Chapter 7, The Blumkin Project

Since killing Count Mirbach a year earlier, Blumkin had disappeared. To appease the Germans, they were told he’d been executed. In fact, he was allowed to slip away to Ukraine to carry out clandestine operations behind White Army lines. His daring gesture had turned the seventeen-year-old terrorist into a patriotic legend. So when he reappeared at the Poets’ Café on Tverskaya Street one evening in July 1919, people couldn’t believe their eyes. They’d thought him dead, yet there he was standing among them, covered with scars, like some sort of Bolshevik Christ. People examined him, touched him. Having heard the rumor, a clutch of Chekists in their leather coats gathered at the door.

When the poet Mayakovsky saw him come in, he interrupted himself and thundered (“We Will Proclaim a New Myth”):

No more literature, no more cant!

Shut up, you orators.

The floor is yours,

Comrade Mauser!

Looming over Blumkin by a couple of heads, Mayakovsky embraced him, stroking his head and affectionately calling him “Blumochka.” Then he picked him up (“To raise up a man, he makes him a Mayakovsky,” Trotsky quipped) and leaped onto the stage. There, he plopped “Blumochka” down and shouted, “Comrades, here is ‘Zhivoi’! He’s alive!”

Futurists threw their caps and top hats in the air; others shot out the chandeliers in a tinkling of glass. People drank more than usual that evening, and Blumkin was celebrated as he never had been before, and probably never would be again. He was the hero who had come to satisfy a crowd hungry for romantic adventures, the survivor who had looked death in the face. A long scar running from his skull to his gap-toothed mouth testified to the ordeals he had undergone.

“Death didn’t want me,” he told his friends gathered around the table. After a pause, he added theatrically: “Every Jew has nine lives. As long as I haven’t lived them, I can’t die! There’s no point in trying to kill me!”

I don’t know where the variation of a saying about Jews that is usually ascribed to cats came from, but under the effects of alcohol, nobody contradicted him. But whether about cat or Jew, Blumkin’s nine lives metaphor is very useful for putting some order in his tangled biography.

Blumkin’s first life was his childhood in Odessa, caught between the social misfortune of being from a poor Moldavanka family, the 1905 pogroms, and the death of his father when he was six. It was also learning from Mendele Mocher Sforim, the grandfather of Yiddish literature. Call it a fable of the awakening of Jewish consciousness.

His second life was the school of the streets. Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, People’s Will populists, and SRs clashing in the harbor’s Greek bistros. At home, his brother was an anarchist and his sister, a Social Democrat. Between the two, Blumkin chose the Socialist Revolutionaries. An awakening of social consciousness.

Blumkin’s third life was war, and meeting “Mike the Jap,” who inspired Isaac Babel to create Benya Krik, the king of Odessa’s gangsters. Blumkin also encountered Odessa’s literary elite, Jewish self-defense groups, poetry, war, literary cafés, and Moldavanka’s criminal underworld. An apprenticeship in violence and bravery, the awakening of a political consciousness.

His fourth life began with the October Revolution. The young Chekist prepared the attack on Mirbach while spending his nights at the Poets’ Café. Here, the themes of his three earlier lives coalesced. Jewish, social, and political consciousness all merged to inspire an act that transgressed the prohibition against killing. The terrorism stage.

In his fifth life, Blumkin went underground. Living as a fugitive, he wandered from Petrograd to Kyiv, crossed a Ukraine ravaged by the Civil War, dodged White, Green, and Black armies, going through a kind of purgatory. And finally a conversion to Bolshevism and forgiveness not by a rabbi, but by a soldier-monk, the head of the Red Army.

