The gates of November by Chaim Potok

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.
    That same year, 1924, Fanya Slepak gave birth to a second baby girl, whom the Slepaks named Rosa, after the German Communist leader Rosa Luxemburg. The delivery, which took place in a Japanese hospital, was again by forceps, marks of which the child bore until the age of three. The following year Fanya gave birth to twin boys. Both were delivered by forceps and born dead. Fanya told her husband that she thought the Japanese had tried to kill their second child and had successfully murdered the first child and the twins because of what Solomon and his army of partisans had done to them during the Civil War. When she became pregnant again, she insisted that the baby be born in the Soviet Union.
    Solomon and Fanya Slepak and their little daughter, Rosa, returned to Moscow, where, on October 29, 1927, Fanya gave birth to a healthy boy, without the aid of forceps. They named the child Vladimir, after Vladimir Lenin, and called him Volodya.
    Two months later, on December 27, 1927, the Fifteenth All-Union Congress of the Communist Party, meeting in Moscow, condemned deviation from the party line and removed Trotsky and his supporters from positions of importance—its way of acknowledging the power of a unified party and stifling all opposition to Stalin. Stalin’s rivals quickly recanted.
    Solomon Slepak, living in Moscow at the time of the Fifteenth Congress and still working as a correspondent for Rosta, attended the sessions and witnessed Stalin’s ascent to power.
    Some while later he was reassigned to China, again as a foreign correspondent. In mid-January 1928 the Slepak family boarded a train for the long journey from Moscow to Peking. And during that trip, little Volodya, two and a half months old, saved their lives.
    It was a journey of nearly five thousand miles along the sweep of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, running from Moscow to Vladivostok. South of Chita the railway branched into two lines. Travelers could continue north and east through Russian territory to the city of Khabarovsk and then south on the single-track railbed to Vladivostok, or take the Russian-run Eastern Chinese Railroad through Manchuria east to Harbin and south to Peking.
    Solomon and Fanya Slepak, with their little daughter and infant son, were taking the train through thousands of miles of snow-covered wasteland and winter forests and isolated villages to Harbin and Peking.
    Harbin lay in the midst of vast swamps and grasslands—a grant of Manchurian land ceded by the Chinese to the Russians in 1896. Many who lived there had come from Russia to work on the railroad. Its population increased after the Revolution and in the twenties numbered about one hundred thousand. Relations between the Kremlin and Chiang Kai-shek were bad. Russian Whites and Chinese bands roamed the steppes, looting Soviet trains.
    The train in which the Slepaks were riding came to a sudden stop some miles before Harbin. Armed Whites went through the cars, ordering everyone off. The passengers—Russians, Europeans, Chinese—stood in the cold, waiting for their papers to be checked. Bolsheviks and Jews were told to stand aside. Solomon Slepak, traveling under the name of Semion Ignatievich and carrying a Soviet passport and Tass credentials, was informed by the officer in command that he was a filthy Bolshevik whose party