The Admiral's Lady

In early 1945 a famous Russian film star and a dashing American naval officer met at a Soviet-American friendship party in Moscow given by then Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov Zoya Fyodorova, 33, was at the peak of her career; she had starred in a dozen roles and had received an offer from MGM. Captain Jackson Tate, 47, had been assigned to Moscow to help the Russians in an abortive plan for the Soviet bombing of Japan. In the brief glow of Allied wartime collaboration, Zoya and Jack fell in love. Their last meeting was on V-E day 1945, when they hoped a child was conceived. If that proved to be so, the couple vowed to name the baby Victor or Victoria in honor of the Allied triumph. "It was a beautiful story," recalled Zoya in Moscow, "a romantic, tragic love story." But as that story unfolded last week, it echoed Alexander Solzhenitsyn's account of Stalinist terror, The Gulag Archipelago, in which Zoya is mentioned.

At several unauthorized meetings with Western newsmen, Zoya, now 63, and her beautiful daughter Victoria, 29, disclosed the details. Five months after Zoya's affair with Jack had begun, the actress was suddenly sent on a road tour, and Jack was declared persona non grata by the Soviets. He was put aboard a plane for Washington the same day. Zoya learned later that he had vainly sent her a series of desperate letters. A few years later, he received an anonymous note from Russia, probably inspired by the secret police, that said: "Stop annoying our famous actress. She has married a composer and already has two children."

Obliterated Name. In fact, Zoya never married. After Victoria's birth, she was arrested and subsequently sentenced to 25 years for espionage because of her relationship with the American officer. Her baby girl was sent to live with an aunt in remote Kazakhstan in Central Asia. Although Zoya now declines to dwell on her ordeal, she is well remembered by another ex-inmate of Stalin's prisons and camps, Alexander Dolgun, who now lives in Maryland. A former U.S. embassy clerk who was kidnaped by the Soviet secret police in 1948 and freed only in 1956, Dolgun spent years in the same vast concentration camp as Zoya. "She ended up in Dzhezkazgan, a hard-labor camp for political prisoners in Central Asia," Dolgun told TIME last week. "The women did the same killing work as the men, on heavy construction jobs and in the copper mines. The prisoners all knew Zoya's movies, and it was a shock when we heard that she had tried to hang herself with a stocking."

When conditions in the camp improved after Stalin's death in 1953, Dolgun added, many of Zoya's films, like the ultra-patriotic Boyevye Podrugi (Comrades at Arms), were shown to the prisoners. But Zoya's name was obliterated from the credits. In 1955 Zoya was released and reunited with her daughter. Since then Zoya has returned to films as a character actress, and Victoria has become a famous movie actress herself. She has been featured in 17 major films, and starred as a deaf-mute in A Ballad of Love. When Ballad was released in the U.S. in 1966, Victoria was acclaimed by one reviewer as "perfect in a difficult part." Divorced from her scriptwriter husband, she lives with her mother in a two-bedroom apartment in a fashionable Moscow neighborhood.

Jack Tate, who returned to the U.S. and married, was unaware of Zoya's fate and of the existence of his daughter until 1963. An American guide at a 1959 U.S. exhibit in Moscow had met Zoya and heard her story, and after a four-year search for Tate finally located him. His letters to Zoya were returned by the Soviet post office until 1973, when one was delivered to her by hand. Since then Tate, a retired rear admiral living in Orange Park, Fla., has been corresponding with his lost family. In a recent letter to Zoya he wrote, "I loved you then, and I still love you. We have done no harm to anyone, only loved each other. Why should we be the subject of malice from a powerful political organization or government? And certainly there can be no onus on Victoria, the innocent child of our union." Since Tate, now 77, underwent open-heart surgery in 1973, father and daughter have been determined to meet. "My life is far behind me," he wrote to Victoria, "and the road ahead is short." When he recovered he sent her an invitation to visit him in Florida.

In Moscow, Victoria's request for a three-month exit permit to visit Tate met with stony silence from the Soviet visa office and disapproval from the secret police. Hoping that publicity would jog the authorities, Victoria turned to the Western press. She told reporters that she fears her career is in jeopardy. Although she was the cover girl of Soviet Screen last March, her picture has been removed from the official Soviet film-export office in Moscow, and her bosses have grown markedly cool.

Beautiful Compliment. Sitting beside his tolerant and understanding wife Hazel last week, Tate said, "I think it is just beautiful and the greatest compliment ever that a young woman, with all the things she has, will take the chance of coming to see an old man at the end of his career. And she knows the risk; her mother spent eight years in the mines."

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