70
years ago on this date, Soviet Girl-Sniper, Roza Shanina was killed in action.
I will post information about this female soldier from Wikipedia and other
links.
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Sniper Roza Shanina, holding a 1891/30
Mosin–Nagant with the 3.5x PU scope. 1944.
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Born
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3 April
1924
Yedma, Arkhangelsk Oblast, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
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Died
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28
January 1945 (aged 20)
East Prussia, Nazi Germany
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Allegiance
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Soviet
Union
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Service/branch
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Red
Army
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Years of
service
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1943–1945
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Rank
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Senior
Sergeant
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Unit
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184th
Rifle Division (3rd Belorussian Front)
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Commands
held
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1st Sniper
Platoon (184th Rifle Division)
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Battles/wars
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World
War II (Eastern Front)
- Battle of Vilnius
- East Prussian Offensive
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Awards
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- Orders of Glory 3rd and
2nd Class
- Medal for Courage
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Roza Georgiyevna Shanina (Russian: Ро́за Гео́ргиевна
Ша́нина, IPA: [ˈrozə ɡʲɪˈorɡʲɪɪvnəˈʂanʲɪnə]; 3 April 1924 – 28 January
1945) was a Soviet sniper during World
War II, credited with fifty-nine confirmed kills, including twelve
soldiers during the Battle of Vilnius. Shanina volunteered for
the military after the death of her brother in 1941 and chose to be a marksman on the
front line. Praised for her shooting accuracy, Shanina was capable of precisely
hitting moving enemy personnel and making doublets (two target hits by two
rounds fired in quick succession).
Allied
newspapers described Shanina as "the unseen terror of East Prussia".
She became the first Soviet female sniper to be awarded the Order of Glory and
was the first servicewoman of the 3rd Belorussian Front to receive it. Shanina
was killed in action during the East Prussian Offensive while shielding the
severely wounded commander of an artillery unit. Shanina's bravery received
praise already during her lifetime, but came at odds with the Soviet policy of
sparing snipers from heavy fights. Her combat diary was first published in
1965.
Early life
Roza
Shanina was born on 3 April 1924 in the Russian village of Yedma (Arkhangelsk Oblast) to Anna Alexeyevna Shanina,
a kolkhoz
milkmaid, and Georgiy (Yegor) Mikhailovich Shanin, a logger who had been
disabled by a wound received during World
War I. Roza was reportedly named after the Marxist revolutionary Rosa
Luxemburg and had six siblings: one sister Yuliya and five brothers:
Mikhail, Fyodor, Sergei, Pavel and Marat. The Shanins also raised three
orphans. Roza was above average height, with light brown hair and blue eyes,
and spoke in a Northern Russian dialect. After finishing
four classes of elementary school in Yedma, Shanina continued her education in
the village of Bereznik.
As there was no school transport at the time, when she was in grades five
through seven Roza had to walk 13 kilometres (8.1 mi) to Bereznik to
attend middle school. On Saturdays, Shanina again went to Bereznik to take care
of her ill aunt Agnia Borisova.
At
the age of fourteen, Shanina, against her parents' wishes, walked 200
kilometres (120 mi) across the taiga to the rail station and travelled to Arkhangelsk
to study at the college there (the trek was later attested by Shanina's school
teacher Alexander Makaryin). Shanina left home with little money and almost no
possessions; and before moving to the college dormitory she lived with her
elder brother Fyodor. Later in her combat diary Shanina would recall
Arkhangelsk's stadium Dinamo, and the cinemas, Ars and Pobeda. Shanina's friend
Anna Samsonova remembered that Roza sometimes returned from her friends in Ustyansky District to her college dormitory
between 2:00 and 3:00 am. As the doors were locked by that time, the other
students tied several bedsheets together to help Roza climb into her room. In
1938, Shanina became a member of the Soviet youth movement Komsomol.
Two
years later, Soviet secondary education institutes introduced tuition fees, and
the scholarship fund was cut. Shanina received little financial support from
home and on 11 September 1941, she took a job in kindergarten No. 2 (lately
known as Beryozka) in Arkhangelsk, with which she was offered a free apartment.
