Author: Maria Bochkareva

Bochkareva walked out of a violent marriage and a Siberian laundry and petitioned the Tsar directly for permission to enlist in 1914, which she was granted. She was wounded repeatedly and decorated. In 1917, with the army disintegrating, Kerensky let her raise the Women's Battalion of Death, intended less as a fighting formation than as a public shaming of men who would not go; around two thousand volunteered and very few lasted the training. She travelled to the United States and Britain, met Woodrow Wilson and George V, and dictated her memoir to the journalist Isaac Don Levine. She went back, was arrested by the Cheka, and was shot at Krasnoyarsk in 1920, at thirty-one.