The photographic portrait of Robert Rozhdestvensky’s mother was taken in the 1980s. One of the poet’s most famous poems, “Hello, Mother”, is dedicated to her:

Vera Pavlovna Fyodorova had a very challenging life. She was born in 1913 in Petrograd, and five years later, she moved with her mother and her siblings to the Altai region to escape the famine. Two years later, their father joined them, and the family moved to Barnaul. There Vera Pavlovna graduated from the Barnaul Pedagogical College and received her teaching diploma. Her first place of work was a peasant youth school in the “Smelaya razvedka” (Bold Intelligence) commune in the Kosikhinsky district. In 1931, she married Stanislav Petkevich, the biological father of Robert Rozhdestvensky, and after the wedding, she lived in the village of Kosikha, where the future poet was later born. There, Vera Pavlovna was put in charge of a Kosikhinsky high school.

Soon, Petkevich received a new work assignment, and the family moved to the Omsk region. However, in 1937 the poet’s parents separated, so Rozhdestvensky did not remember his father very well. In 1936, Vera Pavlovna entered the medical faculty of the Omsk Medical Institute, from which she graduated a few days before the onset of the Great Patriotic War. On June 26, 1941, she was already on a train, which was on its way to the front. Her son Robert, who was 9 years old at the time, was left with his grandmother.

Vera Pavlovna worked during the war as a field surgeon. She took part in the Battle of Moscow, the Battle of Kursk, the Operation Bagration, and many other military operations of those times. On the photo from the museum collection Vera Pavlovna is wearing a jacket with medals and badges for her military service — the Order of the Patriotic War, 2nd Class; The Order of the Red Star, and many others.

After the war, she married a fellow officer, Ivan Rozhdestvensky, who adopted Robert and gave him his last name. In the postwar years, she worked as an ophthalmologist, but in 1969, she was forced to leave her job to care for her seriously ill husband. In the 1970s and 1990s, she was involved in community organizing, often gave public speeches at schools and shared her story with the children. She passed away in 2001 and outlived her son by seven years.