Vidkun Quisling was born on July 18, 1887, in Fyresdal in southern Norway. His father Jon Lauritz Quisling was a Lutheran minister and genealogist and Vidkun’s mother Anna Caroline Bang came from a wealthy family in Grimstad in Norway.

In 1905, then the 18-year-old Vidkun Quisling entered the War College. Of the 250 cadets, he had achieved the highest score on the notoriously difficult entrance exams. From the War College, Quisling entered the Military Academy to pursue a career in the army. Vidkun Quisling graduated with the best grades in the history of the Academy since its founding in 1817 and the King of Norway rewarded him by inviting the young Vidkun to an audience with him.

In 1911, Quisling joined the General Staff of the Norwegian Army. 3 years later on the 28th of July 1914, the First World War began. During the war, Norway was neutral. Quisling detested the peace movement, though the high human cost of the war did temper his views.
In March 1918, he was sent to Russia as an attaché at the Norwegian legation in Petrograd. Though dismayed at the living conditions he experienced, Quisling nonetheless concluded that "the Bolsheviks have got an extraordinarily strong hold on Russian society" and marvelled at how Leon Trotsky had managed to mobilise the Red Army forces so well.
He asserted that by contrast, in granting too many rights to the people of Russia, the Russian Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky had brought about its own downfall. When the legation was recalled in December 1918, Quisling became the Norwegian military's expert on Russian affairs.

In September 1919, Quisling departed Norway to become an intelligence officer with the Norwegian delegation in Helsinki in Finland, a post that combined diplomacy and politics and in January 1922 he arrived in the Ukrainian capital Kharkiv to help with the League of Nations humanitarian relief effort there.
In august of the same year, he married the Russian Alexandra Andreevna Voronina. It appeared that there was no romantic involvement between the two and it is believed that Quisling merely seemed to have wanted to lift the girl out of poverty by providing her with a Norwegian passport and financial security
Soon, he met Maria Vasiljevna Pasetchnikova, a Ukrainian more than ten years his junior. The couple behaved as though they were married, claimed Alexandra was their daughter, and celebrated their wedding anniversary.


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