Women sentenced to death in the USSR (continued) (6 photos). The death penalty in the USSR: chilling stories about the fate of three convicted women

Finally, Antonina Makarovna Makarova (nee Parfenova, according to other sources - Panfilova; 1922, Malaya Volkovka, Sychevsky district, Smolensk province, according to other sources, in 1923 in Moscow - August 11, 1979, Bryansk).

At birth, Makarova was named Antonina Makarovna Parfenova. However, when the girl went to the first grade of a village school, an incident occurred with her name - the teacher, writing down the children’s names in the class register, confused Antonina’s middle name with her last name and as a result, in school documents she was listed as Antonina Makarova. This confusion was the beginning of the fact that in all subsequent documents, including in the passport, Antonina’s name was written down as Antonina Makarovna Makarova.
In 1941, when the Great Patriotic War began, 21-year-old Makarova found herself at the front as a nurse. In the fall of the same year, she was one of the few who miraculously survived the Vyazemsk operation, and after the defeat of her unit, she hid in the forest for several days, but was ultimately arrested by the Germans. After some time, she and soldier Nikolai Fedchuk, seizing the moment, escaped from captivity. For several months, the two of them wandered around the area, trying to get out of the German encirclement. Much later, during interrogation, Makarova said that she was too scared and therefore, in fact, she herself followed Fedchuk, offering him herself as a so-called “camping wife.”
In January 1942, the couple reached the village of Krasny Kolodets, where Fedchuk’s wife and children lived, and he, despite Makarova’s requests, broke up with her.
Makarova wandered around the villages for some time, not staying anywhere for long, and eventually ended up on the territory of the newly formed Lokot Republic in the village of Lokot, where she was again detained by the Germans.

The Lokot Republic is an administrative-territorial national entity in the part of Soviet territory occupied by Nazi Germany during the Great Patriotic War.
Existed from November 1941 to August 1943. The administrative center was located in the working-class village of Lokot, which was proclaimed a city. The district included several districts of the pre-war Oryol and Kursk regions (now the territory is predominantly Bryansk region).
All local power belonged here not to the German commandant's offices, but to local governments. Any German authorities were prohibited from interfering in the internal affairs of the Lokot volost. German institutions on the territory of the Lokot district limited their activities only to assistance and advice to the leaders of the district and its districts.
At the end of November 1941, the head of Lokot self-government K.P. Voskoboinik published the manifesto of the People's Socialist Party "Viking", which provided for the destruction of the communist and collective farm system, the provision of arable land and personal plots to peasants, the development of private initiative and the "merciless destruction of all Jews, former commissioners."
The population of the district was 581 thousand people. The territory of the district, despite the fact that it was an occupied territory, had its own Criminal Procedure and Criminal Code.
It had its own armed forces - the Russian Liberation People's Army (RONA) - a relatively combat-ready association created in the image of the people's militia and consisting of 14 battalions (according to various sources, from 12 to 20 thousand people).
Property confiscated during dispossession by the Soviet government was returned free of charge to its former owners; in case of loss, appropriate compensation was provided. The size of the per capita plot for each resident of the local government was about 10 hectares.
During the existence of the self-government, many industrial enterprises engaged in processing agricultural products were restored and put into use, churches were restored, 9 hospitals and 37 outpatient medical centers operated, 345 secondary schools and 3 orphanages operated, the city art and drama theater named after K. P. Voskoboynik in the city of Lokot.
The main monetary unit in the district was the Soviet ruble. The district budget consisted of taxes on the population. Cash taxes were taken from buildings, all types of agricultural products, livestock, poultry and handicrafts. On average, each household received about 600 rubles annually; in addition, they took out fire insurance, but no compensation was paid to fire victims.
The status of the Lokot District as an autonomous national entity was based on the support of the commander of the 2nd German Tank Army, G. Guderian.
Soviet partisans associated with the NKVD attacked the civilian population of the district and fought with the RONA; the actions of the parties in the territory of the district were in the nature of a civil war.
From May to October 1942, partisans tried to attack the district security forces 540 times.
The district leadership maintained order with brutal repressions against persons suspected of having connections with the partisans.
The Jewish population of the Lokot district was completely destroyed by the police. In Suzemka, 223 Jews were shot, and in Navlya - 39.
The death sentences were carried out by the executioner of the Lokot district, Antonina Makarova, who executed about 1,500 people, including partisans, members of their families, women and teenagers.
On September 5, 1943, Lokot was taken by the 2nd Tank Battalion of the 197th Tank Brigade of the 30th Ural Volunteer Tank Corps together with units of the 250th Rifle Division. During the retreat of the German army, the armed formations of the Lokot district under the command of Bronislav Kaminsky, as well as family members of military personnel and everyone who did not want to remain on Soviet territory (30 thousand people), left in August 1943 with the German army in the city of Lepel, Vitebsk region , where for some time the “Lepel Republic” was created, and RONA participated in military operations against Soviet partisans until the summer of 1944. From here, the RONA brigade as part of the SS troops was transferred to Poland, where, in particular, it participated in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising.

