Zoya Fyodorova
| Zoya Fyodorova | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Zoya Alekseyevna Fyodorova 21 December [O.S. 8 December] 1907 Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire |
| Died | 11 December 1981 (aged 71) Soviet Union |
| Occupation | Actress |
Zoya Alekseyevna Fyodorova (Russian: Зоя Алексеевна Федорова; 21 December [O.S. 8 December] 1907 – 11 December 1981) was a Russian film star who had an affair with American Navy captain Jackson Tate in 1945 and bore a child, Victoria Fyodorova in January 1946. Having rejected the advances of NKVD police head Lavrentiy Beria, the affair was exposed resulting, initially, in a death sentence later reprieved to work camp imprisonment in Siberia; she was released after eight years. She was murdered in her Moscow apartment in 1981.
Fyodorova was a well-known Russian film star starting in the 1930s, and some of the movies she appeared in were also seen in the United States, including Girl Friends in 1936. During her imprisonment she continued to perform in the Gulag theatres.
The year before Fyodorova was murdered, she appeared in Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1980.
University of Connecticut professor Irene Kirk learned of Victoria's story in 1959 and spent years trying to find Tate in the United States. Tate was unaware of having a daughter and of his former lover's arrest and imprisonment. When Kirk found Tate in 1973, she carried correspondence between the two back and forth to Moscow. In 1974, Tate began a campaign to convince the Soviet government to allow his daughter to travel to see him in the United States. Victoria was granted permission and arrived in the United States in March 1975 on a three-month travel visa, and spent several weeks in seclusion in Florida with Tate.
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