Valentina Grigoryeva was born and grew up in Anzhero-Sudzhensk, in the family of a miner. After school, she moved to the neighboring town of Taiga to study at the Railway Technical School. When in 1942, the call-up notice was received, 19-year-old Grigoryeva was sent to the Krasnoyarsk School of Junior Aviation Specialists; six months later she was already at the front line.

She immediately got into the thick of the war — near Stalingrad, in the 116th Fighter Aviation Regiment of the 57th Army of Tolbukhin. There, Grigoryeva served as a motorman of La-5 aircraft — preparing the atrcraft for new flights.

One day, Hero of the Soviet Union, Anatoly Pantelekin, flew the fighter plane serviced by Valentina Grigoryeva. During takeoff, its fuselage was ripped out and the crew had to return to the airfield. Grigoryeva and her colleagues were arrested as responsible for the incident. However, the special commission that arrived at the aviation regiment found out that the breakdown was the fault of the plant, and the arrested were immediately released.

During her service, Valentina Grigoryeva was to Stalingrad, Oryol, Kursk, Kharkiv, and the 3rd Ukrainian Front, and then, there was Europe: Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Austria. In Hungary, she received a medal ‘For Battle Merit’.

Valentina Grigoryeva recalled that at the front, she was nicknamed ‘die-hard Siberian’. She got the nickname when she almost lost her arm: during one of the repair works, Grigoryeva got hurt, but she ignored her wound and continued working. After a few days, the arm swelled up to enormous size, and a field hospital doctor decided to amputate it. For young girls, losing a leg or an arm in the war was their greatest fear. As the patient was being prepared for surgery, she rose from her stretcher and said:

As a punishment for her stubbornness, she was the last to be operated that day, but her arm was saved.

Grigoryeva recalled that she urgently needed to disconnect her compressed air tank during one of the enemy raids. One wrong movement, and the container could explode at any moment. The pilot was already in the plane, everything was ready, but the tank would not move. She barely had time to carry out the order, and when the fighter took off, she cried because she was afraid that she might lose her arm because of the explosion.

Grigoryeva met Victory in Vienna, and in August 1945, she returned home. After the war, she worked as an accountant at her father’s enterprise — mine #9/15 — and at the same time studied at the Mining Technical School. From 1962 to 1981, Grigoryeva worked at the machine counting station, and shortly before her retirement, she went to work at the Anzhersk Machine-Building Plant.

Valentina Grigoryeva received a medal ‘For Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945’ and an Order of the Patriotic War, 2nd class for her military service.