Victor Porfir'evich Petrov was born to Russian missionary parents on March 22, 1907 in Harbin, China. He was educated in Manchuria and China and began his career in the late 1920s as a newspaper reporter in Southern China after receiving a law degree from the Institute of Jurisprudence in Harbin. He also worked for an import-export company in Shanghai.
He immigrated to the United States in 1940 and settled in San Francisco, where he worked for a railway company and wrote articles for two Russian-language newspapers. During World War II, he came to Washington, DC to study at American University and by 1945 he had earned his Bachelors, Masters, and Doctorate degrees with specialties in history, geography, and international affairs.
For the next 30 years, Dr. Petrov taught Russian, geography and Oriental languages at various universities, including California State University at Los Angeles, Shippensburg State College in Pennsylvania, the Defense Department foreign language school and George Washington University in Washington, DC. Dr. Petrov’s last teaching position, from which he retired in 1976, was as a history and geography professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. During these years he also worked as an Assistant Program Director of the National Science Foundation.
Dr. Petrov was one of the founding members of the Congress of Russian-Americans, where he served as President of the Washington Branch. He also served on the Executive Committee of the Freedom Federation and for many years was actively involved in the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, often presenting scholarly papers on the history of Russian America and on the contributions of Russian-Americans to the United States.
Dr. Petrov wrote 35 books on a range of topics, from Sino-Soviet geopolitics to early Russian communities in the United States and China. Among his books were "The Russians in America, 18th to 19th Century," "The Russians in America, 20th Century," "The Russians in American History" and "The Saga of Fort Ross," about an early Russian settlement on California's northern coast. He wrote in Russian, English and Japanese, and he also wrote historical novels and articles on Russian geography and space programs.
In 1959, Dr. Petrov’s article “Soviet Oceanographic Studies Under IGY” was printed in the Congressional Record in support of a bill establishing a ten-year program of oceanographic research and surveys. Later, his articles on Soviet space programs were used by the Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences of the Senate.
After the fall of communism, several of his books and historical studies were published in Russia, and he had the opportunity to lecture there as well. He was elected a foreign member of the Center for Studies of Russian-America and Russian-American relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of World History.
In 1995, Dr. Petrov was honored with membership in the Congress of Russian Americans' Hall of Fame; at the time of his induction, he was only the tenth person to receive this honor. On that evening, held at the Rayburn Building of the Capitol, the invocation was given by Fr. Dmitry Grigorieff.
For those of us who were fortunate enough to have known him, his amazing life and myriad accomplishments are not the most memorable thing. Truly he was a Renaissance man, blessed with seemingly limitless talents that he never buried. But he was also one of the last “old-world gentlemen”; polite, humble, and a faithful parishioner of St. Nicholas with his wife Elizabeth and her daughter Tatiana Tontarski, a founder and tireless worker at the cathedral. He was predeceased by both but continued to attend services even when he was in his 90s and his health became frail. He was fascinating to talk to, kind, interested in all kinds of things, and a true friend.
Victor Porfir'evich died on August 18, 2000, at the age of 93. May his memory be eternal!
