Zinaida Portnova
Soviet partisan (1926–1944)
Zinaida Martynovna Portnova (Russian: Зинаида Мартыновна Портнова, Belarusian: Зінаіда Мартынаўна Партнова; 20 February 1926 – 15 January 1944) was a Soviet partisan and posthumous Hero of the Soviet Union. She is known for sabotaging and poisoning German troops during World War II before being captured, tortured, and then killed at the age of 17.
Biography
Portnova was born in Leningrad on 20 February 1926. She was the daughter of a working-class Belarusian family. Her father worked at the Kirov Plant. She was a seventh-grade student at the 385th school in Leningrad in 1941, when she left for her grandmother's house in the Vitebsk region. Not long afterwards, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. An incident with the invading Nazi troops, who hit her grandmother while they were confiscating the cattle, led her to hate the Germans.
In 1942, Portnova joined the Belarusian resistance movement, becoming a member of the local underground Komsomol organization in Obol, Vitebsk Region, named Young Avengers. She began by distributing Soviet propaganda leaflets in German-occupied Belarus, collecting and hiding weapons for Soviet soldiers, and reporting on German troop movements.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1958666. VIAF identifies the subject as 9623174413952008700006. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1926, 1944, 1941 and 1942.
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This entry incorporates text from “Zinaida Portnova” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.