Agnessa - Zpověď ženy stalinského čekisty – Mironovová Agnessa, Jakovenková Mira (2021)

Agnessa Mironova's memories, recorded by oral historian Mira Jakovenková according to her account, first open the doors to 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 provides an extraordinary testimony from the wife of an ambitious NKVD officer, Sergei Mironov, who, due to her husband's extremely rapid and successful career, reached the very top of Stalin's social elite and later endured imprisonment in the NKVD and the gulag after his execution. Agnessa recounts her life, full of sharp turns, with utmost sincerity, without regretting anything. She candidly recalls the bright and happy days of her youth, the luxurious life, beautiful dresses, and ostentatious idleness she indulged in at a time when millions of people were dying of hunger. The ambiguous narrator we discover in these memories is an extraordinary figure, both charming and repulsive at the same time. Her recollections are not just an interesting biography; they resemble an impressive novel that conveys much more than any archival document: the everyday life, human characters, and mythology of a period that became the most terrible and bloodiest in modern Russian history.