Yekaterina (Katya) Medvedeva was born January 10, 1937, in the village Golubino of Novooskolsky District in Belgorod Oblast into a peasant family.
Her parents died of starvation in 1947, when she was nine years old, and she was brought up in the Shusha's orphanage of the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region Azerbaijan SSR.