By and large, workers remained untouched; they were the audience for the denunciations, not the target. For all others there was in the air the terrifying probability of yet another mass purge of the party. The final act of an old and ailing despot, who saw enemies everywhere, found delight in the subservience and humiliation of others, preferred loyalty out of fear rather than conviction, and raged at the advancing years that were slowly sapping his strength, reducing his
powers of concentration, inexorably forcing him to loosen his hold on the vast apparatus of government. One more cleansing of the party, decisive and shattering. But first, he had to solve once and for all time his problem with the overbearing, cerebral, stubborn Soviet Jews.

  Masha read with deep apprehension the newspaper reports of the arrested doctors—surgeons, internists, neurologists, pediatricians—all accused of having murdered patients during surgery or prescribing poison as medication. Because she knew many of the doctors personally or by reputation, she was able to persuade Volodya that those named were innocent. They began to sense the start of a vast organized campaign against Soviet Jewry. What better way to direct the anger of all the Soviet people against the Jews than to reveal them as agents of an international conspiracy to murder the country’s leaders? But to what end? What lay behind the anti-Semitic campaign? What did Stalin have planned for the Jews?

  On a number of occasions they tried to discuss the matter with Solomon Slepak, but the talk would inevitably degenerate into loud arguments. At times, in the midst of a heated flurry of words, Solomon would abruptly glance at his wristwatch, announce that he had to meet someone, and rush from the apartment. Masha and Volodya ceased talking to him about the doctors.

  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.