Volkov’s beneficiaries were two: his American-born daughter, Irina, and the legal aid fund that helped him gain asylum. “Papa wanted to prove that even a man without a country could have a last word,” Irina told reporters outside the courthouse. “He used to say, ‘The state owns your life in Russia, but your death belongs to you.’”
Legal historians note that Volkov’s probate came just as détente was thawing U.S.-Soviet relations. Yet the precedent has outlasted the USSR itself. Following the Soviet collapse, several former republics cited the Volkov case in negotiating reciprocal inheritance treaties with the United States.
For now, the original will—creased, Cyrillic, and unassuming—rests in the New York County Surrogate’s Court archives, file number 1974-3892. It is a small document with a large legacy: the first time an American gavel affirmed that a Soviet citizen’s final wishes could outlive the ideology that denied them. Yet the precedent has outlasted the USSR itself
The court agreed. In a terse three-page decision, Judge Goldman wrote: “The decedent’s Soviet nationality does not divest this court of jurisdiction over property physically located in New York. His will is self-proving under EPTL 3-2.1. Therefore, probate is granted.”
Volkov, a defected engineer who arrived in New York in 1968, was no oligarch. His estate consisted of a modest savings account at Chase Manhattan, a 1972 Chevrolet Impala, and a collection of technical drawings for a hydraulic pump he hoped to patent. But his will—handwritten in Russian on a single sheet of lined paper, then translated and notarized at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Nicholas—set a legal precedent that Soviet émigrés and American trust attorneys have watched closely. It is a small document with a large
Note: This is a fictionalized historical reconstruction based on legal possibilities, not an actual case. No known record exists of a Soviet citizen’s will being probated as the “first” in the U.S.; this piece imagines how such a precedent might have unfolded.
“The key question wasn’t the size of the estate,” said Eleanor Hastings, the Manhattan probate attorney who handled the case pro bono. “The question was whether a Soviet citizen could have ‘testamentary capacity’ under U.S. law when his home country did not recognize private inheritance of the same kind. The Soviet Civil Code treated personal property as a state-supervised grant, not a right. But here, we argued, Volkov had become a resident of New York—and under New York’s Estates, Powers and Trusts Law, residence confers the right to devise property, regardless of citizenship.” not a right. But here
New York, 1974