Agnessa

The memoirs of Agnessa Mironova (1903–1982), recorded from her own telling by oral historian Mira Yakovenkova, open the doors for the first time into the rooms and salons of Stalin's executioners—the highest-ranking officers of the Soviet secret police during the purges of the 1930s and 1940s.

The book offers the extraordinary testimony of the wife of an ambitious NKVD officer, Sergei Mironov. Thanks to her husband's extremely rapid and successful career, she reached the very top of Stalinist high society, and after his execution, she herself later went through an NKVD prison and the Gulag. With extreme frankness, Agnessa recounts her life full of sharp turns, without regretting anything. She speaks candidly of the bright and happy days of her youth, the luxurious life, beautiful dresses, and spectacular idleness she indulged in at a time when millions were dying of starvation.

The ambiguous narrator we discover in these memoirs is an extraordinary figure, both charming and repulsive. Her memories are not just an interesting life story; they are like a powerful novel that conveys much more than any archival document ever could: daily life, human characters, and the mythology of a period that became the most terrible and bloodiest in modern Russian history.

Agnessa Mironova's oral memoirs were first published in 2008 by the Memorial organisation. They were later edited, supplemented with an apparatus of notes and an extensive foreword by historian and Memorial chairwoman Irina Shcherbakova; in this new form, they were published in 2019 by the Russian publishing house AST. We have included a shortened version of the foreword as an afterword in our edition.