The biography of Yakov Blumkin is still one of the most mysterious in the history of Soviet intelligence. His life is replete with legends, myths and coincidences, often contradicting each other. Blumkin went down in history as a participant in the assassination of the German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach in 1918. This terrorist act served as a signal for the "Left SR" uprising. However, the Left Veser Blumkin, after the "action", not only was not shot or arrested, but for a long time continued to work in the Cheka.
The terrorist from the Cheka and the fierce enemy of Stalin
Self-defense and expropriation
"Misunderstandings" in the biography of Yakov Blumkin begin from the very date of his birth and the place of this very birth. According to one version, he was born in 1900 in Odessa into a proletarian Jewish family. Blumkin announced this in his application form when he entered the Cheka in 1918. According to the second version, Yakov was born in 1898 in Lemberg (now Lviv) in the family of an employee of the city government. At that time, Lemberg was part of Austria-Hungary, and many Germans lived there. The second version seems the most likely, because many sources noted that Blumkin was fluent in the German spoken language.
But we cannot fail to mention the coincidence that would later allow historians and researchers to consider Jacob Blumkin as the prototype of Max Otto von Stirlitz. The fact is that in his profile, Blumkin wrote that he was born on October 8, 1900. And it was this date that was the birthday of the intelligence officer Vsevolod Vladimirov (pseudonym Maxim Maksimovich Isaev) from the novels of Yulian Semyonov.
Yakov Blumkin's father, Herschel Blumkind, served in the city government of Lemberg. After September 3, 1914, when the city was taken by Russian troops, Herschel quickly converted to Orthodoxy, transformed into Grigory Blumkin and got a job in the city chancellery. In July 1915, an Austro-German counteroffensive began, and the Russians left Lvov. Together with them, Grigory Blumkin left the city with his family. They move to Odessa.
Yakov's two older brothers, Lev and Isai, worked for Odessa newspapers. Another brother, Nathan, under the pseudonym Bazilevsky became a famous playwright. The family's political views were different. Sister Rosa was a member of the RSDLP, Lev was an anarchist, and Yakov in 1917 joined the Party of Social Revolutionaries (Social Revolutionaries). It was then that Yakov Blumkin took up arms for the first time. He joined the self-defense units that prevented Jewish pogroms. There Blumkin met Moisey Vinnitsky, better known under the nickname Mishka-Yaponchik. A little later Vinnitsky will become the real king of the thieves' world of Odessa. Together with Vinnitsky, Blumkin participated in the robbery of the State Bank of Odessa in January 1918. According to some reports, the accomplices pocketed part of the "expropriated" funds, although most of the money was indeed transferred to the Bolsheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, who at that time acted as a united front at the head of the new government in Russia.
Peace of Brest and the split in power
In May 1918, Yakov Blumkin left Odessa and soon resurfaced in Moscow. Let us recall that the October coup, as a result of which the Bolsheviks gained power in Russia, could not have taken place without the support of the left wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. By agreement with the Bolsheviks, the Social Revolutionaries were able to promote their party members to a variety of positions, even to the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom). In the Cheka in 1918, the Social Revolutionaries accounted for almost 40% of the personnel. Yakov Blumkin was sent to the Cheka. Since he knew German, he began to work in the "German" department.
After the October Revolution, Lenin began to insist on ending the war with Germany and disbanding the tsarist army. In which he saw a threat to the new government. But the Germans rolled out such conditions that even among the Bolsheviks, not to mention the Social Revolutionaries, serious disagreements arose. Members of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b) Dzerzhinsky, Bukharin, Uritsky, Ioffe, Radek, Krylenko insisted on continuing the war. Another group, led by Lenin and supported by Stalin, Zinoviev, Sverdlov, insisted on accepting any conditions for the end of the war. Leon Trotsky took a neutral position, proclaiming the slogan: "No peace, no war." At that time, Lenin wrote: "An army is needed for a revolutionary war, but we do not have an army ... Undoubtedly, the peace that we are forced to conclude now is an obscene peace, but if a war starts, our government will be swept away and peace will be concluded by another government." ...
Germany demanded to leave behind all the territories it captured (at that time the Germans occupied Finland, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus, occupied Pskov and some central and southern regions of Russia, in total about 780 thousand square meters. Km with a population of 56 million, this is a third of all subjects of the Russian Empire). The Germans also demanded a monstrous contribution at that time of 6 billion marks and 500 million rubles. And only gold. Few people know that the Bolsheviks sent two echelons of gold to the Germans with a total weight of about 94 tons.
The conclusion of the Brest Peace was the main reason for the split between the Bolsheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Who argued that the Bolsheviks were acting in the interests of the Germans. This is approximately how it was: Germany and Austria-Hungary, after the conclusion of the Brest Peace, were able to remove military units from the Eastern Front and transfer them to the West. And they almost turned the tide of the war. The United States, however, stepped in. America entered the war in 1917. For almost a year she did not take active actions in the war, confining herself to the supply of weapons and food to France and England. But in 1918, the Americans decided to take more radical action. Several American divisions were deployed to Europe and Africa. The fate of the "Quadruple Alliance" (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria) was decided. Six months later, Germany was forced to drink the same "drink" that Russia had drank before. The Germans were forced to sign an even more shameful (than Brest for Russia) Treaty of Versailles.
But all this was a little later. And in the spring of 1918, when the shameful Peace of Brest-Litovsk was concluded, the first split occurred in the revolutionary forces of Russia, which stood at the leadership of the country. Trotsky, according to the decision of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b), began to actively create a new, revolutionary, Red Army. And the ideological opponents of the Bolsheviks, including the Social Revolutionaries, seriously believed that the army was a power tool of the imperialist regimes. The people's power does not need such an instrument, and the armed masses of the people will defend the revolution. Now these arguments seem naive, but in those days, many adhered to precisely these views.
Germany was in a hurry to secure a treaty with the Russians. She even recognized the Soviet Republic and established diplomatic relations with it. A personal friend of the Kaiser, Wilhelm von Mirbach, came to Moscow as ambassador. He came to control the new government in Russia, but it turned out - for death.
The main version of the reason for the murder of Ambassador Mirbach is as follows: the "Left Socialist Revolutionaries", who did not agree with the shameful Brest Peace, sought to violate this very agreement, even by killing a diplomat.
But at the same time, some evidence suggests that Dzerzhinsky was aware of the preparations for the assassination of the ambassador. On the one hand, one recalls his opposition to the Brest Peace, and on the other, it is somehow not very hard to believe that the "iron Felix" did not know what was going on in the department he headed. After all, all the preparations for the murder were carried out in the Cheka. And why did Dzerzhinsky not prevent the SRs from preparing a terrorist attack? Maybe because he himself was against the Brest agreement?
Mirbach's assassination and bohemian parties
"Levoeser" Yakov Blumkin, who worked in the "German" department of the Cheka, managed to find approaches to Mirbach. In those days, the German ambassador actively facilitated the departure of Russian citizens of German nationality from Russia. Blumkin sent a letter to the German embassy about the fate of Mirbach's distant relatives. Someone there really was arrested by the Cheka, quite possibly only in order to get close to the ambassador. Mirbach could not help but respond and agreed to a meeting with the Cheka officers. On July 6, 1918, Yakov Blumkin and his friend (and fellow party member) Nikolai Andreev came to the ambassador. Which of them became Mirbach's killer is now quite difficult to establish. One fired from a revolver, the other threw bombs, after which both jumped out the window and disappeared in a waiting car. The "Left SRs" have achieved what they wanted. The Brest Treaty was broken.
On the same day, the "Left SRs" revolted against the Bolsheviks. Which was suppressed in no time. Already on July 7, most members of the Central Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party were arrested, as well as their supporters in the regions. But Blumkin and Andreev, according to some information on the personal order of Leon Trotsky and with the support of Dzerzhinsky, escaped responsibility. Andreev left for Ukraine (where he died a year later), and Blumkin remained in the structure of the Cheka and became involved in active intelligence work.
First he is sent to Ukraine, and then to Persia. In 1921, Blumkin returned to Moscow and went to study at the Academy of the General Staff of the Red Army. To the oriental faculty. Where Blumkin masters Arabic, Turkish, Chinese and Mongolian. However, the first assignment after graduation from the Academy for Blumkin took place not in the east, but in the west of the former Russian Empire. He is sent to Tallinn, under the guise of a jeweler, where he must identify the connections of the Gokhran employees who sold valuables abroad bypassing the authorities.
This episode of Blumkin's life forms the basis of Yulian Semyonov's novel "Diamonds for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat." Blumkin went to Estonia with a fake passport, taking for himself the pseudonym Isaev (does he remind anyone?), On behalf of his grandfather. Blumkin coped with his work. Thieves from Gokhran were exposed.
Upon his return to Moscow, Yakov continued his studies at the Academy of the General Staff. At the same time, he meets poetic bohemia. It is reliably known that Blumkin was closely acquainted with many poets of that time, including Sergei Yesenin, Osip Mandelstam and Vladimir Mayakovsky. However, at that time, many of the Cheka employees moved in that get-together. And Blumkin's hobby for poetry does not look like something out of the ordinary.
In 1922, Blumkin's fate took another turn, which later became fatal. He became Trotsky's closest assistant and was in charge of counterintelligence activities at the General Staff of the Red Army.
Eastern period
His work in this area was highly appreciated. A year later, Blumkin was returned to the special service. But this time not in counterintelligence, but in the Foreign Department, the famous INO OGPU. In the same year, Blumkin, as an expert on the East, was sent to Palestine for intelligence activities. As his deputy, he invites fellow Socialist Revolutionaries Yakov Serebryansky. The future creator of the "Yasha group", which we will talk about later.
In 1924, Blumkin was recalled to Moscow and soon sent to the Transcaucasus. Where there were serious frictions between the Soviet Union, Persia and Turkey. Blumkin, as an assistant to the military commissar and a member of the Transcaucasian collegium of the OGPU, took part in the settlement of border conflicts and the suppression of peasant uprisings.
And then fate throws him into Afghanistan. Blumkin, disguised as a dervish, wanders around the country, trying to reach the Ismaili sect. Why the OGPU needed this is not yet clear - the documents are still classified. But it is reliably known that Blumkin, in search of the leader of the sect Agahan, reached all the way to India. Where he was arrested by the British police. Blumkin escaped from prison, taking with him documents and maps of a representative of British intelligence. How he succeeded is also a mystery with seven seals.
In 1926, Blumkin was sent as the chief instructor for state security to the Mongolian Republic. And again, a coincidence with the literary character of Julian Semyonov. Seva Vladimirov also worked in Mongolia, under Baron Ungern ...
In fact, Blumkin is creating a security service for an entire country. Two years later, he was transferred to Turkey. Blumkin leads intelligence work across the Middle East. And for a while he copes with his work. But in 1929, Stalin's personal secretary, Boris Bazhanov, fled from the USSR.
Stalin was furious and demanded that the special services either intercept the traitor or kill him. It was known that Bazhanov fled from the USSR to Iran, then moved to India, from where the British transported him to Europe. According to some reports, the comrades-in-arms of Trotsky, who by that time had already been expelled from the country, helped Bazhanov to cross the border. It was here that I remembered that the specialist in the East, Yakov Blumkin, at one time was Trotsky's personal assistant. Many historians believe that Blumkin was simply made a "scapegoat". It was not possible to intercept Bazhenov, and it was necessary to blame someone else. Blumkin came up best of all. In the fall of 1929 he was recalled to Moscow, where he was arrested almost immediately. According to legend, Blumkin tried to avoid arrest, ran away and shot back. Whether this is true or not is not so important. However, the fact of secret relations with Trotsky was proven. And not a beaten out confession, but quite serious documents. On November 3 (according to other sources, December 12), 1929, the executioner entered Blumkin's cell. The prisoner immediately understood everything, got up from the rack, pulled up his jacket and began to sing "Internationale". Which did not save him from the bullet ...
Magazine: War and Fatherland # 6 (12), 2017
Category: Secret services
It's time, it's time Blumkin has come to "kill". Well, how much can you write about him, right? But you need an appropriate mood. And read a little more about him. And all this took time, so I had to be late with the end of this extraordinary person. Obviously outstanding, although with a minus sign. So, the previous material ended with the fact that everything seemed to be good for Blumkin.
Participants of those events: L.D. Trotsky with his wife Natalya and son Lev in Alma-Ata in 1928.
In fact, the clouds over Blumkin were already thickening ... And it all began with the fact that when he was returning from a "business trip" back to Moscow, he stopped in Istanbul, and there seemed to accidentally meet with Trotsky's son, Lev Sedov. Trotsky himself later wrote that their meeting was accidental. But Blumkin had been working for Trotsky since 1921 and earned his approval, and it was not at all easy to achieve him. Be that as it may, and the son brought him to his father. The meeting of the former "chief" with his former subordinate took place on April 16, 1929.
