April 5, 1920
She was born in the Moscow region Zoya Zarubina — a Soviet intelligence officer who translated stolen documents on the atomic bomb into Russian.
What was it like translating atomic secrets? Boring, but necessary. It was a riddle, a puzzle that had to be solved.
Father Vasily Zarubin was a famous intelligence officer who reported on Hitler's impending attack in the spring of 1941.
The family had broken up long before: when Zoya was a child, her mother left her To Naum EitingonHe also served in intelligence and led an assassination operation. Leon Trotsky, and then worked under diplomatic cover in China. It was from him that the seven-year-old girl received her first assignment: during a raid on the consulate, she stole a package containing a pistol.
After the war began, she asked to be sent to the front as a nurse. However, military commissars, noticing her knowledge of three languages, enlisted her in intelligence.
I was sorting through the archives of the German consulate in Vladivostok: I was looking for documents confirming the possibility of war in the Far East. I worked as a personal translator. Stalin at meetings with Churchill и Roosevelt.
I was running on an urgent errand, when Stalin suddenly appeared at the door. I ran head-on into his shoulder. I went completely numb. He didn't even react; he just walked past. Voroshilov brought me back to my senses. He patted me on the shoulder and reassured me: "It's okay, girl. It happens."
After the war she worked for Nuremberg Trials.
She supervised the translation of documents on the development of nuclear weapons that were stolen from the United States by Soviet intelligence officers, including her own father.
She recalled how she was once locked in a room with a stack of secret documents: they gave her food, a dictionary, and did not let her out until she deciphered everything.
I sat over sheets of paper with incomprehensible terms and almost cried. I knew English as well as Russian, but I wasn't a physicist, and the meaning of the formulas and diagrams constantly eluded me.
She left the police in the 1950s, after her stepfather was arrested twice. She refused an offer to disown him.
She taught at the Institute of Foreign Languages and created courses for translators at the UN.
She died in 2009, at the age of 88.
