"Comrade Blyumochka"

One of the distinctive features of the events of July 6, 1918 was the shocking immaturity of the age of its main participants. They were very young. For example, the anti-hero Yakov Blyumkin is only 20 years old, his “colleague, friend in the revolution” and accomplice in the murder of Mirbakh Nikolai Andreev is 22 years old, the military leaders of the uprising Dmitry Popov and Yuri Sablin are 27 and 21 years old, respectively. Wise with life experience, the legendary Maria Spiridonova, chairman of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, called by John Reed “the most popular and influential woman in Russia,” had only 32 years behind her.

By the way, Blyumkin and Spiridonova personified, as it were, two wings, two mentalities of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, and indeed revolutionaries of that time in general. Spiridonova is a fanatic and idealist, a worthy successor to the work of Sofia Perovskaya and Vera Figner. Blumkin is an adventurer who traces his “ancestry” back to Azef. In general, “Comrade Blyumochka,” as Mayakovsky would later call him (“Mirbach’s killer,” as he introduced himself to Nikolai Gumilyov, was friends with many poets), is a colorful, mysterious personality, as they say, typological for those years, worth telling about her separately.

Everything is known about Blumkin, and everything that is known is contradictory. It is not entirely clear: by whom and how he was wounded at Mirbach - by a German from the embassy window or by a Latvian guard standing at the gate; whether he hit at least once when shooting at the ambassador, or still missed several times; who served under Trotsky - as an adjutant or chief of security; whether he participated in the mysterious second Himalayan expedition of Nicholas Roerich (which was later repeatedly refuted); whether he was involved in the “murder” of Yesenin; what was his last mission in Iran; by whom he was betrayed - by the frightened Karl Radek, to whom he allegedly carried a letter from Trotsky (whom he met either in Turkey or in Crete), or by his last mistress, who did not forgive him for his betrayal; and finally, what did he shout before the execution - “Long live Comrade Trotsky” or sang “Get up, branded with a curse...”? ...Having fled by a strange and, most likely, happy coincidence from the German embassy, ​​Blyumkin and Andreev lived for some time near the headquarters of the Social Revolutionaries (Blyumkin, by the way, did not betray the people who were sheltering him), and then went underground . Blyumkin hid first in Rybinsk, then in Petrograd, then in Kyiv, where in April 1919, after the arrival of the Red Army, he voluntarily appeared at the Cheka, was tried, but was amnestied on May 16, 1919. Nikolai Andreev, who also fled to Ukraine, settled with Father Makhno, where he soon died of typhus. And Blumkin first joined the anarchists in Moscow, then moved to Trotsky. The Left Social Revolutionaries accused him of treason and organized three assassination attempts on him, as a result of one of which he was seriously wounded. After Trotsky left the post of chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, Blumkin joined the OGPU, where he quickly made a career. I have been on assignments in Mongolia, various countries of the Middle East, India, and Turkey. The last time during a visit to Turkey I met with Trotsky. Upon arrival, he was arrested and shot in November 1929 on charges of “repeated betrayal of the cause of the proletarian revolution and Soviet power.” He was 31 years old.

Anatoly BERSTEIN, Dmitry KARTSEV