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.

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).

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" [1] where he was arrested on the night of February 17, 1935, by the NKVD.

Petrov's namesake son summarizes the reason for his father's arrest as "for coming to the defense of a rape victim."

At times he was one of the worst-treated of all prisoners in the GULAG system, living on a bread ration of less than half a kilogram per day and working near-naked in sub-zero waters to mine gold for the NKVD.

Petrov's run-ins with Prostoserdov serve as one of the work's most poignant refrain; each encounter shows how each man has changed, and how they have struggled to remain themselves.

It is possible that Petrov's internment overlapped with that of Varlam Shalamov, the Russian writer, whose Kolyma Tales depict the brutality of human nature laid bare in this remote camp of the archipelago.

Released from prison in the week that Nazi Germany invaded the USSR in World War II, Petrov made his way across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

In 1947 he managed to secure transportation to America through the good offices of the Tolstoy Foundation, an organization that helped numerous Russians reach the US.

His later work in Sino-Soviet affairs led him to study the controversial relationship between Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, and to openly question American foreign policy regarding what he considered to be an absurd non-recognition of China.

True to his childhood passion for history, he was averse to all forms of historical re-writing, and his academic approach could be described as journalistic, as he much preferred eyewitness interviews to second-hand accounts.

In the 1950s Petrov participated in emigre politics and was a regular contributor to the newspaper Novoye Russkoye Slovo under a pseudonym.

Soviet Gold was the first published memoir of a Gulag prisoner in the West, and received a favorable review from Winston Churchill.

Among those who doted upon him during those last months was daughter-in-law Patty who had only recently married Vladimir, Jr. but very quickly came to "adore" and form a close bond with the elder Petrov.

He was survived by his wife, Jean MacNab, nine children—George, Susie, Lili, Vlad, Sasha, Jane, Anne, Andre and Carol—and seven grandchildren, many of whom work in science, technology, medicine, and the arts.