The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  When, in the middle of December, Tom told him it was time to make Sylvia come, Ramón Mercader knew that something had at last started to move. The strike could happen at any moment and the smell of risk cleared his mind of the mist of forced inactivity. The Duck hunt had begun.

  21

  The House of the Trade Unions in Moscow is a great work of nineteenth-century Russian architecture. The architect Kazakov had turned the eighteenth-century building into a club for the Muscovite aristocracy, and in its luxurious Hall of Columns, Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy had danced, and Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Liszt, and Rachmaninov had played their music. After the revolution, the hall, with its excellent acoustics, was used for party meetings and press conferences. There Lenin’s voice was heard dozens of times; there the funeral chapel was erected from which the remains of the leader would exit toward the mausoleum on Red Square. But Lev Davidovich was convinced that the compound was going to pass into posterity for having housed the most grotesque judicial farce of the century, and on March 2 of the already disastrous year of 1938, when the Hall of Columns’ doors were opened again, he also knew that death was returning to that historic building ready to gather another harvest.

  Ever since they began to cry over the fate of their son Liova, Natalia and Lev Davidovich had learned in too painful a way what it meant to harbor one last hope, since they now had only one—Seriozha’s life—to cling to. Although it had been months since they’d received news of the young man, the fact that they didn’t know if he was dead allowed them to embrace the improbable but still conceivable hope that he was still alive. Their only other hope was Seva. Besides them, the boy was the only member of the family living outside the Soviet Union, and they begged Jeanne to bring him to Mexico, at least for a few months, and, with his presence, help them lessen the pain of the loss they had suffered.

  But Jeanne wanted to request a more exhaustive investigation into Liova’s cause of death and was willing to hire an attorney, a friend of the Moliniers, despite Rosenthal, the Trotskys’ legal representative in France, being of the opinion that they shouldn’t mix the Molinier group up in the case. In the most diplomatic way, Lev Davidovich asked the woman to leave the investigation request in his hands, but she insisted on moving forward and had decided that Seva would remain with her in Paris, since, she said, he had turned into her best support. Natalia Sedova was the first one to foresee that devastating conflicts were coming from that flank.

  Meanwhile, the efficient Étienne had committed himself to continuing the work of the Bulletin in Paris. In his last months, Liova had assured his father that the publication was in circulation often thanks to Étienne’s dedication. Liova’s trust in the young man was such that, in case of emergency, he had given him a key to the mailbox where he received personal correspondence. Now Étienne offered to continue the task begun by Liova, along with Klement, on the planned constitution of the Fourth International. “Hopefully, Étienne will be half as efficient as our poor Liova,” Lev Davidovich commented, knowing how much he was fooling himself.

  The news that the Military Council of the Supreme Court would go into session again in the Hall of Columns didn’t surprise him. Lev Davidovich expected that at any moment the machinery of terror would again be set in motion, since Stalin needed to complete his work of erasing the collective memory that he had initiated with Kirov’s murder and carefully and efficiently continued over the last three years. In a way that made him feel miserable, Lev Davidovich tried to concentrate on the details of the new judicial farce, trying to remove from his mind the obsessive feeling of guilt and pain that had plagued him since his son’s death.

  When the list of the twenty-one accused was unveiled, Lev Davidovich found many predictable names: Rykov, Bukharin, Rakovsky, Yagoda, and Trotsky himself, in absentia. They would also try the memory of Lev Sedov, his eternal deputy, and lesser-known characters, including doctors, ambassadors, and civil servants. Of the accused, thirteen were of Jewish origin, and such an insistence on subjecting Jews to those proceedings could be read as another sign of compliance toward Hitler and as a testimony of Stalin’s visceral anti-Semitism. The charges were none too original, since they repeated the accusations of the previous trials, although there were more, since there always had to be more: terrorism against the people and the party leaders, poisonings . . . The greatest novelty was that several of the accused had fallen so low in the markets of espionage and crime that they were blamed for serving not just German and Japanese intelligence but also Polish intelligence, and not only for wanting to assassinate Comrade Stalin but also for having poisoned Gorky and his son Max. Since they didn’t seem to be criminal enough, the crimes now expanded to the time of the revolution and even previous dates, when the state that would try them didn’t yet exist. The prosecutor’s master move was to accuse Yagoda of having acted as an instrument of Trotskyist aggression by which, throughout the ten years that he had pursued, imprisoned, and tortured Lev Davidovich’s comrades and confined thousands of people to death camps, his criminal excesses were due to counterrevolutionary orders that came from Trotsky himself and not at the disposition of Stalin.

