As they walked without a specific destination, smoking some Cuban cigars that Caridad had sent from Paris (Ramón had to wrap them in damp cloth to bring back something of their Caribbean softness), Ramón told his former mentor that a few months after his arrival in Moscow, taken by his brother Luis, he had begun to visit the Casa de España. He remembered perfectly his disappointing first incursion in that unreal territory, built with calculated doses of memory and unmemory, where the shipwrecked of the lost war swam, encouraged by the vain illusion of reproducing, in the middle of that strange country of the future, a piece of their homeland of the past. Although a good number of the refugees who remained in the USSR were members of the Spanish Communist Party, selected, welcomed, and maintained by their Soviet brothers, Ramón had also found a notable number of the so-called children of the war (renamed Soviet Hispanics) who left the peninsula when they were less than ten years old and came to the Casa de España in search of the best espresso to be had in Moscow and of a fractured cultural identity, to which they obstinately clung.
Luis had warned him that for many years the boss of that displaced tribe was Dolores Ibárruri, already known around the world as La Pasionaria. The woman was so addicted to power and command in the Stalinist sense that the simple possibility of differing with her opinions was ruled out, at least between the walls of the building and her party, of which she had been president since handing over the—shortened—reins of the general secretaryship in 1960 to Santiago Carrillo. As he listened to his brother, Ramón could not help but remember the night he went with Caridad to La Pedrera and heard the insults André Marty heaped upon La Pasionaria, her head lowered and obedient. But Ramón feared in particular the way in which his former comrades would receive him, and the fact that he could hang on his jacket the two most coveted orders of the USSR would surely not be enough to overcome the suspicions that his personal history would cause in many of them.
“The majority of them are hypocrites,” Ramón said, now using Spanish. “They congratulated me on returning, on my medals, and gave me my membership card as a militant in the Spanish Communist Party, but deep in their eyes I discovered two feelings that the bastards couldn’t hide: fear and disdain. For them I was the living symbol of their great mistake, when they swung like weather vanes at the orders from Moscow and Stalin’s policies and many of them became—we became—hangmen; but I was also the most pathetic proof of that useless obedience . . . Some have never said a word to me. Others have become my friends . . . I think. What really bothers me the most is that they consider themselves the ‘pure ones’ and I am the ‘dirty one,’ the man of the sewer, when the truth is that more than one of them has shit all the way up to his eyeballs.”
“And even further up,” the former Soviet adviser confirmed.
They turned left in front of the statue of Gogol, as if they had agreed without any need for words.
“Did La Pasionaria recognize you?” Eitingon wanted to know.
“Yes, she recognized me, but she made it look like she didn’t. She has always acted like I am not worthy of her. Caridad says she’ll throw herself at her neck one of these days . . .”
“I should go with you one day . . . if they would let me. A few of those telling tales there would shit themselves if they saw me. They know that Kotov knows many, many stories. And if you killed Trotsky it is because we sent you to kill him. Some of them snuffed out other people because we sent them—and sometimes without our sending them—because they thought they were more worthy of being our friends if they were ruthless . . .”
The almost physiological urgency to move through known territory, no matter how thorny, had turned Ramón into a regular at the Casa de España. Moscow continued to be for him a city of codes and difficult languages to process, and at least there, amid Stalinist Communists, some Khrushchevists, and simple Republicans weighed down by nostalgia and frustration, they had a perverse language that united them: defeat. Thanks to his brother Luis and to his own capacity for hiding his feelings, Ramón established closer relationships with old comrades from the romantic days of the struggle in Barcelona and with a few new acquaintances who, despite everything, respected him, or at least tolerated him, not as much for what he had done but for the way in which he had withstood twenty years of imprisonment and had proven he was a Spaniard, a Catalan of the kind who cannot be broken, who, moreover, preferred a fragrant stew to a solianka stinking of cabbage.
“Solianka doesn’t stink of cabbage,” Lionia protested. “One day I’ll treat you to one, prepared by me, of course.”
