The Man Who Loved Dogs - Leonardo Padura (about the assassination of Lev Davidovitch Trotsky)

This book is a brilliant novelisation of history, and it is also a history book, as it tells the true facts about Trotsky in exile and all that went on in the Soviet Union to allow Stalin complete mastery of the country. It tells how Stalin used Trotsky while it was useful for him to keep him alive, as a political bogey-man, and when Trotsky was no longer useful to Stalin in this way, and he had seen most of his family killed or suffering, how his murder was contrived.

There are three strands to the story; the modern one is set in Cuba, and concerns the writer of the novel and the information he received that enables him to write about the man who killed Trotsky. It explains how his own life in Cuba was constrained and controlled because of the way communism works when it is based on the Stalinist model, and how this affected him as a man and as a writer.

A second chunk of the action takes place around the Spanish Civil War. This great upheaval with popular support for modernisation and equality could have resulted in a new socialist republic. The fact that it did not was in part due to the "help" of Soviet Russia, sending in agents and arms and splitting the revolutionaries into factions as they fought amongst themselves over how far they must be loyal to Stalin (a point originally irrelevant to their situation) and eventually, their terrible loss and fear of reprisals at the hands of Franco. The war affected those who took part in it in a terrible way because they fought for a better day and ended up with nothing but loss, poverty and disappointment.

The third strand is the story of Trotsky in exile. Through this book I learned to think of him as Lev Davidovitch and appreciate his extraordinary bravery through all his sufferings, (and that of his wife who loved him so much) and his state of mind as he must have realised that the actions that Lenin had decided upon and he himself had helped to carry out (such as the repression of the Kronstadt rebellion) had set Stalin on his path. Did he regret what they had done? Stalin was a monster; was there no other way than terror to enforce the socialist society that they had dreamed of ? Lev Davidovitch comes to life with all his strengths and some failings, and I marvelled at his abilities. Here was a man.

I know very little about life in Cuba, apart from the music and the old cars, and it was news to me that life there was so very imprisoning; that writers lives were controlled by punishments such as making them write lies for a living; and that it was difficult for them to find information such as a factual history of Trotsky's life or the books of George Orwell, and fundamentally, that there was fear. And eventually, there was also hunger. Again, the problem was that Cuba became a kind of Soviet client state which poisoned it internally and in its external relations.

This book was given to me by a student and the size of it was intimidating. It's a huge book; but it deals with 20th century history in different continents and the attempt to convey the experience of being active in that huge dimension demands space. Of the reader, it demands effort, because I think the Spanish style doesn't translate very readily to English, and sometimes a sentence is so long and so full of facts that it is really quite difficult to take in. It's a packed stack of facts for those who like their facts packed. I read most of it twice in an effort to get it all clear. I wondered if the translator could have made a better job of it, but by the end I was just grateful for the job that she had done - it must have been a real struggle.

The annoying thing is I had nearly finished it when I accidentally left it in the airport at Hong Kong. I decided I was too tired to go on with it and started a silly little romantic story instead - much easier to read - but somehow I left the Padura, with all the underlinings I had made, in the stupid terminal somewhere. I have asked the airport to look for it.

As for the title, they all love dogs! Trotsky, the killer, and the writer; through their dogs the lives of the latter two are changed because they make a connection, but particularly that of the writer, who works as a writer at a veterinarian magazine and learns the trade through his connection with veterinarians.

By co-incidence I see (in The Week) that Robert Conquest has died. In 1968 his work "The Great Terror" was published, in which he "laid out in devastating detail the appalling costs of the so-called Soviet experiment - not only the millions who died of famine as a result of Stalin's agricultural reforms, but also those who were shot for "the crime of not being true Stalinist believers" . He had joined the communist party whilst at Oxford University, but he renounced his belief after "witnessing the brutality of the Soviet army in Bulgaria, where he served as an intelligence officer during WW2."
Communists in the West simply disbelieved him. Later their attitude changed to "Stalin was a bad guy, but the Americans were bad guys too, and so was the British Empire." Conquest said that this position was "absolute balls".

