The lioness Kinuli, who lived in a Moscow communal flat with writer Vera Chaplina

In the 1930s everyone knew the story of the lioness from the communal flat at 16 Bolshaya Dmitrovka, and not only in the USSR. Vera Chaplina, a member of staff at the Moscow Zoo and a writer of animal stories, took home a lion cub whose mother had rejected her. She named the little girl Kinuli, because, oddly enough, she had been "kinuli", that is, abandoned. For a year the lioness lived in a communal flat with her human mother Vera and her animal mother, a Shetland sheepdog called Peri, who nursed the cub, licked her clean and kept her warm. From her puppyhood Kinuli became an international celebrity: the foremost photographers took her picture, the world press wrote about her and her foster mother, and films were made. Kinuli lived only 10 years, a very short span for a lioness in captivity, and the circumstances of her death remain unclear; all that is known is that they were connected with a tragic accident that occurred during Vera Chaplina's absence