The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  The arrival of summer would break the island’s peaceful charm with the noisy and vulgar arrival of businessmen and government employees from Istanbul with the economic means to withdraw to Prinkipo, but not enough to travel to Paris and London. Confined to his house, Lev Davidovich had managed to make a final push in the work in which he reviewed his life, despite not having been able to escape the disappointment he felt as he received news of the orgy of surrenders through which the opposition groups were dragged by their most important leaders. From the recently founded Bulletin Oppozitsii, which they started to edit in Paris, and through the messages filtered to the interior of the Soviet Union in the most incredible ways, he focused on warning his comrades that Stalin would try to make them give up their positions with political promises that he would never keep (Lenin used to say that his specialty was breaking promises) and announcements of rectifications that he would not execute, since they implied the acceptance of compromises that the man from the mountains would never recognize. To those who surrendered, he wrote that Stalin would only admit them into Moscow when they showed up on their knees, willing to recognize that Stalin was always right, and never them, he wrote.

  That stream of surrenders convinced Lev Davidovich that his war seemed to be lost, at least within the Soviet Union. Stalin’s sudden about-face, after appropriating the opposition’s economic program and forcing his former rivals to declare themselves supporters of the strategy that was now presented as Stalinist, sealed the political failure that wrote its most regrettable chapter with the surrender of men who, with hands and feet tied, had started to ask themselves why they needed to keep enduring deportations and submitting their family members to the cruelest pressures in order to defend some ideals that, at the end of the day, had already been imposed. The most painful proof of the fall of the opposition had been the announcement that brilliant men like Radek, Smilga, and Preobrazhensky had demonstrated their willingness to reconcile themselves with Stalin’s line, declaring that there was nothing reprehensible about it, once the great objectives for which they had fought had been achieved. Especially despicable to him was the attitude of Radek, who had declared himself an enemy of Trotsky’s ever since the latter had published articles in the imperialist press. The saddest thing was knowing that, with this surrender, those revolutionaries were falling into the category of the semi-forgiven. Presided over by Zinoviev, these men would live in fear of saying a single word out loud, of having an opinion, and would be forced to slither along, turning their heads to watch their shadows.

  The most vivid news about the state of the opposition would come to Büyükada through an unexpected channel. It happened at the beginning of August and its messenger was that ghost from the past called Yakov Blumkin.

  Blumkin had sent him a message from Istanbul, begging for a meeting. According to his note, the young man was on his way back from India, where he had carried out a counterintelligence mission, and he wished to see him to reiterate his respect and support. Natalia Sedova, when she found out about Blumkin’s desires, had asked her husband not to see him: a meeting with the former terrorist, now a high-ranking GPU officer, could only bring about disgrace. Liova had also expressed his doubts about the usefulness of that meeting, although he’d offered to serve as a mediator in order to keep Blumkin far from the island. But Lev Davidovich thought that they should hear what that man wanted, linked as he was to Lev Davidovich ever since the latter exercised the most dramatic of all his powers: that of letting Blumkin live or sending him to his death.

  Twelve years before, when the newly made commissar of war Lev Trotsky had called for him in his office, Blumkin was a callow youth—like a character out of Dostoyevsky—who faced charges that the military tribune would penalize with a death sentence. That young man had been one of two militants in the social-revolutionary party that had tried to kill the German ambassador in Moscow with the intention of discrediting the disputed peace with Germany that the Bolsheviks had signed in Brest-Litovsk at the beginning of 1918. The evening before the trial, after reading some poems written by the young man, Lev Davidovich had asked to meet with him. That night they spoke for hours about Russian and French poetry (they shared an admiration for Baudelaire) and about the irrationality of terrorist methods (if a bomb could solve everything, what was the good of parties, of class struggle?), at the end of which Blumkin had written a letter in which he regretted his action and promised, if he was forgiven, to serve the revolution on any front to which he was assigned. The influence of the powerful commissar was decisive enough to pardon his life, while the German government was informed by official means that the terrorist had been executed. That day Yakov Blumkin’s second life had begun, thanks to Lev Trotsky.

