Johnson's Russia List
#9009
8 January 2005
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#10
The Independent (UK)
January 8, 2005
Obituary
Vladimir Chuguev
BBC Russian Service journalist who was Solzhenitsyn's producer
By Jeanne Vronskaya

Vladimir Chuguev, journalist and publisher: born Bobruisk, Soviet Union, 2
July 1936; married 1977 Jeanne Vronskaya (marriage dissolved 1994); died St
Lô, France 6 January 2005.

Working for the Russian Service of the BBC in London, Vladimir Chuguev was
the radio producer of the books of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. At the end of
the 1960s, as a young journalist, he was also the private secretary to
Alexander Kerensky, the last prime minister of Russia's Provisional
Government before the Bolshevik take-over in October 1917.

Chuguev was the main force in the think tank at the BBC's Russian Service
in the 1960s and 1970s. Writing and speaking in four languages, an expert
in Russian history, literature, poetry and Orthodox religion (at one time
he was head of all Russian religious programmes), he interviewed many
Russian celebrities such as the queen of Russian poetry, Anna Akhmatova,
when she was awarded an Oxford doctorate in the spring of 1965.

Others were the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, the Kremlin
insider, socialist and dissident Roy Medvedev, Ivan Bilibin, the English
private secretary to the Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich, head of the
Romanov House in exile, Arkady Stolypin, the son of the prime minister
Peter Stolypin murdered by Russian terrorists in 1911, and Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, the 1970 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

"Volodya," Solzhenitsyn told him (Volodya is the diminutive of Vladimir),
"I regularly listened to your programmes in the forest and I liked them
very much." Solzhenitsyn had come to London in connection with the 1974
publication of The Gulag Archipelago; Chuguev was appointed his
interpreter. In about 1964, when Solzhenitsyn was known in the West only to
specialists in Russian literature, Chuguev had became his producer on the
radio. Two years before, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had created
a sensation in the Soviet Union.

After Solzhenitsyn was deported and brought to Germany in 1974, Chuguev
produced The Cancer Ward, The First Circle and eventually The Gulag
Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn, who was a difficult character, put in writing
many stipulations as to how this should be done. He didn't understand that
this was not a private radio station but the British Broadcasting
Corporation and that producers and broadcasters had limited time. Chuguev
went to America to see him at his home in Vermont. This was the beginning
of the Christian Millennium in 1988, an important event in all Christian
European countries, and the Russian Service was hoping to get an interview
with Solzhenitsyn, but he bluntly refused. "It is not my problem," he said.
"I shall answer only questions concerning my books." And that was that.

Vladimir Chuguev was born in 1936 in Bobruisk, a tiny medieval Polish town
acquired by Catherine the Great in 1793, turned into a military fortress
which successfully fought off Napoleon's army in the 1812 war. He was the
second of three sons of Tikhon Chuguev, Professor in the Child Psychology
Faculty at Moscow University - which was declared by Stalin's pseudo
historians as "Western and bourgeois" and banned.

In 1938, when Chuguev père returned to Moscow after his holiday, he found
all the tutorial staff had been arrested. The family went into hiding and
settled near Orel. It was occupied during the autumn of 1941 when Nazi
Germany invaded the Soviet Union during the Second World War. In 1942, the
whole family, including Vladimir, aged six, was rounded up by the Gestapo
and transported in a cattle truck to a Nazi forced-labour camp, near Chemnitz.

In April 1945 they were liberated by the Americans. Suffering from TB,
hunger and psychological shock, Vladimir was taken to an American military
hospital, where he recovered. The Chuguev parents refused to return to the
Soviet Union and crossed Germany, then, in ruins, on foot and after 60 days
reached Switzerland. They were arrested by the Swiss border police, put
into a children's psychiatric hospital (as Switzerland had no prison at the
time) and next morning deported to a camp near Singen in the French Zone,
Germany. The aim was to hand them over to Smersh.

Stalin's death squads were freely snatching Russians who refused to return
to the Soviet Union (after General Charles de Gaulle, on 29 June 1945, had
signed his own Yalta Agreement in Moscow). But eventually their Swiss
excursion saved the Chuguevs' life. While a French commander of the camp
was wining and dining with Smersh officers, eating caviar and drinking
vodka, the Chuguevs broke a window and escaped, eventually, to a Polish POW
camp where they lived until 1950. (It was then, when they were hiding from
Smersh, that their surname was deliberately misspelt - Czugunow.)

In the spring of 1978 Vladimir Chuguev became a kind of celebrity when a
terrific scandal broke in Switzerland in connection with the government's
policy in 1944-47 to hand over to Smersh for certain death those Russians
who had refused to return to Stalin's Soviet Union. He was interviewed by
the London correspondent, Anne Cendre, of La Tribune de Genève and his
story, "L'odysée d'un petit réfugié russe refoulé par la Suisse", occupied
a full page.

Chuguev grew up in a small town, Bernkastel, in Germany near the French
border, where he graduated from a private school. There, he was awarded the
Goethe Prize for his German language and literature, the only foreign boy
at his school. After attending a business school in Munich he was a Nato
soldier with the Polish Guards in the US Army in West Germany, in 1954-55.
He went to London on a contract from the BBC Russian Service and
simultaneously became the private secretary of Alexander Kerensky. Kerensky
lived his last years in London, from 1966 to 1970.

In 1966-75 Chuguev owned and ran a small publishing firm, called Iskander
after Alexander Hertzen's pen name while living in exile in London in the
mid-19th century. He was the London correspondent of US Radio Liberty from
1975 to 1981. In 1981 he returned to the BBC Russian Service as a senior
journalist and later became a producer in the BBC World Service. Many of
his programmes were translated into major East European languages and
broadcast to corresponding countries.

He made a private visit to his native country for the first time in June
1991, three months before the first anti- Gorbachev putsch. The main Moscow
television channel made two documentaries about his life. In 1994 his elder
brother, Lev, lost at a German forced labour camp 50 years previously,
contacted him from Kiev, Ukraine, having heard his programme on BBC Radio.

We met on my first day in England from Paris at an office of the Russian
Service in Bush House, London, in July 1969, and became inseparable. Six
months after my divorce we married in the spring of 1977 at Chelsea
Register Office near our flat in Knightsbridge. We later collaborated on A
Biographical Dictionary of the Soviet Union 1917-1988 (1989), revised as
The Biographical Dictionary of the Former Soviet Union (1992). Although we
divorced in 1994 (I was the guilty party) we were greatly attached to each
other and his last years since the summer of 1995 he lived mainly at my
country house in Normandy.

Vladimir Chuguev was an extremely intelligent, very knowledgeable and
likeable man. People who even once met him remembered and loved him. In the
words of one Russian producer, "He exuded humanism."

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