In the future, giving testimony, Makarova stated that she simply pursued the elementary goals of surviving and warming up after long wanderings, and at the same time she was very afraid of death, which is why, when the Germans began to question her, she began to scold the Soviet government. She attributed her fears to the reason why she voluntarily enlisted in the Lokot auxiliary police, where she was given a Maxim machine gun to carry out death sentences to which Soviet partisans and members of their families were sentenced. According to Makarova herself, the Germans clearly did not want to get their hands dirty and they decided that it would be even better if it was a Soviet girl who executed the Soviet partisans. For agreeing to participate in the executions, the Germans settled Makarova in a room at a local stud farm, where she kept the machine gun itself.
“I didn’t know those I was shooting. They didn't know me. Therefore, I was not ashamed in front of them. It happened that you would shoot, come closer, and someone else would twitch. Then she shot him in the head again so that the person would not suffer. Sometimes several prisoners had a piece of plywood with the inscription “partisan” hung on their chests. Some people sang something before they died. After the executions, I cleaned the machine gun in the guardhouse or in the yard. There was plenty of ammunition..."
She also stated that she was never tormented by remorse, and none of the killed appeared to her in her dreams, since the executions themselves were not perceived by her as something unusual.
Prisoners were sent to her for execution in groups of about 27 people. There were days when she carried out death sentences three times a day. According to official data, she shot about 1,500 people, but only 168 people managed to recover their passport data. For each execution, Makarova received 30 Reichsmarks. After the executions, Makarova took off the clothes she liked from the corpses, motivating it like this: “Why should good things go to waste?” She often complained that large blood stains and bullet holes remained on the clothes of the dead. Eyewitnesses recalled that often at night Makarova came to the local stud farm, where the Germans had set up a prison for the condemned, and closely examined the prisoners, as if she was looking at their things in advance.
Makarova often relieved tension at a local music club, where she drank a lot of alcohol and, along with several other local girls, worked as a prostitute for German soldiers. Such a wild life led to Makarova being sent to a German rear hospital in the summer of 1943 for treatment for venereal diseases, and thus avoiding capture by the partisans and the Red Army when they captured Lokot on September 5 of that year. In the rear, Makarova started an affair with a German cook-corporal, who secretly took her in his wagon train to Ukraine, and from there to Poland. There the corporal was killed, and the Germans sent Makarov to a concentration camp in Königsberg. When the Red Army captured the city in 1945, Makarova posed as a Soviet nurse thanks to a stolen military ID, in which she indicated that she had worked in the 422nd Medical Battalion from 1941 to 1944, and got a job as a nurse in a Soviet mobile hospital.
Here, in a local hospital, she met the Belarusian soldier Viktor Ginzburg, who was wounded during the assault on the city. A week later they signed, Makarova took her husband’s last name.

