In the early 1980s in Rome, I met a Russian historian named Aleksei Velidov at a conference on Nikolai Bukharin organized by the Italian Communist Party. I told him about my interest in Blumkin, and he promised to find me some information when he returned to Moscow. Years passed, and I forgot about the encounter.
Almost twenty years later, in 1998, when I had once again abandoned the Blumkin Project, Velidov wrote me a long letter. The GPU archives were being opened and he had gotten access to the Blumkin file. His letter was accompanied by a number of pages titled “Adventures of a Terrorist: Yakov Blumkin’s Odyssey.” They had allowed Velidov to re-create the events and the chain of circumstances that led to Blumkin’s execution almost day by day.
We learned for example, that Blumkin started an affair with Liza Gorskaya, one of the best GPU agents, at the end of summer in 1929. So Liza didn’t have to overcome any “bourgeois prejudices” to start a relationship with Blumkin. She had simply fallen in love with him. He was also in love with her, as a scene at Kazan Station revealed.
On Saturday, October 5, 1929, Liza was coming back from vacation. Blumkin was on the train platform waiting for her, holding a bouquet of flowers. Next day they went to the theater and spent the night together. Blumkin was due to leave on an assignment the following week, but he didn’t want to leave Liza.
On Wednesday, October 9, Blumkin phoned Liza to announce that he had successfully passed the so-called purification exam, a procedure the Party periodically held to test its members’ loyalty.
On Saturday, October 12, Blumkin spent the evening with Liza, who found him depressed. In a report to her supervisor Agranov, she said that Blumkin was saying strange things that evening. “He wanted to prove to me and to all the comrades who didn’t trust him that he was honest and brave.” When she asked the reasons for this sudden need for recognition, Blumkin enigmatically answered that he “had to settle his accounts.”
The next day, still according to Liza, Blumkin again launched into digressions about fault and punishment, the meaning of life, etc. “I then firmly insisted that he tell me what was going on. And he wound up admitting everything: his meetings with Trotsky in Constantinople and the letters he’d agreed to deliver to members of his family.”
Blumkin then confided to Liza that he had decided to write a letter to the Central Committee, confessing everything. She advised him to first speak to Mikhail Trilisser, their superior. But Blumkin felt that he was guilty before the entire Party and that it was for the Party to judge him.
Here is part of Liza Gorskaya’s account to Agranov:
On Sunday, October 13, at ten o’clock in the evening, I was at home. I’d barely had time to think of what Blumkin told me when the telephone rang. It was him. He asked me to join him at the house of some friends. He absolutely wanted to see me, so that I could help him draft his “confession.” I promised I would come the next morning. But by the next day, he had changed his mind. He was in a bad mood. His courage and his firmness had disappeared. He repeated that he was going to be arrested, that the punishment would be merciless, probably even a death sentence. I left. I felt strongly that Trilisser should be informed first, before Blumkin admitted everything in front of the Party Central Committee. I was under his orders and my responsibility was involved. I had to tell him everything.
On Monday at around eleven in the morning, Liza phoned Trilisser. Their meeting took place the next day.
In the meantime Blumkin went to see his doctor and begged him to give him some sort of poison. The doctor refused. Next day, Blumkin decided to run away. He had his suitcase brought to a café near Kazan Station and went to the house of the painter Robert Falk, who lived nearby, at 21 Myasnitskaya Street, in the famous Yushkov House that was home to Vkhutemas, known as “the Soviet Bauhaus.” The painter wasn’t at home. In the apartment Blumkin found Falk’s wife, the poetess Raisa Idelson, and three of her women friends. Blumkin told them that the GPU was looking for him because of his links with the opposition. He wanted to spend the night at her place.
“He looked like a madman,” said the poetess when she was interrogated at the Lubyanka. “He was saying contradictory things. He would get ready to flee, and then be overcome with discouragement. He collapsed into an armchair, saying that there was only one thing left for him, to shoot himself in the head. He kept taking his pistol out and putting it back in its holster. Then he would come back to his escape preparations. He had to change some money. He needed Falk’s passport, and the train schedules.”
On Wednesday, October 16, around eleven o’clock in the evening, Blumkin telephoned Liza. He had come to a decision. He was going to disappear for a while. “I’ve decided to hide for two or three years. I’ll head south. I have a good plan.” The couple headed for Kazan Station. Was Liza thinking of having the transit police arrest Blumkin at the station? Or did she want to give him one last chance? We will never know, because fate made the decision for her: there were no trains until the next morning. Upon learning this, Blumkin’s face fell. “Not being able to leave today is the end. The catastrophe is inevitable. I won’t escape death.”
Georges Agabekov, who succeeded Blumkin as rezident in Constantinople, published a memoir in the West called OGPU: The Russian Secret Terror. In it, he describes Blumkin’s middle-of-the-night arrest near his place in the Arbat neighborhood. It was carried out by the GPU’s operational section, and led by one Vanya Klukarev, the treasurer of the Foreign Department. Klukarev went to Blumkin’s home on Denezhny Lane at one o’clock in the morning to arrest him.
I went upstairs alone, but Blumkin wasn’t at home. As I was leaving the building, I saw a taxi arrive: Blumkin and Liza Gorskaya were in it. When he saw us, Blumkin understood what was up. Before we had time to approach the taxi it had already made a U-turn. We drove after it. The taxi raced at top speed through the empty streets, but you know what our cars are like. We caught up with them near Petrovsky Park. Seeing that he couldn’t get away, Blumkin stopped the car. He got out, raised his hands, and shouted, “Don’t shoot, comrades. I give up.” To me he said, “Take me to Trilisser, Vanya. I’m so weary!” And Blumkin turned to the taxi, in which Liza Gorskaya was still sitting, and said, “I’m sorry, Liza. I know that you betrayed me.” That’s all he said. He smoked in silence during the whole trip to the Lubyanka.
“Writers think they choose their stories in the world,” the Indian novelist and essayist Arundhati Roy once said, “but I’m starting to think that vanity leads them to believe that. In fact it’s the reverse. Stories choose the writers. Stories reveal us to ourselves. They grab us. They invade us. They demand to be told.”
I don’t know if Roy is right or if it’s always that way, but it certainly was the case for this story. It has been following me for more than thirty years. It began when I was the same age as Blumkin when he was executed, twenty-nine. I wanted to write the story of a legendary hero. A Bolshevik Lord Jim. A story of loyalty and betrayal. Crime and punishment. The epic story of a terrorist who also was a poet. In the end, the hero who had faced so many perils and overcome so many dangers was destroyed by his love for a revolutionary as intrepid as he was, in the name of the higher interests of a Revolution that itself had been betrayed.
I now know that I was clinging to Blumkin in an era that was so unheroic, the 1980s, an era of abandonments and betrayals of socialism’s ideals. That’s why this book is also the story of a failure: that of a generation, my generation, that wanted to change the world.
I am finishing this book where I began it, in this house on the banks of the Marne, where, three years ago, I found the trunk that contained the Blumkin Project archives. The chalky facade of the house stands like an unmarked white page in the evening light. The now-empty trunk sits beneath the blackboard, which has been cleared of the city maps, photos, and the multicolored forest of Post-it notes that covered it. The books it once held are on bookcase shelves, and the archives entered into my computer. Blumkin’s nine lives are contained in a USB thumb drive, like ashes in an urn.
Night is falling.
There’s a thunderstorm outside. The storm outside. Why do we write books, if not to lead a life that is more real?
Joinville-le-Pont, May 15, 2017