The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  The worst experience of that time, however, were the tensions caused by Zina’s instability: she was more demanding every day regarding the participation in partisan jobs, but her behavior oscillated between enthusiasm and depression. Although he insisted, in the kindest ways, she had refused to submit herself to psychoanalytic treatment, since, she repeated, she didn’t feel like unearthing all the filth she had accumulated within her. Her disorder had reached a critical point when the failure of her operation was discovered, since the Turkish surgeons had invaded her remaining healthy lung. Fearful for Zina’s life or of a direct confrontation with her, Lev Davidovich ordered Liova to make the necessary arrangements for the woman to travel to Berlin and be seen there by specialists capable of mending her body and her spirit.

  Once Zina’s reservations had been overcome, the woman left for Berlin, leaving her father feeling a mixture of relief and a cutting feeling of guilt. Lev Davidovich had promised her that, as soon as she recovered a bit, she would begin to work with Liova and they would send Seva to her. Meanwhile, for his own stability, the young boy would stay in Turkey, although his grandfather knew that behind the decision to keep the boy was a dose of selfishness: Seva had turned into his best medicine against exhaustion and pessimism.

  Zinushka had left in the company of Abraham Sobolevicius, Senin the Giant, one of Lev Davidovich’s collaborators based in Berlin, who, coincidentally, had spent a few days at the house in Kadıköy. For the last two years, Senin and his younger brother had turned into his most active correspondents in Germany, but since Liova had been placed at the head of the German followers, relations with the Sobolevicius brothers had undergone a period of tensions, and he attributed it to the preeminence he had given his son in the terrain where the brothers had reigned. The strangest thing in the changed attitude from those comrades was the more or less direct rejection of certain guidelines destined to unmask the irresponsible Stalinist policies regarding the German situation. The resistance of the Sobolevicius brothers, precisely because it came from men who were so experienced, worried Lev Davidovich.

  Just a few days after Zina’s departure, information filtered in from Moscow to illuminate like a flash of lightning the darkness in which the Exile had spent two years. The source of the information was trustworthy: it came from Comrade V.V., whose existence only Liova and he were aware of, since his role within the GPU made him especially vulnerable and useful. V.V. warned in a report that he had heard just an echo of a comment about the Sobolevicius brothers carrying out espionage work for the GPU within Trotsky’s closest circle. But placed in its precise context that comment gave form to the riddle of the brothers’ strange attitude.

  The discovery of the true nature of the agents—who disappeared as soon as Lev Davidovich made their real affiliation public—plunged him into deep concern. The fact that he had trusted those men to the point of having handed over his daughter to them—of having let them sleep in his house, play with Seva, speak privately with Natasha and with him—warned him of the fragility of any possible system of protection and made evident the dominion Stalin had over his life: for now, the Grave Digger was satisfied with knowing what he was doing and what he was thinking, but what about tomorrow? He was convinced that the fires and the presumed conspiracy of former general Turkul had only been distraction maneuvers in an attack that had barely begun and whose denouement would require neither spectacular actions nor the conspiracies of old White Russian enemies. The final shot would come from a hand, trained by Stalin himself and capable of passing through all the filters of suspicion, until it became the closest thing to a friendly hand. The actions of the Sobolevicius brothers showed him, nonetheless, that his life still seemed necessary for the general secretary to rise to the most absolute of powers. Terrified before the evidence that clarified the reasons for which he’d been allowed to go into exile instead of being killed on the steppes of Alma-Ata, he understood that, while he was alive, he would be the incarnation of the counterrevolution, his image would stain all demands for internal political change, his voice would sound like the perversion of any voice that clamored for a minimum level of truth and justice. Lev Trotsky would be the measure of justifying all repression, the basis for all the explosions of critics and inconvenient people, a side of the enemy coin of the world Communists: the piece that, to be perfect, would soon have the image of Adolf Hitler on its reverse side.

