Penny Jordan, British romantic novelist, died she was 65.

Penny Halsall, née Penelope Jones better known by her pen name of Penny Jordan, was a best-selling and prolific English writer of over 200 romance novels died he was 65.. She started writing regency romances as Caroline Courtney, and wrote contemporary romances as Penny Jordan and historical romances as Annie Groves (her mother's maiden name). She had also signed novels as Melinda Wright and Lydia Hitchcock. Her books have sold over 70 million copies worldwide^[2] and have been translated into many languages.
Widowed, she lived in Nantwich, Cheshire, England, surrounded by her pets.^[3]

^{(24 November 1946 – 31 December 2011)} 

Personal life

Penelope "Penny" Jones was born on 24 November 1946 in Preston, Lancashire, England, and weighed about eight pounds. She was the first child of Anthony Winn Jones, who died aged 85, and his wife, Margaret Louise Groves Jones, 86,^[1] who passed to Jones her Scots Celtic heritage.^[3] She has a brother, Anthony Jones, and a sister, Prudence "Pru" Jones.
She had been a keen reader from childhood. Her mother would leave her in the children's section of the local library while she changed her father's library books.^[3] Her story-telling career began at the age of eight when she began telling original bedtime stories to her younger sister.^[4]
Her all-time favourite books were those of Jane Austen, Dorothy Dunnett, Catherine Cookson, Georgette Heyer, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare's plays and poetry and the Bible.^[5] After reading a serialised Mills & Boon book in a woman's magazine, she fell in love with the hero. Jones was eleven and she quickly became an avid fan.^[4]
Jones left grammar school in Rochdale with O-Levels in English Language, English Literature and Geography.^[1] In her early days, she spent fourteen years working as a shorthand typist in Manchester.
Jones married Steve Halsall, an accountant and "lovely man", who smoked and drank too heavily, and suffered oral cancer with bravery and dignity.^[1] They did not have children, but she had a bakers dozen of assorted godchildren nieces and nephews.^[3]
Widowed, Jordan wrote from an office in her mock Tudor house in Nantwich, Cheshire, a home that she shared with her dog, Sheba, and cat, Posh.
Jordan ran a writing group where she helped other aspiring writers to develop their craft, pointing them to agents and publishers who might be interested in their work. She was also active in women's charities in her native England.
Jordan died of cancer on 31 December 2011.^[6]

Writing career

By her early twenties, Jordan was writing for herself, but her writing career began in earnest when she was 30, encouraged and supported by her husband. He bought her, at a time when he could ill afford it, the small electric typewriter on which she typed her first books.^[3]
She entered a competition run by the Romantic Novelists' Association. Although she did not win, an agent, who was looking for a new-style Georgette Heyer, contacted the R.N.A.^[1]
In March 1979, she published her first novel under the pseudonym Caroline Courtney, Duchess in Disguise, the same year she published other 4 books. Under this penname she published 25 regency romances until 1986. Her novels was published by different editorials: Arlington Books, Warner Books, G.K. Hall, Corgi Books, Prior...
From 1981 to 1983, she signed 3 air-hostess romps as Melinda Wright and 2 thrillers as Lydia Hitchcock, published by Columbine House.^[1]

In 1981, Mills & Boon accepted her first novel for them, Falcon's Prey signed as Penny Jordan. Since then, almost 70 million copies of her 167 Mills & Boon (or Harlequin) novels have been sold worldwide.^[1]
Some of Penny Jordan's novels are part of series, created by her or in collaboration with other authors. Her favourite Penny Jordan's Series is The Perfect Crightons.^[5] The surname for Crighton family came from her late mother in law as it was her family name prior to her marriage. The Crighton live in the fictional town Haslewich, inspired in Nantwich, the Hasle is a play on her own married surname.^[7]

Ellie Price as Annie Groves, 2003/08

From 2003, she returned to writing historical novels as Annie Groves (she adopted her mother's maiden-name^[1]). Jordan gained much of her inspiration from human interest stories in the news as well as her own family history. She adapted a story told by her grandmother Elsie Jones in Ellie Pride.^[2] This novel also began a family saga.



