In Quisling's Shadow: The Memoirs of Vidkun Quisling's First Wife, Alexandra

Yourieff.)

Introduction

Alexandra Andreevna Voronine’s memoirs reflect a dramatic life in which tragedy, betrayal, and misunderstanding were softened by optimism and moments of great happiness. Her soul-searching began more than seventy years ago in an effort to understand her marriage to Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian whose name became synonymous with traitor during the Second World War, but whose early career included Ukrainian relief work as Fridtjof Nansen’s trusted assistant. It was in this early period (1922–24) that Quisling met, married, and abandoned Alexandra, a girl as petite as he was tall and sturdy, and eighteen years his junior.

She wanted to comprehend what had brought them together and what had caused them to become so painfully separated, for if she could discover what had gone wrong, she might avoid similar mistakes in the future. Far from bringing clarity and understanding, however, Alexandra’s quest led only to greater confusion when she realized that she had been a pawn in a complicated game of politics and personal ambition. Trying to uncover the purpose of that game became as important as understanding both the feelings she and Quisling had brought to their marriage and the reasons he had chosen Maria Vasilievna Paseshnikova over her.

Making her story known became more urgent to Alexandra after Maria Quisling’s death in Oslo on January 17, 1980. The subsequent auction of Maria’s possessions sharpened the Norwegians’ interest in Vidkun Quisling and his private life, including his relationships with Alexandra and Maria. Maria is generally regarded as Quisling’s widow, although no record of their marriage exists. For Alexandra, the closing of Maria’s estate marked the end of her many efforts to retrieve personal belongings from Erling Skjalgssonsgate 26, and the confused and confusing information provided by the daily press made it seem even more important to let the public, especially the Norwegians, know about her relationship with Maria and Vidkun.

It was Alexandra’s wish to set the record straight about those years in Vidkun Quisling’s life, which he and Maria evidently had been most eager to erase from the public record. The publication later, in 1980, of Maria Quislings Dagbok og andre etterlatte papirer (Maria Quisling’s Diary and other posthumous papers), edited by Øistein Parmann, did nothing to tear the web of mystery and contradictions with which Maria and Vidkun had surrounded themselves. It was also in 1980 that I was asked, in my capacity as an historian and novelist, to help Alexandra and her husband, W. George Yourieff, with her memoirs. I agreed because I fully shared Alexandra’s wish to shed new light on Quisling’s controversial personality and because I was impressed with the source material she and her husband laid before me. Mere chance had led to my being asked to help.

At the time of Maria’s death, I was still teaching Norwegian at Stanford University, although I had long since resumed my research into early voyages of discovery in the North Atlantic. In addition, I was quite busy as a translator because everyone who called the University asking for a Norwegian language specialist was referred to me. That was also the case when George Yourieff needed translation of some Norwegian articles about Maria’s estate. He never said why he was interested in Vidkun Quisling’s widow and her possessions, and I naturally did not ask, although I got along very well with this exquisitely courteous and well-dressed Russian.

One day toward the end of 1980, he called and asked if I had time to translate the preface of a newly published book and to give him an oral report on the rest of the work’s contents. When he handed me the book, which turned out to be Maria Quislings Dagbok og andre etterlatte papirer, he asked me somewhat hesitantly to pay special attention to any statements concerning the first Mrs. Quisling. When I told him I’d had no idea that Maria had had a predecessor, he replied that there were many who did not know that!

Toppen Bech knew it, however, when she was the editor of the Norwegian weekly Alle Kvinner (All Women), and she saw to it that the magazine, in 1975, published three articles largely based on interviews with Alexandra in her California home. Maria refused to be interviewed and was, according to Øistein Parmann’s preface in Maria Quislings Dagbok, very upset by what Alle Kvinner had published. Parmann, nevertheless, made it clear that there is no doubt that Quisling already was married to Alexandra when Maria was married to Quisling in 1923, and that we are dealing with a complicated story. Then he wrote: Alexandra has written her autobiography, and I have had the opportunity to read it in manuscript. As a book it would not have found a market here in Norway. Aside from the chapters about her marriage to Quisling, it concerns her career as a dancer and painter. Her story about falling in love with and marrying Quisling nevertheless seems believable. (pp. 18–19)

Neither Parmann nor anyone else in Norway, with the exception of Alexandra’s Norwegian lawyer Lars Tobiassen, who read the preliminary manuscript a good while after Maria Quisling’s Diary was published, has had access to Alexandra’s memoirs either before or after 1980. At the time Parmann claimed he had read the manuscript, her recollections lay well preserved in a bank box here in the U.S., its components not yet pulled together. The only information in Maria Quislings Dagbok about Alexandra’s marriage to Quisling that could be traced directly back to Alexandra came from what had been published in Alle Kvinner. What she had told Alle Kvinner reporter Lars Torekull on that occasion was true, but it was by no means the whole story. This she wanted to tell in her own way, in her own time.

