Wednesday’s Child: An Awl in Sackcloth
The pantheon of Stalin’s era contained, alongside the martyr Pavlik Morozov, killed by the peasants of his village for informing the secret police that his father had hidden his own grain, two other iconic images. One of these was Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. Conveniently for Stalin’s propagandists seeking to plant her story in the consciousness of the common people, Zoya’s surname came from the twin Saints, Cosmas and Damian – as prominent in the Orthodox iconography as in the Catholic one – though, unlike them, this granddaughter of a Russian priest was a member of a partisan band, specializing in reconnaissance and...