She was only nineteen years old when the Nazis carved a five-pointed star into her back and rubbed salt into the wound. She did not break. She did not betray her comrades. And when they marched her toward the mine shaft where she would die, she found a way to signal to the other prisoners that they should sing revolutionary songs.
Ulyana Matveevna Gromova epitomised the unbreakable spirit of Soviet youth in the Second World War. Born on January 3, 1924, in the settlement of Pervomaisky near Krasnodon in eastern Ukraine, she came from a working-class miner's family that cemented in her early values of Soviet patriotism and collective labour. Her pre-war upbringing was shaped by the Stalin-era emphasis on youth organisations and anti-fascist education in Soviet schools. She began her education in 1932 at the local ten-year school, where she excelled academically, earning recognition as an outstanding student with a particular affection for literature and the humanities. By 1940, at age sixteen, she joined the Komsomol, the official Soviet youth organisation, which championed loyalty to the Communist Party and preparation for national defence. In the months leading up to the German invasion, she completed her secondary education, graduating from the tenth grade of School No. 6 in Krasnodon in June 1942. Alongside classmates, she travelled to nearby collective farms for harvest work to support the front lines.
Krasnodon fell under German occupation in July 1942. Nazi policies enforced severe repression, including mass executions of suspected communists and partisans. The regime targeted youth organisations like the Komsomol, banning Soviet youth activities and imposing ideological indoctrination through propaganda. It was precisely this repression that fuelled underground defiance among local teenagers.
Ulyana Gromova joined the Young Guard, an underground anti-Nazi resistance organisation formed in Krasnodon in September 1942, shortly after its establishment. As one of the group's active participants, she served in organisational roles, including as a secretary for record-keeping and communication, helping to coordinate activities among the roughly one hundred members, primarily teenagers and young adults. She contributed to propaganda efforts by distributing anti-fascist leaflets and posting slogans on buildings, such as marking walls with "Death to the Fascists." She participated in sabotage operations, including the theft and destruction of Nazi records to prevent forced labour deportations. In one instance, she joined others in raising a red flag on a school building on November 7, 1942, to mark the anniversary of the October Revolution. These actions, though small in scale, were morally impactful. In meetings held in abandoned mines or private homes, she helped relay intelligence from Soviet partisans and maintained secrecy protocols, using pseudonyms and dead drops for messages.
A prominent sabotage operation occurred on December 6, 1942, when Young Guard members set fire to the Krasnodon labour exchange building, incinerating registration lists of more than 1,000 residents targeted for forced labour deportation to Germany. This action delayed Nazi conscription efforts. Gromova's role entailed coordinating such actions through the staff, including recruitment and morale-boosting via leaflets that made mockery of Nazi defeats. Additional propaganda efforts included forging documents to aid escapes and spreading rumours of imminent Red Army liberation, while sabotage extended to minor disruptions like tampering with German vehicles and warning locals of roundups. These acts, totalling around twenty operations by early 1943, aimed to disrupt occupation logistics without direct combat.
The Young Guard's operations were stifled in early January 1943 through treachery by an informant linked to the organisation, prompting a series of arrests by Nazi occupation forces. This betrayal, attributed in post-war accounts to internal figures such as Gennady Pocheptsov, disrupted plans for an anti-fascist uprising and led to the rapid detention of over seventy members. Ulyana Gromova, as a key staff member, was arrested at her residence around January 10, 1943. Unlike some peripheral members who may have provided partial information under duress, she reportedly offered no confessions upon capture, maintaining composure and even reciting poetry to bolster fellow detainees' morale during initial confinement.
During subsequent interrogation at the local Gestapo headquarters, she faced systematic torture. Interrogators employed methods including severe beatings with metal objects, burns from hot irons, and deliberate mutilations, turning the interrogation room into something resembling a slaughterhouse with bloodstained walls and floors. Post-war Soviet investigations documented her injuries: a fractured right arm, multiple broken ribs, and the five-pointed star carved into her back with a knife, followed by salt rubbed into the wounds to intensify pain. Her fingernails were reportedly pulled out, and her body showed widespread bruising and abrasions. Still, Gromova refused to buckle, maintaining silence on key details even as others under similar pressure relented.
On January 16, 1943, she was executed along with other Young Guard leaders such as Lyubov Shevtsova and Ivan Zemnukhov. The victims were paraded to pit number 5 in mine shaft 104 bis, approximately fifty-eight metres deep, where they were shot or beaten before their bodies were thrown into the abyss. Some reports indicate that certain individuals were cast in alive. This method of disposal aimed to conceal the crimes amid ongoing occupation. Krasnodon remained under Nazi control until its liberation by the Red Army on February 14, 1943. Exhumation efforts recovered Gromova's remains along with those of her comrades in late February, and the group was reburied in a mass grave on the central square of Krasnodon on March 1, 1943.
Ulyana Gromova was posthumously conferred the title of Hero of the Soviet Union on September 13, 1943, honouring her leadership role in the Young Guard's anti-Nazi sabotage activities. This highest Soviet military honour, awarded to five Young Guard members that day, entailed the accompanying Order of Lenin. She further received the Medal "To the Partisan of the Patriotic War", First Class, posthumously on September 21, 1943. A bas-relief monument to her was installed in Tolyatti, Russia, on May 6, 1988, on Ulyana Gromova Street, depicting her in a portrait-style bust with a Komsomol badge.
In Soviet literature, she was glorified as a devoted Komsomol commissar for agitation and propaganda within the Young Guard. Alexander Fadeyev's novel Molodaya Gvardiya (1945) presents her as an unwavering young woman whose speeches and organisational efforts epitomised spontaneous proletarian initiative, enduring brutal torture without disclosing secrets. Still, the novel's initial focus on youth autonomy over explicit Communist Party direction invoked private rebuke from Joseph Stalin, prompting Fadeyev's 1951 revision to amplify party influence and portray figures like Gromova as products of Bolshevik education rather than innate revolutionaries. The 1948 film adaptation Young Guard perpetuated this image through dramatised scenes of her defiance, casting her as a feminine icon of sacrifice to mobilise post-war Komsomol recruitment.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, re-examination of the Young Guard's activities revealed the propagandistic construction of their narrative to engineer Komsomol loyalty and anti-fascist zeal among youth. Critics, researching declassified NKVD records and witness testimonies, discovered internal fractures, including denunciations by members under pressure, which triggered arrests rather than a singular external betrayal as initially claimed by Soviet authorities. This contrasts with the unified, party-led heroism showcased in Fadeev's novel.
Yet even allowing for Soviet myth-making, the physical evidence of what was done to Ulyana Gromova remains indisputable. The broken bones, the carved flesh, the salt in the wound, and the silence she kept through all of it speak to a courage that requires no embellishment. She was not a creature of Bolshevik education or a propaganda tool. She was a nineteen-year-old girl who refused to betray her friends, and that is a truth no revision can erase.
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*Freelance journalist
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