  During the civil war, Blumkin had stood out as a counterintelligence agent, something which earned him decorations, promotions, and even militancy in the Bolshevik Party. Considered a traitor by his former comrades, he miraculously escaped two attempts on his life. In the final months of the war, as he recovered from the wounds from the second attempt, he was an adviser to Lev Davidovich, who recommended him to the military academy upon seeing his aptitude. His capacity for espionage missions would lead him to the world of intelligence, and for many years he had shined as one of the stars of the secret service, for whom he still worked despite the fact that everyone, even the GPU’s highest leader, knew that, because of his devotion to Trotsky, his political sympathies were with the opposition.

  When Liova relayed the details of his meeting with Blumkin (the former terrorist had gone to India, and now to Turkey, to sell some very old Hasidic manuscripts in order to obtain funds for the government), Lev Davidovich was convinced that the secret agent still had the same affection for him as always. And despite all of Natalia Sedova’s precautions, he agreed to see him.

  When Lev Davidovich saw the unmistakably Jewish face of little Yakov, as he used to call him, his large eyes sparkling with intelligence again, he felt a deep happiness infused with waves of nostalgia. They melted in a hug and Blumkin kissed his host’s face and lips many times, only to cry later, as he did on the night in which he had written the saving letter in the office of the powerful commissar of war.

  The three visits that Blumkin made to Büyükada in the second week of August were like a reviving breath of air against the discouragement that was overcoming Lev Davidovich. Between evoking the past and news of the present, they laughed, cried, and argued (even about Mayakovsky and the lamentable state of Soviet poetry), and Blumkin, in addition to bringing him up-to-date about the desperate situation for the opposition inside the country, insisted on serving him as a courier during his imminent return to Moscow, since he thought that his work in intelligence had the mission of neutralizing enemies outside of the USSR, but was not incompatible with his oppositionist political ideas.

  From the agent’s mouth, Lev Davidovich also heard Radek’s arguments to dramatize a surrender that, according to the young man, could only be a maneuver to gain time. Blumkin, showing his invincible capacity for loyalty, defended his friend Radek’s position, since he also thought that if it was possible to fight from within the party, it was better than doing so outside of it. Lev Davidovich confessed that he no longer trusted the abilities of a party that was led by a man like Stalin and in which Radek was active. But Blumkin was surprised at his pessimism and reminded him that it was he, Lev Trotsky, who could not become weak.

  The young man’s departure left a void in the Exile that, weeks later, would be replaced by the malignant feeling of indignation caused by infidelities. The catalyst for the mood change had been a letter from the Pazes in which, following colder greetings than usual, the authors went right to the matter without further ado: “Don’t put too much stock in the weight of your own name,” began that paragraph with the air of an epitaph, which made the revolutionary face the evidence of his political ruin in an alarming way. “For five years, the communist press slandered you to the point that for the masses there is only a vag
ue remembrance of you as the head of the Red Army, as the workers’ leader in October. With each passing day, your name means less, and the machinery that has been unleashed will end up devouring you after your name has been devoured.” Upon reading it for the third time, he had needed to clean his glasses, rubbing them with the edge of his Russian shirt, as if the lenses were truly responsible for the murky perception of words that sounded painful but true. When he stepped away from the window from where he had observed the garden taken over by weeds and, beyond, the oily shine of the former Propontis, he felt that not even his impermeable optimism nor his faith in the cause could remove him from the invasive feeling of solitude that seized him. How many setbacks had taken place in the span of just a few months so that Maurice and Magdeleine Paz would write him that letter poisoned with truths? How had reality come to insist on exchanging a discourse dedicated to the pride of a colossus for these reflections directed at the humiliation of a forgotten man? . . . The most insulting thing about the letter was the fact that, just one month before, during their second visit to Prinkipo, the Pazes had not dared to confess to him their apprehensions and had left promising to work for the unity of French Trotskyists, amid whom, they had again confirmed, the Exile’s prestige and ideas had remained unscathed.