Naturally, I knew nothing of all this when I first read Maria Quislings Dagbok. When I called George Yourieff to say that he could pick up my translation of the preface and hear my report on the rest of the book, I told him what I thought about the work and gave him a general idea of Maria’s brief comments regarding Alexandra. After a long pause at the other end of the line, he told me: I have proof that Maria is lying.

Those were strong words, so when he came to pick up the material, I cautiously reminded him that Parmann claimed to have read the memoirs of Quisling’s first wife. He cannot have, said Mr. Yourieff curtly. He sat there for a while deep in thought before continuing: We need someone who can help us write a book on this topic. I hope you are willing to take part in this.

I replied truthfully that, in the first place, I already had too much to do and, in the second place, this was not a subject I knew much about—I had not even known that Quisling had been married when he took up with Maria!

We have more than enough material, he said gravely. After another long pause, he added: The first Mrs. Quisling is my wife.

Who could resist such a challenge?

At that point, Alexandra’s recollections about Quisling consisted of a large collection of written notes and tape recordings in English and Russian. Her husband’s translations, transcriptions, and registers constituted an additional several hundred pages. As I worked my way through them, I discovered that many episodes were described repeatedly, often from slightly different angles, but always with identical core and dialogue. Naturally, I asked her how she could remember who had said what so many years ago. She gave me a long look and replied:

You must remember that I had nothing to do during that first period [i.e., after Quisling had abandoned her] than to relive these episodes time after time in my head. I had no books or other reading matter, and I was completely alone in a strange place.

I was soon to discover that Alexandra still had a phenomenal memory, in addition to her ability to observe and then describe what she had seen and heard. However, when I came into the picture, she was so physically reduced that she was no longer able to form her memoirs into a book, and her husband had his hands full looking after both her and his business. There was, nevertheless, reason to believe that she might regain enough of her old strength to see the project through with outside help. We hoped that the three of us together could win the race with time and complete Alexandra’s memoirs while she was alive. Unfortunately, that was not to be.

Alexandra’s mind remained clear to the end. Most of her book had been written, and she had carefully gone over the major portion of it when her health took such a rapid downturn that it became impossible for her to continue active work at all. But glimpses from the period we had not yet covered still came through during our many conversations before she died and in conversations with George Yourieff afterwards. In addition to these conversations and the written material, over the years I consulted a number of secondary sources, as well as archives in Norway, England, and the U.S.

This material I have now used to create a frame around Alexandra’s personal document. Within this frame appear all the chapters that Alexandra had approved before she died on October 1, 1993. I had matched these chapters as closely as I could to her spoken style because all of her Russian notes had reached me through her husband’s English translation, making it impossible for me to reproduce her own written voice. The contents of the chapters are unchanged, with one important exception: I am now free to reveal Alexandra’s family background. Having solemnly promised her mother not to reveal the latter’s maiden name, she did not tell even Vidkun Quisling what that name was. Nor did George, who shared Alexandra’s innermost thoughts for over fifty years, learn this name until they went together to a bank here in California to open an account in her name, and she had to give the bank clerk her mother’s maiden name.

But Maria Vasilievna Paseshnikova and her mother in Kharkov knew the secret from the time before the Revolution, and Alexandra’s story will show how they later used that knowledge. I myself did not learn the full story until October 7, 1993, when Alexandra was buried.

In the Russian Orthodox church in Menlo Park the day before, many people had come to kiss the consecrated brow band placed above those still classically beautiful features, and many followed Alexandra’s coffin to the cemetery in the golden October morning on the day of her burial. When the last fistful of earth had been tossed on her coffin and the last silent greeting sent to the woman in the grave, the other mourners went home while I accompanied my grieving friend George to his mother’s gravesite at the same cemetery. On the back of his own mother’s headstone was the only visible memorial to a woman who had done everything in her power to prevent anyone from knowing who she really was: an inscription dedicated to the memory of Alexandra’s mother Irina, born Kossuch. George explained that this is a Russian version of the German noble name von Kotzebue.

There was good reason to keep this name secret. When revolution, civil war and terrorism began to wash over the Ukraine, Irina von Kotzebue realized that if she and her daughter were to have a chance of survival, nobody must know that Alexandra was the descendant of a Russian tsar’s viceroy in Poland and that they both were descended from Rörek, the Viking king. In the aftermath of World War I and the 1917 Revolution, a genealogy like hers was as good as a death sentence in the Ukraine.

