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Family

Namin’s father, Alexei Mikoyan (1925 - 1986), was a World War II military pilot. He was entrusted to lead the show of fighter squadron during the Victory Parades on the Red Square.  Wounded in the War and awarded a hero’s status, he flew the MIGs designed by Namin’s great-uncle and remained in the military for the duration of his life.

Nami Mikoyan, Namin’s mother, was a classical musician educated at the Moscow Conservatory where she became friends with many of Russia’s great performers and composers, including Khachaturian, Schnittke, Shostakovich and Oistrakh, among many others.  Later a journalist and writer, she has just published With My Own Eyes, an autobiographical, first-hand glimpse into the four regimes she and her illustrious family lived through.

His grandfather, Anastas Mikoyan (1895 – 1978), whose tenure in Soviet government is legendary and unmatched in terms of its longevity, was President of the Soviet Union in the 1960s. He was a member of Politburo in the regimes of Lenin, Stalin, Khruschev and Brezhnev, rising to international prominence for his pivotal role in the resolution of the Indonesian missile crisis and Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Anastas Mikoyan is one of the Soviet Union’s few elite political figures to have retained a positive image to this day, despite the rigors of archival exposure and scrutiny.  TIME Magazine called him “the world’s best crisis manager” putting his portrait on the cover. He was a personal friend of John Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Ernst Hemingway, and Pablo Picasso, and many other world celebrities.

Namin’s great-uncle, Artiom Mikoyan (1905 - 1970), invented the MIG fighter jet, one of the most lethal weapons in the Soviet arsenal.


Namin's maternal grandmother, Ksenia Priklonskaya (1909 - 1988), descends from the noble stem, related to the noble families of the Venevitinovs’ and Pushkins’.