Vail (Weil) Pyotr Lvovich (born 1949, Riga) — publicist, literary critic.

After finishing secondary school, Pyotr Vail served in the army from 1969 to 1971. He graduated from the Moscow Printing Institute in 1975. Worked for the Riga newspaper Soviet Youth. He began publishing in 1973. Since 1977, he lived in the United States, where he worked for the newspapers and magazines Novoye Russkoye Slovo, Novy Amerikanyets, Seven Days, among others. He also contributed to various émigré publications such as Kontinent, Vremya i My, Grani, Ekho, and others.

From the mid-1980s, he was associated with Radio Liberty, and in 1993 became the editor-in-chief of its Russian service in New York.

He co-authored several books with Alexander Genis, published in Russian in the USA: Contemporary Russian Prose (1982), Paradise Lost: Emigration as a Self-Portrait Attempt (1983), The Sixties: The World of the Soviet Person (1988), Native Speech (1990), among others. His works began to be published in Russia from 1989. A number of his publications touch upon Jewish themes.