Blumkin confessed to Trotsky that he doubted "Stalin's line" and asked for advice: should he continue to work in the OGPU, or leave them and become an underground member. It is clear that, being in the OGPU, Blumkin could bring the opposition a lot of benefits. True, Trotsky could not understand how an obvious Trotskyist in his views could continue his career in the organs, and so that no one suspected him of anything. Blumkin replied to him in such a way that his superiors do not pay attention to his past, since he is an irreplaceable specialist in terror.
Here a kind of "fork of circumstances" arises, the possibility of which should not be forgotten. Blumkin's meeting with Trotsky could - And it could be a provocation of the OGPU, and then whatever he didn’t speak in it didn’t matter, since he was on a mission and was trying to win Trotsky’s trust. And circumstance B could have taken place - he really was on the positions of Trotskyism and wanted to fight the Stalinist regime.
But here it is clearly worth interrupting our story about Blumkin and talking a little about Trotskyism, primarily because this term for some reason is very popular in VO. I am sure that many of those who speak and write here about Trotskyism have no idea what it is. At best, we looked at what it is on Wikipedia, which can already be considered a "gift of fate." Meanwhile, in fact, everything is very, very simple. One should not think that "Trotskyism" is some kind of revolutionary theory and that Trotsky is its author. There was no such theory. Trotsky also did not write any "works" substantiating it. What happened? And it was that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels at one time came to the conclusion that the socialist revolution cannot win in one country, that even if this happens, its defeat is inevitable.
Trotsky thought the same way. That is, he assumed that a revolution could take place in one country. First ... But then, one way or another, it will have to cover the whole world, that is, it will have a permanent character, and it was her idea (and not Trotsky at all!) Put forward by K. Marx and F. Engels. And by the way, V.I. Lenin thought the same way at first. But after the October Revolution took place, he was forced to reckon with the realities of harsh everyday life and began to say that ... and it can happen in one, separately taken country, and can win.
By the way, such a person as A. Bogdanov, a scientist, writer, author of the sensational novel "Red Star" (1908), did not agree with him at all. In 1903 he joined the Bolsheviks, but already in 1909 he was expelled from the party for engaging in factional activities. Moreover, Bogdanov believed that a socialist reorganization of society was possible, but he was convinced that after the October Revolution, people were still not ready to live under socialism, and that it would take a long time to prepare them. Otherwise, the new state and the form of government that will be established in it have more chances to go over to a totalitarian regime with the most severe form of despotism.
Participant of those events: Alexander Alexandrovich Bogdanov (real name - Malinovsky, other pseudonyms - Werner, Maksimov, Private; Russian encyclopedic scientist, author of the visionary novel "Red Star". Ideological opponent of V.I. Lenin. Born in 1873, died in 1928, putting on a blood transfusion experiment on himself.
In his novel, he wrote that: ““ not one, but many social revolutions are foreseen, in different countries, at different times, and even in many ways, probably, of a different nature, and most importantly - with a dubious and unstable outcome. The ruling classes, relying on the army and high military equipment, in some cases can inflict a destructive defeat on the insurgent proletariat that in entire vast states will throw back the struggle for socialism for decades; and examples of this kind have already happened in the annals of the Earth. Then individual advanced countries, in which socialism will triumph, will be like islands in the hostile capitalist, and partly even pre-capitalist world. Fighting for their own domination, the upper classes of the non-socialist countries will direct all their efforts to destroy these islands, will constantly organize military attacks on them, and will find among the socialist nations enough allies ready for any government, from among the former owners, large and small. The outcome of these collisions is difficult to predict. But even where socialism holds on and emerges victorious, its character will be deeply and permanently distorted by many years of a state of siege, the necessary terror and military clique, with the inevitable consequence - barbaric patriotism. " Well - that's how it all happened in our country. And it is precisely this kind of patriotism, by the way, that we have enough today. So we can say that Bogdanov "looked into the water." But Lenin did not like his views at all, and that is why the paths of Bogdanov and Lenin parted forever. And it turned out that Bogdanov, who was close to him at first, began to move further and further away from Lenin's vision of the "new world". And then close friends and like-minded people, Bogdanov and Lenin, parted as real enemies.
And exactly the same thing happened with Trotsky and Stalin. After Lenin's death, Trotsky continued to assert that everything that takes place in the USSR must follow one goal - a permanent revolution, in line with the views of Marx and Engels. Well, Stalin adhered to a different point of view: that since history has given us a chance, we need to take advantage of it. Roughly speaking, Trotsky demanded to put the workers at the machines and the peasants at the plows in order to forge and feed the world revolution, and Stalin demanded the same ... but only for the sake of strengthening a single state, and helping the revolutionary movement around the world insofar as. But when the USSR gets stronger ... then it will be possible to seriously think about the world revolution. And then there was the important question of power. That is, who is to lead the country. And those who supported Trotsky on this issue were called Trotskyists (that is, "Trotsky's supporters"), and those who were Stalin's supporters - Stalinists. That's all. Two ways. Two leaders. Two groups of supporters. And no new theories, except for the two already created: K. Marx and F. Engels, and V. Lenin. In this regard, Trotsky was a real Marxist, but Lenin took up the fact that he subjected Marxism to revision and, therefore, can be fully called ... a revisionist, although, of course, no one called him such a rude word, since it was said that “Marxism not a dogma, but a guide to action. "
That is, Trotsky, who was defeated in an open battle with Stalin (in a "military camp, who wants to live, and even an indefinite time ?!") dreamed wherever he could find his like-minded people, create a "left" underground and overthrow the hated enemy who did not understood that he was doomed to defeat in the future. It was necessary to start with the delivery of illegal literature to the USSR, entrusting this mission to the crews of Soviet merchant ships sailing abroad. But Blumkin said that they had only one contraband on their minds and they would sell it for a penny. It would be better to load a fishing felucca with such literature in Turkey and deliver it to Transcaucasia. And from there to send it all over the USSR.
In addition, Trotsky told Blumkin that the Stalinist regime would fall apart in three months, and that then he, Trotsky, would again be returned to Moscow, where he would outline the "general" path of the country's future development. That is, it was simply necessary to put together the majority of supporters in leading positions, and then, they say, everything will work out, by itself.
Trotsky then asked Blumkin to his son's wife, or Platon Volkov, the husband of his eldest daughter, two books in which instructions to his supporters were written in sympathetic ink. But Blumkin never gave these books to anyone, although he kept them with him. This was his first mistake on the way to the execution wall, and the second he made in October 1929, telling about his meeting with Trotsky to Radek, Preobrazhensky and Smigla.
A participant in those events: Karl Berngardovich Radek (pseudonym Radek - chosen in honor of the character of the Austrian humorous press, real name Karol (Karl) Sobelson, - Soviet politician, secretary of the Comintern, employee of the newspapers Pravda and Izvestia. In Verkhneuralsk political isolator on May 19 In 1939, beaten to death by I.I.Stepanov, the former commandant of the NKVD of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, who was imprisoned there for official sins, but was immediately released.
However, these people were the least worthy of his trust. Let's just say, being considered Bolsheviks, they did not have high moral merit.
Radek was so frightened that he immediately advised Blumkin to immediately inform the "leader" of everything. And Blumkin was horrified. That is, apparently, his meeting with Trotsky was deliberate and not accidental. He even decided to get poison in order to be able to poison himself in case of ... "critical circumstances."
And then Blumkin completely "lost his mind" and "shared" his secret with his mistress and "colleague" at work in the OGPU Lyubov Gorskaya, well, and she immediately reported this to the right place. That is, the poor fellow forgot two very wise proverbs at once: German - "what two know, the pig knows", and Arabic (and he lived in the East!) - "The guilty tongue is cut off with his head!" Then he told her that he realized the mistake and began to write a letter of repentance to the Central Control Commission (Central Control Commission) of the CPSU (b), and seemed to have decided to surrender to the mercy of the party court. But for some reason this letter remained unsent.
Blumkin's immediate boss and his great patron Trilisser decided not to take any action against Blumkin. That is, “circumstance A” seems to be looming on the horizon here. But then Blumkin himself began to act - he cut his hair, shaved off his mustache, and sent the luggage to the Kazan station.
Participant of those events: Elizaveta Yulievna Gorskaya - Elizaveta Yulievna Zarubina (also known as Esther Ioelievna Rosenzweig; December 31, 1900, Rzhaventsy, Khotinsky district, Bessarabian province - May 14, 1987, Moscow) - Soviet intelligence officer, lieutenant colonel of state security.
On October 15, 1929, he met with Gorskaya and went with her to the station. It turned out there that the train to Georgia was only going tomorrow. Then Gorskaya invited Blumkin to spend the night at her apartment, and he again agreed ("like a fool" by the way), and he also told her that he had decided to "lie low" until the passions with Trotskyism settled down and sit out this time with friends in the Caucasus.
It was then that the Chekists "tied" him, since Lizonka Gorskaya worked not only in the OGPU, but also at the OGPU, and entered into an intimate relationship with Blumkin on direct instructions from "above", and even playing a man disillusioned with the Stalinist regime ...
But there is another version, the essence of which is that Blumkin confessed to Radek even before leaving for Istanbul that he wanted to meet with Trotsky. Radek immediately reported this to Stalin and Blumkin was under surveillance, in which Liza Gorskaya, an agent of the OGPU, participated.
The news that Blumkin had been arrested literally stunned those who had seen the views of the Chekists and the entire party elite. So, G.S. Agabekov, who was Blumkin's immediate superior, then wrote that he could not understand how he, being a recognized favorite of Dzerzhinsky and having so many friends in high positions, could have been arrested at all. And it is clear that only Stalin himself could have given this order.
A participant in those events: Georgy (Grigory) Sergeevich Agabekov (real name - Arutyunov, 1895-1937) - an employee of the NKVD of the USSR, a defector. The first in a series of high-ranking Soviet foreign intelligence officers who fled to the West in the 30s of the 20th century. In August 1937 he was killed by a special group of the NKVD in France.
Again, there is a version that Blumkin lived before his arrest in the apartment of the People's Commissar of Education A.V. Lunacharsky, a well-known, albeit repentant Trotskyist. Moreover, when the Chekists put him in the car, he tried to escape: he pushed the driver away, jumped into the car and rushed on it at breakneck speed, but the OGPU cars blocked him in one of the narrow Moscow lanes. "How tired I am!" - Blumkin allegedly declared when he was brought to the Lubyanka prison.
During a search of Blumkin's house, they found a letter from Trotsky to his supporters, which spoke about organizing an anti-Stalinist underground and proposed distributing the Trotskyist "Bulletin of the Opposition" in the USSR.
When the interrogations began, Blumkin, hoping to get out and that “friends would help,” joked and acted as if he had fallen into the cell by a misunderstanding. But after he was interrogated with the use of fists and clubs, he immediately confessed to everything ...
The process was not very long. After eighteen days, Blumkin was sentenced to death, which was carried out immediately. Moreover, Menzhinsky and Yagoda voted for the execution, but the head of the INO OGPU Trilisser voted against.
Participant of those events: Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky (Polish: Wacław Menżyński, Mężyński; August 19 (31), 1874, St. Petersburg - May 10, 1934, dacha "Gorki-6", - Russian revolutionary, one of the leaders of the Soviet state security agencies, successor FE Dzerzhinsky as head of the OGPU (1926-1934) In 1938, at the Third Moscow Trial, it was announced that Menzhinsky had been killed by Yagoda's order on the instructions of the right-Trotskyist bloc through improper treatment.
Participant of those events: Genrikh Grigorievich Yagoda (birth name - Enokh Gershenovich Yagoda, November 7, 1891, Rybinsk, Yaroslavl province - March 15, 1938, Moscow. Russian revolutionary, head of the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD), People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR (1934-1936).
Participant in those events: Meer Abramovich Trilisser - Russian revolutionary, one of the leaders of the Soviet state security agencies. Shot on February 2, 1940 at the Kommunarka shooting range, Moscow Region.
Trotsky tried to do everything to make the "Blumkin case" analogous to the Sacco and Vanzetti case in the USSR. But he did not succeed in stirring up revolutionaries in the West against Stalin, as soon as they learned that they had shot Mirbach's murderer, all their sympathy for the victim of the “Stalinist regime” vanished like smoke. And no one could even imagine that it was his execution, carried out in 1929, that is, long before the trials and executions of 1937, would become a kind of prologue to the "great terror".
Interestingly, before his death, Blumkin did not write any letters. And when they shot him, he seemed to shout: "Long live Trotsky!"
Sadly, the fate of one villain was shared by people who were completely innocent, except for ... biological relationship. So, Blumkin's brother, Moisey, lived in Odessa, where he worked in a newspaper. In 1924, he quarreled with his fellow journalist over a typewriter and killed him with a shot from a revolver that his brother had given him. For this murder of an innocent man, Blumkin Jr. received four years in prison, but he did not serve this term either - through the intercession of his brother, his term was reduced to a year. Life cost him something completely different. In 1930, Moisei Blumkin was arrested and shot. Just because brother!
