The Gates of November

by Chaim Potok

  She remembered hearing on a number of occasions during the years immediately after the war that Russian soldiers who had been captured by the Germans were, upon their release, transported directly to Siberia. That had seemed cruel to her, sending your own soldiers away to the labor camps, repaying them like that. But one said nothing about such matters in those days, not even to the members of one’s own family. And then there were rumors that those who had been released from the camps after serving ten-year sentences were being arrested again. And in 1948, there was that business about the three thousand biologists fired from their jobs for disagreeing with the genetic theories of Trofim Lysenko, who claimed that he had disproved the laws of heredity and that man could easily overthrow the laws of nature and control the environment. All of that, together with the articles in journals and newspapers endlessly attacking “cosmopolitans.” Somewhat fearfully Masha had begun to wonder what was happening in her country: Why the imprisonment of its captured soldiers, the persecution of its intellectuals, the attacks against its Jews?

  Then came the strange order to efface all foreign names from medical school textbooks. In one of Masha’s classes the professor lectured one day about the Blumberg Symptom in cases of painless appendicitis and said that it had really been discovered by a Professor Shchyotkin and was from now on to be known as the Shchyotkin Symptom. When, two years later, someone stumbled upon the fact that Blumberg, a professor of medicine in Odessa, was actually a Russian and not a Jew, they took to calling it the Blumberg-Shchyotkin Symptom.

  The reaction of the students to the various rewritings of medical history ranged from docility to concealed contempt to anger they suppressed because it was believed there were MGB agents attending classes.

  One day in April 1951, while interning in Ryazan, Masha was arrested by the secret police. The charge against her: possession of a concealed weapon. Two agents interrogated her for eight hours. “With whom are you friendly?” they wanted to know. Dismayed by the arrest and frightened by the interrogation, she still had the wits to answer, “With everyone.” “We mean among the students,” they said. “With all the students,” she said, and mentioned no names. Apparently, two students in her class had been arrested for anti-Soviet activity, and the agents wanted from Masha names they might use as witnesses against them. She was released after signing a paper that she would not leave Ryazan without MGB permission, and she spoke to no one about her arrest.

  She kept away from groups, felt there was danger in being part of any coalition. Indeed, Soviet law made membership in a clandestine group a worse crime than acting alone. She had at the time only one close friend and said nothing of her arrest even to him.

  The arrest had followed an MGB search of her mother’s apartment in Moscow. The agents, looking for concealed weapons, had found nothing. When Masha returned to Moscow for her June marriage to Volodya, her frightened mother told her of the search, and Masha informed her mother of the arrest and interrogation. They said nothing to Volodya.

  The two students who had been arrested were tried, found guilty, and sent to a labor camp.

  The summer of 1952, when Masha returned to medical school some months after giving birth, she was startled by a sudden message from her very close friend, who asked urgently to meet her alone. This friend was a fellow student, a non-Jew, who lived in Siberia. His father was an interrogator in a procurator’s office. They met on August 20 of that year, months before the arrest of the doctors, and he told her he had information that there was to be an action against the Jews in the near future, all the Jews would be transferred to Siberia from central Russia, and the conditions of transport would be such that half would not survive the journey. He said, “I can save you and the child. Your son is blond, and I will give him my name and take the two of you to Siberia far away from all cities,” and Masha said, “No, I will go with my own people, with my brothers and sisters.” She trusted him completely and told no one, not even Volodya. In February 1953 he came to her again and said that the final decision had been made and very soon the action against the Jews would take place, and Masha said, “I haven’t changed my mind, I can’t save myself this way,” and he said, “At least you can save your child,” and she said, “No.” She had known him for years, he was a completely honest person, and she believed him. He had come from Siberia to study medicine, was a very good student, determined to do well. He said to her angrily, “You are a weak people, spoiled by civilization, and in forty years I will be a professor.” Today he is a member of the Academy of Sciences and holds the august rank of Academician. The family chronicles do not reveal his name.