During the second half of 1919, Blumkin was a member of the small group of advisers that accompanied Trotsky in his armored train. He made himself invaluable, taking every available task: from organizing the train’s security to writing and printing its newspaper, from leading espionage missions in enemy territory to translating and encoding information. On some evenings Trotsky would call him to dictate a note for the Politburo or a few pages for a theoretical essay he was writing. During the few calm moments of the war, they would talk poetry: Baudelaire, Esenin, Mayakovsky. Blumkin would occasionally suggest a nighttime sortie with his fellow fighters. Trotsky agreed, while urging caution and specifying the time for them to be back. On those nights, you would hear explosions behind enemy lines: a bridge had been blown up, an ammunition dump was ablaze, a telegraph network or a telephone exchange demolished. All bore the hallmarks of Blumkin and his comrades, who trudged home at dawn like drunken sailors after a night of shore leave. As always, steam was up in the locomotive. The train would take off, quickly vanishing into the darkness.

Trotsky’s train was no mere convoy for inspection trips. It was the Red Army’s mobile headquarters, a propaganda train, and a combat unit that carried a store of matériel and one or two cars of machine guns—the only cars that were armored, along with the two locomotives. When it stopped, one of the two engines would be used for quick side trips. The other one was always kept under steam. The walls of the cars had been lined with steel plates, and sandbags stacked in the windows. Dozens of sharpshooters manned the machine-gun nests on the car roofs around the clock. The train carried rifles, machine guns, and grenades. Several cars had been turned into garages, including a gasoline tank car with a number of trucks and small cars. These could carry a team of twenty to thirty men, including riflemen and machine gunners, on reconnaissance missions. That way, they could travel away from the tracks and go deep into the countryside. The train was equipped with a recreation room, a galley, and a car stocked with spare food and clothing. It had everything needed to sustain some fifty fighting men whose leather coats, said Trotsky, gave them heft and made them look imposing.

The train organized the troops, educated often-illiterate soldiers, tried deserters, and resupplied the army, though ammunition was always in short supply. The Red Army had no reserves. “Shirts were sent to the front direct from the workshop,” wrote Trotsky in My Life.

The train was also a mobile government unit with its own means of communication: a telegraph station, a printing press, and a radio station with a tall antenna that was raised on the roof during long stops. In this way, it could receive not only Radio Moscow but also a dozen European broadcasts (including from the Eiffel Tower) and stay informed of day-to-day developments of events in the world. En Route, the train’s daily newspaper, reprinted and editorialized on dispatches from the four corners of the world. People communicated from one train car to the next by telephone and visual signals. In war zones where information was sketchy and hard to get, or where radio and telegraph equipment was lacking, the train was “a messenger from other worlds.”

Trotsky had the tsarist railway minister’s private car remodeled for his personal use. A long table ran the length of the compartment. A map of Russia hung—and swayed—above it. A wide variety of books filled the shelves of a big bookcase: encyclopedias, technical works, novels, even collections of poetry in several languages. You could find both Antonio Labriola’s Essays on the Materialist Conception of History and Mallarmé’s Vers et Prose in the Perrin edition with the blue cover.

In his train car, Trotsky received military and local civilian authorities, read telegrams, and dictated orders and articles. With war raging and the train crossing steppes and deserts, stenographers took dictation from him in shifts, day and night. “In those years I accustomed myself to writing and thinking to the accompaniment of Pullman wheels and springs,” he wrote.

In the Civil War, the train soon became legendary. It was credited with the success of the Red Army and ascribed quasi-supernatural powers. The train was worshipped like a god of war, and its saga told as if about a hero. It was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for its part in fighting White leader Nikolai Yudenich. Lenin claimed that the train’s appearing at the front had a magical effect on the soldiers and the army as a whole. Diplomat Alexander Barmine wrote of “the surge of energy it brought everywhere in tragic moments.” A situation that had been catastrophic the night before was suddenly and miraculously resolved with the train’s arrival. The pages that Trotsky devotes to the train in his autobiography bear witness to the popular infatuation with this magical train. He writes as if it were a living being: “Sometimes the train was cut off and shelled or bombed from the air. No wonder it was surrounded by a legend woven of victories both real and imagined.” Word that the train was coming galvanized Russian soldiers. “The news of the arrival of the train would reach the enemy lines as well. There people imagined a mysterious train infinitely more awful than it really was…The train earned the hatred of its enemies and was proud of it.”

