The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  In the article, written after the victory of the alliance of the French left, Lev Davidovich had commented that Léon Blum, at the head of the new government, was just a minimum guarantee that the Stalinist influence would find pitfalls in establishing itself in the country, and he warned that if France managed to radicalize its politics, it could very well turn into the epicenter of the European revolution that he had been waiting for since 1905, the revolution capable of stopping fascism in its tracks and cutting off Stalinism. Nonetheless, according to the judge, that document was proof of his disloyal conduct toward the government that had so generously taken him in, and constituted a violation of the conditions of his asylum. Lev Davidovich asked if they were investigating his political opinions or the burglary of the house where he was staying, carried out by a group of pro-fascists. As if he hadn’t heard him, the judge turned to the court secretary and confirmed that Mr. Trotsky had admitted to being the author of the document that proved his interference in the politics of other countries.

  When he was walking toward the door, the police who were guarding him informed him that they had to take him to the nearby Ministry of Justice. Once inside the adjacent building, he was greeted by two functionaries who were so imbued with their character that they seemed to have been plucked from a Chekhov story. After informing him that Minister Lie apologized for not being present, they handed him a declaration that the minister asked him to sign as a requirement for extending his residency permit in the country. As he read the declaration, Lev Davidovich thought his temples would explode if he didn’t give free rein to his anger.

  “I, Lev Trotsky,” he had read, “declare that my wife, my secretaries, and I will not carry out, while we find ourselves in Norway, any political activity directed against any state friendly to Norway. I declare that I will reside in the place the government chooses or approves, and that we will not interfere in any way in political matters, that my activities as a writer will be circumscribed to historical and biographical works and memoirs, and that my writings of a theoretical nature will not be directed against the government of any foreign country. I agree to have all correspondence, telegrams, and telephone calls sent or received by me submitted to censorship . . .”

  The Exile stood up as he crumpled the declaration while wondering how soon they would take him to the prison where they would confine him in order to keep him silenced.

  Lev Davidovich would prove that the terrified Norwegians didn’t need to imprison him to submit him to a silence that, whichever way you looked at it, Stalin demanded, determined to cover up any arguments that could draw attention to the lies and contradictions of the judicial farce that had recently taken place in Moscow. Upon his return to Vexhall, from where his secretaries had been removed under deportation orders, he and Natalia were confined to a room given to them by Knudsen, in front of which a pair of guards were placed to prevent all communication—even with the owner of the house. As if it were a child’s game, only more dramatic and macabre, Lev Davidovich slid a formal protest under the door in which he accused the minister of violating the Norwegian constitution with a confinement that was not ordered by any court. The following morning, a policeman handed him a communiqué from Trygve Lie informing him that King Haakon had signed an order that allowed him extraconstitutional extensions in the case of the exiles Lev Davidovich Trotsky and Natalia Ivanovna Sedova. Without a doubt, Lie was determined to allow the silence to cast a shadow of doubt over Lev Davidovich’s innocence.

  Convinced that even more turbulent times were coming, Lev Davidovich tasked his secretary Erwin Wolf with taking the latest draft of The Revolution Betrayed to Liova. Although he had considered the book finished in early summer, the events in Moscow led him to delay sending it to the editors, since he was hoping to add his reflections on the trial against Zinoviev, Kamenev, and their partners in fate. Nonetheless, in view of the uncertainty in his own life, he decided to add just a small preface: the book would be a sort of manifesto in which Lev Davidovich adapted his thinking to the need for a political revolution in the Soviet Union, an energetic social change that would allow the overthrow of the system imposed by Stalinism. He did not fail to notice the strange irony surrounding a political proposal that was never conceived of by the most feverish Marxist minds, for whom it would have been impossible to imagine that, once the socialist dream was achieved, it would be necessary to call upon the proletariat to rebel against their own state. The great lesson to be drawn from the book was that, in the same way that the bourgeoisie had created various forms of government, the workers’ state seemed to create its own and Stalinism was proving to be the reactionary and dictatorial form of the socialist model.

