Yakov Grigorievich Blumkin
Яков Григорьевич Блюмкин
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