After the end of the Civil War, an exposition was organized in the train’s honor that drew many visitors, according to the newspapers. Trotsky asked Blumkin to arrange it, but it may have been Blumkin’s own idea. He gathered all the documents connected to the train’s history: posters, proclamations, orders, flyers, photographs, films, books, speeches, etc. The train was displayed in a huge hall, and visitors could walk through the cars in small groups. The great antenna that allowed the train to connect with the rest of the country and the world was raised on the roof. On the sides of one car, instead of destination signs, a diagram was painted that showed the trips the train had made during the war. It had covered a distance equal to five and a half times around the world: Samara, Chelyabinsk, Vyatka, Petrograd, Balashov, Smolensk, back to Samara, Rostov, Novecherkassk, Kyiv, Zhyrovyr…

In the Russian Civil War, 1919 was a pivotal year. For the first six months, White Armies encircled the Soviets’ republic, threatening Petrograd and Moscow. Fighting had destroyed the country’s industrial infrastructure. Natural resources were drying up, and the occupation of Baku deprived the Bolsheviks of the oil that is essential to a wartime army. The cars that Bolshevik commissars drove ran on a mix of turpentine and alcohol. Lacking kerosene, airplanes filled up with a pharmaceutical mixture concocted by chemical engineers. Pistons and connecting rods were lubricated with castor and cotton oils. Marine diesel fuel was rationed, and steam engines were fed dead fish and animal carcasses.

The White Armies led by Denikin, Kolchak, Yudenich, and Wrangel were gaining ground everywhere, backed by the French in the south and west, and by the English in the north and the Urals. The French supported Pilsudski’s Polish troops and Denikin’s army in the Caucasus and the Black Sea coast. The British supported Yudenich and Kolchak in the Urals. Denikin’s soldiers occupied Baku. The Reds lost Kharkov on June 24, and Ekaterinoslav on June 27. Tsaritsyn (the future Stalingrad, the “Red Verdun”) fell under pressure from British artillery and air strikes.

Denikin launched the White Armies’ big offensive on July 3, making no secret of his objective. “We were already choosing which horses we would ride for our triumphant entrance into Moscow,” remembers a British lieutenant who served under Denikin.

The intervention by Allied armies in Russia would reach its greatest intensity in 1919. By the summer, few people were betting on Lenin’s survival. Newspapers in New York, London, and Paris announced Red Army defeats daily. Whether true or not, the reports lent credence to the promise of an imminent victory over Bolshevism.

Every Western government had its wartime hawks, but Winston Churchill, the United Kingdom’s young secretary of state for war, was one of its most rabid. Even Prime Minister Lloyd George was concerned: “He is obsessed by Bolshevism, and absolutely wants to go fight in Russia.” The British press, most of which opposed intervention, spoke of “Mr. Churchill’s personal war.” But Winston stuck to his guns. To the prime minister, who listened with alarm, he declared, “Of all the tyrannies in history, the Bolshevist tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, and the most degrading.” In the House of Commons he proclaimed, “Bolshevism is not a policy; it is a disease…Civilization is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of their cities and the corpses of their victims.” He called them “a league of failures, the criminals, the morbid, the deranged and the distraught”…sustained by “typhus-bearing vermin.”

In fighting that “vermin,” Churchill wanted to pull out all the stops. Researchers at the Porton Down military laboratory had just perfected a secret weapon dubbed Device M: a shell that released a toxic gas derived from arsenic when it exploded. It was intended for use against the rebellious tribes of northern India. The general in charge of its development called it “the most effective chemical weapon ever devised.”

Many voices in His Majesty’s government were raised against using such a barbarous weapon in Russia, either on principle or for fear of public reaction if word got out. Churchill was unmoved. “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes,” he declared in one secret memorandum. “Why is it not fair for a British artilleryman to fire a shell which makes the said native sneeze? It is really too silly.”

