The Man Who Loved Dogs (31 page)

That is why he found it so strange when two Norwegian police officers who arrived at Vexhall that afternoon did not display the kind cordiality with which the country’s authorities had always treated him. Stiff in their roles, they informed him that they were carrying out Minister Trygve Lie’s orders and had only come to hand over a document and return to Oslo with it signed. The younger one, after searching in his folder, extended a sealed envelope. Knudsen and Natalia watched expectantly as he opened it, unfolded the sheet, and, after adjusting his glasses, read it. As he read on, the sheet began to shake slightly. Then Lev Davidovich returned it to the envelope, held it out to the officer who had given it to him, and asked him to tell the minister he could not sign that document and that asking him to do so seemed an undignified gesture on the part of Trygve Lie.

The younger officer looked at his colleague without daring to take the envelope. The policemen were overcome by uncertainty, frozen before an attitude for which they were surely unprepared. At that moment he let the envelope fall, and it came to rest alongside the boot of the older of the two officers, who at last reacted: if Lev Davidovich didn’t sign the document, he could be arrested and handed over to the authorities until he was deported, since they had evidence that he had violated the conditions of his residency permit by involving himself in the political matters of other countries.

Then came the explosion. Wagging his finger in a clear sign of warning, Lev Davidovich yelled at the officers to remind the minister that he had promised not to intervene in Norwegian matters but that he wouldn’t give up for anything in the world a right that was the reason for him being a political exile: to say whatever he thought convenient about what was happening in his home country. As such, he would not sign that
document and, if the minister wanted to silence him, he would have to sew Lev Davidovich’s mouth shut or do something to him that would surely bother Stalin greatly: kill him.

A few days later, Lev Davidovich would be forced to recognize that Stalin, political opportunist that he was, had treacherously chosen the most propitious moment to organize the judicial farce in Moscow and try to make him the scapegoat for every conceivable perversity. Hitler’s recent entry into the Rhineland had announced to Europe that the expansionist intentions of German fascism were not just a hysterical speech. Meanwhile, the uprising of part of the Spanish army against the Republic, and the start of a war on whose battlefields Italian troops and German planes and ships were advancing, had placed the governments of the democracies (terrified of the possibility of remaining alone in the face of the fascist enemy) in a situation of almost absolute dependency on Moscow’s decisions. In that situation, when the fates of so many countries were being decided, no one was going to dare to defend some pitiful souls being tried in Moscow and an exile who had been accused, of all things, of being a fascist agent in the pay of Rudolf Hess. He realized that the pressure on the Norwegian government was surely intense and he warned Natalia that they should prepare for greater aggression.

But Lev Davidovich had decided that, while possible, he would exploit his only advantage: the Oslo government couldn’t deport him, since no one would take him, and they didn’t even have the option of handing him over to the Soviets, who didn’t want him, despite his own request to be tried. Stalin wasn’t interested in putting him on trial, even less so when one considered that his repatriation would have to go before a Norwegian court, where he would have the opportunity to refute the accusations made against him and against those who had already been sentenced and executed in Moscow.

Lev Davidovich was certain that a crisis had been unleashed when the court in Oslo summoned him to make a declaration about the raid on Knudsen’s house. Everything became clear when the judge who had summoned him revealed the rules of the game, warning him that, since it was a declaration and not an interrogation, neither the presence of Puntervold, his Norwegian lawyer, or of Natalia, or even Knudsen as the owner of the house, was allowed. Alone, in front of the judge and the court’s secretaries, he had to respond to questions about the nature of the documents that had been removed, in which, he assured, he had not meddled in
Norway’s internal affairs or that of any other country besides his own. Then the judge lifted some papers and he understood the trap that had been set for him: this essay proved the contrary, according to the judge, since, with regard to the Popular Front, Lev Davidovich had made a call for revolution in France.

In the article, written after the victory of the alliance of the French left, Lev Davidovich had commented that Léon Blum, at the head of the new government, was just a minimum guarantee that the Stalinist influence would find pitfalls in establishing itself in the country, and he warned that if France managed to radicalize its politics, it could very well turn into the epicenter of the European revolution that he had been waiting for since 1905, the revolution capable of stopping fascism in its tracks and cutting off Stalinism. Nonetheless, according to the judge, that document was proof of his disloyal conduct toward the government that had so generously taken him in, and constituted a violation of the conditions of his asylum. Lev Davidovich asked if they were investigating his political opinions or the burglary of the house where he was staying, carried out by a group of pro-fascists. As if he hadn’t heard him, the judge turned to the court secretary and confirmed that Mr. Trotsky had admitted to being the author of the document that proved his interference in the politics of other countries.

When he was walking toward the door, the police who were guarding him informed him that they had to take him to the nearby Ministry of Justice. Once inside the adjacent building, he was greeted by two functionaries who were so imbued with their character that they seemed to have been plucked from a Chekhov story. After informing him that Minister Lie apologized for not being present, they handed him a declaration that the minister asked him to sign as a requirement for extending his residency permit in the country. As he read the declaration, Lev Davidovich thought his temples would explode if he didn’t give free rein to his anger.

“I, Lev Trotsky,” he had read, “declare that my wife, my secretaries, and I will not carry out, while we find ourselves in Norway, any political activity directed against any state friendly to Norway. I declare that I will reside in the place the government chooses or approves, and that we will not interfere in any way in political matters, that my activities as a writer will be circumscribed to historical and biographical works and memoirs, and that my writings of a theoretical nature will not be directed against the government of any foreign country. I agree to have all correspondence,
telegrams, and telephone calls sent or received by me submitted to censorship . . .”

The Exile stood up as he crumpled the declaration while wondering how soon they would take him to the prison where they would confine him in order to keep him silenced.

