Kosmodemyanskaya, Zoya (1923–1941)

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Kosmodemyanskaya, Zoya (1923–1941)

Soviet partisan who, after her capture and execution by German troops, became a symbol of heroism in the Soviet Union's war against Nazi Germany. Name variations: Tanya; Kosmodemjamskaja; Kosmodemianskia. Pronunciation: Kos-MO-dem-YAHN-sky-ah. Born Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya on September 13, 1923, in the village of Osinovye Gai, Tambov Oblast, near Moscow; executed by hanging on November 29, 1941, in the village of Petrishchevo, Moscow Oblast; daughter of an office worker and a mother widowed early; educated at Moscow's School No. 201; never married; no children.

Joined the Labor Front and worked in a factory; joined a sabotage unit engaged in guerrilla activities (autumn 1941), and captured within a few weeks by the Germans; tortured and hanged the next day.

On a bitterly cold morning in late November 1941, soldiers from Hitler's army led a young girl toward the town square of Petrishchevo, near the city of Vereya. A captured Soviet partisan, she had been savagely beaten and forced to walk barefoot in the snow. Under interrogation, flames had been held to her face to force her to reveal her name and the identities of her comrades; one young German officer left the room covering his face with his hands, no longer able to stomach the scene. Still nothing was learned—not the name of the 18-year-old partisan, nor any information about her fellow partisans, family or friends. Finally, the Germans ended her ordeal by hanging her in the village square, where her body was left for a month, in warning to all who dared defy the Nazi occupation.

German units passing through Petrishchevo jabbed at the body of the young woman with their bayonets and laughed. They did not realize that word of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya's courage and martyrdom had spread throughout the Soviet Union, helping to sustain civilians starving in the siege of Leningrad, Red Army soldiers fighting to save Moscow, aviators trying to clear the air of Luftwaffe planes, and millions of other Soviet citizens in factories, mines, and farms. In early 1943, when the defeated German troops finally surrendered at Stalingrad, the spirit of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya hovered over the city that sealed Adolf Hitler's doom.

The beginning of World War II went extremely well for Hitler's superbly trained forces. Using tanks and aircraft to a new advantage, his armies quickly occupied Europe after war was declared on September 1, 1939. Poland fell in a matter of weeks, followed by the collapse, in April 1940, of Denmark and Norway; the following month, the Blitzkrieg was launched against Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg, and soon engulfed France. The German Luftwaffe began massive air attacks on Britain, although that country did not fall, contrary to Hitler's predictions. In the meantime, Yugoslavia and Greece were overrun by German troops.

In August 1939, Joseph Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, so during the early part of the Blitzkrieg the Soviet Union was outside the fray. The Führer, however, was already planning to achieve what Napoleon had failed to accomplish over a century before—the occupation of Russia. Four million men, 3,300 tanks, and 5,000 planes were assembled for the German attack, and the battle was expected to be of short duration as it had been in the West. Conventional wisdom held that the Soviet army, decimated by Stalin's purges in the 1930s and equipped with outdated weapons, would soon collapse.

Although weaponry had changed since Napoleon's attempt to conquer Russia, other factors had not. The winters were as fierce as ever and so was the determination of the Russian people to defend the motherland. Soviet women especially personified the national determination to defend their country, volunteering for every kind of assignment. The Red Army was not prepared for so many women soldiers, who often had to wear oversize boots and overlong men's trousers, as smaller uniforms were not available. Proportionally, losses among women at the front were heavier than among the men, and German veterans of the Eastern Front were shocked by the numbers of Soviet women soldiers they found dead on the battlefield.

Over 800,000 women saw active duty, serving as combat pilots, navigators, snipers, gunners, paratroopers, sappers, cooks, and nurses; more than 300,000 women crewed anti-aircraft defenses, and the Soviet navy mustered 25,000 women. As combat pilots, women carried out low-level bombing and strafing attacks. Flying at night, these women became known as the "night witches." Describing their effort, one woman flyer said, "After a mission an aircraft stayed on the ground for a few minutes and then it was back in the air. Imagine how our girl armourers worked! During those few minutes they had to load the bomb racks with four bombs—400 kilos—by hand.… [T]he body reorganized itself to the extent that we ceased to be women throughout the war.… [W]e had no female functions at all."

Red Army women snipers took a tremendous toll against the enemy. There were many women like Nina Pavlovna Petrova , who was aged 48 when she first went to the front and notched up 122 kills. Lieutenant Stanislava Volkova was one of the Red Army's sappers, who had the dangerous and often fatal job of clearing minefields. Once, when a Soviet general bellowed for the sapper commander to clear a field, he brushed aside a grime-streaked and dishevelled woman only to learn she was the platoon commander. The mines were soon cleared so the tanks could advance.