  Feeling how that aggression for the truth was giving him back his energy, the Exile wrote that the Grave Digger of the Revolution was going beyond all his previous experience and the limits of the most militant credulity. The irrationality of the accusations was such that it was nearly impossible to conceive of a counterattack, although at the beginning he decided to respond with sarcasm: he wrote that he had such power that under his orders, given from France, Norway, or Mexico, dozens of civil servants and ambassadors with whom he had never spoken turned into agents of foreign powers and sent him money, lots of money, to maintain his terrorist organization; leaders of industry became saboteurs; respectable doctors devoted themselves to poisoning their patients. The only problem, he would comment, was that those men had been chosen by Stalin himself, since it had been many years since he’d appointed anyone in the USSR.

  The incredible confessions heard during the ten days that the proceedings lasted, and the way in which they humiliated men loaded with history, such as Bukharin and Rykov, didn’t surprise Lev Davidovich. He was greatly saddened to read the self-incriminations of a fighter like the radical Rakovsky (so close to death that he was allowed to sit while making his statement), who acknowledged having allowed himself to be led by Trotskyist theories, despite the fact that Trotsky had confessed to him in 1926 that he was a British agent. What extremes had they gone to in order to break the dignity of a man who had withstood years of deportations and imprisonments without giving up his convictions and who knew he was at the end of his life? Did any of them really think that, with his confession, he was rendering a service to the USSR, as they were forced to claim? Lev Davidovich was incapable of understanding those displays of submission and cowardice.

  One prime setback in the proceedings showed the seams in their fabrication, and Krestinsky was at the center of it. For an entire afternoon he dared to maintain that his confessions, made before the secret police, were false and declared himself innocent of all charges. But the following morning, when he took the stand, Krestinsky admitted that the previous accusations and some more, surely developed in a hurry, were true. What means had they used to break a man who was already convinced he would be executed? The new GPU was developing methods that would horrify the world the day it found out about them, methods thanks to which the most spectacular revelation of the proceedings was produced when Yagoda, after declaring himself innocent and receiving the same treatment as Krestinsky, confessed to having prepared Kirov’s murder under Rykov’s orders, since the latter was envious of the young man’s meteoric rise.

  But the star of the trial, as to be expected, was Nikolai Bukharin, who, at the end of a one-year stay in the pits of the Lubyanka, seemed ready to undertake the last act of his political and human self-demolition. Although he denied being responsible for the most dreadful acts of terrorism and espionag
e, Lev Davidovich thought he noticed that his tactic was to accept the unacceptable with a conviction and emphasis with which he hoped to show the most perceptive observers the falsity of the indictment. The old revolutionary nonetheless noticed the error of perspective Bukharin was committing by trying to give a cry of alarm to the alarmed, for whom (despite the silence they maintained) all of those accusations would be as hard to believe as those of previous trials. But the great masses, the ones who followed the course of the proceedings in Moscow and in the world, came to just one conclusion from his words, which validated the charges and destroyed the prisoner’s strategy: Bukharin confessed, they said, and that was what was important. To end up kneeling and sobbing, admitting to fictitious crimes, Bukharin had preferred to return to Moscow? Lev Davidovich asked himself, recalling the dramatic letter that Fyodor Dan sent him three years before.

