The Blumkin Project, A Biographical Novel

This page-turning biographical novel follows the footsteps of a forgotten legend of the Russian Revolution, from Odessa to Moscow, Istanbul, and beyond. Yakov Blumkin claimed to have had nine lives. Born to a poor Jewish family and orphaned as a child, he was a Socialist Revolutionary, a terrorist, the assassin of the German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach, a poet close to the avant-garde, a member of Cheka, a military strategist, a secret agent, and Leon Trotskys secretary. Executed in 1929 on Stalins orders at the age of only twenty-nine, he has continued to inspire a powerful curiosity, and wild rumors and falsehoods about his extraordinary life abound today.As a young man in 1980s Paris, Christian Salmon identified strongly as a Bolshevik, drawn to the glorious October Revolution immortalized in literature and films such as Warren Beattys Reds and Sergei Eisensteins trilogy. Picking up the thread of his dream...