Chernavin, Vladimir Vyacheslavovich

Born into a noble family. In 1902, his father passed away. In his youth, he participated in the expeditions of Professor V.V. Sapozhnikov in Siberia. Later, he himself led scientific expeditions to southern Siberia and to Lapland . ^[3]

• He studied at the university in 1912-1917. intermittently due to the outbreak of World War I and the revolution. He was drafted into the army and after being wounded was disability commissar in 1915 ^[2] .
• In 1917, he married , daughter of VV Sapozhnikov , who worked in the USSR in the 1930s as a museum curator in the Hermitage ^[4] .
• He began his career by giving lectures at the Petrograd Agronomical Institute, where he completed work on a dissertation and received a degree. According to the wife’s recollections, the main motive for joining the institute was the possibility of receiving milk (for a newly born baby), which was daily given to the institute employees who had their own herd of dairy cows ^[5] .
• In 1923 he began to teach ichthyology at the same institute. ^[6]
• Since 1926 he worked as Director for the production and research of the fishing trust in Murmansk. Since 1928, he retired from production activities and focused on research in the field of development of the skeleton of salmon. ^[7]
• In 1930 he was arrested. In January-March 1931, at the Crosses with Chernavin, “a handsome brunette of small stature, a cheerful and courageous man”, Professor B. E. Raikov met ^[8] . According to Raikov, Chernavin was arrested according to the " stupid process of" canning pests " " ^[8] . Low-quality canned fish appeared on the market, and there were cases of poisoning by them. The GPU suspected wrecking and arrested a group of technicians and engineers involved in the canning industry, who were subsequently shot. Chernavin was attracted to this business only because he studied fish, although he had no direct relation to canned food. During interrogations, Chernavin was required to confess, otherwise they threatened to execute him. To exert psychological pressure, the GPU also arrested his wife. Understanding that confession - as well as for 48 people previously charged in this case - would mean imminent death, Chernavin denied everything, and on April 25, 1931 he was convicted of “wrecking” under Art. 58 (paragraph 7) of the Soviet Criminal Code and sentenced to 5 years in a forced labor camp . Raikov says that “he was a very educated person, who traveled a lot abroad, a wonderful storyteller who entertained the whole camera” ^[8] .
• Finding himself first in the Solovetsky camp on hard work, such as loading logs, Chernavin was subsequently transferred to Kem , where he got a job as a specialty in a camp fish farm. Here, having learned that his wife had been released from prison, he began to prepare for an escape from imprisonment and from the country. By the nature of his activity, Chernavin traveled a lot without protection across the territory of the Kemsky district, choosing places for fishing and studying the possibility of using fish to feed livestock. At times, he even "rented out" to the camp authorities as a lecturer and instructor to work with the chairmen of local fish farms. In November 1931, his wife and son came to see him on a date.

In August 1932, during the next visit of his wife and son Andrei, Chernavin fled with them from Kandalaksha to Finland , for which they had to walk 22 days on rough terrain, suffering from lack of food and bad weather ^[9] . (Subsequently, the son of Chernavin described their escape from the USSR, and according to this description in 2000 the documentary film "Gulag" (director Angus McQueen) was shot ^{[10] [11]} .

More than a year, Chernavin and his family lived in Finland, where his wife was treated for a heart disease provoked by the difficult conditions of escape ^[5] , which she later described in the book “Escape from the Soviets”.

In 1934, the Chernavins moved to the UK. In 1937? —1939 he worked in the British Museum (in what capacity it is unclear). Vladimir Nabokov, who was intensely searching for work in 1937, wrote with envy that Chernavin at home "in his coat is drawing a salmon skeleton" ^[4] . Tatyana Vasilievna began working as a translator in the Ministry of Information ^[11] .

The Chernavins family, in particular Tatyana Vasilievna, maintained relations and helped Vladimir Nabokov . He wrote about T.V. Chernavina:

What a charm she is! She told me, incidentally, that she especially took some of the pages of the “Gift” because her father was a (famous) nerd-traveler and she accompanied him to Altai , etc., about two times (in the 1920s), and then he disappeared, like my [hero "Dara" entomologist K. K. Godunov-Cherdyntsev], they told her in Tomsk that he had died, but then it turned out that he had been captured by some local rebels ^[4] .

Back in 1933, while in Finland, Chernavin wrote a letter to the London Times about the methods of the OGPU, published in one of the April issues of this newspaper. The letter was a refutation of A. Vyshinsky ’s claim, based on the author’s personal experience, that “... the accused are not tortured in the USSR ...”, which was heard at a demonstration trial in Moscow against six Metropolitan-Vickers engineers accused of espionage . In March 1934, Chernavin’s wife, Tatyana, delivered a public lecture in London entitled “The fate of the intellectual worker in Soviet Russia”.

Shortly afterwards, Chernavin’s book “I speak on behalf of the silent. Prisoners of the Soviets” (I Speak for the Silent: Prisoners of the Soviets.), Along with his wife’s book, became one of the first published in the West evidence of living conditions under Soviet rule, about the activities of the GPU and about the rules in the camps of the Gulag.

The New Masses , an American Communist-style literary magazine published in New York , called the book of Chernavin a "vicious" attack on the Soviet Union by the "aristocrat." A book review published in this journal said:

"Chernavin wants to show himself to be an intellectual, above political intrigues and preoccupied only with his work, which he cannot do because he is being persecuted as a class enemy ... Pretending to be a" scientific analysis ", he writes about the impossibility and absurdity established the Gosplan of jobs due to lack of manpower, both skilled and unskilled ... and inefficiency of party members ... The rest of the book tells the story of Chernavina stay in detention and his attempts to escape from there. Here the author Sat asyvaet mask scientist and we plunge into the atmosphere of cheap adventure novel ... Tchernavin flaunts scientific objectivity, but, in fact, his book - is the story of a man who as a result of the shortcomings of their class turned renegade in the new society. " ^[12]

In his memoirs, W. Chambers called Chernavin's book "I speak on behalf of the silent" one of the reasons for his decision to break with the communist underground in the late 1930s. ^[13]

• Son - Andrei (1918–2007), at the age of 14 he fled abroad with his parents ^[4] , received his education and later worked as an engineer ^[11] .

• 1935 - I Speak for the Silent Prisoners of the Soviets . Boston: Half Cushman & Flint.
• 1938 - Changes in the Salmon Skull.
• 1939 - The origin of salmon: Is its ancestry marine or fresh water. Salm. Trout Mag.
• 1940 - Six Specimens of Lyomeri in the British Museum (with notes on the skeleton of Lyomeri).
• 1940 - Further Notes on the Structure of the Bony Fishes of the Order Lyomeri (Eurypharynx).
• 1944 - A revision of some Trichomycterinae based on material preserved in the British Museum (Natural History). Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 114: 234-275.
• 1944 - The breeding characters of salmon in relation to their size.
• 1953 - The feeding mechanisms of a deep sea fish, Chauliodus sloani Sckneider.

• Vladimir V. Tchernavin, I Speak for the Silent Prisoners of the Soviets. Half Cushman & Flint, 1934. In the Internet Archive
• Tatiana Tchernavin . Escape From The Soviets. EP Dutton and Co., Inc, 1934. In the Internet Archive
• Chernavin V.V. Notes of a “pest” / Vladimir and Tatyana Chernaviny. Notes of the "pest"; Escape from the Gulag. - SPb. : Canon, 1999.

• Chernavin Vladimir Vyacheslavovich (1887-1949)