From the airport, the taxi sped down the highway along the Bosporus. It was snowing heavily, and the domes of the two great mosques on the hills overlooking the bay were drowned in dense fog and barely visible. It was a freezing late afternoon typical of Istanbul in winter. On the Galata Bridge that links the city’s two coasts, a line of fishermen with rods in hand and buckets and baskets at their feet made a human chain linking East and West. The taxi raced across the bridge, heedless of the icy patches that punctuated the pavement. It drove for a while by the docks on the western side, then the driver suddenly braked and pointed to some huts with steamed-up windows. That was where the ferries left for Prinkipo, an island in the Sea of Marmara that I planned to visit the next day.
In Blumkin’s day, Istanbul was still called Constantinople, but he was no longer Blumkin; he was Sultanov, and later, Sultan-Zade. You went to Constantinople if you wanted to disappear. You could enter with one identity and leave with another, changed from head to toe. The archaeologist turned out to be a secret agent, the businessman was a diplomat, and the rug seller was negotiating mining concessions for British or American consortiums. It was a dangerous city, with many diplomatic representatives; a nest of spies. You could vanish without a trace, under a false name or six feet under, the victim of a contract or a settling of scores.
The Western powers had their spies, and the Soviets kept an eye on them. They also infiltrated the circles of White Russians who had emigrated en masse at the end of the Civil War, and watched the representatives of ex-empire nationalist movements from Kazakhstan, Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Between the Turkish and Soviet secret services, traded information was the coin of the realm. For the Soviets, Turkey was at their doorstep, an intelligence hub. The steamer Ilyich shuttled between Odessa and Constantinople with cargos of coded messages, documents written in invisible ink, and undeveloped microfilm.
In the mid-1920s, a new generation of Russian military experts, spies, and diplomats was graduating from the Military Academy of the General Staff, and in particular from its Oriental Studies department. They were assigned to Istanbul, Shanghai, Ulan Bator, New Delhi, and Cairo. The victorious Revolution was forging its way along the railroad lines to Asia. The mission of “illegal residents,” who did not have diplomatic immunity, was to redraw, stabilize, and strengthen the Soviet Union’s borders to the south and east. They organized uprisings, supported strikes, and pressed local populations’ demands against the British Empire.
Blumkin was probably too individualistic for a military career. His shadowy personality was better suited to espionage, and his knowledge of foreign languages more useful in diplomacy than in the army. But he started his career by killing an ambassador. This left secret diplomacy, so he elected to go into intelligence. As a secret agent, he spent his whole career first in the Cheka foreign affairs department, then the GPU, carrying out secret missions in Inner Mongolia, Tibet, northern China, and Palestine. But after 1925, his footsteps disappear into the fog that surrounds clandestine operations overseas, which are secret by nature, but also into the mists eddying around the legends that were increasingly being told about him. Spies and defectors. Infiltration operations on foreign soil. Unexplained murders. A chart of Blumkin’s missions looked less like pieces of territory than a horizon where the clear interests of the new Soviet state and the inclination of a generation of young diplomats to the Orient converged. Blumkin hopped from one city to the next: Ulan Bator, New Delhi, Shanghai, Lhassa, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Cairo. The stories of his exploits hopped also between literary genres, from coming-of-age story to spy thriller, from war memoir to adventure novel by way of travelers’ tales. Majestic scenery unfolded behind a series of stage sets: the Gobi Desert, the Manchurian Railway, the slums of Shanghai, the cliff-clinging roads of Tibet.
Istanbul was the final stage of my journey tracking Blumkin in the eighth and ninth stages of his life. In 1928, he was named “clandestine resident” and tasked with creating a counterespionage network in Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. When it became operational, the network was to gather information on English and French Middle East policy and infiltrate liberation movements in the British protectorates. The GPU and Komintern’s Foreign Departments were concerned about the situation in Palestine. There was a risk of war or clashes between communities. Palestine was a launching pad for revolutionary actions and intelligence gathering in all the Arab countries. But the Secret Intelligence Service, which looked out for British interests, was omnipresent in the region. It had highly trained agents and thousands of informants. It wouldn’t be easy to establish a local presence without attracting its attention, and recruiting on the ground was practically impossible. So Constantinople was an ideal rear base for Blumkin’s network.
With Constantinople, Blumkin’s life reached a kind of acme. He was at the summit of his career as a spy, a clandestine rezident of the KGB. Yet in less than a year, he would tumble from those heights into a cell at the Lubyanka and be executed without a trial on Stalin’s personal order.
