The woman was thirty years old when they finally came for her, though she looked older. It was 1978, and she had spent more than three decades building a careful, ordinary life: a husband, two children, a job at a local factory, and a past she had learned to bury under a new name. When the men in civilian clothes stopped her on the street and showed their badges, she did not resist, did not demand to see a lawyer, did not even seem surprised. She followed them quietly, as if she had been waiting for this moment since 1943.

In the town of Lepel, where she had lived as Antonina Ginsburg, wife of a decorated war hero and mother of two, nobody suspected that the polite middle-aged woman who sometimes spoke to schoolchildren about her frontline service was actually the woman the partisans had called Tonka the Machine Gunner, an executioner responsible for the deaths of roughly fifteen hundred people. She had been born Antonina Peruna, in a village called Malya in the Smolensk region, in March of 1920 or, by some accounts, 1921. Her family were ordinary peasants, and like all Soviet children she went to school. There, a small mistake set her on a strange path.

Antonina was shy and pronounced her own surname indistinctly. When the teacher asked her to repeat it, the girl remained too embarrassed to answer clearly. “She’s Makarova,” another child shouted, referring to her father, Makar Perunov. In Russian villages it was traditional to call children by their father’s name, but the young teacher, newly arrived from the city, did not know this local custom.

She wrote down “Makarova” in the class register, and from then on Antonina was documented everywhere as Antonina Makarova. The erroneous name followed her through school and into her certification documents. When the war broke out, Antonina was in Moscow, studying. Like most young people of her generation, she enrolled in courses for machine gunners and nurses, and driven by patriotic fervor, she volunteered for the front.

She was an adult, and after finishing her training she was sent to the army in August 1941. Her first posting was modest: a bartender in a military unit, where she received the rank of junior sergeant. But the front was collapsing, and soon she was reassigned as a medical instructor to the 422nd Regiment of the 117th Infantry Division of the 24th Army of the Reserve Front. In October 1941, the troops of the Western, Reserve, and part of the Bryansk Fronts found themselves fighting desperate battles, encircled in what would become known as the Vyazma Cauldron.

At the end of October, Sergeant Makarova was captured along with several other soldiers. The Germans had built their field camps hastily, which meant escape was possible, and many prisoners took the chance. Antonina escaped too, together with a soldier named Sergey, or by some accounts Nikolai, Feduk. But unlike most fugitives, the two did not try to return to their own lines.

Instead they decided to make their way toward Feduk’s native village, Krnevo, in the Bryansk region. According to Makarova’s later testimony, the weeks of traveling together brought them close, and they fell in love, or at least she fell in love with him. When they finally reached his home village, Antonina learned the unpleasant truth: her beloved was already married, with children. She had become unwanted, superfluous.

In despair, not knowing what to do, Antonina began wandering through the village, looking for shelter. A woman took her in for a time, but the arrangement did not last long, whether over a quarrel about a man or for some other reason, and she was soon thrown out. She continued drifting from village to village, offering herself to local men in exchange for food and drink. Peasants, policemen, anyone who could provide at least temporary shelter took advantage of this arrangement.

Eventually she reached a larger settlement called Lokot. By that time, in parts of the Bryansk, Kursk, and Oryol regions, local police and collaborators had created a kind of autonomy, the so-called Lokot Republic, headed first by Konstantin Vozvik and, after his death at the hands of partisans, by Bronislav Kaminsky. This collaborationist territory had its own army, the Russian National Liberation Army, or RONA, not to be confused with General Vlasov’s ROA. Its principal purpose was to fight the partisans, maintain internal order, keep roads safe for German troops and rear services, and supply the German army with food.

In exchange, the Germans did not interfere in the internal affairs of this pseudo-republic. Here, in the center of this collaborationist enclave, Antonina was detained by a police patrol. Finding nothing suspicious about her, they allowed the woman to settle in the village. She quickly began affairs with the local policemen, hoping to secure their support.

The policemen, the RONA soldiers, even the Germans, were willing to give her food and drink in exchange for her services, but nothing more. Then one evening, while drinking heavily with a group of policemen and RONA soldiers, someone asked her directly: did she know how to handle a machine gun? Antonina nodded. She had not hidden her skills from the police even during her first interrogation, admitting she had completed a machine gun course.

The soldiers took her out into the yard, where a Maxim machine gun had already been set up. From a truck that pulled up, they unloaded arrested partisans and members of their families, including women and children. “Come on, show us what you can do,” one of the policemen demanded. “Or are we feeding you for nothing?

”

The girl drank vodka and went to the machine gun. She fired one burst, then another, then a third, frantically pressing the trigger until the last person had fallen. The next day a RONA officer informed her that she had been enlisted into the firing squad, with a salary of thirty Reichsmarks for each execution day. The pay was generous, and there was plenty of work.

Neither the policemen nor the Germans wanted to deal with executions every day, so Makarova became a godsend to them. She quickly grew accustomed to her position. She had a stable job, a good salary, and the Lokot authorities even gave her housing: a separate room at the state farm where prisoners were held before execution. The local collaborators worked hard to prove their loyalty to the Germans, dealing brutally with partisans and underground fighters.