Now that Alexandra’s family story may be told, George Yourieff has helped provide more detailed information regarding her background, where there were only allusions before. If family connections are capable of causing a person’s death, they are also an important part of that person’s experiences in life. Otherwise, every effort has been made to stay true to Alexandra’s own distaste for people who liked to boast of their ancestry. The irony here is that Quisling never knew that the young girl he married and then betrayed came from the very background he had helped Maria invent for herself.

All is fair in love and war, we say. It might be better to say that under those two conditions, the participants often disregard the normal rules for human intercourse, while non-participants look the other way in embarrassment when they sense that there is too much they do not understand. This is, therefore, above all the story of a little-known period in Vidkun Quisling’s life. It is otherwise my hope that Alexandra’s memoirs will be read not as a tale about saints and sinners, but about three people whose fates were intertwined under the extreme conditions that the combination of war, revolution, and famine created in Russia. Alexandra would have been in full agreement with such a view, and were she still alive, she would also have joined me in thanking all the people who helped me collect material for this work.

First and foremost among them is her faithful life’s companion, George. Without his self-sacrificing work, this book would never have seen the light of day. Alexandra, George, and I all owe the Fredrikstad lawyer Lars Tobiassen a great deal. When he entered the picture, it was the first time that Alexandra and her husband had met with sober understanding in Norway, and this gave them the courage to continue their work on the book despite many difficulties. Having ascertained the facts, Tobiassen quickly understood the claims that Alexandra had vainly tried to forward in Norway, and he did his best to help her and to provide her with needed information.

Furthermore, I am personally indebted to John Herstad and Ole Kolsrud at Riksarkivet (the Norwegian National Archives), to Sverre Flugsrud of the Manuscript Department at the Oslo National Library (formerly the Oslo University Library), and to the archivists on duty at the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University in California. The Hoover Archives contains well-organized information about both the Russian activities of the American Relief Administration (ARA) and Nansen’s and Quisling’s work in Russia.

I also owe great thanks to the Norwegian television producer, author, and publisher Arve Juritzen for his good friendship and many valuable insights. In the course of doing research for his 1988 book Privatmennesket Quisling og hans to kvinner (The Private Quisling and His Two Women), he found several important and hitherto unknown documents and pictures related to his subject at Norsk Folkemuseum (the Norwegian Folk Museum), among other places, and he interviewed many people who had known one or more of his three main characters. In addition, I am grateful for a long and useful talk with Paul M. Hayes, late of Keeble College, Oxford. He was the author of Quisling: The Career and Political Ideas of Vidkun Quisling (Indiana University Press, 1971).

Last, but not least, I want to thank Sarah Tyacke, now retired from her post as Keeper of Public Records in England, who called my attention to her institution’s recently released documents concerning Norway just before and during the German occupation period. These documents give one pause, both because they are a reminder of the care we must take not to judge in black-and-white, with no shades in between, and because they show so clearly that even under the extreme conditions brought about by war and despair, individuals, on the whole, behave according to their basic nature, although their experiences may obviously cause great changes both in their perspective on life and in their actual lives.

Alexandra stated very clearly why she wished to go public with her memories about Maria Paseshnikova and Vidkun Quisling:

This book is not written to dishonor the memory of the dead. But 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.

Kirsten A. Seaver

Palo Alto, California, U.S.A.

1

Background Sketch

Both inside and outside Norway, people nod in recognition at Quisling’s name. Those with personal experience of the Second World War usually know that he collaborated with the German occupation forces in Norway, even if they don’t know the details of Quisling’s Nazi sympathies in the decade between 1930 and his coup d’état on April 9, 1940.¹ Younger generations, especially in English-speaking countries, frequently use the noun quisling as a synonym for traitor. That this notion was born rather soon after the German invasion and Quisling’s exhortation to the Norwegians that they should turn their backs on England and submit to German protection, we see from a résumé of a number of letters that fell into the hands of English censors in November of 1940. This notes that (Vid)Kun (Q)u(i)sling also goes by the name of Vidkjent Usling (Widely Known Scoundrel), and the letters appear on the whole to have been sharply critical of both Quisling himself and his Rikshird—the Norwegian Nazi storm troopers who had sworn allegiance to him as if he were an ancient Norse king.²

More than fifty years after Vidkun Quisling on the night of October 24, 1945, was executed at Akershus for treason to his country, historians and biographers both at home and abroad still struggle to plumb this complicated personality who played such a marked role in recent Norwegian history, and who paid so dearly for what he himself regarded as the fulfillment of his destiny and duty. His speech in his own defense in September of 1945 concluded with these words:

If my work has constituted treason—as claimed here—then I would to God wish for Norway’s sake that very many of the sons of Norway may be traitors just like me, only that they escape being thrown in prison.³

The gaps are just as wide in the judgments of posterity. Hans Fredrik Dahl, who examines several aspects of Quisling’s personality, writes:

But his often gruff speech and abrupt and awkward manner were illuminated from within by moral thinking and incorruptible sincerity, which became a somewhat important factor early in the 1930s, when Quisling raised the rod against Marxism.⁴

Else Margarete Barth got a somewhat different impression after working through Quisling’s incomplete philosophical work Universismen:

Quisling’s moral development may be described as a movement away from requiring a firm character and over to the ideal of an elitist, self-willed, and changeable ‘personality.’ There is not much that is new in this, except that it was in agreement with a fashion which arose within Fascist and Nazi circles …⁵

The Norwegian-American historian Oddvar K. Høidal for his part thinks that while the religious, historical, philosophical, and scientific observations Quisling made in Universismen and in Universistiske aforismer (Universistic aphorisms) at times were simpleminded or even wrong, it is obvious that Quisling tried hard to find a universal explanation for human existence, and that because of the mystical element in his personality, he had to fulfill the need to create such a philosophical system—this too was an essential part of his nature.⁶

The only thing historians on both sides of the Atlantic seem to agree on is that Vidkun Quisling’s early years and his family greatly influenced his view of life and his personality, and that the years he spent in Soviet Russia became the watershed in his personal landscape. For my own part, I want to add that in his relationship with Alexandra and Maria lies an important key to his moral concepts.

Vidkun, the oldest of four children, was born in 1887 in Fyresdal to the educator and parson Jon Qvisling [sic] and his sixteen years younger wife Anna Caroline Bang. The historian Sverre Hartmann described the atmosphere in the home as harmonious. Life in the Quisling family has otherwise been vividly portrayed by Arve Juritzen and by Hans Fredrik Dahl, among others.⁷ There was no lack of mutual consideration between man and wife, quite the contrary, but caresses were rare, and the ambience to a large degree consisted of a dry bourgeois mentality, religiosity, and family pride joined with nineteenth-century national romanticism, narrow-gauge historical studies, and—last but not least—constant ambition for the children.

Those last three qualities in particular affected not only Vidkun, but also his younger brothers Jørgen and Arne, who both survived him. That Vidkun was fond of his brothers was often confirmed by Alexandra, who added that he grieved greatly over his sister Esther who had died at a young age. As Alexandra’s recollections of her time in Oslo reveal, he also felt close to his mother and was a dutiful son to his eccentric father.

The parents had good reason to be proud of their oldest son. He graduated from the gymnasium in 1905 with a straight A average, and when Quisling completed his training at the Military Academy in 1922, his grades were so outstanding that he was commended to the king.⁸

His choice of a military career was understandable. From childhood, he had been imbued with a national pride and a male ideal fitting easily with an inclination toward romanticism—a romanticism to which his head-over-heels infatuation with Alexandra and his early writing efforts bear full witness.⁹ Furthermore, the same spring he graduated from the gymnasium, the union between Norway and Sweden was dissolved following a prolonged period of tension with armies present at both sides of the border. Being an officer in the independent Norwegian army was prestigious and would also have allowed Quisling release for his ingrained devotion to duty. It became evident quite soon that his choice gave him a useful start in other ways as well.

Vidkun Quisling as a newly appointed captain, 1917. (National Library of Norway, Picture Collection)

While still a young officer, Vidkun Quisling met Captain Anton Frederik Jakhelln Prytz, who was to have a great influence on the rest of Quisling’s career. They first met at a field maneuver, according to Arnold Ræstad, who also notes that Prytz quite early came to admire the younger man’s intelligence and competence,¹⁰ an admiration that later turned out to be mutual. This first meeting is likely to have taken place before 1911, when Prytz became the Norwegian Vice Consul in Arkhangelsk by the White Sea where he had established himself as a sawmill owner and lumber merchant, after first serving with a Russian military detachment in Novgorod in 1908 on the recommendation of the Norwegian General Staff.¹¹ Subsequent to 1911, Prytz did not take part in military exercises, as became apparent when he applied for a Norwegian military pension with the rank of major in 1933.¹²

It would have been easy for the two men to maintain contact after 1911. Dahl notes that also after that year, Prytz was in Norway every year and maintained his contact with the General Staff, to which Quisling had received a probationary appointment in November of 1911, and where he was assigned Russia as his area of special study.¹³ As usual, Quisling’s methods were thorough, and he acquired not only historical and geographical knowledge about Russia, which at that time was still an empire, but also learned Russian and delved into Russian literature.