  To Lev Davidovich, it seemed clear that in the proceedings Stalin demanded more than a truth: he demanded the human and political destruction of the accused. When he executed the accused in the previous trials, he had forced them to die conscious that they had not only debased themselves but had condemned many innocents as well. For that reason it surprised him that Bukharin, who without a doubt had learned the lesson of the Bolsheviks who had preceded him in that moment of peril, should retain the deluded hope of saving his own life. In one of the many letters that he wrote to Stalin from the depths of the Lubyanka and that the Grave Digger was sure to have circulated in certain circles, Bukharin finally told him that all he felt for him, for the party, and for the cause was a grandiose and infinite love, and he bid farewell embracing him in his thoughts . . . Lev Davidovich could imagine Stalin’s satisfaction upon receiving messages like that one, which turned him into one of the few executioners in history to receive the worship of one of his victims as he pushed him toward death . . .

  On March 11 the trial closed for sentencing. Four days later, Pravda confirmed those sentenced to death had been executed . . .

  Ever since that spectacle started to unfold, Lev Davidovich had been shutting himself up in his room, as it was painful to try to answer the questions posed to him by journalists, followers, secretaries, and bodyguards, all in search of some logic beyond the hate, the conspiratorial obsession, and the criminal insanity of the man who governed over one-sixth of the earth and influenced the minds of millions of men and women around the world. Lev Davidovich knew that Stalin’s only possible objective in these proceedings was to discredit and eliminate real and potential adversaries and blame them for every one of his failures. What escaped them was that the discrediting was directed inward at Soviet society, which undoubtedly believed everything that was propagated, no matter how difficult it was to take in. The other great purpose was to make fear extensive and omnipresent, especially in those who had something to lose. Because of that, the first targets of those purges had been, in reality, the bureaucrats. Following that strategy, Stalin beat dozens of his acolytes, including various members of the Politburo and party secretaries in the republics, Stalinists who, from one day to the next, were labeled traitors, spies, or inept. If the oppositionists of other times had been publicly dishonored, the Stalinists, by contrast, tended to be destroyed in silence, without open proceedings, in the same way that the Communists of various countries taking refuge in the USSR were decimated along with those whom Stalin, after using them, seemed to have turned upon.

  The most terrible thing was knowing that those sweeps had affected all of Soviet society. As could be expected in a vertical and horizontal state of terror, the participation of the masses in the purges contributed to its geometric diffusion because it was impossible to undertake a witch hunt like the one experienced in the USSR without exacerbating people’s basest instincts and, above all, without each person being terrified of being caught in the net for any reason, even no reason. Terror had the effect of stimulating envy and the desire for revenge; it created an atmosphere of collective hysteria and, worse still, of indifference before the fate of others. Once the purge was unleashed, it fed on itself and released infernal forces that made it keep growing and moving forward . . .

  Weeks before, Lev Davidovich had received dramatic proof of the horror endured by his compatriots when an old friend, miraculously escaped to Finland, wrote him: “It’s terrible to confirm that a system born to rescue human dignity has resorted to rewards, glorification, the encouragement of denunciations, and feeds on everything that is humanly vile. I feel the nausea rise in my throat when I hear people say: they’ve shot M., they’ve shot P., shot, shot, shot. The words, after hearing them so much, lose their meaning. The people say them with greater calm, as if they were saying: we’re going to the theater. I, who lived these years in fear and felt the compulsion to denounce (I confess so with terror, but without any feeling of guilt), have lost in my mind the brutal semantics of the verb ‘to shoot’ . . . I feel that we’ve reached the end of justice on earth, the limits of human dignity. That too many people have perished in the name of what, they promised us, would be a better society . . .”

  André Breton’s arrival brought Lev Davidovich out of the well of his personal and historic sorrows. Diego and Frida received him with enthusiasm. Breton was the guru of surrealism, the eternal nonconformist capable of challenging the most sacred dogmas, such as when he noted that he and his friends were affiliating themselves with the French Communist Party and accepting party discipline as citizens . . . but not as surrealists.

