The Gates of November

The family chronicles tell us nothing of his travels. But there were no choices then in the way one journeyed from Russia to China. One took the two-week journey across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. From the Manchuria station on the border one traveled to Harbin via the Chinese Eastern Railroad, which was still held by White Russians. Then from Harbin on the South Manchurian Railroad, which was operated by the Japanese, to Mukden. From there one journeyed to Peking on the railroad run by the British. Then the Chinese Railroad to Shanghai and the boat to Swatow and by foot into Kwangtung Province and by train to Canton, where lived Sun Yat-sen.

This was a period of appalling turmoil in China. The imperial regime was dead, along with the idea of a constitutional monarchy. Educated Chinese, many of whom had studied in universities in Japan and Europe, sought to establish some kind of republican government to unify the land and build a nation. In the meantime, the land lay in fragments, ruled by militarist regimes, feuding warlords, a half dozen or so predatory foreign armies, and missionaries.

Somehow, in this roiling land, Solomon Slepak found and rescued his friend Gregory Voitinsky. And made contact with Sun Yat-sen. Strangely, in none of the books I have read on this period in Chinese history is there any mention of Sun Yat-sen in co

Why is there no mention of Slepak in the numerous books I’ve combed on this period of Russian-Chinese history? Was he only a low-echelon bureaucrat? But would Zinoviev and the Central Committee of the Comintern have sent a minor figure on a major mission to rescue a Comintern agent and open relations with Sun Yat-sen, who held the future of China in his hands? And would they have let him return later to China for two more years? Not very likely. Was Solomon Slepak, then, a full-fledged Comintern agent? With Cheka co

These are not the only questions left us by the family chronicles.

Shortly after he returned from China, Slepak was called to the office of Georgi Chicherin, the people’s commissar of foreign affairs. There he met with Deputy Commissar Maxim Litvinov, who informed him that the Foreign Ministry had decided to send him to Japan as the correspondent for Rosta, the Russian Telegraphic Agency, founded in 1918 and foreru

The Japanese had no diplomatic relations with Bolshevik Russia. Solomon Slepak would be the first Russian in any official capacity in Japan since the Revolution. It would be a mission of some delicacy, having to do with a good deal more than journalism, and involving meetings with ministers of state, perhaps with the emperor himself.

He would need to change his obviously Jewish name. After all, he was now representing the new Russia. “In all the world they are saying the Jews have taken power in Russia,” Litvinov remarked. “It’s not good for you to go as Solomon Izrailevich Slepak. Change your name to Semion Ignatievich. A good Russian name.” Litvinov himself was of Jewish origin.

And as it was against the policy of the Foreign Ministry to send on an extended foreign diplomatic mission anyone who was unmarried, he would need to find a wife, and quickly.

Solomon Slepak remembered a girl he had known during his childhood and made immediate arrangements to visit his mother, who had survived the war and the Revolution. He had not been home since he had run away seventeen years before. His mother still lived in Kopys, some miles from Dubrovno, the small town of his Jewish begi

Nothing of that journey home is recorded in the family chronicles: no conversations, no memories, no account of who was alive and who dead, of conditions in little Dubrovno and larger Kopys, about three miles away, of the consequences of the war and the Revolution on the region. And not a word about his mother.

All we are told is that he found the girl who had been his childhood friend. Black hair, brown eyes, and half a head taller than the short, stocky Solomon Slepak. She could read, was notably talkative, had no formal advanced education. Her name was Fanya. He asked her to marry him, and she accepted.

He returned with her to Moscow.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Foreign Ministry, while trying to obtain the required diplomatic documents for Solomon Slepak’s-or, more accurately, Semion Ignatievich’s-entry into Japan, had run into unexpected difficulties.

The Japanese, it turned out, knew precisely who he was and were decidedly unhappy about his coming. They had not forgotten the Bolshevik known as Sam, who had organized the uprising on Sakhalin Island and commanded the Red partisans on the mainland and slaughtered Ussuri Cossacks, allies of the Japanese in Siberia during the Russian Civil War. Clearly, the Japanese would not welcome a man who had been responsible for the defeat of their former allies and the deaths of so many of their own soldiers.

The Office of the People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs informed the Japanese Foreign Ministry that if the journalist Semion Ignatievich was not given proper credentials to enter Japan as a foreign correspondent, the three Japanese foreign correspondents then in Russia would be expelled immediately. The Japanese yielded.

Solomon Slepak and his wife traveled to Japan and arrived in Tokyo in late 1922. At first they lived in a hotel in Tokyo; then they moved to an apartment. As the sole representative in Japan of Soviet Russia, Solomon Slepak was treated as a quasi ambassador of the new Bolshevik country and invited to diplomatic functions. He received an audience with the emperor. Though ostensibly a journalist, he was nevertheless being accorded high diplomatic status. Was he permitted to transmit coded messages to Chicherin and Litvinov? Could he send and receive sealed mail?

The following year Fanya Slepak gave birth to a girl in a Japanese hospital. A difficult forceps delivery. The child was born dead.

On Monday, January 21, 1924, Vladimir Lenin died after the last of a series of strokes, without designating a successor. Trotsky had refused Lenin’s earlier offer of deputyship, in part out of concern that his taking such a high position would give the Soviet Union’s enemies a final justification for claiming that the country was controlled by Jews.

A war of succession broke out among Stalin, Trotsky, and others in the Politburo. At Stalin’s initiative, Lenin was embalmed and placed on permanent public display in a mausoleum on Red Square, an echo of the Russian Orthodox folk belief that the bodies of saints never decay, and a sign of proper continuity between Lenin and those who would succeed him in governing the Soviet state he had founded.

A small number of specialists in the art of embalming were formed into a group named the Immortalization Commission and given the task of preserving the mummified corpse. The city of Petrograd, once St. Petersburg, was renamed Leningrad.