Leigh is a Barfly, a regular posting member of Baen's Bar, in good standing. Her background, as it obvious from the story, is in Russian history and literature. This story very much met the standards I was looking for; it took a different approach on life during the invasion and it dealt with areas with which most people are unfamiliar.
It's also a cracking good yarn.
Stalin had an intense dislike of travel, and for many years he avoided visiting his mother, although she begged him to come. Only when she was very old and near death did he make the trip to Tbilisi, where his henchman Beria had installed her in the old viceroy's palace. The aging woman was delighted to see her famous son once more.
As their visit drew to a close, she had one question she wanted to ask him. "Tell me, Soso," (even after all these years she still called him by that Georgian diminutive of his given name), "what exactly are you?"
"You remember the tsar. Well, I am like the tsar."
Ekaterina Dzhugashvili smiled and shook her head. "You'd have done better to have become a priest."