Nine days later, without the jubilation they expected, Lev Davidovich, Natalia, and Liova arrived at Les Embruns, the villa that Raymond Molinier had rented in the outskirts of Saint-Palais, in the French Midi. The former commissar of war’s entrance into the house had not exactly been dignified: he was trembling with fever, thinking that the pounding in his temples would burst his skull, and felt as if his waist was being broken by a biting and unrelenting pain. Because of that, as soon as he crossed the threshold, he fell on a couch and immediately accepted the aspirins and sleeping pills that Natalia Sedova gave him.
They had barely left Istanbul when he had felt a crisis of lumbago, accompanied by a return of malaria. During the entire crossing, Lev Davidovich had remained in his cabin and even refused to speak with the journalists who were waiting for him in El Pireo, attracted by the rumors of his imminent return to the Soviet Union, after his meeting in France with Stalin’s new commissar of foreign affairs. When Marseille came into sight, dozens of journalists, policemen, and protesters opposed to his presence in France were also waiting for them, and his wife had surprised him with the news that Liova and Molinier had come from the port in a ferry to avoid encountering the crowd that could have upset the authorities. Seeing his son again after a tense separation, and hearing him say that in the course of a few days Jeanne would travel from Paris to bring Seva to him, brought him happiness capable of dulling his pains. He then found out that Molinier had prepared everything so that they disembarked in Cassis, from which they traveled in cars to Saint-Palais. But that almost two-hour-long journey on narrow roads had ended up conquering the recently arrived man’s physical resistance.
The pills were starting to take effect, when Lev Davidovich heard some voices ripping him away from that kind lethargy. He would confess to Natalia Sedova that at first he thought he was dreaming: in his dream someone was screaming “Fire! Fire!” But he had enough lucidity not to brush away the nightmare returning him to the nights of arson in Büyükada and Kadıköy as insignificant. He managed to open his eyes just as he felt his arm being pulled and saw the terrified expression on Liova’s face. Then he knew that reality was greater than the ramblings of his fever, and, leaning on his son, he managed to go out to the garden, above which smoke was floating, and he had the feeling of carrying hell with him. Shit! he thought, and fell on the grass, where he at last found out that the fire (seemingly caused by a train spark that had fallen on the very dry earth) had only affected the hedge and the backyard’s wooden shed.
Liova and Molinier were in a rush to speak with Lev Davidovich, as in just one month the founding assembly of the Fourth International planned by the Exile would take place in Paris. However, stopped by Natalia Sedova, the men had to contain their impatience and give the sick man a few days of peace. Nor could Seva’s anxiously awaited arrival be celebrated as it should have been, due to the fevers overtaking him; he asked Natalia to let him talk to the boy, though, since he wanted to see how his spirits were and explain why his beloved Maya was not with them.
When the fever receded a bit, and particularly when the lumbago pains began to decrease, Lev Davidovich put a deaf ear to his wife’s prohibitions and held a meeting with Lev Sedov, Raymond Molinier, and his coreligionist Max Shachtman, who had accompanied him from Prinkipo. The Exile knew that he was racing the clock and that the four weeks until the constitutive meeting in Paris were forcing them to be especially efficient, since he sensed that he was playing the most important card of his exile. His main concern was Liova and Molinier’s capacity for gatherings, since they would not only be in charge of organizing the meeting but also be his voice, impossible as it was for him to travel to Paris due to the conditions of his asylum. Weighing each of his collaborators’ judgments, the old revolutionary listened to their opinions and immediately was sure that the Fourth International was hanging on a precipice, affected by his own contradictions and created at an adverse time, perhaps too quickly. While Liova offered the dismal panorama (fear and doubts in Germany, dispersion and rivalries in France and Belgium, adventurism in the United States), Molinier trusted in the Exile’s authority to overcome the doubts of many followers and in the possibility of taking advantage of the rise of fascism to call for unity.
Before returning to Paris, Liova would confess to his mother that, for the second time in his life, he had felt compassion for Lev Davidovich and even asked himself if it was worth continuing to fight. Although his father hadn’t given up, the truth was that only his pride, his historic optimism, and his responsibility made him insist on his ideas: at the end of thirty years of revolutionary struggle it was clear, seeing how the world was breaking under the weight of the reaction around him, the totalitarianism, the lies, and the threat of a devastating war, that the man was on his own.
It was precisely that optimism about the future and the laws of history that constituted Lev Davidovich’s mainstay throughout the weeks in which, from his sofa, he devoted up to fifteen hours daily to drafting the thesis to be discussed in Paris. His political perception, altered by events of recent years, allowed him to clarify some of his purposes in calling for a new International, to which he hoped to attract the dispersed Trotskyist groups and those unhappy with the Stalinist policy applied in Germany, and also some radical sectors, which were always difficult to discipline. But its great contradiction continued to be the policy the meeting of parties should adopt regarding the Soviet Union: the situation there was different, and for the time being caution was the priority, since the struggle had no reason to attack the basis of the system if it managed to unmask it and, when the time came, dethrone the bureaucratic excrescence.
