Krivitsky Exposed a Berlin Fur Company Masking Russian Military Intelligence
By Vera Kessler ·
Agents operated under the guise of the Far Eastern Fur Trading Co. Ltd. for years, using notional employment to hide their identities in Security Service files that tracked Soviet fronts.
Men spent decades erasing their identities to serve a distant master, living as ghosts in the cities they were paid to betray. This erasure left them vulnerable to the whims of a state that viewed a defector's testimony as the only true record of their existence.
In the archives of the UK Security Service, the trade in animal pelts appears not as commerce, but as a strategic screen. The catalogue entry for file KV 2/1655 records the existence of the Far Eastern Fur Trading Co. Ltd., an entity that had little to do with the actual movement of goods. According to the record, the company was identified by the Soviet defector Krivitsky as a cover set up by Russian military intelligence in Berlin in 1922. Its primary purpose was not profit, but the provision of "notional employment" for agents.
Berlin, 1922
To an outside observer in the Weimar Republic, a fur trading company was a plausible business. In the public record of Canadian economic history, the fur trade is described as a force that shaped the very boundaries of a nation, driven by the interplay of geography and the demand for staple products. The Soviets understood the utility of this image. By mimicking a staple industry, military intelligence could embed operatives in a foreign capital under the guise of legitimate trade.
The catalogue description for KV 2/1655 notes that the file contains information on several individuals associated with this company. For these men, the company provided a legal shield—a way to explain their presence in Berlin, their income, and their contacts without alerting local authorities. The trade was not in furs, but in access.
"Notional Employment"
The term "notional employment" is a sterile phrase for a precarious existence. It suggests a life lived in the gap between a fake payroll and a real mission. When an agent's identity is tied to a front company, their safety depends entirely on the stability of that fiction. If the cover is blown, the agent ceases to be a businessman and becomes a liability.
Krivitsky’s testimony turned the Far Eastern Fur Trading Co. Ltd. from a shield into a map. By naming the company, he provided the Security Service with a way to trace the movements of those who had used it. This pattern of exposure is visible across other personal files in the archive. In KV 2/3786, the record notes a Philip Rosenbliett, an American dentist who visited London. Krivitsky named Rosenbliett as a Soviet agent in the USA in 1939, though US authorities recorded that Rosenbliett had already left the United States for Russia in 1936.
In these records, the professional identity—the dentist, the trader, the businessman—is merely a skin to be shed. The true identity is found in the aliases. The catalogue entry for KV 2/2565 lists a Georgiy Kislov, who operated under the names Sirenev, Vorobiev, and Afanasiev. Kislov’s career took him from Moscow to Persia and China before he became the head of the Russian intelligence presence in France during the late 1930s. For Kislov and others, the shift between identities was a professional requirement, a necessary oscillation to avoid detection.
Dentists and Diplomats
The reach of these operations extended far beyond the Berlin storefront. The Security Service files document a global network of military intelligence officers operating under diplomatic or commercial cover. Sergei Koudriavtsev, listed in KV 2/1650, served as a First Secretary in the Russian Embassy in Ottawa between 1942 and 1944. His status as a diplomat provided a layer of immunity that a fur trader did not possess, yet he was eventually implicated in a spy ring uncovered by the defector Gouzenko.
The archives also suggest the coercive nature of this work. The catalogue entry for KV 2/2778 describes Franz Riemann, a German who was arrested by the Russians in 1948. A defector claimed that Riemann was released only on the condition that he work for the Soviet apparatus. This is the darker side of the cover story: for some, the "notional employment" was not a strategic choice, but a ransom payment for their freedom.
To manage this influx of information, the Security Service developed formal protocols. File KV 4/334 outlines the "Procedure for bringing to the UK alien defectors from Russian Intelligence Services, Russian Official Missions and deserters from the Russian Forces." This process was the mechanism by which men like Krivitsky were integrated into the West's intelligence apparatus, turning their knowledge of fake companies and aliases into actionable data.
The file's catalogue entry for KV 2/1655 records that information exists on several other individuals associated with the Far Eastern Fur Trading Co. Ltd., though their names remain outside this summary.