As it’s 9 July, it must be the 106th anniversary of the day Maria Bocharevka led her magnificently named 1st Russian Women’s Battalion of Death over the top in the Kerensky Offensive, the country’s last major operation in WWI.
When she first tried to enlist, Maria was mocked, so she “personally petitioned the Czar, via telegram, to allow her to serve”, later writing in what may not be an entirely reliable memoir:
Apparently, she “adored military life, embracing the uniform, swagger, lifestyle and haircut that went along with it”. According to They Fought for the Motherland, a book by historian Laurie Stoff, about Russia’s women soldiers in the era:
(Stoff scrupulously points out that “none of the sources address [the issue of female soldiers’ sexuality] directly, making any conclusions regarding sexuality purely speculative”. So: knock yourselves out.)
The battalion was assembled (in the words of her New York Times obituary) “to inspire the women’s war-weary male counterparts to keep fighting or, alternatively, to shame them into doing so”. The response was remarkable: The 1st Russian Women’s Battalion of Death received applications from more than 2,000 volunteers. Bochkareva whittled that down to around 300.
They can’t all have been as fearsome as Maria, but she apparently cut an impressive figure at the front line
Finally, after much training (and apparently having their heads shaved, being denied toothbrushes, and having Maria exhort them “to spit and swear and act as masculine as possible”), the women found themselves about to go over the top.
After the Bolsheviks took power, the women’s units were disbanded, and Maria went to America. She’d become famous, and managed to meet Woodrow Wilson, George V and Emmeline Pankhurst. Theodore Roosevelt gave her $1,000 of his Nobel Peace Prize money.
In New York, she also came across a Russian journalist who wrote her autobiography, but apparently this involved a fair amount of printing the legend — we only have her word for the meeting with Lenin, for example.
She went back to Russia later in 1918, and tried to get back into the fighting, but the Bolshevik secret police found her, imprisoned her, and interrogated her — apparently for a full four months.
She was shot in May 1920. In 2015, a Russian film celebrated the battalion, and went for relatively realistic casting by having Mariya Aronova play Maria…
…and then opted for standard film industry practice when they designed the poster.
