Leonardo Padura - The Man Who Loved Dogs

One of the conversations they had with the Pazes would take on a strange dimension a few months later when Stalin broke the sacred blood barrier. It had taken place on an afternoon in early May, when Natalia, Liova, Maurice, Magdeleine, and Lev Davidovich, with Maya the dog running ahead, had gone down to the coast to enjoy the afternoon breeze with a carafe of Greek red wine while the Turkish policemen prepared a seafood-based dinner in the Ottoman fashion, seasoned with spices. Due to his excessive exertions in setting up the villa, Lev Davidovich was suffering from a lumbago attack that barely allowed him to make headway on the many writings he was engaged in. After the first glasses of wine, the Pazes had given free rein to their enthusiasm over the possibility of being able to fight alongside the mythical Lev Trotsky. It pleased them that the Exile who was watching the sunset with them in Prinkipo in 1929 was not the same man to whom they had bid goodbye in Paris in 1916, when he moved with an exalted voice but without a specific role in the clandestine movement on whose success very few were betting. Now they said that he was the Exile, known around the world as Lenin’s companion, the leader of the October uprising, the victorious commissar of war and creator of the Red Army, the cheerleader of the Third International, which he had founded with Vladimir Ilyich. Even Maurice, perhaps convinced that his host was in need of encouragement, reminded him that he had been at a height from which it was impossible to descend, from which he was not allowed to withdraw, and he spent his time exalting his historical responsibility, since no Marxist, with perhaps the exception of Lenin, had ever had so much moral authority, as a theorist and as a fighter. And he had concluded: “Your rival is History, not that upstart Stalin who will fall at any moment under the weight of his own ambitions. .”

The Exile tried to downplay that historic greatness, reminding his interlocutor that, besides his back pain, he had nothing else behind him. The hostility surrounding him was infinite and powerful and his main conflict was with a revolution that he had led to triumph and with a state that he had helped to found: that reality was tying one of his two hands.

Despite praises like these and the proofs of affection that arrived with his correspondence every day, Lev Davidovich knew that those followers did not have the scars that can only be left by real combat. Because of that, he silently entrusted the future of his battle to the deportations of oppositionists that Stalin would undoubtedly order; the tempering of those men forged by repression, torture, and confinement, with their convictions unaltered, would strengthen the movement.

The arrival of summer would break the island’s peaceful charm with the noisy and vulgar arrival of businessmen and government employees from Istanbul with the economic means to withdraw to Prinkipo, but not enough to travel to Paris and London. Confined to his house, Lev Davidovich had managed to make a final push in the work in which he reviewed his life, despite not having been able to escape the disappointment he felt as he received news of the orgy of surrenders through which the opposition groups were dragged by their most important leaders. From the recently founded Bulletin Oppozitsii , which they started to edit in Paris, and through the messages filtered to the interior of the Soviet Union in the most incredible ways, he focused on warning his comrades that Stalin would try to make them give up their positions with political promises that he would never keep (Lenin used to say that his specialty was breaking promises) and announcements of rectifications that he would not execute, since they implied the acceptance of compromises that the man from the mountains would never recognize. To those who surrendered, he wrote that Stalin would only admit them into Moscow when they showed up on their knees, willing to recognize that Stalin was always right, and never them, he wrote.

That stream of surrenders convinced Lev Davidovich that his war seemed to be lost, at least within the Soviet Union. Stalin’s sudden about-face, after appropriating the opposition’s economic program and forcing his former rivals to declare themselves supporters of the strategy that was now presented as Stalinist, sealed the political failure that wrote its most regrettable chapter with the surrender of men who, with hands and feet tied, had started to ask themselves why they needed to keep enduring deportations and submitting their family members to the cruelest pressures in order to defend some ideals that, at the end of the day, had already been imposed. The most painful proof of the fall of the opposition had been the announcement that brilliant men like Radek, Smilga, and Preobrazhensky had demonstrated their willingness to reconcile themselves with Stalin’s line, declaring that there was nothing reprehensible about it, once the great objectives for which they had fought had been achieved. Especially despicable to him was the attitude of Radek, who had declared himself an enemy of Trotsky’s ever since the latter had published articles in the imperialist press. The saddest thing was knowing that, with this surrender, those revolutionaries were falling into the category of the semi-forgiven. Presided over by Zinoviev, these men would live in fear of saying a single word out loud, of having an opinion, and would be forced to slither along, turning their heads to watch their shadows.

The most vivid news about the state of the opposition would come to Büyükada through an unexpected channel. It happened at the beginning of August and its messenger was that ghost from the past called Yakov Blumkin.

Blumkin had sent him a message from Istanbul, begging for a meeting. According to his note, the young man was on his way back from India, where he had carried out a counterintelligence mission, and he wished to see him to reiterate his respect and support. Natalia Sedova, when she found out about Blumkin’s desires, had asked her husband not to see him: a meeting with the former terrorist, now a high-ranking GPU officer, could only bring about disgrace. Liova had also expressed his doubts about the usefulness of that meeting, although he’d offered to serve as a mediator in order to keep Blumkin far from the island. But Lev Davidovich thought that they should hear what that man wanted, linked as he was to Lev Davidovich ever since the latter exercised the most dramatic of all his powers: that of letting Blumkin live or sending him to his death.

Twelve years before, when the newly made commissar of war Lev Trotsky had called for him in his office, Blumkin was a callow youth — like a character out of Dostoyevsky — who faced charges that the military tribune would penalize with a death sentence. That young man had been one of two militants in the social-revolutionary party that had tried to kill the German ambassador in Moscow with the intention of discrediting the disputed peace with Germany that the Bolsheviks had signed in Brest-Litovsk at the beginning of 1918. The evening before the trial, after reading some poems written by the young man, Lev Davidovich had asked to meet with him. That night they spoke for hours about Russian and French poetry (they shared an admiration for Baudelaire) and about the irrationality of terrorist methods (if a bomb could solve everything, what was the good of parties, of class struggle?), at the end of which Blumkin had written a letter in which he regretted his action and promised, if he was forgiven, to serve the revolution on any front to which he was assigned. The influence of the powerful commissar was decisive enough to pardon his life, while the German government was informed by official means that the terrorist had been executed. That day Yakov Blumkin’s second life had begun, thanks to Lev Trotsky.