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This page-turning biography follows the footsteps of a forgotten legend of the Russian Revolution.
Yakov Blumkin claimed to have had nine lives. He was a terrorist, the assassin of the German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach, a poet close to the avant-garde, a member of Cheka, a military strategist, a secret agent, and Leon Trotsky's secretary. Executed in 1929 on the orders of Stalin at the age of twenty-nine, he has continued to inspire a powerful curiosity: Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian Internet users have been adopting "Blumkin" as a pseudonym, and wild rumors and falsehoods about his extraordinary life abound today.
With a trove of manuscripts, documents, rare photographs, and personal souvenirs, writer and researcher Christian Salmon sets out to reconstruct the shadowy past of this multifaceted figure.
Yakov Blumkin claimed to have had nine lives. He was a terrorist, the assassin of the German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach, a poet close to the avant-garde, a member of Cheka, a military strategist, a secret agent, and Leon Trotsky's secretary. Executed in 1929 on the orders of Stalin at the age of twenty-nine, he has continued to inspire a powerful curiosity: Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian Internet users have been adopting "Blumkin" as a pseudonym, and wild rumors and falsehoods about his extraordinary life abound today.
With a trove of manuscripts, documents, rare photographs, and personal souvenirs, writer and researcher Christian Salmon sets out to reconstruct the shadowy past of this multifaceted figure.