Jakob Blumkin Shot by the Stalinists

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Author(s) Leon Trotsky
Written 4 January 1930


Written: January 4, 1930
First Published: In Biulleten Oppozitsii, No. 9, February-March 1930
Source: Writings of Leon Trotsky, Vol. 2, 1930, pp. 22-25.
Collection(s): Biulleten Oppositsii, The Militant (USA)
Keywords : Biulleten Oppositsii, Cheka, Yakov Blumkin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Politburo, Left Opposition, Russian Revolution, Russian Civil War, Turkey, Istanbul, The Militant (USA), Stalinism, USSR, Russia

Note from Writings of Leon Trotsky:

"Jakob Blumkin Shot by the Stalinists." Biulleten Oppozitsii, number 9, February-March 1930. Unsigned. Translated for this volume by Jim Burnett. Excerpts from this article, dated one day later, signed by Trotsky and rewritten in the first person as a letter to Alfred Rosmer, were translated in The Militant, March 1, 1930, under the title "Opposition Serves the Bolshevik Revolution.”

There is no doubt left even for those who did not want to believe it: Blumkin has been shot on the charge that he visited Trotsky in Constantinople and held a conversation with him about the fortunes of the party and the tasks of the Opposition.[1]

Blumkin has been shot—by decision of the GPU.[2] That could have happened only because the GPU has become Stalin's personal instrument. During the years of the civil war, the Cheka carried out grim work. But this was done under the control of the party. Hundreds of times from inside the party there came protests, declarations, and demands for explanations about one sentence or another. At the head of the Cheka stood Dzerzhinsky,[3] a man of outstanding moral authority. He was under orders from the Politburo,[4] whose members were aware of his personal opinions on all matters and supported what he stood for. This altogether constituted the guarantee that the Cheka was a weapon of the revolutionary dictatorship. Now the party is strangled. With the shooting of Blumkin, thousands and tens of thousands of party members stand in corners, whispering horrible things. At the head of the GPU is Menzhinsky, not a man but the shadow of one.[5] In the GPU the chief role is played by Yagoda,[6] a despicable careerist who has tied his fortune to Stalin, and who is ready to perform anything he is told to do, without thinking and without questioning. The Politburo does not exist. Bukharin has already stated that Stalin holds the members of the so-called Politburo in his hands,[7] by means of documents collected by the GPU. Under these conditions, the shooting of Blumkin was Stalin's personal business.

This unheard-of crime cannot have passed without a trace even in the present conditions of an all-powerful apparatus. Stalin could not have been insensitive to this beforehand; and the fact, with all the precautions he took, that he had made up his mind to kill Blumkin shows how great is that person's fear of the Left Opposition. There can be no doubt about it: Blumkin was victimized to pay for the fact that only a small minority of the Opposition followed Radek[8] and the other capitulators at the very time when the Opposition abroad is gaining serious ideological and organizational successes in a number of countries.

By shooting Blumkin Stalin wishes to warn the International Opposition of Bolshevik-Leninists that inside the country he is holding hundreds and thousands of hostages who would pay with their heads for the successes of authentic Bolshevism on the world arena. In other words, after expulsions from the party, loss of jobs, condemnation of families to hunger, imprisonment, banishment, and exile, Stalin is trying intimidation of the last of the Opposition still in his hands by the method of—shooting.

It can be said with confidence: the results will prove exactly the reverse of those ends Stalin has set himself. The advance of a historically progressive ideological tendency, operating according to the logic of development, will not be bullied or shot down.

Very soon after the insurrection of the Left SRs—when, a youth of eighteen, he threw a bomb at Mirbach[9]—Blumkin went over to the Bolsheviks and played a hero's part in the civil war. Shortly after, he worked in Trotsky's military secretariat. Thereafter, he worked mainly for the GPU but also for both the military and the party. He carried out very responsible missions. His devotion to the October Revolution and to the party was absolute.

Till his last hours, Blumkin was occupied in responsible Soviet work. How could he stay in it, being an Oppositionist? This is explained by the nature of his work—it had a completely individual character. Blumkin had nothing—or almost nothing—to do with the party cells or participation in discussions on party problems, and so on. But this did not mean that he concealed his views. On the contrary, to both Menzhinsky and Trilisser[10]—former head of the foreign section of the GPU—Blumkin said that his sympathies lay with the Opposition but that it went without saying he was prepared—like any Oppositionist—to carry out his responsible work for the defense of the October Revolution. Menzhinsky and Trilisser considered Blumkin irreplaceable, and that was no mistake. They kept him in his work which he carried out to the end.