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Alfonso Gómez-Lobo, Chilean-born American academic, professor of metaphysics and moral philosophy (Georgetown University), died he was 71.

Alfonso Gómez-Lobo was a professor of metaphysics and moral philosophy at Georgetown University known for his critical evaluations of modern day ethics died he was 71..^[1] He was a member of The President's Council on Bioethics of USA. He was born in Viña del Mar, Chile.

(January 1, 1940 – December 31, 2011)

Born in Chile in 1940, Gomez-Lobo studied at the Catholic University of Valparaiso in Santiago, Chile, the University of Athens in Greece and three German universities: the University of Tübingen, the University of Munich and the University of Heidelberg.^[1] He completed his PhD in Munich in Philosophy, Classic and Ancient History in 1966, graduating magna cum laude. He then went on to teach at universities in Valparaiso, Puerto Rico, and finally at Penn State before joining with Georgetown University in 1977.^[1]
He has received a number of awards and several research fellowships, including one from the Guggenheim Foundation.^[1] His work translating Ancient Greek texts into Spanish has also received considerable attention.^[1]

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Murray Barnes, Australian soccer player (Sydney Hakoah), national captain (1980–1981), died he was 57.

Murray Barnes was an Australian football (soccer) player died he was 57.. Barnes played for the Australian team for six years, captaining the team nine times.

(16 January 1954 – 31 December 2011)

Playing career

Club career

Barnes played for a number of junior soccer clubs including Northern Tigers and Kissing Point in New South Wales.^[1][2] He also spent a year with the youth team of English club Leeds United.^[3] During his senior club career Barnes played for Sydney Hakoah (later known as Sydney City Soccer Club) in the New South Wales State League and in the National Soccer League.^[4]

International career

He played 32 full international games for the national side scoring six goals.^[5][6] He was captain of the Socceroos for nine matches between 1978 and 1981 including World Cup qualifiers against New Zealand, Fiji, Chinese Taipei and Indonesia.^[5][7]

Death

Murray died on 31 December 2011, at the age of 57.^[8]

Honours

Barnes has received the Football Hall of Fame (Australia), Award of Distinction. In June 2008, Football Federation Australia created the Socceroo Club made up of former national team members. Barnes was announced as a founding member.^[9]


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Eva Zeisel, Hungarian-born American ceramic artist and designer, died she was 105.

Eva Striker Zeisel^[2] was a Hungarian-born American industrial designer known for her work with ceramics, primarily from the period after she immigrated to the United States died she was 105.. Her forms are often abstractions of the natural world and human relationships.^[4] Work from throughout her prodigious career is included in important museum collections across the world. Zeisel declared herself a "maker of useful things".^[4]

^{(born Éva Amália Striker,[3] November 13, 1906 – December 30, 2011)}

Early life and family

She was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1906^[5] to a wealthy, highly educated assimilated Jewish family. Her mother, Laura Polanyi Striker, a historian, was the first woman to get a PhD from the University of Budapest. Laura's work on Captain John Smith's adventures in Hungary added fundamentally to our understanding and appreciation of his reliability as a narrator. Laura's brothers, Karl Polanyi, the sociologist and economist, and Michael Polanyi, the physical chemist and philosopher of science, are also very well known.^[6] Despite her family's intellectual prominence in the field of science, Eva Striker always felt a deep attraction towards art. At 17, Zeisel entered Budapest's Magyar Képzőművészeti Akadémia (Hungarian Royal Academy of Fine Arts)^[7] as a painter.^[5] However, to support her painting, she eventually decided to pursue a more practical profession and apprenticed herself to Jakob Karapancsik, the last pottery master in the medieval guild system. From him she learned ceramics from the ground up. After graduating as a journeyman she found work with German ceramic manufacturers.^[5]

