Yakov Blumkin

Yakov Grigorevich Blumkin ( _ru. Яков Григорьевич Блюмкин; 1898 – 3 November 1929) was a Left Socialist-Revolutionary, assassin, Bolshevik, Cheka agent, GPU spy, Trotskyist, and adventurer.

He was born into a Jewish family, was orphaned early in his life, and was raised in Odessa. In 1914 he joined the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.

After the October Revolution, in 1917 he became head of the Cheka's counter-espionage department working for Felix Dzerzhinsky. During the Red Terror, Blumkin was known for his brutality. The writer Isaiah Berlin recounts the following story about the poet Osip Mandelstam:

:"One evening early in the Revolution he was sitting in a cafe and there was the notorious Socialist Revolutionary terrorist Blumkin… at that time an official of the Cheka… drunkenly copying the names of men and women to be executed on to blank forms already signed by the head of the secret police. Mandelstam suddenly threw himself at him, seized the lists, tore them to pieces before the stupefied onlookers, then ran out and disappeared. On this occasion he was saved by Trotsky's sister."

Terrorist

Politically Blumkin remained a Left Socialist-Revolutionary. This party was opposed to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, oppression of the peasants, and the German possession of the Ukraine. Blumkin was ordered by the executive committee of the Left Socialist-Revolutionary party to assassinate Wilhelm Mirbach, the German ambassador to Russia; they hoped by this action to incite a war with Germany. This event was timed to occur at the opening of the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. On the afternoon of 6 July 1918, Blumkin – along with an aide, Nikolai Andreyev – went to the residence of the German Ambassador on Denezhny Lane. Blumkin gained entrance to the embassy by presenting forged documents. When Mirbach entered the drawing room, Blumkin pulled a gun from his case and shot the ambassador point blank, killing him. This provoked an armed insurrection in Moscow, sometimes called the Third Russian Revolution, which was quickly quelled by the Red Guard. The members of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries at the Bolshoi Theater were arrested and their party was forcibly suppressed. Blumkin, however, escaped and went into hiding.

He fled to Leningrad and then to the Ukraine where he joined the LSR Cheka. In Kiev he organized an assassination attempt against the Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi and fought in the LSR insurrection against the reactionary government of Symon Petliura. In April 1919 Blumkin surrendered to the Bolsheviks, who still had a warrant for his arrest. Dzerzhinsky pardoned Blumkin, due to his voluntary surrender, and ordered him to return to the Ukraine to assassinate Admiral Kolchak. While forming a combat group, Blumkin survived three assassination attempts made by his former LSR comrades. He joined the 13th Red Army as director of counter-espionage and worked under
Georgy Pyatakov.

Persia

In the spring of 1920, Dzerzhinsky sent Blumkin to the Iranian province of Gilan, on the Caspian Sea, where the Forest Party under the leadership of Mirza Koochak Khan had established a secessionist government called the Persian Socialist Soviet Republic. On 30 May 1920, Blumkin, with his penchant for intrigue, fomented a coup d'etat which drove Koochak Khan and his party from power and replaced them with the bolshevik controlled Iranian Communist Party. The new government, nominally headed by Kuchak Khan's second-in-command, Ehsanollah Khan, was dominated by the Russian Commissar, Abukov. He commenced a series of radical reforms which included the closing of mosques, extorting money from the rich, and forcing the populace to wear the hammer and sickle ensignia. Blumkin became chief of the General Staff of the Persian Red Army. This rabble was raised with the intention of marching on Tehran and bringing Persia under the Red Banner.

In August 1920, Blumkin was back in Petrograd where he was entrusted with the command of an armored train that conveyed Zinoviev, Karl Radek, Béla Kun, and John Silas Reed from the Second Congress of the Communist International [ [http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/index.htm History of the Communist International ] at www.marxists.org] to the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities in Baku. [ [http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/baku/index.htm History of the Communist International ] at www.marxists.org] Their journey took them through parts of Western Russia where the Civil War still lingered. Blumkin claimed he served as a member of the Persian delegation, perhaps incognito because his name is not listed in the published rolls. At the congress, the delegates enacted the proposal of Zinoviev, leader of the Comintern, which called upon the bolsheviks to support the uprisings of native peoples from the Middle East against the British. Lenin shortly abandoned this policy, and the Persian Red Army, in order to sign a treaty with Great Britain.

