Yakov Grigoryevich Blumkin (Russian: 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).
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.
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.
[5][6] In Kyiv he organized an assassination attempt against the Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi and fought in the LSR insurrection against the government of Symon Petliura.
Dzerzhinsky pardoned Blumkin, due to his voluntary surrender, and ordered him to return to Ukraine to assassinate Admiral Kolchak.
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.
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.
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".
[10] 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.
"[11] Blumkin was often seen meandering about Moscow with poets as an adherent of the Imaginism literary movement to which Esenin belonged, boasting a gun and a notorious reputation.
There is a story told by Mandelstam's biographer Clarence Brown:[13] One evening early in the Revolution he was sitting in a cafe and there was the notorious Socialist Revolutionary terrorist Blumkin… at that time an official of the Cheka… drunkenly copying the names of men and women to be executed onto blank forms already signed by the head of the secret police.
Mandelstam, who did not know the intended victim, was so angry that he persuaded the poetry-loving Bolshevik Larissa Reissner to join him in a direct approach to the head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, and saved the man's life.
[14] When Blumkin returned from Persia, the French writer Victor Serge heard him declaim lines written by the Persian epic poet Ferdowsi.
He stayed in a small apartment in the Arbat quarter, bare except for a rug and a splendid stool, a gift from some Mongol prince; and crooked sabres hung over his bottles of excellent wine.
[17] In 1926, Blumkin was supposedly the secret representative of the GPU in Mongolia, where he ruled for some time as a virtual dictator and occasionally travelled on missions in China, Tibet and India, until he was recalled to Moscow because the local communist leadership was tired of his reign of terror.
[17][18] In his book The Storm Petrels, Gordon Brook-Shepherd relates that the GPU sent Blumkin to Paris in October 1929 to assassinate the defector and former Stalin personal secretary, Boris Bazhanov.
[18] In 1929, Blumkin was the chief illegal resident in Turkey, where he allegedly sold Hebrew incunabula that he collected from synagogues all over Ukraine and Southern Russia and even from state museums such as the Lenin Library in Moscow, to finance an espionage network in the Middle East.