Anatoli Markovich Gurevich
Anatoli Markovich Gurevich
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Anatoli Markovich Gurevich
[photograph of Gurevich][name at birth: Aron Mordkovich Gurevich, Date of birth: 7 November 1913; Place of birth: Kharkov, Russian Empire; Date of death: 2 January 2009 (95 years of age); Place of death: Saint Petersburg, Russia; Citizenship: USSR, Russian; Occupation: undercover agent]
Anatoli Markovich Gurevich (7 November 1913, Kharkov, Russian Empire – 3 January 2009, Saint-Petersburg, Russia) – employee of the Soviet military ‘GRU’ intelligence agency, undercover agent, one of the leaders of the Red Orchestra.
Contents
• 1. Early years
• 2. Civil War in Spain
• 3. The Red Orchestra [8]
• 4. Collapse of Red Orchestra
• 5. Arrest of Kent
• 6. Condemnation and rehabilitation
• 7. Personal life
• 8. Notes
• 9. Literature
• 10. References
Early years
He was born in Kharkov in a Jewish family. His father, a pharmacist named Mark Osipovich Gurevich (1870-after 1952), owned the large ‘Mariinskaya Chemist of M. O. Gurevich’ [1][2] on the corner of Sumskaya and Veterinarnaya Streets, which was used as a secret rendez-vous for underground revolutionaries[3][4][5]. His mother, Yulia Lvovna (maiden name Vinnitskaya, 1879-1959), worked in the family pharmacy as a laboratory assistant.[6] After the Soviet government came to power, his father worked in the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate and the People’s Commissariat of Health. In 1924, the family moved to Leningrad.[7]
In Leningrad School No. 13 (formerly Secondary School No. 3, now School 181 of Saint-Petersburg), his favourite subjects were literature, social studies and German. Gurevich was an active member of Osoaviakhim, a civil defence organisation.
When he finished school, Gurevich studied at a railway institute, and then at the Intourist Institute (specialising in ‘work with foreigners’).
The Civil War in Spain
He participated in the Civil War in Spain as a volunteer, serving as an interpreter with Commander G. M. Shtern. At the same time he was performing undercover intelligence work. In Spain, Gurevich worked under the pseudonym of Antonio Gonzalez, a lieutenant of the Republican navy. He took part in the crossing of the submarine C-4 from Carthage to Barcelona. In one battle, he saved the life of the submarine captain, submarine Commander I. A. Burmistrov, first of the naval fleet to be awarded the title ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’.
For six months, Gurevich trained as a cipher clerk and radio operator. He was given a passport in the name of a Uruguayan, Vincent Sierra, the son of wealthy parents. He was said to have come to Europe as a tourist, but with the intention of setting up a business and developing business contacts. For learning about the city of Montevideo, where he was supposed to have been born, and his new ‘biography’, Gurevich had only a few days. At the Intelligence bureau, he was given the pseudonym of ‘Kent’. It is worth mentioning the GRU blunder when giving him his false Uruguayan passport. Another member of the undercover group, Mikhail Makarov, received exactly the same false passport in the name of Carlos Alamo, but with the next number in sequence.
On 17 July 1939, Gurevich arrived in Brussels, where he had an appointment to meet the GRU resident, Leopold Trepper, the head of a group of undercover agents.
The Uruguayan, Vincente Sierra, began to be seen at Brussels restaurants, high-level parties and theatre events, and he managed to develop an influential circle of contacts in Belgium’s high society.
In March 1940, Gurevich went to Switzerland to meet another Soviet agent, Sandor Rado (a member of the Red Orchestra), who needed help sorting out his radio communications. From July 1941 to October 1943, hundreds of radio messages sent to Moscow from the Red Orchestra in Switzerland contained precious information: orders issued by the German high command, information on troop movements, and a mass of operational details on combat activity. However, the Soviet leadership did not fully trust these communications.
After that meeting, Kent returned to Brussels. In Brussels, Anatoli Markovich moved into a building with a millionaire family, who had fled Czechoslovakia. They were obviously afraid of the German occupation because of their Jewish origins, so they decided to leave Belgium. Their daughter, Margaret Barch, Kent’s common-law wife, refused to leave with her parents. Margaret’s father offered to give Vincente Sierra his network of business connections. Soon after, the business firm of Simexco was launched. Vincente Sierra was its president. This business cover of the undercover group earned considerable profits and provided financial support to the GRU undercover activities.
