Maria Osten

[1] Her 1935 book Hubert in Wonderland is about her adoption, with Pravda journalist Mikhail Koltsov, of a 12-year-old boy who was the son of a German Communist from the Saar region of Germany.

The boy was toured all around the country and taken to visit Marshals Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Semyon Budyonny in the Kremlin.

[citation needed] The family's fate, however, changed, when Joseph Stalin began to purge the party ranks.

Koltsov was arrested in December 1938 following a denunciation filed by André Marty and executed about a year later, and the book disappeared from circulation.

He tried to return to Germany, but was unable to, dying in 1959 in a hospital in Simferopol after a poorly-performed operation for appendicitis.