Vadim Andreyev

After his mother's death in 1906, his maternal grandmother Evfrosinya Varfolomeevna Veligorskaya (Shevchenko) and her governess raised the child. He lived in his father's villa in Vammelsuu in Finland. In 1913, Vadim went to study in St Petersburg where he lived with the family of Professor Mikhail Andreyevich Reisner. In October 1917, he left with his father for Finland and then, at the beginning of 1921, with former soldiers from the Arkhangelsk front who had fled to Finland, he enlisted in Wrangel's army. He was brought to Marseille for training but, during this period, Crimea fell. Andreyev, along with several others, traveled to Georgia in February 1921 via Constantinople, when the RSFSR declared war on it. They joined the ranks of independent Kuban “greens” in Georgia who fled after the first battle. In March 1921 he was evacuated to Constantinople, studied at the Constantinople Russian Lyceum (where he met V.B. Sosinsky) and after its closure at the end of 1921 – at the Constantinople Russian Lyceum which was transferred to Sofia. From there, after receiving a Whittimore scholarship (support for emigrant students), he went to study at the University of Berlin then at the Sorbonne in Paris. In France, Andreyev marries Olga Chernoff-Fedoroff, the adopted daughter of the President of the Constituent Assembly of Russia Viktor Chernoff (they have two children - son Alexander and daughter Olga). Participates in the French Resistance. In 1932, on the recommendation of M. A. Ossorguine, he was initiated into Freemasonry in the Parisian Russian lodge “Etoile du Nord”. At the same time, he became one of the initiators of the creation of the independent lodge “Brothers of the North”, created by M. A. Ossorguine which is not part of any major Masonic lodge.

During the Occupation, he lived on the island of Oléron and participated in the French Resistance. Arrested by the Nazis on December 15, 1944, he was sent to the Boyardville prison, and then exchanged for German prisoners of war. In 1948, he took Soviet citizenship but did not return to the USSR. During his life, he wrote numerous works including three collections of poetry: "L'heure de plomb" (1924), "La Maladie de l'être" (1928), "Le second souffle" (1950), as well as as the poem "The Revolt of the Stars" (1923) and also "At the Border", posthumous work, in 1977. In 1949, he left for the United States, where he worked in the UN services. Then he worked at UNESCO in the publishing department and in 1959 – 1961 in Geneva in the European publishing department of the UN. Solzhenitsyn counts Vadim Andreyev as one of his 115 secret aides. In October 1964, after the dismissal of N. S. Khrushchev, he took to the West a film containing most of Solzhenitsyn's archives, including the manuscript of the novel "The First Circle".

He spent his last years in the US and died in Geneva, from where his ashes were transferred to the cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève des Bois where he is buried with Daniel Reznikoff (1904-1970) and Eugénie Sosinsky (1892–1958).