Yakov Grigorievich Blumkin was born in Odessa on October 8, 1900.
Perhaps. He himself gave that date during a deposition before a Cheka commission in 1919, but in his autobiography—members of the Bolshevik Party had to write their autobiographies several times during their lives—Blumkin put down March (without further precision) and not October 8. Just a few extra months in an existence lived at a dead run. After his arrest in 1929, Blumkin gave yet another version, saying he was born in Sosnytsia, near Chernigov, in 1898. This version is cited on a website devoted to the history of Jewish communities in Ukraine, which mentions “Yakov Blumkin” among “Famous Jews from Sosnitsya.” Other sources give his birthplace as Lemberg (Lvov), where he supposedly studied at the German gymnasium. This might explain a precocious anti-German prejudice to which he gave full rein at seventeen when he killed Germany’s ambassador to Moscow, Count von Mirbach.
After Russian troops seized Lvov in September 1914, his father, Grigory Isayevich, was said to have enlisted in the Russian Army and accompanied the soldiers as they retreated to Odessa, where his family settled. But that’s hard to believe. His father, a former lumber worker in Polesia, died when Blumkin was six (in 1904 or 1906, depending on the two versions of his birth), leaving his family and brothers and sister destitute. So he couldn’t have joined the Russian Army in 1914.
Of the three versions recorded by historians—two of them from Blumkin himself, as I was able to verify in GPU archives—I prefer the first date, 1900, for three reasons that will have consequences for the rest of this book. One: Blumkin was born with his century, and this perfect synchronicity is the only harmony to be heard in a biography loud with the dissonances of troubled times. Two: Blumkin’s birth on the “magical date of the century’s change” shines an augural, almost Christlike light on our hero’s humble birth to a poor family in Odessa’s Moldavanka ghetto. Three: in a biography complicated by pseudonyms and a breathless succession of locales, the date 1900 gives readers an easily remembered benchmark that lets them calculate the hero’s age at every stage of a life full of false trails and blind alleys.
You could give a thousand details of young Blumkin’s life: the spicy scent of acacia trees, the courthouse’s white domes, street peddlers’ cries, the sirens of ships sailing for Port Said and Newcastle, Marseille and Cardiff, the whirling of dead leaves on the muddy roads driven by the first automobiles…The Moldavanka neighborhood, its “wind men,” big-hearted bandits who robbed the rich to feed the dockworkers, the Combat Organization terrorists, whose names blistered the tongues of white-stockinged bourgeois lounging on flowered sofas, the merchants, the brokers. You would have to describe the first strikes, the garbage cans heaped in the street, the burning of the synagogue, the muzhiks sweeping through Odessa, the ransacked shops, the air choking with feathers from ripped mattresses. You would have to talk about revolts, ticking bombs, the shredded bodies of the tsar’s ministers. But if we’re going to say just one thing, let’s quote Blumkin’s grandmother, who told him, “Study, study, and you’ll get everything, riches and glory. You must know everything. People will fall at your feet and bow down. The whole world must envy you. Don’t trust anyone, don’t have friends. Don’t give them money; don’t give them your heart.”
I reread those lines in February 2011, on the plane taking me to Odessa. It was an excerpt from a synopsis I had written twenty years earlier for a publisher, a dozen pages that contained what little information I had collected about Blumkin. I found it in the bottom of my Blumkin Project trunk a few days before I left, and I took it along, thinking it might guide me during this trip to Odessa. I was startled by the specificity of the images: the acacias, leaves, and feathers, etc. Had I actually gone there, to question the witnesses or their descendants? Of course not, and the Internet didn’t exist back then. Those images were lifted from history books, memoirs, and novels. I consulted accounts of the 1905 pogroms, the memoirs of writers contemporary to Blumkin like Isaac Babel and Yuri Olesha, images from Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, both of which were shot in Odessa.
That’s how every biographer proceeds, borrowing memories, stories, and images from witnesses, historians, and writers to bring a tableau to life. Mixed in with these literary and cinematographic quotations were memories of my own childhood in Marseille. Wasn’t Odessa called the “Marseille of the Black Sea”? For decades, cargo ships shuttled between those cities like buses serving the same line, tying up to the same docks, trading Ukrainian wheat for Marseille tiles. In my mind, Babel’s Moldavanka neighborhood looked like Marseille’s Le Panier, and I conflated the famous steps in Potemkin with those of the Saint-Charles train station. I felt I knew Odessa even before visiting it, a paper Odessa composed of quotations and personal memories. A montage of mental images.
I closed the synopsis. Its cover sheet bore a date, my name, and a Paris address near the Bastille. In taking it, I thought it might guide me during this trip, but I was wrong. Maybe I would at least find in it an explanation for the reasons that got me interested in this “elusive hero,” as Emmanuelle called him when she accompanied me on this return to my Bolshevik Ithaca. As the plane flew over the snow-covered peaks of the Alps, I thought back to that distant period she once dubbed “Blumkinian.” She hadn’t known about him, because she was still a child at a time when I’d already gotten interested in a character who gradually took over my life, to the point that I devoted all my free time to him. Were my motives that of a historian, a militant, a writer? Did I want to write a biography or a novel? I couldn’t answer those questions. The person I was then had become distant, and was as remote from me as I was from Blumkin. Far from helping me track him down, it blocked him. The two stories were mirroring each other, exchanging their own enigmas. I had to separate them, untangle them.
