Left SR assassin of Mirbach turned OGPU illegal resident, executed for meeting Trotsky
"A man who, amid the crowd, shot the imperial ambassador / Came up to shake my hand / And thank me for my poems." — Nikolai Gumilyov, 'My Readers'
A Jewish revolutionary from Odessa. As a Left SR inside the Cheka, he led the 1918 assassination of German ambassador Mirbach, sparking the Left SR uprising. Amnestied, he became one of the OGPU Foreign Department's first illegal residents, building agent networks in Persia, Palestine, Mongolia, and the Middle East under commercial cover. A flamboyant figure in Moscow literary circles who befriended Mayakovsky and Yesenin, he was arrested and shot in 1929 after secretly meeting Trotsky in Constantinople and agreeing to carry opposition letters into the USSR.
Career Timeline
- 1918.06Cheka Section Chief for Countering International Espionage — placed by Left SR leadership
- 1918.07.06Assassinated German Ambassador Mirbach with Nikolai Andreev — triggering Left SR uprising
- 1919.05Amnestied by VTsIK after voluntary surrender; resumed Red Army and Cheka service
- 1920Sent to Persia — joined Iranian Communist Party, military commissar in Gilan Soviet Republic
- 1923–1924OGPU illegal resident in Palestine (Jaffa) — network under laundry-business cover
- 1926–1927OGPU resident in Mongolia and chief instructor of Mongolian State Internal Guard
- 1928–1929OGPU resident in Middle East — Constantinople, antique Hebrew book-dealer cover
- 1929.10Secret Trotsky meeting exposed — arrested, sentenced to death by OGPU Collegium
Related historical events
Blumkin and the Moscow Literary Bohemia
Blumkin entered Moscow literary circles in the spring of 1918 through Sergei Yesenin. According to Vladislav Khodasevich's memoirs, at a gathering of writers hosted by Alexei Tolstoy, Yesenin arrived with 'a bearded brunette in a leather jacket': it was Blumkin. He soon befriended the Imagist poets, especially Yesenin, Mariengof, and Shershenevich, and at the literary café 'Pegasus's Stable' he even served as master of ceremonies for poetry evenings.
His standing in the literary world was contradictory. When the Cheka arrested Yesenin in October 1920, Blumkin's personal guarantee secured his release within a week. Mayakovsky gifted him three volumes of poetry inscribed 'To dear Blyumochka.' Nikolai Gumilyov, after meeting Blumkin in Moscow in summer 1921, immortalized him in the famous poem 'My Readers.' Osip Mandelstam, by contrast, tore up a stack of execution orders that Blumkin drunkenly brandished, and the tension between them never faded. Literary figures both feared him and sought his protection: a dual relationship Blumkin relished. His friendship with Yesenin soured in September 1924 in Baku, when Blumkin, jealous over his wife, threatened the poet with a pistol.
Blumkin was himself a literary man: he wrote poetry and studied ancient Iranian languages. Roman Jakobson recalled discussing the Avesta with him in a café. Whether his bohemian socializing also served intelligence purposes remains debated, but contemporaries saw in him a revolutionary romantic, a braggart, and a genuine lover of literature all at once.