Yashka

Maria Bochkareva was born into a poor Russian peasant family and endured beatings, forced labour, and two violent marriages before the First World War remade her life. This memoir, dictated to the journalist Isaac Don Levine, tells how she petitioned the Tsar himself for permission to enlist, fought and was wounded in the trenches, and in 1917 organized the famous Women’s Battalion of Death. Her account moves from village misery and a spell spent following an exiled lover into Siberia toward the chaos of revolution, where her loyalty to the old army left her stranded between the Bolsheviks and the collapsing front. It is a plain, forceful record of an extraordinary woman who fought as hard as any soldier of her generation. Free to read as a PDF and EPUB.