Vladimir Nikolayevich Petrov

Vladimir Nikolayevich Petrov (1915 in Ekaterinodar oblast, Russian Empire – March 17, 1999 in Kensington, Maryland) was at various times an academic, philatelist, prisoner, forced laborer, political prisoner, adventurer, factory worker, chess player and writer of short stories and autobiographies. He was at various times a Russian, American, and man of no country, though he was brought up in the USSR and died in the United States. Most of the information concerning his life originates from his personal memoirs, entitled Soviet Gold and My Retreat from Russia and collected in the published work Escape from the Future. Petrov was born in Russia in 1915 during the last days of the Tsar. His parents were from the petit bourgeoisie, his mother a teacher in an experimental school, his father a free-thinker, banker and lay philosopher (follower of Ernest Renan, among others). His father was part of a group socially-minded associates who organized a farmer's credit union, thus enabling farmers to own their means of production during the early years of socialism. The success of the farmers' bank (in its heyday the farmers collectively owned several trucks and even a river steamship for transporting their produce directly to city markets) brought trouble from the Bolshevik authorities. Petrov's father was imprisoned for the first time when young Volodya was 7 years old, for allegedly exploiting the working classes. Upon his release, Petrov's father called him up to Leningrad to continue his studies at a technical high school. Petrov was 14 and wished to study history, but his father's prison record excluded his son from this potentially political subject. Petrov later entered the department of civil engineering at the University of Leningrad, living in his words "the meager existence of a young student" where he was arrested on the night of February 17, 1935 by the NKVD. He was arrested at age 19 as part of the mass purges which followed in the wake of the assassination of Sergey Kirov.