Lev Davidovich would prove that the terrified Norwegians didn’t need to imprison him to submit him to a silence that, whichever way you looked at it, Stalin demanded, determined to cover up any arguments that could draw attention to the lies and contradictions of the judicial farce that had recently taken place in Moscow. Upon his return to Vexhall, from where his secretaries had been removed under deportation orders, he and Natalia were confined to a room given to them by Knudsen, in front of which a pair of guards were placed to prevent all communication—even with the owner of the house. As if it were a child’s game, only more dramatic and macabre, Lev Davidovich slid a formal protest under the door in which he accused the minister of violating the Norwegian constitution with a confinement that was not ordered by any court. The following morning, a policeman handed him a communiqué from Trygve Lie informing him that King Haakon had signed an order that allowed him extraconstitutional extensions in the case of the exiles Lev Davidovich Trotsky and Natalia Ivanovna Sedova. Without a doubt, Lie was determined to allow the silence to cast a shadow of doubt over Lev Davidovich’s innocence.

Convinced that even more turbulent times were coming, Lev Davidovich tasked his secretary Erwin Wolf with taking the latest draft of
The Revolution Betrayed
to Liova. Although he had considered the book finished in early summer, the events in Moscow led him to delay sending it to the editors, since he was hoping to add his reflections on the trial against Zinoviev, Kamenev, and their partners in fate. Nonetheless, in view of the uncertainty in his own life, he decided to add just a small preface: the book would be a sort of manifesto in which Lev Davidovich adapted his thinking to the need for a political revolution in the Soviet Union, an energetic social change that would allow the overthrow of the system imposed by Stalinism. He did not fail to notice the strange irony surrounding a political proposal that was never conceived of by the most feverish Marxist minds, for whom it would have been impossible to imagine that, once the socialist dream was achieved, it would be necessary to call upon the proletariat to rebel against their own state. The great lesson
to be drawn from the book was that, in the same way that the bourgeoisie had created various forms of government, the workers’ state seemed to create its own and Stalinism was proving to be the reactionary and dictatorial form of the socialist model.

With the hope that it would still be possible to save the revolution, Lev Davidovich had tried to separate Marxism from the Stalinist distortion, which he qualified as a government by a bureaucratic minority that, by force, coercion, fear, and the suppression of any hint of democracy, protected its interests against the majority dissatisfaction within the country and against all the revolutionary outbreaks of class struggles in the world. And he ended up asking himself: If the social dream and economic utopia supporting it had become corrupt to the core, what remained of the greatest experiment that man had ever dreamed of? And he answered himself: nothing. Or there would remain, for the future, the imprint of an egotism that had used and deceived the world’s working class; the memory would persist of the fiercest and most contemptuous dictatorship that human delirium could conceive. The Soviet Union would bequeath to the future its failure and the fear of many generations in search of the dream of equality that, in real life, had turned into the majority’s nightmare.

The premonition that had pushed him to order Wolf to send on
The Revolution Betrayed
took shape on September 2. That day, he and Natalia felt like they were opening the pages of the darkest chapter of the storm that had become their lives and were certain that the Stalinist machine would not stop until it asphyxiated them. The transfer order drily informed them that their destination would be a place selected by the minister of justice and they were allowed to take only their personal effects. The policemen, by contrast, had the deference to allow them to say goodbye to the numerous members of the Knudsen family. The air in the house had acquired the unhealthy heaviness of a funeral, and Konrad’s young children cried to see them leave like pariahs after having shared a year with them during which the family had acquired a new member (Erwin Wolf and Hjordis, one of Knudsen’s daughters, had married), a preference for coffee, and, as that moment proved, the notion that truth does not always prevail in the world.

The destination chosen for them was a hamlet called Sundby, in an almost uninhabited fjord near Hurum, twenty miles to the south of Oslo.
The ministry had rented a two-story house that the couple would share with a score of policemen devoted to smoking and playing cards, and where the restrictions would end up being worse than those of a prison regime. They were not authorized to leave, and the only person allowed to visit them was Puntervold the lawyer, whose papers were inspected as he entered and again as he left. In addition, they only received newspapers and correspondence after they had been crudely censored with scissors and black ink by a government employee who, like Jonas Lie, the head of the guards watching them, proudly proclaimed his militancy in Quisling’s National Socialist Party.

The captives barely had an idea of what was happening outside that remote fjord until Knudsen managed to have their radio, which had been confiscated when they were in Oslo, returned to them. Thus Lev Davidovich was able to get a measure of Stalin’s success with his Norwegian collaborators when he heard prosecutor Vishinsky’s declorations that if Trotsky hadn’t responded to his ministry’s accusations, it was because he had no way to challenge them, and that the silence of the Exile’s friends in the socialist governments of Norway, France, Spain, and Belgium only proved the impossibility of refuting the irrefutable. Lev Davidovich understood that he should make himself heard or he would be lost forever: the most blatant of lies, repeated over and over again without anyone refuting it, would end up becoming the truth. He had already thought: They want to silence me, but they will not succeed.

Using the invisible ink that Knudsen had managed to get to him in a cough syrup bottle, he prepared a letter to Liova in which he ordered him to launch a counterattack, and he accompanied it with a declaration, directed at the press, in which he refuted the accusations against him and accused Stalin of having staged the August trial with the goal of suppressing dissatisfaction in the USSR and eliminating all kinds of opposition by means of a criminal offensive that began with Kirov’s assassination. In addition, he pointed to the nonexistence of lines of communication with any person in Soviet territory, including his younger son Sergei, whom he had not heard from in over nine months. And finally, he expressed to the Norwegian government his willingness to have all of the accusations against him evaluated and asked for an international commission of workers’ organizations to be created to investigate the charges and to try him publicly . . .