The Man Who Loved Dogs (58 page)

Finally, on July 25, the
Manifesto for Independent Revolutionary Art
was ready. Since Lev Davidovich felt that his name could taint the document politically, he refrained from signing it. For that reason, he asked Rivera to undersign it along with Breton, and the painter agreed. Lev Davidovich believed this to be a first step toward a Federation of Revolutionary and Independent Artists, so necessary for a world trapped between the two most devastating totalitarian systems that had ever existed.

To send off Breton, Diego and Frida planned a surrealist party. Although the Trotskys were feeling far from festive, they tried not to dampen everyone else’s high spirits. Frida designed for Breton as “high priest of surrealism” a robe adorned with Dalí clocks, Masson fish, and Miró’s colors, and covered it with a Magritte hat. Several of the guests read surrealist poems and Diego toasted with mescal, which was, according to him, the most surrealist liquor.

Lev Davidovich was trying to fill the void left by the extraordinary Breton by concentrating on writing the resolutions and planning the program of the Fourth International, when an alarming letter arrived from the South
of France. It was signed by none other than Klement himself, informing him of his political break with him in aggressive terms, full of invective. The Exile had the terrible feeling that the letter had not been written by his collaborator, unless Klement had written it under duress. One week later his worst fears came true when, on the banks of the Seine, Klement’s dismembered corpse was found.

Under the dark cloud of Klement’s murder, the constituent assembly of the Fourth International was held at the Rosmers’ villa in Périgny. Although the meeting did not come close to being what Lev Davidovich had wished for, what mattered was that the International existed at all. Following the deaths of Liova and Klement, the assembly was presided over by his old collaborator Max Shachtman, but barely forty delegates attended. The Russian contingent, as had previously been decided, was represented by the practically unknown Étienne.

Although Lev Davidovich didn’t dare confess it even to Natalia, he knew that act had been, if anything, a cry in the dark. The times they lived in were not particularly propitious for workers’ and Marxist associations without ties to Stalinism, and to prove it, one needed only to take one look at the world: within the USSR, Trotsky had barely any followers left, all of them imprisoned; Europe was rife with defections and Molinier-style divisions, and Socialists and Communists were squashed en masse in Germany and Italy; in Asia, the workers went from failure to failure. Only in the United States had the Trotskyist movement grown with the Socialist Workers Party, thanks to leaders such as Shachtman, James Cannon, and James Burnham. Meanwhile, the communist parties, routinely bowing before Moscow’s demands, had been silenced, and in the United States they had even bent to Roosevelt’s New Deal policy. “But if there’s a war, there will be a revolutionary shakeup,” he wrote. And there would be the Fourth International to prove that it was something more than the dreams of an obstinate man who refused to give up.

His predictions about the imminence of war seemed more accurate when Hitler, after meeting with Chamberlain, called a conference in Munich on September 22 and told the European powers that either they gave him a piece of Czechoslovakia or there would be war. As could be expected, the “powers” sacrificed Czechoslovakia, and Lev Davidovich could see on the horizon, more clearly than ever, the completion of an agreement between Hitler and Stalin that the two dictators had worked on in secret (and not so much) in recent years. For now, he wrote, they should agree to
the division of Europe. Hitler was devoted to Aryan supremacy and turning the eastern part of the continent into his field slaves; Stalin dreamed of having a greater empire than any of the czars ever had. When these ambitions collided, there would be war.

It was around then that the Exile received a letter, this time posted in New York, that would cause him persistent anxiety. Its author introduced himself as an old American Jew of Polish origin who, without practicing his political faith, had followed his history as a revolutionary. He explained to him that he had learned the news relayed to him through a Ukrainian relative, a former member of the GPU, who a few weeks before had deserted and asked for asylum in Japan and had asked him insistently to get in touch with Trotsky. For his security, that would be the only letter he would send and he hoped it would be useful, he said.

