Maria Limanskaya

After the Battle of Berlin ended in early May 1945, Limanskaya was assigned to direct traffic at the Brandenburg Gate during the Potsdam Conference in late July. While conducting her duties, she was photographed, filmed, and also interviewed by Yevgeny Khaldei, a journalist employed by TASS, a state news agency. Her picture was widely published in newspapers and magazines worldwide and she quickly became an iconic image of the victory over Nazi Germany. However, all of this is possibly confusion with Lydia Spivak, another regulator who was actually filmed and interviewed at the Brandenburg gate. Limanskaya furthermore had a brief conversation with the British leader Winston Churchill as his entourage was passing by the gate on their way to Potsdam. Limanskaya later said about her meeting Churchill, "[he] looked precisely the way I imagined him, puffing on a cigar".

Mariya Filippovna Limanskaya (Russian: Мария Филипповна Лиманская; born 12 April 1924) was a regulator - a female member of Red Army traffic control units, serving for three years during World War II. She became known as one of the Russian women who directed traffic at the Brandenburg Gate in 1945 after the Battle of Berlin. She has since become a symbol of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, but she is often confused with Lydia Spivak (many online photos of Limanskaya are actually Spivak).

Born in 1924 as Mariya Limanskaya, she joined the Red Army in 1942, at the height of World War II. She was 18. At that time the Soviet Stavka ("high command") increasingly lacked trained reserves to reinforce the entire 2,000-kilometre (1,200 mi) front, and as a result began to conscript underage boys and girls. Almost 800,000 women would eventually serve in the Red Army throughout the war. Little is known about Limanskaya's military career other than several occasions where she was nearly killed. At one point, she left a building a few seconds before it was leveled by a bomb attack. She also contracted malaria.