We are now on the threshold of Yakov Blumkin’s seventh life—the longest and most mysterious one. It stretches from the winter of 1921 to the middle of the decade and appears as a series of events distorted by rumor. Its one fixed point is Leon Trotsky, the pivot of the story. Trotsky’s account is easy to check. Most of his archives were given to Harvard’s Houghton Library shortly before his assassination, where they were safe from the censorship that erased Trotsky from Soviet history in the 1930s.
In 1937, Trotsky was interviewed in Mexico by the Dewey Commission, created to investigate Stalin’s charges against him. Trotsky described his relationship with Blumkin this way: “After the revolution in Germany and the denunciation of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty, he appeared before us and said, ‘I am now a Bolshevik; you can test me.’ He was sent to the front, where he was a very good fighter and a very courageous man.” During the Civil War, Trotsky employed Blumkin in his military secretariat, reporting directly to him. He also had him edit his military writings and organize the exposition of the armored train, which proved a big success. Trotsky sent him to the military academy in Moscow he’d founded and gave him a number of dangerous missions, which Blumkin was always willing to carry out. “When I needed a courageous man, Blumkin was at my disposal.”
The academy archives describe Blumkin as a serious student with a gift for languages. (He would learn Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, Mongolian, and Persian.) Classes went from nine in the morning until ten at night, with one-hour breaks for lunch and dinner. At the academy, Blumkin studied principles of strategy and tactics, military geography, the structure of the Red Army, military psychology, and six economic and social topics, including the philosophical and sociological principles of Marxism and the political economy of the transition.
Trotsky breathed new life into the military academy in Moscow, where former tsarist generals taught as professors and lecturers. He worked to modernize the teaching system and free it from “the pedantry typical of senior military thinkers.” He railed against the academy generals and their traditional tsarist “pseudo-historical style,” to which he opposed French military writers who knew how to combine historical research and the study of contemporary warfare with its sociological context.
Behind these questions of form lay a basic disagreement on the concept of war. Academics viewed the Civil War with a certain contempt, as a bastard child of grand strategy. Trotsky, to the contrary, thought that “the Civil War, with its highly mobile and flexible fronts, opened a fantastic field for real initiative and military art.” He contrasted the revolutionary warfare of movement with trench warfare, which had shown its limitations during World War I. Victor Serge says Blumkin subscribed to his mentor’s concepts and published articles on French generals Joffre and Foch in Izvestia.
Blumkin’s stay at the academy was often interrupted by military missions. In particular, he fought Antonov’s partisans in the Tambov Rebellion, an episode in the Civil War that Lenin called “the greatest threat the regime ever faced.”
Outraged by the requisitions of wheat, peasants killed thousands of Bolsheviks, leaving a trail of bodies nailed to trees with crosses branded on their chests and foreheads, bodies with ears cut, tongues and eyes ripped out, arms legs and genitals cut off, and stomachs slashed open and stuffed with wheat. At the head of the 79th Brigade, Blumkin restored order “with an iron fist,” says an article in Pravda.
A few days later, Alexander Barmine, a Soviet diplomat who would later flee to the West, encountered Blumkin on a train to Baku, watching over the drunken friend sitting next to him, the poet Esenin. “They took to each other tremendously and never went to bed sober,” Barmine wrote. “[Esenin] made a painful impression on me. His youth had been early blighted, and he was now suffering from overindulgence in alcohol and women and from the orgies to which he had treated himself after writing his poems, which remain some of the most moving in the Russian language. His face was pale and puffy, his eyes tired, his voice husky. He gave the impression of someone who had completely lost all moral sense. Blumkin, whose soldierly temperament always saved him from excess, had saddled himself with the job of ‘pulling him around.’ ”
In the summer of 1924, Blumkin helped put down the peasant insurrection in Georgia launched by Mensheviks and Georgian nationalists. Under orders from Stalin and Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the Red Army and the GPU killed thousands. “We may have gone a bit too far,” conceded the latter, “but we couldn’t stop ourselves.” It’s impossible to know Blumkin’s contribution to this massacre, which is often compared to Kronstadt, but his superiors’ reports show that his work was properly appreciated. V. Menzhinsky once reminded Mikhail Trilisser, the head of the Foreign Department, to mention Blumkin’s mission in Tbilisi in a report on his performance.
During the 1924–25 winter, under the name I. Issakov, Blumkin served with various frontier commissions (Irano-Soviet and Turko-Soviet) and oversaw the fortification of the border with Iran and Turkey. At the head of several hundred men, he liberated the city of Bagram-Tape, which had been occupied by the Iranians in 1922. The victory would open the path to irrigating the Mugan Plain in Azerbaijan.
By the age of twenty-five, Blumkin had already won several medals, and the three stripes on his uniform sleeve showed he was a member of the Red Army’s high command. But in the summer of 1925 he decided to return to civilian life, probably weary of being continually in combat since 1917. We find him at the commerce commissariat wearing one of those blue serge suits with square shoulders that Bolshevik commissars wore when they worked in diplomacy or import-export. A sign on his office door gave this job description: “economic consultant,” a title that hardly fits him. Officially, he ran an interdepartmental commission responsible for evaluating mechanical agricultural construction, and headed the “standardization office.” Had Blumkin settled down? Whatever the case, he worked in several areas with the same energy he brought to fighting the Whites during the Civil War, and everywhere preached the militarization of work propounded by Trotsky. In the autobiography that Blumkin wrote at the end of his life he claims to have held twelve positions in this commissariat, but it isn’t clear if those were real jobs or covers for more secretive activities. Fighting against sabotage? Investigating corruption?