It is worth noting that the Simexco firm and the Gestapo Sondercommander who was investigating the undercover group’s activity happened to be located in Brussels in the same building, without knowing it. This fact reappeared in a different form in the film about the Red Orchestra’s activity. According to the film, Trepper (the ‘big’ boss, Jean Gilbert), lived in Paris in the same building as the Sondercommander Carl Giring.
Using a different name, Kent rented a villa on Atrebat Street in Brussels, a site for secret rendez-vous. Mikhail Makarov also moved in there.
In October 1941, Brussels agent Kent was ordered by ciphergram to leave for Berlin, where he was to revive a former spy-ring of German anti-fascists, such as Harro Schulze-Boysen (‘the Elder’) and Arvid Harnack (‘the Corsican’). This organisation was later named the Red Orchestra by the Nazis.
In the German capital, Gurevich met the German officer, an ober-lieutenant and anti-fascist, Harro Schulze-Boysen. On his return to Brussels, Kent confirmed by radio link his success in the task, and sent to Moscow information obtained in Berlin: about the difficulties the Germans had in maintaining and replenishing reserves, on the German command’s realistic assessment of the failure of the blitzkrieg, on a possible enemy attack in spring or summer of 1942 to take over Soviet oil production.
Collapse of the Red Orchestra
On 12 December 1941, the Germans zeroed in on the traitor Makarov at Atrebat Street. The day before, Trepper had arrived from Paris. However, he had for some reason not mentioned that he was calling a meeting of the Kent group at the villa the next day. That morning,Trepper rang Gurevich to report that the radio operators had been arrested at the villa, also the cipher operator, but by a miracle Trepper himself had managed to get away. Gurevich called Margaret, and they escaped, taking nothing with them so as not to arouse suspicions. They hid out for a while in Paris at the house of some friends, then made their way to Marseilles. There they lived at liberty for another eleven months. One of the radio operators gave way under torture and revealed the cipher he had been using. The Germans began to read the radio messages, and the Gestapo were astonished to read the addresses of Schulze-Boysen and others in the Berlin underground. Many agents were arrested and subsequently executed.
In November 1942, Kent and Margaret were arrested in the apartment they had rented in Marseille. It was only after their arrest that Margaret realised she had fallen in love with a Russian spy.
Kent’s arrest
On 19 November 1942, the French police handed over Gurevich and his common-law wife to the custody of the Gestapo[9]. Based on recent research of archived documents, it has been concluded that two weeks after Kent’s arrest, German counter-espionage agents arrested Otto, who entered into a wireless deception of the GRU, controlled by the Germans.
At his interrogation, Kent was shown radio messages describing the assignments he had received, and his coded messages to the Centre. It was a blow for Gurevich to find that the Germans were sending radio messages to the Centre in his name, when he was already in their hands. The Germans had reported that he was still free. Gurevich then managed to communicate in one of his cipher messages to the Centre that he was under German control; and the Centre decided to continue playing along with the ‘radio deception’.
Kent accepted the rules of the game from Heinz Pannwitz, the head of the Red Orchestra Sondercommand in 1943, perhaps hoping that he would find a way to break its course and turn it against the Gestapo.
By the end of 1943, Kent had realised that the head of the Sondercommand was afraid of Germany’s defeat. Kent convinced Pannwitz to cross over into serving the Soviet spy ring. Kent managed secretly to send radio messages from Pannwitz to Moscow, and to receive guarantees of safety for Pannwitz.
Condemnation and rehabilitation
[A. M. Gurevich’s grave in Bogoslovski Cemetery]
On 21 June 1945, Gurevich returned to Moscow in a military aircraft, with the German counter-espionage agents he had won over, including the criminal counsellor Pannwitz.
As soon as they arrived he was arrested by counter-espionage agents. From 1945 to 1947, he was at the NKVD prison, accused of betraying his fatherland; the investigation was headed, according to Gurevich[10], by the commander of the Chief Counter-Intelligence Directorate, SMERSH, and the deputy People’s Commissar of Defence, General Viktor Abakumov. Gurevich’s father was officially informed that he ‘had been lost without trace, in dishonourable circumstances’; he only learned that his son was alive in 1948.
In January 1947, he was sentenced by a special panel of the USSR MGB to 20 years of confinement, under Article 58-1 ‘a’ of the RSFSR Criminal Code (‘betrayal of the Fatherland’); until October 1955 he was in the labour camps of Vorkuta. Also convicted were others who were still alive, including Leopold Trepper and Sandor Rado.
In Vorkutlag, he worked on general duties in the PGS camp then in the design and production section of the same camp, also in mine No. 18, and as senior economist of the design and production section at the 8th mine[11]; then later at Rechlag in the ShU-2 Camp Section (mines Nos. 12, 14 and 16)[12].
