Narrative that is direct, candid, unpretentious. Reflecting all that is strange and incomprehensible about Soviet WWII Russia.

A member of a highly privileged caste in Soviet society… reduced to a ‘mozho’ girl mixing with foreigners, with instructions to report on them… the real story is in the simple, graphic and almost entirely persuasive account of her observations – some amusing and others horribly or pitifully gruesome.

She emerged from a fantastic situation as the wife of the secretary to the British Naval Attaché in Moscow (Mr Murray), with Soviet permission to leave with him for England.