Although that scenario seemed fantastic, the letter had a distinct air of truth. The letter centered on the existence of a Soviet agent, planted in Paris, whose code name was Cupid. That man had come to assume an important role within the French Trotskyist circles, thanks to the infinite naïveté of his followers, who had even permitted him access to secret documents. Meanwhile, Cupid maintained contact with an operative at the Soviet embassy the entire time and collaborated with the Society for the Repatriation of Émigrés, a front for the NKVD that was linked to the deaths of Reiss and Klement. The former agent taking refuge in Japan could not prove it, but due to Cupid’s proximity to the Trotskyist leadership, he thought he must have a more or less direct connection to the death of Lev Sedov. What he did know with certainty was that his mission, besides espionage, would consist of approaching Trotsky and murdering him, if conditions allowed it. He was sure that the Kremlin had already given that order following the March proceedings against Bukharin, Yagoda, and Rakovsky.

The old Jewish man ended his letter with a revealing story. His relative said he had been present at the interrogation to which they subjected Yakov Blumkin following his trip to Prinkipo. The truth about Blumkin’s arrest was that his wife, also a GPU agent, had been the one to inform on him and accuse him, not only of having contacted the Exile, but even of having given Trotsky a certain amount of money realized from the sale of old manuscripts Blumkin had taken to Turkey. The rumor that Karl Radek had been his informant was a maneuver by the Lubyanka to destroy Radek’s prestige, making him seem like a rat. In that whole
proceeding, the former agent stated, Blumkin had acted with integrity and dignity that, in similar circumstances, he had seen in very few men. Despite the brutal torture sessions, Blumkin had refused to sign any type of confession, and the day on which he was executed, he had refused to kneel.

Lev Davidovich read and reread the letter and consulted with his secretaries and with Natalia. They agreed that there were only two ways to interpret the document: either it was a GPU provocation, behind which they could not see a clear objective, or it had been sent by somebody who knew the purposes of the secret police very well and who, by revealing the presence of an agent in Paris, was pointing precisely at Étienne. Although it was difficult for them to admit that Liova could have let in an enemy (Sobolevicius had introduced them, Lev Davidovich recalled), the very idea that Étienne was in reality one of Stalin’s men made him nauseous. Because of that, in his innermost being, Lev Davidovich wanted the letter to be a trick by the NKVD. Nonetheless, behind the smokescreen, he smelled a whiff of genuineness, and what made him believe in the authenticity of the information was the story of Blumkin’s detention, since until the arrival of the letter not even Natalia had known of the money the young man had given him. But what most led him to believe what the letter said was a certainty that, after the last trial, Stalin needed him much less to bolster his accusations and, as a consequence, his time on earth had begun its final countdown.

That is why Lev Davidovich did not find it strange that, following the creation of the Fourth International, the campaign against him organized by the Mexican Communist Party increased in pressure. The worst thing, however, was the fact that the political heat generated by the founding of the new meeting of parties also entered the Casa Azul, something that bothered Rivera very much. The painter was mad because Lev Davidovich had not supported his candidacy to become the secretary of the Mexican section of the Fourth International. But the reason the Exile had withheld his support was that he didn’t think it would be beneficial for Rivera to sacrifice his creativity for a bureaucratic job that, even if it gave him political direction, would have taken up all his time in meetings and in drafting documents. The second reason—which he was less likely to confess—was that he did not think Diego had sufficient political savvy. Nonetheless, Rivera aspired to political preeminence and felt betrayed by his guest.

A few days before his birthday, Lev Davidovich received a report from
his former correspondent V.V., who told him that now his boss at the NKVD, that midget Yezhov, had been removed and, shortly after, jailed under charges of abuse of power and treason. Like Yagoda, Yezhov was going to die, and the real reason was that, as always, Stalin needed a scapegoat in order to make his own innocence shine.

