Gurevich's work was informed by Jacques Le Goff and Georges Duby, and he considered himself a member of their Annales School.
[3] In 1950 after defending his dissertation Peasantry of South-Eastern England during the pre-Norman period he became a Candidate of Sciences[2] and a lecturer of Kalinin State Pedagogical Institute (now Tver State University),[2] a provincial posting he was relegated to, and which he held from 1950 until 1964.
[2] His career would suffer notably from the fact that he was Jewish, something that spelled considerable difficulties for scholars within the Soviet Union at that time.
[2] In 1966 Gurevich joined Moscow Institute of Philosophy, but he was fired after publishing Problems in the Origins of Feudalism in Western Europe (Problemy genezisa feodalizma v zapadnoi Evrope(1970)), where he contested the theory on origins of feudalism adopted in Marxist historiography,[2] and was denounced for his employment of structuralist methods.
In 1989 during Perestroika Gurevich was allowed to exit the country for the first time, and he lectured abroad in 1989–1991.