The Man Who Loved Dogs (49 page)

An event in Paris, of which Liova informed him, attracted his attention when they returned to the Casa Azul. Ignace Reiss, the nom de guerre of one of the heads of the Soviet secret service in Europe, had approached Lev Sedov to communicate his intention to desert. The young man, with understandable caution, held two meetings with the agent, who told him, among other horrors, that Yezhov and several soldiers designated by Stalin had been the ones who, in agreement with the Germans, fabricated the false accusations used to try the heads of the Red Army. According to Reiss, the purge of soldiers, which was still in progress, was not only necessary for Stalin’s political security but also part of the collaboration sustaining Stalinism and Nazism, under the cover of their respective hates, and had the objective of facilitating the alliance with which they would arrive at the war. The secret services were playing the most active role, for the time being, in that cooperative effort, and what most horrified Reiss was the betrayal that such a machination represented for all the revolutionaries in the world who were enlisting in the antifascist struggle along with the USSR—for the Communists who, despite what happened in Moscow, still obeyed.

As Trotsky read the reports about Reiss, the Exile felt growing disgust at the betrayal of the most sacred principles. And despite the disgraces that Reiss had surely committed due to his profession, he couldn’t help but feel admiration for a man who, he knew well, had placed his neck under the executioner’s axe. His greatest fear, however, was that Reiss’s
break had implicated Liova and the Fourth International, and that when in anger Stalin let loose his henchmen, the Trotskyists were going to once again be his scapegoat.

Lev Davidovich didn’t have to wait much longer to find out the denouement of that story that would end up touching the very center of his life: on September 6, Liova gave him the news that, a few days earlier, Reiss had been killed on a highway close to Lausanne. The police suspected that the committee for the repatriation of Russian citizens, one of the NKVD fronts created in Paris, was responsible. That same day, by a parallel route, he received another letter, sent by his collaborator Rudolf Klement, in which he commented that Reiss had assured him that one of the plans of the Stalinist police was the elimination of the Trotskyists outside the USSR and that Lev Sedov topped the list. Thus, Klement advised the evacuation of the young man, who was already on the edge of a physical and nervous breakdown due to the political and economic tensions under which he was carrying out his work, exacerbated by personal complications ever since his wife, Jeanne, had declared herself a supporter of her ex-husband Raymond Molinier’s political faction. Because of that, following a conversation with Natalia in which they weighed the options for the young man’s future, Lev Davidovich wrote to Liova, asking his opinion regarding Klement’s fears, before proposing any alternative measures to protect his life.

As they waited for Liova’s response, the long-awaited verdict of the Dewey commission finally arrived. As Lev Davidovich had foreseen, Dewey and the rest of the members of the jury had reached the conclusion that the Moscow trials of August 1936 and January 1937 had been fraudulent and, as a result, declared him and his son innocent. Excited, he sent a telegram to Liova, demanding that he get as much publicity for the results of the counterproceeding as he could, and that he gather journalists and reporters to initiate a propaganda offensive. At the same time Lev Davidovich would devote himself to preparing the articles to accompany the text of the sentence in a special edition of the
Bulletin
.

Just a few months later, Lev Davidovich would try to clarify the ways in which his personal life and history became intertwined in those moments until they drove him to his greatest tragedy, because in the middle of the storm of optimism unleashed by the verdict they received Liova’s response. The young man (like his father) considered that for the time being he was irreplaceable in Paris and could not delegate his duties to Klement, who was already tasked with coordinating the Fourth
International, or to Étienne, his most responsible collaborator. It was true, he confessed, that he had financial problems, that he was living in a cold attic, that his relationship with Jeanne had become complicated, and that what had happened in Moscow had affected him more than he originally thought it would, since practically all of the men he had grown up surrounded by and who had been his role models had gone down one by one after admitting to horrible betrayals. Natalia and Lev Davidovich again discussed Liova’s fate, and at that moment it seemed to them unfair to ask him to come to Mexico, almost certainly without his wife, to shut himself away, since, if he didn’t hide, he would just be substituting one danger for another. Lev Davidovich then told his wife that he trusted in Liova’s ability to take care of himself, and that perhaps Stalin would think that killing him would be excessive. “Nothing is excessive for him,” Natalia commented. Despite agreeing with her husband, she would have preferred to have the boy closer to them.