The chronology of events in Blumkin’s life, which was so difficult to establish in earlier sequences, now became easy to follow. During the last year of his life you could follow his movements almost week by week. They all lead in and out of Constantinople, to Europe (Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Vienna) or to the Middle East (Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Iraq).
But Constantinople wasn’t only the rezidentura, the GPU’s headquarters. It was a kind of motif, an image in the carpet where all the threads of intrigue in Blumkin’s life came together. In the center of the tapestry was the face of his absent father, or rather those of his two substitute fathers: Leon Trotsky and Mendele Mocher Sforim. The creator of the Red Army and the grandfather of Yiddish literature. The instructor and the teacher. The strategist and the poet. In early 1929, Stalin drove Trotsky out of the USSR and exiled him to Constantinople. It was there that Blumkin visited him in the spring and summer of 1929, a visit that should have remained secret and would cost him his life. Mocher Sforim, who died in 1917, would be a ghost that haunted Blumkin during the last year of his life. And at this point, the affair took a truly novelistic turn.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, a note drafted by Blumkin and addressed to the head of the OGPU Foreign Department was found in the Russian Federation’s archives. The note was titled “Proposal for the Creation of a Clandestine Network in Palestine.” It specified: 1. The identity of the members of the initial core of agents. 2. The conditions of their recruitment. 3. The modes of communication between them. 4. The rules to follow for physical meetings. 5. Forms of communication with the Foreign Department. Blumkin proposed including Iraq and Persia in the new network and naming a permanent representative in each country. Objective: to oppose the region’s omnipresent Secret Intelligence Service in case of war. Blumkin planned to travel to all the countries to supervise and direct the activity of the rezidents.
But first, he had to come up with a fake name and profession that could serve as a cover for his espionage work. During a trip to Europe Blumkin had met a dealer in rare books in Vienna. The man told him that since the end of the war demand had been strong for collectible works, incunabula, holy books, old Bibles, Torahs, and Talmuds. Dealers had already ransacked Galicia and Poland and were now scouring Turkey, Syria, and North Africa.
“The sale of antiquarian Jewish books overseas is doing very well,” wrote Blumkin to Mikhail Trilisser, the head of the Foreign Department. “The potential buyers are not museums, but mostly collectors who made their fortune during the war and want to invest their money by collecting valuable books. What better cover for our work! It would give us the opportunity to make connections and would explain our presence anywhere in the Middle East.”
Increasing postwar demand had driven up the price of rare books in the marketplace, and Russia had a great many of them. Some had passed from private collections to the state libraries during the Revolution, but many works were to be found in Jewish villages of the former Pale of Settlement, in people’s attics and cellars. To Trilisser, Blumkin suggested selling these treasures abroad, since Russia had no use for them, and setting up a legal protocol to facilitate the purchase, not to say confiscation, of the books from individuals. To make it impossible to trace commercial operations that amounted to pillaging national treasures, Blumkin suggested using shell companies and smuggling to get the works out of the country.
In November 1928 several paintings from the Hermitage and Imperial Palace collections had been sold for low prices in auctions in Berlin and Vienna. They included European paintings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, porcelain objects, and furniture. The émigré press raised a hue and cry, accusing the Bolsheviks of plundering the national patrimony. Blumkin heard about the scandal and sent Trilisser another note.
The sale of holdings held by the state and in museums has proved inefficient, for two reasons. First, items are being sold at a loss, which doesn’t bring in much money. Second, the fact that Soviet institutions are selling these confiscated goods themselves creates legal and political complications, exposing them to lawsuits by their former owners. Future operations of this sort should be carried out by shell companies, not directly by official Soviet organs. Items must be chosen whose transfer would do no harm to science, and at the same time bring in significant amounts of money. Ideally, we would select items that would not be the subject of lawsuits by their prior owners.
Selling Jewish books filled all three conditions. There was no demand for those kinds of religious works in the USSR, confiscating the books from libraries “did no harm to science,” and selling them abroad avoided the possibility of legal action against the state, their sole owner.
