Maya Ulanovskaya

Maya Ulanovskaya was born in 1932 in New York City

Ulanovskaya was born in New York City in 1932 to Jewish parents who worked there as Soviet intelligence officers for the GRU. Her father was Alexander Ulanovsky and her mother was Nadezhda Ulanovskaya. She had an older brother who was killed fighting the Germans.

Her parents were arrested on political charges in 1948 and 1949. In 1949 she finished school and entered the Moscow Institute of Food Industry, where she joined an underground anti-Stalinist group. She was arrested in 1951 and in 1952 was sentenced to 25 years in a labor camp, but she was released under an amnesty in 1956.

In 1956 she married Anatoly Yakobson, and their son Alexander was born in 1959. She later worked at a library of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. She also took part in the human rights movement by copying samizdat and passing information abroad.

In 1973 she emigrated to Israel with her husband, son and mother, and she divorced in 1974. She worked at the National Library in Jerusalem and translated books into Russian from English, Hebrew and Yiddish, including works by Arthur Koestler. In 1989 the Supreme Court of the USSR rehabilitated her. She died in 2020.