Posted on October 7, 2009 - by Venik

Miliband dynasty: long-lost Russian relative calls Ed on air

It was supposed to be about enlisting Russia’s help on climate change, and possibly sneaking a peak at the Kremlin and other historic sights.

But Ed Miliband’s first-ever trip to Russia ended with the cabinet minister discovering that he had a long-lost relative – an 87-year-old great-great-aunt called Sofia. Milband, the climate change secretary, gave an interview on Tuesday to the opposition Moscow radio station Ekho Moskvy. Towards the end of the show, a caller phoned up and announced in breathless Russian: “I am Sofia Davidovna Miliband. I am your relative. I am the only one left.’

Staff at the station swiftly confirmed that the elderly Miliband was not a hoax caller but a respected Russian academic and orientalist, with several scholarly publications to her name. The pair then puzzled out that Miliband’s great-great-grandfather was the brother of Sofia’s grandfather, who were both born in the Jewish quarter in Warsaw.

Miliband dropped in later that evening to his great-great-aunt’s flat in Moscow for a cup of tea. The pair spent an hour and a half poring over family trees and black-and-white photographs.

Miliband’s grandfather Samuel left Poland and headed west. His father, the Marxist political theorist Ralph Miliband, was born in Belgium but fled to Britain. Sofia Miliband’s family, meanwhile, set off in the other direction and settled in Moscow, where she was born.

Yesterday Miliband described his great-great-aunt as an “amazing woman” and said that meeting her had been a “magical experience. I did sort of vaguely know when I was a kid about her existence,” he told BBC Radio 4′s PM programme. “The way I knew about it, if you look on a library computer her name pops up.”

He added: “I’ve always slightly wondered about her ever since she was a kid. It was just amazing for me to come face to face with her and she really thought it was a great thing.’

Miliband said that she was not especially impressed by his cabinet minister rank, nor by that of his older brother, foreign secretary David Miliband, who is due to travel to Moscow next month and will also meet her, Echo Moskvy reported.

Sofia told the station she had stumbled across her British relatives after chancing on one of Ralph Miliband’s books in a Leningrad library. She has no children of her own, she said. “I’ve got no descendants, no dynasty. I didn’t have anybody. But both David and Ed have sons, so now I have lots of descendants.”

During his three-day trip to Moscow Miliband signed a memorandum of understanding with his Russian counterpart, gave a speech to students from Moscow state university, and had a convivial dinner with British journalists, including the Guardian. He refused to say whether he harboured prime ministerial ambitions.

Original article

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