She was credited with fifty-nine confirmed kills, including twelve soldiers during the Battle of Vilnius. Shanina volunteered for the military after the death of her brother in 1941 and chose to be a marksman on the front line. Praised for her shooting accuracy, Shanina was capable of precisely hitting enemy personnel and making doublets (two target hits by two rounds fired in quick succession).
She was one of the first women to join the Soviet army during World War II and was the first Soviet female sniper to be awarded the Order of Glory, also becoming the first servicewoman of the 3rd Belorussian Front to receive it.
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Roza was above average height, with light brown hair and blue eyes, and spoke in a Northern Russian dialect. After finishing four classes of elementary school in Yedma, Shanina continued her education in the village of Bereznik. As there was no school transport at the time, when she was in grades five through seven Roza had to walk 13 kilometres (8.1 mi) to Bereznik to attend middle school.
At the age of fourteen, Shanina, against her parents’ wishes, walked 200 kilometres (120 mi) across the taiga to the rail station and travelled to Arkhangelsk to study at the college there.
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Her childhood was deeply impacted by the events of the war, during which she lost three of her five brothers. She volunteered and enrolled at the ‘Central Women’s Sniper Training School,’ from where she graduated with honors. She joined the ‘184th Rifle Division’ and was appointed as the commander of a newly raised special female-sniper platoon.
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Shanina was killed in action during the East Prussian Offensive while shielding the severely wounded commander of an artillery unit. Shanina’s bravery received praise already during her lifetime, but conflicted with the Soviet policy of sparing snipers from heavy battles. Her combat diary was first published in 1965.
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Shanina had a straightforward character and valued courage and the absence of egotism in people. She was described as a person of unusual will with a genuine, bright nature by war correspondent Pyotr Molchanov.
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The Amazon founder says giving money away ‘is really hard’.
Luckily, poor people do far more of it than he does, says Guardian
columnist Marina Hyde
How bracing to wake up yesterday and read that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had donated $100m
to Dolly Parton’s charitable endeavours, at his own “Courage and
Civility” event. (Sarcastic airquotes: my own.) The many, many news
reports about this act suggested it was a truly incredible sum from the
second richest man in the world, who – according to recent estimates –
gets richer by about $205m a day.
Anyway, once I’d peeled myself off the ceiling, I got busy on the government’s tax calculator. If you’re on the median average UK salary
– and you pay your taxes – your take-home pay is £72 a day. Looked at
one way, then, Jeff’s benevolence would be the equivalent of donating
£34.56 to charity. Have YOU ever donated thirty-four quid to charity? Do
you pay your taxes? If so, you’re actually being more generous than Jeff Bezos, who, famously, avoids almost all of his.
And yet, where’s YOUR splashy news write-up in all the fine news
outlets of the world? Where’s YOUR fawning TV interview? Why does no one
refer to YOU as a “philanthropist”?
We’ll
come to the obvious answers to those questions shortly, but for now,
let’s look at the stage-managed hoopla around these so-called Courage
and Civility awards. And yes, that title does make it sound like Jeff
just demanded a warehouse operative bring him two inoffensive abstract
nouns that were out of copyright. In fact, Bezos announced the initiative
last year, shortly after disembarking his little space rocket, possibly
sensing a planetary disdain being levelled at the kind of guy who could
put himself in zero gravity for four minutes but couldn’t figure out how to treat his workers properly. …
… According to what Bezos told CNN, philanthropy “is
really hard”. It certainly seems to be for him. Do recall he was only
dragged kicking and screaming to the giving-a-shit game, having spent
years accruing billions before it was finally pointed out to him that
not having some kind of philanthropic arm looked fairly abysmal. In 2017
Bezos asked Twitter users
for ideas on how to help the world “in the here and now”, before
embarking on a truly committed programme of ignoring every single one of
them who suggested paying his workers properly and contributing fair
tax. …
…
So yes, for Bezos philanthropy “is really hard”. What he does –
fauxlanthropy – is much, much easier. Moving billions to non-profits
you control, effectively awarding yourself tax breaks, buying media
fawning with one of the lamest possible sleights-of-hand: these things,
self-evidently, are a whole lot easier. What’s hard to understand is why
on earth we’re still buying into this obvious bullshit from some of the
most selfish people in the world. The poor give a far greater
proportion of their money to charity than the rich. I don’t mean to be
uncivil, but what is courageous about letting Jeff Bezos pretend otherwise?