The plane began its descent into Odessa. Looking out the window, I watched as its white wing ripped the surrounding fog. Then the Gulf of Odessa appeared with its long arms stretching inland, the hips of its estuaries, and the jumble of basins glittering in the setting sun. Rail lines ran to the foot of warehouses where containers were stacked like Rubik’s cubes and orange-clad longshoremen busied themselves around the cranes. Freed of its barge, a tugboat zigzagged back into the harbor, trailing a snake of foam. The plane banked gently, momentarily revealing the city with its grid of streets, a checkerboard on a cliff. Then it skirted the Black Sea beaches, following an invisible path toward the ground. A vacant lot with scraggly bushes appeared in the windows on either side, and the plane bumped along the runway until it came to a stop.
The Londonskaya Hotel stands a few hundred yards from the famous steps in Eisenstein’s movie Battleship Potemkin. It overlooks the harbor and in fair weather provides a wide panorama of Odessa Bay, “like a balcony on the Black Sea,” says the hotel’s website. This morning, however, we could barely make out the tall rust-colored cranes dipping their long arms into ships’ holds. Snow was coming down hard, and the acacias on Prymorsky Boulevard, which ran along the hotel, bowed under its weight.
It was in this hotel that the writer Yuri Olesha learned of Sergei Kirov’s assassination, the event that launched the great 1936–38 Moscow trials. The guest register displayed the signatures of a constellation of writers and film people: Robert Louis Stevenson, Anton Chekhov, Henri Barbusse, Sergei Eisenstein, Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet, Sergei Esenin and Isadora Duncan, Marcello Mastroianni, Nikita Mikhalkov, and many others. The opera and the archaeological and literary museums were very near at hand. To my right, I could glimpse the white colonnaded facade of what had been the stock market before the Revolution and became the regional Soviet headquarters in 1917. The building housed the Odessa city museum. The monument to the Potemkin sailors had been removed, replaced by a statue of Catherine the Great.
On the flat-screen TVs lining the hotel walls, Euronews was replaying muted scenes of a violent demonstration. Hundreds of thousands of people had gathered on Tahrir Square in Cairo to demand the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. The police were charging the demonstrators. Bodies were being carried away on stretchers as image followed image of streets filled with tear gas, a forest of green flags, bloodied faces. From time to time, a shot of a journalist reporting on the event would appear, only to be relegated to a corner of the screen to make room for images of the angry crowd. TV screens in gilded frames hung on every wall, with dozens lining the hallways to the ballrooms, each repeating the same images, as in an electronics store. I had come to Odessa to investigate the 1905 and 1907 revolutions, and here the news was giving me a revolution unfolding in Egypt at that very moment.
I had made an appointment with a historian who was studying police archives, and whom I’d agreed to keep anonymous. He claimed that the legend of Odessa as the mother of crime was constructed by literature and cinema. He had gotten interested in the famous bandit Moisei Vinnitsky, who inspired Babel to create the character of Benya Krik, the “King” of Odessa Stories. Blumkin became close to Vinnitsky after the February Revolution of 1917. The historian was late, probably because of the weather. In fact, no cars were driving on the boulevard. Outside, bundled-up crews were clearing the streets with shovels.
Very early this morning we had decided to go see the famous Odessa Steps. The streetlights were still on, their pale light filtered by the thick veil of snow-flakes. Emmanuelle walked ahead of me, holding a city map and pointing to some invisible spot in the distance. With difficulty we trudged through fresh powder snow up to our calves. We retraced our path several times, searching for the start of steps that loomed so large in my imagination that we couldn’t possibly have missed them. No sign indicated the spot. I had screened the scene of the steps in Eisenstein’s movie so often, I was positive I would recognize them at first glance. But there was nothing in the layout of the area that matched my mental picture, neither the modest statue of Governor Richelieu, nor the huge lions from the movie, now no more than tabby cats half buried in snow. Emmanuelle was a veteran mountain hiker and expert map reader, but it took all her powers of persuasion to convince me to try the modest stairway we eventually found. The steps looked much narrower than those in the movie, squeezed on either side by fences covered with inscriptions hiding abandoned gardens with graffiti-covered concrete borders that poked up here and there under the snow.
We took the icy steps one at a time, with my memory protesting at how narrow they were. It was only when I got to the foot of the stairway and turned around that I recognized the steps of the film. The optical illusion created by the architects gave the flight of steps a monumental dimension that Eisenstein further emphasized with low-angle shots. But how had the filmmaker managed to assemble so many extras in such a small area? There were hundreds of them, maybe a thousand. I was tempted to calculate the area’s surface by pacing off the width of the steps. How often had I watched this scene precisely because of the great number of extras Eisenstein used, all of them contemporaries of my hero with a thousand faces!
Eisenstein made the movie for the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 revolution. It tells the story of the Potemkin sailors’ mutiny. Blumkin was twenty-five years old then. I would have liked to add him to the crowd, put his face on one of those extras. I had studied each of them, looking for clues. As I climbed the steps, I could see them, one after another. The elegant woman in the feathered hat who observes the distant battleship through a lorgnette. The woman twirling an umbrella on her shoulder. The amputee who leaps from step to step, swinging his arms. The little boy with the basket who runs down the steps with his mother, and falls under the Cossacks’ bullets. The foot that crushes his hand, its fingers spread. The bloody face of the woman with shattered glasses. The girl in the white blouse and knotted scarf. The little boy plugging his ears, next to his fallen father. The young woman who is shot and loses hold of the buggy that starts bumping down the steps, carrying her baby.