Antonina and her husband settled in Lepel (Belarusian SSR) (this was Victor’s hometown) and they had two daughters. Antonina worked as a supervisor in the sewing workshop at a local clothing factory, where she carried out product quality control. She was considered a responsible and conscientious worker, and her photograph often appeared on the local honor board. However, after working there for many years, Antonina did not make any friends. The then inspector of the factory’s HR department, Faina Tarasik, recalled that Antonina was very reserved, quiet and during collective holidays she tried to drink alcohol as little as possible (she was probably afraid to spill the beans). The Ginsburgs were considered respected front-line soldiers and received all the benefits due to veterans. Neither her husband, nor neighbors, nor family acquaintances knew about Antonina’s real identity.
The KGB began looking for Makarova immediately after Lokot was liberated from the Germans. However, the surviving residents of the village could only provide the investigators with meager information, since they all knew Makarova only as Tonka the Machine Gunner. The search for Makarova lasted for 30 years, and only in 1976 the matter moved from a dead point, when in Bryansk on the city square one man attacked a certain Nikolai Ivanin with his fists, whom he recognized as the head of the Lokot prison during the German occupation. Ivanin, who, like Makarova, had been hiding all this time, did not deny it and spoke in detail about his activities at that time, at the same time mentioning Makarova (with whom he had a short-term affair). And although he mistakenly gave her full name to the investigators as Antonina Anatolyevna Makarova (and at the same time erroneously reported that she was a Muscovite), this was a major clue, and the KGB began to develop a list of USSR citizens with the name Antonina Makarova. However, the Makarova they needed was not on it, because the list contained only those women who were registered under this name at birth.
Her real name became known when one of her brothers, who lived in Tyumen and was an employee of the Ministry of Defense, filled out a form to travel abroad in 1976. In Lepel, Makarova was under surveillance, but after a week it had to be stopped because Makarova began to suspect something. After that, the investigators left her alone for a whole year and all this time they collected materials and evidence on her. At one of the concerts dedicated to Victory Day, the dispatched security officer started a conversation with Makarova: Makarova could not answer his questions about the locations of the military units where she served, and about the names of her commanders - she referred to bad memory and the remoteness of the events.
In July 1978, investigators decided to conduct an experiment: they brought one of the witnesses to the factory, while Makarova, under a fictitious pretext, was taken out onto the street in front of the building. The witness, watching her from the window, identified her, but this identification alone was not enough, and so the investigators staged another experiment. They brought two more witnesses to Lepel, one of whom played a local social security worker, where Makarova was allegedly summoned to recalculate her pension. She recognized Tonka the machine gunner. The second witness was sitting outside the building with a KGB investigator and also recognized Antonina. In September of the same year, Makarova was arrested on her way from her place of work to the head of the personnel department. Investigator Leonid Savoskin, who was present at her arrest, later recalled that Makarova behaved very calmly and immediately understood everything.
Makarova was taken to Bryansk. At first, investigators feared that she would decide to commit suicide, so they put a woman “whisperer” in her cell. She recalled that Makarova was still very calm and confident that she would be given a maximum of three years, both because of her age and because of how long ago those events were (she even made plans for her future life after serving time). She didn't remember her family.
She volunteered for interrogation herself, where she demonstrated the same composure, answering questions directly. Antonina was sincerely convinced that there was nothing to punish her for, and she blamed everything on the war. She behaved no less calmly during investigative experiments when she was brought to Lokot. During the investigation, she never once remembered her family. Victor Ginzburg, not knowing the reasons for his wife’s arrest, constantly tried to achieve her release, after which the investigators had to tell him the truth, which is why Ginzburg and his children left Lepel in an unknown direction (their further fate remained unknown).
On November 20, 1978, she was sentenced to capital punishment - the death penalty. Makarova took this, as always, calmly, but from the same day she began to submit petitions for pardon to the CPSU Central Committee and other authorities, which were all rejected. Most of all, she insisted that she needed eye surgery and that 1979 was the year of the woman.
On August 11, 1979, the sentence was carried out.

In general, Tonka’s story alone would be enough for the series - it is amazing in itself, and then there are a lot of murders, and stupid ones at that. The story about this unfortunate Raisa. Very often the ends do not meet, although the image of a woman who takes into account only the interests of her family in life and hates everyone else is a success.

In 1987, the Soviet Union was rocked by a horrific crime: a Kyiv school dishwasher poisoned 20 people. Her name was Tamara Ivanyutina, and she became the third and last woman in the USSR to receive capital punishment for her atrocities.