Blumkin suggested that the state sell the books to the Iranian merchant Yakum Sultan-Zade, meaning Blumkin himself, who would be responsible for having them appraised by experts. The books would then be put on the European market. It’s not impossible that by getting these books out of the USSR, Blumkin was trying to save them. He had seen Jewish works stolen and burned in autos-da-fé during the Civil War pogroms. He may have thought that by selling these treasures of Jewish culture to Western collectors, he would be sparing them a possible collapse of the Soviet Union, where anti-Semitism was on the rise in the late 1920s, during Stalin’s Great Turn.
Blumkin was now walking in the footsteps of Mendele Mocher Sforim, his old teacher at the Talmud Torah in Odessa. After all, didn’t the man’s name mean “book peddler”? Hadn’t he crisscrossed the Pale of Settlement roads before him? Once Blumkin obtained the legal authorizations, he left for Odessa. Traveling through little Ukrainian towns with the authority of a Chekist, he knocked on bookstore and synagogue doors and inspected peoples’ attics. In exchange for a receipt, he confiscated Talmuds, Torahs, prayer books, psalms, Tanyas (“which are a guide to life”), Hassidic tales of unexpected depth, stories marrying the mystical to daily life; in short, everything that could be read about a life with a connection to the divine.
Back in Moscow, Blumkin made an inventory of works held by the state libraries. In the Lenin Library he found a collection of Hebrew manuscripts confiscated from Baron Ginsburg, as well as a great number of uncataloged works. His friend and neighbor A. V. Lunacharsky, the education commissar, wrote to the director of the Public State Library and the director of Leningrad State University as follows: “July 26, 1928, to the Public State Library: The RSFRS People’s Commissariat for Education requests that all sixteenth-century Hebrew books held by the State Library be removed and sent by courier to the Leningrad GPU at my personal address. [Signed] People’s Commissar for Education Lunacharsky.” Blumkin was living at the same address as Lunacharsky at the time, and even on the same landing.
Leningrad Chekists were pressed into service and sent to libraries, where they confiscated rare books. Between the end of August and the middle of October they sent more than a hundred books to the GPU Foreign Department, including incunabula, two Tanakhs published in 1462 and 1491, and a four-volume rabbinical Bible on parchment.
For the last time, the book and the sword were crossing in Blumkin’s life, as they had in his youth in Odessa. He tried to reconcile the one with the other. He wielded the sword of the Chekists to confiscate sacred books. Selling the books confiscated from libraries would finance that sword in the Middle East. It was now time to make contact with antiquarians in Constantinople and negotiate the first transactions.
In mid-September 1928, two and a half months after his initial letter to Trilisser, Blumkin returned to Odessa to start the process of getting a visa for Turkey. This took two weeks. The moment he got it, he telegraphed the GPU Foreign Department: “I received the letter. I am in good health. Love to Mom. Liza.” On October 8 another telegram reached the GPU: “I am worried about the lack of letters. Nadia.” This meant that he had arrived in Constantinople. It would take him a couple of months to rent a space, buy furniture, and order seals, paper, and envelopes with his new import-export company’s logo. In late October 1928, the first batch of books reached him in Constantinople. Blumkin stored the rarest ones in the Deutsche Orientbank’s vaults, and the others in those of the Ottoman Bank. He made contacts among Constantinople’s Jewish merchants and rabbis and brought from Vienna the first Jewish resellers, with whom he undertook what he called “complicated Jewish negotiations.” They were all dazzled by his collection. His reputation crossed borders and his name spread among booksellers and antiquarians. In November, Blumkin received an attractive offer from the Kaufmannverlag-antiquariat company in Frankfurt am Main. He promptly traveled from Vienna to Frankfurt to meet Herr Kaufmann, bringing three incunabula: a three-volume Tanakh with commentaries (1486), the Naples Bible in Hebrew (1488–1491), and four volumes of the Bomberg rabbinical Bible (Venice, 1518). Blumkin conducted the negotiations with brio and received $6,000 for the sale of the three works. But that wasn’t all. Kaufmann agreed to make “Sultanov” his representative in Turkey and the other countries of the Middle East. The metamorphosis was complete. The secret agent had become a seller of rare books. In a few months, Sultanov’s reputation was established.
In Moscow, there was some concern that Blumkin might get carried away by this commercial activity at which he was so successful and forget about his principal mission, the counterespionage network in Palestine. “Don’t forget that your main task consists in organizing the network,” wrote Trilisser, his boss. “Palestine is important from a strategic point of view, because in case of war with England, the disruption of Red Sea shipping would be very helpful for us.” It was time for Blumkin to go back to Constantinople. An unexpected development would precipitate his return.
