The Man Who Loved Dogs (25 page)

A few weeks later, Dan continued, Bukharin received a communiqué from Stalin: he should forget the negotiations, he was no longer interested in Marx’s and Engels’s papers, and he demanded that he appear in Moscow immediately. Dr. Le Savoureux was present when Bukharin received the order and witnessed the anger that came over the face of the prodigal son of Bolshevism, the most promising revolutionary theorist. Le Savoureux had suggested that Bukharin not return: that unforeseen call could only be geared at retaining him and turning him into the victim of repression. Nikolayevsky was of the same opinion, and he reminded Bukharin that if he remained in Europe, he could become a second Trotsky and, together, lead an opposition with greater opportunities to
dethrone Stalin. But Bukharin had begun to prepare for his return: he did it in silence, automatically, like a man who willingly and conscientiously directs himself to the scaffold. Le Savoureux, in a fit of rage, asked him how it was possible for a man, who for years had fought against czarism and accompanied Lenin in the darkest days of the struggle, to return like a lamb, to submit himself to a sure punishment. Then Bukharin gave him the most devastating response: “I’m returning out of fear.” Le Savoureux thought he had not understood correctly—perhaps Bukharin’s French had been affected by his nervousness—but when he thought twice about it, he was certain he had heard perfectly well:
I’m returning out of fear
. Le Savoureux told him that precisely for that reason he should not return—in exile he was more useful to his country and to the revolution—and then Bukharin at last offered his full reasoning: he wasn’t made of the same material as Lev Davidovich and Stalin knew it—and above all, he knew it himself. He would not be able to withstand the pressures Trotsky had experienced for years, and he wasn’t willing to live like a pariah, waiting to be stabbed in the back any day. “I know that sooner or later Stalin is going to finish me off; maybe he’ll kill me, maybe not. But I’m going to return to cling to the possibility that he not think it necessary to kill me. I would rather live with that hope than with the constant fear of knowing I am a condemned man.”

Bukharin returned to Moscow. He took Anna Larina, who was already seven months pregnant. Le Savoureux saw him off at Gare du Nord and later went to meet Nikolayevsky and Dan in the Russian restaurant in the Latin Quarter where they usually ate. The conversation, of course, centered on Bukharin. “Then we realized,” Dan continued, “that Stalin had played with him the whole time, like a cat that pretends to be asleep. But Stalin had bet that he wouldn’t need to run after his captive. He was sure that the poor mouse, overcome with fear, would return to kiss the claws that would tear him apart and devour him when the cat’s appetite required it. It’s impossible to conceive of a sicker and more sadistic attitude. It’s terrible to know that the man capable of doing this is he who leads our country today, the revolution that you and I dreamed of in different ways but with the same passion, and the one dreamed of by Lenin and so many men who Stalin is annihilating and will continue to annihilate in the future. And I’m sure that amid those sacrificed in the Stalinist slaughterhouse will be Bukharin, who was so afraid that he preferred the certainty of death to the risk of every day having to demonstrate the courage to live.”

For weeks, Lev Davidovich fought himself to push the dismal story relayed by Fyodor Dan from his preoccupations. But the image of a pale Bukharin, so different from the exultant and romantic young man who had welcomed him in New York when France banished him in 1916, came back to his mind too frequently; and a few months later, while he was following the trial of a group of old comrades in the newspapers and on the radio, he recalled Bukharin’s sentence over and over again: “I’m returning out of fear.” Then Lev Davidovich understood the exact proportions of the point to which the country he had helped found had turned into a territory dominated by fear. And when he heard the conclusion of that trial, which seemed more like a farce, he had the painful certainty that, with the decision to shoot many of the men who had worked for Bolshevism’s victory, Stalin had poisoned the last ember of the soul of the revolution and one had only to sit and wait for its final agony to arrive, tomorrow, within ten, in twenty years. But the infection was irreversible and fatal.

