It is not known how many invaders perished from this sabotage, what material damage was inflicted on the Wehrmacht. The meaning of this is when the owners are burned at home, leaving their homes beforehand – as happened in Moscow in 1812. Quite accurately, the action prompted many Ukrainians, who had already been shaken by the Holodomor of 32nd year to cooperate with Hitlerite Germany and the armed confrontation of the USSR.
In the so-called. Babi Yar – a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev, 1.5 km long, 50 meters deep, since autumn 1941. By 1943, the occupiers were shooting 170,000 Soviet POWs, Jews, including women, the elderly and children, who until the last wish to believe in the «census» and «resettlement», OUN members, A. Melnik’s groups who did not agree to cooperate, etc. an experimental soap factory, to make soap from bodies, but the Germans do not have time to put it into use. In 1950, the city (Soviet) authorities decided to fill the ravine with waste from neighboring brick plants. The mixture does not wish to solidify, and, in March 1961, breaking through the earth dam, rushes to the houses. As a result of the Kureniv tragedy (by the name of a neighboring village), one and a half thousand people die.
3. «Thin red line» near Moscow, autumn 1941.
4. Zoya Dmitrievna Kosmodemyanskaya, 1923 – November 29, 1941, a Red Army soldier, a subversive group fighter, Hero of the Soviet Union. Parents – teachers who escaped, or exiled to Siberia, grandfather – a priest, shot by the Cheka. 1940 – treatment in a sanatorium for nervous diseases, acquaintance with (writer) Arkady Gaidar lying there. The Komsomol member has a painful gap between the dream (about the universal brotherhood of people) and the harsh reality surrounding it.
Zoya is to the place of gathering of volunteers at the (Moscow) theater of the Colosseum, sent to a sabotage school. On November 27 in the village of Petrischevo, a group of three people set fire to three peasant houses, killing 20 horses. On November 28, Zoya, having missed his comrades, decides to continue arson, is seen by the master of the house, a certain Sviridov, who summons the Germans. The girl calls herself Tanya. She was driven for 4 hours in the cold, subjected to beatings. To tortures are joined by local residents, whose houses are burnt by partisans. One of them said before execution: «Who did you harm? My house was burned, but nothing was done to the Germans! «The last words Zoe roughly convey the demographic situation in the country «You do not outweigh all, we are 170 million.» Other sources, for better agreement with the second census of the population, distort words to «two hundred million».
The body remains in place of execution for about a month, subject to the outrages of German soldiers. Later it will be buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery.
The whole situation looks rather clumsy, just does not fit into the head, causes controversy to this day, releasing a certain psychic energy. In nonsense, a special meaning is born. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya did not show herself in a loud military success. But the more true it joins the pantheon of the people’s martyrs (to which, of course, officers can not belong, in full safety, mincing the «Children’s World»). The article in Pravda, January 27, 1942, produces an impact on Soviet citizens, comparable, it seems, with the advent of a battle-worthy tank corps. Kosmodemyanskaya is the same person as very many in the Union, somewhat confused, awkward, realizing that, after the disappearance (built at the expense of humiliation, sweat and blood of millions of people), the mountains of weapons, almost all the personnel of Stalin’s army, have to fight independently, at least somehow, almost from scratch.