On February 12, 1929, a steamship from Odessa docked at Constantinople in bitterly cold weather. Aboard were Leon Trotsky, his wife, and their son Lev Sedov, who was twenty-three. An icebreaker had had to clear a path through the frozen Black Sea. “The Ilyich, which carried no cargo or passengers, cleared about one o’clock in the morning,” wrote Trotsky in his autobiography. When in Turkish territorial waters, he handed the customs officers who came aboard a letter for Mustapha Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s head of state: “Dear Sir: At the gate of Constantinople, I have the honor to inform you that I have arrived at the Turkish frontier not of my own choice, and that I will cross this frontier only by submitting to force. I request you, Mr. President, to accept my appropriate sentiments.”
In a single night, the founder of the Red Army had become an exile that Churchill called “a bundle of old rags, stranded on the shores of the Black Sea.” The man Churchill couldn’t defeat on the battlefield was leaving history by the back door, and Winston could now give his contempt free rein. The news of Trotsky’s expulsion from the USSR hit like a thunderbolt. Stalin tried to delay the announcement as long as possible, but the news spread undercover and caught the attention of the worldwide media. The journalists pouring into Constantinople all asked Trotsky the same question: “How could you lose power?” Losing power isn’t “the same thing as losing a watch or a notebook,” he explained, but is the result of a political and ideological shift. “When the revolutionaries who directed the seizure of power begin at a certain stage to lose it, whether peacefully or through catastrophe, the fact in itself signifies a decline in the influence of certain ideas and moods in the governing revolutionary circles.”
After Lenin’s death in 1924, Trotsky lost every battle he fought, one after another. First he was excluded from the Central Committee, then from all Party proceedings, and finally he was deported to Alma-Ata, where he was closely guarded while a suitable country was found to send him to. Stalin eventually gave the order to deport him to Constantinople, where Moscow had powerful connections who could keep him under surveillance while his elimination was being prepared. And killing Trotsky might not even be necessary. The city was infested with White Russians and Western spies who might well decide to eliminate the person responsible for their exile and defeat.
Trotsky was initially lodged in a wing of the Russian consulate while his wife and son looked for housing in the city. But there was no way he would stay at the mercy of his enemy in the consulate, where his every move was watched and his correspondence opened. But then, the entire city felt like a prison. He stayed closeted in the consulate just a few days, only going out to walk a few steps in the snowy street. He could be seen along the tramway tracks on the Grande Rue de Péra, in the company of his guards. He was offered several housing options, but none suited him. After a few weeks, the Constantinople GPU representative moved the family to the Hotel Tokatliyan near the consulate, from which Trotsky’s wife could continue her search for a place to live. In reality, Trotsky distrusted the consulate and wanted to escape its burdensome protection as soon as possible. The isolation was weighing on him. For more than ten years he had been at the forefront of all the battles of the Revolution, Civil War, and reconstruction. He had no desire to permanently settle in a country whose language he didn’t speak. He hoped to soon get a visa from England, Germany, or France, where he had many supporters and friends made during his first exile. That way, he could continue the political struggle on an international scale. During his first months in Constantinople, Trotsky repeatedly requested visas for Europe. But European capitals feared the contagion of Bolshevik ideas, and the aura of the Red Army founder was such that nobody wanted to risk welcoming such a dangerous exile on their soil. The doors closed one after another. First it was Germany, then France. In the spring of 1929, when Labourite Ramsay MacDonald won election, Trotsky began to hope for an exile in England, but his hopes were soon dashed. Except for a short visit to Copenhagen, the Trotskys would remain in Turkey for more than four years. As Trotsky biographer Isaac Deutscher put it: “They sat there all the time as in a waiting-room on a pier, looking out for the ship that would take them away.”
The new guard was already coming from Prague and Berlin, however. From Paris, Raymond Molinier and his wife, Jeanne Martin des Pallières, sailed to Constantinople, burning with the fervor of the first apostles. They were the first settlers of that “planet without visa” that Trotsky would roam for his eleven years of exile. Molinier was able to find a large house on the island of Prinkipo overlooking the Sea of Marmara, about twenty miles from Constantinople. Irony of history: the “Princes’ Islands” were so named because Byzantine monarchs used them as a place to exile royal heirs they wanted to keep away from the throne.