Blumkin really did seek out Comrade Trotsky in Constantinople. As already mentioned above, Blumkin had been closely connected personally with Comrade Trotsky, working in his secretariat. In particular, he prepared one of Comrade Trotsky's military volumes (the preface to that volume speaks about it), Blumkin sought out Comrade Trotsky in Constantinople to find out how he appraised the situation and to verify whether he was acting correctly by remaining in the service of a government that was deporting, exiling, and imprisoning his closest cothinkers. L.D. Trotsky answered him that he was of course acting absolutely correctly in doing his revolutionary duty—not with respect to the Stalinist government, which has usurped the rights of the party, but with respect to the October Revolution.

In one of Yaroslavsky's articles[11] there was a reference to the fact that in the summer Comrade Trotsky had had a conversation with a certain visitor and allegedly predicted to him the speedy and inevitable end of the Soviet power. It goes without saying that the contemptible sycophant is lying. But comparing the facts with what has been said, in our opinion the remark refers to Comrade Trotsky's conversation with Blumkin. To his question concerning the connection between his work and his adherence to the Opposition, Comrade Trotsky told him among other things that his banishment abroad, like the imprisonment of other comrades, did not alter our fundamental line; that at the moment of danger the Oppositionists would be in the foremost positions, that in the hour of Stalin's difficulty, the latter would call on them as Tseretelli had called on the Bolsheviks for aid against Kornilov.[12] In this connection he said, "If only it is not too late to help." Obviously, after his arrest, Blumkin presented this conversation as proof of the genuineness of the feelings and intentions of the Opposition; it mustn't be forgotten, you know, that Comrade Trotsky was exiled on the charge of preparing an armed uprising against the Soviet power. Through Blumkin, a newsletter to cothinkers was transmitted to Moscow wherein they read basically the views expounded in a number of Trotsky's printed articles: Stalinist repression against us still did not mean betrayal of the class nature of the state, but only that it paved the way and facilitated such betrayal; our road, as before, remains the road of reform but not of revolution; irreconcilable struggle for our views must be expected for a long time.

Later a report was received that Blumkin had been arrested and that the letter sent through him had come into Stalin's hands.

Blumkin was not shot in 1918 for participating in an armed insurrection against the Soviet power, but he was shot in 1929 for selflessly serving the cause of the October Revolution, separating himself, however, on significant questions from the Stalin faction, and for counting it his duty to disseminate the views of the Bolshevik-Leninists (Opposition).

It is fully possible that Stalin will try to use some kind of poisonous variant, in the style associated with the "Wrangel officer"[13]—preparation for an armed uprising or terrorist acts. We must be prepared for this kind of foulness. Such an explanation, however, will scarcely produce serious effects. In general it smells too much of Bonapartist police methods[14] and, in particular, in his struggle with the Opposition Stalin has as a matter of fact already exhausted all his resources. There is no need for a reminder that the principled stand taken by Blumkin on behalf of all of us excluded any kind of adventurist methods of struggle on his part.

