The porcelain figurines Zhorik claims descended to him are dated, in his telling, to Russia’s storming of the Ottoman fortress of Ochakov in December 1788 — a bloody, decisive victory in the Russo-Turkish War of 1787–1792 led by Prince Grigory Potemkin, with a young Mikhail Kutuzov among the officers wounded in the assault. The fall of Ochakov was celebrated across the Russian Empire and inspired Gavrila Derzhavin’s famous ode «On the Capture of Ochakov,» along with a wave of commemorative decorative arts — porcelain figurines, medals, and snuffboxes — produced by the Imperial Porcelain Factory and private workshops to mark the victory. By the twentieth century, genuine 18th-century commemorative porcelain of this kind had become a serious collector’s item, exactly the sort of thing an antique dealer on the Arbat might be asked, skeptically, to appraise.