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Translator's Introduction
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Translator’s Introduction This is a unique voice of a vain, flamboyant, irritating, complex, and amazing woman whose life spans most of the Soviet epoch. Agnessa, a small-‐‑town beauty, married a high-‐‑ranking NKVD operator, “Mirosha,” who was the great love of her life. Her family referred to Mirosha as an executioner—and he was. Young, restless, and naive when she met him in 1926, she reveled in the life his position provided for them. While the vast majority of Soviet citizens were living through famine and every manner of deprivation, Agnessa reveled in pleasures, amenities, unimaginable luxuries that were reserved for the highest party and secret service elite—and that, to this day, have rarely been glimpsed by the public. But just like hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens, innocent and not so innocent, Agnessa experienced the fear and then the reality of “repression.” In 1940 Mirosha was shot in the purges of high-‐‑echelon secret service and party officials. Two years later Agnessa was arrested and sentenced to five years in the Gulag. She willed herself to survive, emerging chastened (somewhat) but unbroken. She negotiated her way through the pitfalls of rehabilitation into a still dangerous post-‐‑Gulag life with a new husband who was serving his own term in the Gulag. She did everything with a spirit and a spontaneity and an irreverent gaze that will either charm or irritate the reader—or both. I love the title page of Agnessa in the original Russian. It looks like no other I have seen in a serious Russian publication. But how apt it is. AGNESSA Narrated by Agnessa Ivanovna Mironova-‐‑Korol Tales about her Youth About the Joys and Sorrows of Three Marriages About Her Boundless Love for the Well-‐‑Known Stalin Chekist Sergei Naumovich Mironov About Fabulous Resorts and Receptions in the Kremlin And… About Prisons, Prisoner Transports, Prison Camps About Life Lived on the Roller Coaster of Soviet History In 1997 I was in Moscow working for the Ford Foundation, a major supporter of Agnessa’s Russian publisher, the human rights organization Memorial. Mary McAuley, the head of the Ford Foundation’s project in xii AGNESSA Moscow, was my boss and my dear friend since our first scholarly trips to the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. She gave me a copy of Agnessa hot off the press, so to speak, and promised me that I would love it. I read it, I loved it, I was hooked. What I would have done to have a book like this for my students (not to speak of myself) in the twenty-‐‑five years that I taught Russian and Soviet history—in the bad old days when a book like this could never have been published. It probably took me five minutes after I set it down to decide that it should be translated. Agnessa is also about Mira Yakovenko, to whom Agnessa told her story— stories—in the course of a twenty-‐‑year friendship. “I did not encourage her to write out her stories,“ writes Mira. “I feared that if she knew her words were being taken down she would censor herself and would begin to pick and choose and that her spontaneous recollections would turn into something contrived and lifeless.” According to Mira’s daughter Olga, Mira had a phenomenal memory: “Each time I left Agnessa” says Mira, “I would write down what I remembered and then I augmented her own words with what I learned from (talking to) her friends and relatives.” But Mira Yakovenko, a near contemporary of Agnessa’s, had something she too wanted to say about the “roller coaster of Soviet history.” A talented listener and experienced writer, she shaped Agnessa’s narrative. This book, then, was a collaboration between two remarkable women. Mira Yakovenko was a volunteer at Memorial. I was able to talk with her a few times (too few, alas) that year and later. She died in 2005. But her daughter Olga Yakovenko answered many of the questions I would have asked Mira—and then some. Olga Yakovenko has been so generous and helpful in helping me clarify and enrich Agnessa’s story that she is part of the story as well. Among the many ways she befriended and helped me was to put me in touch with Agnessa’s adopted daughter, who is a character in the story—then and now. I spent several days with Agulya, as everyone calls her, in her St. Petersburg apartment, plied...