In honor of Woman’s History Month, I thought we could take a look at an amazing Ukrainian woman, Lyudmila Pavlichenko. She was born on July 12, 1916, in Bila Tserkva in the Kyiv Oblast of what was then Russia. Her family moved to Kyiv in 1930 where she worked as a grinder at the Kyiv Arsenal Factory. She admitted that she was extremely competitive and a bit of a tomboy, and was delighted to join a shooting club in Kyiv, where she became an excellent sharpshooter. In 1937 Lyudmila entered the Kyiv University (studying history🥰). But life changed on June 22, 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

Like so many others, she immediately volunteered, and ended up in Odessa, where she was ordered to Nurses Training. She refused, insisting that she would be more useful as a marksman. She was assigned to the Red Army’s 25th Rifle Division. Weapons were in short supply, but when a sniper in her unit was wounded, she took his Mosin-Nagant 189 bolt-action rifle and immediately shot two Germans. With that, she officially became a sniper. Pavlichenko spent the next ten weeks at the siege of Odessa, during which she accrue 187 kills and quickly was nicknamed “Lady Death.”

As the Romanians wrested Odessa from the Soviets in October 1941, the Russians withdrew toward Sevastopol, in Crimea, which also came under siege. By May 1942, the new Lieutenant was cited by the Southern Army Council for having another 257 kills. In June, she was hit with shrapnel from a mortar. She was evacuated via submarine and spent a month in a hospital in Moscow.

With a total of 309 kills, Pavlichenko was more important to the Soviets as a spokesman than sending her back to the front. Instead, she went on a propaganda tour throughout the country. She then was out a tour to both Canada and the US where she met both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House, and spoke in both Chicago and New York City. On returning to the Soviet Union, she trained new sharpshooters and snipers until the end of the war.

After the war, she went back to Kyiv and graduated from the University with her history degree. Ultimately she became the Senior Researcher for the USSR’s Navy Headquarters. After dealing with what we now understand to be PTSD for years, she died of a stroke at the age of 58 in 1974.