Work as a set designer at the Maly Theatre, later at the Gogol Theatre. In their tiny semi-basement apartment on Krasina Street, every Tuesday became an open house and salon, crowded with creative people: artists, poets, actors, and directors from the nearby Sovremennik Theatre. Lidia somehow managed to feed everyone - potatoes with salt, a camp recipe, as well as fashionable little canapés. She made dolls whose elegant figures contrasted beautifully with her husband’s avant-garde paintings. There were endless gatherings with artist friends in Moscow, trips to Estonia, and meetings with the Estonian bohemian circle - life was in full swing.

Then came 25 October 1970. Her husband’s sudden and tragic death.

She raised her son, continued working in the theatre, often touring across the Soviet Union. And she devoted herself faithfully to preserving Ülo Sooster’s artistic legacy: organizing exhibitions, meeting art historians, and transferring works to Estonian museums.

Then came the decision to leave the USSR together with her son’s family.

Emigration to Israel finally freed her from the constant, deeply rooted fear of the KGB and the Soviet security services...

A new country, new friends, and travels around the world - to the very countries she and her husband had dreamed of visiting back in the distant 1960s.

And finally, her most important task: to write her memoirs of Ülo. The book My Sooster was published in Tallinn in 2000 in Russian and Estonian.

Her second book, I Am from Krasina Street, combined autobiographical notes with broad, vivid sketches of Moscow’s artistic and underground life during the generation of the 1960s.

And then a quiet departure after the manuscript was completed - as though the logical final stage of a long and extraordinary life... The book was published after the author’s death.

Tenno Pent Sooster, son of Ülo and Lidia Sooster

In the photographs: Lidia, 1939; Lidia, 1977–78; Lidia with her son Tenno and granddaughter Meedi, 1992.