Both his knowledge about Russia and his acquaintance with Prytz stood him in good stead when, in the spring of 1918, he was asked to serve as the military attaché at the Norwegian legation in Petrograd, as St. Petersburg had been renamed at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The new name did not last long, however; in 1924, when Vladimir Ilyich Lenin died, this Russian capital at the head of the Finnish Bay came to be known as Leningrad, in memory of the founder of Bolshevism and a father of the Russian Revolution that had shaken the world’s moorings since 1917, the year before Vidkun Quisling made his first journey abroad and took his first turn with legation work. For Quisling, who seems to have felt a strong need since childhood to show the world his mettle, this journey to Petrograd—now a focus for the world’s politicians and reporters—must have seemed like a unique opportunity to make people aware of his knowledge and capabilities. Even better: he could do this while traveling with a diplomatic passport, a prestigious and useful document that he quickly learned to appreciate, according to Alexandra.

There was probably not much diplomatic social life of the usual kind under these unusual circumstances, but Quisling must have been prepared for that, since the Norwegian authorities had not given diplomatic recognition to the new Soviet government. Dahl believes that, for the same reason, Quisling’s acquaintance with Trotsky (at that time the Soviet defense minister) is likely to have been both brief and superficial.¹⁴ In this, Dahl’s view agrees with Alexandra’s; she said that Quisling boasted of the acquaintance but avoided giving details.

It is likely that before he left home, Quisling also knew that in Petrograd he would meet again his old acquaintance Captain Prytz, who had married a Norwegian woman while living in that city in 1915. Caroline Prytz was now in Oslo together with their little daughter, while he was putting his experience in dealing with Soviet Russian trade authorities at the disposal of the Norwegian legation during those turbulent times. It is not known whether Prytz had put in a good word for Quisling among the upper echelons of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well as of the General Staff, but it is a fact that Prytz and Quisling arrived in Petrograd within a short time of each other toward the end of May, 1918, and that they shared the apartment which the Norwegian chargé d’affaires Arild Huitfeld consigned to Prytz when he himself was recalled to Oslo in September. From then on Prytz, assisted by Quisling, was responsible for the legation during the time that remained, before they had to close it down completely in December of that same year and return home under rather dramatic circumstances.¹⁵

The catastrophic conditions in Russia were due not only to the world war (which, at least as far as Western Europe was concerned, was officially over on November 11, 1918), but to the uprisings and civil wars that were a consequence of the Revolution. On his journey in the spring of 1918 through Eastern Europe and across the new demarcation line at Brest-Litovsk, Quisling everywhere saw signs of continuing devastation of various kinds and reported home about them. Høidal comments that the intelligence Quisling included with his first report to the Department of Defense did not hold a very high standard, but he admits that the accounts which the young officer subsequently sent from his post in Petrograd gave a good overview of the military situation and the chaotic conditions generally. And Quisling was not far wrong in the opinion he expressed on October 23, 1918, about five months after his arrival, that there was a worrying similarity between Russia’s present situation and that which confronted France in the summer of 1793 after the execution of the French royal couple.¹⁶

Tsar Nicholas II, who had been taken prisoner and forced to abdicate in March of 1917, was shot on July 17, 1918, together with the rest of his family, because the revolutionary authorities wanted to prevent the counter-revolutionary forces threatening Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk) from liberating the tsar from his prison there. Although the tsar’s fate was kept secret at the time, there were enough rumors to cause turmoil all over Russia. The capital, where Quisling and Prytz found themselves, was no exception. The situation grew even more tense after Uritsky, the head of Petrograd’s Cheka, was murdered on August 30, while on that same day in Moscow Lenin was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt by Dora Kaplan.

In both private letters and official reports, Prytz and Quisling described their experiences when they returned to Petrograd from their summer holiday in Norway and encountered martial law and conditions so dangerous that even the four walls of a legation were no guarantee of safety.¹⁷ While Quisling was still in Norway, a group of Cheka men had forced their way into the British Embassy in Petrograd and murdered the British naval attaché Captain Cromie, who had stood his ground as long as he was able. After Cromie’s body had been tossed out of an upstairs window, the Bolsheviks arrested most of the British and French representatives in the city. That meant even more work for the few remaining diplomats. Prytz said on a later occasion that his legation represented six embassies and ten legations that autumn.¹⁸ It was left to the Dutch minister Oudendijk to assume responsibility for British interests; he was also able at long last to have Cromie’s body turned over to him. The funeral took place on September 6, in other words right after Quisling had returned to town.¹⁹

The Cromie murder and its political repercussions were bad enough in themselves, but it probably made a particularly deep impression on Prytz and Quisling that no less a power than Great Britain had been treated in this manner. Prytz was born and in part raised in England and still had good connections there, and whether it was due to Prytz or for other reasons, Quisling’s ideal was an English gentleman—as Alexandra not infrequently learned in connection with what he considered correct behavior.

