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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 i
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 stu
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 i
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 cu
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 ca
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.