Natasha Sadomskaia

Natasha Sadomskaia

Natal’ia Nikolaevna Sadomskaia, 85, died January 9, 2013 following complications from a stroke. Born June 12, 1927, Natasha Sadomskaia’s life began under hard circumstances when Soviet authorities executed her father for his opposition activities in Ukraine in 1934. Only a few years later, her mother sat in prison for seven months, falsely accused of anti-Soviet activities. While initially a young patriot—she can even be found in the closing scenes of the legendary wartime children’s film, Timur i ego komanda—she would go on to move widely in dissident circles throughout her life. Sadomskaia trained at Moscow State University and later the Institute of Ethnography of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, becoming a specialist on the history and culture of Spanish Galicia.

Together with her second husband, philosopher Boris Shragin, she was among the signatories of a number of famous letters of protest sent to Soviet authorities in the late 1960s, and was subsequently exiled. With her ethnography of Spain in final production, and held up by Soviet authorities, she emigrated to the United States in 1974. For 20 years, she commanded rapt audiences of students at Amherst, Boston, Middlebury and Queen’s Colleges, as well as Columbia and Yale Universities. She taught a range of courses on Soviet society, as well as the history of Russian anthropology, culture and language. She stood out for her remarkable warmth, depth of character, and uncommon generosity. Following the death of her husband in 1990, she took what was, for so many but herself, the bold step of declining her US citizenship to return to Russia during one of its most difficult periods of post-Soviet reform.

Back in Moscow, with her charismatic teaching style, she trained an entirely new cohort of young Russian anthropologists. At her Moscow apartment, she continued to receive the legions of friends and former students from her American life who missed her so greatly. In her final years, she worked with Roman Ignat’ev to finally issue her long delayed and now co-authored work on Galicia. She is buried in Moscow’s Donskoi Cemetery. (Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries)

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/03/18/natasha-sadomskaia/