  Masha Slepak then witnessed the staged meetings at the medical institute and the hospital, the cruel fulminations against Jewish doctors, the crude admissions of Jewish guilt, and asked Volodya to talk to his father, solicit from him an explanation for what was happening; after all, he was a party member, he seemed to know high party people. Why were innocent Jewish doctors the target of official rage and persecution? And then the fierce quarrel took place in the Slepak apartment. And weeks later the nine doctors were arrested and trains stood waiting and lists were being readied. The predictions of Masha’s friend from Siberia were proving true. The Soviet Union was about to rid itself of the Jews.

  Using the figures in official Soviet censuses and taking into consideration the enormous difficulties in defining who precisely was a Jew in the Soviet system, we can estimate that there were a little more than two million Jews in the Soviet Union at the time of the “Doctors’ Plot.”

  In 1939 the Jews had numbered about three million. One out of every three Jews perished in the war, thereby reducing them from 2¼ to around 1 percent of the total population. Jewish losses in the war were proportionately four times higher than those of the population as a whole.

  Stalin’s intention was to rid the major population centers of Jews and bring to an end his perceived troubles with that arrogant people. Instead he died.

  In February 1956 Khrushchev stood for about three hours before the Twentieth Party Congress and delivered a twenty-thousand-word speech, carefully prepared in advance, that exposed many of the horrors of Stalin’s rule and stunned the Communist world. There is a photograph of Khrushchev speaking behind the podium, a phalanx of microphones like blackbirds before him, and the rows of deputies, some staring, some with eyes averted, some whispering to one another. Delivered in closed session, the speech was to have remained secret—notes could not be taken; questions could not be asked; no one was permitted to leave during the reading—but it made its way to Communist parties in the West and to the CIA and the American State Department and into the offices of party officials throughout the Soviet Union. Accounts of the speech tell of dense, shocked silence in the vast meeting hall of the congress, an icy silence punctured from time to time by cries of outrage, buzzes of anger, waves of disquiet, and applause. Stalin, said Khrushchev, had moved far away from Leninist principles, had been guilty of despotism, mass terror, brutal violence, and the cult of personality. Upon his head lay the guilt of the country’s lack of military preparedness and its costly defeats in the Great Patriotic War. Kirov’s murder in Leningrad in 1934 should be looked into again, for Stalin may well have had a hand in it. A full 70 percent of the members of the Central Committee elected at the Seventeenth Congress in 1934, as well as over half the deputies, had been executed on Stalin’s order. He was a cruel, bloodthirsty, and sickly-suspicious tyrant, who had slaughtered the innocent along with the guilty in his purges of the party and the army. He had deported the Volga Germans and other loyal nationalities. The “Doctors’ Plot” had been a fabrication initiated by Dr. Lidia Timashuk, and Stalin had personally advised concerning the conduct of the investigation and the method of interrogation, himself calling the investigating judge and telling him he was to “Beat, beat, and, once again, beat,” until confessions were obtained. It was not the party that had been at fault, said Khrushchev, but one man, its leader, Stalin, whose aberrations the
party now needed to correct so that the country could once again be ruled with the same vision and effectiveness it had known in the time of Lenin. He said nothing about the party before 1934; about the innumerable peasants and nonparty people starved and slain; about the Ukrainian intelligentsia he himself had ordered killed; about his own participation in Stalin’s brutal endeavors; about the millions of prisoners still in labor camps; about the plan to climax the “Doctors’ Plot” with mass deportations of Soviet Jews.

  To this day there is no generally accepted explanation of why Khrushchev gave that speech. To consolidate his position in the party by openly opposing the Stalinist faction: Malenkov, Kaganovich, Molotov, Shepilov? To put an end to the terror and the secret police that were stifling Soviet art and culture? To make some sort of restitution to the innocent victims of Stalin’s paranoia?

