Dmitri Panine

Dimitri's father - Mikhail Ivanovich Panin passed the exams of the law faculty of Moscow University, which gave him the right to personal nobility. He spoke three European languages. Before the War of 1914, he worked as a sworn juror and served as an army officer during the First World War. His father died of starvation in 1943 during the war. Her mother - Maria Valerianovna Panina was of hereditary nobility, from the ancient Opryanin family and a graduate of the Catherine Institute for Noble Maidens. She devoted the last years of her life to the Church, and died in 1927, at the age of forty-nine.

Before the revolution, Dimitri Panin entered a vocational school then a chemical technical school, from which he graduated under Soviet power. Due to his noble origin, he had become "lichenetz" (deprived of his civil rights after 1917) and could only enter a higher education establishment after having completed a period of work, so he had to work at the Podolsk cement factory for three years. After that, he entered the Moscow Institute of Chemical Engineering (MIChM)and in 1936 graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering. He made a number of inventions, worked as a designer in the design bureau No. 25 of the People's Commissariat of Munitions (1937-1940). In July 1940, before the defense of his thesis, he was arrested following the denunciation of a colleague from the MIChM. Dimitri Panin was sentenced without trial to five years in re-education through labor camps for anti-Soviet agitation. He was sent to the Vyatlag forced labor camp, where he worked in mechanical workshops. On March 19, 1943, he was arrested in this camp with twenty-seven other prisoners, accused of preparing an armed insurrection, and sentenced to a further prison term of 10 years on August 19, 1944. He was transferred to the labor camp forced from Vorkutlag, where he worked as an engineer in mechanical workshops. In October 1947, after spending a month in Butyrka prison, Panin was transferred to the Marfino sharashka (prison-research institute in the field of communications and transmissions), where he met Lev Kopelev and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who later portrayed Panin as Sologdine in his novel "The First Circle". Within this sharashka he developed, among other things, mechanical ciphers, submitted to the evaluation of Professor Timofeev, supreme authority in the field of decryption and who became Tchelnov in Solzhenitsyn's novel. He worked there until 1950. In June 1950, he was transferred together with A. Solzhenitsyn to the Peschanlag (Ekibastuz) forced labor camp. Details of his arrest and imprisonment can be found on the New Orthodox Martyrs website (in Russian).

After Stalin's death in 1953, Panin was released and sent into exile in North Kazakhstan, in Kustanai. He returned to Moscow in 1956 and in the 1960s worked as a chief project designer at the "Stroydormach" research institute.

Dimitri Mikhailovich never hid his faith in God and his affiliation with Orthodoxy. During his reflections and research in 1959, he found in Catholicism what he lacked in Orthodoxy. In 1971 he became a Catholic with Yuri Glazov in Lithuania. However, having adopted Catholicism, he did not break ties with the Orthodox Church. In 1972, after retiring, Panin decided to leave for the West to be able to complete his philosophical and scientific work, begun during his student years. He emigrated with his wife to Italy on an Israeli visa. Upon arriving in Rome in 1972, the Panines received the blessing of Pope Paul VI during an audience. Later, they chose France as the host country. It was there that he completed and published works conceived before his arrest, gave lectures in different cities in France and Europe, participated in international congresses and seminars on physics, epistemology and biomathematics, taught Philosophy and political economy at the Royal University of Kingston in Canada. In 1973 he published a memoir of his years in detention under the title “Notes of Sologdine”. In 1974-1983 he published several philosophical works. Disappointed with Catholicism, he returned to Orthodoxy. In the last years of his life, Dimitri Panine was a parishioner of the Church of the Sign of the Mother of God on Boulevard Exelmans in Paris.