Tatiana Okunevskaya | |
---|---|
Born |
Zavidovo, Moscow Governorate, Russia |
March 3, 1914
Died | May 15, 2002 Moscow, Russia |
(aged 88)
Tatiana Kirillovna Okunevskaya (Russian: Татьяна Кирилловна Окуневская; March 3, 1914 – May 15, 2002) was a Soviet and Russian actress.
She was born in Zavidovo, Moscow Governorate, in 1914.
She was active in film and theater from 1933 to 1948, whereupon she was arrested for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, raped by Lavrentiy Beria, and sentenced to ten years labor at Steplag. Beria picked her up under the pretense of bringing her to perform for the Politburo. Instead, he took her to his dacha where he offered to free her father and grandmother from NKVD prison if she submitted. He then raped her telling her "scream or not, it doesn't matter." Yet Beria already knew her relatives had been executed months earlier. Okunevskaya was arrested shortly afterwards and sentenced to solitary confinement in the Gulag from which she survived.
Following her release in 1954, she returned to the theater, where she worked until 1959.
From 1959 to 1979 she worked as an artist for Gosconcert (the Soviet State Concert Company) and Mosconcert (its Moscow equivalent).
Her previously robust health declined rapidly due to complications from surgery in 2000, culminating in her death in Moscow in 2002.