Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya

File:Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya.jpg

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya

Zoya Anatolyevna Kosmodemyanskaya, alternatively Romanised as Kosmodem'yanskaya (Russian: Зо́я Анато́льевна Космодемья́нская) (September 13, 1923 in the village of Osino-Gay, Gavrilovsky District, Tambov Oblast – November 29, 1941) was a Soviet partisan, and a well-known posthumously declared Hero of the Soviet Union.

Life

Kosmodemyanskaya joined the VLKSM in 1938. In October of 1941, still a high school student in Moscow, she volunteered for a partisan unit. At the village of Obukhovo near Naro-Fominsk, Kosmodemyanskaya and other partisans crossed the front line and entered territory occupied by the Germans. She was arrested by the Nazis on a combat assignment near the village of Petrishchevo (Moscow Oblast) on November 27, 1941. Details of the assignment and the arrest were classified for sixty years because treachery was involved.

The criminal case number 16440 was declassified in 2002. The case was then reviewed by Russia's Chief Military Prosecutor Office, and it was decided that Vasily Klubkov, who betrayed Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, was not eligible for rehabilitation. According to criminal case 16440, three Soviet combatants: Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, Vasily Klubkov, and their commander Boris Krainov had to perform acts of sabotage on Soviet territory occupied by the Nazis. They had been given the task of setting fire to houses in the village of Petrishchevo, where German troops were quartered. Krainov was to operate in the central part of the village, Kosmodemyanskaya in the southern and Klubkov in the northern one. Krainov had carried out the task first and returned to the base. Zoya had performed her task too, as was evidenced by three tongues of flames in the southern part of Petrischevo seen from the base. Only the northern part was not set on fire at all. According to Klubkov he was captured by two German soldiers and brought to their staff. The Nazi officer threatened to kill him and Klubkov gave him the names of Kosmodemyanskaya and Krainov, who had similar tasks to Klubkov's one. After this Kosmodemyanskaya was captured by the Germans.

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was tortured and humiliated. In particular, she was undressed and beaten with rubber sticks for two or three hours by several Nazis. However, Kosmodemyanskaya did not give away the names of her comrades or her real name (claiming that it was Tanya). She said: "Kill me, I'll tell you nothing" (Russian: "Убейте меня, я вам ничего не скажу"). She was hanged on November 29, 1941. It was claimed that before her death Kosmodemyanskaya had made a speech with the closing words, “There are two hundred million of us, you can’t hang us all!” Kosmodemyanskaya was the first woman to become Hero of the Soviet Union (February 16, 1942).

Bringing her story to the public eye

The story of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya became widely known after a Pravda article by Pyotr Lidov published on January 27, 1942. The journalist had heard about the execution of Zoya accidentally, from an elderly peasant shaken by the valour of the young girl. The witness recounted: "They were hanging her and she was giving a speech. They were hanging her, and she was hectoring them." Lidov travelled to Petrishchevo, collected the details from the residents and published them in an article about a yet unknown partisan girl. Reportedly, the article was noticed by Stalin who made statement: "here is the people's heroine", which started the Soviet propaganda campaign of praising Kosmodemyanskaya. She was soon identified (in February of the same year) and awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union (posthumously.)

Legacy

Many streets, kolkhozes and pioneer organizations in the Soviet Union used to bear the name of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. Soviet poets, writers, artists and sculptors dedicated their works to Kosmodemyanskaya. The Soviets erected a monument in her honour not far from the village of Petrischevo (sculptors - O.A.Ikonnikov and V.A.Feodorov). Another statue is prominently located at Moscow Metro station Partizanskaya. Two asteroids were named after her: 1793 Zoya and 2072 Kosmodemyanskaya. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya is buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya's brother Alexander (1925 - April 13 1945), a Senior Lieutenant, died in combat in Germany and was posthumously awarded Hero of the Soviet Union in 1945.

In the 2002 book Zoya's Story: An Afghan Woman's Struggle for Freedom the narrator tells of her decision to use the name "Zoya" as one of her pseudonyms when she joined The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan in the struggle against fundamentalism. She cites the story of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya as an inspiration in the struggle against oppression.

Media controversy

The biography of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya became a subject of media controversy during the Perestroyka period.

