Ziba Ganiyeva

Ziba Pasha qizi Ganiyeva (; ; 20 August 1923 – 2010) was a Soviet sniper , reconnaissance scout, and radio operator in the Red Army. She killed at least 20 enemy soldiers in World War II. After the war, she starred in a movie and became a philologist.

Early life Ziba Ganiyeva was born to an ethnic Azerbaijani father and ethnic Uzbek mother. Sources vary widely on her place of birth; most indicate that she was born in Shamakhi, but the Azerbaijani Soviet Encyclopedia said that she was born in Guliston, Verchernyaya Moskva said she was born in Uzbekistan, and the Podvig naroda database says that she was born in Shymkent. In 1937 during the Great Purge her mother was arrested, so her father had her sent away from home for her own safety. She soon relocated to Tashkent, where she entered the newly formed choreographic department of the Uzbek Philharmonia. She then moved to Moscow in 1940 and began attending the Lunacharsky State Institute for Theatre Arts. She quickly became friends with other women soldiers in the division, and she became close friends with Nina Solovey, In addition to serving as a sniper she work as a radio operator on reconnaissance missions, and crossed into enemy territory 16 times during the winter of 1941. As she suffered from blood poisoning, she was taken care of by Mariya Shvernik, the wife of politician Nikolai Shvernik. Only eleven months later she was released from the hospital, but she did not engage in combat after her injury. Her highest rank was junior lieutenant.

Publicity During the war her photo was featured in Verchernyaya Moskva, and on the cover of Ogonek magazine. An appeal written by her addressed to mothers of the Caucuses calling on them to support the war effort was published in issue No.19–20 of the magazine Rabotnitsa in 1942.

Controversy over number of kills Ganiyeva's exact sniper tally is disputed: her award sheet for the Order of the Red Banner and an issue of the newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva published in June 1942 both credited her with 20 kills, Russian historian Vera Murmantseva credited her with 21 kills, Komsomolskaya Pravda credited her with 28 kills, while Tahir Salahov claimed that she killed 129 fascists.

Postwar After the war she returned to her theater career and married Soviet diplomat Tofik Kadyrov. She starred in the movie "Tahir and Zuhra" by the Uzbek director Nabi Ganiev as a Persian shahini. From 1955 to 1956 she headed the Department of Language and Literature of the Baku Higher Party School, and in 1956 she became a researcher at Institute of Oriental Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. She received a Candidate of Sciences degree in philology. She died in Moscow in 2010.

Works Qorkinin dekadentçiliyə və naturalizmə qarşı mübarizəsi (Gorky's Struggle Against Decadence and Naturalism), "Azərbaycan", 1955, No.6 О сатире Горького в период первой русской революции (On Gorky's Satire in the First Russian Revolution Period), "Литературный Азербайджан", 1955, No.12 Страницы из истории революционной поэзии на урду (Pages from the History of Revolutionary Poetry in Urdu), "Народы Азии и Африки", 1970, No.2