Vladimir V. Tchernavin

This article is about the Russian ichthyologist. For the Russian Fleet Admiral, see Vladimir Chernavin.

Vladimir Vyacheslavovich Tchernavin (alternative transliteration: Chernavin) (Russian: Чернавин Владимир Вячеславович) (1887–1949) was a Russian-born ichthyologist who became famous as one of the first and few prisoners of the Soviet Gulag system who managed to escape abroad.

Early life

Tchernavin was born in 1887 into a noble family of modest means.[1] After his father died in 1902 he took part as a collector-zoologist in expeditions to the Altai region with the Russian explorer Vasili Sapozhnikov. Later he became the leader in a series of scientific expeditions to the Altai Mountain and Sayanskii Mountain, Mongolia, the Tian Shan Mountains, the Amur River region, and the Ussuriysk region on the Siberian-Manchurian border and to Lapland.

Studies and work

In the period from 1912-1917 Tchernavin studied at St. Petersburg University but his studies were interrupted by the war. He was conscripted and served in the army, but was wounded and invalided out in 1915.[2] He resumed his studies at the renamed Petrograd University, and graduated in 1916.[3] He married Tatiana, an arts graduate from the same university. Their son Andrei was born in 1918.

Food shortages were very severe in Russian cities at this time, and Tchernavin took a lecturing post at the Petrograd Agronomical Institute in order to obtain the daily issue of milk from the Institute's herd to members of staff, for the baby.[4] Here he completed a thesis and obtained an advanced degree.

From 1923, he was Professor of Ichthyology at the Institute,[5] and from 1926 he moved to Murmansk as Director of Production and Research Work of the Northern Fisheries Trust, the State-owned industry which had been set up to deal with the fishing sector in the region along the Arctic Ocean. He gave up the management of production in 1928, in order to concentrate on research work. His main academic research to this point had been study of skeletal development and re-development in salmon species, and its application to systematics and evolution: these publications were not available outside the USSR in his lifetime.[6]

His family remained in Leningrad (Saint-Petersburg), where Tatiana worked as curator in the Section of Applied Arts of the Hermitage.[4] In 1930 some of his colleagues were arrested by the Soviet secret police, the Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie (State Political Directorate) or 'GPU'. He was also questioned by GPU officers. While on a visit to Moscow, 48 leading figures and intellectuals in charge of Russia's state food industry were convicted in show trials and executed for 'wrecking' activities. A number of the executed persons were personal friends and colleagues of Tchernavin.

Arrest and conviction

He then decided not to return to Murmansk but to join his family in Leningrad. Here he was arrested at his home and his apartment was searched. He was imprisoned in the Shpalernaya prison in Leningrad. He was interrogated and threatened with execution should he refuse to confess. To put more pressure on him, the GPU also arrested his wife in January 1931. He refused to confess in the knowledge that a confession would mean certain death. He was later moved to the Kresty prison.

On 25 April 1931, Tchernavin was convicted for 'wrecking' under Article 58, Paragraph 7 of the Soviet Penal Code and was sentenced to 5 years of Gulag labor camps. He was able to have a brief meeting with his son before his transport to the camps.

Gulag life

He was put on a prison transport to the Solovetsky labor camp on 2 May 1931. Initially sharing with other inmates hard labour such as loading logs he was subsequently translated to the camp of Kem where he worked as an ichthyologist in the Fishery Department of the camp. Here he started making preparations for his escape. He learned that his wife had been released from prison.

He was able to arrange that as part of his prison work he could travel extensively throughout Kem district without an escort with the purpose of setting up new fishing points and study the possibility of using fish for animal feed. He used these travels to make further preparations for his family's escape. He had a first meeting with his wife and son in November 1931.

For a while he was 'rented out' by the prison authorities as a lecturer and trained the managers of collective fish farms. The better treatment that he received during this period allowed him to remain fit for his planned escape.

Escape

In August 1932 his wife and son visited him again and they then set out on their epic escape. After 22 days of trekking through rugged terrain and suffering hardships due to a lack of provisions and poor weather, they were finally able to reach Finland. Andrei gives an account of the escape,[7] filmed on the real location in the Russian arctic, in Andrew Macqueen's documentary 'Gulag' (1999). Tatiana began to write her account of their escape during a period she spent in hospital recovering from the adverse effects of the journey on a heart condition.[4]

The book was published first in London in October 1933.[8] The Tchernavins were still living in Finland in 1933, but in April of that year, a letter from Vladimir, entitled Methods of the OGPU was published in the London 'Times'.[5] The letter was a rebuttal from his personal experience of the statement by Andrey Vyshinsky at the then current trial in Moscow of Metropolitan-Vickers engineers that '...in U.S.S.R. the accused are not put to torture...'. A subsequent letter from Sir Bernard Pares[9] strongly suggests that Pares had helped to bring about Vladimir's publication, and in March 1934 Pares presided at Tatiana's public lecture in London, entitled "The fate of the intellectual worker in Soviet Russia".

In 1934 Tchernavin and his family moved to England where he continued his scientific work as an ichthyologist. His book I Speak for the Silent Prisoners of the Soviets [1] and his wife's book Escape From The Soviets[4] published in 1934 were among the first to give testimony of life under the Soviets, the GPU 's operations and the Gulag.

References

  1. 1 2 Vladimir V. Tchernavin, I Speak for the Silent Prisoners of the Soviets, originally published in 1934 by Half Cushman & Flint, available online at The Internet Archive
  2. ↑ Beveridge, W.H. (1959). A defence of free learning. London. p. 21.
  3. ↑ Sorokina, Maria Y. (2011). "Within Two Tyrannies: The Soviet Academic Refugees of the Second World War". Proceedings of the British Academy 169: 225–238.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Tatiana Tchernavin, Escape From The Soviets, published in 1934 by E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc, available online at The Internet Archive,
  5. 1 2 "Methods of the OGPU". The Times (London, England) (46421): 11. 18 Apr 1933.
  6. ↑ Tchernavin, Vladimir (1938). "Notes on the chondrocranium and bronchial skeleton of Salmo". Proceedings of the Zoological Society 108: 347.
  7. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9_JpcNps7k&index=5&list=PL62C4270D747AF9E3
  8. ↑ "Shorter Notices". The Times (London, England) (46574): 21. 13 Oct 1933.
  9. ↑ "Bolshevist Methods". The Times (London, England) (46427): 15. 25 Apr 1933.

External links

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