In September 1991, (close to the fifty years after Zoya's death) an article by Russian writer Alexander Zhovtis was published in the weekly newspaper Argumenty i Fakty. The article alleged that were no German troops in the village Petrischevo, and that Zoya was caught by local peasants who were unhappy about the destruction of their property. The information was sourced to an anonymous school teacher who apparently told the story to writer Nikolay Anov (already dead at the time) who passed it on to Zhovtis. In the end, Zhovtis blamed Stalin's scorched earth policy for the unnecessary death of the young woman.

A month later, the same newspaper published another article completely based on letters from readers commenting on Zhovtis' publication. Some authors supported the mainstream version. A letter signed P.A. Lidov's family (Lidov was the journalist who originally broke Kosmodemyanskaya's story) said that every house in the village was filled with German troops who were the target of Zoya's strike. The letter referred to documents supporting the info including unpublished protocols of NKVD interviews with residents of the village. Other readers shared stories contradicting the mainstream version. A resident of Moscow, Petrov, told the story he heard from a Petrischevo resident in 1958 about irregularities in the identification of "Tanya"s identity. A postgraduate of the Institute of Russian History Elena Sinyavskaya published research supporting that the true person executed in Petrischevo was not Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya but a missed in action partisan woman, Lila Azolina.

The Argumenty i Fakty articles prompted a response from Pravda observer Viktor Kozhemyaka in the form of an article titled Fifty years after her death Zoya is tortured and executed again. In the article, Kozhemyaka criticized Sinyavskaya's theory and insisted on the official expert conclusion about the identity of the executed partisan. Later the Institute for Criminal Expertise and the Department of Justice of Russian Federation issued an official conclusion stating that the family photographs of Kosmodemyanskaya belong to the same person as the Pravda photograph of hanged partisan. The article ended by emotional sentences Let your names be sacred for centuries, Tanya, Zoya, Lila! So many of you gave for us the most precious you had got: your lives. And we cannot, should not, have no right to forget you or renege on you.

Ten years later, Kozhemyaka wrote another article Zoya is executed yet again . In the article Kozhemyaka told how he was emotionally shaken when discovering some "absurd material" on the internet boards. These materials alleged that Zoya hurt Russian peasants rather than German troops. They also alleged that Zoya suffered from schizophrenia, was a fanatical Stalinist, etc. Kozhemyaka mistakenly attributed materials to the same Elena Sinyavskaya (now Doctor of Historical Science). In her response (in the newspaper Patriot from 26 February 2006 Sinyavskaya stated she had no connections to the material except that a few quotes were from her monograph. The real author of the internet publication seems to be an obscure "psychoanalystic writer" called Alexander Menyaylov.

Another important development was the publication by the newspaper Glasnost of the previously unknown protocols of the official commission of residents of Petrischevo village and Gribtsovsky selsovet on 25 January 1942 (two months after Zoya's execution). . The protocol stated that Kosmodemyanskaya was caught while trying to sabotage a stable containing more than 300 German horses. It also quite graphically described her torture and execution.

A slightly different story was told by the notes of Pyotr Lidov published in Parlamentskaya Gazeta in 1999. Apparently, Lidov for years meticulously collected all the available information on Kosmodemyanskaya. The notes supported the version that Kosmodemyanskaya and Vasily Klubkov were caught while sleeping in the hay on the outskirts of Petrischevo. The Germans were called by Petrischevo resident Semyon Sviridov. Lidov's notes also included an interview with a German noncommissioned officer taken prisoner by the Soviet Army. The interview described the negative effect on the morale of the German soldiers who witnessed the burning of the houses.

Bibliography

• Lyubov Kosmodemyanskaya:Story of Zoya and Shura, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow, 1953 ("Shura" is a nickname for "Alexander", the author is Zoya's mother)

External links

• Zoya's Story, a short biography, some tributes and excerpts from the book "Story of Zoya and Shura"
• "The Truth on Zoya and Shura" (in Russian). RIA Novosti. November 16, 2006. Retrieved 2006-11-22. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Biography (in Russian), on the website dedicated to the Heroes of the Soviet Union/Russia
• Short Biographical Article (in English), From Northstar Compass
• Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya From The Voice of Russia
• زويا فرزند قهرمان‌ روسيه (Persian)