deported from Palestine by the British. It is known that during his work in Turkey, Blumkin met with Trotsky, who lived there after his expulsion from the Soviet Union. Trotsky gave Blumkin a secret message to transmit to Karl Radek, Trotsky's former supporter and friend in Moscow, which was seen by Stalin as an attempt to set up lines of communication with "co-thinkers" and "oppositionists" in the Soviet Union. Information about the meeting reached the OGPU. Trotsky later claimed that Radek had betrayed Blumkin to Stalin, and Radek would later acknowledge his complicity, but it is also likely that the information was passed along by an OGPU informer within Trotsky's entourage. After Blumkin met with Radek in Moscow, Mikhail Trilisser, head of the OGPU Foreign Section, ordered an attractive agent, Lisa Gorskaya (also known as Elizabeth Zubilin) to "abandon bourgeois prejudice" and to seduce Blumkin. The couple carried on an affair lasting several weeks, and Gorskaya revealed their pillow talk to Trilisser. When agents sent to arrest Blumkin arrived at his apartment, he was getting into a car with Gorskaya. A chase ensued, and shots were fired. Blumkin stopped the car, turned to Gorskaya and said, "Lisa, you have betrayed me!" After his arrest, Blumkin was brought before an OGPU tribunal consisting of Yagoda, Menzhinsky and Trilisser. The defector Georges Agabekov claimed: "Yagoda pronounced for the death penalty. Trilliser was against it. Menzhinsky was undecided". The matter was referred to the Politburo in which Stalin ended the deadlock by declaring himself for the death penalty. In his Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1941), Victor Serge related that Blumkin was given a two-week reprieve so that he could write his autobiography. That manuscript, if indeed it ever existed, remains undiscovered. Alexander Orlov wrote that Blumkin stood before a firing squad and shouted, "Long live Trotsky!" The Russian government has never rehabilitated Blumkin. See also Sidney Reilly Elizabeth Zarubina Notes External links Leon Trotsky, "Revolt of the Left SR." Review of a Biography 1900 births 1929 deaths Odesa Jews People from Odessky Uyezd Left socialist-revolutionaries Cheka officers Interwar-period spies Jewish socialists State Political Directorate officers Ukrainian Trotskyists Soviet Trotskyists Ukrainian revolutionaries Frunze Military Academy alumni People executed for treason against the Soviet Union People executed by the Soviet Union by firing squad Jews executed by the Soviet Union Left Opposition