Whatever became of that baby, that movie extra? He was probably about six months old at the time of filming, which ran from August to November 1925. So in 2011 he would be about eighty-five. Could he still be alive? What had his life been like? Back in my hotel room, I watched the film’s credits, but the names of the extras weren’t listed. I tried a search on my computer. Many hits referred to the scene, to references to the scene in other movies, like The Untouchables and Brazil, and to the architects who designed the steps, but there was nothing on the identity of the diminutive extra. I gave up my search. A few days later I put the question to a film historian who confirmed that no one ever learned the baby’s identity. “You have the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe,” he said. “We have the Unknown Baby of the Steps.”
“Childhood is wonderful,” wrote Victor Shklovsky, the father of Russian formalism, “it wants to dig to the depths of the world.” That’s probably true of any childhood, but digging takes on special meaning in Odessa. Shklovsky wrote that line in “Plumbing the Depths,” his preface to the Odessa writer Yuri Olesha’s book No Day Without a Line. After the huge success of Envy, his first novel, in 1927, Olesha wrote only for theater and film, but he devoted his last years to an unfinished book of memories. After Olesha’s death, Shklovsky and his wife used those unfinished manuscripts to create a collection of fragments that glowed with “the brilliance of spent uranium.” The first two parts, titled “Childhood” and “Odessa,” offer irreplaceable testimony about the century’s first two decades in Odessa. If I wanted to get a picture of Blumkin’s childhood, I would have to visit the city’s catacombs.
Odessa is perched on a cliff overlooking the Black Sea, but its buildings and monuments are built of stone blocks quarried underground. The yellow chalk of its downtown buildings was cut, loaded, and hauled along narrow tunnels by oxen and mules gone blind from spending their lives in darkness. The farther the city spread, the deeper its roots sank underground, excavating a maze of galleries that would extend two hundred feet below sea level and cover more than 1,500 miles. Odessa has the biggest network of tunnels in the world, more extensive and more complex than the famous catacombs of Rome (185 miles) and Paris (300 miles). Laid end to end, they would stretch from Odessa to Paris.
The city is a colossus with feet of clay. Whenever a roadway slumps, the town’s underground tunnels are blamed. If a facade cracks, it’s because the catacombs under the building are collapsing. After the Revolution, the Bolsheviks forbade any more excavation in the catacombs, so as not to further weaken the city’s foundations. The abandoned mines became the haunts of vagabonds, bandits, and smugglers. From the very beginning, the catacombs served as storage areas for contraband, a veritable Ali Baba’s cavern piled high with all sorts of merchandise offloaded from ships. Smuggling was especially easy because some tunnels led down to the sea, which made transshipping illicit merchandise simple.
After the Second World War, a museum honoring the partisans was built at the catacombs’ entrance. When fascist troops occupied Odessa, the partisans went underground with their weapons and ammunition. For the next thirteen months, some six thousand fighters harassed the occupying troops. They would emerge to the surface through air ducts, launch attacks in the heart of the city, then disappear back underground. In response to this invisible terror, fascist troops tried to block access to the catacombs and pumped smoke into the tunnels to force the partisans out. They went deeper instead. Valentin Kataev describes those fierce battles in The Waves of the Black Sea. The tunnels still bear their marks: defensive firing slits cut into galleries, walls pockmarked with bullets and grenade shrapnel. A hot water bottle. Nazi uniform buttons. The partisans set up an underground military base with dormitories, canteens, a laundry, and working hospitals. Countless caves served as ammunition dumps. In a break room, people played chess, checkers, and dominoes by candlelight. Rooms cut into the rock on either side of the main tunnel housed men and women; hay-lined niches in the walls served as bunks. The medical wing had real beds and an operating room. The women cooked on wooden ovens built of yellow chalk, venting the smoke up to a higher tunnel. On the surface, villagers would pretend to be drawing water from wells, while actually lowering baskets of food down air shafts to the partisans.
Stories and legends of all sorts have always risen from Odessa’s catacombs: unexplained disappearances, rumors of ritual crimes. It’s hard to tell truth from fiction in all these stories from the lower depths, a dubious grab bag of false memories and adventures partly shaped by rumors, imagination, and mystic vibrations. Gangs kept women imprisoned down there, to be sold into slavery. A survivor of the Titanic, rescued by a brigantine bound for Odessa, supposedly made a model of the liner in solid gold and hid it in the catacombs. He was afraid it would be confiscated by the Bolsheviks, who had seized control of Ukraine six years after the sinking. A century later, people are still looking for the treasure. Other stories speak of a spirit—or even a god—that watches over the catacombs. Sometimes called “Bout,” this avenging divinity protects the riches hidden there. If someone tries to steal treasure buried in the catacombs, Bout will lock them in frozen darkness. According to these beliefs, it’s forbidden to bring what you find underground to the surface. And if you break this law, you have to at least leave something in exchange.
