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a steady flame. One becomes obsessed by a single goal: Redeem the despicable past with blood; cleanse away its evils; create the world anew. No more theorizing, no more observing as a bystander. The weak talked, dreamed, idealized. The strong accepted the bitter realities of life, and acted.
    The chronicles contain no record of the growth of Solomon Slepaks political consciousness during those wartime years in New York. One imagines a dedicated revolutionary traveling from one clandestine meeting to another, carrying messages through all sorts of weather, passed from comrade to comrade, fed behind counters in railway eating houses and the kitchens of union halls, arrested, thrown into jail. But Solomon took a job as a window washer on skyscrapers during the day, and in the evenings he began to attend medical school. Which leads one to believe that he was precariously balanced between two different futures: full-time dedicated revolutionary or member of the bourgeoisie.
    Imperial Russia, too, seemed suspended between futures.
    For the tsar and his armies, the war went disastrously in 1915. There were rumors that the Russian Army had run out of ammunition and weapons and that one-fourth of its soldiers were being sent to the front lines unarmed and with orders to pick up the weapons of the dead. A bungling bureaucracy; a policy of oppression against religious and ethnic minorities; shortsighted ministers; the vast territorial losses and casualties of the war; a tsar who would not cooperate with even the most moderate of progressive groups and was too often dependent upon his witless wife, Alexandra, and her adviser, the bizarre and depraved holy man Gregory Rasputin: that was Russia in 1915 and 1916.
    Acting against the advice of most of his ministers, the tsar took personal command of the armed forces and left for the front. Empress Alexandra, politically a reactionary, emotionally a near-hysteric, remained in the capital (its name now changed to Petrograd from the original German, Petersburg, because of the war with Germany). Together with her Siberian peasant, Rasputin, she virtually controlled the capital. She began to change ministers repeatedly, often on the advice of Rasputin. The two of them, a half-mad empress and a diabolic holy man, held in their hands the fate of Russia.
    On the night of December 17, 1916, a member of the royal family, along with an aristocrat related to the family by marriage, carried out a messy murder of Rasputin; he proved difficult to kill and had to be shot a number of times. His body was thrown off a bridge into the water and was not found until the following day. It was a desperate attempt to save imperial Russia and the Romanov dynasty.
    On March 8 (February 23 by the old Russian calendar), word spread that there was not enough bread in the city. Housewives and women factory workers took to the streets in demonstrations. By evening one hundred thousand workers were on strike. Lines of hungry people began to form outside the bakeries. Riots broke out. A bakery was looted, and Cossack troops were called in, but they refused to fire on the people and instead drove the police away. Then the Petrograd military garrison, made up of pensioned peasant conscripts, mutinied. Crowds surged through the city, shouting, “Long live the republic!”
    The tsar wrote in his diary: “Riots began in Petrograd several days ago. To my regret, troops have begun to take part in them. It is a hateful feeling to be so far away and receive such poor, fragmentary news!” And he added, “In the afternoon took a walk down the road to Orsha.…”
    One day in March 1917, Solomon Slepak opened his New York newspaper and read that the monarch of his native land, Tsar Nicholas II, had abdicated the throne.
    There is a photograph of the parlor car on the imperial train where the tsar signed the instrument of abdication. A sofa, an easy chair, a coffee table, sconces, a wooden side bar with an unclear framed