Despite its strict belief in change through the ballot box, the Chilean Communist Party, like many Communist Parties around the world, was strictly Stalinist. It believed that defending the Soviet Union was essential to protecting the values and the people they believed in, especially in the fight against fascism. For many, this idea first grew from the political circumstances surrounding the Spanish Civil War, which pushed a vast number of people like Neruda to the left. The United States, England, and France had abandoned the Spanish Republic. France had acted indifferently toward the desperate refugees, who had nowhere else to go in their retreat from Franco’s forces. So they took a side: Stalin defended their comrades and their ideals. And from that point forward they planted the flag of Stalinism, making a firm commitment that would prove hard to break later on.
Had Neruda been a U.S. or French citizen, he might have renounced Stalinism based on the realities of the Cold War and his personal convictions. He might have even renounced the Communist Party. But in Chile, the Communist Party had given Neruda a platform, a support network, and even a senatorial nomination. Neruda had become personally invested in it, to the degree that by the time Stalin’s crimes came to light, it was too hard for him or other members of the party, including Delia, to break from it. Neruda had partially constructed his political identity out of the Communist Party’s perspective. For him the party wasn’t just a group of people who wanted to change the world, but thousands of working-class families the entire length of the country. It may have seemed impossible for Neruda to renounce his allegiance to Stalin, because in some sense he would be renouncing his family as well.
While it was one thing to defend Stalin, it was another to trample on personal friendships and practicalities in order to toe the party line. His relationship with the Polish Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz is one example. Milosz’s anti-Soviet political views had created tensions with his Communist government, forcing him to seek political asylum in France. He had previously lived in Paris during the time Neruda was in exile, and he became friends with the Chilean, attending parties with him and his leftist friends. Milosz had even translated some of Neruda’s poetry a few years earlier. But once he publicly turned away from the regimes and communism, he instantly became persona non grata. The newspaper of the French Communist Party assigned Neruda the task of writing the denunciation of Milosz, which he did, in an article entitled “The Man Who Ran Away,” naming Milosz, among other slanders, “an agent of American imperialism.”
Neruda was by no means the only artist, writer, or intellectual swept up by Stalinism in that period. Neruda’s article isolated Milosz among French intellectuals who were all pro-Soviet in those years (except Albert Camus, who remained his friend). As Milosz explained in a 1994 Paris Review interview, “Anyone who was dissatisfied and who came from the East like myself was considered a madman or an agent of America.”
In his classic book Zniewolony umysł (The Captive Mind), detailing the magnetism that totalitarian thought exerted on many intellectuals, Milosz mentions Neruda:
When he describes the misery of his people, I believe him and I respect his great heart. When writing, he thinks about his brothers and not about himself, and so to him the power of the word is given. But when he paints the joyous, radiant life of people in the Soviet Union, I stop believing him. I am inclined to believe him as long as he speaks about what he knows: I stop believing him when he starts to speak about what I know myself.
A decade and a half after Neruda wrote his denunciation of his former friend, the two saw each other at the 1966 PEN Conference in New York. Neruda saw Milosz across the room, cried, “Czeslaw!” and rushed to embrace him. Milosz turned his face away and Neruda said, “But, Czeslaw, that was politics.”
Eventually, given the overwhelming evidence, Neruda would use his poetry as a means to address Stalin’s abuses and the failure of the Soviet Union to achieve the ideals of socialism. He’d even criticize Stalin in public pronouncements. Though he didn’t do it aloud, within the texture of his poetry, he’d even ask for absolution from his once-blind allegiance.
But in December 1953, Neruda, Delia, and Volodia Teitelboim (by then one of the highest-ranking officials of the Chilean Communist Party) traveled to Moscow for the Second Soviet Writers Congress at the Kremlin. They stayed at the luxurious Hotel Metropol, where they received intellectuals and politicians and planned great parties. The trip was cut short, as Neruda came down with the flu and decided suddenly to return home. He said he wanted to be back in Chile for Christmas. Delia couldn’t understand why he would travel while so sick. She said bitterly to Teitelboim, “I don’t know how he can make the trip in such conditions. It could be dangerous. Why is he in such a rush?” Teitelboim couldn’t answer. Delia felt he knew more than he was letting on, which he did: Neruda had told him he was returning to see Matilde. Matilde was upset that Neruda had traveled without her, and she gave him an ultimatum: either return and be with her for the end-of-year holidays, or she would go to Mexico and leave him forever.
When he returned to Chile, Matilde made it known that she was not happy with her cramped, drab living situation. The new setting was a stark contrast to Capri, and Santiago was suffering through rolling blackouts in order to conserve energy, which added to her agitation. Gone was the light of Capri and the Mexican sun, gone was her ability to have Neruda all to herself. Having idealized Chile from afar