It was around that time that a certain Josep Nadal showed up in Coyoacán. The man said he was Catalan, a POUM militant, and a very close friend of Andreu Nin. In light of the repression unleashed in Spain against his party, Nadal had preferred to get as far away as possible. Since he was asking for an interview with Comrade Trotsky, van Heijenoort held a meeting with him and, upon returning, confessed to Lev Davidovich that he had felt a stinging in his back as he talked to the man. The deaths of Nin and Reiss warned Lev Davidovich and his inner circle of the new Stalinist offensive outside the USSR, and they all knew that any humble Spanish worker, any German refugee, any French intellectual, could be the black angel sent by Moscow. But, motivated by what the Catalan seemed to know about Nin’s disappearance, Lev Davidovich decided to see him on the condition that Jean van Heijenoort be present during the interview.

The Catalan ended up being a loquacious man with sharp reasoning who, despite his excessive love of cigarettes, captivated Lev Davidovich. According to him, there was no doubt: Nin was dead and his murderers had been directed by the men in Moscow who were imposing their rule on the Republican alliance. The comments he had heard pointed at a Soviet adviser named Kotov and the French Communist André Marty, famous for his brutality, as the organizers of the operation charged with kidnapping Nin and eliminating him when he refused to sign confessions of his collaboration with Franco’s supporters.

Nadal, who, due to his proximity to Nin, was familiar with many
political secrets, would confirm to Lev Davidovich several of his suspicions about Moscow’s strategy in Spain. For him, it was clear that Stalin was playing for the domination and eventual sacrifice of the Republic with several cards, and one of them was financial. After getting Negrín, in his days as the minister of finance, to authorize the Spanish treasury to be moved to Soviet territory, an enormous amount of money seemed to have evaporated and now new payments in cash were demanded of the Republican government for military assistance. The weapons received, Nin had told him, were sufficient for the Republic to resist in the short term but insufficient to stand up to the fascists supported by Hitler and Mussolini, and the real reason that they didn’t sell more war matériel to the government was that Stalin wasn’t interested in a Republican army that was well enough equipped to aspire to victory; once they reached that point, they could end up being uncontrollable . . . But since the financial yoke didn’t guarantee control, Stalin had also ordered the political manipulation of the Republic.

The offensive against the POUM’s “Trotskyists,” the anarchists, syndicalist groups, and even the Socialists who did not agree with Moscow’s policies had begun in 1936, but the great repression had started after the events in Barcelona in May. According to Nadal, the results of that operation could already be felt; the Communists now dominated the three sectors that most interested Stalin: domestic security, the army, and propaganda. Meanwhile, the Comintern advisers and the men from the GPU were working out in the open, deciding political positions and directing the repression. The two most visible representatives of the Communist International had been, until a few weeks before, the Frenchman Marty and the Argentinean Vittorio Codovilla, the former in charge of the International Brigades and the latter in control of the Communist Party. The hatefulness of these men was so palpable that Marty was called “the Butcher from Albacete” because of his cruelty with the international volunteers, and Codovilla was such a dictator that the International itself had to replace him with the more discreet Palmiro Togliatti.

Lev Davidovich listened to the POUMist’s statement without asking any questions. Nadal was smoking with old-fashioned relish; the abstinence he had been subject to in Spain still made him anxious. Calling him Comrade Trotsky, he then asked what would remain of the dream of the Soviet society, the dream of justice, democracy, and equality, when it became known that it was the men from Moscow who had ordered the murders of Nin and of other revolutionaries? What would happen when
they found out that the men from the USSR had manipulated the Communists and ordered the political and even physical destruction of those who were opposed while at the same time demanding more money in return for weapons and advisers? What would survive when it was known that they were stopping the proletarian revolution? . . . Lev Davidovich bid farewell to Nadal almost convinced that at least that man would not be the murderer Stalin would send for him. And no, he had told him as he shook his hand: he didn’t know what was going to be left standing of the poor communist dream.

