The saga of Gelya

Ardan Markizova was the People’s Commissar for Agriculture of the Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Province in the U.S.S.R in the 1930s. He took his daughter Engelsina Sergeyevna Markizova (Gelya) to a meeting at the Kremlin with Joseph Stalin in 1936. What occurred at the meeting would change Gelya and her family’s life for better and for worse. […]