Yakov Blumkin
This article needs additional citations for verification. (January 2013) |
Birth name | Yakov Grigoryevich Blumkin |
---|---|
Born | 12 March [ OGPU |
Rank | Intelligence officer |
Yakov Grigoryevich Blumkin (
Early life
Blumkin was born into a
Cheka employee
After the October Revolution in 1917, he became head of the Cheka's counter-espionage department working for Felix Dzerzhinsky.[4]
Terrorist
Popov's Cheka detachment that included Blumkin, consisted of
In Kyiv he organized an assassination attempt against the Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi and fought in the LSR insurrection against the government of Symon Petliura.[7] 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 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
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 closing of mosques and confiscating money from the rich. Blumkin became chief of the General Staff of the Persian Red Army. An army 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 Grigory Zinoviev, Karl Radek, Béla Kun, and John Reed from the Second Congress of the Communist International[8] to the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities in Baku.[9] 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 afterwards abandoned this policy in order to sign a treaty with Great Britain.
Relations with poets
Blumkin was a lover of poetry. In July 1921
In 1923, the diplomat
Blumkin also knew Osip Mandelstam. There is a story told by Mandelstam's biographer Clarence Brown:[13]
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 onto 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.
Mandelstam's widow told a different, and probably more accurate version of the story. She said that Blumkin tried to persuade Mandelstam to work for the Cheka, soon after it was founded and before the Mirbach assassination. Blumkin was also a regular and "welcome" guest in the Poets' Cafe, in Moscow, where Mandelstam overheard him boasting that he was going to have an art historian shot. Mandelstam, who did not know the intended victim, was so angry that he persuaded the poetry-loving Bolshevik Larissa Reissner to join him in a direct approach to the head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, and saved the man's life.
In 1919, Mandelstam and his wife were on a balcony in Kiev, when Blumkin rode past at the head of a cavalcade, dressed in a black coat, and when he saw Mandelstam, drew a pistol pointed it at him, but did not fire. He threatened Mandelstam with a gun several times, but never fired, and probably had no intention of killing him.[14]
When Blumkin returned from Persia, the French writer Victor Serge heard him declaim lines written by the Persian epic poet Ferdowsi. At that time Blumkin was "more poised and virile than ever, his face solid and smooth-shaven, the haughty profile of an Israelite warrior. He stayed in a small apartment in the Arbat quarter, bare except for a rug and a splendid stool, a gift from some Mongol prince; and crooked sabres hung over his bottles of excellent wine."[15]
Vagabond agent
After his adventure in the Caucasus, Blumkin returned to Moscow and became a student at the
From the summer of 1924 to the fall of 1925, he worked for the OGPU in
In 1926, Blumkin was supposedly the secret representative of the GPU in Mongolia, where he ruled for some time as a virtual dictator and occasionally travelled on missions in China, Tibet and India, until he was recalled to Moscow because the local communist leadership was tired of his reign of terror.[17][18]
In his book The Storm Petrels, Gordon Brook-Shepherd relates that the GPU sent Blumkin to Paris in October 1929 to assassinate the defector and former Stalin personal secretary, Boris Bazhanov. In fact, the information comes from Bazhanov himself.[18] Although it became common gossip among the inmates of the labor camps that Blumkin had indeed killed Bazhanov, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn repeats that legend in The Gulag Archipelago, the truth is that Bazhanov died in 1983. Bazhanov was then also aware of the rumour of his own murder and wrote that Stalin had probably planted the rumour to instill fear.[18]
Later life
This section needs additional citations for verification. (January 2023) |
In 1929, Blumkin was the chief
It is known that during his work in Turkey, Blumkin met with Trotsky, who lived there 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 OGPU.
Trotsky later claimed that Radek had betrayed Blumkin to Stalin, and Radek would later acknowledge his complicity, but it is also likely that the information was passed along by an OGPU informer within Trotsky's entourage.
After Blumkin met with Radek in Moscow,
After his arrest, Blumkin was brought before an OGPU tribunal consisting of
In his Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1941), Victor Serge related that Blumkin was given a two-week reprieve so that he could write his autobiography. That manuscript, if indeed it ever existed, remains undiscovered. Alexander Orlov wrote that Blumkin stood before a firing squad and shouted, "Long live Trotsky!" The Russian government has never rehabilitated Blumkin.
See also
Notes
- ^ Matonin, Yevgeny (2016). Яков Блюмкин: Ошибка резидента [Yakov Blumkin: The Secret Agent's Blunder]. Lives of Remarkable People (in Russian). p. 2.
- ^ Shmidt, O.Yu. (chief editor), Bukharin N.I. et al (eds) (1927). Большая советская энциклопедия Volume 6. Moscow. p. 537.
{{cite book}}
:|first1=
has generic name (help)CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ISBN 978-5-386-09586-4.
- ISBN 978-1-85984-451-9.
- ^ Chamberlin, William (1935). The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921, Volume Two. New York: The Macmillan Company. pp. 50–57.
- ^ "Шестое июля". www.kommersant.ru (in Russian). 2018-07-02. Retrieved 2023-01-13.
- ^ "Как «террорист №1» в Киеве на гетмана охотился". KP.UA (in Russian). Retrieved 2023-01-13.
- ^ History of the Communist International at www.marxists.org
- ^ History of the Communist International at www.marxists.org
- ISBN 0-85031-998-6.
- ^ Barmine, Alexander (1945). One Who Survived. New York: G.P.Putnam's Sons. p. 140.
- ^ [Ройзман, М. 1973. Все, что помню о Есенине. Глава 13.]
- ^ Osip Mandelstam (ed. Clarence Brown) 1973. Cited by Isaiah Berlin in "The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture Under Communism"
- ISBN 0-00-262501-6.
- ISBN 0-86316-070-0.
- ^ Leon Trotsky: 1918 - How The Revolution Armed/Volume I (Author's Preface) Archived 2006-09-02 at the Wayback Machine at www.marxists.org
- ^ a b c Савченко Виктор Анатольевич. 2000. Авантюристы гражданской войны: историческое расследование
- ^ a b c Бажанов, Борис. Воспоминания бывшего секретаря Сталина. Глава 17. Эмиграция. Финляндия. Берлин.
External links
- Leon Trotsky, "Revolt of the Left SR."
- Review of a Biography