“Something very fucked-up happened to me when I asked to be part of the group in charge of drafting the history of the civil war, the one they started to publish in 1966 to commemorate thirty years from the start of combat.”
“I already read it and what I found didn’t surprise me. Franco’s crimes and those of his people are the most terrible episode of what happened in Spain, what gave the war its tone—everyone knows that. But they’re not the only bad stories.”
“And you know that all too well, correct?” Ramón attacked, and Eitingon shrugged his shoulders. “Of course, the whole rigmarole of writing the book would be directed by La Pasionaria, and she didn’t seem very happy with my being part of the team. But others insisted; I don’t know if it’s because they felt bad for me. In the end—so I would leave them alone, I think—they assigned me the task of interviewing veterans of the war and gathering their remembrances and interpretations of the events they lived through or knew of firsthand. As I already expected, every one I interviewed insisted on telling it the way it best suited them, sometimes without any shame, and only remembered what meshed with their political ideas, with their version of the war. Do you know how many spoke to me of the ‘removals’ of prisoners in Madrid and Valencia, of the executions in Paracuellos?”
“None.”
Ramón looked at his former mentor and had to smile.
“It was as if they hadn’t existed . . . Fear still hounded them and they didn’t dare utter any truth. The worst was seeing how they twisted stories that I myself lived, that you lived when you were Kotov. The executions in Paracuellos were an anarchist thing, according to them. And the taking of the Telefónica is still a necessary action to get rid of the Trotskyists and the fifth columnists that had been found. They justify or don’t speak of Nin’s disappearance; some insist on minimizing the importance of the International Brigades in the defense of Madrid; they don’t remember anything about the plans you prepared for them to get the other groups out of the way . . .”
As a member of the research committee, Ramón made a decision that he only shared with his brother Luis. He went to the Academy of History of the USSR, which was financing (and controlling) the project and its future publication, and began to study the documents placed at the disposal of historians. Since at that time, Roquelia, horrified by the Muscovite winter, had made her first trip to Mexico with Arturo and Laura, Ramón had more than enough time to devote to the research, and he discovered, at first puzzled and then shocked, that the documentation available to him was not only partial—overwhelmingly favorable to the Soviet and Comintern’s collaboration with the Republic—but also on occasion manipulated and differing from the experience he had lived through.
“What were you expecting, kid? The true history of the conquest of New Spain?” Leonid sucked on his cigar and found it had gone out. “Haven’t Franco’s men done the same thing, but less gracefully and more shamelessly? . . . Here all Khrushchev’s thaw did was move around a little bit of leftover snow. Neither the Spanish Communists nor the Soviet government were in a position to get to the bottom of things, nor did they want to, because, even when it’s frozen, that dark thing hiding underneath is all shit. It’s like the petrified mammoth shit they found a little while ago in Siberia, thousand-year-old shit, but shit nonetheless.”
Long before Eitingon put it into paleontological terms, Ramón had understood that the order had been given that the
shit, no matter how old, could not and should not come to the surface. He knew it the morning he arrived at the Academy of History and the kind archivist who had helped him was not at her post. She was out sick, the substitute commented to him, and then took his slip and returned five minutes later with the information that the files requested by Comrade Pavlovich López had been transferred to a closed section and could only be accessed by those with an authorization from the Kremlin office in charge of the History and Social Research Institutes. Ramón was not even surprised that when the first volumes of War and Revolution in Spain, 1936–1939 were published, bearing the logo of the Progreso publishing house, his new name did not appear among the members of the research committee, presided over by Dolores Ibárruri and made up of her most loyal squires.
“How did you feel?” Eitingon wanted to know.
“Frustrated, but what the hell, I’m already used to it.”
“Yes . . . Now, just remember that rewriting history and putting it wherever is most convenient to those in power was not something Stalin invented, although he used it, in his rough and contemptuous way, to the utmost. And talking about ‘revolution’ in Spain, when that was the first thing that was impeded, and without going into the Republican alliance’s cruelties . . . well, that’s really making a bitch of history. That’s why it’s better to have a muzzle on historical controversy . . .”
