Natalia Svetlova was born in
Moscow in 1939. Her father, Dmitry Velikorodny, a graduate of the
Institute of Red Professors, went
missing in action two years later during the
Battle of Vyazma–Bryansk. Her mother, Yekaterina Svetlova, was a graduate of the
Moscow Aviation Institute. Natalia's maternal grandfather, Ferdinand Svetlov, a member of the
Socialist Revolutionary Party who worked for the
Izvestia newspaper, was arrested a year and a half before her birth and was sent to the
Gulag. In 1962, Natalia graduated from the
MSU Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics and later worked in the mathematical statistics laboratory led by the renowned mathematician
Andrey Kolmogorov. In 1968, she met
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, becoming his personal assistant, editor, and secretary. The couple had three sons together, Yermolai (born 1970),
Ignat (born 1972), and Stepan (born 1973), before marrying officially in 1973. Natalia left the
Soviet Union with her mother and four sons following her husband's
exile. Her
Soviet citizenship was revoked by a decree of the
Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union in October 1976. It was later restored by a decree of the
president of the Soviet Union in August 1990. The Solzhenitsyns returned to
Russia in 1994. and his wife
Lyudmila at their
dacha in west Moscow, September 2000 at her husband's funeral, August 2008 After her husband's death in 2008, Natalia Solzhenitsyna became the primary custodian and executor of his literary, historical, and documentary legacy. She has publicly supported the
Russian annexation of Crimea and called for dialogue with the incumbent authorities to avoid what she termed a "new disastrous confrontation", drawing parallels to the
events of 1917. ==Awards==