Pavel Timofeevich Filip'ev, 1896 - 1981

P. T. Filip'ev was born in Ekaterinodar on 14 December 1896 (O.S.). He graduated from the Ekaterinodar School of Arts in 1915, was drafted into military service the same year, and commissioned as an officer following training at the Tiflis Military School in May 1916. He saw action in the Caucasus during the First World War, and served in Siberia and South Russia during the Civil War, eventually being evacuated with General Baron P. N. Vrangel's army. From 1920 to 1925, he worked as a painter and draftsman in Yugoslavia.

In 1925, Filip'ev moved to Prague, Czechoslovakia, to continue his studies at the Russian Higher School of Transportation (Russkoe vysshee uchilishche tekhnikov putei soobshcheniia), graduating in 1928 as a transportation technician. This gave him the opportunity to find employment as a surveyor, project manager and auditor in the highway section of the Czechoslovak State Construction Department, where he worked until 1941. With the advent of the Second World War, Filip'ev was forced to change employment several times, working as an artisan and a teacher at a high school in Klatovy, Czechoslovakia, before illegally crossing the border into Allied-occupied Germany in January 1947. After working there at a variety of jobs, including policeman, tanner and toymaker, he left for the United States in 1951.

In America, he became intensely interested in the so-called "Vles-Kniga," devoting most of the remainder of his life to examining and deciphering it and attempting to prove its veracity, although it has long been dismissed as a forgery by all competent scholars. Filip'ev died in San Francisco in September 1981.

Detailed processing and preservation microfilming for these materials were made possible by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and by matching funds from the Hoover Institution and Museum of Russian Culture. The grant also provides for depositing a microfilm copy in the Hoover Institution Archives. The original materials and copyright to them (with some exceptions) are the property of the Museum of Russian Culture, San Francisco.

Pavel Filip'ev Register