Anastasiya Biseniek

Anastasiya Alexandrovna Biseniek (; 1899 – 1943) was the leader of the Dno Soviet partisan organization of the Pskov region who transferred information for scouts and partisans in addition to providing weapons and explosives. As an employee at the depot of a railroad junction she was able to help partisans sabotage much-needed equipment for the Germans. On 8 May 1965 she was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union, over twenty years after she was executed in the Zapolyansky death camp.

Pre-war life Anastasiya Biseniek was born in 1899 in the city of Dno, then part of the Russian Empire to a large Russian family; she had four brothers and three sisters. Her father, Aleksander Pavelovich Finogenov, worked at the Dno-1 Railway Station. In 1914 he was drafted into the Imperial Russian Army but was soon demobilized after he was injured during the Russian Civil War, after which he worked as a master shoemaker and repaired boots. After completing primary school Anastasiya worked at the rail station until 1914 when her father left for the army and arranged for her to move to Petrograd to work at a clothing factory. In 1917, just several days before the October Revolution, her lover who she had met while working in Petrograd was killed during a night patrol; he was a Bolshevik.

In 1919 Anastasiya returned to Dno and got a job working at a boarding school, and in 1921 married a Latvian refugee Fyodor Biseniek. She took on his surname and the couple soon had their first child, Yura. In 1922 Fyodor was granted permission to return to Latvia, and he immediately left for Latvia to visit his family without telling Anastasiya. In search for her husband she illegally left the Soviet Union for Latvia, where they reconnected and Anastasiya eventually birthed a son Konstantine ten years later. Through personal connections to high-ranking officials such as Mikhail Kalinin she managed to return to Dno, where she found employment working at a freight station and later as a rail conductor. In 1937 she was arrested by the NKVD during the Great Purge for having left the Soviet Union, but was released until 6 June 1938 when she was arrested again and sentenced to ten years in prison on 27 October for violating Article 58. On 18 September 1939 the case was dismissed and the ruling was revoked. After she was released she met Vasily Zinovev, who later became the commander of her partisan unit.

Partisan activities

Partisan activities in the Dno area On 18 July 1941, when the district committee of the Communist Party worried about the possibility of the 22nd Rifle Corps retreating from the ongoing German offensive, the party formed a partisan detachment. Zinovev was eventually appointed commander of the unit, a party member named Timokin became the commissar, and Anastasiya's oldest son Yura became a guerilla in the unit. Before the unit left the city of Dno to fight approaching Germans the leadership of the unit contacted Anastasiya, asking her to serve as leader of the part of the unit that stayed in Dno. Her job would be to organize observation of the situation in the city and at the railway station, pass information on to partisans who had occasionally left the forest, hold meetings in her apartment, and disrupt German communication and transportation equipment in order to hinder the German advance on Leningrad. Sympathetic to the efforts to resist the Leningrad blockade, Anastasiya was happy to facilitate the resistance. To do so she would have to remain in the city, and when she was given an opportunity to evacuate the city with her young son she refused; just one day later on 19 July the city was taken over by German troops.

Through communications with schoolteacher E. Ivanov, Biseniek established connections with the partisan-controlled village of Botanog. In 1942, partisan intelligence agent Dmitri Yakovlev, who worked as a machinist before the war and escaped from German captivity traveled to Biseniek's apartment to meet his parents; but he did not carry any required identification documents with him. When a group of German police officers approached him and asked to see his papers, one of the policemen realized he was a fugitive and arrested him. Yakovlev's arrest alarmed Anastasia, and after his arrest Yevgenia asked Anastasiya to leave the city of Dno for her own safety but she refused, realizing that if she did leave the Nazis would arrest all of her relatives and anyone she had previously spoken to. Not long after Yakovlev's arrest, Anastasiya and Yevgenia were summoned by the Germans for interrogation and then shown to the beaten Yakovlev to see if Yakovlev might recognize them. However, Yakovlev denied any acquaintance with the two. Anastasiya and her sister were permitted to leave but after leaving Yakolev was shot.

On 13 October 1943 Anastasiya was shot on the orders of the camp commandant. In November 1943 the camp was dismantled and all remains of the prisoners killed in the camp's ten months of existence were burned in preparation for the advancing Soviet military. Just three months later the 2nd Baltic and Leningrad fronts of Red Army retook the Dno railroad junction and the surrounding area.

Recognition On the eve of the 20th anniversary of the defeat of the Germans in the Second World War Anastasiya and nine other partisans in the Pskov region were declared Heroes of the Soviet Union by decree of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, with eight of the nine people awards being posthumous. A large granite memorial plaque inscribed with "Here, at the station Dno, during the temporary German-Fascist occupation of the city, Hero of the Soviet Union Biseniek Anastasia Alexandrovna participated in the underground resistance. The courageous patriot was brutally tortured and executed by the fascists in October 1943. Eternal glory to the heroes who gave their lives for the freedom and independence of our Motherland" was placed at the train station in Dno where she worked. The depot in Dno contains a small museum dedicated to the history of the town during German occupation and a central street in Dno was named in her honor. In the 1980s historian Nikolai Vassarionovich Masolov compiled her complete biography after speaking with her relatives and surviving members of her partisan detachment.