The fate of Blumkin is probably the best illustration of how the Moloch of the revolution devours its own children. True, it remains a mystery how and why such a talkative neurasthenic and swindler for such a long time was "highly trusted". Maybe he knew too much? But then why hadn't he been killed earlier? Would his comrades in leather jackets put his head under the train and that's it ... But no, they "endured" for a long time, although then they still "finished". And it is possible that if he had not worshiped Trotsky, he would have lived until 1937, although he certainly would not have survived, if, like Lyushkov, he had not managed to escape abroad ...
A man among a crowd of people
Who shot the imperial ambassador.
N. S. Gumilyov "My readers"
The great Russian revolution spilled out from its depths at times absolutely amazing characters. So amazing that even the revolution itself hastened to get rid of them, as soon as its stormy stream found itself on the granite shores of the gradual and planned state building. But there, in the stream, these amazing characters managed to do a lot of such accomplishments that normal people would never have thought of. Something normal people still use, preferring not to remember once again where it came from.
We still know about one of these characters mainly either from his own words, or from legends and myths - and this despite the fact that in the 1920s he was one of the most famous people of Soviet Russia. Even the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in its first edition devoted more than thirty lines to it - an unimaginable amount. Then, after the shooting, approved by the "troika" in the person of Menzhinsky, Yagoda and Trilisser (the latter, by the way, was against it), yes - how it was cut off. So cut off that we do not even know for certain the dates of his birth and death.
Yakov Grigorievich Blumkin. He is Simkha-Yankev Gershevich Blumkin, he is Max, he is Isaev, he is Vsevolod Vladimirov, and none of the sane historians will swear that at least one of these names is real.
Revolutionary. Left SR. Terrorist. A convinced Trotskyist (although who can vouch).
Bohemian character, friend of Sergei Yesenin, friend of Mayakovsky and Mariengof. A man who aroused admiration in the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, who was shot by the Bolsheviks.
A participant in the Soviet mission in Persia, where he took Yesenin with him (it was Blumkin that we should be grateful to for "Persian motives" and "You are my Shagan, Shagan").
A participant and, possibly, an organizer (one of the main coordinators, for sure) of the Central Asian expedition of Roerich.
One of the founders of the Soviet intelligence services, among other things, who recruited Leopold Trepper for the first time in Palestine, the future founder and leader of the Red Chapel.
When he was born is unknown.
He himself claimed that on October 8, 1900 in Odessa in the "proletarian family", but there are not very many reasons to believe this cunning man. He also spoke equally convincingly about Chernigov. At least the level of education speaks for something else. Yes, and there is information that he actually lived until 1915 in Lemberg, where he studied at a German gymnasium, from where, by the way, and a brilliant knowledge of German "as a native". Although, as “native”, Yakov Blumkin spoke many more languages: Hebrew, Mongolian, Chinese, Turkish, Arabic, Russian. But he really spoke German so well that even a completely exotic version was walking around that the real Yasha Blumkin, the zhovial Odessa revolutionary and friend of Mishka Yaponchik, the brother of the Odessa playwright Bazilevsky, was buried somewhere near Odessa, and only Dzerzhinsky knows who the character who replaced him Menzhinsky, but by no means "like a father."
In any case, more than one adventure novel can be written about any period in the life of this amazing person, whoever he is.
In Odessa 1917-1918. he, the Left Socialist-Revolutionary, confidant of the "revolutionary dictator" Muravyov, but at the same time befriends Savinkov's associate, poet and English spy Erdman.
Then he moved to Moscow, where he headed the "German department" of the Cheka and killed the German ambassador von Mirbach, provoking a revolt of the Left SRs against the Bolsheviks and thereby contributing to the establishment of the classic Soviet "one-party system".
Then he takes part in the assassination attempts in Kiev - on Hetman Skoropadsky and Field Marshal of the German occupation army Eichhorn. Tries to organize an attempt on Kolchak's life in Siberia.
Once again he finds himself in Ukraine, is captured by the Petliurites, from where by some miracle he escapes - at the cost of health, broken ribs and knocked out front teeth.
According to the official version, he is "confessing" to the Cheka, where he is sentenced to death, replaced by - the official wording! - "atonement in the battles to defend the revolution." After which he finds himself at Trotsky: the head of the personal guard of the "Lion of the Revolution", his personal assistant and literary editor of his numerous works.
After the civil, he appeared before the "inter-party court" in the "case of the Left Social Revolutionaries", but the court never made any final decision on his case.
In 1920 Blumkin was sent to Persia, where he took his friend with him.
Sergei Yesenin. In the meantime, the poet is inspired, Blumkin does not waste time: he participates in the overthrow of Kuchek Khan and promotes the coming to power of Khan Ehsanullah, who was supported by the local "left" and the communists. Six were wounded in the battles - attention! - times. He took it calmly. Participated in the creation of the Iranian Communist Party, was a member of its Central Committee and Military Commissioner. Many of his comrades-in-arms were convinced that Blumkin had at least a very deep professional military education: it was there, in Persia, that they first dully talked about the fact that someone else, much more experienced, was hiding under the name of a "boy from a Jewish shtetl" , an educated and well-trained comrade.
In October 1921, Blumkin under the pseudonym Isaev (hello, "young Stirlitz"!) Went to Tallinn as part of the investigation of the "Gokhran case". We will not repeat ourselves: it was these events that formed the basis of the famous novel by Yulian Semenov "Diamonds for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat."
After that, he becomes the official adjutant of the People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, Leon Trotsky. But he doesn't stay there for a long time: an adventurous streak throws him over to Dzerzhinsky, who recommends him as an agent of the Foreign Department of the OGPU.
The adventure romance continues.
Resident in Palestine.
Political representative of the OGPU in Transcaucasia, member of the board of the Transcaucasian Cheka.
Afghanistan.
The Pamirs, where he works with the Ismailis and penetrates under the guise of an Ismaili dervish (the eastern languages, we mentioned this, Blumkin-Isaev knew perfectly) to India. Where he is arrested by the British British police, but escapes from prison, thereby causing a decent scandal in His Majesty's special services. Because when escaping, the Soviet resident also managed to take with him as a souvenir British military maps of India, as well as a briefcase with the documents of a British secret agent, according to some rumors, “treating” him with a bottle to the head during interrogation and changing into his suit.
And, of course, the Central Asian expedition of Nicholas Roerich is a separate chapter around which there are still too many unverified rumors and conflicting information. So much so that we simply will not dare to write about it now - most of the official data is still classified.
Then there was Mongolia, and China with Tibet, and again India, and Constantinople (from where, as a resident of the OGPU, he oversaw the entire Middle East), the recruitment of Jacob Ehrlich and the future leader of the great "Red Capella" Leopold Trepper. And in parallel, while in Soviet Russia, continued friendship with writers and poets - from Mayakovsky to Mandelstam. Here are just a former white officer and also a native Odessa citizen Valentin Kataev for some reason did not like him very much and brought him out in the post-war years in the magnificent story "Werther has already been written" in the caricatured role of Naum the Fearless, who finished badly and "licked the red boots of his executioners."
In fact, Blumkin, who restored ties with the disgraced Trotsky and was shot for this, behaved somewhat differently during the execution. According to the testimony of the old Chekist Georgy Agabekov, Blumkin “passed away calmly, like a man. Throwing away the blindfold from his eyes, he himself ordered the Red Army men: "For the revolution, plie!" The exact date of the execution of Yakov Blumkin, as well as the exact date of birth, is not reliably known to this day.
What can be added here?
And nothing needs to be added. This biography in itself is a monument to that era, which alone could make such biographies. Now they don't do that. Or do we just don’t know about them? ..
For those who studied in the Soviet school and did not skip history lessons, the name of Yakov Blumkin is associated with the assassination of the German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach. It was he, along with Nikolai Andreev, on July 6, 1918, on the instructions of the leadership of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, killed the German ambassador to Soviet Russia von Mirbach in order to disrupt the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty signed by the Lenin government with Germany and ignite a “revolutionary war.” For a normal Soviet schoolboy, it was also completely understand that after that Yakov Blyumin was to be shot as an enemy of the Soviet regime, although the school textbooks did not say about this.
Now, those who want to know the true history and not mythology know that the textbook did not say about the further fate of Blumkin, for a banal reason, everything that was connected with him was a big state secret.
This is what the knowledgeable Wikopedia writes about him.
Yakov Grigorievich Blumkin (Simkha-Yankev Gershevich Blumkin aliases: Isaev, Max, Vladimirov; date of birth February 27, 1900, shot by order of the OGPU Collegium of November 3, 1929) - Russian revolutionary and terrorist, Soviet security officer, intelligence officer and statesman, adventurer ... One of the founders of the Soviet intelligence services.
Was born on February 27, 1900 in Odessa. Father, Girsha Samoilovich Blumkin, was a clerk in a grocery store, mother, Khaya-Livshi Blumkina, was a housewife.
In 1914, after graduating from the Odessa Jewish Theological School (Talmudtor), Blumkin worked as an electrician, in a tram depot, in a theater, at a cannery of brothers Avrich and Izrailson. Brother Lev was an anarchist, and Sister Rosa was a Social Democrat. Yakov's older brothers, Isai and Lev, were journalists for Odessa newspapers, and his brother Nathan was recognized as a playwright (pseudonym "Bazilevsky"). Participated in the Jewish self-defense units against pogroms in Odessa. He joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
In November 1917, Blumkin joined a detachment of sailors, took part in battles with units of the Ukrainian Central Rada. During the revolutionary events in Odessa in 1918, he participated in the expropriation of the values \u200b\u200bof the State Bank. There were rumors that he appropriated a part of the expropriated for himself. In January 1918, Blumkin, together with Moisey Vinnitsky (Mishka "Yaponchik"), took an active part in the formation of the 1st Volunteer Iron Detachment in Odessa. Enters into the credibility of the dictator of revolutionary Odessa, Mikhail Muravyov.
In the same years, in Odessa, Blumkin met the poet A. Erdman. Already in April 1918, Erdman, disguised as the leader of the Lithuanian anarchists, Birze, put under his control part of the armed anarchist detachments of Moscow and at the same time worked for the Cheka, collecting information about German influence in Russia for the Entente countries. Erdman probably helped Blumkin arrange his further career in the Cheka.
In May 1918, Blumkin arrived in Moscow. The leadership of the Party of Left SRs sent Blumkin to the Cheka as head of the department for combating international espionage. Since June 1918, he was the head of the counterintelligence department for monitoring the security of the embassies and their possible criminal activities. Can you represent the head of the Cheka department at the age of 18?
Being the head of the "German" department of the Cheka, Blumkin appeared at the German embassy on July 6, 1918, allegedly to discuss the fate of a distant relative of Ambassador Count von Mirbach, who was arrested by the Cheka. He was accompanied by an employee of the same Cheka department, Socialist-Revolutionary Nikolai Andreev. At about 14:40, Blumkin fired several shots at the ambassador, and Andreev, fleeing, threw two bombs into the living room. The ambassador died on the spot. The criminals fled. Boris Bazhanov, a former secretary of Stalin who fled to the West, describes these events in his memoirs as follows:
“About the murder of Mirbach, Blumkin's cousin told me that the case was not quite as Blumkin describes: when Blumkin and those accompanying him were in Mirbach's office, Blumkin threw a bomb and with extreme haste threw himself out the window, hanging with his pants on the iron fence in a very uncomfortable position. The sailor accompanying him unhurriedly slammed Mirbakh, took Blumkin off the grate, loaded him into a truck and took him away. The sailor very soon died somewhere on the fronts of the civil war, and Blumkin was outlawed by the Bolsheviks. But very soon he went over to the side of the Bolsheviks, betraying the organization of the Left SRs, was accepted into the party and into the check, and became famous for his participation in the brutal suppression of the Georgian uprising. "
The assassination of Mirbach served as a signal for an armed uprising of the Left SRs against the Soviet government, led by the Bolsheviks. In Soviet historiography, these events were called a rebellion. After the failure of the rebellion, Blumkin under the name of Belov hid in hospitals in Moscow, Rybinsk and Kimr, then under the name of Grigory Vishnevsky he worked in the Kimrinsky Commissariat of Agriculture.
Since September 1918 Blumkin has been in Ukraine. Without the knowledge of the leadership of the Left SRs, he makes his way to Moscow, and from there to Belgorod - to the border with Ukraine. In November of the same year, at the time of the general uprising against the Ukrainian hetman Pavel Skoropadsky and the Austro-German occupiers, Blumkin found his party comrades in Kiev and joined the Socialist-Revolutionary underground work. He is involved in the preparation of a terrorist act against Hetman Skoropadsky and the attempt on the life of Field Marshal Eichhorn of the German occupation forces in Ukraine.
According to some reports, in December 1918 - March 1919, Blumkin was the secretary of the Kiev underground city committee of the PLSR.