In the Red Army, 41% of the doctors and 43% of the front-line medical personnel were women, and often as not they carried weapons as well as medical supplies. Engaged in an unequal battle with German troops, Dr. Polina and her assistants managed to carry 27 of the most gravely wounded into the woods. Cut off from Soviet troops, they built snow huts to shelter the wounded. Moss became cotton and razors were used as scalpels until they were rescued a month later.

Women also fueled the war machine in factories behind the front, serving as welders, machine operators, and painters. There was, for example, a "special women's brigade" which worked on moving flat-cars, painting artillery pieces as they sped to the front. Women even toiled as miners in the depths of the earth, working some mines entirely without men, while the war-torn country also depended to a great extent on women for its food supply. Because tractors had been turned into gun tows and fuel was an expensive luxury, the women harnessed themselves to plows in groups of half a dozen to prepare the soil for planting and did other work by hand. Special "tractor brigades" learned to operate the few machines and to keep them in working order.

Such determination was often fueled by horrifying experiences. Pasha Prskovia Yermolenko was sent to a work camp in Germany, from which she managed to escape. She returned to the Ukraine where she was met with further ravages of war. The German army in retreat from Kiev torched the thatched roofs of the village where she was hiding, setting 900 houses on fire, and hanged Yermolenko's best friend and killed her baby. Yermolenko's response to these atrocities was to plant potatoes. Soon, her kolkhoz (cooperative farm) was producing more than 14 tons of potatoes per acre. Women like Yermolenko fed Russia, not grandly or satisfyingly, but their efforts were critical to the winning of the war.

Partisans were another important group in the war effort. At least 100,000 women did that dangerous work, living in trenches and woods by day and sabotaging German war efforts by night. In actions that were highly effective at frustrating the enemy, they blew up bridges, destroyed roads, cut communication lines, derailed trains, and attacked garrisons using any means at their disposal. The partisans were the glue which held the resistance effort in the occupied country together. They published leaflets and newspapers reporting the latest war news and called on the people to unite in the war effort.

You won't hang us all. I will be avenged.
—Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya exemplified the spirit of all the partisans who fought for Mother Russia. She was born in the village of Osinovye Gai, in Tambov Oblast, southeast of Moscow, on September 13, 1923. Her father was an office worker. In 1938, when she was 15, Kosmodemyanskaya, like many students, joined the Komosomol (Communist Youth Organization). When the war broke out, she was living with her widowed mother and younger brother in Aleksandrovskii Prospect, near the gardens of the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy, in Moscow. Zoya was in the tenth form of School No. 201, where she was a model student. An idealist, she copied whole pages from War and Peace into her diary along with quotes from Chekhov and Chernyshevskii.

With the Soviet Union at war, Zoya and her brother joined the Labor Front, working in a factory as wood-turners, but her heart was not in this work. As the Germans drew ever nearer to Moscow, she decided to join in active service, applying in October for duty in a sabotage unit behind enemy lines. "Don't worry," she told her mother. "I'll either come back a hero or die a hero."

Kosmodemyanskaya chose Tanya as a new name and set off with a group of other young volunteers to the forested area between Mozhaisk and Moscow, deep behind German lines. At the time she joined her unit, partisan efforts were not well organized, and many lost their lives in these early days of the war. As time passed, however, the underground warfare became more refined and played an important role in ridding the country of the invaders.

According to Nazi ideology, Slavs were Untermenschen, inferior people, to be used in any way seen fit. During the German occupation, hundreds of thousands of men and women were enslaved and sent from the Soviet Union to Germany to be worked to death in factories. Those who were not enslaved were often executed outright; in one case, 60 wives of Red Army soldiers were hanged from telephone poles in Alexandria, in Kirovgrad District, and their corpses left as a warning. The wife of Senior Lieutenant Gabriel Kolesnikov was tortured before being hanged. Her six-month-old baby was impaled by a bayonet, and her two other children were also murdered while villagers were forced to watch.

As a woman, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya faced particular horrors, as do all women in every war. If every victim of rape in wartime were awarded a Purple Heart, women would no doubt be the most highly decorated combatants on earth. Sexual slavery was also a common practice among the German invaders, who routinely gathered up the best-looking young girls to serve in brothels. One famous story was told of two lovely girls, Zina and Vera, who lived in a Germanoccupied village in the North Caucasus, where they were taken to the house quartering 12 Nazi officers. Knowing their fate, Zina maneuvered herself near a tank full of benzine while pretending to accept an officer's advances. After telling Vera to lock the door and throw the key into the stove, she asked for a cigarette and tossed it into the benzine tank. Only two German officers escaped the conflagration; they told the story later as military prisoners. Zina and Vera, whose last names do not survive, symbolized the fate of many women in the Soviet Union during the war, but also the courage that made them fight.