Ever since he had arrived in Norway the year before, Lev Davidovich frequently commented to Knudsen that, when his health allowed, he would like to go out fishing, and he had told him about his relaxing outings in the Sea of Marmara with his friend Kharalambos. Many things had prevented him from fulfilling that desire until, on August 4, 1936, he got into his host’s car and left in the direction of one of the fjords in the south, where there was a small, desolate island that was said to be ideal for fishing. As they left Vexhall, Knudsen had the impression that a car was following them; he then took a side road and managed to leave their pursuers behind, whom he had identified as men from the fascist party of the so-called Commander Quisling.

When they reached the fjord, a speedboat took them to the islet, where there were numerous wooden cabins. The landscape, wild and peaceful, seemed to Lev Davidovich like the very picture of the world in the first days of creation, and he immediately felt in harmony with its desolate grandeur.

The following morning Lev Davidovich got up early; despite the brisk temperature, he left the cabin and, with a pitcher of coffee in his hand, went to the jetty to see the sun rising between a break in the mountains. Immersed in contemplation, he was startled when Knudsen tapped his
shoulder to tell him that they had sent him a message from Vexhall: a group of men dressed as policemen, but who were obviously members of Commander Quisling’s party, had entered the house to search Lev Davidovich’s room. Knudsen’s children and sons-in-law, upon realizing they were imposters, sounded the alarm and managed to kick them out, but they couldn’t stop them from taking some papers. According to Knudsen, that must have been the reason that they had followed them in the car: they wanted to be sure that they were leaving Vexhall.

When he knew that nothing had happened to Knudsen’s family, Lev Davidovich didn’t lend much importance to the episode: if they were looking for his papers while he was out, it meant that they weren’t too interested in him as a person, at least for the time being.

Three days later, Knudsen, Natalia, and Lev Davidovich saw a small plane land on the island and they understood that something unusual was happening. The head of Hønefoss’s judicial police was in it, sent by the minister of justice, Trygve Lie, to interrogate the Exile about the papers that were removed. He wanted to know if in those documents there was any reference made to Norwegian politics, and when Lev Davidovich assured him that in the fourteen months he had spent residing in the country he had not involved himself in its internal affairs, the policeman bid them a good afternoon and returned to the light aircraft. But they couldn’t help feeling unsettled by the visit. Despite being convinced that no one could accuse him of having violated his commitment, Lev Davidovich thought that the minister’s concern must have had some basis that for the moment eluded him.

The following day, as they had breakfast, Knudsen turned on a small radio to listen to the news from Oslo. As Lev Davidovich had only just started to understand Norwegian, he took no notice of the transmission and went out to the yard. A few minutes later Knudsen approached him with a stony face to tell him that something serious was happening in Moscow: they had just announced that they were taking Zinoviev, Kamenev, and fourteen other men to trial, accused of conspiring against Soviet power, of committing Kirov’s murder, and of conspiring with the Gestapo to kill Stalin. The prosecution was asking for the death penalty.

Lev Davidovich looked at his friend and his indignation made him want to slap him. They returned to the cabin and the Exile began to look for some station on the radio that would prove that the information was just a macabre misunderstanding. An hour later, on a German news
program, the Soviet agency confirmed what Knudsen had heard and added that the prosecution’s case also accused Lev Trotsky of heading and instigating the conspiracy organized by a Trotskyist-Zinovievist cell in favor of a foreign power and claimed they were using Norway as a base for sending terrorists and assassins to the USSR. Lev Davidovich immediately knew that the bloodiest and most devastating wave of terror had been unleashed in Moscow and that its effects would reach even remote Vexhall, where he had spent the most pleasant days of his exile.

During the trials against the sixteen accused, every time he heard the irate voice of prosecutor Viyshinsky, who, in his role as the Soviet people’s indignant conscience, asked the court for the execution of the rabid dogs on trial, Lev Davidovich recalled those heroic times in which he and Lenin had handed over the reins of the machinery of revolutionary repression to Felix Dzerzhinsky to apply a Red Terror without law or limits capable of saving, by fire and sword, a stuttering revolution that could barely hold itself up. The terror of Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka was the dark arm of the revolution—pitiless as it should have been; as it had to be, one would say—and it annihilated hundreds and thousands of the people’s enemies, of the losers in the class struggle who refused to watch the disappearance of their form of life and their culture of injustice. They, the victors, ruthlessly administered their adversaries’ defeat, and the party had to function as an instrument of History and of its inevitable massive, albeit impersonal, revenge. It had been a merciless, surely excessive, but necessary violence: that of the victorious class over the loser, the straight choice of “us or them . . .” But the men that Stalin had decided to kill in that dismal month of August 1936 were Communists, comrades of the struggle, and confronted by that affiliation, the machinery of violence led by Lenin and by Lev Davidovich had always stopped, respectful to the utmost limit. The Stalinist terror, perfected in its previous persecutions (peasants, the religious, the country’s intelligentsia), now seemed on the verge of crossing a sacred boundary.