On the instructions of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (together with the Ukrainian anarchists-Makhnovists), he was involved in the preparation of an assassination attempt on the Supreme Ruler of Russia, the leader of the White Guard movement, Admiral Kolchak. The need for this has disappeared due to the arrest of Kolchak by the Left SRs in Irkutsk.
In March 1919, near Kremenchug, he was taken prisoner by the Petliurites, who severely beat Blumkin, in particular, knocked out his front teeth. After a month of treatment in April 1919, Blumkin confessed to the Cheka in Kiev. For the murder of Mirbach, Blumkin was sentenced to death by a military tribunal. But, largely thanks to the People's Commissariat for Military Affairs Lev Trotsky, the Special Investigative Commission, in agreement with the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and with the approval of the Chairman of the Cheka Felix Dzerzhinsky, decided on an amnesty for Blumkin, replacing the death penalty with "atonement in the battles to defend the revolution." This decision was also facilitated by the fact that he betrayed many of his former comrades, for which he was sentenced to death by the Left SRs. 3 attempts were made on Blumkin, he was seriously wounded, but managed to escape from Kiev.
From 1919 on the Southern Front (chief of staff and acting commander of the 79th brigade) and as part of the Caspian Flotilla.
In 1920, Blumkin appeared before an inter-party court in cases related to the Left SR uprising, which included anarchists, left SRs, maximalists, and Borotbists. The comradely court was headed by Karelin, a former member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR, a mystic, leader of the Russian anarchist-communists. Blumkin's trial dragged on for two weeks, but never made a final decision. Since 1920 - a member of the RCP (b).
In the secretariat of L. Trotsky, he served as the head of the personal security of the creator of the Red Army.
In 1920-1921 - at the special courses of the Military Academy of the Red Army, after which he was again transferred to the organs of the GPU.
In May 1920, the Volga-Caspian military flotilla under the command of Fyodor Raskolnikov and Sergo Ordzhonikidze was sent to Anzeli (Persia), with the aim of returning Russian ships that had been taken there by the White Guards evacuated from Russian ports. As a result of the ensuing hostilities, the White Guards and the British troops occupying Anzeli retreated. Taking advantage of this situation, in early June, armed detachments of the revolutionary movement of the Dzhengali people under the command of Mirza Kuchek Khan seized the city of Rasht, the center of the Gilan ostan, after which the Gilan Soviet Republic was proclaimed here.
Blumkin is sent to Persia, where he participates in the overthrow of Kuchek Khan and promotes the coming to power of Khan Ehsanullah, who was supported by the local "left" and the communists. In battles he was wounded six times. After the coup, Blumkin participated in the creation of the Iranian Communist Party on the basis of the Social Democratic Party "Adalat", became a member of its Central Committee and military commissar of the headquarters of the Gilan Red Army .. He represented Persia at the First Congress of the oppressed peoples of the East, convened by the Bolsheviks in Baku.
In Persia, Blumkin, in particular, meets Yakov Serebryansky, assists in the organization of his employee of the Special Department of the Iranian Red Army
Returning to Moscow, Blumkin published a book about Dzerzhinsky and, on the personal recommendation of the chief security officer, joined the RCP (b) in 1920. Sent by Trotsky to study at the Academy of the General Staff of the Red Army in the eastern branch, where they trained embassies and intelligence agents. At the Academy, Blumkin added knowledge of Turkish, Arabic, Chinese and Mongolian languages, extensive military, economic and political knowledge to the knowledge of Hebrew.
In 1920-1921, Blumkin was the chief of staff of the 79th brigade, and later - the brigade commander, planned and carried out punitive actions against the rebellious peasants of the Lower Volga region during the suppression of the Elan uprising. In the fall of 1920, Blumkin commanded the 61st brigade, directed against the troops of Baron Ungern.
In the fall of 1921, Blumkin is investigating embezzlements in Gokhran. In October 1921, under the pseudonym Isaev (taken by him by the name of his grandfather), he went to Revel (Tallinn) under the guise of a jeweler and, acting as a provocateur, revealed the foreign connections of the Gokhran workers. There is a version that it was this episode in Blumkin's activity that was taken by Yulian Semyonov as the basis for the plot of the book “Diamonds for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
In 1922, after graduating from the Academy, Blumkin became the official adjutant of the people's commissar for military and naval affairs, L. D. Trotsky. He carried out especially important assignments and became close friends with the People's Commissar. Blumkin edited the first volume of Trotsky's program book "How the Revolution Armed" (1923 edition). In the fall of 1923, at the suggestion of Dzerzhinsky, Blumkin became an employee of the Foreign Department (INO) of the OGPU. In November of the same year, by decision of the INO leadership, Blumkin was appointed a resident of illegal intelligence in Palestine. He invites Yakov Serebryansky to go with him as his deputy. In December 1923, they leave for Jaffa, having received the assignment of V. Menzhinsky to collect information about the plans of England and France in the Middle East. In June 1924, Blumkin was recalled to Moscow, and Serebryansky remained resident.
At the same time, Blumkin was brought in for conspiratorial work in the Comintern.
In 1924 he worked in Transcaucasia as a political representative of the OGPU and a member of the board of the Transcaucasian Cheka. At the same time, he was an assistant to the commander of the OGPU troops in the Transcaucasus and an authorized representative of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade to combat smuggling. Blumkin participated in the suppression of the anti-Soviet uprising in Georgia, and also commanded the storming of the city of Bagram-Tepe, which was captured by Persian troops. Participated in the border commissions for the settlement of disputes between the USSR, Turkey and Persia.
Blumkin, who knew Eastern languages, secretly went to Afghanistan, where he tried to find a connection in the Pamirs with the Ismaili sect, who revered as a living god their leader Aga Khan, who lived at that time in Pune (India). With the Ismaili caravan, Blumkin, depicting a dervish, entered India. However, there he was arrested by the British police. Blumkin escaped from prison safely.
There is a version that Blumkin, disguised as a lama, participated in the Himalayan expedition of Roerich. In the records of Blumkin's interrogation after his arrest, there are materials about this expedition to Tibet.
In 1926, Blumkin was sent as a representative of the OGPU and Chief Instructor for State Security of the Mongolian Republic. In particular, he is credited with the murder of P. Ye. Shchetinkin, an instructor of the State Military Guard of the Mongolian People's Republic, and a secretary of the party cell. Performed special missions in China (in particular,
in 1926-1927 he was a military adviser to General Feng Yuxiang), Tibet and India. In 1927 he was recalled to Moscow due to friction with the Mongol leadership.
In 1928, Blumkin became a resident of the OGPU in Constantinople, from where he oversees the entire Middle East. On instructions from the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, he was organizing a resident network in Palestine. He works either under the guise of the pious owner of a laundry in Jaffa Gurfinkel, or under the guise of the Azerbaijani Jewish merchant Yakub Sultanov. Blumkin recruited the Viennese antiquarian Jacob Ehrlich, and with his help set up a residency, undercover as a second-hand bookstore.
In addition, Blumkin established the export of Jewish manuscripts and antiques from the USSR through the Cheka channels. The OGPU did an enormous amount of work in the western regions of the USSR in collecting and confiscating ancient Torah scrolls, as well as 330 works of medieval Jewish literature. In order to prepare material for Blumkin's successful trade, OGPU expeditions were sent to the Jewish townships of Proskurov, Berdichev, Medzhibozh, Bratslav, Tulchin with the aim of confiscating ancient Jewish books. Blumkin himself traveled to Odessa, Rostov-on-Don and Ukrainian townships, where he examined the libraries of synagogues and Jewish prayer houses. Books were even seized from state libraries and museums.
In Palestine, Blumkin met Leopold Trepper, the future head of the anti-fascist organization and the Soviet intelligence network in Nazi Germany, known as the Red Chapel. He was deported by the British mandate authorities.
In the memoirs of my colleague at work Yu.A. Labas, whose family knew Blumkin well, Blumkin's failure in Palestine is described.
- In Haifa, Blumkin went to start a revolution among the local Arabs - under the guise of a Jewish emigrant with a false belly and glued sideways. The English girl fell overboard and Blumkin, forgetting about makeup, rushed to save her. They wanted to present for a medal for the rescue of drowning people, but the sidepieces came off, the pillow on the belly got wet and slipped off. British intelligence became interested in the strange passenger. The operation failed, and Blumkin narrowly escaped being shot. He was forgiven and sent as a resident to Istanbul.
In 1929, on the instructions of Stalin, he unsuccessfully tried to assassinate the former Stalinist secretary B. G. Bazhanov, who had fled abroad. In the summer of 1929, Blumkin came to Moscow to report on his work in the Middle East. His report to the members of the Central Committee of the party on the situation in the Middle East was approved by the members of the Central Committee and the head of the OGPU V. Menzhinsky, who even invites Blumkin to a home dinner as a sign of affection. Blumkin successfully passes the next party purge, thanks to the excellent description of the head of the foreign department of the OGPU M. Trilisser. The party committee of the OGPU described Blumkin as a "trusted comrade."
Blumkin secretly established contact with Trotsky, exiled from the USSR. In 1929 their conversation took place. In a conversation with Trotsky, Blumkin expressed his doubts about the correctness of Stalin's policy and asked for advice: should he remain in the OGPU, or go underground. Trotsky convinced Blumkin that, while working for the OGPU, he would be more useful to the opposition. At the same time, Trotsky expressed doubts about how a Trotskyist, whose views were known, could stay in the organs of the OGPU. Blumkin replied that the authorities consider him an irreplaceable expert in the field of sabotage. It is likely that Blumkin was establishing contacts with Trotsky on the instructions of the OGPU.
So we see that the biography of Yakov Blumkin is completely exceptional and by the age of 29, this person has gone through what is enough for a hundred other biographies.
So why was Blumkin shot in 1929? Officially for the connection with Trotsky.
The same Wikopedia reports that Blumkin was arrested after Elizaveta Zarubina, who was following him in Istanbul, (a future colonel and participant in the extraction of US atomic secrets), informed the OGPU about his ties with Trotsky. Blumkin tried to escape, but was arrested after a car chase with gunfire on the streets of Moscow. Blumkin was tortured, beaten during interrogations. On November 3, 1929, Blumkin's case was considered at the OGPU court session (judged by the "troika" consisting of Menzhinsky, Yagoda and Trilisser). Blumkin was charged under Articles 58-10 and 58-4 of the RSFSR Criminal Code. Menzhinsky and Yagoda were in favor of the death penalty, Trilisser was against it, but remained in the minority.
According to one of the versions, Blumkin exclaimed during the execution "Long live Comrade Trotsky!" On the other he sang: "Get up, branded by a curse, the whole world of hungry and slaves!" Georgy Agabekov, in his book Cheka at Work, writes with reference to an unnamed colleague in the Cheka that “[Blumkin] passed away calmly, like a man. Throwing away the blindfold from his eyes, he himself commanded the Red Army: "For the revolution, plie!" "As the exact date of the execution of Blumkin, November 3 and 8, as well as December 12, 1929 are given
There are many oddities in this execution. As for members of other parties and former ruling classes, the Bolsheviks began to destroy them immediately after coming to power. In relation to the oppositionists in their own party, in 1929 they were not yet shot, but sent to exile in prison. Moreover, among the exiled oppositionists there were people of a much higher position than Blumkin. The destruction of the old Bolsheviks and any opposition will begin later in the 30s.
In the 1920s, only two and a half months - from the second half of November 1927 to the end of January 1928 - 2,288 people were expelled from the party for belonging to the "Left Opposition" (another 970 oppositionists were expelled before November 15, 1927). The cleansing of the opposition from the party continued throughout 1928. Most of the expelled were sent to administrative exile in distant regions of the country. In mid-January 1928, the leader of the opposition, L. D. Trotsky, was exiled to Alma-Ata, and in 1929 he was exiled abroad. Another leader, G. Ye. Zinoviev, was also sent into exile in 1928, but in the same year he repented and "disarmed", was reinstated in the party and was appointed rector of Kazan University, and then returned to work in Moscow.
Here is what the BULLETIN OF THE OPPOSITION (BOLSHEVIKOV-LENINTSEV) published by Trotsky after his expulsion from the USSR wrote.
- Blumkin was not shot in 1918 for leading participation in an armed uprising against Soviet power, but he was shot in 1929 because he, selflessly serving the cause of the October Revolution, disagreed, however, on the most important issues with the Stalin faction and considered it his duty to spread the views of the Bolshevik-Leninists (opposition).
Isn't it strange. Other, much higher-ranking opposition figures are only removed from high posts and exiled, while Blumkin is shot.
