Great Patriotic War veteran, military doctor and Medical Service Captain Valentina Georgievna Chistyakova is the grandmother of Roman Tsygankov, deputy head of the customs transit control department. Source: Central Excise Customs (CAT).
Valentina Georgievna was born in Petrograd in 1915. Before the war she qualified as a doctor. Mobilised in 1941, she was assigned to a rear unit because of a one-year-old child. After evacuating her family and child along the Road of Life to the mainland, in 1943 she voluntarily transferred to a combat unit on the Kharkov axis, where she helped fight a typhus epidemic among troops.
She then served as a military physician in the famed 11th Red Banner Radomsko-Berlin Orders of Suvorov and Kutuzov Tank Corps, in the 3rd battalion of the 12th motor rifle brigade of the 1st Belorussian Front. With her comrades she followed front-line roads across Europe to Berlin. Under artillery and mortar fire she repeatedly treated and evacuated wounded soldiers; in one battle she received a shrapnel wound and returned to the front as soon as she recovered.
From 1943 she was always at the front. In Germany she also acted as an interpreter — she had studied German at a special school in Leningrad and knew the language well.
In 1946 she returned to Leningrad, continued medical work, became a candidate of medical sciences and an associate professor at the Leningrad Institute for Advanced Training of Physicians. After losing her husband early, she raised two daughters and grandchildren.
Articles about the courageous doctor and interpreter appeared in newspapers and journals. Tsygankov’s family keeps a book describing her wartime path; one copy is on display at the Central Excise Customs. Her decorations include the Order of the Red Star, Orders of the Patriotic War, 1st and 2nd class, medals for Victory over Germany, the liberation of Warsaw, the capture of Berlin, Labour Valour, Zhukov, and jubilee Victory medals.