She studied in the evenings and worked in the kindergarten during the daytime.
The children liked Shanina and their parents appreciated her. Shanina graduated
from college in the 1941–42 academic year, when the Soviet Union was in the
grip of World War II.
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World War II sniper Roza Shanina with her
rifle, 1944. Photo by A. N. Fridlyanski
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Commendation list of Roza Shanina for her
Order of Glory 3rd Class.
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Commendation list of Roza Shanina for her
Order of Glory 2nd Class.
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Commendation list of Roza Shanina for her
Medal for Courage
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Tour of duty
Following
the German invasion of the Soviet Union,
Arkhangelsk was bombed by the Luftwaffe,
and Shanina and other townspeople were involved in firefighting and mounted
voluntary vigils on rooftops to protect the kindergarten. Shanina's two elder
brothers had volunteered for the military. In December 1941, a death notification
was received for her 19-year-old brother Mikhail, who had died during the Siege of Leningrad. In response, Shanina went
to the military commissariat to ask for
permission to serve. Two more of Shanina's brothers died in the war. At that
time the Soviet Union had begun deploying female snipers because they had
flexible limbs, and it was believed that they were patient and cunning. They
were also thought to be more resilient than men under combat stress, and more
resistant to cold. In February 1942, Soviet women between the ages of 16 and 45
became eligible for the military draft, but Shanina was not drafted that month
as the local military commissariat wanted to pinion her out of war's way. She
first learned to shoot at a shooting
range. On 22 June 1943, while still living in the dormitory, Shanina
was accepted into the Vsevobuch program for universal military training. After
Shanina's several applications, the military commissariat finally allowed her
to enrol in the Central Female Sniper Academy, where she met Aleksandra
"Sasha" Yekimova and Kaleriya "Kalya" Petrova, who became
her closest friends, with Shanina calling them "the vagrant three".
Honed to a fine point, Shanina scored highly in training and graduated from the
academy with honours. She was offered to stay as an instructor there, but
refused due to a call of duty. In 1941 – 1945 a total of 2,484 Soviet
female snipers were deployed for the war and their combined tally of kills is
conservatively estimated to be at least 11,280.
After the
momentous victory in the Battle of Stalingrad the Soviet troops
proceeded to nationwide counter-offensives and Shanina on 2 April 1944 joined
the 184th Rifle Division, where a separate
female sniper platoon had been formed. Shanina was appointed a commander of
that platoon. Three days later, southeast of Vitebsk,
Shanina killed her first German soldier. In Shanina's own words, recorded by an
anonymous author, her legs gave way upon that first encounter and she slid down
into the trench, saying, "I've killed a man." Concerned, the other
women ran up saying, "That was a fascist you finished off!" Seven
months later, Shanina wrote in her diary that she was now killing the enemy in
cold blood and saw the meaning of her life in her actions. She wrote that if
she had to do everything over again, she would still strive to enter the sniper
academy and would go to the front again.
For her
actions in the battle for the village of Kozyi Gory (Smolensk
Oblast), Shanina was awarded her first military distinction, the Order of
Glory 3rd Class on 17 April 1944. She became the first Soviet female
sniper and the first servicewoman of the 3rd Belorussian Front to receive that
order. According to the report of Major Degtyarev (the commander of the 1138th
Rifle Regiment) for the corresponding commendation list, between 6 and 11 April
Shanina killed 13 enemy soldiers while subjected to artillery and machine gun
fire. By May 1944, her sniper tally increased to 17 confirmed enemy kills, and
Shanina was praised as a precise and brave soldier. The same year, on 9 June,
Shanina's portrait was featured on the front page of the Soviet newspaper Unichtozhim
Vraga.
When Operation Bagration commenced in the Vitebsk
region on 22 June 1944, it was decided that female snipers would be withdrawn.
