Elina Avramovna Bystritskaya was born on April 4, 1928, in Kyiv into a Jewish family.

From the age of 13, she worked as a nurse and laboratory assistant in front-line mobile evacuation hospital No.

[1] One of her earliest roles was in Sergei Bondarchuk's and Fridrikh Ermler's Unfinished Story (1955), an archetypal Socialist Realist film.

Bystritskaya was personally chosen by Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov to play the role of Aksinya in the film adaptation And Quiet Flows the Don (1958), over several other distinguished candidates, notably Nonna Mordyukova.

[5][6] 1958-1985, she was married to Nikolay Kuzminsky, employee of the USSR Ministry for Foreign Trade.