[1] Zoya Voskresenskaya was born in Uzlovaya, Tula Governorate, into the family of a railway station master's deputy, and spent her early years in Aleksin.

[1] In 1935, Voskresenskaya started working in Helsinki, under the guise of 'Irina', an Intourist official, as a Soviet secret agent, in a tandem with an Embassy councilor (and NKVD Colonel) Boris Rybkin, whom she soon married.

As the Winter War broke out, Zoya Voskresenskaya returned to Moscow where in the course of the next several years she became one of the Soviet Intelligence service's leading analysts, coordinating the work of several residential groups, including Rote Kapelle in Germany.

Voskresenskaya was preparing to be sent to the occupied territories, under the guise of a railway station guard, when in late 1941, she and Rybkin were sent to Sweden where (as 'Madam Yartseva') she joined the Soviet embassy as Alexandra Kollontai's press attaché.

Both women, working in close co-operation, were later credited for the fact the Sweden remained neutral throughout the war while Finland quit the coalition and in September 1944, signed a peace treaty with the USSR.

Almost instantly, she received retirement orders but asked for the special privilege of remaining an NKVD officer and was sent to a Vorkuta labour camp as a head of a minor department, in the rank of lieutenant.

Writing for children, she made herself quite a name in the 1960s with novels Skvoz Ledyanuyu Mgly (Through the Icy Haze, 1962), Vstretcha (The Encounter, 1963), Serdtse Materi (A Mother's Heart, 1965, about Maria Ulyanova, which has been adapted for the big screen in 1965), Devochka v Burnom More (Girl in the Stormy Sea, 1969), Dorogoye Imya (The Dear Name, 1970).