The day following our arrival in Istanbul, we took the ferry for Prinkipo. After an hour-and-a-half crossing, we docked at the little carless island where Trotsky spent the first four years of his exile, from 1929 to 1933. A group of donkey-drawn buggies awaited us near the dock. It was raining, so we climbed into the first one we saw and took off under a dripping canopy, in search of Trotsky’s house. The buggy drove along a road lined by shuttered villas, their gardens planted with jasmine and bougainvillea. Then the driver pointed to a little side street that ran down to the sea. “Trotsky! Trotsky!” he repeated, with such a strong accent that it took me a moment to understand what he was saying. A driveway led to a big redbrick building with a shattered roof, surrounded by bushes and weeds. A crumbling six-foot fence protected the garden, which sloped toward a small dock. The vacant house stood motionless, facing the sea. Its roof had collapsed, and vegetation made its way from the garden into the rooms. A few miles to the east of the island, the Asian coast could be seen, once deserted but now covered with buildings and houses. The European coast was just visible much farther to the northwest.
This was the place where Blumkin had visited Trotsky in total secrecy, linking his fate to that of the man Stalin considered his worst enemy. In 1929, Stalin was preparing the second Soviet revolution, the collectivization of the farms, and he needed a free hand. Blumkin knew that if this visit reached his superiors’ ears, he would be shot. The leaders of the Soviet Union would consider his loyalty to Trotsky to be an act of high treason, and Stalin wouldn’t bother with a trial. “The GPU doesn’t need me to execute its agents,” he’d warned. Yet Blumkin hadn’t hesitated. Trotsky’s safety was his first priority.
Blumkin located Trotsky very quickly. He arrived in Constantinople on April 10 and was embracing him on the 16th. How could he have found his mentor in a city as big as Constantinople? What connections did he have within the Soviet rezidentura in Constantinople? How often did Blumkin visit? Were these just courtesy visits, or a conspiracy to overthrow the regime? During the meeting, did he raise practical matters connected to establishing an actual clandestine organization? What role did Trotsky’s son Sedov play in arranging these secret meetings? Had Trotsky discussed political subjects? What was in the letter that Blumkin agreed to deliver to Trotsky’s supporters in Moscow?
In the postwar years, all sorts of legends were going around. For example, the authors of The Secret War Against Soviet Russia, a Cold War bestseller, claimed that Blumkin was the head of Trotsky’s bodyguard on Prinkipo and served him “with dog-like devotion.” Others claimed that the GPU had sent Blumkin to Constantinople to assassinate Trotsky, but he changed his mind at the last moment and elected to help him instead. In the most crazily romantic version, Blumkin was sent to Constantinople in the company of a GPU Mata Hari who was ordered to overcome her “bourgeois prejudices” and seduce him, so as to discover the exact extent of his collaboration with Trotsky. Gordon Brook-Shepherd, who wrote The Storm Petrels, claims that Liza Gorskaya, “one of the most attractive agents at the GPU foreign affairs section,” was instructed to make herself available to Blumkin and get him to spill his secrets in pillow talk. Gorskaya was a beautiful woman and an experienced agent, known to American intelligence as “Liza with the big hands and the big feet.” Soon after betraying Blumkin, she married Vasily Zarunbin, a GPU rezident in Berlin. Under the name Elizabeth Zarubina, she played a key role in spying on the atom bomb project code-named “Manhattan Project” in the 1940s by befriending Robert Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty Harrison, who sympathized with communist ideals.
Until the opening of the Trotsky archives at Harvard’s Houghton Library, anyone was free to say almost anything about Blumkin’s relationship with Trotsky without fear of contradiction. I remember how excited we became as January 2, 1980, approached, the date the archives would be opened. Would we find Trotsky’s letter to the opposition that he entrusted to Blumkin? Did Trotsky mention his meeting with Blumkin to any of his correspondents? What role did he want him to play?
At the end of 1929, Trotsky publicly admitted receiving Blumkin’s visit. According to Trotsky, his son Lev Sedov ran into him on the street in Istanbul when Blumkin was returning from the Far East and on his way to the Soviet Union. Sedov then supposedly persuaded Blumkin to “come to the house” to see Trotsky. In reality, a document that Blumkin wrote, dated April 3, 1929, which I found in Sedov’s papers at Stanford, suggests that Trotsky’s contacts with Blumkin were no accidental meeting, but an organized liaison with the USSR in which the secret agent was clearly a key element. This meeting would cause Stalin to have Blumkin, a Bolshevik, executed on his return to Moscow. It would be a first.