The Man Who Loved Dogs (23 page)

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 congress’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.

Barbizon’s pleasant season reached its end with spring. The strange arrest of Rudolf Klement (he had broken the speed limit on his small moped) by a policeman who, previously uninformed by the Sûreté, only now “discovered” Trotsky’s presence in the area, was able to generate a virulent campaign against the government, led by Communists and fascists, who even managed to make a deportation order against him effective.

Fearful of the reprisals announced by the Stalinists and the fascist Cagoulards, Lev Davidovich and Natalia left Barbizon during the night. In order to disguise himself, Lev Davidovich shaved his mustache and beard and changed his rounded glasses, and they escaped to Paris, where they would consult with Liova about what to do.

They chose to disappear from life in Chamonix, the Alpine village near the Swiss and Italian borders, from where expeditions of climbers to Mont Blanc left. A few weeks later, after they were mysteriously discovered by a journalist, the Trotskys were forced by the region’s prefect to go on the move once again. Looking for a lost place on the map, Lev Davidovich made his way to Domène, a small town near Grenoble, where he even decided to go without bodyguards or secretaries. There, he would be a nobody.

Until the end of his life, Lev Davidovich would recall that on the morning of December 2, 1934, he went out to the patio of the house in Domène, where Natalia had hung the recently washed bedclothes. The smell of soap and the morning’s aroma painted a peaceful picture that had seemed definitively unreal before the weight of the news he had just heard on the radio: Sergei Kirov had been killed in his office at the Smolny Institute in Leningrad. The Exile’s mind envisioned the scenes of commotion that undoubtedly reigned in the Soviet Union and the assumptions about what would happen from that moment on, which, he knew so well, marked a point of no return.

The reports he heard spoke of massive detentions and of preliminary investigations that linked the intellectual authorship of the murder to the Trotskyist opposition (in which they said the assassin, Leonid Nikolayev, had been active) and the plot against the government, which even included the participation of the Latvian city consul, a Trotskyist “agent,” according to them. Because of that, when he told Natalia what had happened, the woman asked the question that would pursue the man until the end of his days: “What about Seriozha?”

An entire week of anguish ended when Seriozha’s letter arrived, brought from Paris by Liova. In contrast to his previous letters, warm and personal, always directed to his mother, this one was permeated by a cry of alarm. The situation in Moscow had become chaotic, the arrests were endless, everyone was living under the fear of being interrogated, and the apolitical scientist considered his situation “more serious than could be imagined.” When she finished reading the letter, Natalia broke out in sobs. What was happening to her son? Why was the situation so serious? Was this simply to be expected because he was a Trotsky? The anxiety to obtain new news of Sergei grew from then on and left his parents’ lives in suspense, awaiting any confirmation of his fate.

The path events would take became clearer with the news that on December 2, the GPU had executed about one hundred people—all of them arrested before Kirov’s murder—while numerous party members had been imprisoned. Nonetheless, much more light was shed by the series of articles that Bukharin wrote for
Izvestia
, in which he spoke of the illegality of any type of dissidence within the country, while at the same time repeating Stalin’s motto that opposition only leads to counterrevolution, and exemplified that degradation with the cases of Zinoviev and Kamenev, labeling them as “degenerate fascists.” Because of that, when on the twenty-third of December he heard that Zinoviev and Kamenev had been arrested, accused of being “moral” accomplices to the attack, he had no doubt that a storm had been unleashed of potentially devastating power. Two times Stalin had expelled those old Bolsheviks, Lenin’s comrades; two times he had readmitted them to the party, on each occasion devouring pieces of their human and political stature until they became hovering shadows with no weight but the history of their names. Now, however, the moment of truth seemed to have arrived for two ghosts from the past that he would brutally crush because Stalin owed his ascent to power precisely to
them. If at Lenin’s death they had not allied themselves with the (as they believed) limited and clumsy Stalin, all of them insistent on closing off Lev Davidovich’s access to power, Soviet history could have perhaps been different.

Lev Davidovich recalled Zinoviev’s murky stare and Kamenev’s elusive one (he had never understood how his younger sister Olga had been able to marry him) when they accused him of wanting to take power. Joyous about the success they hoped to achieve, they assumed the visible leadership of the offensive against Lev Davidovich and his ideas, accusing him of being a man anxious to be the protagonist, capable of throwing himself into propagating revolution throughout Europe while putting the sacred fate of the Soviet Union at risk. That tragic duo would never regret enough that Faustian hour in which they accepted the hand of that man from the mountains who, in his other hand, concealed a dagger.

Seriozha’s silence hung over the Trotskys in the transition to the year 1935, which arrived with the worst of omens. On the evening of December 31, despite the cold coming down from the mountains, the couple went out for a walk through the nearby fields with the intention of removing themselves from the radio that from Moscow was transmitting patriotic marches, versions of triumphant speeches by the leader, and news such as that the murderer Nikolayev, his wife, his mother-in-law, and thirteen other party members had been executed after they had admitted their links to the Trotskyist opposition and their direct or indirect participation in Kirov’s death. At one point in their walk, Natalia asked him to stop and she sat down on the leaves, surprised by her fatigue. He watched her and saw how her suffering was making her age with a betraying swiftness. Nonetheless, she never complained about her fate and, when she heard her husband complaining, pushed him to take up the path again. Lev Davidovich asked her if she felt ill and she responded that it was just a bit of fatigue, then she fell silent again, as if she had imposed a vow of silence on herself that prevented her from speaking of her agonies: her desperation over the lack of news from Seriozha was in a way admitting that that son could also have been devoured by the crushing violence unleashed by a revolution whose first principle was peace.