  For weeks that letter floated around Lev Davidovich’s desk as a testament to what he didn’t want to wash his hands of but that he didn’t want to take care of either. Motivated by the calm brought by the approach of winter, he had focused on serious work and was immersed in the writing of his History of the Russian Revolution. At some point, Natalia Sedova had even told him to answer that letter once and for all and he had made excuses.

  Prinkipo’s winter temperatures were nothing like the ones they had experienced the year before, in Alma-Ata. Barely covered with an old coat, Lev Davidovich had gotten used to enjoying the arrival of morning in his study as he drank coffee and contemplated how the dawn’s light filtered in through a silver veil that made the sea sparkle. That day he was ready to work on his History of the Russian Revolution, when Liova entered to pull him out of his deliberations: news had arrived from Moscow. As always, the feeling that something serious could have happened to a loved one wounded the Exile. Liova, as if he couldn’t make up his mind to speak, went to sit on the other side of the table so he would be in front of Lev Davidovich, who remained silent, convinced that he was going to hear something terrible. But his son’s words overwhelmed him. They had executed Blumkin.

  Liova had to relay all of the details: there was no news about the agent because for two months he had been shut up in the depths of the Lubyanka, subject to interrogations by his secret police comrades. According to the Soviet informer, the detention had occurred following a denunciation by Radek, whom Blumkin himself had informed of his meetings with Trotsky. Radek, nonetheless, denied that he had betrayed him, and insisted that the GPU had found out on its own that Blumkin visited Trotsky and returned to the Soviet Union with correspondence for the oppositionists. No one knew the exact date on which he had been executed, Liova said.

  Lev Davidovich noticed how a feeling of guilt invaded him. Natalia Sedova had been right: he should have never received the young man, since now it seemed clear that Stalin had made him go through Turkey because he knew Blumkin would try to see him and a meeting would allow him to teach the oppositionists a real lesson. But this time Stalin had gone too far: killing his rivals over political disputes was making the same mistake as the Jacobins and opening the revolution’s doors to revenge and fratricidal violence. One of the conditions always demanded by Lenin (who was not very compassionate when politics demanded it of him, he told Liova) was that blood should not run between them. Little Yakov’s death had to serve to stir the consciences of all the Communists obeying Stalin. Blumkin could be the Sacco and Vanzetti of their struggle, he told Liova, who stared at him. If the young man had felt compassion for his father for a moment, by then he must have already been reproaching himself.

  When Liova left, Lev Davidovich, his eyes fixed on the sea, thought that he would regret for the rest of his life that his emotional weakness had prevented him from recognizing Blumkin’s presence in Turkey as the start of a sibylline game of chess organized by Stalin. With that spirit, he took a sheet of blank paper and set about to fulfill an outstanding obligation:

  M. and Mme. Paz:

  Today I’ve received news that highlights the pettiness of people like you, who are nothing more than parlor-room Bolsheviks and for whom the revolution is a pastime. You, who have not suffered repression, torture, or winter in the work camps, have the possibility of giving up the struggle when it doesn’t meet your expectations of success and prominence. But the true revolutionary is born when he subordinates his personal ambitions to an idea. Revolutionaries can be educated or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, but they cannot exist without will, without devotion, without the spirit of sacrifice. And as those qualities do not exist in you, I am grateful to you for having so diligently stepped out of the way.

  L. D. Trotsky

  In that first year of exile, Lev Davidovich had only been able to count defeats and defections: inside the Soviet Union, the opposition had practically disintegrated, without there being any of the expected deportations. Outside the country, his followers were fighting for a piece of power, over being more or less to the left, or simply abandoned the struggle, as the Pazes did, unable to resist Stalinist pressures or because of a lack of a clear prospect for success . . . Perhaps it was for that reason that the news of Mayakovsky’s suicide continued to shake him for weeks, during which he had come to feel guilty for having argued with the poet so many times, perhaps providing fodder to the detractors who had popped up all over the country.