  With the hope that it would still be possible to save the revolution, Lev Davidovich had tried to separate Marxism from the Stalinist distortion, which he qualified as a government by a bureaucratic minority that, by force, coercion, fear, and the suppression of any hint of democracy, protected its interests against the majority dissatisfaction within the country and against all the revolutionary outbreaks of class struggles in the world. And he ended up asking himself: If the social dream and economic utopia supporting it had become corrupt to the core, what remained of the greatest experiment that man had ever dreamed of? And he answered himself: nothing. Or there would remain, for the future, the imprint of an egotism that had used and deceived the world’s working class; the memory would persist of the fiercest and most contemptuous dictatorship that human delirium could conceive. The Soviet Union would bequeath to the future its failure and the fear of many generations in search of the dream of equality that, in real life, had turned into the majority’s nightmare.

  The premonition that had pushed him to order Wolf to send on The Revolution Betrayed took shape on September 2. That day, he and Natalia felt like they were opening the pages of the darkest chapter of the storm that had become their lives and were certain that the Stalinist machine would not stop until it asphyxiated them. The transfer order drily informed them that their destination would be a place selected by the minister of justice and they were allowed to take only their personal effects. The policemen, by contrast, had the deference to allow them to say goodbye to the numerous members of the Knudsen family. The air in the house had acquired the unhealthy heaviness of a funeral, and Konrad’s young children cried to see them leave like pariahs after having shared a year with them during which the family had acquired a new member (Erwin Wolf and Hjordis, one of Knudsen’s daughters, had married), a preference for coffee, and, as that moment proved, the notion that truth does not always prevail in the world.

  The destination chosen for them was a hamlet called Sundby, in an almost uninhabited fjord near Hurum, twenty miles to the south of Oslo. The ministry had rented a two-story house that the couple would share with a score of policemen devoted to smoking and playing cards, and where the restrictions would end up being worse than those of a prison regime. They were not authorized to leave, and the only person allowed to visit them was Puntervold the lawyer, whose papers were inspected as he entered and again as he left. In addition, they only received newspapers and correspondence after they had been crudely censored with scissors and black ink by a government employee who, like Jonas Lie, the head of the guards watching them, proudly proclaimed his militancy in Quisling’s National Socialist Party.

  The captives barely had an idea of what was happening outside that remote fjord until Knudsen managed to have their radio, which had been confiscated when they were in Oslo, returned to them. Thus Lev Davidovich was able to get a measure of Stalin’s success with his Norwegian collaborators when he heard prosecutor Vishinsky’s declorations that if Trotsky hadn’t responded to his ministry’s accusations, it was because he had no way to challenge them, and that the silence of the Exile’s friends in the socialist governments of Norway, France, Spain, and Belgium only proved the impossibility of refuting the irrefutable. Lev Davidovich understood that he should make himself heard or he would be lost forever:
the most blatant of lies, repeated over and over again without anyone refuting it, would end up becoming the truth. He had already thought: They want to silence me, but they will not succeed.

  Using the invisible ink that Knudsen had managed to get to him in a cough syrup bottle, he prepared a letter to Liova in which he ordered him to launch a counterattack, and he accompanied it with a declaration, directed at the press, in which he refuted the accusations against him and accused Stalin of having staged the August trial with the goal of suppressing dissatisfaction in the USSR and eliminating all kinds of opposition by means of a criminal offensive that began with Kirov’s assassination. In addition, he pointed to the nonexistence of lines of communication with any person in Soviet territory, including his younger son Sergei, whom he had not heard from in over nine months. And finally, he expressed to the Norwegian government his willingness to have all of the accusations against him evaluated and asked for an international commission of workers’ organizations to be created to investigate the charges and to try him publicly . . .