I have a history book here for A Level students, which points out that Russia, in the end, swapped one autocrat for another, and Stalin was far worse a master than any of the Tsars. It was amazing luck for the Soviets that they took control of the country, something that was only possible because their civil war involved foreign elements of whom most of the country was deeply suspicious. It was the worst possible luck that one of the leaders was Stalin.

Although I have a degree in Modern History

I know very little about Trotsky. But one fact that everyone knows is that he was murdered, by one of Stalin's agents, with an ice axe in the head. Ridiculously, I had mentally devised a story to explain the ice axe detail. My scenario had Trotsky as a keen amateur mountaineer, wearing his hobnail boots, tweed plus fours and knitted hat, negotiating the very top of a little known peak in Mexico when a Dick Dastardly figure climbed up behind him, wrenched the ice axe out of Trotsky's hand, and smashed it in his head. I thought that Trotsky died instantly and that his trusty friends had to stretcher him down the mountain.

The truth was nothing like that. A man who had sneakily befriended other members of Trotsky's circle over a number of years pestered him for some help with an essay he was writing. Trotsky seems to have been an obliging friend. They went into Trotsky's study (in a specially fortified house in Mexico City) but the enemy had hidden an ice axe in his raincoat, and while Trotsky concentrated his attention on the useless essay, the enemy used it. There was much blood. Trotsky did not die immediately. He gave instructions that his grandson, just home from school, should not see the bloody injury.

Trotsky's death remembered A first-hand account from the Guardian.

The behaviour of the US government at that time was incredible. They considered any open revolutionary, like Trotsky, better dead, and the press almost danced on his grave. This was in 1940. After the US joined the war, Joseph Stalin got a complete whitewash by the US press. It happened so quickly. Only in the pages of 1984 (Orwell) has this been truly noted. Meanwhile, any innocent US resident of Japanese, German or Italian nationality could expect to be reviled, harshly treated or imprisoned.

Stalin not only cheated Trotsky out of a place in Soviet Russia, he also made him an exile and killed nearly all of his family - the grandson being the last survivor. How the exile continued to exude enthusiasm for the workers' revolution is a mystery. He lived in constant fear, surrounded by bodyguards.

I am still reading The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver and have checked several Internet pages to find out where the book and the facts part company. All so interesting. A brilliant book.

Barbara Kingsolver - a biologist writes

The other night I went with Roz to the Southbank, where I have not ventured for some time, due to my difficult job eating up my life, and we ate in the British Film Institute, had some wine and saw Barbara Kingsolver, all of which cheered me up a lot.

BK is so gifted. I won't go through all the books she has written but the most famous is called The Poisonwood Bible, which everyone should read as it asks some very important questions about an extreme clash of cultures, which in this case is placed in the Congo. She wrote this book having actually lived in Africa as a child. Unlike most people, she has first hand experience to share. It's a very disturbing novel and I have not yet fathomed out its implications.

She said that she writes only about places she has been to and experienced. At present, I am reading one of her books, The Lacuna, which is set largely in Mexico, so she has been there, but not in the 1930's, which is when the action is taking place. Never mind, she has entered into the mind of the probably unreliable narrator (a gay man) and created a world for us where Lev Trotsky, exiled and in danger of assassination, with his wife and staff, goes to live with the artists Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo. 

The latest book, Flight Behaviour, from which she read, is set in her familiar Kentucky hills and is about love and growth (of course), monarch butterflies and climate change, which is the truth Barbara is commissioned to share. The life cycle of the monarch butterfly is a miraculous thing and the fragility of something beautiful and extraordinary is a perfect example of her message. She is a biologist with a load of qualifications and has some splendid academic colleagues, who, she told us, have read her work for scientific credibility and given it the thumbs up. 

She seems like a very happy person, at home in her life and happy to be feted in London as well as many other cities, I suppose. It bothers me that there were few men in the audience. It was almost 100% women. It is bad that half of a cosmopolitan population is not clued up about  work that is significant thematically, and not just to women. Most of her books are for either sex, but I am not sure that Prodigal Summer would appeal to a man. It's too much like a female fantasy.