Stories such as these inspired Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, who actually served her country only a few weeks. Her partisan group had been quite busy around the Germanoccupied village of Petrishchevo, where the invaders had thrown the villagers out of their huts, taken their food, and shipped many off to labor camps. In retaliation, the partisans had smoked the Germans out of the huts into the cold, attacked small groups of soldiers as well the unit headquarters, wrecked roads, and disrupted communications while acting as scouts for the Red Army. One night, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya cut all the lines for the German field telephone, set fire to German headquarters, and burned a stable holding 17 German horses; the following evening, her target was a stable with more than 200 cavalry horses. Wearing a hat, fur jacket, quilted cotton pants, and felt boots, she crept forward with a bottle of gasoline and bent to strike a match, but was apprehended before the bomb could be thrown.

The Nazi soldiers began to beat her with belts; at one time four were beating her simultaneously. Kosmodemyanskaya was forced to remove her clothing and stand barefoot in the snow, but she gave no information. Brought inside a hut, she was punched by soldiers who held lit matches to her chin. One ran a saw across her back. The owners of the hut begged the Germans to stop for their children's sake. Still she refused to give any name but Tanya, named no friends or associates, and told nothing of movements of the Red Army. The torture continued through the night.

On the morning of November 29, 1941, a scaffold was erected in the town square. "Tanya" was allowed to put on her blouse, slacks, and socks, but her hat, fur coat, down-and-wool undershirt, and felt boots had disappeared. The soldiers hung bottles of gasoline on her chest and a sign around her neck that labeled her a partisan. Local inhabitants were ordered to attend the execution, but few showed up. More than a hundred German soldiers and several officers were present, and one officer began to focus his Kodak on the scaffold; the German military frequently photographed executions. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was picked up and placed on two orange crates, a noose around her neck, and while the executioners awaited the signal from the commandant, she took advantage of the moment to speak. "Hey, comrades! Why so glum? Be brave, struggle, beat the Germans, burn, poison! I'm not afraid to die, comrades. I'm happy to die for my people." Turning to the commandant she said, "You hang me now, but I am not alone. There are two hundred million of us. You won't hang us all. I will be avenged. Soldiers! Surrender before it is too late. Victory will be ours." The Russians wept. Some turned their backs so as not to see her death. The executioner tightened the rope, choking her, but she loosened it saying, "Farewell, comrades! Struggle, don't be afraid!" The executioner pushed his irontipped boot against the crate, someone cried out, and she died.

For a month, the body was left on the gallows as a warning. Finally the village elder called together some men to remove it, at the risk of losing their own lives, and a grave was hacked out of the frozen earth under a willow tree. Zoya's compatriots were never very far away. One cold winter night, the Red Army struck swiftly and savagely against the Germans. In retaliation, the Germans rushed to the neighboring village of Gritsovo and set fire to it. The following day, a German unit was sent back to torch Petrishchevo, but the soldiers, fearful of being separated from the main unit and left at the mercy of the partisans, fled after breaking a few windows.

While the Germans never knew her identity, the name of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was soon on every Soviet's lips. On February 16, 1942, hardly more than a year after her death, she was proclaimed a Hero of the Soviet Union, and her spirit came to symbolize the struggle against the Germans. Starving in Leningrad, fighting in Stalingrad, or manufacturing guns, Soviet citizens remembered her fearless courage. Wrote Isidor Schneider:

They lashed her, beat her,
Seared her skin.
No word, no sound.
They whined their frenzy;
She was still.…
In the unshuddering eye
The Unbroken will!

They hung on her breast
The gasoline flasks
And the sign, "GUERRILLA."
They knotted the noose.…

Then to the villagers
Whipped to the gallows
To see her die,
She cried:
"Keep courage, hold hope."
To the hangmen:
"You cannot hang a nation!"
Thus she died.…

Ultimately, the German army was to prove no match for the determination of the Soviet people, and the fury of Soviet women. Alexandra Zakharova , a partisan from Byelo-Russia, summed up their efforts when she said, "We became a storm and the Germans were terrified [of] us." Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya has been reburied in the Novodevich'e Monastery in Moscow; a monument to her has been erected along the Minsk highway near the village of Petrishchevo, and many streets still bear her name.