(1923). Trotsky noted in particular the irony of a former Left SR conspirator editing the volume describing the Left SR conspiracy. Blumkin introduced Yesenin to Trotsky in the hope that Trotsky would sponsor and promote a literary journal. That sharing of friendship, scholarship, and political ideas with Trotsky would later cost Blumkin his life. From the summer of 1924 to the fall of 1925, he worked for the OGPU in Tiflis and was the Assistant Chairman of the Soviet delegation in the mixed Soviet-Persian Border commission and a member of the Soviet delegation in the mixed Soviet-Turkish Border commission. It is claimed that in 1924, he travelled secretly to Afghanistan or Pamir to contact the Ismailites and the local representative of the Aga Khan for the purposes of "anti-imperialist struggle" against the British, and then disguised himself as a dervish and travelled with an Ismailite caravan and explored the British military positions in India as far south as Ceylon. In 1926, Blumkin was supposedly the secret representative of the GPU in Mongolia, where he ruled for some time as a virtual dictator and occasionally travelled on missions in China, Tibet and India, until he was recalled to Moscow because the local communist leadership was tired of his reign of terror. In his book The Storm Petrels, Gordon Brook-Shepherd relates that the GPU sent Blumkin to Paris in October 1929 to assassinate the defector and former Stalin personal secretary, Boris Bazhanov. In fact, the information comes from Bazhanov himself. Although it became common gossip among the inmates of the labor camps that Blumkin had indeed killed Bazhanov, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn repeats that legend in The Gulag Archipelago, the truth is that Bazhanov died in 1983. Bazhanov was then also aware of the rumour of his own murder and wrote that Stalin had probably planted the rumour to instill fear. Later life In 1929, Blumkin was the chief illegal resident in Turkey, where he allegedly sold Hebrew incunabula that he collected from synagogues all over Ukraine and Southern Russia and even from state museums such as the Lenin Library in Moscow, to finance an espionage network in the Middle East. He supposedly travelled personally to Ukraine to look for rare Hebrew books, but he also spent time in Palestine and elsewhere organizing the network by posing as a devout Jewish laundry owner or as a Jewish salesman from Azerbaijan. Eventually, he was