Early career, imprisonment, and emigration

In 1928 Eva Striker became the designer for the Schramberger Majolikafabrik in the Black Forest region of Germany where she worked for about two years creating many playfully geometric designs for dinnerware, tea sets, vases, inkwells and other ceramic items. Her designs at Schramberg were largely influenced by modern architecture. In addition, she had just learned to draft with compass and ruler and was proud to put them to use. In 1930, Eva moved to Berlin, designing for the Carstens factories.
After almost two years of a glamorous life among intellectuals and artists in decadent Berlin, Eva decided to visit Russia at the age of 26 (1932).^[5] She stayed for 5 years.
At the age of 29, after several jobs in the Russian ceramics industry—inspecting factories in the Ukraine as well as designing for the Lomonosov^[5] and Dulevo factories —Zeisel was named artistic director of the Russian China and Glass industry. On May 26, 1936, while living in Moscow, Zeisel was arrested. She had been falsely accused of participating in an assassination plot against Joseph Stalin.^[5] She was held in prison for 16 months, 12 of which were spent in solitary confinement.^[4] In September, 1937, Zeisel was expelled and deported to Vienna, Austria. Some of her prison experiences form the basis for Darkness at Noon, the well known anti-Stalinist novel written by a childhood friend, Arthur Koestler.^[5] It was while in Vienna that Zeisel re-established contact with her future husband Hans Zeisel, later a noted legal scholar, statistician, and professor at The University of Chicago. A few months after her arrival in Vienna the Nazis invaded, and Eva took the last train out. She and Hans met up in England where they married and sailed for the U.S. with $67 between them.

Later career to present day

Zeisel's career in design continued to develop in the United States. In addition to designing for companies such as Hall China, Rosenthal China, Castleton China, Western Stoneware, Federal Glass, Heisey Glass and Red Wing Pottery, Zeisel developed and taught the first course in Ceramics for Industry at the Pratt Institute in New York.^[5] In 1946, Zeisel was given her first one-woman show "Eva Zeisel: Designer for Industry", at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Zeisel stopped designing during the 1960s and 1970s, to work on American history writing projects, returning to work in the 1980s.^[8] Many of her recent designs have found the same success as her earlier designs. Zeisel’s recent designs have included porcelain, crystal and limited-edition prints for KleinReid, glasses and giftware for Nambé, a teakettle for Chantal, furniture and gift-ware for Eva Zeisel Originals, rugs for The Rug Company, one of Crate and Barrel’s best selling dinner services "Classic-Century" and a coffee table and stoneware / dinnerware set for Design Within Reach,.^[9] "Classic-Century" is an updated version of the Hallcraft sets, most of the pieces made from the original molds (dishwasher safe).
In addition, a bone china tea set, designed in 2000, is being manufactured by the Lomonosov Porcelain factory in St. Petersburg, Russia, her new designs for a line of glass lamps (pendant, wall and table lamps) was introduced in 2012 by Leucos USA, and in 2013 her designs for dimensional wall tiles and space dividers will be launched by Cumulus Design Group.
Eva released two designs in 2010 through EvaZeiselOriginals.com: Eva Zeisel Lounge Chair and Eva Zeisel Salt & Pepper Shakers. The Lounge Chair was featured in the February 2010 issue of O Magazine and The S&P shakers were featured in the April 2010 issues of O Magazine.
Reproduction of earlier designs have been sold at MoMa, Brooklyn Museum and Neue Gallery, as well as other museum gift shops.
Eva Zeisel’s designs are made for use. The inspiration for her sensuous forms often comes from the curves of the human body. Zeisel’s more organic approach to modernism most likely comes as a reaction to the Bauhaus aesthetics that were popular at the time of her early training. Her sense of form and color, as well as her use of bird themes, show influence from the Hungarian folk arts she grew up with.^[9] Most of Zeisel’s designs, whether in wood, metal, glass, plastic or ceramics, are designed in family groups. Many of her designs nest together creating modular designs that also function to save space.
Zeisel describes her designs in a New York Sun article: “I don’t create angular things. I’m a more circular person—it’s more my character….even the air between my hands is round.” ^[10]
Among her most collected shapes are the eccentric, biomorphic "Town and Country" dishes, produced by Red Wing Pottery, in 1947.^[11] This set includes the iconic "mother and child" salt and pepper shakers.