Vagabond Agent

After his adventure in the Caucasus, Blumkin returned to Moscow and became a student at the war college. He befriended Leon Trotsky, becoming a secretary, and helped over the next two years with the "selection, critical checking, arrangement and correction of the material" in Trotsky's "Military Writings" (1923). [ [http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1918-mil/ch01.htm Leon Trotsky: 1918 - How The Revolution Armed/Volume I (Author's Preface) ] at www.marxists.org] Blumkin introduced his friend, the poet Sergei Esenin, to Trotsky, hoping that Trotsky would sponsor and promote a literary journal. This sharing of friendship, scholarship, and political ideas with Trotsky would later cost Blumkin his life.

In 1924 the OGPU made Blumkin the illegal rezident in the Arab peninsula. From the summer of 1924 until the fall of 1925 he worked for the OGPU in Tiflis and was the Assistant Chairman of the Soviet delegation in the mixed Soviet-Persian Border commission and a member of the Soviet delegation in the mixed Soviet-Turkish Border commission. In his autobiography, the Soviet diplomat Alexander Barmine provides a glimpse of Blumkin, whom he met along with Esenin on a train from Moscow to Baku in the spring of 1924. The two friends, Blumkin and Esenin, "got along well and never went to bed sober." Esenin was "suffering from an overindulgence in alcohol and woman," and "had turned into a sot." Blumkin, "whose soldierly temperament always saved him from excess, had saddled himself with the job of 'pulling Esenin together.'" According to Barmine, "It was more than anyone could do!" In his book, "The Storm Petrels", Gordon Brooke-Shepard relates that the GPU sent Blumkin to Paris in 1926 to assassinate the defector and former Central Committee secretary, Boris Bajanov. If the story is true Blumkin proved unworthy of the task, because Bajanov died a celebrated author in Paris in 1982, aged eighty-one. But it became common gossip among the inmates of the labor camps that Blumkin had killed Bajanov. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn repeats this legend in "The Gulag Archipelago".

Le Vivant est Mort

In 1929, Blumkin was the chief illegal resident in Turkey, where he was selling Hebrew incunabula from the Lenin Library in Moscow to finance an espionage network in the Middle East. It is known that Blumkin met with Trotsky, who was living in Turkey after his expulsion from the Soviet Union. Trotsky gave Blumkin a secret message to transmit to Karl Radek, Trotsky's former supporter and friend in Moscow, which was seen by Stalin as an attempt to set up lines of communication with "co-thinkers" and "oppositionists" in the Soviet Union. Information about the meeting reached the GPU. Trotsky later claimed that Radek betrayed Blumkin to Stalin, and Radek acknowledged his complicity, but it is also likely that the information was passed along by a GPU agent within Trotsky's entourage.

After Blumkin met with Radek in Moscow, Mikhail Trilisser, head of the GPU Foreign Section, ordered an attractive agent named Lisa Gorskaya (aka Elizabeth Zubilin) to "abandon bourgeois prejudice" and seduce Blumkin. The couple carried on an affair lasting several weeks and Gorskaya revealed their intimate conversations to Trilisser. When agents sent to arrest Blumkin arrived at his apartment, he was getting into a car with Gorskaya. A chase ensued and shots were fired. Blumkin stopped the car, turned to Gorskaya and said: "Lisa, you have betrayed me!" Following his arrest, Blumkin was brought before a GPU tribunal consisting of Yagoda, Menzhinsky, and Trilisser. The defector Georges Agabekov claims: "Yagoda pronounced for the death penalty. Trilliser was against it. Menzhinsky was undecided." The matter was referred to the Politburo and Stalin, ending the deadlock, resorted to the death penalty.

In his "Memoirs of a Revolutionary" (1941), Victor Serge fancifully relates that Blumkin was given a two week reprieve so that he could write his autobiography. This manuscript, if indeed it ever existed, remains undiscovered. The defector Alexander Orlov writes that Blumkin stood before a firing squad and shouted, "Long live Trotsky!" The Russian Government has not rehabilitated Blumkin.

Notes

External links

*ru icon [http://sovsekretno.ru/1999/02/13.html "Death of an adventurer" article from the newspaper "Sovershenno Sekretno"]
*ru icon [http://sovsekretno.ru/1999/03/14.html "Secret expedition to Shambala" article from the newspaper "Sovershenno Sekretno"]
* Leon Trotsky, "Revolt of the Left SR." [http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/trotsky/works/1918-mil/ch34.htm]
* The Berzin Archives [http://www.berzinarchives.com/kalachakra/mistaken_foreign_myths_shambhala.html]