Free The gates of November by Chaim Potok Page A

chronicles, Voitinsky arrived in China—and shortly thereafter disappeared.
    Word came back some while later: He had been arrested and imprisoned, probably by Whites still operating in Manchuria. The Comintern then resolved to send Solomon Slepak into China. He was to ransom Voitinsky, get him out of China, and complete his mission. Solomon traveled with a false American passport and a great deal of money to use for bribes, money probably acquired through the sale abroad of tsarist jewels, a method employed by Lenin to finance covert operations of Communist cells and newspapers.
    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 connection with a mysterious Russian bearing an American name and passport. Indeed, it is Voitinsky who is credited with making the first contact with Sun Yat-sen. And mention is often made of two important Comintern agents of that period in China: S. A. Dalin and Michael Borodin. But there is the evidence of a photograph of Sun Yat-sen that bears his signature beneath these words in Russian: “To dear Comrade Slepak, in memory of our meeting.” The Slepak family chronicles insist that it was Solomon who persuaded Sun Yat-sen to admit Communists into the Kuomintang, a fateful decision taken in August 1922, while Solomon Slepak was still in China. Opening the Kuomintang to the Communists also opened China to Michael Borodin, the Comintern agent who arrived in Canton in October 1923 to aid in the creation of a Chinese Communist Party along the lines of the party in the Soviet Union. That first success of Solomon Slepak’s, if the chronicles are correct, dramatically altered human history.
    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 connections? Surely he was being kept up-to-date by Cheka agents on events in China.
    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 forerunner of Tass,