The Blumkin Project
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Narrated by:
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Ramiz Monsef
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By:
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Christian Salmon
About this listen
This exciting biographical novel follows the footsteps of a forgotten legend of the Russian Revolution, from Odessa to Moscow, Istanbul, and beyond.
Yakov Blumkin claimed to have had nine lives. Born to a poor Jewish family and orphaned as a child, he was a Socialist Revolutionary, 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 Stalin’s orders at the age of only twenty-nine, he has continued to inspire a powerful curiosity, and wild rumors and falsehoods about his extraordinary life abound today.
As a young man in 1980s Paris, Christian Salmon identified strongly as a Bolshevik, drawn to the glorious October Revolution immortalized in literature and films such as Warren Beatty’s Reds and Sergei Eisenstein’s trilogy. Picking up the thread of his dream thirty years later, he sets out to reconstruct Blumkin’s shadowy past and ever-shifting identity with a trove of manuscripts, documents, rare photographs, and personal souvenirs.
©2017 Éditions La Découverte, Paris. English translation © 2022 by William Rodarmor. Originally published in 2017 as Le projet Blumkine by Éditions La Découverte, Paris (P)2022 Blackstone PublishingListeners also enjoyed...
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Performance
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When Paris Went Dark
- The City of Light under German Occupation, 1940-1944
- By: Ronald C. Rosbottom
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 14 hrs
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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HHhH
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- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
HHhH: "Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich," or "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich." The most dangerous man in Hitler's cabinet, Reinhard Heydrich was known as the "Butcher of Prague." He was feared by all and loathed by most. With his cold Aryan features and implacable cruelty, Heydrich seemed indestructible-until two men, a Slovak and a Czech recruited by the British secret service-killed him in broad daylight on a bustling street in Prague, and thus changed the course of History.
-
-
Himlers Hirn heisst Heydrich
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By: Laurent Binet
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- Downfall of a Revolutionary
- By: Bertrand M. Patenaude
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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-
-
Good Trotsky Book, BAD conclusions at end
- By Darius on 02-09-15
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Children of the Night
- The Strange and Epic Story of Modern Romania
- By: Paul Kenyon
- Narrated by: Paul Kenyon
- Length: 19 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The country that gave us Vlad Dracula, and whose citizens consider themselves descendants of ancient Rome, has traditionally preferred the status of enigmatic outsider. But this beautiful and unexplored land has experienced some of the most disastrous leaderships of the last century. After a relatively benign period led by a dutiful king and his vivacious, British-born queen, the country oscillated wildly.
-
-
A haunting look at Romanian history
- By Steve Adams on 07-19-24
By: Paul Kenyon
-
The Great Escape
- Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World
- By: Kati Marton
- Narrated by: Anna Fields
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The stunning story of the breathtaking journey of nine extraordinary men from Budapest to the New World, what they experienced along their dangerous route, and how they changed America and the world. In a style both personal and historically groundbreaking, acclaimed author Kati Marton (born in Budapest) tells the tale of their youth in Budapest's Golden Age of the early 20th century, their flight, and their lives of extraordinary accomplishment, danger, glamour, and poignancy.
-
-
very interesting, well-narrated
- By D. Littman on 12-17-06
By: Kati Marton
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The Devil's Diary
- Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich
- By: Robert K. Wittman, David Kinney
- Narrated by: P. J. Ochlan
- Length: 15 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A groundbreaking historical contribution, The Devil's Diary is a chilling window into the mind of Adolf Hitler's "chief social philosopher", Alfred Rosenberg, who formulated some of the guiding principles behind the Third Reich's genocidal crusade.
-
-
Fresh perspective on terrible events.
- By Sparkly on 04-20-16
By: Robert K. Wittman, and others
-
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- The City of Light under German Occupation, 1940-1944
- By: Ronald C. Rosbottom
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 14 hrs
- Unabridged
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Story
Drawing on new research, including the diaries, memoirs, and personal letters of both Lenin and his friends, Victor Sebestyen's unique biography - the first in English in nearly two decades - is not only a political examination of one of the most important historical figures of the 20th century but a portrait of Lenin the man. Unexpectedly, Lenin was someone who loved nature, hunting, and fishing and could identify hundreds of species of plants, a despotic ruler whose closest ties and friendships were with women.
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Lenin totally took an extra piece of that cake.
- By John Gathly on 05-14-19
By: Victor Sebestyen
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Symphony for the City of the Dead
- Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad
- By: M. T. Anderson
- Narrated by: M. T. Anderson
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In September 1941, Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht surrounded Leningrad in what was to become one of the longest and most destructive sieges in Western history - almost three years of bombardment and starvation that culminated in the harsh winter of 1943 - 1944. Trapped between the Nazi invading force and the Soviet government itself was composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who would write a symphony that roused, rallied, eulogized, and commemorated his fellow citizens - the Leningrad Symphony.