Odessa is built on three levels. The city proper with its neo-Baroque monuments, flowered gardens, and wide avenues; below that is the port, with its half-moon bay and its long docks bristling with cranes; and finally the underground city of the catacombs. The psychoanalyst Mosche Wolff, a disciple of Freud who settled in Odessa during the first decade of the twentieth century, thought this three-level architecture echoed the three-part construct of the self that Freud was then developing in Vienna: superego, ego, and id. Could that be why psychoanalysis first took root in Odessa before spreading to Moscow? In 1912 Freud wrote to Jung: “There seems to be a local epidemic of psychoanalysis in Russia (Odessa).”
Odessa’s id consists of that maze of tunnels, the refuge of bandits and children searching for an adventure playground in its depths. To keep them from going down there, kids were warned about children who had gotten lost, dying of thirst or crushed by rockfalls. A Wall Street Journal reporter found smashed VHS cassettes littering the ground: the unspooled tapes were used as guidelines to keep people from getting lost in the labyrinth. The story of Theseus and the Minotaur, reinvented.
To our psychoanalyst, the port city above the catacombs, a place of exchanges and transactions where the reality principle reigned, represented Odessa’s ego. It was linked to the superego—the upper city—by the steps made famous by Eisenstein’s film. The upper city rose above the Black Sea like a utopia and a strategic vision. A geometric dream, its checkerboard grid of streets laid out by French architects in the image of urban Renaissance utopias. At the start of the century, Odessa’s superego, perched on its cliff above the Black Sea, suddenly blazed with a thousand lights. The city had discovered electricity.
Years later, Blumkin still remembered the day his father took him to a neighbor’s house to see electricity. Above their heads hung a clear glass bulb connected to a twisted wire that ran along the ceiling and down a panel to a black switch mounted on the doorjamb. The neighbor flipped the switch, and light bathed the objects in the room, even the most distant. He flipped the switch again, and the room plunged back into darkness. The bulb didn’t light up all at once but gradually, like a bowl slowly being filled with water, and it reached its greatest luminosity when it was full to the brim and the light spilled out, as it were.
Today it’s hard to imagine the fascination exercised by the arrival of electricity in homes. Until then, you obeyed the cycle of days and nights. Now you could fire up a captive, domesticated sun in a simple glass bulb with the flip of a switch. Wrote Yuri Olesha in his memoir: “I remember the big crowd of people who gathered in our apartment to see the electric bulb, their faces lifted and mouths agape. It was a miracle.”
Above the bulb, a white reflector hung from a braided cord that ran through a pulley. By raising or lowering it, you could adjust the width of the bulb’s light. Olesha’s neighbor repeated the operation several times. He climbed onto a chair to raise the reflector, and young Olesha could see faces emerge from the shadows and brighten. Then he lowered it, and the faces got dark again.
As soon as he was alone, and despite his parents’ prohibition, Olesha played with the light switch, turning it on and off several times, each time varying the interval, as if to figure how it was rigged or to learn a magic trick. “E-lek-tri-ches-tvo,” he would whisper as he turned the switch, and light flooded the room. “E-lek-tri-ches–tvo,” he said, separating the syllables, as the room went dark. When evening came, he leaned out the window repeating his “E-lek-tri-ches–tvo” mantra as the streetlights along the boulevards all came on at the same time. Electricity lit up windows, avenues, and theaters, as if a long-blind city had suddenly regained its sight. People dreamed of a city “as transparent as crystal.” The heroes of those days weren’t yet Lenin or Trotsky; they were named Edison, Siemens, and Marconi.
Downtown Odessa bristled with electric poles, and cables ran over rooftops, weaving a huge spiderweb between neighborhoods, their shadows crisscrossing the streets. The streetlights glowed with a steady, strong light, as if ordered to restore the right angle’s prerogatives to the world. Objects’ shapes no longer wavered under pale and trembling gas light. The city lamplighters, their long rods on their shoulders, disappeared one by one, departing the world like shadows chased away by electricity. “You like lightning in the sky,” Mayakovsky wrote to Pasternak a few years later. “I like it in the electric iron.” A veritable “electromania” hit the population as industrial and domestic uses appeared, announcing the electrification of society. Electric motors took their place next to steam engines, gasoline motors, and hydraulic turbines. Using electromagnetic waves, the wireless telegraph made it possible to imagine “a planet as transparent as crystal.”
But the arrival of electricity in Odessa in 1905–06 wasn’t just a technological innovation; it was a revolution of perception. “We will move from the lyricism of the machine to the undeniable electrical man,” wrote Dziga Vertov, who would shoot Man with a Movie Camera in Odessa. This new man “celebrates the proper running of the machine, is passionate about mechanisms, marches straight toward the marvels of chemical processes, and writes poems and screenplays with electric and incandescent tools.”
During my stay in Odessa, I got my hands on a real treasure: a few lines written by Blumkin in November 1929. Those few lines contained no revelations, but to my eyes they constituted a piece of evidence, and in Blumkin’s own hand. I found them almost by accident, because they hadn’t been filed correctly. They weren’t in Blumkin’s official file, but in that of Yakov Agranov, the man who interrogated him before leading him to the basement to be executed.
In his Lubyanka cell, Blumkin was said to have written a kind of memorandum summing up his periods of service. Victor Serge, who heard it from a witness to Blumkin’s last days, believed he requested and obtained a fifteen-day reprieve to write his memoirs, and a long letter to his son, Martin, who had been born two years earlier and never knew his father. But this was never found, even after the opening of the archives in the 1990s. At one point I had imagined re-creating this autobiography, an insider’s history of the Revolution’s first ten years, as told by one of its actors. That was the original idea behind the Blumkin Project. The exercise soon struck me as gratuitous and artificial, however, and I abandoned it.
