Vladimir Varankin

Vladimir Valentinovich Varankin (12 November 1902 – 3 October 1938) was a Soviet writer of literature in Esperanto, an instructor of western European history, and director of the Moscow Ped.

[1] His father Valentin Yegorovich Varankin (died 1921), managed a savings bank until he was recruited into the Red Army.

Both in the city and in the gubernia that union carried out an active program: in less than a year the union managed to organize six courses of Esperanto in the city itself, forty cells and little circles in the whole gubernia, and in addition, in several places, (with the help of local Esperanto instructors) even to teach the international language in the schools.

At the end of 1925 the newspaper Mezhdunarodny Yazyk (International Language) began to publish a series of his lessons and methods for the advertising of Esperanto, which continued through all of 1926.

At the end of 1927 he moved to Moscow, after the nineteenth Universala Kongreso (UK) (World Convention of Esperanto) in Danzig.

They condemned him as an active member of Union Center, which never existed; he was accused of spying and sabotage, anti-Soviet propaganda, plotting to murder Joseph Stalin and the like.

In April 1989 the Procurator's Office of the Soviet Union officially released the following information: Vladimir Valentinovich Varankin, born in 1902 in Nizhny Novgorod, member of the Communist Party since 1925, expelled from it because of a criminal accusation, director before the arrest of the 2nd Moscow Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, was sentenced by the Military college of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union to be executed by gunfire and to have all his possessions confiscated on the third of October 1938, for participation in a fascist spy organization "Soyuzny Tsentr" (Union Center), existing under the auspices of the Esperantist organization, with the aim of overthrowing Soviet power through espionage, sabotage, terrorist acts against the leadership of the Communist Party and the Soviet government.

All confiscated possessions, including manuscripts, letters, documents, archives, books were destroyed as "ideologically unuseful" and "without any current or historical value".

The investigation revealed that V. Varankin was convicted totally without basis, and in connection with that the Military college of the Supreme court of the Soviet Union nullified the verdict on 11 May 1957 and threw out the accusation as having an absolute lack of criminal content.