Gutzeit, Petr Davidovich (1900-1939)

An officer of the Soviet OGPU-NKVD foreign intelligence (the INO), who is known as its first “legal” resident in the United States. He served from 1934 to 1938, under the assumed name of Petr Gussev, with the cover name “Nickolai.”

Petr Gutzeit was born in 1900 to the family of a petty tradesman in a village in the Ekaterinoslavskaya gubernia of the Russian Empire (now Ukraine). After finishing the village school, he held a number of menial jobs until the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. In 1920, he became the political commissar of the local Cheka. In 1922, he was mobilized into the Red Army and took part in fighting against the armed anti-Soviet resistance. After a brief course at the OGPU school, Gutzeit became an officer of the OGPU in 1923 and later transferred to its economic department. In 1933, he transferred to the INO.

In early 1934, Gutzeit was posted as the first OGPU “legal” resident in the United States, under the diplomatic cover of Vice-Consul at the Soviet Consulate General in New York. Recalled to Moscow at the height of the purges in 1938, Gutzeit was arrested on October 16, 1938 on charges of participating in a counterrevolutionary terrorist organization. Sentenced to death on February 21, 1939, he was executed on the same day and rehabilitated in 1956. ¹