Tatiana Tchernavin (alternative transliteration: Chernavin) (Russian: Чернавин) (1887–1971) was a Russian-born artist who wrote one of the earliest accounts of escaping the Soviet Gulag system, along with her husband Vladimir V.
On 25 April 1931 her husband was convicted for "wrecking" under Article 58, Paragraph 7 of the Soviet Penal Code and sentenced to five years in Gulag labor camps.
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.
[9][10]) 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.
[12] 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...'.