In the fall of 1979 I interviewed Boris Bajanov, Stalin’s former secretary in exile in Paris, who told me this:
In 1925 Trotsky was visiting factories with the commission charged with production quality control. At the time he was trying to set up systems for production and transportation. Blumkin had been assigned to that commission despite his lack of experience, but Trotsky had no doubt about his ability within the commission. At one point, Blumkin wanted to present a report to a commission meeting, but Trotsky interrupted him, saying, “Comrade Blumkis is the Party’s eye there, and, given his vigilance, we have no doubt that he has accomplished his mission. So we are going to hear the reports from specialists on the subcommission instead.” Looking vexed, Blumkin said: “First of all, my name is Blumkin, not Blumkis. You should know your Party history better, Comrade Trotsky. And secondly—” But Trotsky slammed his fist on the table, and said, “I didn’t give you the floor.” When Blumkin left the commission, he was a bitter enemy of Trotsky.
Bajanov continued:
To make use of Blumkin’s hatred of the opposition, the GPU tried to find him a slot by assigning him to Kamenev as a counselor when Kamenev was named commerce commissar in 1926. But Blumkin’s situation generated howls of laughter among Kamenev’s secretaries. They showed me a formal protest that an unhappy Blumkin had written him. It began this way: “Comrade Kamenev! I ask you: Where am I, what am I, and who am I?” He had to be reassigned from that position as well.
For anyone who knows how close Blumkin and Trotsky had been since 1918, the anecdote told by Bajanov is surprising. Trotsky had a phenomenal memory, so how could he misremember the name of one of his closest staffers? And how could the Central Committee ask Blumkin to spy on Trotsky, knowing the ties that connected them? I shared the anecdote that Bajanov told me with Trotskyist historian Pierre Broué, who wrote: “Frankly, this account casts doubt on his entire testimony.” When I told Bajanov this, he refused to accept the evidence and stood by his story. It was obvious that he was lying, but I was just a young researcher; what was my point of view worth compared with the testimony of a former secretary of Joseph Stalin? Eventually, I pretended to agree with Bajanov and asked him to confirm his version in writing so that I could quote it in my book. A few days later I was surprised to receive a letter from him. Much later I found it in my Blumkin Project trunk. It is dated September 24, 1979.
Monsieur,
You asked me for a few details about Blumkin. He was an adventurer of a certain stature, very vain, who always wanted to play leading roles. His path was very tortuous, but don’t forget that he joined the Cheka in the very beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution, and remained a Chekist to the end.
Did he have sympathies for Trotsky’s Opposition (which dated from 1923)? If he did, they remained well hidden. In 1923–1924, one could very freely take positions in the Party, yet he remained on the side of (anti-Trotskyist) power and continued to be trusted by Stalinist authorities in 1924 when he was assigned to surveil Kamenev (as in 1925 to spy on Trotsky). In 1925 Trotsky considered him an agent of Zinoviev and Stalin, and disliked him, leading to the incident that I described.
For me, the “Blumkis” incident is completely authentic. It was confirmed to me not only by Stalin’s secretary Kanner, who received a GPU report on the subject, but also from Blumkin’s cousin Maximov, with whom I traveled in 1928 (in Europe). But it is certain that in 1927–1928 Blumkin went over to the Opposition, while carefully hiding his feelings from the GPU.
Best regards,
Boris Bajanov
The opening of the Trotsky archives at Harvard a few months later, in 1980, completely demolished Bajanov’s version. It confirmed that of Victor Serge, who wrote, “Blumkin belonged to the Opposition, without having any occasion to make his sympathies very public. Trilisser, the head of the GPU’s secret service abroad, Yagoda, and Menzhinsky were well acquainted with his views.”
This didn’t affect Bajanov’s credibility with the French press, however, and his account continued to be taken for gospel. Blumkin and Trotsky were long dead, and French journalists in the early 1980s lapped up the old defector’s words without seeking to contradict him. A complete rewriting of history was under way, and those who claimed to be fighting the Stalinist falsification of history didn’t trouble themselves with nuance or complexity. The Berlin Wall was still standing, and the Soviet archives hadn’t yet begun to speak.
Nor was Bajanov questioned about his meeting in Berlin with high Nazi leaders in June 1940, a few days before Hitler launched his offensive against the Soviet Union. Yet he didn’t hide this in his memoirs, any more than he hid his political opinions. He had been one of the founders of the right-wing National Front, and former NF chief Jean-Marie Le Pen paid him homage on the organization’s fortieth anniversary. I tried several times to interview Le Pen about Bajanov, but received no answer to my letters.
What Boris Bajanov had not told me was something I discovered thirty years later thanks to Anya Shapovalova, a Russian PhD student who was a great help when I was writing this book. While doing research in the French national defense archives in Vincennes, she stumbled across a Sécurité Nationale report on Blumkin. The file’s summary page said that the intelligence had been gathered from a high-ranking official who had left Russia on January 1, 1928—the very day that Bajanov fled to the West. So Bajanov had been given political asylum in France in exchange for revealing the OGPU’s hierarchy and its main agents to the French secret services.
Here is the summary page about Blumkin in file number F/7/13499:
Bloumkine (or Blumkin), Jacob Grégoréivitch (former socialist revolutionary, assassin of Count Mirbach, the German ambassador to Moscow). Served as an agent from winter 1923 to summer 1924 in the Near East section of the OGPU. Has traveled to Turkey, Palestine, Syria, and Egypt to spy and organize networks of Soviet agents. To enter Turkey and Palestine, he carried a Soviet passport in the name of “Moïse Gourfinkel” an emigrant to Palestine. From that region he continued his travels using false passports. On the photograph in his first passport, Blumkin is clean-shaven, but when he left for Palestine (about two months after that passport was issued) he had a mustache and long beard. In Jaffa he opened a laundry, where agent reports were encoded and forwarded to the Soviet consulate general in Constantinople, from which they were sent home by diplomatic pouch.
In 1919, Blumkin was attached as a counselor to the revolutionary Persian bandit Kuchek Khan. In 1924–1925, under the pseudonym Issakov, he headed the Cheka’s frontier forces in Stancaucasus [sic] and took part in repressing the uprising in Georgia. In 1926 he was assigned to the Outer Mongolia OGPU station.
