Zoya Voskresenskaya

Zoya Ivanovna Voskresenskaya (; in marriage – Rybkina, Рыбкина; 28 April 1907 – 8 January 1992) was a Soviet diplomat, NKVD foreign office secret agent and, in the 1960s and 70s, a popular author of books for children. A USSR State Prize laureate, Voskresenskaya was best known for her novels Skvoz Ledyanuyu Mglu (Through Icy Haze, 1962) and Serdtse Materi (A Mother's Heart, 1965). Between 1962 and 1980 more than 21 million of her books were sold in the USSR.

In the late 1980s, as Perestroika incited a wave of declassifications, Zoya Voskresenskaya's story was made public. It transpired that a popular children's writer was for 25 years a leading figure in the Soviet intelligence service's foreign department. Voskresenskaya's war-time memoirs Now I Can Tell the Truth came out in 1992, 11 months after the author's death.

Biography Zoya Voskresenskaya was born in Uzlovaya, Tula Governorate, into the family of a railway station master's deputy, and spent her early years in Aleksin. Her father died when she was ten and mother with her three children moved to Smolensk. At 14 Zoya started working as a librarian at the 48th Cheka battalion of the Smolensk Governorate. Two years later, in 1923, she was commissioned as a tutor and politruk to a local corrective labor colony for young offenders, then got transferred to a regional CP office in Smolensk. In 1928 Voskresenskaya moved to Moscow and in August 1929 joined the OGPU foreign office. Her first post, in 1930, was Harbin in Manchuria; after two years of reconnaissance work she was moved to Riga, Latvia, then Germany and Austria.

After Stalin's death in 1953, wide-scale purges of the NKVD ranks started. Outraged with the arrest of Pavel Sudoplatov, Voskresenskaya spoke out openly to defend her former boss. Almost instantly, she received retirement orders but asked for the special privilege of remaining an NKVD officer and was sent to a Vorkuta labour camp as a head of a minor department, in the rank of lieutenant.