But now for the first time I was able to read something, barely a paragraph long, written by Blumkin himself. Amid the range of possibilities I faced since restarting my research on Blumkin, I finally had an established fact, a proof of his existence. I examined each of his words like a paleontologist who must reconstitute a dinosaur from a single fossilized bone. I know these lines by heart, having read them so often I can almost hear Blumkin’s voice:
“I was born in Odessa to a poor Jewish family in March 1900. At the time of my birth, my father, who had been a lumber worker in Polesia, became a small merchant. He died when I was six, and my mother and my brothers and sister sank into poverty. Caught between national exclusion and social misfortune, I grew up according to my destiny as a child.”
That last sentence is as concise as an equation. “Social misfortune” was the condition of children from poor families, forced to quit school and eke out a living as messengers, apprentices, hawkers, or street thieves. “National exclusion” referred to the situation of Jews who were confined to the Pale of Settlement (cherta osedlosti) between 1791 and 1917. This covered the western part of the Russian Empire, which today is occupied by Lithuania, Belorussia, Poland, Moldova, Ukraine, and western Russia. “Caught between national exclusion and social misfortune, I grew up according to my destiny as a child.”
In the fog of legends swirling around Blumkin’s life, those few lines give a system of coordinates we can use to orient ourselves, with “social misfortune” on the x-axis and “national exclusion” on the y-axis. Using those, you could draw a curve, a mathematical function on which to arrange all the known and sometimes contradictory facts of Blumkin’s life and trajectory. This is what I once called the “Blumkin function,” the biography of a child of the century born in 1900.
At five, Yakov Blumkin was on the famous steps of Eisenstein’s film when the sailors of the Potemkin sailed into port and threatened the government buildings with their guns. The whole family went out to see the battleship in the harbor. The chestnut trees were in bloom. In a family photograph, his sister Rosetta is wearing a light, flowered dress, a kerchief on her head. His two brothers are in short-sleeved shirts. Suddenly two cannon shots thundered above their heads. The Potemkin was aiming for the municipal theater where the military council met, but missed. The two shells landed somewhere in town. His father died the next year, plunging the whole family into poverty.
Blumkin entered Talmud Torah school at age eight and left four years later. At twelve, he was reading Jack London’s Martin Eden and dreaming of foreign horizons: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Jerusalem—the litany he recited to himself each evening as he went to sleep. His first theft was a map. He stole it from the cloakroom of the Odessa Maritime Company and pinned it on a wall facing his bed. He was fascinated by the dotted lines of transatlantic routes. In the evening he trained himself to memorize frontiers, the outlines of oceans and deserts, the relief of mountains. In his mind, he climbed the highest peaks in Tibet, descending on the other side to disappear into Persia and China. The Black Sea? A passageway to the Mediterranean, which opened to him the doors to the Orient, Africa, Constantinople, Marseille, Tangier, the Strait of Gibraltar.
But in the meantime, he had to earn a living. In 1913, he was a trainee in Karl Franck’s electro-technical office, then in one Inger’s workshop, where he earned twenty or thirty kopeks a day. By day, he wired businesses and private homes. At night he repaired tramway lights at the Richelievski depot for a Belgian company. He occasionally worked as an assistant electrician at Odessa’s Russian theater. In 1916 we find him at the Avitch and Izraïlson cannery. He hopped from one job to another without any apparent logic to this instability.
Blumkin was fourteen when war was declared, seventeen in the year of the Revolution. A year earlier he had joined the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who enjoyed the prestige of Azef and Savinkov’s SR Combat Organization, which had been spreading terror in tsarist Russia since the beginning of the century. Blumkin read a lot. He wrote poems—pretty bad ones, apparently. Still, his verse appeared in various publications: Kolossia, Gudok, and once even in The Odessa Paper. Brochures with red covers lined his shelves, their titles outlining an intellectual itinerary and a path to action. At night he painfully deciphered Marx’s Das Kapital and recited aloud entire passages of Sergei Nechayev’s Catechism of a Revolutionary.
Tossed onto the street very young, Blumkin discovered class struggle, the world of Moldavanka bandits, Odessa’s Jewish elite, and street fighting. His brothers Isaiah and Leo, the youngest, worked as journalists for Odessa newspapers. Nathan, another brother, would become a well-known playwright under the pen name Basilevski. Leo was an anarchist, their sister Rosetta, a Social Democrat; you can imagine the arguments around the dinner table. From 1905 on, they never stopped. Peasantry and proletariat. Strikes. Occupations. Demonstrations. Bolshevik party brochures. Lenin’s complicated articles. The theory of imperialism. Discussions raged over billiards in the harbor’s Greek bistros, between Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, People’s Will populists, and Socialist Revolutionaries. Blumkin was still finding his way.
