Kyra Petrovskaya Wayne

In 1960, she met and married Dr. George Wayne, a distinguished psychiatrist. They traveled extensively, leading to Kyra becoming an enrichment lecturer on Royal Viking Line cruises, which she pursued for 10 years. Her husband died in 1994. Kyra has one son and five grandchildren. She was passionate about dogs, some of which are the subjects of her books.

In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Kyra was active in many cultural and civic organizations, receiving many awards and commendations. In the 1980s, she was the founder and president of the Clean Air Program (CAP), a program of the American Lung Association of Los Angeles County—intended to eradicate smog. She was president of the UCLA Medical Faculty Wives, a member of the board of ISOMATA, an international school of music and the arts, an affiliate of USC, and several other Los Angeles-based cultural organizations.

She was offered a contract by a publisher to write her autobiography, and in 1959, Kyra, her first book, was published by Prentice-Hall. The TV appearance also led to more television and concert invitations. Unfortunately, Kyra had to stop singing many years later when a nerve of her vocal cord was nipped during a thyroid surgery.

After nine years of marriage, she and her husband divorced, and Kyra moved to Los Angeles, where she became a contestant on Groucho Marx’s show You Bet Your Life. In 1955 she appeared on the show Big Surprise, but failed to win the $100,000 jackpot.

Because Kyra spoke several foreign languages fluently, she was invited to various diplomatic receptions as a representative of the Young Soviet Intelligentsia. It was there that she met her future husband, an American diplomat named Shirk. In February 1946, they married, in the first church service between a foreigner and a Russian since the Revolution. Perhaps because the wedding was attended by the whole diplomatic corps stationed in Moscow at that time, she was given permission to leave Russia with her husband. They left for the United States a few months later.

After having been wounded twice, Kyra returned to service as a field nurse. During that time, she rescued a homeless orphan boy, who later became the subject of her book, Shurik. Toward the end of the war, she was decorated with three medals. She left for Moscow in 1943 and joined the Moscow Satire Theatre, renewing her artistic career.

She was drafted into the Red Army in 1941 at the beginning of the siege of Leningrad and became a sniper and a lieutenant. During this tragic period, almost 1 million people died in Leningrad of starvation, including Kyra’s mother and grandmother, who died while she was in the army.

Kyra Petrovskaya Wayne (December 31, 1918 – June 3, 2018) was a Russian-American author, actress and a sniper during World War II. A survivor of the siege of Leningrad, she married an American diplomat and came to the United States, becoming the author of 14 books. Among her various activities in America, she made many appearances on television programs, gave lectures on literature and history on cruise ships, and sang on concert stages.

Kyra was born in Crimea, on the coast of the Black Sea in 1918. She was a descendant of one of the Russian noble families. Her father was a pilot during World War I. He was executed by a Bolshevik firing squad after the Russian Revolution, when Kyra was 7 months old. Her young mother never remarried, and they lived in poverty in Leningrad with her grandmother. They lost all the males of their family in the Russian Civil War that followed the revolution.