The family
Three generations: Mark and Zinaida; Lidia and Igor; Alex. Soroca to Moscow to Kyiv to Vienna to Pittsburgh to Glen Cove to Newton to New York. The family carried the silence about Mark for forty years before crossing the Atlantic and another forty before the file came home.
Zinaida Lazarevna Finkelshtein
30 May 1907 — 26 September 1981, Moscow. Pianist. Wife of Mark; mother of Lidia.
Born the same year as Mark, by about seven months. Graduated the Moscow Conservatory — the principal Russian musical academy, founded in 1866 by Nikolai Rubinstein — in 1934, the year she also married Mark. Took a piano-teaching position at the Kyiv Conservatory and lived with him in Kyiv until his arrest in October 1937. After the arrest she was reassigned by the All-Union Committee on Arts to the Conservatory in Kuybyshev (now Samara), six months pregnant, and removed from Kyiv. Lidia was born in Moscow in June 1938.
On 3 November 1940, Zinaida wrote a four-page letter to Lavrenty Beria — then People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR — asking for the return of her seized grand piano. The letter survives in the case file. The earlier transcription of this episode read "typewriter"; the v3 May 2026 corrected reading from her own later letters is "piano."
She spent her widowhood in Moscow. Her four 1979–1981 letters to her granddaughter's family friend Annika Bäckström survive — the second-pass transcriptions of these letters in v3 of the family correspondence file confirm her birth date as 30 May 1907 from her own statement («30/V мне исполнилось 74 года» — "on 30 May I turned 74"). She died in Moscow on 26 September 1981 — exactly one year, to the day, after her daughter Lidia.
Lidia Finkelshtein
28 June 1938, Moscow — 26 September 1980, Glen Cove, New York. Musicologist and theater scholar. Daughter of Mark and Zinaida; mother of Alex.
Born five months after her father's execution. Never met him. Was raised by Zinaida inside the official fiction — "ten years without right of correspondence" — that the regime issued to the families of those it had shot. The case file came back to the family long after Zinaida's death.
Trained at the Gnessin Music College (one of the two principal Moscow musical schools, founded 1895 by the Gnessin sisters) and the theater-studies faculty of GITIS — the State Institute for Theater Art, Moscow's drama school. Published in the Soviet journal Театр (Theater) and worked in Soviet radio. Married Igor Abramovich; later divorced; one son.
The family emigrated in June 1976, via Vienna. Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner — close family friends through Igor's professional and dissident connections — describe Lidia and Igor in their journals as "close friends," a documentary placement of the family inside the Sakharov-Bonner inner circle.
From 1977 to 1979 Lidia taught a course on the history of Russian and Soviet criticism at the University of Pittsburgh, where she was also writing a doctoral dissertation. Her American letters from this period — preserved in part by the family friend V. K., who would later reproduce them in his memoir — describe an academic life beginning to take shape, an apartment with a bought piano, a heavy teaching load, the elderly-woman babysitting work she took on during the dissertation push.
In November 1978 she traveled to the Philippines to seek treatment from spiritual healers for what was, by then, ovarian cancer. She returned reporting herself cured and relapsed by spring 1979. She spent her last months at the home of Tanya Lechtman — Zinaida's former Moscow piano student — and Tanya's husband Sasha Lechtman, in Glen Cove on Long Island, where a Russian-speaking woman cared for her.
The last surviving piece of her writing is the essay on Andrei Sakharov's exile to Gorky, dated approximately 22 February 1980 — the month after Sakharov's exile, seven months before her own death. She died in Glen Cove on 26 September 1980, age 42. Her published essays — in Sion (1976) and Kontinent (1977) — and her unpublished American letters are in the documents.
Igor Abramovich
— — 28 December 2025, New York. Biophysicist. Husband (later ex-husband) of Lidia.
Worked at the Soviet Institute of Biophysics — the basis, per the family papers, for the OVIR-denial ground stated in the typed factual annex. Inside the Sakharov-Bonner inner circle in Moscow in the mid-1970s; Sakharov and Bonner describe Igor and Lidia in their journals as close friends. After the family emigrated in 1976 the marriage ended; Igor moved to New York and drove a taxi. Died on 28 December 2025.
From the letters
A few sheets in Lidia's hand, photographed from the family archive — one of the surviving primary sources behind everything above.