  The arrival of the first copies of his anxiously awaited autobiography barely gave him any satisfaction amid so many losses. Upon rereading the work, finished a year earlier, he regretted having dedicated so many pages to a self-defense that was beginning to seem futile in the middle of the torrent of adversities that preyed on his friends’ lives and dignity; his insistence on contextualizing his disagreements with Lenin throughout twenty years of struggle seemed opportunistic, and above all, he reproached himself for not having the courage to recognize, with helpful or perhaps harmful hindsight, the excesses that he himself had committed in order to defend the revolution and its permanence. Although he would never publicly admit it, for many years already Lev Davidovich had regretted the moments in which, from his position of power, he had allowed force to take over, independent of the goals being pursued. The militarization of the railroad unions he imposed, when the outcome of the civil war depended on the locomotives standing still on the country’s tracks, now seemed excessive to him, even when it was upon that measure that the fate of the revolution had rested. He already knew that he would never be able to forgive himself for the attempt to apply the same coercive measures to postwar reconstruction when it became clear that the nation was on the verge of disintegration and it was not possible to persuade disenchanted workers without applying force. On his shoulders lay the responsibility for having removed union leaders, for having erased democracy from workers’ organizations, and for contributing to their turning into amorphous bodies that now gladly used Stalinist bureaucrats to cement their hegemony. As part of the power apparatus, he had also contributed to killing the democracy that he now demanded as an oppositionist.

  His role in crushing the Kronshtadt naval base rebellion in the ill-fated month of March 1921 was no less shameful to him. That detachment, whose support guaranteed the success of the Bolshevik coup in October 1917, would demand four years later such basic rights as greater freedom for workers, less despotic treatment for the peasants forced to hand over the bulk of their harvests, and, above all, the sacred right to free elections to the Soviet assemblies. The reasoning that the new sailors of the Baltic fleet were being manipulated by anarchists and counterrevolutionary officers should never have justified the measure that he, as
commissar of war, had applied: the squashing of the revolt and the unleashing of violence that even extended to the execution of hostages. For him and for Lenin, it had been clear that the punishment was a political necessity, since even though they knew that the protest had no possibility of turning into the predicted third revolution, they feared that it would aggravate to unsustainable limits the chaos in a country besieged by hunger and economic paralysis.

  He knew that if in March 1921 the Bolsheviks had allowed free elections, they probably would have lost power. The Marxist theory, which he and Lenin used to validate all of their decisions, had never considered the circumstance that once the Communists were in power, they could lose the support of the workers. For the first time since the October victory, they should have asked themselves (did we ever ask ourselves? he would confess to Natalia Sedova) if it was fair to establish socialism against or at the margin of majority will. The proletarian dictatorship was meant to eliminate the exploiting classes, but should it also repress the workers? The dilemma had ended up being dramatic and Manichaean: it was not possible to allow the expression of the people’s will, since this could reverse the process itself. But the abolition of that will would deprive the Bolshevik government of its basic legitimacy: once the moment arrived in which the masses ceased to believe, the need arose to make them believe by force. And so they applied force. In Kronshtadt—as Lev Davidovich knew so well—the revolution had begun to devour its own children and he had been bestowed the sad honor of giving the order that started the banquet.

  The harshness with which he had acted (generally backed by Lenin) could perhaps have been justified in those years. But now, upon reviewing their attitudes, he couldn’t stop asking himself whether, if he’d had the necessary shamelessness and shrewdness to grab power after Lenin’s death, he would not also have turned into a pseudo-communist czar. Wouldn’t he have raised the excuse of the revolution’s survival to crush rivals, as Lenin did in 1918 to outlaw the parties that had fought for the revolution alongside the Bolsheviks? Would he have been capable of withstanding the democratic relevance of an opposition, of factions within the party, of a press without censorship?