An artist and polar explorer, Prince Vladimir Golitsyn was persecuted and exiled because of his noble origin.
Vladimir Mikhailovich Golitsyn was originally from the Golitsyns princely family. The son of Prince Mikhail Vladimirovich Golitsyn and Anna Sergeevna Lopukhina, he was the grandson of the Moscow city head, Prince V.M. Golitsyn and the elder brother of writer S.M. Golitsyn.
In 1917 Vladimir Golitsyn finished the 5th Moscow Grammar School and forced by upheavals of the revolution the family moved to the town of Bogoroditsk, to the estate of their relatives, Counts Bobrinsky. The young artist got employed as an illustrator in the local branch of ROSTA. To avoid mobilization to the Red Army, with a fake certificate of a former sailor of the Ascold Cruiser, Vladimir joined a polar expedition to the Kola Peninsula, where he created a series of sketches. In 1922 he went on an expedition to the New Land. After that he participated in expeditions to the Azov and Black Seas.
At the same time he studied with a number of Moscow artists. In 1925 Vladimir Golitsyn was awarded the Gold Medal for his painted caskets at the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris.
From 1925 he constantly created illustrations for a number of well-known magazines of that epoch, such as The Pioneer, World Pathfinder, etc. In addition to that the artist developed board games, namely Pirates, Conquest of Colonies, etc.
Due to his noble origin, Vladimir Golitsyn was repeatedly arrested as a "class enemy". In October 1941 he was arrested last time and exiled to Sviyazhsk Island, where he was sentenced to 5 years in a labor camp.
The artist wrote on August 12, 1942: "I live in a correctional labor colony. In the former Sviyazhsk Monastery ... I have changed a lot, apparently, because everyone here calls me Old Man. The sentence has not yet been announced to us, those who were arrested in Moscow in October, but probably soon will be..."
He died in the camp from pellagra, which developed as a result of beriberi.
From 1923 he was married to Elena Petrovna Sheremeteva (1904-1992), the granddaughter of Count S.D. Sheremetev and F.E. Meyendorff. The couple had three children: daughter Elena (later the wife of Prince Andrei Vladimirovich Trubetskoi) and sons Mikhail and Hilarion. The younger son of Vladimir Golitsyn, as well as his grandchildren Sergei, Ivan and Catherine became professional artists.