  At the conclusion of their first meeting, weighed down with condolences, Lev Davidovich asked the poet for a few days to organize his thoughts before beginning to work on the project that had brought him to Mexico: the creation of an International Federation of Revolutionary Artists. Lev Davidovich knew he would work passionately, but that it would require great effort, since not even for someone like Lev Davidovich was it easy to handle the weight of so much death and pain. In addition, the heated situation in Mexico continued to worry him. When President Cárdenas announced the nationalization of oil interests and the U.S. secretary of the treasury responded with the threat of not buying any more Mexican silver, one million people gathered in the Zócalo to express their support for Cárdenas, but at the same time there was talk of possible uprisings against the government. Lev Davidovich knew that these circumstances put him and Natalia in a critical situation, as the NKVD murderers could take the opportunity, in the midst of so much chaos, to pounce on them, indeed he was convinced that, after the last trial, the purge of his former Bolshevik leadership completed, his existence had ceased to be useful to Stalin.

  Before Breton and his wife, Jacqueline, left, the Communists in France and Mexico had begun a campaign against him. The French, from which Breton had separated himself in 1935, were accusing him of being a Judas and, of course, something worse, a Trotsky sympathizer; in Mexico, meanwhile, the local Stalinists, with Lombardo Toledano and Hernán Laborde at their head, launched even more aggressive propaganda against the poet and against Lev Davidovich—so aggressive, in fact, that van Heijenoort decided to take some of the bodyguards for Breton’s protection during the conferences he would be giving in the country.

  To discuss literature and art, surrealism and vanguardism, political commitment and creative freedom, was a balm for the Exile. Breton’s presence and his literary encouragement reminded Lev Davidovich that ever since his childhood, and later on, when he was a young student, his life’s dream had been to become a writer, although soon after he would subordinate that passion and all others to the revolutionary work that marked his existence.

  Guided by Diego, the Bretons and the Trotskys walked around the pre-Columbian ruins and visited museums and local artists who accepted the Exile’s presence. The high priest of surrealism confessed to his astonishment before the multicolored markets, the cemeteries, and the manifestations of popular religiosity, in which he tended to find a “surrealism in a pure state,” more revealing than the shock of the umbrella and the sewing machine on the dissecti
on table, and for that reason he considered Mexico “the chosen land of surrealism.”

  When they began to work on the manifesto of writers and revolutionary artists with which they would bring the international federation into creation, Lev Davidovich and Breton must have felt the explosive tension that two stubborn souls could generate, but at the same time the possibility of an understanding born of shared need. From the beginning, Diego made it clear that the theoretical statements would be left to them, although they could count on his signature, since the three were operating with the urgency of offering a political and intellectual alternative to the left that would allow them to reconcile themselves with Marxist thinking at a moment in which many believers, disillusioned by the repression unleashed in Moscow, were beginning to turn their backs on the socialist ideal.

  In those conversations, Breton maintained the need to make a major distinction: the intellectuals on the left that had linked their thinking to the Soviet experiment were making a serious conceptual error, since it wasn’t the same to march alongside a revolutionary class as in the steps of the victorious revolution, more so when that revolution was represented by a new leadership insistent on suffocating artistic creation with a totalitarian grip . . . But despite the accusations by the Stalinists, his own distance from the party had not been a break with the revolution and, less still, with the workers and their struggles, he said. His great disagreement with Lev Davidovich revolved around a concept both considered fundamental to establish clearly, and about which the Exile’s position was definitive and nonnegotiable: “Everything is permitted in art.” Upon hearing this, Breton smiled and showed his agreement, but only if an essential clarification was added: everything except attacking the proletarian revolution. Breton recalled that Lev Davidovich himself had said that, and the Exile explained that when he wrote The Revolution Betrayed, the aesthetics deformations in the Soviet Union had certainly reached alarming levels, but the events of the last three years had broken the dike. While a proletarian revolution might inevitably pass through a period that was not Thermidorian but rather a terror that negated its own essence, it still had no right to impose conditions restricting artistic freedom: everything has to be permitted in art, he insisted, to which the French man again added: everything except attacking the proletarian revolution. This was the only sacred principle.