From Juli to Yul: The Brynner Family Saga from Vladivostok to Hollywood

At a recent Kennan Institute talk, author and historian Rock Brynner, Adjunct Professor of History at Marist College and son of actor Yul Brynner, spoke about his family's history in Vladivostok, Europe, and the United States. In September 2003, Brynner went to Vladivostok on a State Department-sponsored lecture tour, where he gave lectures on the U.S. constitution and the political impact of rock music. He also participated in the First International Vladivostok Film Festival and presented the first Yul Brynner award. Brynner described the important role his family played in the early development of the city of Vladivostok, and said that he was enthusiastically welcomed as the descendent of one of the city's founding fathers. He believes that this welcome signified the "living, emotional connection to the pre-Soviet era that is crucial to many Russians today."

According to Brynner, his great-grandfather, Juli, was one of the first foreign businessmen to come to the newly established Russian naval base of Vladivostok. Juli Brynner, a native of Switzerland, owned a shipping company in Yokohama, Japan, which he moved to Vladivostok in 1873. Brynner explained that Juli Brynner and his fellow international investors brought in architects from Europe, turning the small naval base into an attractive, modern city and giving it the European character that it retains to this day.

Juli Brynner became a very successful businessman in Vladivostok. Brynner noted that his great-grandfather established a large mining enterprise near Vladivostok and imported materials from Switzerland to build a narrow-gage railroad to transport ore from the mines to the port. He married a Russian woman of Buryat heritage. They had six children who were educated in Moscow and St. Petersburg and brought up as members of the Russian intelligentsia. Juli Brynner's son Boris eventually took over the mining enterprise. Boris Brynner's son Yul was born in 1920.

When the Bolsheviks gained power in Vladivostok in the early 1920s, the Brynner mines were nationalized, but the Bolsheviks were unable to manage them without the assistance of the former owners. Brynner explained that during his lecture tour in Vladivostok, he learned that the negotiations between Boris Brynner and Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin over control of the Brynner mines set a precedent in international law and are being studied by legal scholars today. However, anti-bourgeois sentiment in Russia led the Brynner family, including Boris and Yul, to flee to China in 1928. For a short time, Boris continued to manage the mines from the city of Harbin. The family later joined the large community of Russian émigrés in Paris.

Yul Brynner, according to his son, lived a rebellious life in Paris that included playing guitar with a gypsy orchestra. In Europe, he met émigré actor Michael Chekhov—whom Brynner described as his father's only mentor—and followed him to the United States. Yul Brynner went on to have a successful film career in the United States before moving to Switzerland. He was never allowed to visit Vladivostok, and only one of his films—The Magnificent Seven—was ever shown in the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, Brynner argued that his family had not been forgotten in Vladivostok.