  About one month after the Twentieth Congress, Volodya’s superior at the Electro-Vacuum Factory asked him if he wanted to read Khrushchev’s secret speech. Volodya said, “Yes, of course.” The man said, “Go to my office. It’s on the desk. I took it from the office of the party committee.” At about that same time, the speech was read aloud to the medical staff during a meeting in Masha’s hospital. She and Volodya had known in outline much of the history related in the speech but were astonished by the details and by the fact that party leaders were now talking openly of the horrors perpetrated by Stalin.

  The family chronicles relate the calm reaction of Solomon Slepak when he learned of the speech: “Stalin was certainly a great person. He did many positive things for our socialist state. Yes, he made mistakes. The party will correct them.” But one wonders about that response. The speech and the furious reaction of the Communist Chinese to Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization and liberalization of Soviet life, a reaction that by 1963 was to become an irreparable rift between the two centers of world communism, could hardly have brought much joy to the Old Bolshevik’s ailing heart.

  By the early summer of 1957, some months after the autumn 1956 Hungarian rebellion had been crushed by Soviet troops, Khrushchev further tightened his hold on the Soviet Union when he persuaded the Presidium to oust his opponents—Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich, Bulganin, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Shepilov. Then, in March 1958, Bulganin resigned as head of the government and Khrushchev took over the premiership. He was now head of both the party and the state. A self-made man, whose father had been a Ukrainian peasant, now ruled the Soviet Union: brash, hearty, overbearing, as well as cunning and devious, and schooled since the twenties in the Byzantine politics of the party.

  The Twenty-second Party Congress, which met in October 1961, confirmed Khrushchev’s leadership and documented more of Stalin’s atrocities. Newspapers carried articles detailing facets of the great purge. And to the added astonishment of Masha and Volodya and countless others, the body of Stalin was removed before the end of the year from the mausoleum in Red Square, an event widely reported in the Soviet media and by the BBC and the Voice of America. And the city of Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd.

  How did Solomon Slepak, then sixty-eight years old, react to the unceremonious removal of Stalin from his resting place beside Lenin? The chronicles, silent on the Old Bolshevik’s response, record Volodya’s conjecture about his father’s possible reply: “You see how the party cleans its own ranks? Even the great Stalin cannot evade the watchful eyes of the party.”

  According to Volodya, as far as his father was concerned, events were moving inexorably along the correct course. The original cult of the party was now appropriately replacing the unseemly Stalinist cult of personality.

  The body of Stalin was reinterred in a grave between the mausoleum and the Kremlin wall, beneath a stone and a bust of the tyrant.

  Volodya and Masha began to wonder if the country had turned a corner, if life had moved onto a new plane for the people of the Soviet Union, especially for the Jews. Or was it all merely a period of political infighting, a nervous pause rather than a permanent redirection of purpose? By then Volodya and Masha, together with some very close friends, were listening regularly to the overseas broadcasts of the BBC and the Voice of America.

  Warm weekends and summers Volodya and Masha traveled to the forests outside Moscow, where they camped with their friends amid the pines and alders and maples and junipers. Parents brought children. Each family slept in its own tent, purchased in a Moscow sports shop. Hiking, fishing, swimming, boating; gathering mushrooms and berries—much as Volodya had once done in his childhood with his father, during the thirties.

  It was a circle of about six to ten friends: engineers, doctors, scientists. Their talk centered on new movies, books, music, concerts; on recent achievements in science, medicine, engineering, biology; on world events. They expressed to one another their astonishment that the Soviet authorities had approved the publication, in 1962, of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was not so much the contents of the book that were of interest to them—they were familiar with many of the details—as the very fact of the book itself, what its appearance signaled and its worth as literature. They wondered what comparable works might soon follow.

