ABSTRACT
When no hint of his Okhrana file appeared after the execution of Blumkin, Rabinovich and Silov, Stalin must have hoped that Blumkin had destroyed the file before his arrest. But the fear of its having fallen into unknown hands continued to haunt him. He decided to discredit the documents in the file in advance if it were to reappear, by ‘proving’ that the documents Blumkin had tried to smuggle abroad were forgeries. Stalin had resorted to a similar strategy in August 1917, when he published an article in which he had stated that the enemies of the Bolsheviks used ‘low-grade forgery and falsification’ to malign ‘revolutionary fighters’ as ‘German and tsarist spies’.1 A month earlier, Lenin and Trotsky had branded as calumnies the Provisional Government’s accusations that Lenin was an agent of the German general staff.2
