Remarkable woman, remarkable man: Antonina Pirozhkova, eminent Russian civil engineer and widow of the great Russian Jewish playwright and short-story writer Isaac Babel, has died at age 101. So much life accorded to her; so little to him: He was executed at age 45 by Stalin's OGPU (KGB under another name) in 1940, falsely accused of spying for the French. (In the photo above, they are shown together in 1936.) Even at the end, Babel had a devil-may-care attitude most suitable for a Russian writer of his era. Pirozhkova recalled "riding to the Lubyanka, [OGPU] headquarters, in a car with two [OGPU] thugs on the night of Babel’s arrest. 'I could not say a single word,' she wrote. 'Babel asked the secret policeman sitting next to him, "So, I guess you don’t get much sleep, do you?" And he even laughed.”

As the only female subway engineer in the Soviet Union, she later designed some of Moscow's most famous subway stations. In 1996 she emigrated Stateside. She died in Sarasota, Florida, far from the Lubyanka.