"For more than sixty years the truth about what happened to me so long ago has been deliberately hidden, and soon I, too, shall be a mute memory. I want to tell what I know so that one day, perhaps, the whole truth may be known." Alexandra Andreevna Voronine and her mother lived in Kharkov alone, destitute, and fearing for their lives because of World War I, revolution, civil war, and famine. When Alexandra went to work in 1921 at the office that was coordinating Russian and foreign famine relief, she met Captain Vidkun Quisling, Fridtjof Nansen's representative in the Ukraine. In 1922, at the age of seventeen, she married the man whose name became synonymous with traitor during World War II and accompanied him to Oslo. Abandoned in Paris within a year, penniless and unaware of being a pawn in a game of international intrigue, Alexandra remained under Quisling's strict control for several more years. When her tumultuous life eventually took her to China, she married George W. Yourieff, who supported her efforts to recall and analyze her years as Quisling's wife. A further tide of events saw the Yourieffs settled in California, and in 1980 they began a collaboration with the Norwegian-born historian and novelist Kirsten A. Seaver. The archives Seaver consulted in London and Oslo and at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University confirmed Alexandra's intensely personal, episodic recollections about an extraordinary life and provided the necessary connective tissue. They also revealed to Alexandra at long last the brutal story behind her lost years.

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Copyright ©2007 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction	xi
Background Sketch	1
Alexandra's Childhood and Family	15
Revolution and Civil War	29
Famine	41
PomGol and Alexandra's First Encounter with Quisling	57
An Intricate Workplace	77
The Proposal	89
Farewell to Kharkov	109
Farewell to Russia	127
Honeymoon	147
Daily Life in Oslo	163
Light and Shadow	183
The Doll in the Drawer	201
The Child	211
New Adjustments	229
Maria Enters the Picture	237
The Treasures of the Crimea	251
Together Again in Kharkov	277
“I Want to Divorce You”	289
Maria Appears	311
Muddied Waters	321
Deception's Reach	333
The Trust	347
From the Frying Pan into the Fire	361
Nikitin	381
Home to Oslo	403
Out of the Cage	417
Maria's First Few Years as Mrs. Quisling	435
Alexandra's New Life	447
Sources	473
Index	475