Endgame Viable

Oof. It’s definitely an “I don’t feel like writing” kind of morning, so I will pull from the stack of drafts. Blogging daily is a real chore and/or takes up a lot of time; it’s impossible to imagine doing this outside of Blaugust.

I also don’t like feeling the constant compulsion to keep checking other blogs and feeds and social media and discord all the time. I had largely detoxed from that over the last couple years. It’s hard to maintain a work/life balance with work and also during writing challenges.

I happened upon a Blaugust post from luckyinstar extending an invitation for a new group project to research something new and write about it.

I might be bending the rules a bit, because I saw others leaning more into the research part, while I interpreted it as simply, “tell us something new you learned.”

This subject fell into my lap. I accidentally learned about a Soviet actress named Zoya Fyodorova, incongruously mentioned in an otherwise forgettable Sideprojects video I was listening to about Soviet-era serial killers covered-up by the state.

Zoya Fyodorova was not a serial killer, but a famous actress in Stalin-era Soviet patriotic films, who made the mistake of falling in love with American Navy officer Jackson Tate at the end of World War 2.

Stalin’s Soviet state obviously disapproved, and yada, yada, yada, Fyodorova was arrested for espionage when they found out she was pregnant with Tate’s child. She was imprisoned in a gulag and separated from her child.

After Stalin died, she was released, and she even managed regain custody of her daughter Victoria and return to film.

Then, in the 70s, the daughter Victoria was allowed to leave the Soviet Union to meet her father Tate, and never returned. Her mother was also able to leave the Soviet Union and meet her former lover Tate, but she unfortunately returned home.

Fyodorova was later found murdered, shot in the back of the head. Her murder is unsolved to this day, but various sordid theories abound involving the KGB or organized crime, which I don’t find particularly relevant to the main plotline.

I just found it to be a classically tragic story about ordinary human lives ruined by intractable political machines, a tale as old as time. It would probably make a good movie.

The Wikipedia page is littered with warnings about facts and writing style, but it has the basic outline of it. Victoria Fyodorova, the daughter, published an autobiography written by Haskel Frankel in 1979 called The Admiral’s Daughter. It’s out of print but somehow you can borrow it from The Internet Archive, if you can figure out how that works.