Rosenbliett, Philip Samoilovich (1888-?)

Philip Rosenbliett

Philip Rosenbliett

A Russian-American dentist in New York City whose dental office served in the 1920s and 1930s as a safe house for several “illegalresidents of Soviet military intelligence.

Very little information on Rosenbliett is available from Russian publications, and most of what is known about him originates with Whittaker Chambers‘ account in his book Witness. According to Russian sources, Rosenbliett was born in 1888 in the town of Mogilev-Podolsk in the Russian Empire. At an unknown age, he immigrated with his family to the United States, where he became a naturalized U.S. citizen and trained to become a dentist. Beginning in 1925, Rosenbliett was in the service of the Intelligence Directorate of the staff of the Red Army (“Razvedupr,” commonly known as RU RKKA). For many years, he was the keeper of a safe house in his dental office for a number of “illegal” residents of Soviet military intelligence.

From 1935 to 1937, Rosenbliett was in Moscow, where he arrived with his wife in 1935. [[1.Chambers wrote in Witness that Dr. Philip Rosenbliett left for Moscow around the summer of 1936. - Witness, by Whittaker Chambers. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952, p. 397.]] Once there, he took Soviet citizenship and received the military rank of second class medical officer, or second class quartermaster. In 1937, he was dispatched to the United States with a special assignment and returned to Moscow by the end of the same year. Rosenbliett was arrested in Moscow in January 1938 and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment on September 17, 1939. In April 1949, at the height of a new wave of Stalinist repression, Rosenbliett was exiled on the charge of belonging to a “Trotskyite-espionage” organization. No further information on his fate has been discovered to date. 1

  1. V.M. Lurie, V.Ya. Kochik. GRU: Dela i ljudi. Moskva: Olma Press, 2003m s. 460 (GRU. The Deeds and the People, by V.M. Lurie, V.Ya. Kochik,  Moscow: Olma Press, 2003, p. 460); V.V. Poznjakov. Sovetskaja razvedka v Amerike. Moskva: Mezhdunarodnye otnoshenija, 2005, cc. 295-296 (Soviet Intelligence in America, by V.V. Pozniakov. Moscow: International Relations, 2005, pp. 295-296); a biographical reference mostly sourced from Chambers and from the Lurie and Kochik book.