On May 8, an envelope with a commemorative stamp dedicated to Heroes of the Soviet Union Leonid Golikov and Zinaida Portnova was put into postal circulation in the On the 85th Anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 series

Leonid Golikov (1926–1943) was a member of a Timur youth organization, a participant in the Great Patriotic War, a partisan, and a Hero of the Soviet Union.

Leonid Golikov was born on June 17 of 1926 in the village of Lukino in the Starorussky District (presently, the Parfinsky District of the Novgorod Region). He completed seven years of schooling. He worked at Plywood Plant No. 2 in the village of Parfino. Leonid Golikov took part in 27 combat operations. He particularly distinguished himself during the defeat of German garrisons in the villages of Aprosovo, Sosnitsy, and Sever. In total, he destroyed: 78 German service members, 2 railway bridges and 12 highway bridges, 2 food and fodder depots, and 10 vehicles carrying ammunition. For his valor and bravery, he was posthumously awarded the Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner, the Medal For Bravery, and the Medal For the Partisan of the Great Patriotic War (2-nd Сlass). He was killed in action on January 24 of 1943, in the village of Ostraya Luka of the Pskov Region. He was subsequently registered in the list of Hero Pioneers even though he had already turned 15 by the time the War began.


Zinaida Portnova (1926–1944) was a Pioneer Hero, a Soviet underground activist, a partisan, a member of the underground organization Young Avengers; a reconnaissance scout for the K. Voroshilov Partisan Detachment in the territory of the Byelorussian SSR occupied by German troops; a Hero of the Soviet Union.

Zinaida Portnova was born to a worker family on February 20 of 1926 in Leningrad. By 1941, she had completed seven grades of school. In early June of that year, she arrived to the village of Zui, near the Obol station in the Shumilinsky District of the Vitebsk Region, for her school vacation, and after the German invasion, she was found to be in occupied territory. From 1942, she was a member of the Obol underground organization Young Avengers. She participated in distributing leaflets among the population and carrying out sabotage operations against the invaders. While working in the canteen of a retraining course for German officers, she poisoned the soup with rat poison on orders from the underground. From August of 1943, she was a reconnaissance scout for the K. Voroshilov Partisan Detachment. In December of 1943, while returning from a partisan mission, she was captured in the village of Mostishche. During one of the interrogations at the Gestapo station in the village of Goryany (now in the Polotsk District of the Vitebsk Region of Belarus), the investigator threatened her with a pistol, but Zina remained silent. When he diverted his attention, she grabbed his pistol from the table and shot the investigator along with two other Nazis. She tried to run away, but was caught. After that, she was tortured for over a month in an attempt to extract information of any kind about partisans. On the morning of January 10 of 1944, she was executed by shooting in a prison in the city of Polotsk (according to another version, in the village of Goryany).

The envelope with a commemorative stamp provides portraits of Heroes of the Soviet Union Leonid Golikov and Zinaida Portnova; the commemorative stamp features the emblem for the 85th Anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War.

In addition to the issue of the envelope with a commemorative stamp, JSC Marka produced special cancels for Moscow, St. Petersburg and Veliky Novgorod.


Design Artists: S. Ulyanovsky and A. Moskovets.
Quantity: 500 thousand envelopes.

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