Alime Abdenanova
Alime Seitosmanovna Abdenanova — was a Crimean Tatar scout in the Red Army during World War II. After the German occupation of Crimea began in 1943 she led her reconnaissance group in the collection of intelligence about the positions of German and Romanian troops throughout the Kerch Peninsula, for which she was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. After the group was arrested by the Germans in February, Abdenanova was tortured for over a month but refused to reveal any information to her captors. At the age of twenty she was executed in the outskirts of Simferopol on 5 April 1944. On 1 September 2014 by decree of Vladimir Putin she was posthumously declared a Hero of the Russian Federation, making her the sixteenth woman and first Crimean Tatar awarded the title.
Early life
Alime was born on 4 January 1924 in Kerch to a Crimean Tatar peasant family. Her mother, Meselme, had been born in the neighboring town of Mayak-Salyn to a large family and had grown up in poverty until she married at the age of seventeen; her father Seit-Osman worked at the Metallurgical Plant in Kerch. In 1926 Alime's sister Azife was born, followed by the birth of her youngest sister Feruza in 1929. After the death of her mother in 1930 and her father in 1931 Alime and her sisters lived with their grandmother in Jermai-Kashik and took on the surname Abdenanova.After completing seven years of secondary school with honors she found work as a secretary at the Uzun-Ayaksky village Soviet in the Leninsky district. In 1940 she became a member of the Komsomol. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 she applied to join the Red Army several times, but each time was refused on the grounds that she was a member of the Leninsky District Executive Committee. On 16 November 1941 the committee was relocated to Kerch and later Temryuk. After the relocations she was able to enroll in medical courses and was then assigned to a hospital in Krasnodar.
Activities as a scout leader
After Soviet troops regained territory previously controlled by the Wehrmacht in the Battle of Kursk and the Novorossiysk-Taman Operation, the leadership of the Red Army intended to launch an offensive to retake Crimea next. In order to do so, Major-General Nikolai Trusov, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Maritime Army Intelligence, ordered reconnaissance scouts to be sent to the rear of the retreating Axis forces. The reconnaissance group "Bast" was formed, consisting of two scouts and six agents trained in sabotage, and deployed to the city of Stary Krym; they managed to send over 300 intelligence transmissions to the Red Army. However, the eight-person network was unable to monitor the whole peninsula and was subject to increasing scrutiny by the Nazis. As travel restrictions were tightened by the Nazis, it became harder for the group to avoid labor conscription by the Axis, which would have ended their mission prematurely. Trusov then decided to send out a second reconnaissance group to the peninsula, and Abdenanova soon volunteered for the task. Upon entering the military intelligence training school in Krasnodar she prepared for her assignment, learning to parachute from a plane and receiving a crash course in spying.Late into the night of 2 October 1943, Abdenanova parachuted out of a Po-2 over the village of Dzermai-Kashik with her radio operator Larisa Gulyachenko. Upon landing slightly off target, Abdenanova injured her leg but managed to make it to her grandmother's house. There, Abdenanova began working under the pseudonym "Sofia" and Gulyachenko used the names "Stasya" and "Proud". In order to sufficiently gather the information requested by the Red Army she organized a small scouting group that included her uncle Abduraky Bolatov, schoolteacher Nechipa Batalova, Sefidin and Dzhevat Menanov, Vaspie Ajibaeva, Khairla Mambejanov, and Battal Battalov. The scouts were assigned tasks that included constant monitoring of the local railroad, pinpointing the movement of enemy troops, collecting data on garrisons in the area, and the deployment statue of enemy units in the area. Meetings were held in the house of Battal Battalov, where upon providing Alime with information she would radio the intelligence department of the North Caucasian Front. From the start of the operation in Dzermai-Kashik to 19 October, 16 radiograms were sent out to the Red Army, well above the requirement of two per week. In total the underground organization sent out over 80 intelligence transmissions, resulting in higher losses among German troops.
On 13 December 1943 Major Athekhovsky, head of the second reconnaissance department at the headquarters of the North Caucasian Front nominated Abdenanova and Gulyachenko for the Order of the Red Banner. Major-General Nikolai Trusov supported the nomination and on 5 January 1944 the council of the Primorsky Army approved the nomination; however, since Abdenanova were in occupied territory at the time and hence unable to personally receive the award, the medal was kept in a storage building in Moscow until it was officially handed over to her sister Feruza on 9 May 1992, after which it sent to the Lenino museum.