However, even before graduation, Blumkin had many different interesting adventures - both on the territory of the Russian Federation and abroad! For example, Blumkin for some reason tried to get into the Union of anarchists-maximalists. But before he was admitted there, he was required to acquit himself before the party court, which included representatives of a number of parties. The court was headed by A. Karelin, the leader of the Russian anarchists-communists, and, by the way, was a former member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR. And what's interesting is that Blumkin was tried for two whole weeks, but no specific decision was made. Many continued to consider him a traitor and practically admitted that he was a provocateur. That is, for two whole weeks, none of the circumstances that discredited him could be clarified. Amazing unprofessionalism, isn't it? Or, on the contrary, there was nothing to clarify, but all the circumstances developed in such a way that it was better to leave everything as it is. Obviously, something prevented the court from doing what it should have done. And the question is - what exactly?
Blumkin did not live in poverty either, so he could afford to spend time in the Moscow Poets Cafe, where he often paid for the penniless poets. In which a lot of interesting things happened. The drunken Yesenin made fights there, Mayakovsky admired dad Makhno out loud, in a word, if you wanted to, you could at least "sew on" something to all of them. But … they didn't sew.
Dead Yesenin. The mark on the forehead from the blow is clearly visible. Maybe it was not without all the same Blumkin here too?..
Poet Vladislav Khodasevich later once recalled that there was a case when Yesenin, trying to impress the imagination of bohemian ladies and nodding at Blumkin, boasted that through him he could easily arrange for her an "excursion" to the Cheka, show "how they shoot in the basement." Well, the poets ate and drank with his money, too, quite often, and how could they not have taken them from this neophyte, after all, they were masters ?! Blumkin several times rescued Yesenin and some other poets, and their relatives from the Cheka, and even somehow drew up a "historical document" in which he wrote that he "bails citizen Yesenin and guarantees under personal responsibility that he will the investigation will not disappear …”That is, he provided him with obvious patronage … until a certain time.
And then, a year before his suicide, while in Tbilisi, Blumkin was jealous of Yesenin for his wife, and was so jealous that he began to threaten him with a weapon. Yesenin had to urgently get out of there. But when he ended up in Leningrad at the end of December 1925, then … he immediately committed suicide at the Angleterre Hotel. However, the St. Petersburg writer V. Kuznetsov proved that Yesenin never lived in this hotel, since his data is not in the guest book, and this was simply impossible in Soviet hotels. There is also a mass of absurdities in the poet's death, which have not received a proper explanation, starting with an abrasion on the forehead and items of clothing not found in "his room", and, in particular, his jacket. According to Kuznetsov, as soon as Yesenin appeared in Leningrad, he was immediately arrested and taken to the investigation house of the GPU on Mayorov Street, 8 / 25, where he was interrogated with passion by the Chekists under the leadership of … yes, all the same Yakov Blumkin, and then they killed him there. And only then, already dead, Yesenin, they dragged him to the hotel, where there was an empty room. Even Yesenin's suicide poems may well have been written not by himself, but by Blumkin, who, as you know, was also a bit of a poet … And all this "suicide" could well be another provocation, especially if you remember what Yesenin wrote poems about Soviet power and what he "smeared" her with paints. In addition, he also allowed himself extremely harsh attacks on the members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), and described the "legendary" Civil War as "vile and evil savagery" that ruined thousands of excellent talents in Russia:
They are Pushkin, Lermontov, Koltsov, And our Nekrasov is in them.
I am in them.
There is even Trotsky in them, Lenin and Bukharin.
Is it not because of my sadness
A verse blows
Looking at them
Unwashed hari.
He’s the one about Lenin, right? Leader of the world revolution! Ay-ay! No respect! And it's a shame how it is written, isn't it? "Unwashed hari" This is a hint of a dark complexion, not otherwise … So knowing the character of Trotsky, Yesenin's fate does not cause much surprise. And, by the way, Yesenin could not help but be aware of what might await him for such verses about the "unwashed mugs" of the leaders of the "world's first revolution of workers and peasants." And not without reason, he seemed to have a presentiment of his death, since he wrote this:
And the first
You need to hang me
With my arms crossed behind my back
For being a song
Hoarse and sickly
I prevented my native country from sleeping …
Well, here he, poor fellow, was hanged, and Trotsky himself then wrote a worthy obituary about him in Pravda. Only after all, an obituary is nothing more than words, and the main thing is when there is no person. After all, there are no problems with him then either, and so sometimes even poets the rulers have to reckon with.
However, let us return to our "hero", who was sent a little earlier, namely in 1920, to northern Iran, on a very important and political matter. There, at that time, the Gilyan Soviet Republic was proclaimed. And the Kremlin leaders should be glad that the proletarian revolution also began in Iran, but the problem arose due to the fact that a certain Kuchuk Khan, a man with nationalist positions, turned out to be at the head of the Council of People's Commissars there. And he had to be an internationalist. So here in Gilan it was only necessary to "change the power", which was done under the leadership of the same experienced in such matters Yakov Blumkin. The old government was overthrown and replaced with a new one headed by Ehsanullah - also a khan, but “his own”, of the correct orientation, who was supported by the local “left”, and, most importantly, the communists and Moscow.
Now Blumkin is already a commissar of the headquarters of the Gilan Red Army, and a member of the young Iranian Communist Party, and defends the city of Anzali from the troops of the Shah of Iran. As a delegate from Iran, it was he who came to Baku to the First Congress of the oppressed peoples of the East. That is, one more delegate was “his own man” and spoke the right words there. That was the end of his "exotic business trip". After four months in the East, Blumkin was again recalled to Moscow.
