Anatoli Mikhailovich Granovsky (Russian: Анатолий Михайлович Грановский, 25 January 1922 – 4 September 1974) was a NKVD agent who defected to the West in 1946 and authored an autobiographical book about his career in Soviet intelligence. Granovsky was the son of a high-ranking Soviet bureaucrat, Mikhail Granovsky, who was a victim of the Stalinist Purges of the late 1930s. To find his father in the Soviet Gulag system, Granovsky allowed himself to be arrested by the NKVD on false charges and interned in the same penal system. As a result of his past friendships with the children of his father's high-ranking former colleagues, Granovsky was recruited as an NKVD agent to spy on those same acquaintances in July 1939. After defecting to Sweden in autumn 1946, Granovsky wrote the book I Was an NKVD Agent. Early life Granovsky was born in Ukraine in January 1922. After his father was arrested by the OGPU on November 6, 1937, Granovsky's mother and siblings lived in social isolation and abject poverty, shunned by their neighbors in their Moscow apartment building. Though at first unable to find work, the teenage Granovsky was eventually employed as a turner's assistant in March 1938. In May, however, he was repeatedly questioned by the NKVD about his supervisor. The NKVD apparently wondered why the supervisor would give a job to the son of a man accused of crimes against the State. As a result of the interrogations Granovsky was fired, and in October 1938, his family moved from the apartment building to a room in a ramshackle house. Joining the NKVD On January 27, 1939, Anatoli Granovsky loitered slowly around Lenin's mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square and told a plainclothes NKVD officer that he wished to be taken to the local GUGB chief. Placed in Butyrka prison under deplorable conditions, Granovsky was interrogated repeatedly, often being beaten. He was forced sign his name on blank sheets of paper, later to find his "confession" typed above it. On the night of April 20, 1939, Granovsky was transferred to a comfortable cell in Lubianka Prison in Moscow. After indirectly denouncing his father, Granovsky was recruited into the NKVD on July 20, 1939, to spy on his acquaintances among his father's former colleagues. Following the horrifying conditions of the prisons, Granovsky was immediately given money, a salary, and exemplary treatment, including medical operations to undo the effects of illness and injury