In the same bulletin it was indicated that, until the last hour, Blumkin remained in responsible Soviet work. How could he hold on to it, being an oppositionist? This is explained by the nature of his work: it had a completely individual character. Blumkin did not have or almost did not have to deal with party cells, participate in the discussion of party issues, etc. This does not mean that he concealed his views. On the contrary, to both Menzhinsky and Trilliser, the former head of the foreign department of the GPU, Blumkin said that his sympathies were on the side of the opposition, but that, of course, he was ready, like any oppositionist, to carry out his responsible work in the service of the October Revolution. Menzhinsky and Trilliser considered Blumkin irreplaceable, and this was not a mistake. They left him at work, which he carried out to the end.
Blumkin did indeed find Comrade Trotsky in Constantinople. As we have already mentioned above, Blumkin was personally closely connected with Comrade Trotsky, his work in the secretariat. He prepared, in particular, one of the military volumes of Comrade Trotsky (as stated in the preface to this volume). Blumkin came to Comrade Trotsky in Constantinople to find out how he assessed the situation and to check whether he was doing the right thing while remaining in the service of the government, which expels, exiles and imprisons his closest associates. LD Trotsky answered him that he was doing, of course, absolutely right, in fulfilling his revolutionary duty - not in relation to the Stalinist government, which had usurped the rights of the party, but in relation to the October Revolution.
In one of Yaroslavsky's articles, there was a reference to the fact that in the summer Comrade Trotsky had a conversation with one visitor and predicted to him, as it were, the imminent and inevitable death of the Soviet regime. Of course the despicable sycophant is lying. But from a comparison of facts and dates, it is clear to us that we are talking about a conversation between Comrade Trotsky and Blumkin. To his question about the compatibility of his work with his belonging to the opposition, Comrade Trotsky, among other things, told him that his expulsion abroad, like the imprisonment of other comrades, did not change our main line; that in a moment of danger the opposition will be in the forefront; that in difficult times Stalin would have to call them on, as Tsereteli called on the Bolsheviks against Kornilov. In this regard, he said: "as if it weren't too late." Apparently Blumkin, after his arrest, presented this conversation as proof of the opposition's true sentiments and intentions: one must not forget that Comrade Trotsky was expelled on charges of preparing an armed struggle against Soviet power! Through Blumkin, an information letter to like-minded people was sent to Moscow, which was based on the same views that were set forth in a number of published articles by Comrade Trotsky: the repression of the Stalinists against us does not mean a change in the class nature of the state, but only prepares and facilitates such a change; our path remains, as before, the path of reform, not revolution; an irreconcilable struggle for their views must be calculated for a long time.
Later, a message was received that Blumkin was arrested and that the letter sent through him fell into the hands of Stalin.
The shooting of Blumkin was such an extraordinary event that the Bulletin devoted materials to him in several issues. For example, one of them published a letter with the following content.
Moscow, December 25.
You, of course, know about the execution of Blumkin, as well as the fact that it was done at the personal solicitation of Stalin. This dastardly act of revenge is already worrying quite wide party circles. But they are worried on the sly. They feed on rumors. One of the sources of the rumor is Radek. His nervous talkativeness is well known. Now he is completely demoralized, like most capitulators. But while in I. N. Smirnov, for example, this is expressed in depression, Radek, on the contrary, seeks a way out in the spread of rumors and gossip, which should prove the deep sincerity of his repentance. Undoubtedly, Yaroslavsky uses this quality of Radek in order to circulate the proper rumors through him. All this must be noted in order to understand what follows.
With reference to Radek, the following version is being circulated: when he arrived in Moscow, Blumkin first of all sought out Radek, whom he had met more often than others in recent years, and in whom he was used to seeing one of the leaders of the opposition. Blumkin wanted to be informed and to understand, in particular, to understand the reasons for Radek's surrender. Of course, it never entered his head that in the person of Radek the opposition already had a bitter enemy who, having lost the last remnants of moral equilibrium, would not stop at any vileness. Here it is also necessary to take into account both Blumkin's characteristic inclination towards moral idealization of people and his close relations with Radek in the past. Blumkin conveyed to Radek about LD's thoughts and plans in the sense of the need for further struggle for his views. Radek, in response, demanded, in his own words, that Blumkin immediately go to the GPU and tell about everything. Some comrades say that Radek threatened Blumkin, otherwise, to report him immediately. This is very likely given the current mood of this devastated hysteria. We have no doubt that this was the case. After that, the official version says, Blumkin "repented", appeared at the GPU and handed over the letter from Comrade Trotsky. Not only that: he himself allegedly demanded to be shot (literally!). After that, Stalin decided to "respect" his request and ordered Menzhinsky and Yagoda to shoot Blumkin. Of course, Stalin had previously passed this decision through the Politburo in order to bind the repentant Rights. Needless to say, they completely went to meet him.
How should this official version be understood? Her deceit strikes her eyes. We have no reliable information, since Blumkin, as far as we still know, did not have time to transfer anything to freedom. But the actual course of events follows quite clearly, at least in basic outline, from the whole situation. After a conversation with Radek, Blumkin saw himself as a devotee. He had no choice but to appear at the GPU, all the more since L. D.'s letter, in terms of its content, could not, of course, but be a refutation of all the abominations that were spread here to justify the expulsion. Did the letter contain any addresses, etc.? We think that, no, since no one was decisively hurt among those comrades who could have served Blumkin for communication.
Has Comrade Blumkin "repented"? If he had really "repented", that is, had joined Radek's position, then he could not have failed to name those comrades for whom Comrade Trotsky's letter was intended. But then the author of these lines could not have survived either. Meanwhile, I repeat: no one was arrested. Finally, if Comrade Blumkin had "repented," the GPU, of course, would have been in no hurry to satisfy Blumkin's "request" to shoot him, but would have used him for completely different purposes: after all, the case was quite exceptional. There is no doubt that such an attempt was really made by the GPU and met with resistance from Blumkin. Then Stalin ordered to shoot him. And when an alarming whisper went through the game, Yaroslavsky let the above version through Radek. This is how the case appears to us here.
Stalin could not help but understand that the execution of Blumkin would not pass without leaving a trace in the party, and in the end would inflict cruel harm on the "rude and disloyal" usurper. But the thirst for revenge is stronger than him. A story has long circulated in the party about how Stalin, back in 1923, on a summer evening in Zubalov (near Moscow), having opened his heart to Dzerzhinsky and Kamenev, said: “Choose a victim, prepare a thorough blow, take revenge mercilessly, and then go to bed. .. There is nothing better in life ". Bukharin also hinted at this conversation ("the Stalinist philosophy of sweet revenge") in his last year's story about the struggle against the Stalinists. Books of L. D., his articles, and his autobiography appear abroad. It is necessary to take revenge. Stalin arrested L.D.'s daughter without the slightest reason.But since she is seriously ill with pneumathorax, the Politburo did not dare (they say, despite Stalin's insistence) to keep her in prison, especially since Comrade Trotsky's second daughter died in similar conditions a year and a half ago from tuberculosis. We limited ourselves to the fact that the husband of L. D.'s daughter, Platon Volkov, was sent into exile two months ago. The husband of her deceased daughter, M. Nevelson, has been in prison for a long time. But this revenge is too common and therefore insufficient.
So the official version of Yakov Blumkin was shot for his connection with Trotsky and for bringing a letter to the USSR with instructions for the Trotskyists.
But as we see, people who knew about the contents of the letter do not confirm this, since, firstly, there were no instructions in the letter, and secondly, the person to whom the letter was addressed was not hurt. Proceeding from this, the thought suggests itself that Stalin's revenge and the death sentence were not connected at all with the letter and connections with Trotsky.
There are several versions of the arrest of Blumkin, and one of them is described in the memoirs of my colleague, the famous biologist Yu.A. Labas, with whom we worked in the same laboratory.
He learned these facts from his mother, Raisa Idelson, in the apartment that Blumkin had visited before his arrest.
“At the end of October 1929, in the middle of the night in his mother’s apartment on Myasnitskaya, the bell rang. Mother ran to the door:“ Who is there? ”-“ Open it! It's me, Yasha Blumkin. They are chasing me! ” They let him in with confusion and fear. Who is chasing? Why? After all, everyone was afraid of Blumkin, knowing that he was an important Chekist.
Entering, Blumkin confusedly said that he had brought some Trotskyist instructions: an appeal to the opposition and that a certain Major Stein, a subordinate of the commander of Tukhachevsky, rummaging through the archives of the tsarist secret police, came across a very strange piece of paper. One of the members of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party scribbled a denunciation to the police against another member of the Central Committee, a Duma deputy and at the same time a provocateur Malinovsky. That he is actually engaged in anti-state activities and does not cope well with his direct (provocative !?) duties.
By all indications, the author of the denunciation to the secret police was none other than Koba himself, aka Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili!
Blumkin rashly blurted out everything to his friend - Karl Radek (the Poles called him Karl Kradek, in Polish "Karl the Thief") and was about to take his scout papers to fly back to Turkey in an airplane to transfer a photocopy of the find to Lev Davidovich Trotsky, who was then whether in Istanbul, or on the Princes' Islands. "If the documents entrusted to me reach Trotsky, here the power will turn over!" Radek, however, immediately laid down Blumkin, and now everything was gone. Blumkin rushed about the huge apartment: "Do not open the door to anyone. I will shoot!" Then he called the doctor Grigory Lazarevich Isserson: "Grinya, get me poison!" - "Why do you need?" - "I failed the operation, they are chasing me, I am threatened with execution!" - "So you have a gun on your side" - "From a pistol I can't "-" I could have done others many times. Why can't you yourself? " - “I can't myself” - “And I don't persecute people, I treat them,” Isserson answered in fright and sleepiness and hung up. Blumkin, like a captured animal, rushed about the apartment: “Live! I want to live! Even a cat, but live! " Then he turned to the students: "Girls, do you want to see what I have in my suitcase?" Some of the students reached for the suitcase, but my mother flatly forbade: "We, girls, fools, will start torturing, we will blurt out everything, and if we don't know anything, then the demand from us is not great." - "Raya, you have no Falk's documents left?" - "Of course you don't, and he doesn't look like you in the photo" - "Live! Live! Even a cat, but live! " In the morning after a sleepless night, Blumkin called a certain Liza (Liza Gorskaya, Blumkin's mistress and an OGPU spy assigned to him, in the future GRU Colonel Zarubin): “Liza, come to Myasnitskaya and bring my overcoat from Arbat - it's cold outside (there was an apartment on the Arbat Blumkina. That is naivety!) I hope you will come ONE? " The interlocutor, apparently, protested, they say, of course, I will come alone. Soon Blumkin left, warning: "Don't open it to anyone but me, I'll be back soon." He did not notice how before that the husband of Eva Rozengolts, journalist Levin, who later died in the Finnish war, quietly came to the apartment. Having learned that Blumkin was in the apartment, he ran to the toilet a couple of times (“bear disease”) and fled in horror. His further actions are not known to me, except for the fact that he survived the Yezhovism!
Blumkin never returned. Boots knocked loudly at the door: "Open: OGPU!" They entered: "Where are Blumkin's things here?" The students silently showed. Someone mumbled: “He is sick. His head is in disorder.” “And we came to heal! Show what's in his suitcase? " The students protested in unison. Nevertheless, the Chekists opened the suitcase and showed ... a bundle of dollars. The next day, all the students were summoned to the OGPU to see Meer Abramovich Trilisser. We took a recognizance not to leave. By the way, leaving “for an overcoat”, Blumkin left his chic leather coat of “Chekist” cut in the Falk's workshop. Many, many years later, his mother and aunt gave it to the former director of GOSET, Aron Yakovlevich Plomper, who had returned from prison. And a week later Tsatsulin entered the apartment (he once came to see my mother in front of me after the war in a gray Foreign Ministry uniform): “Girls, you will live. Blumkin before being shot (he was killed on November 3, 1929. Before his death, he shouted: "Long live Trotsky!" - and began to sing "Internationale"). He said that he burst into your apartment, threatening with a weapon, and did not communicate with any of you. By the way, he suddenly asked his executioners: "Do you think a report about my execution will be published in Izvestia?"
Wonderful, but none of those who saw so close the egg with the needle of Kashchei the Immortal was later killed. Everyone waited for arrest and execution until the last day of their lives, even after the XX Congress. Trilisser was soon kicked out of the OGPU, and much later, on February 2, 1940, he was shot. All three heads of the Foreign Department of the OGPU-NKVD, who held this post after Trilisser, were also removed from their posts and then shot. Major Stein, his military commanders and almost the entire senior command of the Red Army, primarily the participants in the civil war, were also shot.
But what is the fate of the contents of the notorious Blumkin's suitcase? ”“ Anyone who opened it and looked through the explosive documents lying in it, undoubtedly, was waiting for death. I do not exclude that the Chekists hurried to shove the briefcase (Major Stein's folder?) Into some safe and were simply afraid to open or destroy in front of witnesses. The risk of any kind of action with the "suitcase", given the then bureaucratic reporting and mutual spy in the OGPU, was equal. And during the civil war in Spain, a large resident of the foreign department of the NKVD, Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov (Lev Lazarevich Feldbin), went there. He was in 1938. fled from there to the United States and took with him some documents, which he put in the bank and bequeathed to publish 40 years after his death, which followed in 1973. The condition was the safety of the old parents who remained in the USSR. It is known that Orlov's parents, unlike thousands of other family members of "enemies of the people", were not touched. And our spy Mikhail Aleksandrovich Feoktistov, already under Khrushchev, met with Orlov in the United States and received assurances that the documents would not be made public earlier than the above-mentioned date.
