The tragedy of Victoria Fedorova: What did the emigration of the daughter of a Soviet actress and an American admiral lead to?

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Everyone knew about Zoya Fedorova - the famous actress was a star of Soviet cinema, who passed away under mysterious and tragic circumstances. But less is known about her daughter in our country - the fact is that in the 1970s. Victoria Fedorova emigrated to the United States, looking for her father, an admiral, because of the romance with whom her mother was called an American spy. But in emigration her life was tragic …

In February 1945, actress Zoya Fedorova was invited to a government reception to mark the Soviet Army Day. There she met the military attaché, the captain of the US Navy, Jackson Tate, and they began an affair. Soon he was sent home, without even giving them an explanation, and Tate's letter, addressed to his beloved, was intercepted and not delivered to the addressee. A year later, the actress was arrested on charges of espionage. At that time, Zoya Fedorova had already given birth to a daughter, Victoria, which Jackson Tate did not even suspect. The girl had to be left in the care of the actress's sister, because she was sentenced to 25 years of exile, which were then replaced by prison, confiscation of property and exile for the whole family. Until the age of 9, Victoria considered Alexandra her mother.

Both Victoria Fedorova and the family in which she lived had a hard time - they were sent to settle in Kazakhstan as relatives of an enemy of the people, for the same reason the local population greeted them unkindly, clods of mud were thrown in their backs, the family lived from hand to mouth. And Victoria's father, meanwhile, wrote letters to his beloved in the USSR, to which he received an anonymous reply that Zoya Fedorova got married, gave birth to two children and was happily married. After that, he stopped trying to contact her.

2 years after Stalin's death, the family was resettled to Petropavlovsk, and Zoya Fedorova was released (she spent 9 of 25 years in prison), after which she was sheltered in her Moscow apartment by Lydia Ruslanova. Only in 1955 was she finally able to see her daughter, and they never parted again. Only at the age of 13 did Victoria find out who her father was, and she decided to find him by all means. After school, Victoria entered VGIK and became an actress. She dreamed that one day a film with her participation would be shown in the USA, her father would hear about her and make himself felt.

Her film career lasted only 10 years - from 1964 to 1974, but during this time the actress managed to star in 17 films and gain popularity and love of the audience. The most notable of her works in cinema were roles in the films "Two", "Literature Lesson", "Crime and Punishment", "About Love" and "Reckoning".

In search of Jackson Tate Zoya Fedorova volunteered to help the writer Irina Kerk, an American of Russian descent. But at the height of the Cold War, it was very difficult to do this, and it was only a few years later that his address was found. As it turned out, by that time he had already become an admiral, retired and married for the third time. When he found out that he had an adult daughter in the USSR, he burst into tears.

Eduard Volodarsky in 1999 in the magazine "Ogonyok" wrote about Victoria Fedorova: "". By the age of 20, Victoria had already been married three times, but all marriages broke up.

In 1975, Victoria Fedorova managed to fulfill her dream: having received an invitation from her father, she began to bother to obtain an exit visa. And although in those days it was difficult to achieve this, she was still given permission to leave. True, only after she convened a press conference, inviting journalists from two American publications accredited in Moscow to it, and stating that there were no political motives in her decision to leave for the United States. She and her father first met when she was 39 years old, and he was 75. "".

Abroad, she could not realize herself in the acting profession - because of a strong accent she was entrusted with only a few episodic roles, but the actress achieved success in the modeling business, showing clothes of famous designers and becoming the face of a famous American brand - a cosmetics manufacturer. In 1978, Victoria Fedorova wrote the autobiographical novel "The Admiral's Daughter" and offered to film it in Hollywood, but there this story was not considered interesting. In the 1980s. she mastered the basics of web design and started creating websites for the first personal computers.

In emigration, Victoria Fedorova was married 2 more times. Married to pilot Frederick Richard Poey, she gave birth to a son, Christopher Alexander, and Zoya Fedorova managed to get permission to travel to the United States to see her family. She also managed to meet Jackson Tate, who died of cancer 2 years later. And in December 1981, Victoria received terrible news: her mother was killed in her own apartment by a shot in the head. This crime remained unsolved and was overgrown with a huge number of rumors and versions - from the massacre of the KGB to murder for the purpose of robbery.

Life abroad turned out to be much more difficult than Victoria had anticipated. She later admitted: "".

For a while, Victoria Fedorova had problems with alcohol, she even had to attend meetings in the society of Alcoholics Anonymous. She went through a difficult divorce from her 4th husband, accompanied by litigation and division of property. And because of her alcohol addiction, the court decided to give her son to be raised by his father. And although she often saw him, he grew up completely alien: "".

Only in her declining years did she meet the person with whom she spent the rest of her days - the commander of the fire brigade, rescuer John Weier. In 2005, Victoria Fedorova learned that she was incurably ill - she was diagnosed with lung cancer. She passed away in September 2012 at the age of 66. This tragedy still haunts the fans of the famous Soviet actress: The mystery of the death of Zoya Fedorova.