Valerian Albanov
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Valerian Ivanovich Albanov (1881 - 1919) was a Russian navigator, best known for being one of only two survivors of the Brusilov expedition of 1912.
Albanov was born in 1881 in Voronezh and was raised by his uncle in the city of Ufa. At the age of seventeen he entered the Naval College at Saint Petersburg, from which he graduated in 1904. He served on board a number of ships before signing on as navigator aboard the Saint Anna under Georgy Brusilov for an expedition intended to traverse the Northeast Passage (a feat which had only been successfully performed once before, by the Finnish explorer Nordenskiöld).
The expedition was ill-planned and ill-executed, and the Saint Anna became locked in the polar ice in October 1912. In early 1914, the ship was still frozen in and did not seem likely to be freed that year, and Albanov, believing that their position was hopeless, requested and received permission from Brusilov to leave the ship and attempt to return to civilization on foot. Thirteen other crewmen accompanied him as he travelled south by ski, sledge, and kayak. Albanov and one crewman, Alexander Konrad, made it to Franz Josef Land, where they were rescued by the Saint Foka.
Albanov was later convinced to write up his memoirs of the ordeal, and they were first published in Saint Petersburg in 1917. Albanov returned to the sea, but died only a few years later. Account of his death vary, with some having him die of typhoid, and some reporting that he was killed in the explosion of a munitions wagon in Achinsk, Siberia.