Description: looks forty years old, though he is only thirty. Fat, average height, a degenerate’s large forehead and black eyes that make him look somewhat like Yevno Azev (according to a photo of Azev taken in 1907–1908). Distinguishing mark: twisted left hand. His address in Moscow is the following (Arbat, 35, apartment n034, tel 4-67-65). The address of his wife (Tatiana Issaevna) is Afanasyevsky Street no. 35; teleph. 4-71-15. In the phone book, Blumkin is listed as “Man of letters.”
In Moscow I went to the address listed on the Blumkin file summary sheet. It was an Art Deco building on Denezhny Lane in the heart of the old Arbat neighborhood. A plaque on the facade stated that People’s Commissar for Education Anatoly Lunacharsky lived in the building until 1929. The plaque didn’t mention Blumkin, who had a service apartment on the third floor, on the same landing as Lunacharsky, where he stayed between missions. Victor Serge, a frequent visitor, described it: “He stayed in a small apartment in the Arbat quarter, bare except for a rug and a splendid stool, a gift from some Mongol prince; and crooked sabers hung over his bottles of excellent wine.”
Boris Bajanov told me that he too had visited Blumkin in the mid-1920s. The description he gave pretty much matched Serge’s remembrance, but with Bajanov, it took an artificial twist. He made Blumkin look like a character in a wax museum, wearing “a red silk robe with an oriental pipe in his hand.” Next to him on a coffee table lay a volume of Lenin’s works “always open at the same page,” and two or three lines of cocaine on a sheet of silk paper. “Blumkin was a pretentious, vain person,” Bajanov told me. “He was convinced he was a historic figure. We used to make fun of his self-conceit.”
One day, Bajanov and some friends played a joke on him. They said, “Yakov Grigorevich, we just went to the Museum of the History of the Revolution. There’s a whole wall devoted to the Mirbach assassination and to you.”
“Really? That’s wonderful. What is on the wall?”
“All sorts of newspaper clippings, photos, documents, and citations, and at the top running along the entire wall, a quotation from Lenin: ‘What we need is the steady advance of the iron battalions of the proletariat, not hysterical and degenerate petit-bourgeois extravagances.’ ”
“We made it all up, of course,” said Bajanov. “Blumkin was very upset, but he didn’t go to the Revolution museum to check on our joke’s authenticity.”
Blumkin’s first cousin told Bajanov that the assassination of Mirbach hadn’t happened quite the way Blumkin described it. Said Bajanov:
When he and his companions were in Mirbach’s office, Blumkin threw the bomb and quickly jumped out the window. But he wound up dangling from the fence by the seat of his pants in a very uncomfortable position. The sailor who accompanied him calmly finished Mirbach off, unhooked Blumkin, put him in a truck, and they took off. The sailor died soon afterward on the Civil War fronts and Blumkin was outlawed by the Bolsheviks. But he very quickly went over to their side, betraying the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. He was then admitted to the Party and taken into the Cheka.
Regardless of his exaggerations, I valued Bajanov’s accusatory testimony. He claimed that Blumkin had come to Paris in 1929 to assassinate him by throwing him off the Paris–Nice train. But Bajanov said Blumkin grabbed the wrong man and mistakenly sent another passenger to the great beyond. Whether he was lying or twisting the truth, Bajanov had known Blumkin, the “real” Blumkin, a man of flesh and bones—not the figure of ink and paper I was tracking in the archives. In the back room of the café where we met, I can still see the malice in Bajanov’s eyes as he stared at me from behind enormous round horn-rimmed glasses. His memories were distorted by hatred, and at eighty he was struggling to impose his version of history. And that version interested me just as much as the other ones.
It was said that in 1921 Blumkin had been sent to Mongolia when it was occupied by Baron Ungern’s troops, to fight at the side of Damdin Sükhbaatar, who was known as the “Mongol Lenin” and led an army of ten thousand horsemen. But had Blumkin really fought “at his side”? Can he be credited with the reported double victory against the two forces that had divided Mongolia between them, Chinese troops and Ungern’s White Army? Having reached the gates of the capital, Blumkin supposedly came up with a daring strategy to avoid having to launch a deadly siege. At this point, Blumkin’s Mongolian saga slides into myth.
Legend had it that when at war, Baron Ungern always traveled with a pair of eagles from the Mongolian steppes, a gift from the living Buddha and a symbol of his invincibility. Disguised as a lama, Blumkin was supposed to have entered the besieged city and secretly made his way to the baron’s headquarters. Getting close to his apartments, Blumkin cut the head off one of the invincible eagles with his saber.
Mission accomplished, he blended into the crowd and spread the rumor that the killing of the eagle showed that the enemy was already within the gates. The city’s defenders panicked, and the disoriented Whites beat a retreat in the confusion. Sükhbaatar then made a triumphant entrance into the city. A few days later, during a celebration of the Revolution, the crowd roared when the two friends thundered down the track lying on their horses, and snatched up a silver coin lying on the ground. Blumkin saved that silver coin in memory of the unforgettable Sükhbaatar, who died a few months after his triumph, poisoned by the Chinese or succumbing to tuberculosis, depending on the account.
Back in Moscow, Blumkin published a book about Dzerjinsky and helped edit Trotsky’s military writings. One evening, at the studio of the Imaginist painter Georgy Yakulov, he met the celebrated dancer Isadora Duncan, who had come to Moscow at Lunacharsky’s invitation, “to teach the proletariat’s children to dance.” According to the civil registry, that was also the time that Blumkin married Tatiana Feinerman, the daughter of Tolstoy’s famous disciple Isaak Feinerman, who wrote under the pseudonym “Teneromo.” “I fell in love with a name,” Blumkin later confessed to Esenin, who had no reason to envy him, having married Isadora Duncan for the same reasons. Blumkin and his wife had one child, their son, Martin. The name was a double literary reference, to Jack London’s Martin and to the hero of Esenin’s poem “The Comrade.” (“Martin lived, no one knew him. He was the son of an ordinary worker. His comrades were Christ and his cat. His father taught him ‘La Marseillaise.’ ”)
I have repeatedly tried to establish an exact chronology of Blumkin’s successive missions during the first half of the 1920s, but it was a waste of effort. Not because of a shortage of events, but because whatever connected them had snapped, and the pieces lay strewn across the ground like an airplane crash site. The events I report in this chapter all took place, but it’s as if the plane’s black box is missing.
