Roza Shanina

Shanina enjoyed playing volleyball whenever she got the opportunity. The death of three of her five brothers in the war had a deep impact on her mind. She was a dedicated soldier and believed that she was killing for the right cause.

She was just 20 years old when she died due to enemy shelling. She had no time for boyfriends or love affairs. She was close to a man named Misha Panarin, who was killed in the war. She mentioned a boy named Nikolai, too, in her journals. However, she had no intention of getting married till the war was over, as she felt her duty toward her country was more important than anything.

She was born on April 3, 1924, in the village of Yedma, Arkhangelsk Oblast, in Russia, to Anna Alexeyevna and Georgiy Mikhailovich Shanin. Her mother was a milkmaid, and her father, who was disabled due to a World War I injury, worked as a logger.

She was named after the Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg and grew up in a large family, with five brothers and a sister. Her parents also raised three orphans.

She was raised in a remote area and had to walk 13 kilometers from Yedma to Bereznik to attend middle school. When she was 14 years old, she walked 200 kilometers to Arkhangelsk to enroll herself at a college, where she moved into a dormitory. In 1938, she joined the Soviet youth movement known as ‘Komsomol.’

In 1940, scholarships were withdrawn and a tuition fee was introduced for secondary education. Roza had to support herself by taking up a job at a kindergarten by day. She attended evening classes in college. She graduated from college in 1942, when Russia was in the grip of World War II.

Her 19-year-old brother, Mikhail, was killed during the Siege of Leningrad, and later, two more of her brothers died in the war. Arkhangelsk was bombed by the German ‘Luftwaffe.’ Soon, Shanina volunteered to serve in the military to save her country from the German invasion. She learnt how to shoot and was enrolled into the ‘Vsevobuch’ program for military training, in June 1943.

Shanina was selected to be an instructor at the ‘Sniper Training School,’ but she preferred to be on active service and joined the ‘184th Rifle Division’ in April 1944. She was appointed as the commander of a special female-sniper platoon that had been newly raised.

She shot her first German soldier three days after joining the force and was shaken by the experience. However, she soon started believing in her cause and did not feel guilty killing fascists.

She became the first Soviet female sniper to have received the ‘Order of Glory 3rd Class’ for her actions in the battle of Kozyi Gory in April 1944, where she killed 13 enemy soldiers, while she was under heavy enemy fire. She was also featured on the front page of the Soviet newspaper ‘Unichtozhim Vraga’ that year.

Although the authorities soon decided to withdraw female snipers from the battle zone of ‘Operation Bagration,’ Roza volunteered to remain on the frontline and wrote to Joseph Stalin, requesting to be attached to a reconnaissance company or a battalion.

She participated in the Vitebsk–Orsha Offensive to eliminate several Germans who were encircled in June 1944. Later, she participated in the battle for Vilnius, where the German occupation forces were routed and driven back.

Shanina maintained a combat diary that was preserved by a war correspondent after her death. Extracts from her diary and sniper log were published in the magazine ‘Yunost’ in 1965. Several of her letters written during the war have also been published.