Daughter of General Anton Denikin, one of the most prominent White Army commanders in the Russian Civil War, President Vladimir Putin granted her citizenship with today's decree, announced the Kremlin press service.
Novosti interviewed the elderly lady in Versailles, where she lives. Our reporter was the first to bring her the good tidings. Miss Denikina was overjoyed.
She said she had applied for citizenship something like two months ago. "The Russian consular officer who was filling in the papers for me said the matter usually took about six months but it surely would be much quicker with me.
"I am eighty-six now, and it occurred to me that I was born Russian and would die a Russian."
Marina Denikina was married several times-the last to Count Chiappe. She is well known as writer by her penname of Marina Gray.
The interviewer wished her a long life, to which the old lady chuckled and retorted, in her fluent Russian:
"It won't be very long, at any rate, considering my present age. It's OK with my brain, but the thing may come any day now. But I know I'll die a Russian, and I am glad."
Marina Denikina will receive her Russian passport on usual arrangements, a Russian ambassadorial officer said to Novosti. "First, an official text of the decree, complete with the President's signature, is to come from Moscow. We shall next draw her passport proceeding from it, so we don't yet know exactly just how we shall arrange the ceremony."
Marina Denikina spent her entire adult life, and a greater part of childhood, in the Russian emigre milieu in France-yet she came into this world in Russia, and she is always aware of it. She was born, 1919, in the vicinity of Krasnodar, in European Russia's south, where her father was commanding the White Army at the time.