Dreams of wealth

Tamara Maslenko was born in 1941. From childhood, her parents instilled in her the idea that the most important thing in life is material well-being. And little Tamara dreamed that in the future she would bathe in luxury and drive a black Volga.

After graduating from school, Tamara married a truck driver. Drivers at that time did not receive the worst money, but Tamara was much less interested in her betrothed’s salary than in his apartment. The selfish spouse did not want to share the property with anyone.

On one of the flights, Tamara’s husband felt unwell. He stopped the car and went for a swim in a nearby river. When he dried himself, he discovered a tuft of his hair on the towel. The truck driver was able to get home, where he died of a heart attack. Then no one suspected Tamara.

After a short time, she married Oleg Ivanyutin. His parents owned a country house and a large plot of land, which Tamara had her eye on. First, she sent her husband’s father to the next world, who died after tasting soup from his daughter-in-law. The father-in-law complained of discomfort in his legs and pain in his heart. The mother-in-law outlived her husband by only a few days: at the funeral, Ivanyutina gave her a glass of water with poison.

She intended to adapt the land of the deceased old people into a pig farm. There was only one problem - to get hold of food for the pigs. In Soviet society during the times of “developed socialism,” petty theft in the workplace was commonplace, so Tamara decided to get a job in the school canteen, where she could steal food.

Deadly breakfasts

Dishwashers were not paid decent money, and there were very few people willing to do such work. Therefore, despite the boorish and rude behavior, Ivanyutin was not fired. Then look for a new person for who knows how long. Ivanyutin was irritated by everyone around her: one said the wrong thing, another did the wrong thing, the third looked askance. The vengeful woman did not forget any of this.

Soon after Ivanyutina appeared in the cafeteria, four people rushed to the hospital with mysterious symptoms: two teachers and two students. One of the victims complained of hair loss. But health workers did not take these complaints into account.

Six months later another tragedy occurred. This time - with nutritionist Natalya Kukharenko. The poor woman's legs were numb and her heart ached. Unfortunately, it was not possible to save her.

The largest poisoning occurred in March 1987 - then 14 people were taken away from the school in an ambulance at once. The preliminary diagnosis is influenza. The symptoms are familiar: leg pain and hair loss. The treatment did not produce results, and then doctors began to lean towards the version of poisoning.

By interviewing witnesses and the victims themselves, it turned out that they all had lunch later than others and ate soup. Law enforcement officers interested in this case decided to exhume Kukharenko’s remains. As a result, thallium, a highly toxic heavy metal, was found in the body of the deceased woman.

Investigators suggested that the substance was used to bait rodents and could have gotten into food due to someone's negligence. But this version was denied by the sanitary and epidemiological station.

Then the police began checking the personal data of school staff. It turned out that the dishwasher was working under a false work book. They began to carefully check Ivanyutin. Strange details of past poisonings with similar symptoms emerged.

During a search of the poisoner, they found the same thallium solution. A friend from a geological exploration expedition supplied her with the deadly substance. Supposedly for baiting rodents.

Without a shadow of remorse

During interrogations, Ivanyutina did not regret what she had done one bit. Two sixth-graders angered her by not wanting to move the tables in the cafeteria, while others “fell out of favor” because they asked for food for the kitten. But the poisoner needed the food to feed the pigs.

The psychiatrists who examined the criminal found her sane, albeit with extremely inflated self-esteem and an exaggerated desire for wealth. These character traits came from their parents: Anton and Maria Maslenko purposefully raised their daughter in a similar way, and, as it turned out later, they used the same technique when dealing with people they disliked - they simply added poison to their food.

The court found Ivanyutina guilty of 20 poisonings, nine of which were fatal. The criminal did not admit her guilt in any of the episodes. My only regret was that I was never able to buy a black Volga.

The mother and father of the attacker were sentenced to 13 and 10 years, respectively. They ended their lives in prison. Ivanyutina herself received the death penalty - execution. The sentence was carried out at the end of 1987. She became the last woman executed in the USSR.

Officially, during all the post-war years, three women were executed in the USSR. Death sentences were handed down to the fairer sex, but were not carried out. And then the matter was brought to execution. Who were these women, and for what crimes were they shot? The story of Antonina Makarova's crimes.

An incident with a surname.

