Maria Tsukanova is the first and only woman Hero of the Soviet Union in the war between Japan and the USSR at the end of World War II.
In G. Sudakov's collection "Heroines of War: Essays on Women - Heroes of the Soviet Union" (1963), information about the future heroine is scarce: a village girl, at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War - 17 years old; repeatedly unsuccessfully asked to go to the front. She served as a telegraph operator, nurse. In Irkutsk, she worked at a mine manufacturing plant, while at the same time taking nursing courses.
According to her nephew Vladimir Sidnev, her aunt tried in every possible way to get into the war with the Nazis, she even ascribed her age to herself (there were not enough years). But it happened to fight only with the Japanese.
In 1942, Masha Tsukanova was enrolled in the Navy and sent to the Pacific Fleet, to an artillery battalion, where she was trained as a signalman, then, while serving in batteries, Maria mastered the specialty of a rangefinder. In 1944, Maria Tsukanova graduated from the school of military sanitary instructors and was enrolled in a separate marine battalion, which participated in the Soviet-Japanese war of 1945.
The essay "Maria Tsukanova" of the book "Heroines of the War: Essays on Women - Heroes of the Soviet Union" says that in August 1945, when the Korean port of Seisin was liberated, the brave corporal-sanitary instructor evacuated more than 50 soldiers and commanders of the Red Army from the battlefield. At the same time, the girl was wounded in the shoulder, but Tsukanova remained in the positions of her company. She, along with other soldiers of her unit, covered the retreat of the main forces, hitting the advancing enemy with automatic fire and at the same time bandaging wounded comrades. The girl was wounded again, she lost consciousness.
Details of the feat of Maria Tsukanova are little known. But, according to the surviving information, she, defending the hill occupied by the marines, laid down up to 90 attacking Japanese with automatic fire. When the enemy took the height, the wounded Tsukanova was brutally tortured. After the Soviet marines recaptured the hill, they found the mutilated corpse of 20-year-old Maria there.
A month later, Maria Tsukanova was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union (posthumously). She forever remained the only woman who received this title in the war between the USSR and Japan.
In Korea, not far from the city of Chongjin (formerly Seishin), there is a marble monument with an inscription about the burial of 25 Soviet marines who liberated this land from Japanese invaders. Among them is the name of Maria Tsukanova. In Primorye there is a river, which was named Tsukanovka in honor of the heroine in 1972, streets were named after Maria Tsukanova in 6 Siberian cities of Russia, at the end of the 80s the Soviet-Korean film "Burnt Sun" was shot based on the girl's feat.
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Nikolay Syromyatnikov