On August 27, 1919, British air strikes began against the garrison in Yemtsa south of Archangel, in Russia’s northern forests. Reported a survivor: “Not knowing what it was, ground troops ran in the cloud. Some died before they managed to get out, others staggered a few more steps, then fell down dead.” According to a medical report, soldiers were seized by dizziness, bleeding from the nose and ears, then vomiting blood and suffocating. The air offensive continued for all of September. The War Ministry reported that 2,718 Device Ms were used against Bolshevik positions. One village was hit by 183 toxic gas shells. When chemical warfare was finally abandoned, some fifty thousand unused shells remained. Because they were too dangerous to transport, they were thrown overboard in the White Sea. They remain on the seabed, 240 feet down.

But as 1919 drew to a close, the fighting finally turned to the Bolsheviks’ advantage. In October, Yudenich was driven from the outskirts of Petrograd. By November, Denikin’s army was in retreat. Kolchak evacuated Siberia. At the end of November, Ukraine and the southern provinces of European Russia were liberated. The Red Army retook Kharkov, Kyiv, and Rostov. The Whites were chased out of Astrakhan. The French departed Odessa for good. Churchill was out of favor, and Lloyd George put an end to British intervention, choosing to negotiate with the Bolsheviks instead.

Directed from Trotsky’s armored train, the Red Army now went on the offensive on every front. It was during 1920, the last year of the Civil War, that the trips were the most risky, and most often directed to the southern front, which was the most persistent and most dangerous.

In the summer of 1919, Trotsky had an insight of genius: the path of world revolution leads east. In his armored train, he started hatching all sorts of plans. Late into the night, he dictated to Blumkin notes that showed an ambition worthy of Napoleon. Trotsky wanted to create an industrial basis in the Urals to make the Soviets independent of the strategically vulnerable Donets Basin; open a revolutionary academy in the Urals or Turkestan in order to train military leaders to direct the struggle in Asia along with technicians, planners, linguists, and other specialists. A “serious military man” suggested a plan to Trotsky for the formation of an expeditionary cavalry corps to serve in India. Blumkin edited as he took dictation, suggesting this or that measure, such as the creation of a Red Army in Azerbaijan. When Trotsky went to rest in his cabin, Blumkin carefully encoded the secret memorandum before transmitting it to the Politburo in Moscow.

Trotsky was asking for a “radical reorientation” of Soviet foreign policy. Up to then, the Bolsheviks had hoped and waited for the workers’ movements in Europe to pick up the revolutionary torch. And events seemed to be proving them right. In Britain’s Clyde region, more than a hundred thousand workers went on strike in January 1919. In March, after a series of strikes, worker councils seized power in Hungary. In Poland, the Dombrowa miners did the same. Other attempts occurred in Austria and in Switzerland; they would be brutally repressed.

The secret memorandum that Blumkin encoded read as follows: “There is no doubt that our Red Army is an incomparably more powerful force in the Asian terrain than the European one. There, we have a clear possibility of deploying our activity, instead of a long and tedious wait to see how things evolve in Europe.”

This line of thought wasn’t firmly rooted in Trotsky’s own mind, wrote his biographer Isaac Deutscher. “It came as an impetuous reflex of his own brain in response to an exceptional set of circumstances.” But Deutscher failed to note that this reflex was shaped by Trotsky’s contact with a generation of young Bolshevik commissars who were fascinated by the East. For someone like Blumkin, Persia was the gateway to Asia. It opened the way to India and China, but also to the Middle East, Europe, Palestine, and Mesopotamia. In his imagination, Blumkin could see himself as a Bolshevik Lawrence of Arabia in a long white tunic, riding a camel through the desert, bivouacking in oases and taking sleeping cities by storm. This thinking didn’t reflect only geopolitics or ideology, but an intellectual climate. Poets like Esenin and Khlebnikov and painters like Yakulov all shared this Orientalist inclination.

The “Orientalization” of Bolshevism’s political and intellectual climate would prove to be a stroke of genius. Writes Deutscher: “The road of the revolution to Peking and Shanghai, if not to Calcutta and Bombay, was to prove shorter than that to Paris and London, and certainly easier than the road to Berlin or even to Budapest.”