Personal life

Eva raised two children with Hans: son, John Zeisel and daughter, Jean Richards. Jean, was born in 1940 and John was born in 1944. In the documentary Throwing Curves: Eva Zeisel, John and Jean comment on their parents' tempestuous relationship in the 1940s and 50s when the children were young. In the film John claims, that both Hans and Eva had dominant personalities, and that this often led to "a collision of forcefields".^[12]

Museums and exhibitions

Zeisel’s works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum; Brooklyn Museum; New-York Historical Society, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the British Museum;The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Bröhan Museum, Germany; as well as Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta and Milwaukee museums and others in the US and abroad.
In the 1980s a 50 year retrospective exhibit of her work organized by Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the Smithsonian Institution traveled through the US, Europe and Russia. In 2004, a significant retrospective exhibition "Eva Zeisel: The Playful Search for Beauty" was organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art, which subsequently traveled to the Milwaukee Art Museum, the High Museum, Atlanta, and the Hillwood Museum & Gardens, Washington D.C.
On December 10, 2006, The Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park, San Diego, opened a major centenary retrospective exhibit "Eva Zeisel: Extraordinary Designer at 100", showing her designs from Schramberg (1928) through to current designs for Nambe, Chantal, Eva Zeisel Originals and others (2006). The show ran through August 12, 2007. In the same year, the Pratt Institute Gallery also organized an Exhibition celebrating her centenary.

Awards

In 2005, Zeisel won the Lifetime Achievement award from the Cooper-Hewett National Design Museum.^[13] She has also received the two highest civilian awards from the Hungarian government, as well as the Pratt Legends award and awards from the Industrial Designers Society of America and Alfred University. She is an honorary member of the Royal Society of Industrial Designers, and has received honorary degrees from Parsons (New School), Rhode Island School of Design, the Royal College of Art, and the Hungarian University of the Arts.

Publications

• Eva Zeisel on Design by Eva Zeisel, Overlook Press 2004
• Eva Zeisel: The Playful Search for Beauty by Lucie Young, Chronicle Books 2003
• Eva Zeisel, Designer for Industry, 1984. (Out of print. Available through EvaZeiselForum)
• Eva Zeisel: Throwing Curves 2002 (documentary film, Canobie Films, Director: Jyll Johnstone
• Regular Bulletins from EvaZeiselForum
• Available as enhanced iBook (iPad, iPhone, iPod: including photos, audio and video); also for Kindle: Eva Zeisel: A Soviet Prison Memoir."

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Mirko Tremaglia, Italian politician, Minister without portfolio (2001–2006), died he was 85.

Mirko Tremaglia  was an Italian politician died he was 85..

(17 November 1926 – 30 December 2011)

He was a Minister without portfolio with specific responsibility for Italians abroad from 2001 to 2006.^[1][2] As a young man he fought for Italy in World War II. He was also a co-founder of the Italian Social Movement, and a former leader of the National Alliance. Tremaglia died at his home in Bergamo in northern Italy, after a long illness (Parkinson's disease)^[3]


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Eleanor Ross Taylor, American poet, died she was 91.

Eleanor Ross Taylor was an American poet who published six collections of verse from 1960 to 2009 died she was 91..^[1][2][3] Her work received little recognition until 1998, but thereafter received several major poetry prizes. Describing her most recent poetry collection, Kevin Prufer writes, "I cannot imagine the serious reader — poet or not — who could leave Captive Voices unmoved by the work of this supremely gifted poet who skips so nimbly around our sadnesses and fears, never directly addressing them, suggesting, instead, their complex resistance to summary."^[4]