In the summer of 1948, my mother was summoned to the KGB, interrogated about her friend Sergei Lukich Kolegayev, who had been arrested shortly before. The boorish-sadistic tone of the interrogation left my mother not the slightest doubt that a concentration camp or execution awaited her. But the investigator suddenly asked: "Have you ever been to our organization before?" Mom replied that she was in 1929. from Trilisser in the Blumkin case. The investigator suddenly changed his face, ran out of the room, and an hour later, my mother was released, even taken home by car. My aunt and I no longer hoped to see her. 48 hours have passed since the arrest! Mother's friend Eva Rozengolts was also arrested in 1948 and sentenced to 10 years in camps for kinship with her brother, "an agent of many foreign intelligence services, Kazimir Rozengolts." They interrogated about my brother, about Falk, about her friends, including, allegedly, a "long-shot spy", my mother Raisa Idelson, about her late husband, but never mind about the terrible night in our apartment with Ya. G. Blumkin. In 1957, as usual in those years, Eva Pavlovna was completely rehabilitated.
As you can see, the rumor about the Blumkin suitcase then, like a terrible secret, in a whisper in your ear, spread very widely in the ranks of the OGPU-NKVD-KGB. They knew practically everything and everyone tried to convince themselves and those around them that they knew nothing, did not hear, did not believe, and in general this is absolutely impossible in our country. This is called “taboo.” Everything that is somehow connected with Major Stein, Blumkin, the fate and contents of the ominous suitcase, the obsessive fear of the ex-provocateur of the tsarist secret police, the paranoid leader, is tabooed. Perhaps, all of Stalin's paranoia developed on this basis of insane fear of exposure of the former provocateur-paid agent of the tsarist secret police?
There were surprisingly many such in the ranks of revolutionaries. The head of the fighting organization of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Evno Azef, who managed to die “over the hill” in his bed; executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Malinovsky (before his death, he warned that the Central Committee has other, besides him, former secret police agents!); hanged by the Socialist-Revolutionary Rutenburg in a cupboard in Ozerki near St. Petersburg, priest Gapon. These three are just the most famous. The author of "Garikov", the poet Igor Guberman, told me that his uncle, the aforementioned Rutenberg, in the days when Lenin and Zinoviev, after the July mutiny, fled from St. Petersburg to the Razliv station, hid there in a hut, suggested Kerensky to find and hang both of them. Kerensky was horrified: "Our revolution was not accomplished for such things." Rutenberg, after that conversation, gave up on all Russian affairs and considered it a blessing to hit the road to Palestine forever.
It was from Yuli Aleksandrovich in the early 1980s that I first heard that Stalin was an informant for the tsarist secret police. In those years it was unheard of to read or hear that, and it was simply dangerous. Since then, a huge amount of literature has been published on this topic. Only in my library there are read dozens of biographies of Stalin written by different authors. Reading these biographies and other literature dedicated to those times, I wanted to understand what could explain such a bloody policy towards my own people.
Different authors offer different explanations for the reasons that, in their opinion, led to such dire consequences. Among the most common are the mental illness "paranoia", the circumstances of the country's development, the fight against the country's enemies, character traits, fear of exposure as a former secret police agent, the desire to stay in power.
Now, decades later, we know that many suspicions about this side of Stalin's activities arose before the revolution, but almost all of these people quickly disappeared without a trace. The Okhrana archives also disappeared, because the first thing that the revolutionaries did after the coup was to destroy the police archives and the police themselves.
Here is what he writes in his article "Stalin and the Security: WHAT DO THE DOCUMENTS SAY?"
Doctor of Historical Sciences Serebryakova Z.L.
In the days of my childhood in the house of my father Leonid Serebryakov and stepfather Grigory Sokolnikov, recalling the past, they tried to mention less and more the more and more glorified Joseph Stalin.
The prominent Menshevik Boris Nikolaevsky noted that in the 1920s the old Bolsheviks, speaking of Stalin, recalled not only about expropriations (for which he was expelled from the then united Social Democratic Party), but also about blackmail and extortion from Baku oil owners, about the murders of party workers who were outraged by this activity, about the denunciations of the tsarist police on their opponents
In 1988, during the time of Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, after the rehabilitation of my father, who died in 1937, Leonid Petrovich Serebryakov (a member of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee, secretary of the Central Committee in 1919-1921, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic), as a historian, I got the opportunity to work in the Central Party archive (now RGASPI). Examining materials with accidentally preserved authentic information about my father, I opened a folder with documents for 1912 of the Sergo Ordzhonikidze Foundation and saw something that shocked me from the very beginning. On the letterhead of the tsarist ministry of internal affairs with the appropriate design, the report of the head of the Moscow security department A. Martynov, dated November 1, 1912, addressed to the director of the Police Department S.P. Beletsky, No. 306442, was typed. It said: “In the last days of October months of this year through the mountains. I drove through Moscow and got in touch with a secret employee of the department entrusted to me "Portnoy" [the nickname is inscribed by hand in red ink] ... Iosif Vissarionov Dzhugashvili, who bears the party pseudonym "Koba" ... ". “Since the named“ Koba ”remained in Moscow for only one day, he exchanged information with secret agents about the latest events in party life and, after that, left for St. Petersburg ...
In a confidential conversation with the above-named secret officer, "Koba" provided the following information on the current situation and activities of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. "
What follows is undoubtedly secret information about the position in the party and about its individual members. The enumeration of the external signs of the Bolsheviks, which Joseph Dzhugashvili carefully remembered and handed over to the secret police, is clearly of an agent nature. He reported: “In St. Petersburg it was possible to form the Northern Regional Bureau, which included three people: A) A certain Kalinin, who participated in the Stockholm party congress (with the surname Kalinin, two took part in the work of the aforementioned congress a) Kalinin, who worked at Semyannikovsky and Obukhovsky factories behind the Nevskaya Zastava, about 25-27 years old, short stature, medium build, light blond, oblong face, married and b) administratively expelled from Moscow in 1910 from the city of Moscow, Yakovlevsky volost, Kovchevsky district, Tver province MI Kalinin, city tram fitter. B) Carpenter Pravdin, who worked from 1907 to 1908 at the Baltic Shipyard. His signs are about 30–32 years of age, of average height, full, stooped, blond, without a beard, large mustache, cheeks sagging heavily with bags, and B) Completely obscure face.
By the way, the Bolshevik Pravdin was soon arrested, and who else, besides the secret police for the purposes of the investigation, to fill out the gendarme's dossier, needed such information?
Where Stalin reported on the activities of the Central Committee, it was said: “c) assign general supervision of the case to one of the representatives of the Social Democratic Duma faction, giving the latter the right to vote, participate and interfere in all aspects of the matter without exception; a member of the State Duma from the Moscow province Malinovsky is scheduled for the designated role.
At the end of his report, A. Martynov wrote: "I have not communicated the information provided by this agent to anyone in order to avoid the possibility of a hitch or failure of the agent source."
Earlier Martynov reported that Koba escaped from exile, but he was not arrested in the following months.
On January 25, 1913, Stalin wrote from abroad in a letter to Roman Malinovsky, who bore the police nickname “Tailor”: “From Vasily - hello, friend, while I’m sitting in Vienna writing all sorts of nonsense. See you later". This is followed by the text of the letter, which itself is very interesting and ends with the signature - "your you ...".
Stalin's special attitude to Malinovsky is revealed in the episode told by L.O.Dan. By that time, rumors began to spread about Malinovsky's provocation. In the newspaper "Luch" there was a letter signed with the letter "C". It was assumed that the author of this letter was L.O. Dan (Zederbaum). Here is how G. Ya. Aronson, from L.O.Dan's words, describes what followed: “The Bolshevik Vasiliev came to her apartment, trying to get her to stop slandering Malinovsky's rumors (among the Mensheviks he was called Ioska Kryavyy), it was not who other than Stalin-Dzhugashvili. "
Soon the Menshevik Tsionglinsky published a letter signed by Citizen Ts. It talked about the need to investigate "dark rumors". And again Stalin came out in defense of Malinovsky. L. O. Dan told: “Comrade. Vasily ... offered to meet with me ... in a rather fragmentary conversation he demanded an end to the persecution and threatened, I don’t remember what, if "this" did not stop. "
Stalin carefully concealed his stormy defense of Malinovsky in the future and did not mention her in any investigation of the Malinovsky case.
The undeniable closeness of Stalin and Malinovsky is also indicated by the memoirs of T. A. Slovatinskaya, written shortly before his death in 1957: Stalin “... went on business to Malinovsky's home, he very persistently invited him to a concert with him. I. V. did not want to go at all, he made excuses that he was not in the mood and in general he was not at all properly dressed, but Malinovsky stuck, even put on some kind of tie. "
On the same day, in the spring of 1913, Dzhugashvili was arrested. According to the prominent Soviet intelligence officer Alexander Orlov, this time the reason was dissatisfaction with Stalin of the tsarist police, associated with his unsuccessful intrigue - an attempt to discredit Malinovsky in order to take his leading position in the secret police. Whether this was so, we do not yet know, but judging by the fact that Martynov in his report to the police department used not a police, but a party nickname - "Koba", and according to some other sources, Stalin had some kind of conflict with the security department then happened.
Dzhugashvili took part in expropriations (essentially in robberies), was involved in murders, but no materials about direct or indirect inquiries about this have been preserved. According to the writer Yulian Semyonov, the undoubted argument in favor of the possibility of Stalin's cooperation with the tsarist secret police is that neither he himself nor his fellow historians have ever met in the archives of the records of the interrogations of Dzhugashvili-Stalin on clearly criminal offenses. There is not a single announcement about him on the all-imperial wanted list.
Usually, Koba's arrests were surprisingly "timely", helping him get away from the suspicions of his fellow Social Democratic Party comrades, from the inevitable party penalties.
However, if in 1911 Stalin was exiled to his chosen place of residence, to the Vologda province, where he was in such a position that he could fill out a dossier on himself instead of a bailiff, and when he signed up, it turned out - Chief of Police Dzhugashvili, this time after his arrest was sent to the really harsh Turukhansk region.
The relationship with the exiled revolutionaries, the lack of ideological orientation, humanity and warmth in them, even more clearly highlights the servile tone in Stalin's letters to Malinovsky. In the accompanying note to the letter dated January 14, 1914, discovered by the writer Yuri Trifonov in the GARF fund, it was stated that "there are undercover information No. 578, the author of which is Joseph Vissarionov Dzhugashvili, a public supervisor of the Turukhansk region." This letter begins with an appeal to Malinovsky: "Hello friend", and then, in the most confidential form, it is said in detail about poor health, "suspicious cough" and other adversities. The complaint about the high cost is obsessively repeated - the cost of various products is indicated up to kopecks. Poor Koba stresses that he "needs milk, needs firewood, but no money, friend."
The appeal to Malinovsky - "friend" is repeated, alternating with the unintelligible exclamation "devil take me." The letter ends with the corresponding words “I shake hands firmly, kiss”, greetings to my wife and children, and a short signature - “your Joseph”.
In November 1913, Dzhugashvili received a parcel from T. A. Slovatinskaya and money, but it was then that he complained especially humiliatingly in a letter to Malinovsky: "There is no money, friend, and I am so exhausted and sick."
In the same November, Stalin received not only money, but also a postcard from Malinovsky, in which he clearly secretly wrote, addressing Stalin: "My brother, while he sold the horse, asked for 100 rubles [lei]."
And here is an excerpt from a letter in the same correspondence "From Joseph from Turukhansk!": "Hello, friend! No. 1 of "Rabotnitsa" and one of No. "Put 'Pravda" with your speech in the Duma received, thank you, friend, especially for the speech ... I also read your article in Pravda on the tasks of the opposition and your behavior (speech in Pravda, not in Sovremennik the article itself is flawless) ”.
P.S. I read an article by Martov about the opposition, where he tries to whitewash the liquidators, casting a shadow over your Bolshevik face, I swear by the dog, friend, such a juggler and magician, such a buffoon and comedian as L. Martov is hard to find in all our socialist literature.
It should be noted that Yu. O. Martov was particularly perceptive, recognizing the essence of Dzhugashvili-Stalin before many others. In the spring of 1912, in a letter from Liege to L. D. Trotsky, he mentioned the “Caucasian ultra-bandit Ivanovich” (one of Dzhugashvili's party pseudonyms), accusing him of exs of 1906-1907. and giving a general extremely negative characterization.