Antonina Makarova was born in 1921 in the Smolensk region, in the village of Malaya Volkovka, into the large peasant family of Makar Parfenov. She studied at a rural school, and it was there that an episode occurred that influenced her future life. When Tonya came to first grade, because of shyness she could not say her last name - Parfenova. Classmates began shouting “Yes, she’s Makarova!”, meaning that Tony’s father’s name is Makar.
So, with the light hand of the teacher, at that time perhaps the only literate person in the village, Tonya Makarova appeared in the Parfyonov family.
The girl studied diligently, with diligence. She also had her own revolutionary heroine -
Anka the machine gunner. This film image had a real prototype - Maria Popova, a nurse from the Chapaev division, who once in battle actually had to replace a killed machine gunner.
After graduating from school, Antonina went to study in Moscow, where she was caught by the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. The girl went to the front as a volunteer.

The traveling wife of an encirclement.

19-year-old Komsomol member Makarova suffered all the horrors of the infamous “Vyazma Cauldron.” After the hardest battles, completely surrounded, of the entire unit, only soldier Nikolai Fedchuk found himself next to the young nurse Tonya. With him she wandered through the local forests, just trying to survive. They didn’t look for partisans, they didn’t try to get through to their own people - they fed on whatever they had, and sometimes stole. The soldier did not stand on ceremony with Tonya, making her his “camp wife.” Antonina did not resist - she just wanted to live.
In January 1942, they went to the village of Krasny Kolodets, and then Fedchuk admitted that he was married and his family lived nearby. He left Tonya alone. Tonya was not expelled from the Red Well, but the local residents already had plenty of worries. But the strange girl did not try to go to the partisans, did not strive to make her way to ours, but strived to make love with one of the men remaining in the village. Having turned the locals against her, Tonya was forced to leave.

A killer with a salary.

Tonya Makarova’s wanderings ended in the area of ​​the village of Lokot in the Bryansk region. The notorious “Lokot Republic”, an administrative-territorial formation of Russian collaborators, operated here. In essence, these were the same German lackeys as in other places, only more clearly formalized.
A police patrol detained Tonya, but they did not suspect her of being a partisan or underground woman. She attracted the attention of the police, who took her in, gave her drink, food and rape. However, the latter is very relative - the girl, who only wanted to survive, agreed to everything.
Tonya did not play the role of a prostitute for the police for long - one day, drunk, she was taken out into the yard and put behind a Maxim machine gun. There were people standing in front of the machine gun - men, women, old people, children. She was ordered to shoot. For Tony, who completed not only nursing courses, but also machine gunners, this was not a big deal. True, the dead drunk woman didn’t really understand what she was doing. But, nevertheless, she coped with the task.
The next day, Makarova learned that she was now an official - an executioner with a salary of 30 German marks and with her own bed. The Lokot Republic ruthlessly fought the enemies of the new order - partisans, underground fighters, communists, other unreliable elements, as well as members of their families. Those arrested were herded into a barn that served as a prison, and in the morning they were taken out to be shot.
The cell accommodated 27 people, and all of them had to be eliminated in order to make room for new ones. Neither the Germans nor even the local policemen wanted to take on this work. And here Tonya, who appeared out of nowhere with her shooting abilities, came in very handy.
The girl did not go crazy, but on the contrary, felt that her dream had come true. And let Anka shoot her enemies, and she shoots women and children - the war will write off everything! But her life finally got better.

1500 lives lost.

Antonina Makarova's daily routine was as follows: in the morning, shooting 27 people with a machine gun, finishing off the survivors with a pistol, cleaning weapons, in the evening schnapps and dancing in a German club, and at night making love with some cute German guy or, at worst, with a policeman.
As an incentive, she was allowed to take the belongings of the dead. So Tonya acquired a bunch of outfits, which, however, had to be repaired - traces of blood and bullet holes made it difficult to wear.
However, sometimes Tonya allowed a “marriage” - several children managed to survive because, due to their small stature, the bullets passed over their heads. The children were taken out along with the corpses by local residents who were burying the dead and handed over to the partisans. Rumors about a female executioner, “Tonka the machine gunner”, “Tonka the Muscovite” spread throughout the area. Local partisans even announced a hunt for the executioner, but were unable to reach her.
In total, about 1,500 people became victims of Antonina Makarova.
By the summer of 1943, Tony's life again took a sharp turn - the Red Army moved to the West, beginning the liberation of the Bryansk region. This did not bode well for the girl, but then she conveniently fell ill with syphilis, and the Germans sent her to the rear so that she would not re-infect the valiant sons of Greater Germany.