Where to begin? And what sources could I trust? I’ve always liked the colorful English expression to indicate a reliable source: getting something “from the horse’s mouth.” Assailed at the racetrack by rumors and predictions, professional bettors know to trust only one thing, the condition of the horse. The expression came to mind as I was about to start this chapter and was looking over the blackboard on my office wall, searching for a trail or a hint that would give me a point of departure. An image at the very top of the blackboard caught my eye. It was a reproduction of a 1918 painting of a horse by Georgy Yakulof called Sulky. To reconstruct this confused period of Blumkin’s life, I would go to the horse’s mouth.
I had seen the original painting at the Centre Pompidou in 2013 as part of an exhibition called Plural Modernities. I came across it almost by accident. It was hung off to one side and wasn’t attracting much attention. I could well have walked past it except that I stopped to read the painting’s caption. As usual, it mentioned the name of the painter, the title of the piece and its dimensions, the year it was executed, and the technique used. But I noticed one further piece of information: “Part of the Pegasus’s Stall café décor.”
I had heard about Pegasus’s Stall several times during my research. It was a popular artistic café in the early 1920s frequented by the people who called themselves “Imaginists.” This was a group of poets and artists who wanted to revive the noisy and spectacular aspects of prewar literary life in Moscow. They had their bookstore, their review—Inn for Travelers of the Beautiful—and their cafés, the Domino and Pegasus’s Stall. The job of decorating Pegasus’s Stall had been given to the Armenian painter Georgy Yakulov, an Imaginist member known for his theater sets. The horse he painted was a central figure of the café’s décor, but also a manifesto.
Pegasus’s Stall attracted a colorful coterie of poets, Chekists, prostitutes, and black-market profiteers. The manager, one Anatoly Silin, put his customers into two categories: the “serious,” speculators from the Sukharevka, Okhotny, and Smolensk market neighborhoods; and the “not serious,” which included the penniless poets and artists that gangsters called “hollow people.” The café allowed the first group to launder its money in the name of art, and the second to feed on vodka and vain poetry.
But Pegasus’s Stall wasn’t merely a gathering place. It was a performance scene that could turn poets into stars whose popularity was measured less by their talent than by their power to transgress. Mayakovsky led the way. His yellow shirt, ringing voice, and provocations had made him famous before the Revolution, before he published a single line. The Imaginists learned from his example: the artist’s performance precedes the work of art. In the early 1920s, Sergei Esenin and Anatoly Mariengof dominated the poetry scene and embodied these new poets’ status. Mariengof made no apologies. “ ‘Comrades, I am a poet of genius.’ That was the line Vadim Shershenevich liked to use when starting his brilliant speeches. We all said pretty much the same thing—Mayakovsky, Esenin, and I, even Ryurik Ivnev, in his girlish voice.”
After two years of war, everything was in short supply. The poet Andrei Biely came up with a much-repeated statement that defined an era unable to satisfy even the most elementary needs: “The victory of materialism in Russia has led to the complete disappearance of material in this country.” The only thing not lacking were poets. They were in the streets, in the theaters, in the cafés. What were they doing? They were building their legends and shortening their nights.
Blumkin was one of them, except that he built his legend not only at poetry readings but with a weapon in his hand in Georgia, Siberia, and Mongolia. Since joining the Bolsheviks, he had proven his loyalty more than once. He was spending his nine lives without counting, dodging ambushes and exposing himself to the greatest dangers. Blumkin was a man of action. He wanted to be a real hero, the only way for a poor Jew like himself to gain notoriety. That was his only allegiance and his only loyalty. Poetry would come later, when he was thirty. Then he would have all the time in the world to draw from his experiences what he called “the honey of words.”
“In the beginning,” wrote Mariengof,
Blumkin held back a little from our glory, as we pompously called our scandalous renown. We had gotten there by many paths, difficult paths. One dark night in the fall, we even “debaptized” certain Moscow streets. We tore down the “Founders Point” sign and replaced it with “Esenin Street, Imaginist.” We pulled down “Petrovka” and put up “Mariengof Street, Imaginist.” Ahead of May Day, we spent our last kopecks to have our pictures taken and framed in red calico. We displayed them in store windows on Tver Street from the Chasseurs alley to the Passion Monastery. The store managers had a sense of humor, and gladly gave us permission.
A number of sources describe the relationship between Blumkin and Esenin and the Imaginist movement. But they aren’t to be found in the Russian Federation archives at 17 Bolshaya Pirogovskaya, where they are now both available and reliable. Instead, they are in literary chronicles, a generally unreliable source because of writers’ natural tendency to make themselves look good, and which become veritable fabulation machines in times of war or revolution.
Mariengof devoted three books to this period, two of which have been published in English: A Novel Without Lies and Cynics, which Joseph Brodsky called a masterpiece. As for the third, a collection of remembrances translated as “My century, my youth, my friends and lovers,” I knew that it mentioned Blumkin several times, but I had searched for it in vain. Not only was it out of print, but I couldn’t find it at the French national library, and none of the various online booksellers carried secondhand copies. I finally wrote Mariengof’s French translator, Anne-Marie Tatsis-Botton, and got this answer:
Dear sir, unfortunately, “My friends” isn’t out of print, for the simple reason that it was never published! I translated it seven or eight years ago for Anatolia, the publisher. I corrected the galleys and noted the book’s publication date, but a dispute arose between the series editor and the publisher, and everything stopped. The translation is sitting in boxes at Noir sur Blanc, which owns the rights and is trying to contact the appropriate people in Russia to restart everything more “legally.” I haven’t given up hope of the book’s coming out “within a few years.” A translator’s job sometimes involves a lot of patience.
To this she added:
I am happy to send you the draft of my translation, which was a great pleasure to do. It’s a very good book, and I would be delighted if at least one person read it. The part you are interested in starts at page 204. If you quote my text, you can caption it, “Forthcoming from Noir sur Blanc, publishers.” That might be a good augury. Sincerely yours…
I immediately opened the file to page 204 and started reading with the excitement of an explorer setting foot on terra incognita.
