Books, Arts & Manners

Berlin Diaries: 1940-1945, by Marie Vassiltchikov (Knopf, 352 pp., $19.95)

Marie, better known as “Missie,” Vassiltchikov was a young Russian aristocrat who came to Nazi Germany at the beginning of 1940, as a refugee from Stalin. Born in St. Petersburg in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, she had fled with her family to the Baltic state of Lithuania, where they lived insouciantly until— following the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov Non-Aggression Pact—the Red Army moved in. Lithuania disappeared into the KGB night as a Soviet colony, and, for White Russians like Missie, Hitler’s Berlin was a welcome haven.

AH

About the Author

Alistair Horne

Sir Alistair Horne’s Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year is published by Simon & Schuster.

Featured Tags

Berlin Diaries: 1940-1945, by Marie Vassiltchikov (Knopf, 352 pp., $19.95)

Marie, better known as “Missie,” Vassiltchikov was a young Russian aristocrat who came to Nazi Germany at the beginning of 1940, as a refugee from Stalin. Born in St. Petersburg in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, she had fled with her family to the Baltic state of Lithuania, where they lived insouciantly until— following the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov Non-Aggression Pact—the Red Army moved in. Lithuania disappeared into the KGB night as a Soviet colony, and, for White Russians like Missie, Hitler’s Berlin was a welcome haven.