An honored veteran instead of a war criminal.

In the German hospital, however, it also soon became uncomfortable - the Soviet troops were approaching so quickly that only the Germans had time to evacuate, and there was no longer any concern for the accomplices.
Realizing this, Tonya escaped from the hospital, again finding herself surrounded, but now Soviet. But her survival skills were honed - she managed to obtain documents proving that all this time Makarova was a nurse in a Soviet hospital.
Antonina successfully managed to enlist in a Soviet hospital, where at the beginning of 1945 a young soldier, a real war hero, fell in love with her. The guy proposed to Tonya, she agreed, and, having gotten married, after the end of the war, the young couple left for the Belarusian city of Lepel, her husband’s homeland.
So the female executioner Antonina Makarova disappeared, and her place was taken by the honored veteran Antonina Ginzburg.

They searched for her for thirty years.

Soviet investigators learned about the monstrous acts of “Tonka the Machine Gunner” immediately after the liberation of the Bryansk region. The remains of about one and a half thousand people were found in mass graves, but the identities of only two hundred could be established. They interrogated witnesses, checked, clarified - but they could not get on the trail of the female punisher.
Meanwhile, Antonina Ginzburg led the ordinary life of a Soviet person - she lived, worked, raised two daughters, even met with schoolchildren, talking about her heroic military past. Of course, without mentioning the actions of “Tonka the Machine Gunner”.
The KGB spent more than three decades searching for her, but found her almost by accident. A certain citizen Parfyonov, going abroad, submitted forms with information about his relatives. There, among the solid Parfenovs, for some reason Antonina Makarova, after her husband Ginzburg, was listed as her sister.
Yes, how that teacher’s mistake helped Tonya, how many years thanks to it she remained out of reach of justice!
The KGB operatives worked like a jewel - it was impossible to accuse an innocent person of such atrocities. Antonina Ginzburg was checked from all sides, witnesses were secretly brought to Lepel, even a former policeman-lover. And only after they all confirmed that Antonina Ginzburg was “Tonka the Machine Gunner”, she was arrested.
She didn’t deny it, she talked about everything calmly, and said that nightmares didn’t torment her. She didn’t want to communicate with either her daughters or her husband. And the front-line husband ran through the authorities, threatened to complain to Brezhnev, even to the UN - demanded the release of his wife. Exactly until the investigators decided to tell him what his beloved Tonya was accused of.
After that, the dashing, dashing veteran turned gray and aged overnight. The family disowned Antonina Ginzburg and left Lepel. You wouldn’t wish what these people had to endure on your enemy.

Retribution.

Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg was tried in Bryansk in the fall of 1978. This was the last major trial of traitors to the Motherland in the USSR and the only trial of a female punisher.
Antonina herself was convinced that, due to the passage of time, the punishment could not be too severe; she even believed that she would receive a suspended sentence. My only regret was that because of the shame I had to move again and change jobs. Even the investigators, knowing about Antonina Ginzburg’s exemplary post-war biography, believed that the court would show leniency. Moreover, 1979 was declared the Year of the Woman in the USSR.
However, on November 20, 1978, the court sentenced Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg to capital punishment - execution.
At the trial, her guilt in the murder of 168 of those whose identities could be established was documented. More than 1,300 more remained unknown victims of “Tonka the Machine Gunner.” There are crimes that cannot be forgiven.
At six in the morning on August 11, 1979, after all requests for clemency were rejected, the sentence against Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg was carried out.