Almost every evening, Blumkin, the former terrorist and Left SR, would sit at a little glass table. He had a black beard and was past twenty-one, so no longer a youth, by the criteria of the times. Another of our friends, who also had once been a Left SR (Yuri Sablin, a handsome man with a natural beauty mark on his pink cheek), was younger, yet already commanded the army that had routed Kolchak in the Urals…
Blumkin was a lyrical being who loved poetry and glory, his and other people’s. How could he have not joined us, since he viewed us as among the elect? He was faithful, friendly, and accommodating. But the Central Committee of the Left SR Party had come to a decision: eliminate the traitor. For Blumkin, this brought a whiff of coffin wood, a smell he didn’t like any more than we pitiful mortals do. So Blumkin made us his bodyguards. After all, the Left SR terrorists weren’t about to throw their little bombs and kill two young poets just to get one “disgusting traitor,” as they then called their delinquent “hero.”
When the Poets’ Café closed for the night, Blumkin would always beg us, “Tolia, Serioja, my friends, walk me home.” He was then living at the Metropol, which we called the “second House of Soviets.”
We walked him home almost every night, more or less risking our skins. After all, there might have been an enthusiast among the ardent bomb throwers who didn’t give a damn about Apollo’s Russian devotees. I usually walked on the left, Esenin on the right, and Blumkin in the middle, holding tight to our arms.
One night when Blumkin was going home with Alexander Kusikov—they were sharing an apartment on Afansevskaya Street near the Arbat—they spotted a suspicious-looking man on a street corner. Blumkin took out his pistol and pushed his friend aside. From the darkness, a shout rang out: “Halt!” Blumkin ran away. Behind him, shots were fired. Kusikov was arrested by a group of Moscow Chekists on night patrol. Blumkin came back and said to them: “It’s a good thing I didn’t shoot you. I’m a good shot. I could’ve killed one of you, comrades.” But the Chekists weren’t having any of this and hauled the two suspects to the Lubyanka. Everything worked out, though. The commissar of the guard knew Blumkin and had him driven home. After that, Blumkin liked to wear the hat with the Chekist bullet holes. Once again, he had dodged a bullet, literally.
Mariengof was busy building his own legend, putting himself and his friend Esenin at center stage. The legend couldn’t stand any rivals, especially not a former terrorist and Chekist, much less a secret GPU agent. Can you imagine the Verlaine-Rimbaud duo founding a literary movement with Bakunin or Netchayev? This complicity between poets and Chekists—an alliance of Parnassus and Lubyanka—is hard to imagine today, because it upsets our settled ideas about police and poetry, which are as far from each other as good and evil. But in the first years of the Revolution, it was perfectly natural. Among the poets and artists, the German ambassador’s killer basked in the aura of the SR and its Combat Organization.
The poet Vladislav Khodasevich, who was married to the writer Nina Berberova, described a scene he witnessed at an evening party at Alexei Tolstoy’s in the spring of 1918. Esenin had come with a bearded, dark-haired man wearing a leather jacket. He listened to the conversations and occasionally said something, always apropos. That was Blumkin, who would kill the German ambassador three months later. He and Esenin were clearly close. Among the guests was a woman poet, K. Esenin found her attractive and started to flirt. To impress her, he baldly declared: “Would you like to see a killing? I’ll arrange it with Blumkin right away!”
When Blumkin was in Moscow, he spent his evenings with his Imaginist friends at the Pegasus’s Stall. He was one of the founding members of the “freethinkers,” a society that Esenin founded and whose goal was to give the Imaginist group a legal existence, support from Lunacharsky, and maybe some subsidies. A freethinkers charter was drafted on the corner of a table and signed by a dozen members, including Blumkin, Mariengof, Shershenevich, and Kusilov, who was called “Sandro.” The freethinkers were committed to the spiritual and economic union of thinkers who created in the spirit of world revolution, in speech and writing. At the first meeting of the association on January 20, 1920, Esenin was elected president.
The first page of the first issue of their magazine, Inn for Travelers of the Beautiful, carried this manifesto:
“Beauty in the arts and letters used to be summed up by expressions: ‘beaux arts,’ ‘belles lettres.’ What does that mean? To speak in the language of images: the mountains are not especially high, the slopes are not especially steep, the cliffs…Oh, the cliffs! Best not have any at all, people might fall off them!’ ”
For the Imaginists, the Revolution shouldn’t bring only better living conditions to the people, but also a deliberate beautification of life. In this way, a small elite, divorced from village reality, undertook a process of general aesthetization of existence and romanticization of life: “the era of the image.” Remaking a new image of man. Refounding a new idea of beauty. “How the nature of beauty has changed in our times! We seek and find the essence of beauty in the catastrophic upheavals of the contemporary mind, in the dangers of setting sail toward new Americas, toward new ways of being in the world. That is how we understand the Revolution.”
“They philosophized at the drop of a hat, and always went to extremes,” writes Vladislav Khodasevich in Necropolis. “They worked on a vast scale. The ate little but drank a lot. They blasphemed with fire, unless that was their way of expressing faith. They went with prostitutes to preach revolution, and beat them. They basically fell into two types: the bearded, dark brooder, and the blond adolescent with long hair and seraphic gaze.”
The seraphic blond was Esenin, the leader of the Imaginist group who had traded his peasant shirt and boots for a dandy’s cape and top hat. The dark brooder was Blumkin, devoted factotum, always ready to do a favor and protect the Imaginists from the authorities and the police. Several times, he freed poor Esenin at dawn when he’d gotten himself locked up in the Lubyanka.
We know one thing for sure: Blumkin, Esenin, and Mariengof were all in Moscow at the same time in the spring of 1918. Esenin was already famous. How did they meet? Probably at the Domino, the literary café that Blumkin and Esenin frequented assiduously before Pegasus’s Stall opened and became their headquarters. Above the Domino’s sign, and stretching across the entire first floor, another sign in big black letters on a white background read, “Psychiatric Clinic.” “That sign was the delight of our many enemies, and our despair,” says Mariengof. “For us, it was a real catastrophe. But there was nothing we could do. Up on the first floor, they really were trying to cure crazy people.”
