The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  Since he spent almost the whole day holed up in his room at the Casa Azul, he made the most of his time by writing an analysis of the foreseeable end of the Spanish Civil War. Spain’s revolutionary movement, if successful, could perhaps have delayed and even prevented the European war. Nadal had told him that, in the final months of the previous year, the Spanish government had asked for more weapons from its allies in a desperate attempt to save the Republic. The Soviets made a shipment through France, but Paris refused to allow the weapons through its borders, and that failure had been definitive. The Soviets, tired of a war without the prospect of a victory, decided to cut off all their commitments, and from that moment Spain was lost. While the fascists were rolling their military power over Spanish soil, Stalin was turning a blind eye and beginning to concern himself with what had always been his true interest, his neighbors in Eastern Europe.

  There had been no information about Seriozha for many months when an American journalist who had recently arrived in New York after a stay in Moscow wrote the Trotskys, telling them that a colleague of his had managed to interview a prisoner just released by the new head of the NKVD, Lavrentiy Beria. The former prisoner had relayed that, a few months before, he had seen Sergei Sedov alive, and another detainee had told him that Seriozha had been in the Vorkuta camp in 1936, during the Trotskyists’ strike, where he had been on the verge of dying of hunger; but in 1937 he had been transferred to the shadowy prison of Butyrka, in Moscow, where he had been subjected to torture to force him to sign a confession against his father: he was one of the few prisoners who withstood it without surrendering. The anonymous prisoner said he had met him in a camp in the subarctic, where other inmates talked about Sergei Sedov as if he were an unbreakable man.

  Natalia and Lev Davidovich had believed the news heart and soul, even when their minds thought it would be difficult for their son to have been able to escape Vorkuta or Butyrka with his life, places that were worse than the sixth circle of hell. But Lev Davidovich couldn’t avoid feeling proud when they kept hearing the same description of Seriozha’s attitude; the only thing about which there was no doubt was that he had resisted the interrogations without signing confessions against his father. So they consoled themselves by thinking that if Stalin had preyed upon his innocent life, Seriozha had conquered him with his silence.

  A new congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, held at the beginning of the year, had left Lev Davidovich several certainties. On the international level, it had made Stalin’s willingness to seek an alliance with Hitler more obvious; on the national level, it underscored the cynical pretension of carrying out yet another revision of history by blaming the expelled heads of the GPU for the excesses of the purge. To the indignation of very few and to popular acceptance of his good intentions, the “great captain” criticized those who carried out the purge, since it had been accompanied by “more mistakes than expected” (his own words). So everything would have turned out okay if only the expected mistakes had been committed? How many was it acceptable to execute by mistake? The most alarming thing was that none of those in the world who recognized Stalin’s honesty seemed to recall that, a few months earlier, the man from the mountains had sent pompous congratulations to Yezhov and the heads of NKVD. It only seemed to matter to them that the genius had warned them about the existence of “deficiencies” in the operation, such as the “simplified investigation procedures” and the lack of witnesses and proof. So where was Stalin while that was happening? the Exile had asked a world that would not respond to him.

  In reality, the most dramatic of the revelations of the congress was the proof that the general secretary had finally ascended to the heights of power. The terror of those last years had allowed him to remove from the scene, in one way or another, eighteen of the twenty-seven members of the Politburo elected in the last congress presided over by Lenin, and to leave the heads on just twenty percent of the members of the Central Committee elected in 1934, the last time the situation was on the verge of slipping out of his hands. Stalin had proven to be a real genius of political chicanery, and his successful elimination of any opposition within the party (relying on the agreement promoted by Lenin over the illegality of factions) turned into his most efficient political weapon to make democracy disappear and, later, to establish terror and carry out the purges that gave him absolute power. Perhaps the first mistake of Bolshevism, Lev Davidovich thought, was the radical elimination of the political tendencies opposed to it, and once that policy went from outside society to inside the party, the end of the utopia had begun. If freedom of expression had been allowed in society and within the party, terror would not have been able to take root. That was why Stalin had embarked on the political and intellectual purge in such a way that everything would fall under the control of a state devoured by the party—and a party devoured by the general secretary. This was exactly what Lev Davidovich, before the aborted revolution of 1905, predicted to Lenin would happen.

