Livent-Levit, Samuil (Samuel) Vulfovich (1898-1938)

A Soviet intelligence operative in the 1920s and 1930s; Captain of State Security (GB).

Livent-Levit was born in Kishinev to the family of a pharmacist. The family soon moved to Odessa – and, in 1905, to Berlin, Germany, where the father opened a drugstore. In 1918, Livent-Levit graduated from a local gymnasium (high school). At that time, he joined the revolutionary movement in Germany, first as a member of the Spartacist League (Spartakusbund), a German Marxist organization in the early 20th century, and then as a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). (His father, Wolf [Vulf] Livent-Levit, also joined the KPD.) In 1918 and 1919, Livent-Levit studied at Berlin University and simultaneously worked as secretary of local and regional KPD committees. For a few months in 1921, he worked in Moscow with the KPD mission at the Executive Committee of the Comintern. From 1923 to 1925, he worked in Vienna as part of the underground apparatus of the Social-Democratic Party of Austria, under the pseudonym of Kurt Adler.

In June 1925, Livent-Levit became an officer of OGPU foreign intelligence (the INO). In 1925 and 1926, he was posted in the Balkans as an “illegal” sub-resident, and from 1926 to 1929, in Istanbul as assistant to an “illegal” and later “legal” resident. In 1929, he joined the VCP (b), and from 1929 to 1931, he worked for the OGPU in Moscow under the cover of an information officer at the Society for Cultural Contacts (VOKS). For a few months in 1931, he was also an assistant section head of the INO. From 1931 to 1935, he was posted in China as an “illegal” resident and was described in a 1936 memo as one of INO’s “best illegals.”

Livent-Levit was soon recalled to Moscow along with his father, who was also an officer of the INO and worked under the pseudonym Victor Mikhailovich Nord. Both father and son were arrested on December 26, 1937, on charges of espionage; they were sentenced to death and executed on August 28, 1938. The father was rehabilitated in 1958 and the son in 1991. ¹