Co-founder of MiG: the Soviet Union's foremost fighter designer who never joined the Communist Party
Toulouse, 1913. Gurevich's classmate at the aeronautics school was Marcel Bloch. Thirty years later, one would design the MiG-15, the other the Mirage — two Jewish fighter designers who once shared a classroom, now facing each other across the Cold War sky.
Born to a Jewish family in Kursk province, expelled from Kharkiv University for revolutionary activity, he studied aeronautics in France. In 1939 he co-founded OKB-155 (MiG) with Artyom Mikoyan, serving as Vice Chief Designer (1939–1957) and Chief Designer (1957–1964), working on every MiG from the MiG-1 through MiG-25. The MiG-3 was a mainstay early in the German-Soviet war; the MiG-15 seized air superiority over Korea; the MiG-25 remains the fastest interceptor ever fielded. Hero of Socialist Labor, six Stalin Prizes, Lenin Prize: the only top-tier Soviet military designer never to join the Communist Party.
Career Timeline
- 1910–11Graduated Akhtyrka Gymnasium with silver medal; entered Kharkiv University — expelled for revolutionary activity
- 1912–14Studied at University of Montpellier and SUPAERO Toulouse, classmate of Marcel Dassault
- 1917–25Graduated Kharkiv Technological Institute in aeronautics; designed Boomerang and Aist gliders
- 1929–37Engineer at Moscow design bureaus; 1936–37 dispatched to Douglas Aircraft factories in the US
- 1939–57Co-founded OKB-155 (MiG); Vice Chief Designer — MiG-1, MiG-3, MiG-9, MiG-15
- 1957–64Chief Designer, OKB-155 — MiG-17, MiG-19, MiG-21, MiG-25; led cruise missile and UAV development
Related historical events
Partnership with Mikoyan — The Birth of MiG
The partnership of Mikhail Gurevich and Artyom Mikoyan was one of the most unusual in the Soviet military-industrial complex. Mikoyan was an Armenian Party member and younger brother of Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan; Gurevich was a Jewish engineer who never joined the Party. The two first met in 1937 at Nikolai Polikarpov's design bureau. In December 1939, with Stalin's direct approval, a Special Design Department (OKO) was carved out of Polikarpov's bureau: Mikoyan as its head, Gurevich as Vice Chief Designer. The unit was soon reorganized as OKB-155 and its aircraft took the designation 'MiG' (from Mikoyan and Gurevich), a name that would become synonymous with Soviet fighter design.
In practice, their roles were sharply divided. Mikoyan was the political face, managing the Party and military leadership; Gurevich was the hands-on chief of calculations and structural design. Colleagues called him 'a perfectionist obsessed with the ruler,' and his hundreds of pages of hand-calculated notes remain in the MiG archives today. That a non-Party Jew could hold the technical backbone of the USSR's premier fighter program, even through the anti-cosmopolitan campaigns of the late 1940s, was a product of Mikoyan's political shield combined with Gurevich's irreplaceable engineering skill. When Gurevich was formally promoted to Chief Designer in 1957, the division of labor remained unchanged, carrying the bureau through to the MiG-25.