Vladimir Tchernavin — ichthyologist and writer with roots in the Russian Empire
Vladimir Vyacheslavovich Tchernavin, also transliterated Chernavin, was born in 1887 in Tsarskoye Selo, near St Petersburg, in the Russian Empire. He studied at the university in St Petersburg from 1912 to 1917, where he also met his future wife, Tatiana, who graduated from the same university; their son Andrei was born in 1918. He specialised in ichthyology, the study of fishes, and in the 1920s became one of the leading fisheries scientists in the Soviet Arctic, heading the research department of the state northern fishing trust in Murmansk.
On 23 October 1930, at the time of the first Five-Year Plan, he was arrested in connection with accusations that specialists had sabotaged the fishing industry's targets, and on 13 April 1931 he was sentenced by the OGPU to five years in a labour camp. He was sent to the Solovetsky camp, where he at first did manual labour, and was then transferred to the camp at Kem to work as an ichthyologist in its fisheries department. In August 1932, during a family visit permitted by the camp, he, Tatiana and their fourteen-year-old son set off by boat and on foot across forests and swamps, and after days of walking crossed the border into Finland. He was among the first prisoners of the Soviet camp system to reach the West.
The family stayed in Finland until 1934 and then settled in England. Both wrote about their experiences: Tatiana's Escape from the Soviets appeared in 1933–34, and Vladimir's I Speak for the Silent: Prisoners of the Soviets, translated from Russian, in 1934–35; published in Russian decades later as Notes of a 'Wrecker', it was among the first first-hand accounts of the Soviet camps. In April 1933 The Times in London published a letter of his on the methods of the OGPU. In England he continued his scientific work as an ichthyologist at the Natural History Museum in London, where he worked until his death.
Tchernavin died in Kensington, London, on 31 March 1949, aged sixty-one or sixty-two; Nature published an obituary. On 11 October 1989 the prosecutor's office of the Murmansk region rehabilitated him. Tatiana died in England in 1971, and their son Andrei in 2007.
"Crossed into Finland with his wife and son in 1932; moved to England in 1934, where he remained until his death in 1949."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Tsarskoye Selo, St Petersburg Governorate (now Pushkin, Russia)
Born in Tsarskoye Selo in 1887, he studied at university in St Petersburg and became a leading fisheries scientist in the Soviet North, heading the research department of the state northern fishing trust in Murmansk, before his arrest in 1930.
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Tsarskoye Selo, St Petersburg Governorate (now Pushkin, Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.