Kicking out recruits simply for giggling. Fighting enemy combatants AND their own countrymen.
A leader who escaped from a death sentence. Russia's all-female Battalion of Death
has one of the most fascinating stories in all of European history.
All-female death battalions don't happen in a vacuum, and they didn't happen at all in
Russia before 1917. Russian women didn't have the right to vote or hold public offices at the time,
although wealth afforded certain opportunities, like the ability to obtain a limited education.
There were certainly some historical exceptions like Catherine the Great,
but even she was the target of myths meant to undercut her accomplishments.
By and large, Russian women were denied independence, and most were illiterate peasants.
In the 1860s and 70s, many Russian women embraced a populist ideology that demanded
social justice and which later gave rise to the Bolshevik uprising. World War I intensified their
fight for equality. As men went off to dig trenches, women began carving their own path
in the workplace and demanding a place in the military. Multiple women, like Maria Bochkareva,
who later created the Death Battalion, initially fought alongside male soldiers.
In 1917, Petrograd became the stage for the largest women's protest in the nation's history.
Later that year, women won the right to vote and began organizing all-female battalions.
Bochkareva's Battalion of Death was the first and most notable.
"I am strong!"
"Holy cow."
The story of the Women's Battalion of Death began — and in many respects
ended — with Maria Bochkareva. In 1889, she was born into poverty to a decorated army sergeant.
In her autobiography, she recalled her father as a "morose and egotistical" man who became a
cruel-hearted alcoholic. He violently terrorized the family and then abandoned them for five years,
leaving Bochkareva, her mother, and two older sisters to nearly starve. When he returned, so did
the violence, and their severe financial hardship only got harder with the birth of a fourth child.
At age eight, Bochkareva spent her nights sleeping in a baker's horse stable and was
forced to take care of a 5-year-old boy to avoid eviction. By age 15, she lived in her
parents' basement. Her father forced her and her mother to spend hours outside in the ice and snow.
Desperate to escape, she married Afanasi Bochkarev, who turned out to also be an alcoholic.
When Bochkareva attempted to escape him, he tied her to a post, flogged her for hours,
and force-fed her alcohol under threat of death. She eventually fled and became
romantically involved with another man who later tried to kill her.
Before commanding Russia's first women's battalion, Maria Bochkareva joined an
otherwise all-male outfit. During that time, she adopted the moniker "Yashka" as an apparent nod
to her husband, Yakov "Yasha" Buk. But the man who inspired that nickname almost killed her.
A gambler and jailbird, he tried to hang Bochkareva when he suspected her of infidelity.
Fearful of her husband's homicidal wrath, she resolved to fight in World War I in 1914,
seeing it as more noble to leave her husband to save her country than to save her own life.
Bochkareva's request to join the military was initially rejected. It took a personal appeal
to the tsar to gain admittance. But then gaining acceptance from male recruits was a war in itself.
Many didn't respect her as a person, let alone a soldier.
At night she had to combat unwanted hands intent on violating her. On one night she
fought back against harassment from her squad commander. As punishment for defending herself,
she had to stand at attention for 26 hours instead of the standard 24 for guard duty.
During Bochkareva's first taste of trench warfare, her regiment was reduced from 250
to about 70 people. Surrounded by wounded men, she braved the treacherous No Man's Land to rescue as
many injured soldiers as she could. As recounted in her autobiography, she carried casualties to
the edge of the trench so that others could bring them to safety and saved approximately fifty lives
by the following dawn. Over the course of the war she also incurred battle scars of her own.
On one occasion, a German shot Bochkareva in the leg. She also got struck in the back by shrapnel
from an exploding shell, leaving her paralyzed for four months. Over the course of her exploits,
she received three medals for bravery. But she didn't rest on her laurels.
By May 1917, Russia's male soldiers were refusing to fight, with dwindling morale spurring mass
desertions on the Eastern front. So Bochkareva met with the Minister of War and proposed
shaming them back into battle by assembling an all-female battalion that she would command.
On May 21, 1917, Maria Bochkareva unleashed a rallying cry that rippled throughout Russia:
"Our mother is perishing. Our mother is Russia. I want to help save her. I want
women whose hearts are pure crystal, whose souls are pure, whose impulses are lofty."
For Bochkareva, sexual purity was essential. Of the 2,000 women who answered her call,
she claimed that she refused 1,500 of them for loose behavior like flirting with instructors.
Women in the Death Battalion were required to make vows of chastity, as were female nurses.
Bochkareva took this vow so seriously that when she discovered a member of her battalion having
sex with a male soldier behind a tree, she snapped and killed the woman with a bayonet.
The Women's Battalion of Death certainly lived up to its serious name.
Recruits were dismissed for giggling and slapped for lack of discipline.
Supply shortages forced many of them to wear normal shoes instead of army boots.
Nevertheless, these joyless, bootless soldiers marched into battle ready to fight to the death.
"Those who are scared can leave!"
The women in the Battalion reportedly carried vials of lethal potassium cyanide in case they
were captured. But they may have been too busy taking lives to worry about being taken prisoner.
One member reportedly even kept the helmet of a slain German soldier as a souvenir.
