Valentina Parshina

Valentina Romanovna Parshina (1937 to 2020) was a Soviet and Russian agronomist and politician, a foreman of vegetable growers at the Detskoselsky Order of Lenin state farm in the Leningrad region. Born into a large peasant family in the village of Maslyakovo, she graduated from the vegetable growing department of the Agricultural Institute in Pushkin in 1959 as an agronomist and horticultural grower and was sent to the state farm that December. Her team worked with scientists of the Institute of Plant Industry and the Agricultural Academy, supplied the state with five million seedlings and 900 tonnes of early vegetables over five years, grew to more than 100 people and became self-sufficient, and a school for teaching vegetable growing teams was set up on the basis of her brigade and adopted by all specialised farms in the Soviet Union. She was twice awarded the Order of Lenin with the title Hero of Socialist Labour, sat in the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union from 1979 to 1989 and was on the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1989 and 1990. She retired in 2001.