  When the reconstruction work on the Büyükada villa was completed, Lev Davidovich demanded to return. Throughout the nine months he lived in Istanbul, the vertigo of transience and the feeling of finding himself at the edge of a cliff never left his spirit, and he had not even managed to progress as he had hoped on the writing of History of the Russian Revolution. For that reason, he trusted that the return to what he now considered his house would allow him to concentrate on what was truly important.

  Kharalambos and other villagers were waiting for them on the dock. The Trotskys appreciated a welcome that included a basket of fish, oysters, and fresh seafood; bags of dried fruit tied with goat cheese and plates of the sweets they called apricots; and, as a special treat, a clay pot with a selection of pochas and pides lying inside, needing only to be placed in boiling olive oil to deliver to the palate a Mediterranean voluptuousness so different from the simple tastes of Russian and Ukrainian recipes.

  Very soon the Exile regained his work rhythm and dedicated ten and even twelve hours a day to writing the History and to the preparation of two articles for the Bulletin. At the end of the day, with the exhaustion that tended to cause bothersome tearing in his eyes, he called to Seva and, preceded by Maya, they went down to the coast to see the sunset. There he told his grandson stories about the Jews of Yanovska; he told him about his mother, Zinushka, recovering in Berlin; and he taught him, supported by the intelligence of the patient Maya, to communicate with dogs and to interpret their language of attitudes.

  Just three weeks later, Lev Davidovich would receive the sword cut unleashed from Moscow as the clearest warning that the war against him would not stop and that he would never be allowed the slightest hint of peace. A perplexed Liova was the one who transmitted the news to him: beginning on February 20, 1932, Lev Trotsky and the members of his family who found themselves outside the territory of the Soviet Union ceased to be citizens of the country and lost all constitutional rights and the protection of the state. The crime committed by the former party member—he was no longer mentioned as a leader—had been participation in counterrevolutionary actions, by virtue of which he was considered an enemy of the people, undeserving of holding the nationality of the world’s first proletarian state. The decree from the Central Committee’s executive presidium, published in Pravda, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, included in the recently enacted sentence of revocation of citizenship, thirty other exiles, also enemies of the people, who in their time had been distinguished Menshevik figures.

  As he read that malicious communiqué—which, with calculated malevolence, mixed him with former exiles who he himself and Lenin had invited to emigrate in 1921—he closely examined the details and sought the hidden objective in a measure that he himself had inaugurated in Soviet history. Without a doubt, Stalin’s prime intention was that of turning him into an outlaw, without a state behind him, totally at the mercy of his enemies, among whom you could now count the very Soviet people. But behind it was the logical consequence of turning his supporters within the country from political oppositionists to collaborators with a “foreign” agent and, as such, accusable of the crime of treason, the most feared in days of patriotic and nationalistic fervor.

  Before the abyss he and his family were staring at, Lev Davidovich regretted as never before the lack of realism and the excess of trust that had blinded him for years, to the point of allowing, before his very eyes, the birth and growth of that malignant tumor clinging to the Kremlin’s walls called Joseph Stalin. A man like him, who had always valued his own ability to understand the human soul, men’s needs and
weaknesses, and had prided himself on having the ability to move consciousnesses and the masses—how had he not noticed the fateful air around that dark being? For years, Stalin had been so insignificant that, as much as Lev Davidovich searched his brain, he never managed to visualize what must have been their first meeting, in London in 1907. Then he was the Trotsky that had behind him the dramatic participation in the 1905 revolution, when he came to be the president of Petrograd’s Soviet; the orator and journalist capable of convincing Lenin or of confronting him and calling him a dictator in the making, a Russian Robespierre. He was a high-ranking, spoiled, and hated revolutionary who would have looked without any great interest at the recently arrived Georgian, uncultured and without history, with his pockmarked face. By contrast, he could recall him at that fleeting meeting in Vienna, during the year of 1913, when somebody introduced him formally, without deeming it necessary to tell the man from the mountains who Trotsky was, since no Russian revolutionary could help but recognize him. Lev Davidovich still remembered on that occasion Stalin had barely held out his hand before turning back to his cup of tea, like a malnourished animal—whom he would only manage to fix in his memory because of that cornered and yellow stare, coming out of small eyes that, like those of a lizard lying in wait (yes, that was the detail!)—didn’t blink. How could he not have noticed that a man with that reptilian stare was a highly dangerous being?