  On September 15, like a voice from the great beyond, he made himself heard with that cry: it was the warning that Lev Davidovich Trotsky was not giving up.

  Even though the Exile had avoided mentioning in his statement the controversy with the Norwegian authorities and the humiliating events of recent days and he had dated it August 27 (the eve of his appearance at the court in Oslo), the ministry of justice forbade him in advance from making any written communications.

  For that reason, although Lev Davidovich had been certain for several months that he didn’t have enough years left in his life to turn back the political current that had turned him into a pariah and the revolution into a fratricidal bloodbath, he decided to try to make his statement resonate as strongly as possible. To begin with, he ordered Puntervold to sue the editors of the Norwegian newspapers Vrit Volk and Arbeideren—the former Nazi and the latter Stalinist sympathizers—in hopes of breaking his seclusion and being heard in an open court. The lawyer presented the petition on October 6 and informed him that the process had been initiated to settle it before the month’s end. But October would go by without the proceedings beginning. An explanation arrived on the thirtieth: Lie had stopped the trial’s process, protected under a new provisional royal decree according to which “a foreigner confined under the terms of the decree of August 31, 1936, cannot appear as a plaintiff before a Norwegian court without the concurrence of the minister of justice.”

  On November 7, Puntervold traveled to Sundby to give Lev Davidovich, on behalf of Konrad Knudsen, a beautiful cake to celebrate his fifty-seventh birthday and the nineteenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Jonas Lie, the fascist head of the police guards, accompanied the attorney while he handed over the dessert and even said celebratory words to the prisoner, wishing him (he was so conceited that he did so without irony) many years of happiness. They then asked Lie for a little bit of privacy to celebrate the unanticipated gift. As soon as they were alone, Natalia cut the cake and they extracted a small roll of paper. Lev Davidovich shut himself up in the bathroom to read it. Knudsen knew that, in the last two months, this was the story that most intrigued him, but it was only very recently that he had managed to learn the details that he was now revealing to the Exile in tiny script, doing so without adjectives and with many abbreviations.

  According to Knudsen, on August 29, three days after Lev Davidovich was confined in Vexhall, the Soviet government asked Trygve Lie, who was substituting for the minister of foreign affairs, to throw out the political exile, since he was using Norway, they insisted, as a base to commit sabotage against the Soviet Union. The extension of his asylum, they threatened, would cause the relations between the two countries to deteriorate. Lie declared that when he shut Trotsky away on August 26, that request had not been made to him yet, and therefore no one could accuse him of having confined Trotsky due to Soviet pressure. Nonetheless, Yakubovich, the Russian ambassador, made sure to comment that several days before, when Lev Davidovich had given an interview for Arbeiderbladet, he had verbally conveyed that same message to Trygve Lie. On that occasion, the ambassador had threatened a political crisis and even the rupture of economic relations. The Norwegian fishermen and sailors, conveniently up to speed on the dispute, feared a reprisal that would harm them, and Oslo ceded under the pressure and assigned Lie the role of suppressor. It was then that the minister proposed that Trotsky sign the declaration of submission to him with which Lie hoped to appease the Soviets, but upon not achieving Trotsky’s cooperation, he was obliged to order the confinement in Sundby.

  Armed with the invisible ink, Lev Davidovich began to prepare a letter to Liova and his French attorney, Gérard Rosenthal. Feeling free of any commitment to the Norwegian politicians, he relayed the details and causes for his isolation and asked his son to step up his responses to Stalin. Now, more than ever, he knew that the only possibility for him was not to surrender—that silence could only result in the victory of the puppet Lie, with Stalin pulling his strings.