Tonka the Machine Gunner, as she was called then, worked on Soviet territory occupied by German troops from 1941 to 1943, carrying out mass death sentences of Nazis on partisan families.
Jerking the bolt of the machine gun, she did not think about those she was shooting - children, women, old people - it was just work for her. “What nonsense that you are then tormented by remorse. That those you kill come at night in nightmares. I still haven’t had a single dream,” she told her investigators during interrogations, when she was finally identified and detained - through 35 years after her last execution.
The criminal case of the Bryansk punisher Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg still rests in the depths of the FSB special storage facility. Access to it is strictly prohibited, and this is understandable, because there is nothing to be proud of here: in no other country in the world has a woman been born who personally killed one and a half thousand people.

Thirty-three years after the Victory, this woman’s name was Antonina Makarovna Ginzburg. She was a front-line soldier, a labor veteran, respected and revered in her town. Her family had all the benefits required by their status: an apartment, insignia for milestone dates, and scarce sausage in their food rations. Her husband was also a participant in the war, with orders and medals. The two adult daughters were proud of their mother.
They looked up to her, they took an example from her: what a heroic fate: to march throughout the war as a simple nurse from Moscow to Koenigsberg. School teachers invited Antonina Makarovna to speak at the line, to tell the younger generation that in the life of every person there is always a place for heroic deeds. And the most important thing in war is not to be afraid to look death in the face. And who, if not Antonina Makarovna, knew about this best...
She was arrested in the summer of 1978 in the Belarusian town of Lepel. A completely ordinary woman in a sand-colored raincoat with a string bag in her hands was walking down the street when a car stopped nearby and inconspicuous men in civilian clothes jumped out of it and said: “You urgently need to come with us!” surrounded her, not allowing her to escape.
"Can you guess why you were brought here?" - asked the investigator of the Bryansk KGB when she was brought in for the first interrogation. “Some kind of mistake,” the woman grinned in response.
“You are not Antonina Makarovna Ginzburg. You are Antonina Makarova, better known as Tonka the Muscovite or Tonka the Machine Gunner. You are a punisher, you worked for the Germans, carried out mass executions. Your atrocities in the village of Lokot, near Bryansk, are still being talked about legends. We have been looking for you for more than thirty years - now the time has come to answer for what we have done. Your crimes have no statute of limitations."
“So, it’s not in vain that last year my heart began to feel anxious, as if I felt that you would appear,” the woman said. “How long ago it was. It’s like it wasn’t with me at all. Almost my whole life has already passed. Well, write it down...”

