Tatyana Savelyevna Marinenko (; ; 25 January 1920 – 2 August 1942) was a Soviet partisan and intelligence officer of the

NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (, ), abbreviated as NKVD (; ), was the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1946. The agency was formed to succeed the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) se ...

during the Second World War. After she was captured and tortured by the Germans in 1942 she was posthumously declared a Hero of the Soviet Union on 8 May 1965.

Early life

Marinenko was born on 25 January 1920 to a

Belarusian Belarusian may refer to: * Something of, or related to Belarus * Belarusians, people from Belarus, or of Belarusian descent * A citizen of Belarus, see Demographics of Belarus * Belarusian language * Belarusian culture * Belarusian cuisine * Byelor ...

peasant family in the small village of Sukhoi Bor in what is now Polotsk district, present-day Belarus. After completing secondary school she entered the Polotsk Pedagogical School where she graduated in 1939, not long before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. She worked as a teacher in a secondary school in the village of Zelenka in Polotsk and was a member of the

Komsomol The All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, usually known as Komsomol, was a political youth organization in the Soviet Union. It is sometimes described as the youth division of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), although it w ...

World War II

The schoolteacher began working as a partisan reconnaissance scout for the NKVD when the Germans invaded and occupied Polotsk. Under the pseudonym "Василёк" (English: Cornflower) she relayed information about the locations of Axis garrisons and troops to the Red Army until a traitor in her unit informed the Germans of their activities. Marinenko and her 14-year-old brother, who was also a partisan, were shot by the Axis after three days of interrogation and torture along with 28 other villagers who were part of the resistance. She was buried in the village of Zharci, Polotsk.

Death and recognition

Marinenko was not awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union until 1965 on the 20th anniversary of the end of the war, when the Supreme Soviet was awarded the title to partisans and soldiers killed in action whose feats had not been made public until after the war. Her portrait was installed in a museum in Belarus with a plaque describing her as the "Belorussian Zoya" and describing her feat as that of

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya Zoya Anatolyevna Kosmodemyanskaya ( rus, Зо́я Анато́льевна Космодемья́нская, p=ˈzojə kəsmədʲɪˈmʲjanskəjə; September 13, 1923 – November 29, 1941) was a Soviet partisan. She was executed after acts of s ...

, who was one of the most revered Heroines of the Soviet Union during the

Great Patriotic War The Eastern Front, also known as the Great Patriotic War (term), Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union and its successor states, and the German–Soviet War in modern Germany and Ukraine, was a Theater (warfare), theatre of World War II ...

. A monument to Marinenko (pictured) was installed in Polotsk in addition to multiple schools named in her honor.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Marinenko, Tatyana Heroes of the Soviet Union Recipients of the Order of Lenin 1920 births 1942 deaths Soviet female resistance members Belarusian partisans Resistance members killed by Nazi Germany Soviet military personnel killed in World War II

Early life

World War II

Death and recognition

See also

References