The Germans brought in prisoners, partisans, and hostages even from neighboring areas outside the Lokot Republic, and so Tonka the Machine Gunner, as the policemen and Germans jokingly called her, never lacked for work. The bloody work did not trouble her. She was allowed to take whatever belongings she liked from the people she killed, and she lived well off her victims. She wore the clothes of the dead without shame, even bragging about her new trinkets in front of her many lovers.

Having known need all her life, she looked after her machine gun carefully, cleaning and lubricating it so that her tool of labor was always ready. Again and again she went out to the execution yard to send her former compatriots to the next world. She killed men, women, old people, children, even infants. In total, about fifteen hundred people died at her hands.

Yet several small children managed to survive. Their parents apparently shielded them with their bodies. Usually Tonka walked around with a pistol, finishing off anyone who still showed signs of life, but that time something distracted her. The local residents the traitors had rounded up to clean up and transport bodies did not give up the children; they hid them and later smuggled them to the partisans.

By then everyone in the area knew Tonka the Executioner. The partisans declared a hunt for her, but they could never get close. Tonka was careful and rarely left Lokot. Everything ends, however.

In 1943 the Red Army began to quickly liberate the Nazi-occupied lands, and the traitors of RONA prepared to retreat to Belarus. Tonka wanted to go with them, but she fell ill with syphilis and was sent to a hospital for treatment. The Red Army kept advancing, and she had to flee. On the road she began an affair with a German corporal, a cook, who took her to Poland.

The corporal soon died, and the Germans sent Tonka to a concentration camp. Perhaps she even wished for it herself. Not long afterward, the Red Army liberated the camp. In the chaos that followed, Makarova managed to forge documents proving she had worked as a nurse in a Soviet hospital in 1944.

Whether she prepared them in advance or improvised after being captured, she had a gift for surviving any situation. She was re-enlisted as a nurse in a field hospital in East Prussia. There, a young fighter named Viktor Ginzburg, recovering from a wound, fell in love with her. They married quickly, and Antonina Makarova became Antonina Ginzburg.

When the war ended, the Ginzburgs first went to Viktor’s hometown, Pytkino. There they discovered that his entire Jewish family had been killed. Viktor took the loss hard, and perhaps that was why the young couple soon moved to the town of Lepel, not far from his hometown. Viktor Ginzburg, a war hero, hated the Nazis who had murdered his family and brought such grief to his country.

He could not have imagined that every night he lay down beside a terrible fascist monster in the form of a pretty woman. His wife gave birth to two children. She worked at a local factory, and sometimes she was even invited to school to speak about her frontline past. For years the KGB could not pick up the trail of the bloody executioner.

Antonina’s change of surname in childhood had thrown confusion into the records. Then, in 1976, chance intervened. In the city of Bryansk, a man got into a fight with a local citizen named Ivanin. When the police arrived, the man explained that he had recognized Ivanin as the former head of the Lokot prison during the occupation.

Under interrogation, Nikolai Ivanin also spoke about Tonka the Machine Gunner, whose last name, he said, was Makarov. The investigators reopened the case. They checked thousands of Makarovs, but without success. They did not know that Makarova had been born Peruna.

And again chance helped. One of the Perun brothers was preparing to go abroad, and the questionnaire listing his relatives indicated that one of his sisters had borne the surname Makarova since school, due to the mistake made long ago. The KGB took notice and began searching not by birth certificate but by school and Komsomol documents. After painstaking work, they finally identified Antonina Ginzburg.

But there was a shortage of evidence, so the operatives began gradually showing Antonina to witnesses. She was even called to the military registration and enlistment office, supposedly to fill out documents for a veteran’s award. Makarova never suspected anything. For almost a year the investigators collected and verified data, determined not to accuse an innocent person of such a terrible crime.

Eventually, when all the evidence and testimony came together, an arrest warrant was issued. During the investigation and the trial, Antonina behaved calmly. She talked about her monstrous crimes as if they were everyday matters. Her only explanation was that she had simply wanted to survive.

Until the very end she hoped she would be forgiven, that the punishment would not be too severe after so many years. But the statute of limitations did not apply to her crimes. Viktor Ginzburg did not believe at first that his wife was a criminal. He went to the authorities, wrote complaints.

When he was allowed to examine the case materials and see the witnesses, he turned gray overnight. The family disowned their wife and mother. Viktor gathered the children and moved away. On November 20, 1978, the court sentenced Antonina Makarova Ginzburg to death by execution for the atrocities she had committed.

At six o’clock in the morning on August 11, 1978, after all courts of appeal had rejected her requests for clemency, the sentence was carried out. That is how Tonka the Machine Gunner, the bloody monster in female form, ended her days. The children she had failed to kill that day in Lokot grew up, and the trail that had gone cold so many times finally led to her door, where she had been waiting all along.