  1. ↑ Jakob Blumkin (1899-1929) was a Left Social Revolutionary terrorist who became a Communist and a GPU official, working for a time in Trotsky's secretariat, where he helped edit Trotsky's How the Revolution Armed Itself, volume 1. He was the first Russian supporter of the Left Opposition to visit Trotsky in exile in Turkey. Bringing back a letter from Trotsky to the Opposition, he was betrayed to the GPU and shot in December 1929. Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) became a revolutionary in 1896 and a collaborator of Lenin on Iskra in 1902. He broke with Lenin the next year over the nature of the revolutionary party and aligned himself with the Mensheviks. He broke with them the following year and tried during the next decade to reunite the factions. In the 1905 revolution, he was the leader of the St. Petersburg Soviet and developed the theory of permanent revolution. In 1915 he wrote the Zimmerwald manifesto against the war. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917, was elected to its Central Committee, and organized the insurrection that made the new Soviet state possible. His first government post was commissar of foreign affairs. Then as commissar of war he organized the Red Army and led it to victory through three years of civil war and imperialist intervention. He formed the Left Opposition in 1923 and fought for the next decade to return the Soviet Union and the Comintern to Leninist internationalism and proletarian democracy. Defeated by the Stalin faction, he was expelled from the CP and the Comintern, and exiled to Turkey in 1929. In 1933 he ceased his efforts to reform the Comintern and called for the creation of a new International. He viewed his work on behalf of the Fourth International as the most important of his career. The name of Constantinople was officially changed to Istanbul in 1930, but many people continued to use the old name for some time thereafter.
  2. ↑ GPU was one of the abbreviated names for the Soviet political police; other names were Cheka, NKVD, MVD, KGB, etc., but GPU is often used in their place.
  3. ↑ Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926), a founder of the Polish Social Democratic Party, was active in the Polish and Russian revolutionary movements. After the Russian Revolution he headed the Cheka from its formation in December 1917, and the Supreme Council of National Economy from 1924.
  4. ↑ The Politburo was, in Lenin's time, a subordinate body of the Central Committee of the Russian CP. The first Politburo, elected in 1919, consisted of Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Krestinsky, and Stalin. After the Sixteenth Congress, when both the Central Committee and the Politburo had become rubber stamps for Stalin, the Politburo consisted of Stalin, Kaganovich, Kalinin, Kirov, Kosior, Kuibyshev, Molotov, Rudzutak, Rykov, and Voroshilov. In December 1930 Rykov was removed and replaced by Ordzhonikidze.
  5. ↑ Vyacheslav Menzhinsky (1874-1934) succeeded Dzerzhinsky as head of the Soviet secret police in 1926, but he was only nominally in charge.
  6. ↑ Henry Yagoda (1891-1938) was Stalin's chief lieutenant in the GPU. After supervising the organization of the 1936 Moscow trial, he was put on trial himself in 1938, convicted, and executed.
  7. ↑ Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938), president of the Comintern, 1926-29, was an Old Bolshevik who represented the right wing of the CP in an alliance with Stalin against the left wing. The Stalinist drive against the leaders of the Right Opposition began shortly after the Fifteenth Congress expelled the Left Opposition at the end of 1927; by the end of 1929 the leaders of the Right Opposition capitulated to Stalin. Bukharin's charge about Stalin's control over the Politburo was made in 1929, a few months before he was removed from it. Despite his capitulation, Bukharin was executed after the third Moscow trial.
  8. ↑ Karl Radek (1885-1939) was an outstanding revolutionary in Poland and Germany before World War I and a leader of the Comintern. He was both an early Left Oppositionist and one of the earliest to capitulate to Stalin after his expulsion and deportation. He was readmitted to the party in 1930 and served as a propagandist for Stalin until he was framed up in the second Moscow trial and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.
  9. ↑ The Left SRs were a faction that split away from the Social Revolutionary Party (SRs) in 1917 and briefly served in a coalition with the Bolsheviks in the new Soviet government. But they soon moved into opposition "from the left,” organizing an insurrection against the Soviet government in 1918 after it had voted to accept the German conditions for ending the war. Wilhelm Mirbach (1871- 1918), appointed German ambassador to Moscow in April 1918, was assassinated in July by the Left SRs, who wanted to disrupt the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty between Germany and the Soviet republic.
  10. ↑ M.A. Trilisser, an Old Bolshevik, was an official of the GPU and was promoted to head a special section of the Comintern in 1935 whose function was to purge the Comintern. He disappeared in the 1937-38 purges.
  11. ↑ Emelyan Yaroslavsky (1878-1943) was a top Stalinist specialist in the extirpation of "Trotskyism,” which, however, did not prevent him from falling from favor in 1931-32 when he failed to keep up with the tempo demanded by Stalin in the rewriting of Soviet history.
  12. ↑ Iraklii Tseretelli (1882-1959) was a Menshevik minister in the coalition Provisional Government, March-August 1917. Although this government had persecuted and imprisoned the Bolsheviks, he called upon them to help fight and defeat the counterrevolutionary drive against the Provisional Government by its own commander in chief, the czarist general Lavr G. Kornilov (1870-1918).
  13. ↑ In 1927 the GPU tried to smear the Left Opposition by claiming that a "Wrangel officer" was seeking contact with its members. Piotr N. Wrangel (1878-1928) was a White Guard general who had fought to overthrow the Soviets in the civil war. This attempt to portray Oppositionists as collaborators of counterrevolutionaries backfired when the GPU was forced to admit that the alleged Wrangell officer was actually an agent of the GPU.
  14. ↑ Bonapartism is a Marxist term describing a dictatorship or a regime with certain features of a dictatorship during a period when class rule is not secure; it is based on the military, police, and state bureaucracy, rather than on parliamentary parties or a mass movement. Trotsky saw two types of Bonapartism in the 1930s—bourgeois and Soviet. His most extensive writings on bourgeois Bonapartism (which he distinguished from fascism) will be found in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (Pathfinder Press, 1971). His views on Soviet Bonapartism reached their final form in his essay "The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism," Writings 34-35.
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