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 thar legend in "The Gulag Archipelago", the truth is that Bazhanov died only in 1983. Bazhanov was then also aware of the rumour of his own murder and wrote that Stalin had probably planted the rumour himself to instill fear.