by Mark Leshkevich
[REGNUM] It was late evening—it gets dark early in November, and if this was November 1941, on the Krasnoye Pokatishche farmstead, lost in the Tver forests, then you could say it was already the dead of night. A short but stocky girl, looking around, approached the door of one of the huts and knocked cautiously. The owners' daughter, Marusya Kuporova, opened the door (strangers weren't likely to come in at that hour) and winced. She recognized her friend, Liza Chaikina, who had joined the partisans at the start of the war.
Liza came from behind the front lines with the mission of gathering information about the German garrison in 14 surrounding villages. A quick conversation, and Marusya agreed to shelter her friend until dawn, and after dark, Liza promised to join ours. Unbeknownst to the girls, their neighbor, Timofey Kolosov, had been watching them through the window. He had recently been appointed a "forshteer" (headman) by the occupiers. He also recognized Chaika, as the locals nicknamed Liza. Timofey nudged his youngest son: "Run to Peno, to the Germans!"
A few minutes later, headlights pierced the darkness—a field gendarmerie car. The door to the Kuporovs' house was knocked down with a rifle butt. An officer, through a translator from the "volunteer assistants," demanded that the partisan and everyone who had harbored her be handed over.
In February 1942, after the liberation of the Kalinin region, correspondents from the Komsomol newspaper Smena arrived in Krasnoye Pokatishche and, based on the neighbors' accounts, described the details of the punitive action.
Marusya Kuporova's mother spread her arms, looking at the soldiers in surprise. A shot rang out, and the woman fell, bleeding profusely. Twelve-year-old Kolya screamed and rushed at the executioner... Another shot, and the boy fell beside his mother.
"Damn dogs, what are you doing?" Marusya screamed, unable to contain herself and spitting in the officer's face. He nodded, and the girl was seized and taken out into the yard.
As a German vehicle approached, Liza ran toward the forest. A shout followed her: "If you don't stop, we'll kill everyone on the farm!" Liza stopped—and returned, sacrificing herself to save her loved ones.
OUR NEWSPAPER
The Gospel of John contains the words: "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends." Komsomol member and atheist Elizaveta Chaikina fulfilled this commandment. In post-war literature, she was often compared to one of France's most important saints—"Joan of Arc of the Upper Volga forests." Author Boris Polevoy called Liza in his essay. It's difficult to say whether Liza knew about the peasant's daughter from the Orléans region, as the peasant's daughter from the village of Runo in the Penovsky district hadn't finished her studies before beginning her course in foreign history.
Before the war, the village of Runo was a small settlement with barely a dozen households in the middle of the forest. Since the late 1990s, the village has been abandoned, and hardly a trace of it remains. The Chaikin peasants suffered poverty both before and after the revolution. Their father, Ivan Ivanovich, returned from the "imperialist" war—that is, the First World War—shell-shocked and died soon after. Their mother, Aksinya Prokofyevna, who survived her daughter's death, told a Smena correspondent in February 1942:
"We worked from dawn to dusk, but the land thanked us poorly, as if it were angry with us. Everyone saw: we wandered about, and gnawed at bark. But if only we lived like that: everyone in the village was poorer than the next. Wherever you looked, there was poverty."
Her mother recalled that as a child, Liza "loved songs and stories." But when they started singing songs "about grief, about a cruel fate," the girl would hide in a corner and cry. "What's wrong, Lizanka?" She would mumble through her tears: "The song is wrong," Aksinya Prokofyevna said. "Wrong" meant something about injustice.
Liza completed four years of school at a village school in the district center, and that was the end of her formal education: she had to help the family—sow, weed, crush flax, and tend to the livestock. But Liza still managed to "read" several kilometers to the neighboring village of Zalesye, where she lived in a reading hut. There, Liza attended her first Komsomol meeting.
In the final decades of the Soviet era, the Komsomol became a launching pad for careerists seeking to advance along party and economic lines. But in the 1920s and 1930s (despite the youth being indoctrinated with the dogmas of the "only true doctrine"), the Komsomol also served as an educational project. At 15, Liza was promoted to manage the reading room. Neighbors called her "our newspaper." Through her efforts, agronomy, drama, and music clubs were established within the reading room.
"YOU'LL SEE, I'LL BECOME A WARRIOR!"
In 1939, Liza was elected ("promoted along Komsomol lines") as secretary of the Penovsky District Committee. But she longed for a serious education—four years of schooling was not enough. She asked to be sent to school and only managed to enroll in a party worker's course in Kalinin. But instead of algebra and geometry, she had to learn combat skills. By June 1941, in the first days of the war, Liza was put in charge of the Komsomol's young soldier training course. At the same time, she had to learn to shoot. And so she proudly wrote to a friend:
"I'm learning to shoot a rifle, I can throw a grenade just like the kids, and soon I'll get to the machine gun. You'll see, I'll become a warrior, and what a warrior!"