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An Eye-Opening, Emotional Tale
- By A.L.R. on 02-05-16
By: M. T. Anderson
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Spies of No Country
- Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel
- By: Matti Friedman
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 6 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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The four spies at the center of this story were part of a ragtag unit known as the Arab Section, conceived during World War II by British spies and Jewish militia leaders in Palestine. Intended to gather intelligence and carry out sabotage and assassinations, the unit consisted of Jews who were native to the Arab world and could thus easily assume Arab identities. In 1948, with Israel's existence in the balance during the War of Independence, our spies went undercover in Beirut, where they spent the next two years operating out of a kiosk....
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Absolutely brilliant
- By David Mane on 06-23-19
By: Matti Friedman
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Lenin on the Train
- By: Catherine Merridale
- Narrated by: Gordon Griffin
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In April 1917, as Tsar Nicholas II's abdication sent shockwaves across war-torn Europe, the future leader of the Bolshevik revolution, Vladimir Lenin, was far away, exiled in Zurich. To lead the revolt, Lenin needed to return to Petrograd immediately. But to get there, he would have to cross Germany, which meant accepting help from the deadliest of Russia's adversaries and betraying his homeland.
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Deteriorates into Unhinged Lenin-Bashing
- By Ike Nahem on 03-18-19
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Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century
- By: Alexandra Popoff
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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If Vasily Grossman's 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the Russian KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the 20th century.
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What? Nazism = communism?
- By James Messelbeck on 06-25-19
By: Alexandra Popoff
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Stalin
- The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives
- By: Edvard Radzinsky
- Narrated by: David McCallum
- Length: 6 hrs and 17 mins
- Abridged
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The Kremlin intrigues, the private worlds of the Soviet Empire's ruling class, Radzinsky thrillingly brings them to life. And the riddle of that most cold-blooded of leaders, a man for whom nothing was sacred in his pursuit of absolute might, and perhaps the greatest mass murderer in Western history, is solved.
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A Great Book About a Great Tyrant
- By Moon Man on 05-01-05
By: Edvard Radzinsky
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The Long Hangover
- Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past
- By: Shaun Walker
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Long Hangover, Shaun Walker provides new insight into contemporary Russia and its search for a new identity, telling the story through the country's troubled relationship with its Soviet past. Walker not only explains Vladimir Putin's goals and the government's official manipulations of history, but also focuses on ordinary Russians and their motivations. He charts how Putin raised victory in World War II to the status of a national founding myth in the search for a unifying force to heal a divided country, and shows how dangerous the ramifications of this have been.
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Fascinating and fair book on Putin's Russia
- By MyPublicName on 02-16-18
By: Shaun Walker
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The People's Republic of Amnesia
- Tiananmen Revisited
- By: Louisa Lim
- Narrated by: Louisa Lim
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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In The People's Republic of Amnesia, NPR correspondent Louisa Lim charts how the events of June 4 changed China, and how China changed the events of June 4 by rewriting its own history. Lim reveals new details about those fateful days, including how one of the country's most senior politicians lost a family member to an army bullet, as well as the inside story of the young soldiers sent to clear Tiananmen Square.
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great book and recording
- By Robert Peters on 06-14-16
By: Louisa Lim
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The Book Smugglers
- Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis
- By: David E. Fishman
- Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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The Book Smugglers is the nearly unbelievable story of ghetto residents who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts - first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets - by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders. It is a tale of heroism and resistance, of friendship and romance, and of unwavering devotion-including the readiness to risk one's life - to literature and art. And it is entirely true.
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The rescue of Jewish culture in WWII's Lithuania.
- By Logophile on 10-12-20
By: David E. Fishman
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Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy
- Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961
- By: Nicholas Reynolds
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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While he was the curator of the CIA Museum, Nicholas Reynolds, a longtime military intelligence expert, began to discover tantalizing clues that suggested Ernest Hemingway's involvement in the Second World War was much more complex and dangerous than has been previously understood. Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy brings to light for the first time this riveting secret side of Hemingway's life - when he worked closely with both the American OSS and the Soviet NKVD to defeat Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
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So entertaining you'd think it was fiction
- By Austin on 03-16-17
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Judgment Before Nuremberg
- The Holocaust in the Ukraine and the First Nazi War Crimes Trial
- By: Greg Dawson
- Narrated by: Gary Dikeos
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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When people think of the Holocaust, they think of Auschwitz, of Dachau; and when they think of justice for this terrible chapter in history, they think of Nuremberg. Not of Russia or the Ukraine, and certainly not a town called Kharkov. But in reality, the first war-crimes trial against the Nazis was in this idyllic, peaceful Ukrainian city, which is fitting, because it is also where the Holocaust actually began.
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Don’t Insult Your Audience
- By Michael Richards on 01-21-22
By: Greg Dawson