Zoya Voskresenskaya
| Zoya Voskresenskaya | |
|---|---|
Zoya Voskresenskaya in 1930s
|
|
| Born |
Zoya Ivanovna Voskresenskaya Зоя Ивановна Воскресенская April 28, 1907 Tula Governorate, Russian Empire |
| Died | April 12, 1992 (aged 84) Moscow, Russian Federation |
| Occupation |
diplomat NKVD foreign agent author |
| Years active | 1930s – 1992 |
| Spouse(s) | Boris Rybkin |
| Awards |
Order of Lenin Order of the Red Banner of Labour USSR State Prize (1968) |
Zoya Ivanovna Voskresenskaya (Russian: Зоя Ивановна Воскресенская; in marriage – Rybkina, Рыбкина; April 28 [o.s. 15], 1907, Uzlovaya, Tula Governorate, – January 8, 1992, Moscow, Russian Federation) was a Soviet diplomat, NKVD foreign office secret agent and, in the 1960s and 70s, a popular author of books for children. A USSR State Prize laureate (1968), Voskresenskaya was best known for her novels Skvoz Ledyanuyu Mglu (Through Icy Haze, 1962) and Serdtse Materi (A Mother's Heart, 1965). In 1962-1980 more than 21 million of her books were sold in the USSR.
In the late 1980s, as Perestroyka incited the wave of declassifications, Zoya Voskresenskaya's story was made public. It transpired that a popular children's writer was for 25 years a leading figure in the Soviet intelligence service's foreign department. Voskresenskaya's war-time memoirs Now I Can Tell the Truth came out in 1992, 11 months after the author's death.
Zoya Voskresenskaya was born in Uzlovaya, Tula Governorate, into the family of a railway station master's deputy, and spent her early years in Aleksin. Her father died when she was ten and mother with her three children moved to Smolensk. At 14 Zoya started working as a librarian, at the 48th Cheka battalion of the Smolensk Governorate. Two years later, in 1923, she was commissioned as a tutor and politruk to a local corrective labor colony for young offenders, then got transferred to a regional CP office in Smolensk. In 1928 Voskresenskaya moved to Moscow and in August 1929 joined the OGPU foreign office. Her first port of call in 1930 was Harbin in Manchuria; after two years of reconnaissance work she was moved to Riga, Latvia, then Germany and Austria.
...
Wikipedia