Harsh Vineyard: A History of Catholic Life in the Russian Far East

Miroslava Igorevna Efimova was born in Ukraine in 1929. Her father was inducted into the Red Army before the outbreak of World War II, and Miroslava and her mother, grandmother and little brother spent the war years seeking safety in Kazakhstan, then Siberia. After the war Miroslava completed her high school education in the Russian Far East and then enrolled in the Far Eastern Technical Institute in Vladivostok, where she earned a degree as a geologist. Miroslava lived and pursued her career in geology and mineralogy with the Soviet Academy of Sciences in the Russian Far East and in North Korea. In 1992 she became involved in the reestablishment of the Roman Catholic parish in Vladivostok and over the following years, having retired from her geological career, she contributed her expertise on the Russian Far East and her research skills to the collection and publication of a variety of materials on Roman Catholic life in the Russian Far East from the 1860s to the present. Harsh Vineyard represents the culmination of those efforts.