The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura

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