Jakow Grigoryevich Bljumkin

Jakow Grigorjewitsch Bljumkin ( Russian Яков Григорьевич Блюмкин , scientific transliteration : Jakov Grigor'evič Bljumkin ; * 1898 in Odessa ; †  November 3, 1929 ) was a left social revolutionary , later a Bolshevik and Trotskyist .

Life

Agent of the Cheka

Jakow Bljumkin came from a Jewish family, was an orphan at an early age and grew up in Odessa. In 1914 he joined the Social Revolutionary Party .

After the October Revolution of 1917, Bljumkin became head of the department for combating German espionage at the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution, Speculation and Sabotage , the Cheka , headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky .

The writer Isaiah Berlin gave the following experience of the poet Ossip Mandelstam :

“One evening at the beginning of the revolution, Mandelstam was sitting in a café, and there was the well-known social revolutionary terrorist Bljumkin ... who was with the Cheka at the time ... Drunk he transferred the names of men and women who were to be executed from some Lists on blank forms that had already been signed by the chief of the secret police. Mandelstam suddenly threw himself at him, picked up the lists, tore them to pieces in front of the amazed spectators, ran out and disappeared. Trotsky's sister saved Mandelstam from the threatening consequences of this dangerous action. "

The murder of the German ambassador

Bljumkin was a Left Social Revolutionary . This party was against the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk , the repression of farm workers and against the occupation of Ukraine by the German Reich . Bljumkin received an order from the Central Committee of his party to assassinate Wilhelm Graf von Mirbach-Harff , the Extraordinary Envoy and Plenipotentiary Minister of the German Reich in Soviet Russia, in order to sabotage the peace treaty signed by the Lenin government in Brest-Litovsk with the German Reich. The opening of the 5th All-Russian Congress of Soviets in the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow was planned as the time of the murder . On the afternoon of July 6, 1918, Bljumkin drove with Nikolai Andreyev, who worked as a photographer in his department, to the building of the German embassy at No. 5 Deneshny Pereulok in Moscow. Bljumkin gained entry with the help of a fictional story about a nephew of the ambassador, who was in danger. Von Mirbach received the visitors who identified themselves as Cheka men. Right at the beginning of the brief meeting, Bljumkin pulled the revolver and fired three shots: at Mirbach, at the Legation Councilor Kurt Riezler , who was also present, and at the interpreter Lieutenant Müller, but missed the target three times. Mirbach wanted to flee, Andreyev dropped a bomb that did not detonate. Andrejew shot Mirbach and hit him fatally. Bljumkin took the bomb that had not detonated and threw it again. The murderers jumped out through the now shattered window and crossed the garden to their car. The murder of the German ambassador was the signal for the uprising of the Left Social Revolutionaries , which was quickly suppressed by the Bolsheviks . The entire faction of the Left Social Revolutionaries was arrested in the Bolshoi Theater, the party was banned and persecuted. The murderers Bljumkin and Andreev managed to escape after the crime.

In May 1919, Bljumkin, who had been sentenced to three years imprisonment in absentia, was acquitted. In the corresponding resolution of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of May 16, 1919 it said:

"In view of JG Bljumkin's voluntary self-determination and the detailed explanation he provided of the circumstances surrounding the murder of the German ambassador, Count Mirbach, the Presidium decided to give JG Bljumkin an amnesty."

The Iranian Soviet Republic

In the spring of 1920 Bljumkin was sent to the Iranian province of Gilan on the Caspian Sea , where a separatist government had been formed under the leadership of Mirza Kutschak Khan . On May 30, 1920, Bljumkin instigated a coup d'état there. Kutschek Khan and his party were ousted and replaced by a government of the Iranian Communist Party . The new government of the so-called Persian Soviet Socialist Republic , which was officially led by Kutschek Khan's deputy Ehshanollah Khan, was dominated by the Soviet Commissioner Abukov. This carried out a series of radical reforms, closed mosques and carried out expropriations.

The Congress of the Peoples of the East

In August 1920 Bljumkin was given command of an armored train that was supposed to bring Grigory Zinoviev , Karl Radek , Béla Kun and John Reed from the Second World Congress of the Communist International in Moscow to the congress of the "oppressed peoples of the East" in Baku . The train traveled through areas of western Russia where the civil war was still ongoing. In Baku, the delegates decided on a motion by Zinoviev, the leader of the Communist International, who called on the Bolsheviks to support the people of the Middle East in the uprising against the British. The idea of ​​the international revolution inspired Bljumkin.