This predilection for all things English is clear in Quisling’s literary attempts dating from this period in his life. Not only did he exercise his language skills in a long and sentimental poem in English, but the same folder at the National Library in Oslo contains the incomplete draft to a short story or novella taking place in London during World War I.²⁰ The tall, elegant Prince Variagin comes out of his hotel one rainy day and sees a desperate young girl of gentle birth who is now reduced to making her living as a prostitute. When she offers to return to the hotel with him, the prince steps back and says that it won’t do—I’m not that way. A short while later, he nobly takes off his raincoat and gives it to the streetwalker along with several pound notes. Before he leaves her, he also counsels her to be brave; she is syphilitic in consequence of her choice of profession. Back at the hotel that same evening, the prince awakens considerable interest in a somewhat plump blonde in her thirties, dressed with taste. We do not find out how things progressed after this evening in London, however.

It is unlikely that Quisling was inspired to occupy himself with such fantasies in Oslo while working hard to make himself stand out at the General Staff, and conditions were no more propitious while he was living in Petrograd. Nor would he have had the time and opportunity for such activities after his arrival in Russia as Nansen’s assistant, early in February of 1922. Everything indicates that it was while he was in Helsinki from September of 1919 until the end of May, 1921, that he embroidered this sampler.

He was in Helsinki because the Norwegian Department of Foreign Affairs had decided to handle Norway’s Russian interests from its legation in the Finnish capital and therefore moved the remainder of the Petrograd legation there in April of 1919. Quisling, who had meanwhile resumed his work at the General Staff and also established something of a reputation as a speaker on Soviet Russia, applied for and was granted the post of intelligence officer (later changed to military attaché) at the Helsinki legation, where he arrived in the middle of September, 1919.

The appointment appeared to be one more lucky move in his life’s chess game, because Minister Andreas Urbye, who headed the legation, was very pleased with his new associate. For many years he therefore did everything in his power to enable Quisling to move over into the diplomatic service, although without success in the end. Urbye was often away from Helsinki and left Quisling in charge of the legation during his absences. As the chargé d’affaires, Quisling helped his old friend Prytz with information about the Finnish lumber market. In all sorts of ways, life both inside and outside the legation was considerably more peaceful than it had been in Petrograd, and Quisling evidently had plenty of time to spare for his own interests. Now that his life was following a more normal pattern, the shy and awkward young officer also enjoyed the acquaintance of a young woman for a change. Her name was Nini Bø. Their relationship did not survive Quisling’s return home in 1921, although Nini, at least, had evidently been truly in love.²¹ The experience nevertheless seems to have made Quisling sit down at his desk to ponder the relationship between men and women.

Little did he know, when he returned to Oslo, that reality lay waiting right around the corner in Russia. In Kharkov, now the capital of the Ukraine, lived two young women who had experienced childhood, war, and Bolshevism in ways very different from one another. One was Alexandra Andreevna Voronina, who turned sixteen while Captain Quisling was still serving at the Helsinki legation. The other woman was Maria (Mára) Vasilievna Paseshnikova.

All the photographs from Maria’s youth show that she was beautiful. Alexandra, too, often said that Maria was attractive in a somewhat heavy, dark manner, and that she dressed and carried herself with style. She was several years older than Alexandra and also—aside from a large number of photographs—considerably more sparing with information about herself. The Norwegian National Library nevertheless has evidence that the first chapter of Maria’s supposed memoirs via Parmann shaved only a year or two from her age, for her student card gives her birth date as October 27, 1899, and shows that she was registered at her university in 1921. In December of 1922 she completed her studies at the university’s Institute of Economics, where she had been enrolled since 1918.²²

Among Maria’s personal papers at the National Library there are also some notes that she wrote to herself while she was in prison in 1945, and in which she reminds herself to talk as little as possible about Russia.²³ She followed this rule so conscientiously that when Parmann was helping her with her book, she let him have only one single anecdote from her childhood, namely a story about a doll’s shoe which Alexandra recalled having told Maria one endless evening in Paris in 1924—one of many such evenings. Maria’s handwritten notes also tell about the time she met Quisling: "I lived at the center of town right across from a nice little park and an old, beautiful church (named kirce) along a long river (not far from long river)."²⁴ Compare this with Alexandra’s detailed description of her Kharkov home in the next chapter, written many years before she learned the stories Maria had been telling about herself.

