Sofia Petrovna is a novella by Russian author Lydia Chukovskaya, written in the late 1930s in the Soviet Union.

Kolya, an engineering student and strong Communist, is at the beginning of a promising career, with his picture featured on the cover of Pravda.

Based on her experiences during the Great Purge of 1938-39, it was written in 1939-40 but remained unpublished due to the critical and honest nature of the piece.

With the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, and his subsequent denunciation by Nikita Khrushchev, Chukovskaya reexamined the work, edited out a no-longer-relevant introduction, and sought publication in 1962.

[1] However, the book was not published in Chukovskaya's native country, and she forbade publication of any other work until after the release in Russia of Sofia Petrovna.