Vladimir Vyacheslavovich Tchernavin (alternative transliteration: Chernavin) (Russian: Владимир Вячеславович Чернавин) (1887– 31 March 1949) was a Russian-born ichthyologist who became famous as one of the first and few prisoners of the Soviet Gulag system to escape abroad.

[1][6] After his father died in 1902 he participated in expeditions to the Altai region with the Russian explorer Vasili Sapozhnikov in order to study the local fauna.

From 1923, he was Professor of Ichthyology at the Institute,[8] and from 1926 he moved to Murmansk as Director of Production and Research Work of the Northern Fisheries Trust, the State-owned industry, which had been set up to deal with the fishing sector in the region along the Arctic Ocean.

His main academic research to this point had been the study of skeletal development and re-development in salmon species, and its application to systematics and evolution: these publications were not available outside the USSR in his lifetime.

While on a visit to Moscow, 48 leading figures and intellectuals in charge of Russia's state food industry were convicted in show trials and executed for 'wrecking' activities.

On 25 April 1931, Tchernavin was convicted for "wrecking" under Article 58, Paragraph 7 of the Soviet Penal Code and was sentenced to 5 years of 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.

[8] 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...'.

The New Masses (a literary, communist magazine in New York City) decried Tchernavin's I Speak for the Silent as a "vicious" attack on the Soviet Union by a member of the "nobility."

Under the guise of a "scientific analysis" he points out that the control figures "dictated" by the Central Planning Buro were impossible and absurd, because of the shortage of labor, skilled and unskilled, the physical handicaps, and inefficiency of party members...

Here the scientist's mask is dropped and we enter the dime novel world... Tchernavin makes a show of scientific objectivity but essentially his is the story of a man who through class drawbacks was a misfit in a new society.

[16] In his memoir, Whittaker Chambers cited Tchernavin's I Speak for the Silent as one of the original factors in his own decision to break from the Soviet GRU during the latter 1930s.