N. Ya. Rapoport. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya

This bronze half-length figure of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was made in 1945–1946. The sculptor Nathan Rapoport portrayed the heroine alive, in the last minutes before her execution: her clothes are torn, and around her neck is a rope, which she holds with her hand.

Zoya Anatolyevna Kosmodemyanskaya (1923–1941) was hanged by the occupiers on 29 November 1941 in the village of Petrishchevo near Moscow. The country learned about her from Pyotr Lidov's essay "Tanya", published in Pravda on 27 January 1942, and on 16 February 1942 she was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union, the first woman to receive the title during the Great Patriotic War. Her deed quickly became a subject for songs, operas, paintings and sculptures.

Nathan Rapoport (1911–1987) was born in Warsaw and studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts; in 1939–1945 he lived and worked in the USSR, in Tashkent and Novosibirsk. After the war he returned to Poland, where his Monument to the Ghetto Heroes was unveiled in Warsaw in 1948; later he lived in France and Israel, and from 1959 in the United States. The bronze was cast by the founder V. Lukyanov, and the surface is patinated. The sculpture measures 85 × 76 × 31 cm.