In Quisling's Shadow

‘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