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.
“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.” Volkov, a defected engineer who arrived in New
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. Nicholas—set a legal precedent that Soviet émigrés and