ABSTRACT
In early 1929 Stalin ordered the head of the GPU, Menzhinsky, to appoint Yakov Blumkin in place of the GPU resident in Turkey, G.A.Agabekov, who had defected to the West. In October Blumkin was instructed to return to Moscow and on his way there to visit Trotsky, who had rented a house on the island of Prinkipo in the Sea of Marmora, near Istanbul. Stalin counted on Blumkin’s ability to, in the words of an old Bolshevik, do the ‘job of winning Trotsky’s confidence and killing him’.1 Stalin believed that Blumkin was capable of committing a murder, because in July 1918, as a young member of the Left Esser party and Cheka officer, he had made history by taking part in the assassination of the German ambassador Count von Mirbach. Blumkin was tried by a military tribunal and sentenced to death, but, thanks to the interference of Trotsky, was pardoned in order to ‘expiate his guilt in the battles in defense of the Revolution’.2 He served on Trotsky’s staff during the Civil War and joined the Bolshevik Party during that time.3 After the Civil War, he resumed his service in the Cheka, and during the 19208 he was often sent by Soviet intelligence on secret missions abroad.