Liza Chaikina's "dark antithesis" could be considered Antonina Makarova, " Tonka the Machine Gunner." Also from a humble family, she also completed Osoaviakhim's marksmanship course and found herself in occupied territory in 1941. But at the crucial moment of their lives, Liza and Tonya made different choices. Makarova, for whom life and comfort were more important than honor, joined the Nazis—and became one of the most heinous war criminals of the 20th century. Chaikina joined a partisan unit, knowing that it would likely cost her life, given the brutality of the Wehrmacht and the SS Einsatzgruppen.
By the fall of 1941, the Kalinin region had become a rearguard front. Twenty-three partisan brigades, numbering up to 14,000 fighters, forced the Germans to redeploy forces from the main front. The Penovsky district was particularly problematic. Liza Chaikina's comrades in the detachment were responsible for 58 destroyed vehicles, 150 killed soldiers and officers, and three blown-up bridges. Near the hamlet of Krasnoye Pokatishche, partisans and underground fighters blew up German trucks. In the village of Gorodishche, a raid was carried out on a German battalion headquarters. Near the village of Kobeyevo, a German supply train was attacked.
She served as a liaison and scout in the unit. The soldiers were amazed—at just 22 years old, she managed to take on several tasks at once, execute them flawlessly, and demand the same from others. In her memoirs, she is described as an agitator. But this wasn't about political briefings among her own people—they already knew everything they needed thanks to the radio, which picked up Sovinformburo reports.
Liza went around the neighboring villages and told them: don't trust the village elders and policemen, Moscow hasn't been taken, our forces have held off the Germans at Smolensk, they're fighting near Vyazma, Siberian divisions are coming to the rescue. And here, the partisans are beating the enemy. Thanks in large part to Liza's efforts, 15 villages in the Penovsky district were transformed into resistance bases.
The "new government" offered the maximum reward for the surrender of the partisans: 5,000 occupation Reichsmarks and a farmstead with a cow. No one surrendered Liza and her comrades, and Chaika remained elusive until that tragic night on the Krasnoye Pokatishche farmstead.
"I'M DYING FOR MY COUNTRY"
As she was being escorted barefoot and wearing only a shirt, the house of the Kuporovs, who had sheltered her, was ablaze, and her entire family, including her friend Marusya, was killed. But when the Germans demanded, the villagers refused to hand over the partisan: they didn't know her, she wasn't local. Liza was taken to the commandant's office in the village of Peno, to a hut on the banks of the Volga, where she gave a cover story: she was from Leningrad, had fled on the eve of the siege, ended up in occupied territory, and knew no one.
According to eyewitnesses, she was brutally beaten, had two fingers on her right hand broken, and was dunked in icy river water. When asked to give her name and information about the partisans, she repeated, "Ivanova. From Leningrad. I don't know anything." Then the commandant ordered local residents brought to the Volga bank for identification: "Do you know this girl?" According to recollections, the "Judas" was a local drunkard, Arina Kruglova: "Arishka approached Liza: 'This is the partisan, the first Komsomol member.'"
The commandant, considering the investigation complete, gave the order for "liquidation." "Shoot," Liza said calmly. According to other recollections, in her final seconds, she cried out, "I'm dying for the Motherland! She will take revenge!" Still others said Liza said more simply: "Ours will come, Victory will come."
Elizaveta Chaikina was executed on November 23, 1941. On the night of the 24th, partisans attacked 11 German positions simultaneously. A few days later, village elder Timofey Kolosov was found dead in the forest. A little later, the traitor Arina Kruglova was also "visited." On the 18th day after the execution, the Germans discovered that Liza's burial site had been dug up and her body had disappeared. The partisans reburied their comrade in the forest with full military honors.
Her grave is now in the village of Peno. She, one of the first Heroes of the Soviet Union during the war to receive the award posthumously, has a monument in her homeland. A museum and exhibition center in Tver, formerly Kalinin, bears Liza Chaikina's name. Anthologies of Soviet literature include two poems about the partisan woman—a more accomplished one by Mikhail Svetlov and a less accomplished, but perhaps more sincere, one by the Kostroma poetess Maria Komissarova.
But, as those who interacted with Liza's neighbors and relatives attest, she was viewed not only as a heroine but also as a "daughter." And they worried that she never got around to marrying (like Joan of Arc). According to her mother, when asked about marriage, Laza answered almost matter-of-factly: "When I find a groom, I'll bring him to you myself: I don't have time now."