Below the psychiatric clinic, poets and writers of various persuasions gathered: Futurists, Imaginists, Acmeists, revolutionaries who loved poetry and poets fascinated by political violence. You might run into Blumkin in his leather jacket, or Esenin and Mariengof in patent-leather shoes, black capes with white scarves, and bowler hats. Past a certain hour, arguments became frequent and would erupt over anything: the role of the verb or the image in prosody, or that of the Party in the Revolution. Blumkin actively participated in those debates, and when he ran out of arguments would pull out his gun. “He seemed to have a pistol where other people had a hand.”
Within a few days, the two young provincials became inseparable. The poet and the Chekist spent their evenings at the Domino and slept together in the same bed. But it would be wrong to jump to a hasty conclusion about that intimacy: it was due to the housing crisis. When winter approached, it was the cold, not the fire of desire, that brought their chilled bodies together. Mariengof says that Esenin one day got the harebrained idea of offering a woman poet who was looking for work a secretary’s salary in exchange for doing a job that would take her less than a quarter hour a day. Her task was to come to their apartment around one in the morning, undress, and get under the covers. When she had warmed the bed for them, she would get out. For their part, they promised to turn their backs during the operation so as not to offend her modesty. Which they scrupulously did while the poetess got undressed. The arrangement took an unexpected turn, however. After a few days, the irritated poetess refused to go on serving as a warming pan. “I didn’t hire myself out to warm the sheets of saints!”
That kind of childishness is hard to imagine in the capital of a young Soviet state suffering from famine and epidemics, a city that lacked everything yet overflowed with provocateurs and spies. What we forget was how very young those revolutionaries were. We can list the Revolution’s excesses and faults forever, but shouldn’t ever forget its authors’ ages. This is a constant misunderstanding. Revolutions are made by young people and described by old ones.
One evening Blumkin went after a certain Igor Ilinsky, a young actor in Meyerhold’s company. Given those revolutionary times, the reason seems almost trivial: Ilinsky had used an old curtain to dust off his shoes. “You uncultured boor!” screamed Blumkin, pulling an impressive Browning from his pocket and pointing it at the actor. But he let Esenin immediately disarm him, while muttering an explanation: “This is a socialist revolution, so we have to kill the boors! Otherwise we’ll never get anywhere.” “A true romantic!” concluded Mariengof, who described the scene in his memoirs. “There were lots of people like that.”
The wounds of the Civil War were not yet healed, and the benefits of the New Economic Policy (NEP) were just beginning to be felt. Two eras were overlapping and doubling their psychological effects: the cruelty of war and the cynicism of prosperity. And this amalgam of terror and cynicism produced a particular sensibility that the Imaginists expressed in their own way.
Esenin and Mariengof wrote side by side in an apartment on Theologian Street, Esenin his poems and Mariengof the draft of his novel Cynics, which would not be published until 1928. “Scraps of paper covered my desk,” he wrote. “Sheets of soft paper covered with my notes wound up spiked on the nail in the meditation room.” Blumkin would visit every day, bringing a fresh crop of news items and anecdotes harvested at the Lubyanka. So a direct line connected the Lubyanka with the novelist’s writing desk, except that the “bugging” worked in reverse. The novelist listened to police informers, not the other way around. In the information Blumkin brought from the Lubyanka, Mariengof saw the chaos of the era, “its face as if reflected in the swollen belly of a samovar. A face deformed and fierce.”
Samples: In the Kama region people were eating a kind of clay. In Tsaritsyn, they ate grass previously reserved for camels. Acorns were now considered luxuries. People were baking cakes of lime-tree leaves. The Caspian was shipping camel meat. In Slovenka (Pugachyov district), a peasant woman named Golodinka cut up her dead daughter’s body to feed her surviving children. The Selyanov orphans stole a dead woman’s wrists.
Cannibalism and necrophagia were happening on a massive scale, reported Pravda. The Bolshevik Factory shipped the first tractor built in its workshops to the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy experimental station. Typhus had affected 1.5 million people in the republic since the start of winter. The Council of People’s Commissars decided to erect a monument to Spartacus, the Gracchi, Brutus, and Babeuf. The Icarus National Aeronautical Enterprise organized a solemn festival to celebrate its first delivery of large-displacement motors. And so on.
Mariengof stuffed his narrative with newspaper headlines, clippings, fragments of government decrees. Events accumulated in successive layers, in shards of reality.
Seismographic writing.
Alfred Döblin used the same collage technique to describe postwar Berlin in Berlin Alexanderplatz, published in 1929. At the same time Dos Passos was drawing inspiration from newsreels, press clippings, official declarations and excerpts of manifestos; his Manhattan Transfer came out in 1925, Mariengof’s Cynics in 1928. The three novels are contemporary without it being clear which was the earliest. They expressed the sensibility of an era. “You can’t take a picture of a world that is blowing itself up,” wrote Hermann Broch in 1934.
The Revolution aimed to change the distribution of wealth and the power imbalance between classes, to invent new law, a new economy, and new political forms of participation that would bring the working and peasant masses into politics. It struggled to impose new forms of expression capable of accounting for a shattered world. It sought new angles to penetrate reality, a different idea of movement.
For the first anniversary of the Revolution, the composer Revarsavr (Arseny Avraamov) proposed to the Soviet government that he conduct a heroic symphony of his own composition. It would be played on the sirens of all of Moscow’s factories and workshops, and on locomotive whistles. He also wanted to destroy all the pianos currently in use. “The piano is the international balalaika!” he told anyone who would listen, while touting a revolutionary modification of the bourgeois piano. So as not to bother Lenin, who liked violin and piano music, the concert of sirens took place not in Moscow, but in Baku. A year and a half later, Revarsavr played his “Revopus” no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, etc., at Pegasus’s Stall. They were especially composed for the grand piano he had modified. Ordinary human fingers were obviously unsuited for playing “revmusic,” so our Imaginist composer strapped little garden rakes to his hands.