Eitingon made an effort and managed to light his cigar again. Ramón looked at his: it was still burning evenly and happily.
“Things have been going on at the Casa de España lately.”
Although many refugees had managed to return to Spain starting in 1956, the ones who still remained fought to gain power. La Pasionaria, who had the loyal Juan Modesto as her deputy, felt that in recent years her absolute preeminence had come under question: Enrique Líster, who carried the record of his legendary participation in the civil war, the Great Patriotic War and in the Yugoslav guerrillas behind him, and Santiago Carrillo were becoming more notably opposed to the famous Stalinist militant’s power. “It’s the same song over and over,” Luis had said to him when the break was becoming visible. “The day we stop fighting amongst ourselves, we’ll have ceased to be Spaniards.”
“It’s not that you are or are not Spaniards, kid, it’s that you’re politicians,” Lionia said, this time in Spanish. “Franco’s end is on the horizon, and the time for the harvest is near. You have to be ready in case there’s a new division of power. You have to improve your image, keep up with the times!”
They both knew that the waters of the Casa de España, before whose walls they stood at that moment, had become very murky in recent months. Due to the Soviet intervention in Prague, some of the leaders of the Spanish Communist Party had dared to express doubts regarding the pertinence of the invasion, which caused a schism in the party’s leadership. To Eitingon, that attitude responded to the need to distance itself from the darker side of Soviet influence and put on a more seemingly democratic face; to Ramón, it was just a propitious although dangerous opportunity to gain some power within the colony, but above all, in a future Spain. The most daring refugees, incited by Santiago Carrillo and Ignacio Gallegos, had even decided to dig around in the Casa’s archives and in the personal records of each one of the Spaniards settled in the USSR. That proposal had been like bringing a flame to dynamite. If certain documents zealously guarded on the second level of the Zhdanov Street building were circulated, many of the plots and cruel maneuvers would come to light in which many of the refugees, turned into informants and betrayers of many others, were involved. And so comrades of so many years moved this time by the fear of being discovered, again divided into bands to launch a war that went from words to blows and the breaking of chairs. From the lower level of the former bank building, Ramón showed Lionia the third-floor window from which one of his compatriots was thrown.
“They say he fell there, in the middle of the street. Everyone thought he had been killed, because he wasn’t moving, but suddenly he stood up, spit, scratched his head, and went back upstairs to continue handing out blows.”
“And then they say we’re savages.” Eitingon smiled as they resumed their walk. They made a stop at the Sardinka beer hall, where Spanish refugees tended to satiate their alcoholic thirst, because of the wise prohibition of serving any of that flammable substance within the confines of the Casa.
The war of blows between the Spanish Communists ended with the arrival of the militia, who emptied the place, Ramón went on. At the same time, the reasons for its foreseeable continuation disappeared that same night, when a KGB unit took away the files full of the fratricidal revelations for safekeeping.
An hour later, when they came out at Dzerzhinsky Square, Ramón looked at the statue of the founder of the Cheka out of the corner of his eye and at the most feared building in the Soviet Union, behind the bronze man.
“Did I tell you I was also down there?” Leonid said, again in French, pointing at the Lubyanka’s basement with his nose. “I don’t know how long, but it was the worst time of my life . . . Yob tvoyu mat!” he exclaimed with an anger from deep inside, and Ramón didn’t know if he was cursing the building or the bronze idol.
“Ever since I got to Moscow, it has always seemed odd to me that that statue survived the reforms.”
“They had enough work with the statues and busts of Stalin. There were millions throughout the country. In Georgia, where Stalin was bloodier, since it was where they knew him best, there were mobs when they tried to take down the largest ones. The people were already so used to living under Stalin, to playing by his rules, that they were afraid that somebody could think they had approved of the demolition of those statues! Do you realize what fear can do when it turns into a way of life? To fill the millions of holes left by the removed statues of Stalin, they had to produce hundreds of statues and busts of Lenin.”