They voluntarily continued to support the advancing infantry anyway, and
despite the Soviet policy of sparing snipers, Shanina asked to be sent to the
front line. Although her request was refused, she went anyway. Shanina was
later sanctioned for going to the front line without permission, but did not
face a court martial. She wanted to be attached to a
battalion or a reconnaissance company, turning to the commander of the 5th Army, Nikolai Krylov. Shanina also wrote twice
to Joseph Stalin
with the same request.
From 26 to
28 June 1944, Shanina participated in the elimination of the encircled
German troops near Vitebsk during the Vitebsk–Orsha Offensive. As the Soviet
army advanced further westward, from 8 to 13 July of the same year, Shanina and
her sisters-in-arms took part in the struggle for
Vilnius, which had been under German occupation since 24 June 1941.
The Germans were finally driven out from Vilnius on 13 July 1944. During the
Soviet summer offensives of that year Shanina managed to capture three Germans.
From her
time at the military academy, Shanina became known for her ability to score
doublets (two target hits made in quick succession). Shanina was also capable
of precisely hitting moving enemy personnel. During one period she crawled
through a muddy communications trench each day at dawn to a specially
camouflaged pit which overlooked German-controlled territory. She wrote,
"the unconditional requirement—to outwit the enemy and kill him—became an
irrevocable law of my hunt". Shanina successfully used counter-sniper tactics against a German cuckoo sniper
hidden in a tree, by waiting until dusk when the space between the tree
branches would be backlit by sunlight and the sniper's nest became visible. On
one occasion, Shanina also made use of selective fire from a submachine gun.
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A page from Roza Shanina's diary.
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Diary
Shanina
enjoyed writing and would often send letters to her home village and to her
friends in Arkhangelsk. She started writing a combat diary; although diaries
were strictly prohibited in the Soviet military, there were some furtive
exceptions, such as The Front Diary of Izrael Kukuyev and The
Chronicle of War of Muzagit Hayrutdinov. To preserve military secrecy,
Shanina termed the killed and wounded "blacks" and "reds"
respectively in her diary. Shanina kept the diary from 6 October 1944 to 24
January 1945.
After
Shanina's death, the diary, consisting of three thick notebooks, was kept by
the war correspondent Pyotr Molchanov for twenty years in Kiev. An abridged
version was published in the magazine Yunost in 1965, and the diary was
transferred to the Regional Museum of Arkhangelsk Oblast. Several of Shanina's
letters and some data from her sniper log have also been published.
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Roza Shanina with the Red Army sniper badge.
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East Prussia
In
August 1944 advancing Soviet troops had reached the Soviet border with East Prussia and by 31 August of that year
Shanina's battle count reached 42 kills. The following month the Šešupė River was
crossed. Shanina's 184th Rifle
Division became the first Soviet unit to enter East Prussia. At that
time, two Canadian newspapers, the Ottawa Citizen and Leader-Post, reported that according to
an official dispatch from the Šešupė River front, Shanina killed five Germans
in one day as she crouched in a sniper hideout. Later in September her sniper
tally had reached 46 kills, of which 15 were made on German soil and seven
during an offensive. On 17 September, Unichtozhim Vraga credited Shanina
with 51 hits. In the third quarter of 1944, Shanina was given a short furlough and visited Arkhangelsk. She
returned to the front on October 17 for one day, and later received an
honourable certificate from the Central Committee of Komsomol. On 16 September 1944, Shanina was
awarded her second military distinction, the Order of Glory 2nd Class for
intrepidity and bravery displayed in various battles against the Germans in
that year.
On
26 October 1944 Shanina became eligible for the Order of Glory 1st Class for
her actions in a battle near Schlossberg (now Dobrovolsk), but ultimately received the Medal
for Courage instead. Shanina was awarded the medal on 27 December
for the gallant posture displayed during a German counter-offensive on 26
October. There Shanina fought together with Captain Igor
Aseyev, the Hero of the
Soviet Union, and witnessed his death on 26 October. Shanina, who
served as an assistant platoon commander, was ordered to commit the female
snipers to combat. She was among the first female snipers to receive the Medal
for Courage. Schlossberg was finally retaken from Germans by the troops of the 3rd Belorussian
Front on 16 January 1945 during the Insterburg–Königsberg Operation.