  By means of the radio and the few censored newspapers that he was allowed to receive, the captive tried to keep himself up-to-date on what was happening beyond the fjord. With a few drops of bitter satisfaction he learned that, just as he had forecast, in Moscow and in the rest of the country the arrests of real or fabricated oppositionists continued. Among those who had been falling was the infamous Karl Radek, just after he had called for the death of the “super-bandit Trotsky” in the press; he also found out about the arrest of that wretched Piatakov, who had thought he had saved himself when he declared that Trotskyists had to be eradicated like carrion. As was predictable, at the end of September, Yagoda had been removed from his post as the leader of the GPU, and this role had been assigned to an obscure character named Nikolai Yezhov, in whose hands Stalin placed the baton so that he could conduct in a new chapter of the terror: Lev Davidovich knew that in Moscow they needed to organize another farce to try to fix the botched August proceedings and to eliminate accomplices who knew too much, such as Yagoda or the infamous Radek.

  Another one of his focal points of interest was the development of the war in Spain, which could turn following Stalin’s recently announced offer of logistical support to the Republic. But it didn’t surprise him to know that along with the weapons—even before them—Soviet agents had traveled to Madrid, establishing guidelines and mining the territory so that Moscow’s interests could flourish. Despite the devious nature of that operation, Lev Davidovich thought how much he would have liked to be in that effervescent and chaotic Spain. A few months before, when the nature of the Republic was defined with the electoral victory of the Popular Front, he had written to Companys, the Catalan president, asking him for a visa that, a few days later, the central government roundly denied him. In his way, Lev Davidovich begged for the Republicans to resist the advance of rebel troops that aimed to take over Madrid, although he already sensed that for the Spanish revolutionaries it would be easier to defeat the fascists than the persistent and creepy Stalinists to whom they had opened the back door.

  The good news that Knudsen had won the parliamentary elections in his district reached the fjord, reinforced by the release, surprisingly allowed, of Le livre rouge sur le procès de Moscou, published by Liova in Paris. Lev Davidovich confirmed that the pamphlet managed to show, in an irrefutable way, the incongruities and falsehoods of the Moscow prosecutors while it warned the world that a trial where no proof is presented, based on self-incriminating confessions of prisoners detained for over a year, could not have any legal value.

  The best news for the deportee had been confirming that Liova, when the moment came to make decisions, was also capable of doing so.

  In the letters that his son had sent him, before and after the publication of the Red Book (letters that Puntervold tried to recite to him from memory), the tension the young man had been experiencing, especially after the August proceedings, filtered through. While the trials in Moscow had h
ad the positive effect of bringing old comrades like Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer closer together and disposed to come out in defense of Lev Davidovich, it had also unleashed in Liova a feeling of being trapped that wouldn’t leave him and that led him to worry that he could be kidnapped or assassinated. His situation had become complicated by the exhaustion of funds to pay for the printing of the Bulletin and by family tensions, given that ever since the political rupture with Molinier, Jeanne was saying she felt closer to her ex-husband’s position than to that of Liova and his father. Nonetheless, his greatest concern, the young man insisted, wasn’t for himself or his marriage but rather for something much more valuable: Lev Davidovich’s personal and historical archives, kept in Paris. Liova had managed for part of these papers to be donated to the Dutch Institute for Social History, and at the beginning of November he had handed over another part to the institute’s French branch. The rest, which contained some of the most confidential files, he had placed under the watch of his friend Mark Zborowski, an efficient and refined Polish-Ukrainian whom everyone called Étienne.

  Very soon, the matter of the archives would prove to be more than an obsession of Liova’s when, with the new packet barely handed over to the institute, what he had feared so much occurred. On the night of November 6, a group of men entered the building and took some of the files. To the police, it was clear they were dealing with a professional and political operation, since there were no other valuable objects missing from the place. The strange thing was that the burglars had known about the existence of a warehouse that was known only to people in whom Liova had absolute confidence. Furthermore, if the burglars knew about that secret paperwork, why did they enter the institute and not Étienne’s apartment, where the most valuable documents were kept? Liova accused the GPU of the theft, but, like the fires in the Prinkipo and Kadıköy houses, his father perceived that a murky story was hidden behind it.