Yakov Blumkin

Yakov Grigoryevich Blumkin (Я́ков Григо́рьевич Блю́мкин; 12 March 1900 – 3 November 1929) was a Left Socialist-Revolutionary, a Bolshevik, and an agent of the Cheka and the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU).

Blumkin was born into a Jewish shopkeeper's family, was orphaned early in his life, and was raised in Odessa.

After four years in a Jewish school, he was sent to work running errands for shops and offices.

In 1914 he joined the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.

After the October Revolution in 1917, he became head of the Cheka's counter-espionage department working for Felix Dzerzhinsky.

Popov's Cheka detachment that included Blumkin, consisted of Left Socialist Revolutionaries rather than Bolsheviks.

Since this party was opposed to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Blumkin was ordered by its executive committee to assassinate Wilhelm von Mirbach, the German ambassador to Russia.

They hoped by this action to incite a war with Germany.

This event was timed to occur at the opening of the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.

On the afternoon of 6 July 1918, Blumkin and Nikolai Andreev went to the German Embassy.

Blumkin gained entrance to the embassy by presenting forged documents.

With Mirbach was Dr. Rietzler, the Counsellor of the Embassy, and Lieutenant Moeller, a military attaché.

Blumkin pulled a gun and fired at all three, while Andreev hurled a bomb.

Both then fled through a window, where Blumkin broke his leg, but both made it back to the Pokrovsky Barracks, the location of the Socialist Revolutionary staff.

The assassination was timed with the Left SR uprising, which was quickly quelled.

The members of the Left SR party at the Bolshoi Theatre were arrested and the party was forcibly suppressed.

Blumkin, however, escaped and went into hiding.

He fled to Ukraine and helped reestablish the Soviet regime.

On 16 May 1919, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee pardoned him.

In Kyiv he organized an assassination attempt against the Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi and fought in the LSR insurrection against the government of Symon Petliura.

In April 1919 Blumkin surrendered to the Bolsheviks, who still had a warrant for his arrest.

Dzerzhinsky pardoned Blumkin, due to his voluntary surrender, and ordered him to return to Ukraine to assassinate Admiral Kolchak.

While forming a combat group, Blumkin survived three assassination attempts made by his former LSR comrades.

In the spring of 1920, Dzerzhinsky sent Blumkin to the Iranian province of Gilan, on the Caspian Sea, where the Jungle Movement under the leadership of Mirza Koochak Khan, had established a secessionist government called the Persian Socialist Soviet Republic.

On 30 May 1920, Blumkin, with his penchant for intrigue, fomented a coup d'état which drove Koochak Khan and his party from power and replaced them with the Bolshevik-controlled Iranian Communist Party.

The new government, nominally headed by Kuchak Khan's second-in-command, Ehsanollah Khan, was dominated by the Russian Commissar, Abukov.

He commenced a series of radical reforms which included closing of mosques and confiscating money from the rich.

Blumkin became chief of the General Staff of the Persian Red Army.

An army was raised with the intention of marching on Tehran and bringing Persia under the Red Banner.

In August 1920, Blumkin was back in Petrograd where he was entrusted with the command of an armored train that conveyed Grigory Zinoviev, Karl Radek, Béla Kun, and John Reed from the Second Congress of the Communist International to the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities in Baku.

Their journey took them through parts of Western Russia where the Civil War still lingered.

Blumkin claimed he served as a member of the Persian delegation, perhaps incognito because his name is not listed in the published rolls.

At the congress, the delegates enacted the proposal of Zinoviev, leader of the Comintern, which called upon the Bolsheviks to support the uprisings of native peoples from the Middle East against the British.

Lenin shortly afterwards abandoned this policy in order to sign a treaty with Great Britain.

Blumkin was a lover of poetry.

In July 1921 Nikolay Gumilyov, a monarchist who was shot soon afterwards, was giving a poetry recital in a cafe in Petrograd when "a man in a leather jacket", described as having "bold features, framed by a black beard, and his face looked biblical", began reciting as if "drunk on Gumilyov's verses".

Gumilyov was astonished when the man was introduced as the notorious Yakov Blumkin and remarked, "I'm happy when my poems are read by warriors and people of great strength".

Gumilyov later wrote "The man amidst crowd who shot the Imperial Ambassador came up to shake me by the hand and thank me for my verses".

In 1923, the diplomat Alexander Barmine travelled by train from Moscow to Baku with Blumkin and the poet Sergei Yesenin, who was on a downward slide and committed suicide months later.

He joined the 13th Red Army as director of counter-espionage and worked under Georgy Pyatakov.