  To top off that series of defeats, one afternoon in March, Josep Nadal arrived at the Casa Azul with several newspapers in his hands and a look of disappointment on his face. The Republican army had surrendered and Franco’s troops were marching through Madrid. Lev Davidovich knew that in the coming months the reprisals would be terrible and he felt pity for the Republicans who had not been able to or had not wanted to flee Spain. The saddest thing was seeing how a courageous country that had had the revolution at the tips of its fingers had been sacrificed by the owners of the revolution and socialism, just as years before they had done to the Chinese Communists and the German workers. Was it so difficult to see that series of betrayals? he asked, looking into Nadal’s face.

  Their new lives at the house on Avenida Viena forced the family to depend only on their own economic resources. Lev Davidovich’s author royalties were smaller every day: only the advance paid for the English edition of Stalin and his contributions to newspapers allowed them to stay afloat. He was bitter that part of that money had disappeared in the effort to turn the estate into a trench, because no matter how high the walls were, no matter how impregnable the doors seemed, when the GPU order was given, they would find a crack in the defenses and reach him. And he sensed—in fact knew—that the order had been given: the more imminent the war, the closer his death.

  Natalia and the bodyguards tried to extend their vigilance to every single person who visited them, but Lev Davidovich refused to be so suspicious as to succumb to paranoia. The great advantage of living in his own house was being able to deal freely with the people who interested him, and from the moment they moved in, he had begun to receive visits from politicians, philosophers, university professors, Mexican sympathizers and those from other countries, including recently arrived Spanish Republicans, many of whom had felt uncomfortable around Rivera or, simply, had preferred not to visit Trotsky at the Casa Azul. Those meetings and the friends he kept were his contact with the world, and their opinions served to inform him, to reaffirm or temper his ideas.

  Regularly, the Trotskys went out of town in the car they had purchased. They made the decision to leave randomly, almost by surprise, and the employees of the house never knew when it would happen, and on occasion not even the bodyguards—whom van Heijenoort alerted about the outings with very little notice—knew their schedule. Since the situation in Mexico was getting more and more explosive (from the start of the electoral campaign, the Exile’s presence had become a hotly debated issue), they barely visited the city, and when they did, Lev Davidovich hid himself in the backseat. But decidedly the outings to the countryside were the ones Lev Davidovich most enjoyed. He took long walks that stimulated his body, dulled by so many hours of sedentary work, and he devoted himself to what would become one of his favorite hobbies, collecting rare cacti, which he replanted in the yard of his home. The marvelous variety of those plants turned the search for specimens into an adventure that sometimes took the Trotskys over difficult terrain and gave them many hours of exerci
se as they dug up the cacti with picks and shovels and transported them to the car. Natalia called those outings “days of forced labor,” but returning to the house with specimens that they planted with the utmost care was the prize for that work. One afternoon, as they planted one of the most singular cacti in his collection, Lev Davidovich remembered the order not to sow a single rosebush in the house at Büyükada. Were those cacti the image of his defeat?

