Capitalist history textbooks rarely tell us real working-class history. They especially don’t teach us about the countless working-class heroes. One such hero is Zinaida Portnova, or “Zina” for short, a Soviet teenager, Soviet partisan, and hero of the Soviet Union under leader Joseph Stalin.
She was known for killing over 100 Nazis by poison. She is said to have shot the Nazi detective who captured her. Zina was born on February 20, 1926 in the city of Leningrad in a working-class Belarusian family. Her father Martyn worked at the huge Kirov factory. She graduated from seventh grade in 1941, then left for her grandmother’s home in in the countryside.
Nazis invade USSR, Zina becomes a red
At the beginning of June 1941, she arrived for school holidays in the village of Zui, near the Obol station of the Shumilino district of the Vitebsk region. When the Nazis invaded the USSR on June 22, 1941, Zina  found herself in Nazi-occupied territory. She was forced to watch as soldiers beat her grandmother for their cattle.
In 1942, she became a member of the local underground resistance “Young Avengers” headed by Yefrosinya Zenkova (who was a leader of the Komosol, the youth division of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union). Zina committed herself to communism.
She began by distributing Soviet propaganda leaflets in German-occupied Belorussia, collecting and hiding weapons for Soviet soldiers, and reporting on German troop movements. After learning how to use weapons and explosives, Portnova participated in sabotage actions at a pump, local power plant, and brick factory.
Zina poisons a 100 Nazis
She got herself a job working in the kitchens of a nearby Nazi garrison. On the instructions of the underground she poisoned the soup, which resulted in the deaths of many high-ranking officials. Soviet sources say more than 100 Nazi scum died.
The Nazis began a search for intruders. Zina claimed that she was innocent and ate some of the food in front of the Nazis to prove it was not poisoned. When she did not fall ill immediately, they released her. She managed to survive this after being  treated with grass broth antidote at her grandmothers house. However, after this it was too dangerous for her to remain in the village, and Zina was later transferred to the fighting partisan detachment.From August 1943, she was a member of the Kliment Voroshilov scout partisan detachment. In December 1943, returning from an assignment to discover the reasons for the failure of the Young Avengers organization, she was captured in the village of Mostysche.
Reports of her escape vary. One version is that, during Gestapo interrogation in the village of Goriany, she took the investigator’s pistol off the table, then shot and killed him. When two Nazi soldiers entered after hearing the gunshots, she shot them as well. She then attempted to escape the compound and ran into the woods, where she was caught near the banks of a river.
Another version is that the Gestapo interrogator, in a fit of rage, threw his pistol to the table after threatening to shoot her. Taking the pistol, Portnova shot him. Escaping through the door, she shot a guard in the corridor, then another in the courtyard. After the pistol misfired when Portnova attempted to shoot a guard blocking her access to the street, she was captured. After that the Nazis tortured her for more than a month, trying to get information about the partisans. On the morning of January 10, 1944, she was shot, either in the prison of the city of Polotsk or in the village of Goryany.
Remember Zina
Today there are two monuments standing for her, a bust in Minsk near where she was born and an obelisk in Obol where she was killed.
Zina’s story is one of working-class bravery. Trained by communists, she clearly had a deep hatred for the Nazis and a deeper love for the working class. Her story shows that young people can be thinkers and fighters for a better world.