[1] Nadezhda Viktorovna Troyan was born on 24 October 1921 to a working-class Belarusian family in the village of Drissa, located within the Vitebsk province of present-day Belarus.

She found an anti-occupation pamphlet in her backyard and spread out several copies, but after her family moved to Smalyavichy she became more involved in the resistance movement after learning that a fellow nurse at the hospital where she worked, Nyura Kosarevskaya, was helping a group of partisans.

[4][5] In Spring 1943 Troyan was assigned the dangerous task of finding someone to assassinate Wilhelm Kube, a high-ranking member of the SS and the General-Kommissar of Nazi-occupied Belarus.

Troyan eventually settled on a young woman by the name of Yelena Mazanik, who worked in Kube's mansion as a maid and was the sister of another partisan, Valentina Shchutskoi.

Mazanik planted the bomb the assassination went as planned; afterward all three members of the plot including Troyan were awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union on 29 October 1943.