How a Soviet family raised a lion Valery Shustov/Sputnik; Yu. Rakhil, S. Kuleshov/TASS Imagine the scene: It is morning and a family is having breakfast - the mother, father and their children are drinking tea, but at the head of the table sits a lion, with a basin of raw meat in front of him. This is the story of how an ordinary Soviet family took in a sick lion cub and how it all ended. Lev Lvovich Berberov, his wife Nina and their two children - Eva and Roma [Roman] - lived in a spacious 100 sq. m. apartment in Soviet Baku (now the capital of Azerbaijan). Lev worked as an architect, but all his life he had loved wild animals - at different times he kept cats, dogs, parrots, hedgehogs, raccoons and snakes, and even a wolf and puma lived in his apartment for a time, according to an interview his wife Nina gave to the Argumenty i Fakty weekly.