This somewhat larger than life sculpture depicts Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya as a young woman, standing and casually holding a rifle with a strap over her right shoulder. She wears a skirt and knee-high boots and a light jacket. She has short hair and looks to her left. It seems to be a painted metal. It is located in the Ploshchad Revolyutsii (Moscow Metro Station). The artist and date are not indicated at the site.
Wikipedia (
visit link) informs us:
"Zoya Anatolyevna Kosmodemyanskaya... September 13, 1923 – November 29, 1941) was a Soviet partisan, and a Hero of the Soviet Union (awarded posthumously). She was one of the most revered heroines of the Soviet Union...
Fame
The story of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya became popular after Pravda published an article written by Pyotr Lidov on January 27, 1942. The journalist had heard about Zoya's execution from an elderly peasant, and was impressed by the young woman's courage. The witness recounted: "They were hanging her and she was giving a speech. They were hanging her and she was threatening them." Lidov travelled to Petrishchevo, collected details from local residents and published an article about the then-unknown partisan girl. Soon after, Joseph Stalin noticed the article. He proclaimed: "Here is the people's heroine", which started a propaganda campaign honouring Kosmodemyanskaya. In February, she was identified and was awarded the order of Hero of the Soviet Union.
Many streets, kolkhozes and Pioneer organizations in the Soviet Union bore the name of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. Soviet poets, writers, artists and sculptors dedicated their works to Kosmodemyanskaya. In 1944, the film Zoya was made about her. The Soviets erected a monument in her honour not far from the village of Petrishchevo (sculptors – O.A.Ikonnikov and V.A.Feodorov). Another statue is prominently located at the Partizanskaya Moscow Metro station. A 4108-meter (13,478 feet) mountain peak in Trans-Ili Alatau is named after her. A minor planet 1793 Zoya discovered in 1968 by Soviet astronomer Tamara Mikhailovna Smirnova is named after her. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya is buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
Zoya Phan, an outspoken political activist for the Karen people and member of the Burma Campaign UK, was named after Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya by her father, Padoh Mahn Sha Lah Phan. Her father chose this name because he had read about Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya while studying at Yangon University and saw several parallels between the Karen resistance against the Burmese government and the Soviet resistance against the Nazis in Europe.
Controversy
The biography of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya became a subject of media controversy during the 1990s.
In September 1991, almost fifty years after Zoya's death, an article by Aleksandr Zhovtis was published in the weekly Russian magazine Argumenty i Fakty. The article alleged that there were no German troops in the village of Petrischevo, (in spite of several photos of her being hung by German soldiers) 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 had apparently told Nikolai Anov the story. Anov, already dead, apparently passed it on to Zhovtis. At the end of the article, Zhovtis blamed Stalin's scorched earth policy for the 'unnecessary' death of the young woman.
A month later, the same newspaper published another article[15] completely based on letters from readers commenting on Zhovtis' publication. Some authors supported the mainstream version. A letter signed P.A. Lidov's family 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 a story he heard from a Petrischevo resident in 1958 about bizarre irregularities in the identification of "Tanya's" identity. A postgraduate student of the Institute of Russian History, Elena Sinyavskaya, published research supporting that the person executed in Petrischevo was not Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya but a "missing in action" partisan, 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 upheld the official expert conclusion about the identity of the executed partisan. Later the Institute for Criminal Expertise and the Department of Justice of the Russian Federation issued an official conclusion stating that the family photographs of Kosmodemyanskaya belong to the same person as the Pravda photograph of the hanged partisan. The article ended in emotional sentences Let your names be sacred for centuries, Tanya, Zoya, Lila! So many of you gave for us the most precious thing you had; your lives. And we cannot, should not, and indeed have no right to forget or betray 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 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, and so on. Kozhemyaka attributed materials to the same Elena Sinyavskaya (now a Doctor of Historical Science). In her response (in the newspaper Patriot from February 26, 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 have been an obscure "psychoanalytic writer", 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 January 25, 1942 (two months after Zoya's execution). The protocol stated that Kosmodemyanskaya was caught while trying to destroy 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 asleep 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 Red Army. The interview described the negative effect on the morale of the German soldiers who witnessed the burning of the houses.
Marius Broekmeyer in his 2004 book claims that she was reported to the Germans by angry neighbors because she had burned their stables and killed their horses while trying to destroy supplies before the Germans could get to them."