Two tutelary figures emerge from the mists of Yakov Blumkin’s childhood, a writer and a bandit. One ruled the y-axis (the condition of Jews in the Pale of Settlement); the other ruled the x-axis (the condition of the poor). The writer was celebrated, the bandit legendary. While the first owed his fame to his works, the second became a literary character, the famous Benya Krik, the great-hearted bandit in orange pants that Isaac Babel immortalized in his Odessa Stories. But you have to be careful not to confuse the “King” of Moldavanka with his model, a certain Mishka Vinnitsky—dubbed Mishka Yaponchik (“Mike the Jap”) supposedly because of his slanted eyes—who had his hour of glory in Odessa in 1917–19. As Babel writes in “Justice in Parentheses,” “There is no other like Benya the King! He stamps out lies in his quest for justice—justice in parentheses as well as justice without parentheses.”
Mendele Mocher Sforim (his pseudonym means “Mendele the book peddler”) was Mike the Jap’s total opposite. Where Mendele’s knowledge and experience gave him sway over people’s minds, Vinnitsky ruled Odessa by stealth and strength, committing burglaries, robberies, and expropriations. He stole from the rich and gave to the poor. But both men were driven by a desire for justice, and shared the same love of their people. They differed only in how to put it into practice. Mendele believed in cultivating minds through education; Mike the Jap couldn’t stand to wait. Mendele gave Moldavanka’s people the dignity of their language; Mike the Jap fed and armed them. In his autobiography, Blumkin pays homage to both his masters: “One opened my mind, the other taught me the most basic of skills, how to kill a man.”
In 1908, when Yakov Blumkin entered Odessa’s Talmud Torah, Mendele Mocher Sforim was seventy-three and had been running the school for a quarter century. He is considered the founder of modern Jewish literature, one of the greatest scholars of the Bible, Talmud, and Hebrew authors. The publication of his complete works is under way.
On the first day of school, Mendele received young Blumkin in his book-lined office, which reeked of tobacco. He was an old man with a neat white beard, rimmed glasses, and surprisingly liberal ideas. As the principal, he felt that Jewish children should pursue more than just religious studies. He encouraged them to learn foreign languages and to free themselves from the yoke of the religious community. He severely criticized his so-called benefactors for their bigotry, cruelty, and cynicism. He admired the Renaissance.
Called “the grandfather of Yiddish literature,” Mendele during his lifetime was celebrated all over Europe and as far as the United States. He would be a national treasure, except that the Jews in the Russian Empire had no nation, merely a “zone of residence.” That’s where nearly five million Russian Jews, mostly peasants in shtetls, lived at the start of the twentieth century.
Mendele’s great merit was to capture shtetl life just as it was disappearing, and give written form to its humor, anecdotes, and language. From his travels through the Pale of Settlement, he brought back the lives of men and women accustomed to making the best of their bad luck. He wrote: “My fate was to go down to the lowest level, to the basement of Jewish life. My merchandise is rags and tatters. The people I deal with are the poor, beggars, tricksters, charlatans, the dregs of life, the lowest of humanity. Mendele took Yiddish—despised as “a language of stutterers” “for women and the ignorant,” “bastardized German,” “a cursed jargon”—and turned it into a literary language. In 1909, during a lecture tour from Vilnius to Bialystok and from Lodz to Warsaw, thousands awaited him in train stations, jostling each other to get close, to catch his eye or shake his hand. But in Odessa, Mendele passed unnoticed. Visitors were surprised to see him strolling the streets incognito, eavesdropping on conversations in search of popular expressions and bursts of spoken language. A modest hero who cared nothing for glory, he wanted only to be useful to his people.
In 1923 in Berlin, Dora Diamant, Franz Kafka’s last love, read to her ailing lover stories from Fishke the Lame and The Travels of Benjamin III. The latter is a picaresque tale often compared to Don Quixote, and it earned Mendele the title of “the Jewish Cervantes.”
The centenary of Mendele’s birth was celebrated on February 10, 1936, also in Berlin. A Jewish restaurant was booked, supposedly for a wedding reception. The would-be bride was none other than Dora Diamant. A Warsaw Yiddish newspaper gave a moving account of the event: “Around us were a few dozen members of our now defunct cultural club who were still in Berlin, along with some other lovers of Yiddish. Standing at the head of the table, Dora read a chapter from Mendele’s favorite novel, The Wishing Ring. We all sang Yiddish songs, thrilled that a group of persecuted Jews in Nazi Germany had managed to join in celebrating the centenary of our great classical writer.” It was Diamant’s last evening in Berlin. Next day, she took the train to Moscow to join her husband, a German communist who had left Nazi Germany and moved to the Soviet Union.
We don’t know much about Blumkin’s second mentor, Mishka Vinnitsky, alias “Mike the Jap.” Very few documents survive that would help reconstruct his life. It should be noted that in 1918 Vinnitsky himself attacked the state police archives and destroyed the registration files of some sixteen thousand criminals. All the hard data about Mike the Jap having disappeared, Isaac Babel and his imagination stepped in.
This reshaping of reputation is a fairly common phenomenon, whereby a person is turned into a hero by entirely literary means. These people often come across as hybrid beings, men of flesh and paper who rise above the human condition to reach the kind of universality only attained in books. Once a flesh- and-blood man has been transformed into a hero, it’s very hard to start with the romantic hero Benya Krik and work backward to find the real Mike the Jap. But we can try.