In Moscow, we spent a long time looking for Pegasus’s Stall. An old map put it at 37 Tver Street, at the corner of Gnezdnikovsky Street, where the Café Bom and its clowns stood before the Revolution. But the clowns, like the Imaginists, were no longer of this world, and their haunts impossible to find. We had to face facts. After spending days poring over old Moscow maps at the land registry, I finally gave up. The street had been dug up and widened several times since the 1920s, and the mythic Pegasus’s Stall lay under the ruins of old Tverskaya Street.
One night at the hotel, Emmanuelle torpedoed my last hopes by showing me a photo of a torn-up Tverskaya Street on her computer screen. The Russian caption, soberly translated by Google, read, “Pegasus’s Stall, here somewhere.”
My only link with Pegasus’s Stall was Sulky, the horse painted by Georgy Yakulov. It was the sole survivor of the Imaginists’ nights. I had to make it speak. At the Centre Pompidou, I stood for a long time in front of the painting, as if hesitating on the threshold of an abandoned house. Before me, Sulky glowed like a radioactive object, or rather a “memory-active” one, charged with traces of life and memories. It was the only “real” material piece of the puzzle I’d been trying to assemble for years. I had read accounts, consulted archives, assembled maps and photographs, but I had never seen an object from Blumkin’s everyday environment up close before.
Blumkin and his Imaginist friends must have passed in front of Yakulov’s painting hundreds of times. Had they looked at it carefully? They probably did in the first days, and then got used to its presence, and forgot it. The horse retreated into the silence of objects. But it made me dizzy to think that it had been present at all those Pegasus evenings—the readings, the bravado, the arguments, the glances. By a bizarre effect of translation, I could see, through the horse, the inside of the café decorated by Yakulov: the entrance, hung with a sign he painted with a winged Pegasus bordered with stylized, old-style calligraphy: “Cтойл Пегаса.” I could see the chandeliers and wall sconces repeated in the mirrors that widened a space so narrow that the tables were practically stuck together. On the stage, a Romanian orchestra was playing. On either side of the mirrors, nude women were painted with an eye instead of a navel, along with Imaginist slogans and Esenin’s golden curls haloed by his verse: “Плюйся, ветер, охапками листъв” (Spit, you wind, leaves by the armful). On a wall, Sulky galloped though the cigarette smoke.
Blumkin would sit at a glass-top table facing the entrance. He kept his back to the wall, because he didn’t trust his former Left SR comrades; they had already tried to kill him three times. Overhead, Sulky watched over him like a guardian angel. When Blumkin’s thoughts ran away with him, whipped by liquor and cocaine, the faithful horse ran by his side without leaving its plywood backing.
Sulky is a pictorial demonstration of Yakulov’s technique for portraying movement, and is opposed to that of the Italian and Russian Futurists. His horse is a collection of separate fragments, a heterogeneous mix of individual pieces and signs: gears, pictograms, fan-shaped ideograms, curls, spirals, arabesques, vague nuances, and splashes of color.
Futurism and chronophotography try to portray the tension of movement using a multiplicity of shapes in motion, as in Dog on a Leash. By contrast, Yakulov tried to bring that movement out from within lines and planes, from the very texture of the painting. “The Futurists’ attempt to give a walking dog forty paws is naive,” he said, “and it doesn’t make the dog go any faster.”
In a 1926 article on Picasso, Yakulov wrote that earlier artists had worked through a series of perspectives: “conventional flat” perspective in the Middle Ages, “three-dimensional” perspective in the Renaissance, and “pure photographic” perspective in the twentieth century. “Today’s artists face a new task, that of determining and expressing the perspectives of objects in oscillation.” The painter’s eye wasn’t a camera; everything was vibration. The whole era was intoxicated with speed, with the energy of movement. “The railroad has changed the whole course, the whole structure, the whole rhythm of our prose,” wrote Mandelstam. Yakulov put his galloping horse on a sheet of plywood. Esenin searched for the verbal image to convey the vibration of the real and its life principle.
Esenin, Duncan, and Yakulov. All three would soon find themselves together in the painter’s studio in Moscow one night toward the end of 1921.
Isadora Duncan had just arrived. It was her first invitation to Yakulov’s. The little Imaginist gang was all there. The scene was legendary. Duncan lay stretched out on the sofa with Esenin at her feet. The dancer ran her hand through his curls and whispered, “Zolotaya golova!” (Golden head). Duncan didn’t know more than a dozen Russian words, but several witnesses claimed to have distinctly heard her say those two words. She then kissed the poet on the lips and, in a strong accent, said, “Angel!” (Angel). She kissed him again, and said, “Chort!” (Devil). Standing off to one side, Blumkin observed the scene with one hand on the grip of his Browning—you never know. At three o’clock in the morning, Duncan and Esenin went off together.
A friend of Duncan’s named Mary Desti gave another version of the evening, probably inspired by Duncan. “Suddenly the door opened, and on the threshold appeared the most beautiful face she’d ever seen, crowned with golden hair. Piercing blue eyes gazed at her. There was no need for introductions. She opened her arms, and he fell to his knees, hugging her knees and tearfully repeating, ‘Isadora! Isadora! Mia, mia.’ ”
A third version of the encounter came from a witness present at the evening. “Isadora spotted the blue-eyed poet and cried, ‘Who is that man with the face of a debauchee?’ They were introduced, and gossips claimed they slept together that very first night.”
Georgy Ivanov, whom we encountered earlier, also had a version of the event, a colorful story no more credible than his account of the Blumkin-Mandelstam quarrel. “At a banquet in her honor, Isadora kissed Esenin on the lips. The poet, who was drunk, pushed her away, and when she kissed him again, he slapped her hard. Isadora began to sob, and he comforted her. She then wrote on a window, ‘Esenin is a hooligan!’ ‘Esenin is an angel!’ That was the start of their love story.”