  When the house was minimally set up for work, Lev Davidovich decided to make a final push to complete his Stalin biography. Natalia, so radical in her attitudes, insisted that he was debasing his talents by dedicating himself to deconstructing the Georgian, and she thought that many would have doubts about his objectivity due to the confrontation between the two of them over so many years. His editors had also encouraged him to write a biography of Lenin and spoke of sizable advances. But Lev Davidovich wanted to show the world the red czar’s true face. Even when he knew he was blinded by his passion, he didn’t reach the point of distorting the truth. Moreover, the monstrosities and crimes of Stalin’s era disgusted him, and he wanted that feeling to pervade the work. If from his pages a sinister figure rose almost reptilelike, it was because Stalin was in fact that way. Stalin’s years of infighting had given him that capacity to work for his promotion behind the scenes and one day take all power—aided by Lenin’s indolence, by Zinoviev’s, Kamenev’s and Bukharin’s congenital fear, and by Lev Davidovich’s own damned pride, he said. Or was the dictatorship an unavoidable historical necessity, the system’s only possibility? But what most encouraged Lev Davidovich to dedicate himself to writing that devastating book was the belief that, as had happened to the also deified Nero after his death, Stalin statues would be brought down and his name erased from everything—because history’s revenge tends to be more thorough than that of the most powerful emperor who ever existed. Lev Davidovich was sure that, when Louis XIV declared “L’état, c’est moi,” he was pronouncing an almost liberal formula in comparison with the reality of Stalin’s regime. The totalitarian state he had created went well beyond Caesar’s—and for that reason the general secretary could say, with all honesty, “La societé, c’est moi.” But the world should remember that both Stalin and the society custom built for him were deeply sick beings. The terror of those years had not been just a political instrument but also personal pleasure, an orgy of the senses for the Grave Digger and the dregs of Russian society. No one should find it strange that the terror should have come to include his own family and those closest to him (Why did Nadezhda Alliluyeva commit suicide? Give me a convincing answer that doesn’t have Stalin pointing the gun, he thought). The most terrible thing was the certainty that the terror had reached Lenin himself, whom, Lev Davidovich was convinced, Stalin had poisoned, since he knew that Vladimir Ilyich, if his devastated body and mind allowed it, would have named Lev Davidovich his successor as general secretary.

  As the summer of 1939 went on, Lev Davidovich was certain that the start of the war in Europe was a question of days. The atmosphere in his own surroundings was also heating up, and he agreed with his secretaries and friends that he needed to be more careful about his movements. The animosity of local Stalinists was growing, and that was bound to result in more attempts on his life. Over the last year, the demands that he leave Mexico had turned into a campaign for his head. He knew that if the war started, Stalin would do almost anything to destroy him, since, even in his isolation, he was the only one capable of challenging him and Stalin could not run the risk that Lev Davidovich would return to Soviet territory and organize opposition to the system.

  Natalia continued the work of fortifying the house and decided to reduce the visits of journalists, professors, and sympathizers who requested meetings. The number of men who protected him increased, although they faced the problem that those young men came to Mexico for a few months and, just when they had become familiar with their duties, had to return to their countries. The result of that collective paranoia was that he returned to living practically sequestered and his marginalization became especially painful in those summer days, the most pleasant for walking and fishing. Resolved to find a distraction from his many hours of work, he then had the idea of raising rabbits and hens, and began to ask for books on those subjects, for if he was going to try it, he would do so scientifically.

  What most worried Natalia Sedova was that her husband’s health, so weakened in recent years, was suffering at an altitude that could cause a permanent state of high blood pressure. His digestion was difficult, and only light food, at set hours, saved him from greater ills. Definitively, the life of a pariah lived for so many years was taking its toll, and when he was on the verge of turning sixty, Lev Davidovich himself had to admit that he had turned into an old man, to the point that many people called him simply “the Old Man.”

  When Lev Davidovich wrote about the impending war, he couldn’t help but warn that the USSR would perhaps end up being an easy victim of German tanks and aviation. Stalin, who accused Trotsky of being an opportunist and a traitor when he published this analysis, had weakened the military power of the country to the point that, everyone knew, only a miracle could save them. And that miracle—nobody could say it better than Lev Davidovich—was the Soviet soldier, whose capacity for sacrifice was unrivaled in the world. But the price to be paid would be many lives that could have been saved. What did Stalin need to withstand a German attack? Above all, time, he wrote. Time to reinforce the borders and rebuild the leaderless army. And he also needed for Western Europe to resist the fascist onslaught, at least for a while. Because of that, when on August 23, 1939, the news broke, Lev Davidovich was not really surprised, although he felt deep disgust. The radio stations, the world’s newspapers on the left and the right, communist or fascist, big or small, all had the same headline that day: the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had signed a pact of nonaggression, a pact of understanding . . .