They crossed the square, and when they got to Kirov Street, Eitingon entered a liquor store and came out with two bottles of vodka. On Petrovsky Boulevard, they looked for an empty bench. Before sitting down, Leonid slapped his limping leg three times while he called it suka and took his first drink. He put two fingers to the base of his neck, asking for company, but Ramón rejected the invitation. The sun was starting to set and the afternoon was becoming cool. When he saw Eitingon lounging comfortably, he wondered if a drink wouldn’t do him some good, although he preferred to wait.
“What happened with the Casa de España files and the power disputes among the Spaniards reminded me of something that you surely don’t know,” Eitingon said, and had a second drink. “When Stalin died, a lot of things happened in very little time. Beria, Khrushchev, Bulganin, and Malenkov went right into action and practically the first thing they did was send a special group from the Ministry of the Interior to gather all of Stalin’s belongings and files that were in the Kuntsevo dacha and in his offices at the Kremlin. Svetlana, Stalin’s daughter, had the pass taken away from her with which she could enter her father’s offices, and until last year, when she finally managed to flee from the Soviet Union, she always said that Khrushchev and Beria had stolen Stalin’s treasures.”
“What treasures was she talking about?”
“There were no treasures. What need for money or jewels does a man have who is the lord and master of an enormous country and all it contains? And when I say everything, it’s everything: the mountains, the lakes, the snow, the airplanes, the petroleum, even its people—the life of its people . . . It’s true that there were many silver objects, especially busts and plaques he had been given, but all of those were sent to a foundation. The furniture, the china, the rugs, and those things were distributed to different places. It was decided that the History Institute’s Section for the Family conserve his marshal’s uniform and some samples of the gifts workers gave him every day. But the majority of his clothing wasn’t worth anything, some was fairly worn-out, and what didn’t get thrown out was donated to centers for handicapped veterans
.”
“So there was no money?”
“There was. Those in charge of the operation were overwhelmed by the amount of envelopes with bills that were everywhere. Stalin earned a salary for each one of his ten posts, but as he didn’t have to buy anything, not even to give gifts or host parties . . . But that money didn’t make anyone rich, and what my companions were looking for were documents. Those seeking power, without telling each other, were afraid that a testament like Lenin’s would appear, which would complicate things for some of them and benefit others. That was why they decided, like knights, to take all of Stalin’s papers out and burn them so that none of them would have the advantage or disadvantage of having been selected or rejected by Stalin.”
“And how do you know all of this?”
Leonid took another swig and Ramón held out his hand to take the bottle. He needed a drink.
“When I recovered a little, after getting out of jail, I began to work with Beria. They made me part of that team and I was one of the ones who, after the burning of the papers, found, in a drawer of a table in the office of the Kremlin, some letters that had been hidden under newspaper. There were five—just five letters—and it appears that Stalin read them from time to time. One was the one dictated by Lenin on March 5, 1923—I can’t forget the date—in which he demanded an apology from Stalin for having insulted his wife, Krupskaya. Another one was from Bukharin, written shortly before he was executed, in which he told Stalin how much he loved him . . . And there was one, very short, written by Marshal Tito, dated 1950, I believe, but I remember perfectly well what it said: ‘Stalin, stop sending assassins to liquidate me. We’ve already caught five. If you don’t stop, I personally will send a man to Moscow and there will be no need to send another’ . . .”
“So did anyone ever find out that Stalin’s papers had disappeared?”
“Nothing has ever been said officially, of course. But besides the personal documents, there were what were called ‘special files,’ a supersecret record where laminated documents were kept and which could only be viewed if Stalin himself authorized it. These were kept and I imagine that within them there must be some reports that are too uncomfortable, because nobody yet knows where they are, if they still exist. Hopefully, one day they will be able to be read, because on that day we’re going to discover that the earth is not round . . .”
The Man Who Loved Dogs Page 67