^{(June 30, 1920 – December 30, 2011)}

Biography

Eleanor Ross was born in rural North Carolina in 1920. She enrolled at the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina, now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she studied with the poets Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon.^[5] She graduated in 1940, and worked for a time as a high school English teacher. With the recommendation from Allen Tate, she was admitted to Vanderbilt University for master's work with Donald Davidson. There in 1943 she met Peter Taylor, whom she married after a six-week courtship, having broken off her engagement to another man.^[1][2] Panthea Reid has written of their marriage, "Like most women of her generation, Eleanor Ross assumed that marriage and a career were incompatible. Despite precocious beginnings, therefore, Eleanor Ross largely ceased to write when she married the major short story writer and novelist, Peter Taylor. Perhaps she did not want to compete with her husband; certainly she was too busy to follow a dedicated writing regime. She served as wife, mother, housekeeper, hostess, letter-writer, and also family packer, as Peter Taylor nomadically moved from one to another writer-in-residence post."^[6]

Poetry

In the 1950s, Peter Taylor was teaching at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, along with the poet Randall Jarrell. Eleanor Taylor had been writing poems for some time, and Jarrell became her critic and sponsor.^[5] In 1960, her first poetry collection, A Wilderness of Ladies, was published; Panthea Reid has speculated that Jarrell "probably was behind the publication of Eleanor Taylor's first collection of poems",^[6] and Jarrell wrote an introduction for the volume.^[7] This first volume received a middling review from Geoffrey Hartman, who wrote, "That every poem is like to every other is not a fault, at least not in this volume. It is the price Mrs. Taylor pays for achieving a style with her first book. There is, miraculously, no pastiche. The fault I do find is related to her wish to write directly from the middle of other minds."^[8]
In 1972, her second book of poetry, Welcome Eumenides, was published by George Braziller, Inc.; Richard Howard, a poet who was then editing the Braziller poetry series, wrote a foreword for the volume.^[9] In her New York Times review, the poet Adrienne Rich commented that, "What I find compelling in the poems of Eleanor Taylor, besides the authority and originality of her language, is the underlying sense of how the conflicts of imaginative and intelligent women have driven them on, lashed them into genius or madness, ...".^[10]
Taylor's third collection, New and Selected Poems (1983), was published by a small press run by Stuart T. Wright,^[11] and apparently received very little distribution.^[12] Her next collection, Days Going, Days Coming Back (1991), was chosen by Dave Smith for the University of Utah Press poetry series. In his review of this volume, Richard Howard summarized Taylor's poetry, "Eleanor Ross Taylor devised, in her startling first poems over thirty years ago, and practices still, for all the modesty of her address, a tough modernist poetics of fragmentation and erasure, the verse rarely indulging in recurrent pattern or recognizable figure, the lines usually short and sharp in their resonance, gists and surds of a discourse allusive to the songs and sayings of a largely southern community dispersed among Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida and readiest (or at least, most eloquent) to speak in the tongues of remembered or imagined Others."^[12]
Dave Smith subsequently selected both of Taylor's ensuing collections, Late Leisure: Poems (1999) and Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008 (2009), for the "Southern Messenger" poetry series of the Louisiana State University Press.^[13]

Affinities and influences

Taylor's originality has been emphasized by several critics writing of her work; thus Lynn Emanuel writes of Captive Voices, "It is a complex and unexpected convergence of the influences of modernism and a wholly original, native genius. Reading it one suddenly realizes that one is in the presence of an American classic."^[14] In a 2002 interview with Taylor, Susan Settlemyre Williams proposed Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop as possible influences, but Taylor herself acknowledged Edna St. Vincent Millay as the poet she had read enthusiastically as a student, and who had "made me feel that poetry was contemporary and could relate to me right now, in the way that you know that all those wonderful heroines of poetry and heroes do, ...".^[5]

Taylor's "southernness"