Birth of a legend

Retribution

But it was impossible to just take it and forget about it. “Her crimes were too terrible,” says Golovachev. “It was simply impossible to comprehend how many lives she took. Several people managed to escape, they were the main witnesses in the case. And so, when we interrogated them, they said that Tonka still comes to them in their dreams. The young girl, with a machine gun, looks intently - and does not look away. They were convinced that the executioner girl was alive, and asked to be sure to find her in order to stop these nightmares. We understood that she could have gotten married a long time ago and changed her passport, so we thoroughly studied the life path of all her possible relatives named Makarov..."
However, none of the investigators realized that they had to start looking for Antonina not from the Makarovs, but from the Parfenovs. Yes, it was the accidental mistake of the village teacher Tony in the first grade, who wrote down her patronymic as a surname, that allowed the “machine gunner” to elude retribution for so many years. Her real relatives, of course, never fell into the circle of interests of the investigation in this case.
But in 1976, one of the Moscow officials named Parfenov was going abroad. When filling out the application form for a foreign passport, he honestly listed the names and surnames of his siblings; the family was large, as many as five children. All of them were Parfenovs, and for some reason only one was Antonina Makarovna Makarov, married to Ginzburg in 1945, now living in Belarus. The man was summoned to the OVIR for additional explanations. Naturally, people from the KGB in civilian clothes were also present at the fateful meeting.
“We were terribly afraid to jeopardize the reputation of a woman respected by everyone, a front-line soldier, a wonderful mother and wife,” recalls Golovachev. “Therefore, our employees went to the Belarusian Lepel secretly, watched Antonina Ginzburg for a whole year, brought there one by one the surviving witnesses, the former punisher, one of her lovers, for identification. Only when everyone said the same thing - it was she, Tonka the Machine Gunner, we recognized her by a noticeable crease on her forehead - doubts disappeared."
Antonina's husband, Victor Ginzburg, a war and labor veteran, promised to complain to the UN after her unexpected arrest. “We didn’t admit to him what they were accusing the one with whom he had lived a happy life. We were afraid that the man simply wouldn’t survive this,” the investigators said.
Victor Ginzburg bombarded various organizations with complaints, assuring that he loved his wife very much, and even if she had committed some crime - for example, embezzlement - he would forgive her everything. He also talked about how, as a wounded boy in April 1945, he was lying in a hospital near Koenigsberg, and suddenly she, a new nurse, Tonechka, entered the room. Innocent, pure, as if she had not been at war - and he fell in love with her at first sight, and a few days later they married.
Antonina took her husband’s surname, and after demobilization she went with him to the Belarusian Lepel, forgotten by God and people, and not to Moscow, from where she was once called to the front. When the old man was told the truth, he turned gray overnight. And I didn’t write any more complaints.
“The woman who was arrested did not give a single line to her husband from the pre-trial detention center. And, by the way, she also did not write anything to her two daughters, whom she gave birth to after the war, and did not ask to see him,” says investigator Leonid Savoskin. “When we managed to find contact with our accused, she started talking about to tell everyone. About how she escaped by escaping from a German hospital and finding herself surrounded by us, straightened out someone else’s veteran’s documents, according to which she began to live. She didn’t hide anything, but that was the worst thing. One got the feeling that she sincerely misunderstood: Why was she imprisoned, what was SUCH a terrible thing she did? It was as if there was some kind of block in her head from the war, so that she herself would probably not go crazy. She remembered everything, every execution, but did not regret anything. She seemed to me a very cruel woman. I don’t know what she was like in her youth. And what made her commit these crimes. The desire to survive? A momentary darkness? The horrors of war? In any case, this does not justify her. She killed not only strangers, but and your own family. She simply destroyed them with her exposure. A mental examination showed that Antonina Makarovna Makarova is sane."
The investigators were very afraid of any excesses on the part of the accused: before there were cases when former policemen, healthy men, remembering past crimes, committed suicide right in the cell. The aged Tonya did not suffer from attacks of remorse. “It’s impossible to be constantly afraid,” she said. “For the first ten years I waited for a knock on the door, and then I calmed down. There are no such sins that a person will be tormented all his life.”
During the investigative experiment, she was taken to Lokot, to the very field where she carried out the executions. The villagers spat after her like a revived ghost, and Antonina only looked sideways at them in bewilderment, scrupulously explaining how, where, whom and with what she killed... For her it was the distant past, another life.
“They disgraced me in my old age,” she complained in the evenings, sitting in her cell, to her jailers. “Now after the verdict I’ll have to leave Lepel, otherwise every fool will point a finger at me. I think they’ll give me three years’ probation. For what?” more? Then you need to somehow arrange your life again. How much is your salary in the pre-trial detention center, girls? Maybe I should get a job with you - the work is familiar..."
Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg was shot at six o'clock in the morning on August 11, 1978, almost immediately after the death sentence was pronounced. The court's decision came as a complete surprise even to the people who led the investigation, not to mention the defendant herself. All requests for clemency from 55-year-old Antonina Makarova-Ginzburg in Moscow were rejected.
In the Soviet Union, this was the last major case of traitors to the Motherland during the Great Patriotic War, and the only one in which a female punisher appeared.
After Tonka, two more women were executed: Berta Borodkina in 1983 for speculation on an especially large scale and Tamara Ivanyutina in 1987 for poisoning 9 people.

Probably, Antonina herself was also interested in looking at an execution at least once in her life through the eyes of the victim, and not the executioner...

Officially, during all the post-war years, three women were executed in the USSR. Death sentences were handed down to the fairer sex, but were not carried out. And then the matter was brought to execution. Who were these women, and for what crimes were they shot? The story of Antonina Makarova's crimes.

An incident with a surname.

The traveling wife of an encirclement.

A killer with a salary.

1500 lives lost.

An honored veteran instead of a war criminal.

They searched for her for thirty years

Retribution.

Berta Borodkina.

Pay or lose...

Stolen degrees.

Bertha, aka Iron Bella.

The case of the sale of pornographic products.

The mysterious disappearance of the first secretary of the city committee of the CPSU.

She knew too much.