Of the millions put to death in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s reign of terror in the 1930s, the case of the Russian literary critic and historian D. S. Mirsky (1890–1939) is surely one of the strangest. Unlike so many other victims of the Terror, Mirsky may be said to have written his own death warrant by choosing to return to the Soviet Union from a decade-long exile in Britain at the very moment that Stalin was declaring war on intellectuals like himself as class enemies. There were many other Russians, to be sure, who were persuaded to repatriate themselves in order to participate in the brave new world of Soviet Communism, only to find that their ultimate reward was humiliation, arrest, and execution. But few were as heavily burdened as Mirsky was by politically incriminating antecedents. From a Soviet perspective, there could never have been any doubt that Mirsky really was a class enemy.

He was born Prince Dimitry Patrovich Svytopolk-Mirsky, scion of one of the oldest princely families of Russia. He thus belonged to a class which Lenin had earmarked for extinction. Add to this the fact that at the turn of the century Mirsky’s father had been appointed Deputy Minister of the Interior and Commander of the Corps of Gendarmes—head of the secret police—in the Czarist government. And then, as a Guards officer in the Civil War that followed upon Lenin’s seizure of power, Mirsky himself had fought with the “Whites” against the Bolsheviks. Given this