Erika Howsare discerns a regional quality to Taylor's verse. She associates Taylor with "a literary circle that includes figures such as Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Robert Penn Warren" and writes, "The southernness of her background makes her tend to rein in her formidable intellect and biting wit with an uneasy deference to form and convention. This tension may be witnessed in her use of both metrical and nonmetrical lines. Just when the organization of her poems seems on the verge of wavering, she returns to the restraint with which most of them begin."^[15]
Eric Gudas writes, "The importance of region in Taylor's work simply cannot be overstated. These poems are grounded in the consciousness of a woman whose familiarity with Southern history, culture, and landscape is profound."^[16] Gudas discerns a tension that "has everything to do with the history of white women in the male-dominated, white supremacist South; and it is embodied in the music and rhythms of the poems, wherein a restrained, almost genteel tone is shot through with "a passion always threatening to go undisciplined with the characteristic intensity of her native South" (in the aptly worded jacket copy of her last book)." He illustrates his point with a close reading of Taylor's poem, "Retired Pilot Watches Plane":

...the speaker observes her suburban neighbor on an early morning dog-walk "…stopped / midstreet looking up / The early NY flight / slowing for coming in:"

His head

turning with the plane a maze

of speeds and altitudes?

controls he is unleashing

there in the cockpit?

Half dizzy

I come down to

my yard yews my late

husband planted East and color

raying far no line between

earth's atmosphere

black space no oxygen

Critical studies

Jean Valentine edited a collection of essays about Taylor's poetry that was published in 2001.^[17] Eric Gudas has written a doctoral dissertation about Taylor's life and poetry, and is working on a related book.^[18][19]

Awards

In 1998, she was awarded the Shelley Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America, which honors one or two poets each year "with reference to genius and need". She received the 2000 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, which honors a "substantial and distinguished career". In 2009, she was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers and was awarded the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize. In March 2010, her volume Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008 received the William Carlos Williams Award for the year's best volume of poetry from a small or a university press. On April 13, 2010 the Poetry Foundation announced that Taylor would receive the 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which honors poets whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition"; the prize was $100,000.^[20]

Family

Eleanor and Peter Taylor had two children, Katherine Baird (b. 1947) and Peter Ross (b. 1955). Peter Taylor died in 1994. Peter Ross Taylor is a poet himself; Katherine Baird Taylor died in 2001. After many years living in Charlottesville, Virginia, Eleanor Ross Taylor last resided in Falls Church, Virginia.^[21][20]

Poetry collections

• Taylor, Eleanor Ross; Jarrell, Randall (1960). Wilderness of Ladies. New York: McDowell, Obolensky.
• Taylor, Eleanor Ross; Howard, Richard (1972). Welcome Eumenides. George Braziller. ISBN 978-0-8076-0633-9.
• Taylor, Eleanor Ross (1983). New and Selected Poems. Winston-Salem: Stuart Wright Publishers. ISBN 978-0-913773-02-4.
• Taylor, Eleanor Ross (1991). Days Going/Days Coming Back. University of Utah Press. ISBN 978-0-87480-364-8.
• Taylor, Eleanor Ross (1999). Late Leisure: Poems. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-2355-3.
• Taylor, Eleanor Ross; Voigt, Ellen Bryant (2009). Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-3412-2.

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Vasily Starodubtsev, Russian politician, Governor of Tula Oblast (1997–2005), member of the Gang of Eight (1991), died he was 80.

Vasily Alexandrovich Starodubtsev ^[1] was a Soviet/Russian politician and governor of Tula Oblast from 1997 to 2005 died he was 80..^[2][3] He was also one of the GKChP members during the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt^[2] and was a leader of the Agrarian Party of Russia.

(Russian: Василий Александрович Стародубцев) (December 25, 1931, Volovchik village, Lipetsk Oblast - December 30, 2011, Novomoskovsk, Tula Oblast)

Starodubtsev graduated from Voronezh Agricultural Institute and All-USSR Correspondence Agricultural Institute. For many years he was a chairman of kolkhoz in Novomoskovsk district. Among his awards were Hero of Socialist Labour title, three Orders of Lenin, USSR State Prize, Order of the October Revolution, Order of the Badge of Honour. He had Candidate of Sciences degree in agriculture and was a corresponding member of VASKhNIL.
Starodubtsev was a member of the Federation Council of Russia (1993–96; also in 1997–2001 as a region governor) and of the State Duma (2007–11).
Starodubtsev was a member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.


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