"Under the Sign of Scorpion" by Juri - Gnostic Liberation Front

code). The GPU had then gathered together a large amount of de-
nunciations describing anti-Semitic statements made by Yesenin, who was
well aware of the real situation in Russia. This trial would probably have
attracted too much attention and the names of several secret agents who
had infiltrated Yesenin's circle of acquaintances would also have been
revealed. That was why they chose on a number of occasions not to take
him to trial, despite the fact that indictments of anti-Semitism (i.e. counter-
revolution) had already been brought in against him.
So Trotsky decided to dispose of Yesenin in another way. Yesenin
moved from Moscow to Leningrad on the evening of the 23rd of
December 1925. He wanted to find a good new flat there, to give out his
poems in two volumes and begin publishing his own periodical. He
intended to stay at the hotel Angleterre in the beginning.
Yesenin's murder became a special mission for the GPU, who had
earlier kidnapped opponents of the Soviet regime, even abroad, and taken
them to Moscow to execute them there.
A group of assassins led by Yakov Blumkin arrived at Yesenin's hotel
on the night before December 28, 1925 and broke into his room. Their
henchman was Wolf Erlich, who was later given the task of leading astray
the investigation into Yesenin's death. Yesenin resisted, surprisingly
enough. His neighbours heard this. Then the murderers kicked Yesenin
and seriously injured his head with an object before they hanged the great
poet. This was how the brave Sergei Yesenin died.
Yesenin's murderer Yakov Blumkin began his career as a rabbi in the
synagogue in Odessa. Like many other orthodox extremist Jews, he sought
a position in the Cheka after the Bolsheviks came into power. At the same
time he was an official member of the Social Revolutionary Party. Trotsky
gave him the mission of murdering the German ambassador Count
Wilhelm von Mirbach, on the 6th of July 1918, to prevent the Brest-
Litovsk peace agreement. The Social Revolutionaries were accused of this
murder. Also the Communist Aino Kuusinen related in her memoirs that
Blumkin murdered Mirbach.
After the murder of Ambassador Mirbach, Blumkin was appointed to
the Cheka in Kiev in April 1919. In the summer of 1920 he returned to
Moscow, where he studied at the military academy. Blumkin was later
named military inspector of Caucasia, where he led the crushing of an
anti-Soviet rebellion in Georgia in the summer of 1924. Blumkin became
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