On
12 December 1944, an enemy sniper shot Shanina in her right shoulder. She wrote
in her diary that she had not felt the pain, "the shoulder was just
scalded with something hot." Although the injury, which Shanina described
as "two small holes", seemed minor to her, she needed an operation
and was incapacitated for several days. She reported in her diary that the
previous day she had a prophetic dream in which she was wounded in exactly the
same place.
On
8 January 1945 Nikolai Krylov
formally allowed Shanina to participate in front-line combat, albeit with great
reluctance: previously Shanina was denied that permission by the commander of
the 184th Rifle Division and the military council of the 5th Army
as well. Five days later, the Soviets launched the East Prussian
Offensive, which prompted heavy fighting in East Prussia. By 15
January, travelling with divisional logistics, Shanina reached the East
Prussian town of Eydtkuhnen (now Chernyshevskoye), where she used white
military camouflage. She joined the infantry offensive despite enemy fire from rocket mortars. Several days later, she
experienced friendly fire
from a Katyusha rocket
launcher and wrote in her diary, "Now I understand why the
Germans are so afraid of Katyushas. What a fire!" At the border of East
Prussia, Shanina killed 26 enemy soldiers. The last unit she served in was the
144th Rifle Division. According to the online Book of Memory of Arkhangelsk
Oblast, Shanina served in the 205th Special Motorized Rifle Battalion of that
division. Shanina had hoped to go to university after the war, or if that was
not possible, to raise orphans.
In
the course of her tour of duty Shanina was mentioned in
despatches several times. Her final sniper tally reached fifty-nine
confirmed kills (fifty-four, according to other sources), including twelve
kills during the Battle of
Vilnius, with sixty-two enemies knocked out of action. Domestically
her achievements were acknowledged particularly by the war correspondent Ilya Ehrenburg and in the newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, which said that
Shanina was one of the best snipers in her unit and that even veteran soldiers
were inferior to her in shooting accuracy. Shanina's exploits were also
reported in the Western press, particularly in Canadian newspapers, where she
was called "the unseen terror of East Prussia". She paid no special
attention to the achieved renown, and once wrote that she had been overrated.
On 16 January 1945 Shanina wrote in her combat diary: "What I've actually
done? No more than I have to as a Soviet man, having stood up to defend the
motherland." She also wrote, "The essence of my happiness is fighting
for the happiness of others. It's strange, why is it that in grammar, the word
"happiness" can only be singular? That is counter to its meaning,
after all. ... If it turns necessary to die for the common happiness, then
I'm braced to."
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Death notification of Roza Shanina addressed
to her mother Anna Shanina.
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Death
In
the face of the East Prussian Offensive, the Germans tried to strengthen the
localities they controlled against great odds. In a diary entry dated 16
January 1945, Shanina wrote that despite her wish to be in a safer place, some
unknown force was drawing her to the front line. In the same entry she wrote
that she had no fear and that she had even agreed to go "to a melee
combat". The next day, Shanina wrote in a letter that she might be on the
verge of being killed because her battalion had lost 72 out of 78 people. Her
last diary entry reports that German fire had become so intense that the Soviet
troops, including herself, had sheltered inside self-propelled guns.
On 27 January Shanina was severely injured while shielding a wounded artillery
officer. She was found by two soldiers disemboweled, with her chest torn open
by a shell fragment.
Despite attempts to save her, Shanina died the following day near the Richau
estate (later a Soviet settlement of Telmanovka), 3 kilometres (1.9 mi)
southeast of the East Prussian village of Ilmsdorf (Novobobruysk).
Nurse Yekaterina Radkina remembered Shanina telling her that she regretted
having done so little. By the day of Shanina's death the Soviets had overtaken
several major East Prussian localities, including Tilsit, Insterburg and Pillau, and approached Königsberg. Recalling the moment Shanina's
mother received notification of her daughter's death, her brother Marat wrote:
"I clearly remembered mother's eyes. They weren't teary anymore. ...