Isadora’s own account drew from the canons of mythology. According to her, the union of their two souls began while they were asleep, when “his soul soared up to meet mine.”
The affair was the talk of the town. A legend was born, and it didn’t lack for memorialists. Dance and Poetry. America and Russia. A flood of more or less apocryphal novels, essays, and memoirs followed, including a Franco-British film, Isadora, directed by Karel Reisz, which earned Vanessa Redgrave a best actress award at the 1968 Cannes Festival.
The worst enemy of truth isn’t a lie, it’s pathos. In his memoirs, Mariengof is harsh. He thought that Esenin was attracted not by Isadora Duncan, but by her worldwide fame—a religion he wasn’t about to join. His account is merciless. “She only came to Soviet Russia because Lunacharsky, the culture commissar, had promised her the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Ordinary theaters no longer inspired her. The barefoot dancer’s spirit was soaring very high. Instead of the dust in theater wings, she wanted to inhale the sweetest incense.”
The government put a town house on the Purest Icon of the Virgin Street at Isadora Duncan’s disposal to establish a dancing school. She taught there for a time. Short film clips show children jumping, spreading their arms like wings, their legs moving, and their bodies rising into the air before falling back to the ground, imitating the flight of birds.
Esenin’s marriage to Duncan proved a disaster. They left for Europe and the United States to escape the ghosts hovering around them. Esenin was in bad shape when he returned. They’d had many fights, in private and in public. When they came back from the European tour they separated for good. Esenin continued his long descent into hell, sinking into depression and displaying growing signs of paranoia.
“Toward the end of 1925, the idea of ‘leaving’ became Esenin’s idée fixe,” wrote Mariengof. “He would lie down on train tracks, try to throw himself out a window, cut his veins with a shard of glass, stab himself with a kitchen knife. Eventually he cut his veins. He left a few lines of a poem written in his own blood.” The Imaginist years ended with Esenin’s death in late 1915. Blumkin left Moscow for Mongolia. Mariengof got married and wrote his masterpiece, Cynics. Yakulov died in 1928. Isadora Duncan abandoned her dancing school and fled to the Riviera to write her memoirs. She died on September 14, 1927, in the most melodramatic possible way. Her scarf got caught in the wheel of a Bugatti convertible she was riding in, and strangled her.
November 13, 2015, our last day in Moscow. We went to the New Tretyakov Gallery, which was showing works by Chagall, Mayakovsky, Kandinsky, and Malevich. I wanted to see Sulky again, and Yakulov’s self-portrait. The museum, which covers a square block, is set in a large park near the Moskva River that is planted with trees and statues. Children call it “the statue garden” and guidebooks refer to it as the garden of “fallen” or “torn-down” statues. A poor translation calls it “the garden of fallen monuments.”
The Muzeon Art Park, to give its proper name, is a fifty-acre square created in 1992 that features some seven hundred bronze, wood, marble, and stone sculptures among trees and playgrounds. At the park entrance, we passed a big granite Stalin with a broken nose surrounded by cages piled high with stone skulls, which were added in 1998. The statue originally stood in Theatre Square. A little farther, the tall bronze statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky that dominated Lubyanka Square from 1958 to 1991 rose high into the stormy sky. It was the work of Evgeny Vuchetich, Party member and hero of socialist labor. A specialist in warlike gigantism, he also created monuments to soldiers of the Soviet Army in Berlin and Volgograd. Turn a corner and you encounter a large Sverdlov, the reputed brains behind the November 1917 insurrection. Also several Lenins, an immense Gorky, and a Kalinin, along with anonymous workers, a vigorous couple brandishing hammer and sickle, and a dairymaid.
Soviet statuary was born soon after the 1917 Revolution, contradicting the Old Bolsheviks’ cherished principle of anonymity. Before the August 1918 attack on Lenin, few people knew what he looked like. To the revolutionaries, the hero was the people, a faceless entity as difficult to portray as productive forces or the means of production. But since there was no point in decorating streets with tractors and machine tools, it was decided to revert to statues of great men. It would be a transitory measure while waiting for the triumph of the people, faceless and nameless.
What followed was a tremendous boom in monumental statues that made the USSR a gold mine for the sculptors who got commissions from the state. Among these, the famous Sergei Merkurov—he made Leo Tolstoy’s death mask—became the Soviet regime’s official sculptor. His fifty-odd commissions included a Dostoyevsky for Tverskaya Street and a few Lenins put up here and there. Merkurov had studied sculpture in Paris, where he was influenced by Rodin. “Carried away by the energy of the Revolution, he became its spokes-sculptor.” Mayakovsky ridiculed the official sculptor for producing “bronzes by the kilo” and “slick marbles.” But Merkurov had the last word: he made the poet’s death mask after his suicide.
Following the collapse of the USSR, the Russian government relegated the bronze ghosts to this park, where they are enjoying a second life while awaiting history’s final verdict. Whether purgatory or salon des refusés, it stars the has-beens of the Revolution, now demoted and harmless, that you can study at your ease. Men once feared in their day are at the mercy of children’s jokes. Honeymooning couples kiss at their feet. Those nostalgic for communism can gaze at them and ponder the unfairness of history. In this Disneyland of communism, Western tourists take selfies. We took pictures, too. Standing on tiptoe, Emmanuelle barely reached Gorky’s knees, which gives an idea of the monument’s scale. A little farther, her gloved hand wiped a dusting of snow from Lenin’s smooth pate. In another photo, I have joined a group of revolutionaries with martial profiles, led by a gesturing woman. I am marching with them toward the radiant future of communism.
That was November 13, 2015. Our last day in Moscow, a carefree, happy day. A peaceful day, until the moment our smartphones started to vibrate in the middle of the night. Terrorists were shooting in Paris. Under the muted Euronews screen, the news crawl read, “Paris Under Assault,” and a figure: 140 people dead. The Bataclan facade. Ambulances’ flashing lights. Café terraces. Terrorists…In our Metropol hotel room, images were splattering the screen. A line from a Heiner Müller play came to mind: “When she walks through your bedrooms carrying butcher knives, you’ll know the truth.”