Lev Davidovich wanted to trust that the farce would stop at the edge of the precipice: Stalin, with some remains of historic sanity, would prevent the catastrophe and show the world his benevolence. Because now it was no longer about the unknown Blumkin, nor was the punishment hidden behind the dark circumstances in which Kirov had died. Many of
the accused had been Lenin’s comrades and, for decades, had resisted the czarist repression and deportations; being who they were, they had even submitted to Stalin and played a not-very-credible role in his shocking script: they had incriminated themselves in the most outrageous crimes against the Soviet state and, above all, had admitted that from Turkey, France, and Norway, Trotsky’s shadowy hands and his lieutenant Lev Sedov had led the conspiracy devised by a “Trotskyist-Zinovievist center,” insistent on assassinating Comrade Stalin and reinstating capitalism on the heroic Soviet soil. An insulting lack of respect for the intelligence emanated from that legal horror show: the shamelessness of the show taking place in Moscow demanded a new kind of ideological faith from the worshippers of the boss of the revolution and a new kind of submission that was capable of overcoming political obedience and turning it into criminal complicity.

Like all dictators, Stalin followed the well-worn tradition of accusing his enemies of collaborating with a foreign power and, in the case of Lev Davidovich, he repeated almost the same arguments that the provisional government of 1917 had hurled against Lenin, with proof fabricated by the secret service, to turn him into an agent of the orders of the German Empire with the mission of handing Russia over to the kaiser. In context, Trotsky’s mission was to serve the Soviet Union to the führer. The Exile would later ask himself how he could have been so deluded to have, at times, felt almost calm, to have even convinced himself that the prosecution would find it impossible to present any proof substantiating those accusations. Moreover, the fact that the first claims referred to fifty men arrested and that only sixteen men were brought to trial clearly indicated that they were the ones who had reached an agreement, and in exchange for their self-recriminations Stalin would spare their lives, once the anti-Trotskyist campaign and the annihilation of the opposition had achieved its propaganda purposes.

But raising those implausible accusations without presenting any proof, the court ratified the death penalties for Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, Evdokimov, Mrachkovsky, Bakayev, and another seven who stood accused, including the soldier Dreitser, who had accompanied Lev Davidovich on his departure from Alma-Ata and who had allowed him (had that been his crime?) to take his papers into exile. In the conclusion to the trial, Lev Davidovich also heard the predictable sentence that he was waiting for: Liova and he were guilty of
personally
preparing and
directing—as agents paid by capitalism first, then by fascism—terrorist acts in the Soviet Union and were subject, in the case of being found in Soviet territory, to immediate arrest and trial by the Supreme Court’s military college.

When he heard those sentences issued, Lev Davidovich felt a great sadness for the fate of the revolution enveloping him, since he knew that in the Great Hall of Columns of the House of the Trade Unions in Moscow, and under the flag that announced
THE PROLETARIAN COURT IS THE PROTECTOR OF THE REVOLUTION
, a final frontier had been crossed. Within and outside of the USSR, perhaps many naïve people and fanatics believed something of what had been said during the trial. But people with a bare minimum of intelligence would have to admit that practically every word pronounced there was false and that a lie had been used to kill thirteen revolutionaries. The trial and execution of those Communists would become, through the centuries, a unique example in the history of organized injustice and a first in the history of credibility. It would signify the murder of true faith: the death rattle of utopia. And the Exile knew all too well that it also laid the groundwork for the charge destined to eliminate the People’s Greatest Enemy, the traitor and terrorist Lev Davidovich Trotsky.