On January 27, 1942, Pravda carried the latest in a series of articles about female partisans who had been captured, tortured, and executed by German forces during the offensive on Moscow in 1941. Accompanying that day’s article, “Tanya” by Petr Lidov, was a harrowing photograph of the partisan’s exhumed body, with the noose still around her neck and clear signs of mutilation on her exposed breasts. The striking beauty of the executed woman, along with the uncomfortable eroticism of the image, made the photograph one of the most memorable of the war. The story of eighteen year-old Zoya Kosmodem’ianskaya, as the young woman was later identified to be, would transcend more ordinary examples of atrocity propaganda to become a central narrative of heroic self-sacrifice in Russian and Soviet culture, still resonant to this day. This talk investigates the Zoya Kosmodem'ianskaya myth for what it reveals both about the Soviet experience and memory of the Second World War and, more generally, about the place of femininity in modern military conflict. My particular focus is the ambivalent gendering of violence that appears in representations of Kosmodem’ianskaya during the war and the subsequent effacement of this ambivalence in the years following.