Tatiana Tchernavin

Background Tatiana Vasilievna Sapozhnikova was born on December 20, 1887, in the Russian Empire. She studied at St. Petersburg University. )

Life after Tchernavin 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. The Tchernavins were still living in Finland in 1933, but in April of that year a letter from her husband, entitled "Methods of the OGPU", was published in The Times.

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 strongly suggests that Pares had helped to bring about their publication. In March 1934 Pares presided at Tatiana's public lecture in London, entitled "The fate of the intellectual worker in Soviet Russia".

In 1934, the family moved to England. Tchernavin became a translator in the UK Ministry of Information for the remainder of World War II and helped subtitle Noël Coward's war propaganda film In Which We Serve. Andrei became a civil engineer and designed the Bow Flyover.

Legacy Tchernavin's Escape From The Soviets (1934)