Lev Efimovich Manevich

Manevich, Lev Efimovich 

(pseudonym, Et’en [Etienne]). Born Aug. 20, 1898, in the city of Chausy, now in Mogilev Oblast, Byelorussian SSR; died May 11, 1945, in Ebensee, Austria; buried in Linz. Soviet military intelligence agent; colonel (1935); Hero of the Soviet Union (Feb. 20, 1965, posthumously). Member of the Communist Party from 1918. Son of a minor office worker.

Manevich was educated in Geneva. He was drafted into the army in 1917, and in April 1918 he voluntarily joined the Red Army. He fought in the Civil War of 1918-20 on the Eastern Front and in the Caucasus, serving as commissar of an armored train, a staff officer, and commander of a special-purpose detachment. He graduated from the Higher School of Staff Service for Command Personnel of the Workers’ and Peasant’ Red Army (RKKA) in 1921, the Military Academy of the RKKA in 1924, and the training courses at the N. E. Zhukovskii Air Force Academy in 1929 and served in the Intelligence Directorate of the RKKA. From the mid-1920’s until the early 1930’s, periodically spending time abroad, Manevich demonstrated remarkable qualities as an intelligence agent as well as great self-control and courage. He was arrested by the fascist Italian counterintelligence and given a long prison sentence. In 1943 he was turned over to the Hitlerites and held in the camps at Mauthausen, Melk, and Ebensee. Under the harsh conditions of concentration camps, where he was known as Colonel Ia. N. Starostin, Manevich became gravely ill with tuberculosis but still showed great patriotism, strength of will, and endurance. He was liberated on May 6, 1945, by American forces but soon died.