The work, in any event, would not be easy. Stalin had already ordered the “friends of the USSR” to initiate a campaign destined to get hold of the antifascist monopoly, at least on the verbal level, since, when it came to action, they didn’t seem too interested in opposing the necessary enemy that had finally emerged from the German ashes. Stalin’s new campaign propagated the myth that the Soviet system was the only possible choice against Hitler and barbarism. While they accused the democracies of being sympathetic to and even having been the cause of fascism, they reduced the ethical and political options to just two: on the one hand terror, made incarnate by fascism; and on the other, hope and the common good, represented by the Communists led by Stalin. The trap was set and Lev Davidovich started to predict the fall of almost all of the West’s progressive forces into the abyss.
Throughout the four weeks he worked on preparing the conference, the pain and fever would not leave him. Many times Natalia tried to tear him away from his work, but he refused, promising that, after the meeting, he would submit to the regimen of her choice. On the brink of collapse, he finished drafting the documents and bid goodbye to van Heijenoort, begging him to forget his wife’s orders and keep him up-to-date.
The anxiety soon gave way to disappointment before a predictable fiasco. The parties and groups represented in Paris were a reflection of the dispersal experienced by the European and American left, discouraged by failure and frightened by Moscow’s pressures. More than a current, his followers formed small grouplets, the majority being dissidents from communist parties, and they stepped back, scared by that new affiliation that demanded a defined anti-Stalinist position and a philosophical practice that was essentially Marxist, guided by the doctrine of permanent revolution as an ideological principle. Lev Davidovich thought that perhaps Molinier’s unrestrained energy and Liova’s inexperience had led to the impossibility of achieving important strategic agreements and because of that, when he found out that only three of the invited parties accepted to join a new coalition, he advised Liova that, to save his honor, he desist from founding the International and announce that the meeting had been just a preliminary conference for the future organization.
Overcome by exhaustion and disappointment, he put his body in Natalia’s hands; she began by confining him to a room without a desk, to which all visitors were forbidden,
including Liova. Nonetheless, his mind kept going around in circles, and for several days he thought about the reasons for the failure in Paris. That fiasco proved how much his political power had diminished in five years of almost complete marginalization, although he had to recognize that the political situation in which he now had to act was decisive, so different from that of 1917: the revolutionary positions were withdrawing and it was utopian to wait for a situation capable of unleashing a wave of rebellion to advance through Europe and reach Moscow’s doors. By any measure, the clamor for permanent revolution and the image of a leader who would subvert the Muscovite order as well as the capitalist one began to seem anachronistic.
A few weeks later, when the French authorities lifted some restrictions on his asylum (now he was prevented only from living in Paris and in the Seine department), Lev Davidovich decided to leave Saint-Palais and cut off his dependent relationship with Raymond Molinier. Due to his limited finances, he chose to establish himself in the outskirts of Barbizon, the small town that Millet, Rousseau, and other landscape artists had made famous. Located on the edges of the Fontainbleau forest and less than two hours from Paris, Barbizon represented the advantage of being closer to his followers, although it forced them to again use a corps of bodyguards.
The house was a two-story building, from the turn of the century, that its owners baptized “Ker Monique,” and was only separated from the forest by a dirt path that barely fit a car. Since moving to that place, always perfumed by the scent of the forest, he felt himself regaining his ability to work and was again writing and receiving visits from his followers, to whom he proselytized on an almost individual basis. Thus, he tried to prevent new dissent from forming, as had just occurred in Spain, where the group led by his old friend Andreu Nin had decided to found a party independent of any International, or the one that was led in France by fighters like Simone Weil and Pierre Naville. The most regrettable thing was discovering how much the proposed International had been hurt by Molinier’s political ambitions, capable of planting chaos in the French opposition to the point that, he wrote, they would need years of work to bring together the scarcely hundred or so militants who still followed him.
With Natalia, he spent many afternoons that winter walking to the domesticated forest of oaks and chestnuts that made up the hunting grounds of the French monarchy, and even crossed it to visit the Palais-Royal. Some nights, wanting to treat themselves, they went to eat venison at the nearby Auberge du Grand-Veneur, but he almost always dedicated those hours to catching up on new developments in French literature and with pleasure read a couple of novels by Georges Simenon, that young Belgian who had interviewed him in Prinkipo; he discovered the overwhelming Céline of Journey to the End of the Night, which had been capable of shaking the vocabulary of French literature; and he enjoyed Malraux’s epic Man’s Fate, the novel that the writer gave him during his visit to Saint-Palais.
