21 Facts About Yakov Blumkin

Yakov Grigoryevich Blumkin was a Left Socialist-Revolutionary, a Bolshevik, and an agent of the Cheka and the Joint State Political Directorate.

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

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

Yakov Blumkin gained entrance to the embassy by presenting forged documents.

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

Yakov Blumkin fled to Ukraine and helped reestablish the Soviet regime.

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

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

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

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".

Yakov Blumkin said that Blumkin tried to persuade Mandelstam to work for the Cheka, soon after it was founded and before the Mirbach assassination.

Yakov Blumkin was a regular and "welcome" guest in the Poets' Cafe, in Moscow, where Mandelstam overheard him boasting that he was going to have an art historian shot.

In 1919, Mandelstam and his wife were on a balcony in Kiev, when Yakov Blumkin rode past at the head of a cavalcade, dressed in a black coat, and when he saw Mandelstam, drew a pistol pointed it at him, but did not fire.

Yakov Blumkin threatened Mandelstam with a gun several times, but never fired, and probably had no intention of killing him.

When Yakov Blumkin returned from Persia, the French writer Victor Serge heard him declaim lines written by the Persian epic poet Ferdowsi.

Yakov Blumkin 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.

Yakov Blumkin befriended Leon Trotsky, becoming a secretary, and helped over the next two years with the "selection, critical checking, arrangement and correction of the material" in Trotsky's Military Writings.

Yakov Blumkin introduced Yesenin to Trotsky in the hope that Trotsky would sponsor and promote a literary journal.

In 1926, Yakov 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.

In 1929, Yakov 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.

Yakov Blumkin supposedly travelled personally to Ukraine to look for rare Hebrew books, but he spent time in Palestine and elsewhere organizing the network by posing as a devout Jewish laundry owner or as a Jewish salesman from Azerbaijan.