That November, the revolution celebrated its twentieth anniversary and Lev Davidovich turned fifty-eight. Since his birthday nearly coincided with the Day of the Dead, which Mexicans celebrated with a party that aimed to bring the deceased back to life and give the living a peek over the threshold of the great beyond, Diego and Frida filled the Casa Azul with skulls dressed in the strangest ways and built an altar, with candles and food, to remember their deceased. That Mexican proximity to death seemed healthy to Lev Davidovich, because it familiarized them with the only goal all lives shared, the only one from which it was not possible to escape, even for Stalin.

But Lev Davidovich was not in the mood for a celebration. A few days earlier, information had reached him that, following Marshal Tukhachevsky’s fall, Yezhov had been merciless with his family. While two of his brothers, his mother, and the marshal’s wife were executed, one of his daughters, who was thirteen (and whom Lev Davidovich had carried as a newborn), had committed suicide out of pure terror. The family purge didn’t surprise him too much, as it seemed to be a habitual practice. His own sister Olga had been arrested and her oldest son executed for being guilty only of being the wife and son of Kamenev, who led the Soviet council in October 1917; three brothers, a sister, and Stephan, the oldest son of Zinoviev himself, who protected Lenin in the most difficult days of 1917, had also been executed, while another three brothers, four nephews, and who knew how many relatives of that old Bolshevik remained in the so-called gulags that were really death camps. And poor Seriozha: What had happened to his son?

Ever since Yezhov had taken over for Yagoda, the wave of terror unleashed ten years before with forced land collectivization and the struggle
against the peasant landowners had reached levels of insanity that seemed poised to devour a country made prostrate by fear and the practice of denunciation. It was said that in state offices, schools, and factories, one out of every five people was a habitual GPU informant. It was also known that Yezhov boasted openly of his anti-Semitism, of the pleasure he received from participating in interrogations, and that his greatest joy was hearing a detainee, beaten by torture and blackmail, incriminate himself. He and his interrogators warned the victims that, if they didn’t confess, their relatives would be executed or deported to camps where they would not survive. “You will not be able to save yourself and you will condemn them” was the most efficient formula to obtain the confession of crimes that had never been committed. Would his son Sergei have been able to withstand those threats, the physical and mental pain? he used to ask the people with whom he spoke. “Should I still nurse the hope that he has survived in a prison camp in the Arctic, almost without food, with workdays that even the toughest can only withstand for three months before kneeling down like living corpses?”

Lev Davidovich’s most recent sorrow had arrived from an unexpected source. For several weeks, a group of writers and political activists who claimed to be close to the positions of the old revolutionary had devoted themselves, in the fervor of the twenty-year October anniversary, to finding the defects of the Bolshevik system that led to the birth of Stalinism. To that end, they had wanted to examine the bloody repression of the Kronshtadt sailors’ uprising and decided to publicize Trotsky’s responsibility for the event. The most repeated argument had been that this repression could be considered the first act of “Stalinist terror” and compared the military response and the execution of the hostages with Stalin’s purges. Because of his responsibility, they considered the then commissar of war the father of those methods of repression and terror.

It had been so painful for Lev Davidovich to learn that men like Max Eastman, Victor Serge, and Boris Souvarine held those opinions about an act that had been hounding him for years, but above all it bothered him that they took a military mutiny, which occurred during times of civil war, out of context and placed it alongside rigged trials and summary executions of civilians occurring in times of peace. But it hurt him even more that they did not realize that the discussion only served to benefit Stalin just when Lev Davidovich was most insistent on denouncing the terror in which those who opposed the man from the mountains—and
many men and women who hadn’t even dreamed of opposing him—lived and died.