Friendship with Trotsky

After his stay in the Caucasus, Bljumkin went to the Military Academy in Moscow as a student. He befriended Leon Trotsky , became his secretary and helped "the selection, critical review, assignment and correction of the material" for Trotsky's Military Writings (1923). Bljumkin invited his friend, the poet Sergei Esenin , to Trotsky because he hoped that Trotsky would support the establishment of a literary magazine. The friendship with Trotsky later cost Bljumkin his life.

Bashanov

In the book Die Sturmschwalben , Gordon Brooke-Shepard reported that the GPU sent Bljumkin to Paris in 1929 to assassinate the defector and former second man of Soviet Russia, Stalin's head of organization, the "Organization Secretary of the Politburo of the CPSU ", Bashanov . The attack did not take place. Bashanov died in Paris in 1982 at the age of 81. However, it was widely believed that Bljumkin murdered Bashanov. Solzhenitsyn repeated this legend in his book The Gulag Archipelago .

Trotsky on Prinkipo

In 1929 Bljumkin stayed in Turkey . During the civil war, Bljumkin was the leader of the armed bodyguard of Trotsky, who was granted asylum on the Turkish island of Prinkipo after his expulsion from the Soviet Union .

Bljumkin conveyed a secret message from Trotsky to Karl Radek , Trotsky's former friend and supporter in Moscow. Stalin saw this as an attempt to establish links with the opposition forces in the Soviet Union. Trotsky later claimed that Radek betrayed Bljumkin to Stalin. While Radek confirmed his complicity, it is also possible that information about a GPU agent in Trotsky's environment was leaked to Stalin.

Judgment and death

After Bljumkin's meeting with Radek in Moscow, Mikhail Trilisser , the head of the GPU's foreign department, put the attractive agent Lisa Gorskaja (also known as Elizabeth Zubilin) ​​on Bljumkin. The two had an affair that lasted a few weeks. Gorskaya reported on all the intimate conversations with Trilisser. When his agents wanted to arrest Bljumkin, he was getting into his car with Lisa Gorskaya. After a chase and an exchange of fire, Bljumkin stopped and said to Lisa Gorskaya: "Lisa, you betrayed me!". Bljumkin was brought before a GPU tribunal made up of Jagoda , Vyacheslav Menschinsky and Trilisser. The defector Georges Agabekov claimed: "Yagoda voted for the death penalty, Trilisser was against, Menschinsky was undecided." The matter was brought before the Politburo and Stalin ruled on the death penalty .

In his memoirs of a revolutionary , Victor Serge wrote that Bljumkin had been given two weeks' gallows to write his autobiography. This manuscript, if it exists, has not yet been discovered. The defector Alexander Orlov wrote that Bljumkin shouted when he stood in front of his firing squad: "Long live Trotsky!"

literature

• B. Leonov: Последняя авантюра Якова Блюмкина. In: Otetschestwo. (Magazine), Moscow 1993.
• A. Velidow: Похождения террориста. Одиссея Якова Блюмкина. In: Sowremennik. (Magazine), Moscow 1998.

Web links

• Boris Chavkin : The murder of Count Mirbach
• Электронная еврейская энциклопедия: Блюмкин Яков. (Russian)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Boris Chavkin: The murder of Count Mirbach Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (KU)
2. ↑ Bruce Thompson: The Mandelstams ( July 5, 2008 memento in the Internet Archive ) University of California
3. ↑ A. Kolpakidi, D. Prokhorov: The KGB liquidators . Moscow 2004, p. 43
4. ↑ Victor Serge: The Russian Revolution and Iran
5. ↑ Victor Serge: Memoirs of a Revolutionary
6. ^ Hito Steyerl : Multicultural, Lenin Style. On a knife edge: Inter-Nationalism European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies
7. ↑ Nick Brauns : Congress of the Peoples of the East
8. ^ David Walters: The Military Writings of Leon Trotsky
9. ↑ Heiko Zänker: Stalin: Death or Socialism , Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2002, ISBN 3-8311-2706-9 , p. 149