  Very much on their minds was the atmosphere of relaxation in Soviet culture that had succeeded the death of Stalin: Ilya Ehrenburg’s 1954 novel The Thaw; the rehabilitation in 1955 of the writer Isaac Babel, who had been arrested during the purges of the thirties and was thought to have perished in a labor camp; the journal and newspaper articles lamenting the stagnation of Russian literature. There was a sudden freeze on the arts following the Hungarian revolt in October 1956, but then a thaw once again, with the appearance of the poetry of Joseph Brodsky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and the public readings attended by thousands in Moscow’s Mayakovsky Square and Luzhniki Sports Palace, where a new generation of young poets read works that openly declared rebellion against their fathers and mothers. Volodya and Masha did not attend the readings but knew of them. They were aware, too, that the authorities had finally put a stop to the readings; organizers and poets were arrested, some sent into exile and others to psychiatric hospitals.

  Arrested in the late fifties for reading poetry to his friends, exiled to Siberia, and released in February 1961 was the mathematician and poet Alexander Yesenin-Volpin, whose mother was Jewish. Some of Volpin’s friends were arrested in February 1962. When they were brought to trial for “anti-Soviet agitation”—they had read their poetry to a crowd in Mayakovsky Square—Volpin tried to enter the courtroom, but was stopped by guards. The trial was closed to friends and relatives. On a sudden impulse Volpin showed the guards a copy of the new criminal code, which contained the promise made by the new Soviet leaders that henceforth trials would be open to the public and conducted with “Soviet legality.” The guards, after some hesitation, permitted him to enter.

  There are those who, in retrospect, regard that seemingly insignificant event as the instant of conception for the civil rights and human rights struggle in the Soviet Union.

  That same year, 1962, there appeared Anatoly Kuznetsov’s novel Babi Yar. Like the great poem of that name by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, it deals with the 1941 German slaughter of ninety thousand Jews in the ravine outside Kiev. One might have thought that the Soviets were finally acknowledging the unique dark destiny of the Jews in their midst. But then, in 1963, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences published twelve thousand copies of a book called Judaism Without Embellishment by Trofim Kichko, a reworking of the turn-of-the-century tsarist police hoax known as Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Jewish bankers and Zionists allied with Western capitalists in a conspiracy to take over the world. The book was studded with ugly racial cartoons reminiscent of the Nazi era.

  Volodya and Masha and their friends talked at length about those events during their weekend and summer excursions in the forests outside Moscow. In the evenings they sat around a campfire, listening to the broadcasts in Russian that came from the world beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. Those who planned the programs
knew Russian work patterns and broadcast only in the early morning and from late afternoon into the night. Words from the world outside emerged from portable radios and drifted through the woods: news from Britain, Germany, America, Israel. Turbulent times, the fifties and early sixties: Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy in the American White House, Joseph McCarthy in the Senate, civil rights demonstrations in the streets; everywhere the Cold War and the armaments race; the Sinai War in the Middle East, the launching of Sputnik, the space race, the Cuban missile crisis, the growing American involvement in Vietnam. And the news from the United States seemed to be coming over the airwaves raw and uncensored, the good and the bad alike. Volodya repeatedly asked himself, What sort of country broadcasts to the world in such sordid detail its domestic turbulence, its ugly riots, the assassination of its leader? A strong and free country, he thought, and said so often to his friends.

  Among his friends were David and Noemi Drapkin, Leonid Lipkovsky, Victor and Elena Polsky, Alexander Gilman, Alla Futer, Vladimir Prestin, Pavel Abramovich.

  In the winters they went to the forests to ski. Again they brought their radios, listened to voices talking of distant worlds.

  None of the Soviet shortwave radios available in shops had the frequencies needed for foreign broadcasts; to net the outside voices, one had to retune the frequency bands. With his knowledge of radio electronics, Volodya found the retuning a simple matter: Rewind some coils and change some capacitors. He did it for himself and for his friends. As more and more people began to listen to foreign stations, it became possible to find technicians who, for not a great deal of money, would unofficially retune one’s shortwave radio.