In 1945, she met United States Navy Captain Jackson R. Tate, a deputy attaché who was stationed in Moscow, and they had an affair.

[1] When Soviet leader Joseph Stalin learned of the affair, Tate was declared an unwelcome person and expelled from Moscow, and Zoya Fyodorova was arrested and sent to Siberia for 8 years.

University of Connecticut professor Irene Kirk learned of Victoria's story in 1959 and spent years trying to find Tate in the United States.

In 1974, Tate began a campaign to convince the Soviet government to allow his daughter to travel to see him in the United States.

The story of Tate's attempts to reunite with his daughter gained worldwide attention and after a personal appeal by Leonid Brezhnev,[3] Victoria was granted permission to leave the Soviet Union, arriving in the United States in March 1975 on a three-month travel visa.