Nor did Arve Juritzen manage to unearth more concrete information about Maria than that which was available at the National Library and in other Norwegian archives, and even her pastor during her last years in Oslo was aware that his famous parishioner’s personal life was and remained an enigma.²⁵

Alexandra sincerely admired Maria because the latter had, despite poverty and ignorance at home, managed to work her way up through the Soviet system, and she assumed that Maria had probably seen the same real and imagined qualities in Quisling that had made her marry him herself in 1922. Besides, to her way of thinking Maria’s background was a downright advantage and also honorable enough to be in no need of false feathers. For this reason, her surprise at how Maria had used details from her own life and background was just as great as at the myth about Maria’s privileged family and upbringing. It is probably no coincidence that this myth reached its zenith after Quisling and Maria were safely back in Norway and did not risk Soviet Russian inquisitions.

1. This period has been sketched and documented in Oddvar K. Høidal, Quisling: A Study in Treason. Oslo, 1989, especially pp. 313–379. It is also the focus from p. 143 of Hans Fredrik Dahl, Vidkun Quisling: En fører blir til. Oslo, 1991.

2. From a summary of letters from Norway, addressed to Norwegians in a refugee camp in Dumfries. Public Record Office, London, HS2/238. SOE/Nor-way 84: General and Unconfirmed Information on Norway from June 1940 to November 1940.

3. Vidkun Quislings forsvarstale i lagmannsretten september 1945. Published by Institutt for Norsk Okkupasjonshistorie. Oslo, 1987, p. 106. Quote translated by K. A. Seaver.

4. Dahl, Vidkun Quisling, p . 15. Quote translated by K. A. Seaver.

5. Else Margarete Barth, Gud, deter meg: Vidkun Quisling som politisk filosof. Oslo 1996, p. 80. Quote translated by K. A. Seaver.

6. Høidal, Quisling, p. 765.

7. Sverre Hartmann, Fører uten folk, Oslo, 1959, p. 52; Arve Juritzen, Pri-vatmennesket Quisling og hans to kvinner. Oslo, 1988, pp. 11–32; Dahl, Vidkun Quisling, pp. 39–54.

8. NB, Quislingarkivet, Ms. fol. 3920: I; Juritzen, Privatmennesket, pp. 26, 31 (with reference to Quisling’s trial transcript, Stenografisk referat fra straffesaken mot VQ, published by Eidsivatings lagstols landssvikavdeling (Eidsivating Circuit Court, Dept. of National Treason). Oslo, 1946, p. 328 ).

9. Poems and drafts to a short story/novella and a play: NB, Quislingarkivet, Ms. fol. 3920: III.

10. Arnold Ræstad, The Case Quisling. Unpublished manuscript sent to the Norwegian National Archives in 1961, Ms. 154, folio series, p. 35. Ræstad’s manuscript contains much faulty information, but as a seasoned foreign service man with a good knowledge of Norwegian-Russian relations, he would have been informed about Prytz’s activities.

11. Norsk Biografisk Leksikon, Prytz (by Benjamin Vogt, 1952); Dahl, Vidkun Quisling, pp. 62–3.

12. RA, Privatarkiv Frederik Prytz, box 4, Militære dokumenter 1898–1933.

13. Dahl, Vidkun Quisling, p. 63; Juritzen, Privatmennesket, pp. 32, 34.

14. Dahl, Vidkun Quisling, p. 61.

15. RA, Privatarkiv Frederik Prytz, box 1, Foredrag holdt i Trondheim 25. april 1941; Benjamin Vogt, Mennesket Vidkun og forræderen Quisling. Oslo, 1965, pp. 43–4; Juritzen, Privatmennesket, ss. 34–8; Dahl, Vidkun Quisling, pp. 59–67.

16. Høidal, Quisling, pp. 19–20, with reference to Quisling’s report no. 12 til Det kgl. forsvarsdepartement (The Royal Department of Defense), RA, GA, Journalsaker 1166.

17. Dahl, Vidkun Quisling, pp. 64–66. For independent eyewitness descriptions of the situation in Petrograd at this time, see Robin Bruce Lockhart, British Agent, New York and London, 1933, especially pp. 157–63; Michael Kettle, Sidney Reilly: The True Story of the World’s Greatest Spy, New York, 1983, pp. 24–44. Kettle’s account also contains important information about Captain Cromie during this period.