Somewhat later, on June 2, 1914, in connection with rumors about Malinovsky, Yu. Martov wrote to P. Axelrod: "We are almost sure now that all 'Pravdism' was directed from the secret police."
To the credit of the Mensheviks, it must be admitted that they rejected those who, like Stalin, could in no way be considered representatives of Social Democratic culture.
I dwell in more detail on Stalin's relations with the Mensheviks in connection with the fact that introducing a split, deepening it within the revolutionary parties and, in particular, in the Social Democracy, was one of the main daily tasks of the tsarist secret police.
At that time, the personality traits of Stalin, his frank anti-Semitism were also manifested: "Indeed," he writes, "what kind of people: Martov, Dan, Axelrod are circumcised Jews ... cowards and hucksters."
Reading Stalin's letters of those years, you see deep contempt for other prominent revolutionaries. About Kropotkin he spoke like this: "... an old fool, completely out of his mind," about Plekhanov: "An old incorrigible chatterbox ..."
We have to admit that it was precisely into the Bolshevik part of the Social Democracy that Kobe managed to penetrate deeper and deeper. In historiography, it is customary to assert that he enjoyed all the support of V.I. Lenin. However, judging by the letter of N.K.Krupskaya, the opinion of the Ulyanovs about Stalin was very low.
In February 1912, Krupskaya wrote to Ordzhonikidze: “I received a letter from Ivanovich, develops my point of view on the state of affairs, promises to give an address in a month, apparently, terribly cut off from everything, as if it had fallen from the sky. If not for this letter of his, it could have made a depressing impression. It's a pity, it's a pity that he didn't make it to the conference. "
Referring to the Prague Conference, Krupskaya says nothing about the forthcoming co-optation of Stalin to the Central Committee, and the indication of his isolation from everything and the general tone of his statements did not imply the need for him to advance towards the leadership of the party.
In his notes with Stalin's revelations, A. Orlov writes that it was Roman Malinovsky who achieved his co-optation in the Central Committee.
Stalin had clear violations of the unwritten laws of political exiles, which prohibited friendly relations with criminals. “Stalin, according to NS Khrushchev, recalled:“ What good guys were in exile in the Vologda province from the criminal. We used to go into a drinking establishment. ... Today I cry, tomorrow others, and so in turn. Very good artel guys were criminal. But the politicians, there were a lot of bastards among them. What did they do? They organized a comradely court and tried me for drinking with criminals ”.
Stalin's relations with the tsarist gendarmes, strange for a political exile, are also noteworthy. When there was a threat of criminal prosecution against him on charges of cohabitation with a 14-year-old young girl, a certain Laletin was the guard, and when he once entered the hut where Dzhugashvili lived without warning, the latter literally pounced on the guard and pushed him out.
Surprisingly, it was not Stalin who was punished for this, but Laletin, whom he did not like. He was replaced by Merzlyakov, with whom the exiled developed very friendly relations. According to some testimonies, contrary to Koba's statements about acute need, they sent him a lot of money. There were transfers of 50, 60, 100 rubles.
AS Taraseeva (the owner of the hut in the village of Kureyka in the Turukhansk region, where Koba lived) said: “To prevent the gendarmes from being alarmed by these transfers, they were received by the police guard Merzlyakov, with whom Koba became friends and drank with him.” Later, these binges became so widely known that the all-powerful general secretary in 1930 had to give a written explanation. I will cite eloquent excerpts from a document discovered by Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences V.A.Kumanev in the funds of RGASPI. Stalin wrote: "Merzlyakov was a guard ... he treated the task formally, without the usual police zeal, did not spy on me, did not hound, did not find fault, turned a blind eye to my frequent absences and often scolded the bailiff for his annoying" instructions and instructions. " It is noteworthy that no mention was made of their receipt of money, which supposedly explained their contacts.
Why didn't Dzhugashvili take advantage of the "connivance" of the gendarmes for another escape? The answer will come naturally if we admit that Stalin was in the last exile not only because of the explicit, but also mainly because of the secret will of the police department, which was dissatisfied with his agent. Obviously, he could not disobey the "owners". In one of his letters to Malinovsky, he wrote that this time he would not leave the link before the expiration date.
J. Stalin's dark past aroused suspicions more than once. Where he appeared, there were inexplicable arrests, failures of revolutionaries. No matter how carefully the secret police masked him, suspicions inevitably arose again and again. But they fell mainly on the less successful conspirator - Malinovsky.
By the way, he overcame the party investigation of the RSDLP commission in 1914, without mentioning his closeness to Stalin. However, in 1917, the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry of the Provisional Government revealed his close cooperation with the tsarist secret police.
By that time Malinovsky was not in Russia, but in the fall of 1918 he unexpectedly returned and appeared before the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal. What miracle was he hoping for? Whose help was he hoping for?
In all the hearings in the Malinovsky case, especially at the party proceedings, it was clarified in detail with whom he communicated. Witnesses were called, written testimonies were collected, sometimes fragmentary memories of a fleeting acquaintance, even chance meetings with him. Only Stalin was silent - supposedly there was never any correspondence, no meetings, not the slightest communication between him and Malinovsky.
Malinovsky also avoided mentioning Stalin in every possible way. He told about 1912: "I was in Moscow once in seven months, with Koba, although he was, - we did not see each other, they confused the time of the meeting, and I could not go home." A deliberate lie - Malinovsky denies the meeting, judging by the time reflected in the previously quoted document of the Moscow Security Department (if indeed Stalin gave secret information to Portnoy, and not to some other police agent).
At the trial of the Revolutionary Tribunal in 1918, Malinovsky speaks even less about Stalin. Whether the prosecutor Krylenko and the members of the court believed or for some other reason, the name of Stalin is not mentioned in any connection in the indictment in the Malinovsky case.
In November 1918, Roman Malinovsky, as an agent provocateur of the tsarist secret police, was shot, but this did not affect the fate of his partner Joseph Stalin. Their close connection was not only hidden for various reasons by those who knew about it in those years, but in the future, historians and publicists, even those who wrote directly about Malinovsky, usually omitted. They either continued to suppress the correspondence with the address "friend" and "brother" and other manifestations of certain relations, or again repeated the usual clichés about Stalin the revolutionary and the provocateur Malinovsky.
Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences I. Kh.Urilov examines important pages of history related to Stalin's past in his works. In the spring of 1918, Stalin filed a lawsuit for alleged slander against the leader of the Mensheviks, Yu. O. Martov, who accused Stalin of past expropriations and other crimes. To confirm his words, Martov suggested calling a number of witnesses, including the Bolshevik Stepan Shaumyan, who also accused Koba of betrayal.
The witnesses were never able to give their testimony. In September 1918, Stepan Shaumyan died in the Caspian region, shot by the Social Revolutionaries and the British.
It is now difficult to establish the degree of Dzhugashvili's participation in the expropriations, since the archive of Kamo, one of the main executors of the "ex", was seized, apparently, at the direction of Stalin, and soon Kamo himself was killed, hit by an "accidental" car.
The situation in the country during the civil war was extremely difficult, sometimes catastrophic. The uprising of the Czechoslovakians, riots, the offensive of the White Guards, reinforced by foreign interventionists, the threat to Moscow and thereby the existence of Soviet power, crowded out important political problems. At the same time, Stalin, for his own purposes, used in every possible way the active support of some influential Bolsheviks (especially G. Ye. Zinoviev, then N. I. Bukharin). Relying on his experience of skilful camouflage, on slander, forgery and intrigue, despite his failures on the North Caucasian (Southern) Front and in most other military operations of the Civil War, despite all the aggravated relations with the chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic L. D. Trotsky, rudeness and obvious disloyalty in relations with comrades, he sought more and more power in the party and state.
Stalin became especially stronger after the replacement in 1921 of the Leninist secretariat of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) - NN Krestinsky, EA Preobrazhensky and LP Serebryakov with his proteges and then - becoming General Secretary of the Central Committee of the party.
The only specific instruction from Lenin, the founder of our state (Russia is the legal successor), to remove Stalin from the post of General Secretary was fatally not fulfilled.
Subsequent events prove how blasphemous the words sound that Stalin, they say, is the successor of Lenin's cause. From the end of the twenties and until the Khrushchev thaw, simple reading, and even more so the dissemination of Lenin's will, began to be severely punished. The many years of imprisonment in prisons and camps of the writer Varlam Shalamov is a vivid evidence of this.
After the death of V.I. Lenin, using unlimited power, Stalin preferred to nominate to the most important posts in the state those who in the past had grave offenses and weighty evidence of ties with various enemy police organizations.
Obviously, these people were close to him in their outlook, life experience, in their readiness to carry out any of the most criminal instructions.
Beria and Vyshinsky, who was once considered a Menshevik, were such close associates of Stalin, who had his constant disposition and support.
The secretary general's cynical hatred for the revolution, for the Bolsheviks was clearly manifested in the fact that to supervise the legality, to conduct trials in Moscow that doomed Lenin's closest associates to shame and death, to sign mass lists for executions, Stalin instructed Vyshinsky with his formula “Confession of the accused - evidence ”- and especially with the fact that in the summer of 1917 Vyshinsky, then the commissar of the Yakimansky district of Moscow, signed an order for the district to search for and arrest Lenin and Zinoviev.
Indicative is the surprising calmness with which Stalin received the message of Manuilsky, who asserted that Vyshinsky was connected with the tsarist secret police and betrayed several Baku Bolsheviks to the police.
Having received this letter with a laconic accompanying note: “Comrade. Vyshinsky. I. St. ”, the closest Stalinist henchman interrupted his vacation and treatment abroad and returned to Moscow. “And he returned,” writes Arkady Vaksberg, “in order to work in the archives. What was he looking for there? Didn't he try to destroy what could expose him? " And whether only him or him and Dzhugashvili, with whom he became close in the old years in a Baku prison.
During the period of mass terror, in the thirties, the secretary general once, in a conversation with NS Khrushchev, noticed that there was evidence of a dark spot in his biography in the NKVD too. What "spot", he did not specify, as if making it clear that he himself knows. He really knew. "At that time, though dull, there were still rumors that Stalin collaborated in the old days with the tsarist secret police and that his escape from prison and exile had been set up from above."
Khrushchev believed that some rumors had reached Stalin, but that time, probably, it was not about them, but about A. Orlov's information that the NKVD officer Stein had found documents revealing Stalin's role in the tsarist secret police. The story of the "folder of Vissarionov", one of the chiefs of the police department, told by Orlov, requires special consideration, however, in our opinion, there is no reason not to trust the statements of such an experienced intelligence officer as General Orlov. He stayed in the West so as not to perish in Stalin's dungeons, and, living there for many years, did not betray any of the many of our intelligence officers known to him.
The material about Stalin's connections with the tsarist secret police was kept in Yezhov's safe, says G. Malenkov's son from the words of his father, who entered the office of the “bloody dwarf” immediately after his arrest.
Here are the unpublished diary statements of the writer Galina Serebryakova. In January 1967, she wrote: “For me there is no doubt inwardly that, like Hitler, Stalin was associated with the Security Department. Hence the inexplicably easy escapes ... the persecution of people who knew him from a young age and the words of Mamiya Orakhelashvili and others about his unclean past and dark connections. "
In conclusion, we will cite several facts proving Stalin's hostility to the whole cause of social democracy, his hatred of Lenin and his associates, which cannot be explained without taking into account Stalin's cooperation with the tsarist secret police.
In 1927, on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, he effectively ended the opposition, which consisted mainly of prominent Bolsheviks. Soon Stalin liquidated the NEP. In 1931, he conducted a completely fabricated trial of the Mensheviks. In the mid-thirties, the secretary general closed the Society of Old Bolsheviks and the Society of Political Prisoners and Exiled Settlers, thereby showing the alienation for him of the life path of revolutionaries and their entire struggle with the autocracy.
No one compromised socialism so much as Stalin, declaring it to be basically built in the USSR, in a country where the Gulag then ruled, lawlessness, forced labor, and ever more massive terror.
The provocative murder of S. M. Kirov was used by Stalin to put into effect an illegitimate decree prepared by him in advance, called the Law of December 1, 1934. This "Law" made it possible to execute (1st category) and send to camps (2nd category) millions of innocent people.
Stalin's execution lists of that time expose Stalin - personally responsible for the murder of about 40 thousand people.
One of the pages of this monstrous document is written on a piece of paper: “Comrade. Stalin. I am sending the lists of those arrested, subject to trial by the Military Collegium in the first category, Yezhov. " The resolution read: “For the shooting of all 138 people. St [alin], Mol [otov] ". Among those sentenced to death without trial were: Alksnis Ya.I., Antipov N.K., Bubnov A.S., Dybenko P.E., Krylenko N.V., Pyatnitsky I.A., Rudzutak Ya.E. , Chubar V. Ya. And other outstanding participants in the October Revolution and the construction of the Soviet state.
Permission to torture prisoners was given in 1937 in a circular written by Stalin's hand and signed by him. In 1939 he confirmed this method as "absolutely correct and expedient."