  The news that von Ribbentrop and Molotov, as foreign ministers, had reached an agreement, of which, obviously, only a part had been made public, surprised more people in the world than Lev Davidovich would have imagined. A treaty that left Hitler’s hands free to attack the West was incomprehensible for those who willingly and even unwillingly had, despite the terror and the criminal proceedings, continued to defend Stalin as the great leader of the working class. For that reason, the Exile dared to predict that for centuries that date was going to be remembered as one of the most extraordinary betrayals of man’s fate and gullibility.

  Lev Davidovich knew that Stalin would soon argue that the defense of the USSR was the priority, and that if the West had given free rein to German expansionism with the Munich Pact, the USSR, too, had the right to avoid a war with Germany. And he would be partially right. But the muddy trail of humiliation could never be erased, he wrote; seeing that the USSR’s radical antifascism was not what it seemed would cause massive disappointment, and the faith of millions of believers, who had resisted all tests, might be lost forever. But the demoralized workers and militants would perhaps soon have the opportunity to turn shame into an impulse to achieve the postponed revolution. Days of pain were coming, he concluded, but perhaps also times of glory for a new generation of Bolsheviks armed with the bitter experience of life, both inside and outside the Soviet Union.

  Less than ten days later, when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, Lev Davidovich noted that the Germans seemed to penetrate Polish territory with too much caution, as if their tanks were advancing with the brakes on. But when, two weeks later, Soviet troops entered Poland, the Exile understood the conditions of the pact. The two dictators, as he had assumed, were spreading their hands over the once again sacrificed Poland. The curious thing was that the Western powers that had declared war on the Nazis accepted, without great protest, that Stalin would do the same as Hitler. The hypocrisy of the policy, he thought, would have disastrous consequences.

  At that moment, Lev Davidovich was a man with his soul divided in anguish. Somed
ay, he told himself, they would recognize that it was the mistakes of revolutionaries, more than the pressures of imperialism, that had delayed the great changes of human society; but even with that conviction and after so much infamy, political lows, and crimes of all kinds, he continued to believe that defense of the USSR against fascism and imperialism constituted the great duty of the workers of the world. Because Stalin was not the USSR, nor the representative of the true Soviet dream.

  It shamed him, because of what it meant for the socialist ideal, to know that after invading Poland, Stalin was imposing the Soviet order there with the same fury with which Hitler exported fascist ideology. That crude imposition of the Soviet model on Poland and the Western Ukraine would bring about the demoralization of European workers once they saw the political opportunism of Stalinism. The inhabitants of those conquered regions, historic victims of the Russian and German empires, surely already asked themselves what differences existed between one invader and another, and Lev Davidovich would not be surprised if, very soon, many of those people came to consider the Nazis their liberators from Stalinist tyranny.

  Even so, Lev Davidovich felt the contradiction like an overwhelming weight, not knowing if it was possible to oppose Stalinism while still defending the USSR. It anguished him not to be able to discern whether all of that bureaucracy was already a new class, incubated by the revolution, or just the excrescence that he had always thought it was. He needed to convince himself that it was still possible to show the difference between fascism and Stalinism and try to show all honest men, dumbfounded by the low blows of that Thermidorean bureaucracy, that the USSR still contained the essence of the revolution and that essence was what had to be defended and preserved. But if, as some said, won over by the evidence, the working class had shown with the Russian experience its inability to govern itself, then one would have to admit that the Marxist concept of society and socialism was mistaken. Was Marxism just one more ideology, a form of false consciousness that led its supporters and the oppressed classes to believe they were fighting for their own ends when in reality they were benefiting the interests of a new governing class? . . . Just thinking of it caused him intense pain. The victory of Stalin and his regime would be raised like the triumph of reality over philosophical illusion and as an inevitable act of historical stagnation. Many, himself included, would see themselves forced to recognize that Stalinism did not have its roots in Russia’s backwardness nor in the hostile imperialist atmosphere, as had been said, but rather in the proletariat’s inability to become the governing class. He would also have to admit that the USSR had been no more than the precursor of a new system of exploitation and that its political structure had to breed, inevitably, a new dictatorship, albeit adorned with a different thetoric . . .