Vladimir Valentinovich Varankin was a Russian writer of literature in Esperanto, an instructor of western European history, and director of the Moscow Pediatric Institute for foreign languages. He wrote the novel Metropoliteno.

During his last year of study at the city high school (1919), he began learning Esperanto with several friends, boys and girls. Together with his equally young friends, he soon founded a little city circle of young Esperantists, which later transformed into the provincial (gubernia) circle. Both in the city and in the gubernia that union carried out an active program: in less than a year the union managed to organize six courses of Esperanto in the city itself, forty cells and little circles in the whole gubernia, and in addition, in several places, (with the help of local Esperanto instructors) even to teach the international language in the schools.

For one or two years he and his friends vastly developed their Esperanto activity. Starting then he began active, energetic, impetuous activity. Besides little circles, courses, and cells, he organized promotional spectaculars and put on sketches, whose text he wrote himself, or translated, or took from pre-revolutionary Esperanto reviews (for example, from La Ondo de Esperanto ~The Esperanto Wave). He himself began to publish a newspaper Ruĝa Esperantisto ~Red Esperantist. In this newspaper (under the pseudonym Vol-Volanto ~Want-Wanter) the twenty-year-old Varankin published his verses and the verses of his friends, articles, translations, announcements, survey results, and also calls to the national and foreign Esperanto community to help the hungry in the young soviet republic. However, at that time he wrote in an Esperanto that was full of errors and very russesque.

In 1920 with several friends he even attempted to organize in Nizhny Novgorod the third Pan-Russian Esperantist Convention, but that failed because chaos and the difficult economic situation in the country did not yet permit organizing the arrangements. The convention came about one year later in Petrograd, and at the convention they founded Sovetlanda (later, sovetrespublikara) Esperantista Unio; young Vladimir Varankin was elected as a member of its central committee.

In 1929 he wrote the textbook Teorio de Esperanto (~Theory of Esperanto) and a year later also the textbook Esperanto por laboristoj (~Esperanto for Workers). Vladimir Varankin was elected from the beginning a member of the board of secretaries, later director of the organizational department, vice president and finally general secretary of the All-Russia committee of SEU. He became a full fledged member of the Language commission at SEU and member of the Language committee at the Akademio de Esperanto (~Academy of Esperanto).

During the night of 7 February 1938 — 8 February 1938 Varankin was arrested. They condemned him as an active member of Union Center, which never existed; he was accused of espionage, sabotage, anti-soviet propaganda and plotting to murder Stalin. He was executed on the 3rd of October 1938.

Twenty years later the Military college of the Supreme Court looked into the matter. The investigation revealed that V. Varankin was convicted totally without basis, and in connection with that the Military college of the Supreme court of the Soviet Union nullified the verdict on 11 May 1957 and threw out the accusation as having an absolute lack of criminal content. V. Varankin was fully exonerated.