However, the book that really moved him at that time had arrived from Moscow and served to reveal to him once again why Mayakovsky had chosen to shoot himself through the heart and, at the same time, to prove the extremes to which the totalitarian system can pervert an artist’s talent. This was Belomorsko-Baltiyski Kanal imeni Stalina (The Canal Named in Honor of Stalin). The book had been edited by and had a prologue by Maxim Gorky and brought together texts by thirty-five writers determined to justify the unjustifiable. Ever since the summer, when the canal uniting the White Sea with the Baltic Sea was inaugurated, the “friends of the USSR” and the European communist press had started to praise the great work of socialist engineering and to deem anyone who merely asked about the enterprise’s utility an enemy of the working class. But Gorky’s anthology of texts went beyond the limits of abjection. In his previous hyperbolic book, the novelist had already devoted himself to exalting the humanist effort undertaken in the Solovski lager, where, according to what was declared in Moscow and happily repeated by Gorky, the Soviet penal system fought at thirty degrees below zero to turn common criminals and enemies of the revolution into socially useful men. And now Kanal imeni Stalina proposed to sanctify the horror, documenting the prodigious transformation of the prisoners forced to work on the canal into shining models of the New Soviet Man. The book’s immorality was such that it managed to surprise Lev Davidovich when he thought he was immune to that type of shock. If the French gazetteers could save their souls by saying they were unaware of the truth about what happened in the building of that canal and arguing that they were just repeating what was dictated from Moscow, those Soviet writers could not be unaware of the horror lived by two hundred thousand prisoners (unsatisfied peasants, degraded bureaucrats, political and religious opponents, alcoholics, and even some writers) forced for years to build the locks, dams, and dikes of the canal, which included twenty-five miles of path cut through nothing but rock, just so that Stalin could demonstrate the supremacy of socialist engineering that, coincidentally, he also directed. The death toll during the execution of the work could never be calculated, but every Soviet knew that more than twenty-five thousand prisoners had perished in accidents or had been devoured by the cold and exhaustion. Besides, they all knew that the supplier of the physical labor for the canal had been the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, the maniacal Genrikh Yagoda, and that, for his dedication, Stalin had conferred upon him the Order of Lenin during the inauguration of the canal.
Lev Davidovich was moved to disgust, lamenting the moral degradation of a man like Maxim Gorky, the same Gorky who preferred to go into exile in 1921, still very much convinced that “everything I said about the Bolsheviks’ savageness, about their lack of culture, about the cruelty rooted in sadism, about their ignorance of the Russian people’s psychology, about the facts that they’re carrying out a disgusting experiment with the people and destroying the working class—all of that and much more that I said about Bolshevism is still as potent.” What arguments had Stalin used to achieve the return of a man with those ideas from his comfortable Italian exile? Which ones to force him into the humiliation of signing his name to those books and turning into the accomplice of horrifying crimes against humanity, dignity, and intelligence?
The year 1934 brought with it a ray of hope to Barbizon that would keep Lev Davidovich in suspense for weeks. Through the scarce information channels to which he still had access, he received the news from Moscow that Stalin’s political rivals had conspired to use the Bolshevik Party’s Twenty-Seventh Congress to make the decisive battle for their survival. Many of the activists who, without mentioning Trotsky’s name, continued to support him and considered his return a necessity—in addition to those who had opposed Stalin at some point, and those who for years had been his collaborators and were later expelled by the leader—were thinking of using the congress to remove the Georgian from power through a vote in which they would propose their future politicians. At the head of the heterogeneous group—united only by their hate or fear of Stalin—were old Bolsheviks of various leanings, among them Lenin’s oldest comrades—Zinoviev, Kamenev, Piatakov, the unpredictable Bukharin—and Trotskyist oppositionists who had been readmitted to the party after surrendering. The rumors said that they had placed their faith in the election of Sergei Kirov, the party’s young secretary in Leningrad, a man whose history wasn’t stained with the internal struggles of the 1920s. The reports assured him that Kirov, even though he had refused to reach any agreement with the oppositionists and maintained he was loyal to the general secretary, had criticized Stalin’s collectivizing, industrializing, and repressive excesses and, as a Communist, was willing to accept the congress’s will.
With the experience of expulsion behind him, Lev Davidovich couldn’t stop imagining the tricks Stalin would use to destroy the rebellion in the making, which he followed closely. His ability to divide and use people, blackmail the weakest ones, and terrorize his most committed followers and converts with possible revenge would, without a doubt, shine in those days. Because of that, during the congres
s’s opening session on February 26, when the initial praise for the five-year plan was heard, the ambitious economic plans for the future were proclaimed, and it was decided to call it the “Congress of Victors,” he had bet that the general secretary’s rivals had lost the battle.
The defeat was confirmed by the summary of the speech by Bukharin, who focused his diatribe on condemning the political position that he himself had led, only to later recognize that “Comrade Stalin was right when, by brilliantly applying the Marxist-Leninist dialectic, he destroyed a series of theoretic proposals from the twisted right, for which I, above all, accept my share of responsibility.” Before that tacit acceptance of failure, Lev Davidovich could not help but admire the courage with which a few activists still dared to propose the propriety of Stalin being relieved of his duties and the need to air out the country’s political environment. The vote against Stalin, which many delegates joined, ultimately was unable to overcome the majority terrorized by the specter of change, the loss of privileges, and possible reprisals. As Piatakov had done to him, now Lev Davidovich could prophesy to Piatakov himself, to Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and even to Kirov, that Stalin would make them pay with blood for their daring and the challenge they had launched.
The Man Who Loved Dogs Page 17