He was born Moisei Vinnitsky on October 30, 1891, to a lower-middle-class Jewish family in the Moldavanka neighborhood. He had high cheekbones, olive skin, and the slanted eyes that gave him his nickname. His life story preceded Blumkin’s by a decade. Like Blumkin, Vinnitsky was born and raised in Moldavanka, lost his father at six, and very early experienced poverty. He also was a student at Talmud Torah, but had to drop out. He even became an apprentice electrician, too. There’s nothing miraculous about this repetition, however. Those were the material conditions of Moldavanka’s impoverished Jews, and they turned the children of wig-wearing Jewish mothers into bandits and revolutionaries. In 1905, at age fourteen, Mike the Jap joined a Jewish self-defense detachment formed to protect the community against pogroms. The triggering event was the murder of a gentile boy in Dubossary, a little town near Kishinev, in April 1903. Following Easter celebrations a few days later, a mob attacked Jewish neighborhoods. In three days, they sacked hundreds of stores, burned hundreds of homes, and killed dozens of Jews. The forces of law and order didn’t lift a finger. Starting in 1904, the pogroms spread, to peak in late 1905 and early 1906 amid a general climate of revolutionary agitation. The last two months of 1905 saw no fewer than 657 pogroms, with more than three thousand killed and fifteen thousand wounded, mainly in Bessarabia and Odessa (eight hundred killed, five thousand injured in late October 1905).
A year later, Mike the Jap joined an anarchist splinter group, attacking stores, munitions depots, even private homes. This politics of expropriation led him to participate in terrorist acts. While still an adolescent, he was sentenced (apparently unjustly) to twelve years in prison for killing a policeman. Only the fact that he was a minor saved him from hanging. In February 1917 he was amnestied, along with other criminals convicted of political crimes.
Vinnitsky returned to Odessa in the summer of 1917, on the eve of the Revolution. He formed a gang of robbers that quickly became known throughout the city. Merchants, restaurant owners, and brothel keepers paid him protection money. He also paid off the police (for their passivity). And he remembered the poor when spreading money around, which earned him a reputation as Odessa’s Robin Hood. He fed this reputation by publishing a letter in the Odessa Soviet deputies’ Pravda, in which he rejected the accusations of banditry in the name of a very personal concept of class struggle. “Personally I would be very happy if someone asked a worker or a peasant if I had ever harmed them. I know in advance that no one could answer in the affirmative. Concerning the bourgeoisie, if I have undertaken offensive actions against it, no worker or peasant can condemn me. The bourgeoisie rob the poor, so I began robbing it in turn. I am proud to be called a robber, and I will be a threat to capitalists and the enemies of the people wherever they are for as long as I live.”
At seventeen, Yakov Blumkin encountered Mike the Jap in the Jewish self-defense groups he later called his “school of life.” There he discovered a whole fauna of adventurers, activists, Zionist militants, bandits, and terrorists, and it wasn’t always easy to tell them apart. From self-defense committees to expropriations, from terrorism to state violence, the ranks of the Revolution’s clandestine movements were full of Jews frustrated at the slowness of Russian society to accept them.
Future Zionists first took up arms in Russian revolutionary terrorism. In Odessa, Jews like Blumkin turned to political violence. Self-defense groups organized in response to the pogroms, determined to break with the victims’ legendary passivity. Vladimir Jabotinsky, who would later found Revisionist Zionism, tells this story: “We traveled to Moldavanka and met a few young men in a big room that looked like an office. They gave us about twenty pistols as a gift, and sold us the rest at cut-rate prices, mostly on credit and without hope of repayment. We stored our weapons—pistols, iron bars, kitchen and butcher knives—in that office, which two people guarded day and night. The other part of the office held the mimeo machine on which we printed flyers in Russian and Yiddish. Their content was very simple: two penal code articles that clearly stated that someone who kills in self-defense is not punished, and a few words of encouragement to young Jews, that they not let themselves be led to the slaughter.”
In his obituary of Theodor Herzl, who was also a cosmopolitan Jew, Jabotinsky contrasted the ghetto Jew, whom he called “ugly and sickly, without external charm,” with the real Hebrew, “the ideal image of male Hebrew beauty, tall, broad-shouldered, and graceful.” To the “fearful and oppressed Jew who prefers to hide and avoid meeting strangers’ eyes” he set a bold Jew unafraid to “look anyone in the eyes” and raise a banner before him, declaring “I am a Hebrew.”
Mike the Jap’s reign as king of Moldavanka was tumultuous but short, less than two years in all, from 1917 to 1919. But what years those were! Blumkin was with him during that period, before leaving Odessa, which was occupied by French and Greek forces, to settle in Moscow in the spring of 1918.
When the Soviet Republic of Odessa was proclaimed, Mike the Jap understood the need to collaborate with the new authorities. He went to the Cheka and offered to form a detachment that would be part of Odessa’s Soviet Army. His troops displayed great style, as described by a witness who saw them marching through the streets of Odessa: “Musicians that Mike the Jap had gathered from all over the city led the parade. Trumpet players and flutists from the Opera, wandering street fiddlers, and accordion players from outlying taverns all walked in step together, playing appropriate marches and well-known Moldavanka tunes. Following the orchestra came the Jap himself, riding a white stallion and wearing a leather cap, white tunic, and baggy, dark red pants.” According to another account, Mike’s horse was black and not white, and the commander led the parade and was followed, not preceded, by two Jewish Moldavanka bands. Then came the parade of infantry, two thousand men armed with rifles and Mauser pistols, dressed in long white pants and smocks, but with a wide assortment of head coverings, from top hats and boaters to felt bonnets and kepis.