  During the vertigo of 1917, on very few occasions Stalin had passed in front of him, like a furtive shadow, and Lev Davidovich had never given him a thought. Later, when he at last stopped to think of him, he discovered that the Georgian had always repelled him because of those qualities that must have been his strength: his essential meanness, his psychological crudity, and that cynicism of the petit bourgeois whom Marxism had freed from many prejudices but without managing to substitute them with a well-assimilated ideological system. Before each one of the attempted approaches carried out by Stalin, he had instinctively stepped back and had unwittingly provided the distance for resentment; but he had not understood the error of his calculation until years later. “The main quality that distinguishes Stalin,” Bukharin had said to him one day, “is laziness; the second, limitless envy of everyone who knows or could know more than he does. He has even undermined Lenin.”

  Lev Davidovich would come to have the conviction that his greatest mistake had been not fighting at the moment in which it was already clear that a struggle for power had begun and he had in his hands the crushing victory represented by Lenin’s letters reprimanding Stalin for his brutal handling of the “nationalities question” and the “Testament” in which Vladimir Ilyich asked that the Georgian be removed as party secretary. But at that moment he had thought that Stalin was not a considerable rival and that launching a campaign against the man from the mountains would be viewed as a personal battle to take over Lenin’s position (as it would have been manipulated by Stalin’s followers within the party), and Lev Davidovich was not able to think about that possibility without feeling ashamed. Later he would understand that even with the support of Lenin’s will and opinions, he had lost that battle a long time before: beneath his feet a well-laid-out conspiracy had been organized, and Stalin—with Zinoviev and Kamenev’s complicity and Bukharin’s cowardly support—had disarmed him without his noticing; his fall was already a reality that needed only to be consolidated. The worst, nonetheless, was knowing that his defeat did not signify only his defeat but that of an entire project—and not because he saw his access to power impeded but because he had also facilitated Stalin’s ascent and, with it, the annihilation of the social dream that the unstoppable Georgian was carrying out.

  Lev Davidovich needed several days to begin to ponder the response demanded by that decree. Knowing that he was going to be assaulted by enormous and immoral propaganda resources, capable of lying before the eyes of the world without the slightest shame, he debated between drafting a measured communiqué, focused on the illegality of the sentence, and a frontal attack directed against the dictator. But what occupied his mind most vehemently was whether the time had not come to resign from a struggle for the reform of the party and the Soviet state that was becoming all the more unviable: whether the hour had not arrived to throw himself into the void and proclaim the need for a new party capable of recovering the truth of the revolution.

  The echoes of the decree would soon begin to penetrate the atmosphere of his private life. Zina, also affected by the punishment, sent him a desperate message from Berlin: How would she now meet with her daughter again, who was still in Leningrad? And she demanded Seva’s presence, since she wanted to live with at least one of her children. Never before that moment had Lev Davidovich felt the burden of family.

  A message brought from Moscow by friendly hands arrived at Prinkipo to confirm for Lev Davidovich the magnitude of the disaster that was being forged in his old country. The remittent was Ivan Smirnov, the old Bolshevik he was united with in an intimate friendship, and who had been one of the staunch oppositionists in the summer of 1929. Smirnov had quickly understood that, even though he had been assigned an official position, his fate had been marked by having confronted Stalin under the renegade Trotsky’s banner. Sensing the counteroffensive his old comrade would undertake, Smirnov had decided to run the risk of sending him a report about the proportions of the economic and political devastation ravaging the USSR and that, nonetheless, offered very little hope for the victory of any opposition, at least in the short term.