In 1955 he was released under amnesty, but not rehabilitated. Also released were Leopold Trepper, Sandor Rado, Heinz Pannwitz, Emme Kemp and Gustav Sluka, who all left the USSR. Trepper later wrote a book in which he laid the blame for the collapse of the Red Orchestra on Kent, calling him by his true name; the writer Gilles Perrault also gave the same story in his book ‘The Red Orchestra’[13].
I. A. Damaskin writes, in his book ‘A hundred years of great spies’:
“The majority of members of the Belgian section of the Red Orchestra were tortured and then executed. But the most terrible thing is that the undeserved stain of treachery was imposed on many of them, such as K. Efremov and M. Makarov. The great ‘merit’ for this lies with L. Trepper, who slandered Gurevich, Efremov, Makarov and several others, in his post-war testimony and in his book, ‘The Great Game’”.
In 1958, Anatoli Markovich Gurevich began to seek justice, writing letters to various sections of government – but he was again arrested. In 1960, he was released from the Mordva camp on probation.
On 22 July 1991, he was fully rehabilitated: the decision on his rehabilitation was signed by the Deputy General Prosecutor of the USSR, Chief Military Prosecutor, Lieutenant-General of Justice, A F. Katusev.
He died after a long illness in Saint-Petersburg at the age of 95, in the night of 2 January 2009. He was buried in the Bogoslovski Cemetery[14].
Private life
He was married to Lidia Vasilyevna Kruglovaya[15 (DOB 7/11/1926). In addition, he had a common-law wife, Margaret Barcha and a son Michel Barcha in France. The agent’s grandson, Sasha Barcha, lives in Spain, and his great-grandsons Bel and Nikol.
Notes
1. Development of the pharmacy network in Kharkov and the province, 1890-1905
2. Pharmaceutical flask
3. Anatoli Gurevich: ‘My early childhood and youth’
4. ‘I was interrogated by Muller’
5. Memoirs of Anatoli Gurevich
6. Vladimir Schliachterman: “To the Director. Urgent. From Kent”
7. The last member of the Red Orchestra
8. Vol. VII. Cipher codes of agents and partisans
9. “He was guilty of having survived NVO” 23 January 2009
10. A. M. Gurevich, “The truth about the Red Orchestra” Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 5 November 2004
11. P. P. Astakhov, “The zig-zags of fate: From the life of a Soviet prisoner of war and Soviet convict. Moscow, ROSSPEN, 2005, pp. 225-447
12. ru/memo/russian/gurevich_am01/gurevich_am01.html – A. M. Gurevich, Spying is not a game. Memoirs of Soviet resident Kent.
13. Gilles Perrault, The Red Orchestra, Librairie Artheme Fayard, Paris, 1967
14. Photograph of A. M. Gurevich’s grave at the Bogoslovski Cemetery
15. Anatoli Markovich Gurevich
Literature
• Gurevich: Spying is not a game. Memoir of Soviet resident Kent. Spb, Nestor, 2007. 500 pages, ISBN 978-5-303-00304-0 Search this book on 
. (RNB)
• A. Kolpakidi [I]: The GRU in the Great Patriotic War, Moscow, Yauza, Eksmo, 2010, 608 pages, (GRU), 3000 copies. ISBN 978-5-699-41251-8 Search this book on .
• V. L. Peshcherski: The Red Orchestra, Moscow: Centrpoligraph, 2000
• P. A. Sudoplatov: Spying and the Kremlin, Moscow: Gaia, 1997
• P. A. Sudoplatov: Special ops – Lubyanka and the Kremlin, 1930-1950s
Agent Kent: The rise and fall of the man who led the USSR’s ‘Red Orchestra’
Oldest Soviet Intelligence Officer Died in St. Petersburg
The Oldest Soviet Spy Is Buried
Anatoly Gurevich, fost spion sovietic, a murit la 96 de ani
Personal website of A. M. Gurevich
References[edit]
Personal website of A. M. Gurevich
Kent – the best undercover spy
Anatoli Gurevich (agent Kent): “I was interrogated by Muller”
The Red Orchestra
[the general title attributed by the Gestapo
to independent groups of the anti-Nazi movement
Resistance and Espionage Networks, in contact
with the USSR and operating in European countries]
[follows a list of the organisation’s members]
Artistic references: the novel ‘Red Pianists’; the TV serial ‘Red Orchestra’
Anatoli Markovich Gurevich[edit]
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