Viktor Serge, who personally knew many of the defendants, wrote about the accusations at the Moscow courts of Lenin's closest associates, wrote: “In the truncated reports on the trials, I found hundreds of absurdities, contradictions, gross distortions of facts, simply crazy statements. This delirium poured in streams ... ".
Any citizen of the country became victims of genocide. But Stalin dealt with the former Social Democrats, Mensheviks and especially the Bolsheviks especially mercilessly. On April 29, 1937, it was ordered to immediately begin "the rapid and complete destruction of the Menshevik underground."
Of the 139 Bolsheviks elected at the 17th Party Congress in 1934 to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, 97 were executed, two committed suicide.
On Stalin's orders, children were killed: two sons of Trotsky, two sons of Kamenev - the younger schoolboy Yura barely reached 16 years old, the only son of Zinoviev, two sons of Ryutin, the son of Nestor Lakoba and the sons of his relatives - on the day of the arrest, boys were 13, 14, 15 years old, and many others.
According to incomplete official data, the number of those executed in 1937-1938 exceeds 725 thousand people, in fact - more than a million citizens of their country.
Obviously, nothing contributed to the cult of Stalin's personality more than the torrent of blood he shed.
In his actions, an undoubted role was played by his boundless cruelty, psychopathological character traits, sadism, manic suspicion, but all this was aggravated by the long-term need to hide his true feelings and aspirations, the forced double life in constant fear of exposure and retribution.
In 1953, Stalin died preparing the next trials and executions.
Authentic documents and irrefutable evidence of the era show that only a hidden enemy at the head of the Soviet state could cause those innumerable troubles and suffering that cannot be justified, forgotten, or even more forgiven.
The scientist, bard and poet Alexander Gorodnitsky said very well:
“We live in a troubled time when they are trying to restore the bloody cult and everything connected with it. If we, scientists, do not assess this in relation to any report, to any book, if we pretend that it is beneath our dignity, that we cannot discuss this, then we will make a deep mistake. And then all this will come back "
Yakov Grigorievich Blumkin (Simkha-Yankev Gershevich Blumkin pseudonyms: Isaev, Max, Vladimirov; date of birth is unknown (about 1900), the exact date of death is unknown) - Russian revolutionary, security officer, Soviet intelligence officer, terrorist and statesman. One of the founders of the Soviet intelligence services. Possible prototype of the young Stirlitz.
Odessa revolutionary
According to the data reported by the Cheka in 1918 by Blumkin himself, he was born on October 8, 1900 in Odessa, in Moldavanka, according to others reported by him after his arrest in 1929, he was born in the town of Sosnitsa, near Chernigov, in 1898. According to the first version, Yakov Blumkin came from an Odessa proletarian family. In 1913 he graduated from the Jewish primary school, which was led by the famous writer - "the grandfather of Jewish literature" Mendele Moicher-Sforim. Schooling was free, at the expense of the Jewish community. There he received the beginnings in Hebrew and Russian.
However, there is information that Blumkin and his family until July 1915 lived in Lemberg (now Lvov), where he studied at a German gymnasium. After the capture of Lemberg by Russian troops in September 1914, his father Grigory Isaevich entered the Russian service, and after the Russians left Lvov in July 1915, he left with them.
Blumkin wrote: In conditions of Jewish provincial poverty, squeezed between national oppression and social deprivation, I grew up, left to my own childish fate.
According to some reports, in December 1918 - March 1919. Blumkin was the secretary of the Kiev underground city committee of the PLSR.
Mission to Persia
Blumkin is sent to Persia, where he participates in the overthrow of Kuchek Khan and the coming to power of Khan Ehsanullah, who was supported by the local "left" and the communists. In battles he was wounded six times. After the coup, Blumkin participated in the creation of the Iranian Communist Party (based on the Social Democratic Party of Iran "Adalat"), became a member of its Central Committee and military commissar of the headquarters of the Red Army of the Gilan Soviet Republic (,). He represented Persia at the First Congress of the oppressed peoples of the East, convened by the Bolsheviks in Baku.
In Persia, Blumkin, in particular, meets Yakov Serebryansky, assists in the organization of his employee of the Special Department of the Iranian Red Army.
Favorite of Dzerzhinsky
Returning to Moscow, Blumkin published a book about Dzerzhinsky and became his favorite in the Cheka. On the personal recommendation of Dzerzhinsky, in 1920 he joined the RCP (b). He was sent to study at the Academy of the General Staff of the Red Army at the Faculty of the East, where they trained employees of embassies and intelligence agents. At the Academy, Blumkin added knowledge of Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, Mongolian languages, extensive military, economic, political knowledge to the knowledge of Hebrew.
Diamonds for the dictatorship of the proletariat
Natural ingenuity and the ability to understand precious stones, acquired by him during the Odessa expropriations, allowed Blumkin in the fall of 1921 to quickly unleash the case of embezzlement in Gokhran. In October 1921, Blumkin, under the pseudonym Isaev (taken by him by the name of his grandfather), went to Revel (Tallinn) under the guise of a jeweler and, acting as a provocateur, revealed the foreign connections of the Gokhran workers. It was this episode in Blumkin's activity that Yulian Semyonov made the basis for the plot of the book "Diamonds for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat."
Blumkin and poets
In the 1920s, Blumkin became closely associated with a circle of poets and writers. He was friends with Yesenin, met Mayakovsky, Shershenevich and Mariengof (see). Blumkin was one of the founders of the semi-anarchist poetic "Association of Freethinkers", a regular in the Imagist circle.
In November 1923, by decision of the leadership of the INO OGPU, Blumkin was appointed a resident of illegal intelligence in Palestine. He invites Yakov Serebryansky to go with him as his deputy. In December 1923, they leave for Jaffa, having received the assignment of V. Menzhinsky to collect information about the plans of England and France in the Middle East. In June 1924, Blumkin was recalled to Moscow, and Serebryansky became a resident.
At the same time, Blumkin was brought in for conspiratorial work in the Comintern.
Transcaucasia
Oleg Shishkin believes that one of the proofs of Blumkin's participation in the Central Asian expedition of Roerich is a photograph from an expeditionary passport to Beijing, issued by the Chinese governor in Urumqi in 1926. In Shishkin's documentary story in this photo, the first lama with a tie on the left is Yakov Blumkin. According to A.V.Stetsenko, a representative of one of the Roerich organizations, deputy general director of the Museum named after N.K. Roerich, the photograph shows Ramzan from Ladak, not Blumkin.
Representatives of various Roerich organizations were critical of Oleg Shishkin's book. As one of the bases for criticism, the statement of the head of the press center of the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation Yuri Kobaladze is used. He stated: “The famous scientist was confused with a Buddhist agent, and hence the whole confusion. ...<> Roerich was not connected with our political intelligence. I declare this officially. " In 2000, the Deputy Director of the International Center of the Roerichs A.V. Stetsenko met with B. Labusov, who replaced Y. Kobaladze in his post, and said that “Unlike his predecessor, Labusov did not show the slightest desire to refute Shishkin's fabrications, referring to the same Law on the Foreign Intelligence Service, which in 1993, when materials about Roerich and his expedition were transferred from the foreign intelligence archive to the ICR, obliged them declassify and make publicly available " ... In addition, according to him, Stetsenko checked the archives that Shishkin refers to in his publications, and found some inconsistencies.
On the basis of Oleg Shishkin's book, a number of articles in the media and books were written, including the documentary-historical book "Occult secrets of the NKVD and the SS" by Anton Pervushin, as well as programs and documentaries were shot, shown on the TV channel "Culture" and "NTV" ... Shishkin's version has become widespread, and the results of his research are cited not only in the books of Russian scientists, but also in foreign studies on the history of Tibet.
The historian Maksim Dubaev in his book "Roerich", published in 2003 as part of the series "Life of Remarkable People", does not refer to Shishkin's works, but he also believes that Roerich was associated with the OGPU and conducted the expedition with the help of the Soviets. In a different way from Shishkin, Dubaev describes the role of Ya.G. Blumkin in N.K. Roerich's expedition: "Unexpectedly, the Soviet trade representative began to persuade Nicholas Roerich to leave Mongolia as soon as possible, since he was instructed to delay the expedition until Y. G. Blumkin arrived from Moscow, and this could only mean one thing - the arrest of Nikolai Konstantinovich."
The orientalist, Doctor of Historical Sciences Vladimir Rosov, in his dissertation on N. Roerich's activities in the Central Asian expeditions, denies Shishkin's version: "Scientific research does not confirm this version, as well as the official representatives of the Foreign Intelligence Service." Shishkin's book "Battle for the Himalayas" Rosov ranks among "historical and mystical novels and stories that distort the idea of \u200b\u200bN. Roerich's expeditions"
Dictator of Mongolia
In 1926, Blumkin was sent as a representative of the OGPU and Chief Instructor for State Security of the Mongolian Republic. He carried out special assignments in China (in particular, in 1926-1927 he was a military adviser to General Feng Yuxiang), Tibet and India. In 1927 he was recalled to Moscow due to friction with the Mongolian leadership and the desertion of the head of the Eastern Sector of the INO Georgy Agabekov. Having fled to the West, Agabekov declassified information about Blumkin's activities in Mongolia. In particular, he is credited with the murder of P. Ye. Shchetinkin, an instructor of the State Military Guard of the Mongolian People's Republic, and a secretary of the party cell.
Constantinople and Palestine
In 1928, Blumkin was a resident of the OGPU in Constantinople. Supervises the entire Middle East. On the instructions of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b), he was organizing a resident network in Palestine. He works either under the guise of the pious owner of a laundry in Jaffa, Gurfinkel, or under the guise of the Azerbaijani Jewish merchant Yakub Sultanov. Blumkin recruited the Viennese antiquarian Jacob Ehrlich, and with his help set up a residency, undercover as a second-hand bookstore.
In addition, Blumkin established the export of Jewish manuscripts and antiques from the USSR through the Cheka channels. The OGPU has done a tremendous job in the western regions of the USSR in collecting and confiscating old scrolls of the Torah, Talmud, 330 works of medieval Jewish literature. To prepare Blumkin material for successful trade, the OGPU expeditions went to the Jewish townships of Proskurov, Berdichev, Medzhibozh, Bratslav, Tulchin with the aim of confiscating ancient Jewish books. Blumkin traveled to Odessa, Rostov-on-Don, to small towns in Ukraine, where he examined the libraries of synagogues and Jewish prayer houses. Books were even seized from state libraries and museums.
Blumkin's personality assessment
In the 1980s, Blumkin was one of the most famous people in Soviet Russia. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (editor-in-chief O. Yu. Schmidt) devoted more than thirty lines to him. Valentin Kataev in the story "Werther has already been written" endowed his hero, Naum the Fearless, with his features and portrait likeness.
In modern texts about Blumkin, no one sympathizes with him, except the Trotskyists - he does not fit the stereotypes of a Russian, Soviet or post-Soviet, or Jewish, Zionist hero too much. When characterizing him, they use anachronisms: a terrorist, although at that time he would have been called a saboteur and this would not have had a negative connotation. However, the very career of Blumkin suggests that he was an outstanding person.
Notes
- The Red Book of the Cheka. Volume 1
- Account Suspended
- V. Starosadsky. Punishing sword of intelligence. Intelligence and counterintelligence news, M., 11/18/2005
- Shishkin O. Battle for the Himalayas. NKVD: magic and espionage.- M .: OLMA-Press. 1999.
- Shishkin O. Battle for the Himalayas. NKVD: magic and espionage.- M .: OLMA-Press. 1999.S. 163-166
- Shishkin O. “Battle for the Himalayas. NKVD: magic and espionage. " - M .: OLMA-PRESS, 1999. ISBN 5-224-00252-4. Page 12 of the first tab with photos.
- Stetsenko A.V. Slander, slander, let something remain / Collection "Defend the name and heritage of the Roerichs", Volume 1, ICR, 2001
- Gindilis L. M., Frolov V. V. Philosophy of Living Ethics and its interpreters. The Roerich movement in Russia // "Questions of Philosophy", No. 3, 2001.
- Fatkhitdinova Y. Yu. Recent history of the Roerich movement in Russia. Abstract of dissertation for the degree of candidate of historical sciences. Specialty 07.00.02 - National History. Ufa, 2009. Pp. 8.
- Sokolov V.G. The paradigm of culture in the philosophical heritage of Helena I. Roerich and N. K. Roerich. Abstract of the dissertation for the degree of candidate of philosophical sciences. Specialty 26.00.01 - theory and history of culture. Kharkov, 2008.
- Rosov V.A. "Russian-American Expeditions of Nicholas Roerich to Central Asia (1920s and 1930s)". Abstract of dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences.
- Yuri Kobaladze: “If Roerich were our intelligence officer, we would say about it with pride” // Interlocutor No. 48, 1994.
- Dardykina N.