She was born on a farm near the village of Poddegtyarnaya (belor. Paddzyagtsyarnya, now Pukhovichi district, Minsk region), in a peasant family. Education — secondary, 6 grades. In 1931, she took a job as a waitress in the canteen of the Council of People's Commissars of the BSSR. Soon she married B. A. Tarletsky, a chauffeur, an employee of the NKVD. In 1935, her son Zhenya was born, who died a year and a half later. After the birth of the child, Elena went to work in the recreation center of the Belarusian People's Commissar; in 1939, she suffered a premature birth; the child could not be saved. In the same year, Elena went to work in the canteen of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus.
After the fall of Minsk, Elena (her friends called her Galina, under this name she was known to both Germans and partisans) got a job as a cleaner in one of the German military units, then worked as a waitress in a factory kitchen and in a casino for German officers. At the beginning of June 1943, she was hired in a three-story mansion at 27 Teatralnaya Street, where the Commissioner General of Belarus Wilhelm Kube lived with his family.
By the time Elena started working in the mansion, Kube was already being hunted. Having received the sanction of Moscow, the partisan detachments operating in the Minsk area began preparing for the liquidation of the Commissioner General. So, on July 22, 1943, a bomb was detonated in the Minsk theater, which destroyed 70 German servicemen. However, Kube left the building just a few minutes before the explosion. On September 6, 1943, as a result of a terrorist attack in the officers' mess during a banquet, 36 high-ranking officials and officers were killed; the Commissioner General himself was not present at the banquet for some reason. The ambush on the road, which Kube often traveled, was also fruitless.
On August 8, 1943, one of the former cleaners who worked for Kube, Tatiana Kalita ("Tala"), introduced Elena Mazanik to an employee of the NKVD task force (the "Arthur" detachment, which operated as part of the "Uncle Kolya" brigade), Nadezhda Troyan ("Kanskaya"). During a number of meetings, Elena agreed to commit murder to Cuba (it was supposed to lay a mine or use poison), and as conditions, she set, firstly, the evacuation of her family (sister and her relatives) from Minsk, and, secondly, a personal meeting with the head of Hope Troyan, I. F. Zolotar. However, the impossibility of the meeting led to the fact that Elena Mazanik, although she continued to meet with Nadezhda Troyan, nevertheless stopped trusting her, and on September 16 declared it impossible to destroy Cuba for objective reasons.
It is worth noting that in addition to Hope Trojan, another partisan agent, Nikolai Khokhlov, tried to establish contact with Elena Mazanik. In August 1943, together with the German anti-fascist Karl Kleinung, he was thrown into the German rear under the guise of Oberleutnant Otto Wittgenstein. Acting from the positions of the task force "Yuri" (commander Emmanuel Kutsin), Khokhlov already met with Elena Mazanik on September 18, 1943 and tried to persuade her to arrange the murder of Cuba. However, the conversation ended in nothing: Elena did not believe Khokhlov and did not agree to cooperate with him.
Both of these refusals may have been due to the fact that by this time Elena Mazanik had been contacted by a liaison of a number of partisan detachments, Maria Osipova ("Black", "Heron"). On September 3, 1943, through the director of the Minsk cinema N. V. Pokhlebaev, she met Elena's sister, Valentina Shutskaya, and through Valentina she met "Galina". Osipova Elena Mazanik set the same conditions as Nadezhda Troyan: evacuation of her sister's family and a personal meeting with the commander. Since "Galina" herself could not leave Minsk, Valentina Shutskaya went to a meeting with the partisan commander — Major Nikolai Fedorov ("Kolokol", one of the leaders of the special squad "Dima"), and only after that Elena Mazanik agreed to discuss specific proposals for the elimination of Cuba.
The first proposal put forward by Osipova — to use arsenic to commit a terrorist attack — was immediately rejected by Elena, since the first one was a small child of the Commissioner General, which could lead to the disruption of the operation. As a result, it was decided to blow up the Cube. On September 20, 1943, the preparation of the operation was completed: Nadezhda Osipova handed Elena Mazanik a small mine and, just in case, poison for suicide.
At 22.00 on October 12, 1943, Elena Mazanik, along with other participants in the liquidation of Cuba, was sent by plane to the Soviet rear. After writing the report, she was still waiting for a thorough interrogation. Due to the special importance, the interrogation was conducted by the People's Commissar of State Security V. Merkulov, his deputy B. Kobulov and the head of the intelligence directorate of the General Staff of the Red Army F. Kuznetsov. As a result of the operation on October 29, 1943, Elena Mazanik (together with Maria Osipova and Nadezhda Troyan) received the title Hero of the Soviet Union.
After the war she lived in Minsk. In 1948 she graduated from the Higher Republican Party School under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus, in 1952 — the Minsk Pedagogical Institute. From 1952 to 1960, Elena worked as Deputy director of the Fundamental Library of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR. Honored Worker of Culture of the Belarusian SSR.