It is not even clear how Blumkin studied at the academy at all, since he was continually forced to interrupt his studies and go to various important "hot spots". So, at the end of 1920, he went to the Crimea, where another unpleasant situation for the Soviet regime was created. There, many thousands of White Guard officers surrendered to the Red Army and then "passed registration", to whom the Commander-in-Chief Mikhail Frunze personally promised to save their lives. However, Trotsky took the Soviet government to fear, declaring that "forty thousand fierce enemies of the revolution" were simply dangerous for Soviet Russia, and thus achieved a decision to destroy them.
Such "specialists" as Bela Kun, Zemlyachka and, of course, Blumkin, went to supervise the "trial" from Moscow. The latter was there for only a few weeks, but actively participated in mass executions, which he later boasted to his acquaintances more than once. Then, according to various sources, from 50 to 100 thousand people were killed. Then, following Trotsky's decree, more than 20 thousand people were executed in Sevastopol and Balaklava alone. After all, he said that “Crimea is a bottle from which not a single counter-revolutionary will jump out,” so they all remained there.
In 1921, Blumkin also had a chance to participate in the suppression of the actions of the peasants, who were qualified by the workers 'and peasants' authorities as "political banditry." In the list of his achievements in this field, the suppression of the Elan uprising in the Lower Volga region, and then participation in the defeat of Antonov's gangs in the Tambov region. Well, and then, as the brigade commander of the 61st brigade, Blumkin goes to fight the troops of the "yellow baron" Ungern. But then he was immediately made Leon Trotsky's secretary, which the new German ambassador to the USSR was surprised to learn about.
The German embassy decided to obtain from the Soviet authorities, if not punishment, then at least condemnation, both of the murder itself and of the one who committed it. But Trotsky wrote a letter to Lenin, as well as to other members of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, in which he suggested simply not to pay attention to the "stupid demands for satisfaction for Count Mirbach". And the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR, Chicherin, received friendly advice from him to convince the Germans not to do this, since, they say, this interferes with a new Russian-German rapprochement.
Boris Bazhanov, Stalin's secretary who managed to escape abroad, later wrote that Blumkin had got to Trotsky obviously "for a reason," but that the Cheka had assigned him to him. But in the same 1921, F. Dzerzhinsky did not work for Stalin yet, but rather, he just supported Trotsky. And here is the question - why did "Iron Felix" need to follow the "party comrades"? Was it just because the Cheka should know everything, or did he have some of his own, personal motives?
In 1922, Blumkin became the official adjutant and secretary of Trotsky, who immediately entrusted him with an extremely responsible task: to edit the first volume of his program book "How the Revolution Armed" (1923 edition), which collected a wealth of material from the civil war, and which, either by chance, or reflecting the real state of affairs … it was Trotsky who represented the organizer of all the victories of the revolution. And it was Yakov Blumkin who edited, compiled and checked the materials.
It is interesting that Trotsky himself was even amused by this situation. In any case, he wrote about his work in his office that, they say, this is what a strange fate this person has: in July 1918 he fights against us, but today he is a member of our party, is my employee, and even edits a volume reflecting our mortal struggle against the party of the Left SRs. And indeed - amazing metamorphoses are presented to us by life. Today for some, tomorrow for others. However, on the other hand, everything is according to the Bible. Remember the prophet Ecclesiastes, who said that a living dog is better than a dead lion. And this is how it happens most often in life.
Well, since 1923, the period of the most fascinating adventures of Yakov Blumkin began, only information about them is still closed in secret archives and it is not known when their content will become public. It would seem, what is easier - to take, and collect in one place all the cases where his name is mentioned, come and work, gentlemen researchers, separate, so to speak, the wheat from the chaff, but … we have a hitch with this. And the Bolsheviks are gone for a long time, and the USSR itself has fallen asleep, and historians still only have to guess about many moments in the life of the terrorist-spy Yakov Blumkin.
Well, here we should start with the fact that Grigory Zinoviev himself, who led the Comintern at that time, asked Blumkin to help in an important matter: once again organize a revolution in Weimar Germany. Moreover, he was only required to instruct the "German comrades" in the field of subversion and terror. He did the work, but nothing came of it with Germany, and Blumkin moved to the Foreign Department of the OGPU, where he became a resident of his Eastern Sector, and began work, receiving the nicknames "Jack" and "Live". Blumkin's foreign spy career took place in Palestine, where in the city of Jaffa, having documents in his hands in the name of the faithful Jew Gurfinkel, he opened a laundry. What he did there is unknown, but he only worked there for only a year, then returned to Moscow. However, there was undoubtedly some benefit from his trip. Here in Palestine, Blumkin met with the German Leopold Trepper. They met, and even the "all-knowing" Wikipedia does not know how this acquaintance ended. However, it was Trepper who in the future turned out to be the head of the famous "Red Chapel" and the Soviet intelligence network in Nazi Germany. So, of course, they were talking about something “like that” …
After Palestine, as a political representative of the OGPU, he again went to Tbilisi, where he became an assistant to the commander of the OGPU troops in the Transcaucasus and at the same time authorized the People's Commissariat of Foreign Trade to combat smuggling. And here he also has to sniff gunpowder: suppress the peasant uprising and liberate the city of Bagram Tepe, which the Iranians captured in 1922. He also had to work in the border commissions to resolve various controversial issues that now and then arose at that time between the USSR, Turkey, Iran.
Being in the Transcaucasus and knowing the eastern languages, Blumkin managed to visit Afghanistan, where he tried to get in touch with the Ismaili sect (descendants of the ancient assassins), in which the Bolsheviks wanted to see their direct allies in the struggle against the British colonialists. Then he traveled to India, where he studied the situation of the British colonial troops and even reached Ceylon. He returned to Moscow only in 1925, and he brought various oriental "antiques" into his apartment and played like himself in front of acquaintances and friends of a certain oriental guru.