18. RA, Privatarkiv Frederik Prytz, box 1, Foredrag holdt i Trondheim 25. april 1941.

19. Some of the information here comes from George W. Yourieff. He survived the horrors of war and revolution in Russia, and he and his family were good friends of Minister Oudendijk’s in both Russia and China. See also Lockhart, British Agent, especially pp. 318–19.

20. NB, Quislingarkivet, Ms. fol. 3920: III: 2–3. The poem Summer Night is dated 12.7.1920 by Quisling personally. The prose draft has no title and is undated.

21. Juritzen, Privatmennesket, pp. 38–40; Dahl, Vidkun Quisling, pp. 77–8; Høidal, Quisling, pp. 20–21.

22. NB, Quislingarkivet, Ms. fol. 3920: XI: 4.

23. NB, Quislingarkivet, Ms. fol. 3920: X: 2.

24. NB, Quislingarkivet, Ms. fol. 3920: X: 11. Translated by K. A. Seaver, as closely as possible, from Maria’s somewhat flawed Norwegian. There is no reason to make fun of her mistakes, however. She learned Norwegian remarkably fast. Nevertheless, one gets the impression that her skill stopped developing in later years, probably because she was living alone and was rather isolated from the rest of the world.

25. Parmann, Maria Quislings Dagbok og andre etterlatte papirer, Oslo 1980, pp. 16–17; Juritzen, Privatmennesket, pp. 63–4.

2

Alexandra’s Childhood and Family

I was born on August 20, 1905, in the city of Sebastopol on the beautiful, subtropical Crimean peninsula, where my father, Dr. Andrei S. Voronin, had his medical practice at the time. I grew up believing that people arrive in this world only to have a long, happy life.

When I was about three years old, we moved from Sebastopol to Yalta, where Papa continued to practice medicine for several years. Although we were not wealthy, I had everything a child could wish for and remember my early childhood as a warm and sunlit paradise in which I was loved, humored, and indulged, with nothing demanded from me in exchange. The third of five children, I was the only one to survive infancy, which may account for the way my parents spoiled me. Even though my mother, Irina Theodorovna, tended to be strict and sparing with outward demonstrations of affection, I always had my way, even with her, and certainly with my father, my nanny, and my governess.

It is very hard for me to write about my mother. Even if I could find the words to describe her and what she meant to me, they would still be inadequate, for I should have said them while I was still near those tender and caring hands, those loving eyes. It is much easier for me to write about my father, although he disappeared in the early years of World War I when I was still a little girl.

I know that my parents loved each other and had married despite strong family disapproval. Considering my father an inferior match, my mother’s family would not consent to my parents’ marriage, so they had eloped when he was still a medical student. Afterwards, Mama’s relatives turned their backs on her and my father for several years, regarding their union as yet another misalliance in the family. There had been equally great consternation when my maternal grandmother (who belonged to one of a small number of Russian families descended directly from Rörek, the Viking king who played such an important part in the early history of Russia) married Theodore von Kotzebue, a descendant of an old German family that had settled in Russia during the Napoleonic Wars and had served Russia ever since in the arts and sciences, exploration, and the diplomatic and civil service. Although various tsars had rewarded several members of the von Kotzebue family for their loyalty and outstanding service, my maternal grandmother’s parents considered her new husband and his family upstarts.

Instead of wishing her daughter Irina well in a situation so similar to her own, my grandmother and the rest of her family continued to look disdainfully at my father and his perfectly respectable relatives, who naturally resented this treatment. But, eventually, some kind of olive branch must have been extended, for I remember being presented to my great-grandfather when I was three or four years old. I was made to walk the length of an immense, ornate room, at the end of which an old man was seated in a large chair. When he lifted me onto his lap and bent over me, his breath was so terrible that every subsequent encounter with halitosis has reminded me of that occasion.

On my father’s side, the oldest ancestor I remember meeting was Papa’s mother, Maria Katroutza. She had married Sergei Voronin, whose father was, I believe, a Russian Orthodox priest in Moldavia, and my father was their only son. Grandmother and her brother Gregory were the children of a landed gentleman who lived on his large estate in Moldavia (or Bessarabia, as it is sometimes called), which at that time was a part of the Russian Empire. When, in the last century, oil was discovered on and around the old Katroutza estate, the family, which had always been wealthy, became even more rich.

Great-Uncle Gregory had two sons and two daughters, Catherine and Eugenia. Aunt Génia came to play an important part in my life, but I do not remember meeting Aunt Káthia. She was first married to an important government official in St. Petersburg, and when he died, she married a millionaire by the name of Hertza and became a very