  To justify his capitulation, Smirnov commented that in 1929 the economic about-face unleashed by Stalin seemed a logical and even moderate process that followed the ideas almost step-by-step about industrialization and the collectivization of land that until then had been the program and simultaneously the mark of an opposition accused of being the enemy of the peasants and fanatics of industrial development. However, the crushing of the faction led by Bukharin and the surrenders of the last Trotskyist oppositionists had left Stalin without adversaries and allowed him to turn the war against the enriched peasants in a storm of collectivizing violence that had succeeded in paralyzing Soviet agriculture: first the large landholders, then the medium and small landholders later, upon seeing their wealth threatened by expropriations that included even the hens and guard dogs, had opted for a silent sabotage, and an orgy of animal sacrifices resulted that filled the countryside with foul-smelling bones and the steam of boiling oil, and that finished off half the nation’s livestock. As could be expected, they also began to devour the wheat and all other grains, without stopping at the seeds meant to guarantee the coming harvest, which was only planted and tended to when the peasants were placed at the end of the barrel of a rifle. The neglect was aggravated with the transfer of entire villages and towns from the Ukraine and the Caucasus to the forests and mines of Siberia, from where the government planned to extract the wealth the land had ceased to produce. The predictable result had been a startling famine that ravaged the country from 1930 with no end in sight. In the Ukraine, there was talk of millions of people dead from starvation, and it was even said that there had been acts of cannibalism. In the cities, the people fell over themselves for potatoes in the black market, paying exorbitant amounts of rubles so devalued that many could only engage in commerce through barter. How many lives paid the price of that “attack” on socialism was something that could never be known, and Smirnov was of the opinion that the nation’s agriculture would not recover in the next fifty years.

  No less devastating, Smirnov said, was the way that Stalin had insisted on erasing those elements of memory that didn’t meet with his version of Soviet history, dedicated to promoting his preeminence. A few months before, Riazanov, the director of the Marx-Engels Institute, and Yaroslavsky, the author of the most widely circulated History of the Bolshevik Revolution, had been expelled under the charge of not sufficiently rescuing the Leninist legacy. The real reason was that Riazanov could not prove that Stalin had made any contribution to Marxist the
ory, and that Yaraslavsky’s History, already sufficiently altered, could not totally glorify Stalin, since the events of the revolution were too recent and too many of its main characters were still living.

  Stalin’s violent egotism, his former comrade commented, had taken even more painful paths due to their irreversible and catastrophic effects. With the “Great Change,” the idea had arisen to convert Moscow into the new socialist city; and Stalin placed himself at the head of the project that had started with the transformation of the Kremlin, within whose walls the monasteries of the Miracles and of the Ascension, built in 1358 and 1389, and the magnificent Nicholas Palace, a work from the time of Catherine II, were demolished. Outside of the Kremlin, the most regrettable destruction had been that of the Temple of Christ the Savior, the biggest sacred building in the city, 270 feet high, its walls covered with Finnish granite and marble slabs from Altai and Podole, its dome lit up by bronze sheets, its main cross thirty feet high and its four towers, topped by fourteen bells among which that giant one weighing twenty-four tons stood out, challenging the laws of physics and inspiring the envy of all of Europe’s faithful. That temple, blessed in 1883 before 20,000 people inside, had perished only forty-eight years after its consecration, when Stalin decided that the spot occupied by the church was the ideal place, due to its proximity to the Kremlin and Red Square, to raise the Palace of the Soviets. To Smirnov, that decision had seemed the most triumphant proof of Stalin’s power to choose not only the political fate of the country but also that of its agriculture, livestock, mining, history, linguistics (he recently discovered that capacity of his), and even its architecture, since, with Christ the Savior demolished, he commented that Red Square would look better without the nuisance of St. Basil’s Cathedral. All of this, Smirnov concluded, had occurred under a policy of terror that had shut the mouths of workers and eminent scientists alike—a terror turned not just into fearful obedience but into the apathy of the very people who had led the most spectacular social transformation in human history.