Yakov Blumkin - Cheka Employee

Cheka Employee

After the October Revolution, in 1917 he became head of the Cheka's counter-espionage department working for Felix Dzerzhinsky. During the Red Terror, Blumkin was known for his brutality. The following story is recounted about the poet Osip Mandelstam by his biographer Clarence Brown:

"One evening early in the Revolution he was sitting in a cafe and there was the notorious Socialist Revolutionary terrorist Blumkin… at that time an official of the Cheka… drunkenly copying the names of men and women to be executed on to blank forms already signed by the head of the secret police. Mandelstam suddenly threw himself at him, seized the lists, tore them to pieces before the stupefied onlookers, then ran out and disappeared. On this occasion he was saved by Trotsky's sister."