In May 1919 Mike the Jap’s 54th Revolutionary Detachment was battling troops under Symon Petlyura. In letting Mike the Jap organize a revolutionary battalion, however, the Soviets had laid a trap. By sending him to the front, they got him out of the city. Vinnitsky never saw Odessa again. He was shot in the back in a little train station. His funeral became a key moment in the construction of his legend. All the Jews of the region, including many from Odessa, were said to have gathered for the funeral. The funeral service was sung by the Great Synagogue’s cantor, joined by the soloists of the Odessa Opera.
Two years later, Mike was resurrected on the page and on-screen under the pseudonym “Benya Krik.” Everything suggests that Isaac Babel knew the details of Mike’s death. He describes it with what in Odessa is called “scrupulous inexactness,” except for the critical event, the bullet in the back.
In the years that followed, Mike the Jap’s life ceased to belong to the real world and entered legend. A clear sign of this switch was the proliferation of different versions of every event in his life. Stories about him multiplied and contradicted each other. They spread by word of mouth and were enriched with extravagant details. They came from a number of sources: from Vinnitsky and his lieutenants, who ruled the city, from Soviet authorities who understood the danger of the popular Jap’s two thousand bandits, from the press, and from the street. All of them passed on stories of the struggle, the ultimate goal of which was control of the city.
That’s how “Mike the Jap” became “King” Benya Krik in Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories. And what Babel knew, he could only have learned from the Jap himself. As he wrote in “Justice in Parentheses”: “The King speaks little and speaks politely. Who can fathom the meaning of the King’s few words? Between yes and no, a five-thousand-ruble commission hangs in the air…The words of the King lay like a stone block across the road where hunger roamed.”
You could also say that they lay like a stumbling block across the path leading to the facts. Who could have told Babel about Mike the Jap’s activities? Who described the funeral of Josif the shop assistant, shot by one of Krik’s drunken men? Who drove the red car in which the gangsters showed up at Josif’s funeral, where they were certainly not welcome? Whose guns kept the crowd in check while Krik gave his speech?
In 1925 Babel began writing the screenplay of Benya Krik for Goskino, the state’s first movie studio, drawing on two of his stories: “The King” and “How Things Were Done in Odessa.”
It was obviously impossible to bring Babel’s prose to the screen without losing something, especially since the film was silent. The script was offered to Eisenstein, who was getting ready to shoot Battleship Potemkin. If he had accepted, it would have changed the history of film. Instead of Potemkin, we might have a Soviet Godfather, born of the Moldavanka Jewish ghetto.
To the censorship board, the film’s director, Vladimir Vilner, declared: “I had to be constantly vigilant not to let myself be influenced by the rumors from Odessa, which repeated a thousand romantic legends about Mishka the Japanese, ‘the big-hearted robber,’ and take care to avoid anything that would make crime seem heroic…We tried not only to avoid romanticism, but also not to focus too much on the main character.”
It wasn’t enough. The “Benya Krik” myth resisted demystification. Wondered film historians Yuri Morozov and Tatiana Derevianko: “Why was the real Jap so popular in Odessa? Why couldn’t the film’s opponents forgive him for it?” Mike the Jap became famous in many Odessans’ eyes for reasons other than his skills as a burglar and bandit: in caricature, he personified the Jewish street’s defiance of authority.
The censorship board’s verdict was final. According to its members, the film tried to romanticize the criminal underworld by lending it a certain “Odessan charm…The scandalous treatment of the Bolshevik character who tries to use Benya Krik’s gang to lead a revolutionary activity is a defamatory distortion of historical truth.”
Benya Krik wasn’t distributed in Ukraine. (In English, its title is Bennie the Howl.) It is said that the premiere was held in January 1927 in Kyiv, and that the film was immediately banned on the order of local Party organs. Another source says that Lazar Kaganovich, the general secretary of the Ukraine Communist Party’s Central Committee, attended the film’s premiere in Kharkov, which was then the republic’s capital. He emerged very unhappy about its “romantic treatment of crime.”
So was Odessa the capital of organized crime, as it was described? If you believe the police department’s data, no organized Jewish criminal gang existed in Odessa before 1917. Mike the Jap spent the ten years before the Revolution in jail, convicted of participating in anarchist expropriations in his youth. So he couldn’t have been the author of the exploits attributed to him. The only acts reliably linked to Mishka Vinnitsky when he belonged to the anarchist group Molodaya Volya (Young Will) were a break-in at the Lansberg flour store and the burglary of a certain Lander’s home.
Isaac Babel’s Benya Krik is as far from its model as his Odessa is from the city I had before my eyes. Babel hadn’t only told the stories of the city; he had created a myth. He built Odessa the way Catherine the Great’s minister Potemkin built villages. Anyone who writes about the city today runs the risk of writing about Babel’s Odessa, Babel’s bandits, and Babel’s Moldavanka. Odessa is a city that now only exists in the imagination of its inhabitants and their descendants scattered throughout the world. Its Jews have been driven out or exterminated, but Odessa can’t rid itself of their presence. Moldavanka has become a Ukrainian neighborhood, but its back alleys still ring with the sound of Babel’s parties. As Benya Krik says at the funeral of Josif the shop assistant: “There are men who are already doomed to die, and there are men who still have not begun to live.”