Yakov Blumkin

File:Blumkin.jpg

Yakov Blumkin

Yakov Grigorevich Blumkin (Russian: Яков Григорьевич Блюмкин; 1898 – 3 November 1929) was a Left Socialist-Revolutionary, assassin, Bolshevik, Checka 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."

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.

Dzerzhinsky pardoned Blumkin and employed him once again as a Cheka Agent. In the spring of 1920, Blumkin was sent 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. 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 [1] to the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities in Baku[2]. Their journey took them through parts of Western Russia where the Civil War still lingered. At Baku, the delegates enacted the proposal of Zinoviev, Head of the Comintern, which called upon the bolsheviks to support the uprisings of native peoples from the Middle East against the British. This idea of international revolution inspired Blumkin.

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).[3] 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

File:Blumkin Shambala.jpg

Nicholas Roerich Message from Shambhala shows Yakov Blumkin during his expedition to Tibet

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. Bajanov died a celebrated author in Paris in 1982, aged eighty-one. But it became common gossip among inmates of the labor camps that Blumkin had killed Bajanov. Alexander Solzhenitsyn repeats this legend in The Gulag Archipelago.

At the insistence of Dzerzhinsky, Blumkin rejoined the foreign department of the GPU. In the 1920s, the GPU financed several expeditions to Tibet in search of the mythical city of Shambhala, where it was rumored the inhabitants possessed telepathic powers. Two expeditions in 1926 and 1928 led by the well known Russian artist and theosophist, Nicholas Roerich, visited Lhasa. Blumkin was the chief agent in these expeditions and went about disguised as a Kalmyk Mongol officer and Buddhist lama. It is said he met with the Dalai Lama and proposed an alliance with the Soviet Union that would guarantee the independence of Tibet.

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.

External links

• Template:Ru icon Death of an adventurer article from the newspaper Sovershenno Sekretno
• Template:Ru icon Secret expedition to Shambala article from the newspaper Sovershenno Sekretno
• Leon Trotsky, "Revolt of the Left SR."[4]
• The Berzin Archives[5]