'That's all, that's all'—she repeated". Shanina was buried under a
spreading pear tree on the shore of the Alle River—now called the Lava— and was later reinterred in the
settlement of Znamensk,
Kaliningrad Oblast.
Posthumous honours
In
1964–65 a renewed interest in Shanina arose in the Soviet press, largely due to
the publication of her diary. The newspaper Severny Komsomolets asked
Shanina's contemporaries to write what they knew about her. Streets in Arkhangelsk,
Shangaly and
Stroyevskoye were named after
her, and the village of Yedma has a museum dedicated to Shanina. The local
school where she studied in 1931–35 has a commemorative plate. In Arkhangelsk,
regular shooting competitions were organized among members of the paramilitary DOSAAF sport
organisation for the Roza Shanina Prize, while Novodvinsk
organized an open shooting sports championship in her memory. The village of
Malinovka in Ustyansky District started to hold annual cross-country ski races
for the Roza Shanina Prize.
In
1985, the Council of Veterans of the Russian Central Women Sniper Academy unsuccessfully
requested the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union
to posthumously bestow the Order of Glory 1st Class on Shanina (which would
have made her a Full Cavalier of that order). In the same year, Russian author Nikolai Zhuravlyov
published the book Posle boya vernulas (Returned After Battle).
Its title refers to Shanina's words, "I will return after the
battle," which she uttered after receiving a note from her battalion
commander urging her to return to the rear immediately. Verses have been
composed about Shanina, such as those by writer Nikolai Nabitovich. A
small memorial stele
dedicated to Shanina (part of a three-piece monument) was erected in
Bogdanovsky settlement, Ustyansky District.
In
2000, Shanina's name appeared on the war memorial stone of the Siberian State Technological
University, although there is no evidence she had any affiliation with it
during her life. Russian author Viktor Logvinov controversially wrote in the
1970s that Shanina had studied in the Siberian Forestry Institute and that she
was the daughter of an "old Krasnoyarsk
communist". The claim was continued by Krasnoyarsk publications in later
years, particularly in 2005. In 2013, a wall of memory, featuring graffiti
portraits of six Russian war honorees, including Roza Shanina, was opened in Arkhangelsk.
Character and
personal life
The
war correspondent Pyotr Molchanov, who had frequently met Shanina at the front,
described her as a person of unusual will with a genuine, bright nature.
Shanina described herself as "boundlessly and recklessly talky"
during her college years. She typified her own character as like that of the
Romantic poet, painter and writer Mikhail
Lermontov, deciding, like him, to act as she saw fit. Shanina dressed
modestly and liked to play volleyball. According to Shanina's sister-in-arms
Lidiya Vdovina, Roza used to sing her favourite war song "Oy tumany moi,
rastumany" ("O My Mists") each time she cleaned her weapon.
Shanina had a straightforward character and valued courage and the absence of
egotism in people. She once told a story when "about half a hundred
frenzied fascists with wild cries" attacked a trench accommodating twelve
female snipers, including Shanina: "Some fell from our well-aimed bullets,
some we finished with our bayonets, grenades, shovels, and some we took
prisoners, having restrained their arms."
Shanina's
personal life was thwarted by war. On 10 October 1944, she wrote in her diary,
"I can't accept that Misha Panarin doesn't live anymore. What a good guy!
[He] has been killed ... He loved me, I know, and I him ... My heart
is heavy, I'm twenty, but I have no close [male] friend". In November
1944, Shanina wrote that she "is flogging into her head that [she]
loves" a man named Nikolai, although he "doesn't shine in upbringing
and education". In the same entry she wrote that she did not think about marriage
because "it's not the time now". She later wrote that she "had
it out" with Nikolai and "wrote him a note in the sense of 'but I'm
given to the one and will love no other one '". Ultimately in her last
diary record, filled with sombre tones, Shanina wrote that she "cannot
find a solace" now and is "of no use to anyone".
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