The gates of November by Chaim Potok Page B

men.
    Nicholas Triapitsin commanded a division of partisans. In those chaotic years of the Russian Civil War, a division meant anything from five thousand to fifteen thousand men. Bands of brigands and partisans roamed everywhere, taking advantage of the absence of order to loot and kill. Whites plundered and killed Reds and Red sympathizers; Reds plundered and killed Whites and White sympathizers.
    The seven-month period between May and November 1919 was the bloodiest time of the Civil War; the fiercest and most decisive battles, resulting in the final defeat of the Whites, were fought then by a newly organized Red army of three million men. Its field units were commanded by tens of thousands of former tsarist officers: men who had once been hunted and imprisoned pariahs, but whom the Bolsheviks had reluctantly, out of dire need, rehabilitated and recruited. Anti-Bolshevik foreign troops on Russian soil—the hesitant British, French, and American forces who failed to engage in any consequential combat, and even the more aggressive Czechoslovak Legion, made up of soldiers who had been captured by the tsar’s army during the war, and who had subsequently broken out and taken up arms against the Reds—played no significant role in the outcome of the Civil War.
    Somewhere on the mainland of Asia, between the Sea of Okhotsk and Lake Baikal, Solomon Slepak and his army linked up with the partisan division of Nicholas Triapitsin. It was the spring of 1919. Triapitsin had heard of the deeds of Solomon Slepak on Sakhalin Island and greeted him warmly as “Sam,” the name by which the latter was then popularly known. He welcomed “Sam” and his men into the ranks of the partisans. There would be a party that night, he said, to celebrate the birthday of the woman he loved.
    There was a party that night, but not the one planned by Triapitsin.
    Once again the family chronicles blur and details become unclear, perhaps because of what is about to ensue. Triapitsin and his lover, a woman known only as Sonya, became drunk, as did many of his officers. Possibly they spoke too boldly in their drunkenness, began to make anarchist noises. Doubts about the Revolution? Slurs against Trotsky, who was then organizing the new Red Army into a fighting machine that would bring an end to any need for partisan forces? An unwillingness to accept the verbal orders “Sam” claimed he brought from the Bolshevik center in Russia? What seems clear is that Solomon Slepak ordered his core of two hundred loyal men to surround the building where the party was taking place, drew his gun, and arrested an astonished Triapitsin and his staff officers. There then followed a swift trial, with no defense and no appeal, before a military troika, a court of three men appointed by Solomon Slepak. All the defendants, including Triapitsin’s lover, were found guilty of counterrevolutionary activities—and shot. Their bodies were thrown into a nearby river.
    Solomon contacted the Bolshevik political head of the Far Eastern Province and informed him of the executions. He received in response the gratitude of the official and an immediate appointment to the positions of deputy minister of the Far Eastern Province, commander of the Bolshevik Far Eastern Army, and head of the Amur-Argun front, the region where the Shilka and Argun rivers join to form the Amur River. His orders were to suppress the Ussuri Cossacks, who were rampaging in the region between Lake Baikal and the city of Khabarovsk, hijacking trains, plundering, killing. And to halt the advance of the Japanese Army in Siberia.
    Solomon Slepak now had under his command an army of about ten thousand men.
    Decades later, in Moscow, in the presence of his son, Volodya, he would meet an Old Bolshevik named Abram Kamzel, a lean gray-haired man in his early eighties, tall, with blue eyes. Solomon was then in his seventies.
    “Slepak?” said the Old Bolshevik in astonishment. “You are still alive?”
    “You see I