V.V. told him in detail how, under Yezhov’s command, the labor camps had ceased to be Yagoda’s prisons, managed cruelly and with disdain, where people died from hunger and the elements. Under Yezhov, the propaganda about the excellence of the Soviet reeducation of criminals had been forgotten, and the so-called gulags had been turned into camps of systematic extermination, where the prisoners were forced to work until their deaths, or were murdered, in unprecedented numbers. But Yezhov’s terror had not been as irrational and sick as it seemed. For example, in February 1937, Stalin told his peon Georgi Dimitrov, the Comintern general secretary, that the foreign Communists received in Moscow were “playing with the enemy” and immediately tasked Yezhov with solving the problem. One year later, of the 394 members of the executive committee of the International who lived in the USSR, only 170 were still alive, the rest having been executed or sent to death camps. There were Germans, Austrians, Yugoslavs, Italians, Bulgarians, Finns, Balts, British, Frenchmen, and Poles among them, while the proportion of sentenced Jews was once again noteworthy. In that witch hunt, Stalin eliminated more leaders of the German Communist Party from before 1933 than Hitler himself had. Of the sixty-eight leaders who, after obeying his policies and allowing fascism to rise, fled to seek refuge in the homeland of communism, more than forty had been executed or died in the camps; so many Poles were eliminated that their faction in the party had to be dissolved.

As he read and wrote notes on V.V.’s letter, Lev Davidovich felt himself sinking under the weight of the revelations. Could he hold out hope that someday humanity would come to know how many hundreds of thousands of people had been executed by Stalin’s henchmen? How many true Communists had he taken out? He was convinced that both totals were dizzying, to which one had to add the millions of peasants who had died of hunger in the Ukraine and other regions due to the catastrophe of collectivization, and the millions who had perished in the resettlement of entire towns ordered by the former commissar for nationalities. In all certainty, he thought, we’re dealing with the greatest massacre in
peacetime history, and the worst thing is that we will never know the true and terrible proportions of the genocide, since for many of those sentenced there was no criminal proceeding, trial, or sentence. The majority had died in jails, suffocated in trains, frozen in the Siberian camps, or been executed on the banks of rivers and precipices so that the corpses would be dragged under by the waters or covered by avalanches of earth and snow . . .

The feeling of finding himself at the mercy of that terror was accentuated when Victor Serge and other friends from Paris confirmed that Étienne was the agent Cupid, linked to the deaths of Liova, Reiss, and Klement. In addition, they accused the young man of having manipulated Jeanne to cause the break that ended in the trial over Seva’s custody (favoring the Trotskys, fortunately) and of intervening in the investigation of Liova’s death, slowing down the police’s work rather than helping it. But, at the same time, the Rosmers and other comrades had tried in vain to find a gap in Étienne’s behavior, and Lev Davidovich still refused to accept the conclusion of his other friends. During all of those months, Étienne’s efficiency had been prodigious: never before had the
Bulletin
come out so regularly, and in all of his work prior to and following the establishment of the International, his dedication had been exemplary. He knew, nonetheless, that all of that diligence could have been a mask behind which an enemy agent was hiding. He decided that the only solution was to confront Étienne with the accusations against him and demand that he prove his innocence.

Jeanne, in turn, refusing to acknowledge the court’s verdict, had fled from Paris, taking Seva and the part of the archives Liova had kept, reasoning that they belonged to her, since she had been his wife. Marguerite Rosmer, willingly and kindly, had taken it as a question of honor to find the boy and guaranteed Natalia that she would bring him to Mexico. Poor Seva! The woman then exclaimed that with his biological father in a concentration camp; his mother dead by suicide, practically in front of him; his adoptive father dead under strange circumstances that pointed to Stalin; his tutor seemingly gone mad, turning all of his frustrations against him; his grandparents in exile; another grandmother confined to a prison camp; dead aunts and disappeared uncles, siblings, and cousins who were never heard from again . . . was there ever a victim more innocent and at the same time more exemplary of Stalin’s hate than that small Vsevolod Volkov?