Despite fighting courageously, Maria Bochkareva's band of killer women triggered dismissiveness
and murderous rage in their male counterparts. As she recounted in her autobiography,
when the women's battalion needed backup after gaining ground and suffering huge losses,
the resentful men refused to assist and instead mocked her squad. They cried out things like:
"The women will fight!"
And:
"Just watch those women run!"
After a successful Bolshevik rebellion back home, Russian men on the Western
front rebelled against Bochkareva and her battalion, as they shouted out,
"Kill her! Kill them all!"
Four instructors who tried to protect the Death Battalion were trampled to death by
a lynch mob that killed 20 women. Following that incident, Bochkareva's squad secretly disbanded.
1917 marked a sea change when the Bolsheviks toppled Russia's provisional government,
thereby ushering in the Soviet era. Some sources have claimed that Bochkareva led
the final line of defense against the Red Army when it sacked the Winter Palace in Petrograd.
But according to Bochkareva's telling, she was away being betrayed by Russian men on
the Western front when the palace fell. It was actually the Petrograd Women's Battalion,
which emulated Bochkareva's squad, that attempted to beat back the Bolsheviks.
Unfortunately for the Petrograd unit, it was a doomed effort before it even began.
By the time the Red Army made its move, the palace was largely unguarded. In fact,
many of the men charged with guarding the building had switched allegiances, aligning themselves with
the Bolsheviks. The battleship Aurora kicked off the killing by training its cannons on the
Winter Palace and opening fire. Some accounts from the time alleged that most or all of the
female soldiers were sexually assualted and in some cases thrown from windows. Unsurprisingly,
the young Bolshevik government cleared itself of the bulk of those accusations.
The book Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed is the most well-known American account of
the Russian Revolution. You might be familiar with Reed's story if you've seen the 1981 movie Reds,
starring Warren Beatty. When Reed traveled to Russia to cover the story, he ended up becoming
a part of the Bolshevik cause himself. He was also loath to embrace claims that were critical of the
Red Army. When the proto-Soviets were accused of assaulting most of the Petrograd Women's
Battalion and throwing some of them from windows, Reed seemed intent on discrediting the accounts.
"We'll join you in revolution!"
(speaks Russian)
Reed's wife Louise Bryant interviewed members of the Petrograd Women's Battalion and documented her
observations in her own book, Six Red Months in Russia. She also dismissed allegations of assault.
At least one female soldier confirmed that she'd been shoved through a window,
but she claimed her assailant was remorseful. Of course, the Red Army was in charge now,
so it may have felt unwise and dangerous to accuse them of anything serious. It's worth noting that
Bryant described the Russian Revolution as, quote, "one of the best arguments I know in favor of
women's suffrage." So she might not have wanted to see their struggle harmed by the revolution.
After the dissolution of the Women's Battalion of Death, Maria Bochkareva continued to serve her
country during the Russian Revolution. She had no desire to take up arms against any Russian.
However, when a civil war broke out between the pro-Bolshevik Reds and the anti-Bolshevik Whites,
she agreed to collect intelligence for the Whites. The Reds then arrested her
and sentenced her to death. Luckily, one of the local Bolsheviks was a former Imperial
soldier whom Bochkareva had saved in battle, so he returned the favor and secured her release.
Bochkareva used her new lease on life to petition foreign allies for help in overcoming Germany
in the ongoing world war. She met with England's King George V, American President Woodrow Wilson,
and former president Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt frowned on the idea of female soldiers,
though he admired Bochkareva's character and reportedly encouraged President Wilson to
intervene in Russia's Civil War. Roosevelt was so moved by the hardships suffered by
the women of the Death Battalion that he gave her $1,000 of his own Nobel Prize money to help them.
In 1917, Maria Bochkareva found herself caught between a world war, a looming civil war,
and militant misogynists. A mob of enraged Russian men on the Western front saw to
it that No Man's Land would become No Woman's Land by lynching Bochkareva's Death Battalion
and prompting its dissolution. And after the Bolsheviks ran roughshod over the Winter Palace,
many of the women whom Bochkareva inspired to fight now fought against her.
Bochkareva later lashed out against the women disavowing her, and she also made enemies in high
places. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky perceived her as a threat and personally interrogated her.
She presented herself as someone who was not interested in politics and not opposed to an
egalitarian society. Alas, she repeatedly ran afoul of the leaders by attempting to aid the
anti-Bolshevik White Army. She escaped execution once but wouldn't cheat death a second time.
While trying to organize a female sanitary brigade for the White Army, she was apprehended.
The Bolsheviks branded her an enemy of the people and executed her in 1920.
Neither the Women's Battalion of Death nor the units that followed in its wake managed to shame
men into battle effectively. Nor did the women's valiant battlefield efforts raise men's morale or
prevent widespread sexism. The government tried to sideline them by assigning most
of the women to non-combat tasks like guarding railroads. But the men objected to this as well,
complaining that the women were taking their jobs and forcing men to fight.
Once the Bolsheviks took over, they canceled the women's battalions altogether. Some of the units
instantly complied, while others stood their ground before being stamped out of existence.
Some participated in the Russian Civil War. But the end is never really the end
when it comes to history, as the Women's Battalion of Death ended up becoming a propaganda tool for
Vladimir Putin's government. Decades later in 2015, the Russian government even memorialized
World War I with the release of a film celebrating Bochkareva and her ill-fated squad.