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. Early life 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. At age 8, Kyra was admitted into a school for musically gifted children, the Leningrad Academic Capella, and became a member of the children’s group of the Kirov Theater of Opera and Ballet. Even though she was studying music, she had to go through military training: All Soviet schools had to spend a certain amount of time on military education—marching, learning about guns, and competitive shooting. Kyra was a good marksman, and at 16 she won a distinction, the Voroshilov Marksman badge. After graduation, she entered the Institute of Theater Arts and became an actress and concert singer. The siege of Leningrad 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. 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. Moving to the United States 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