Overlooked No More: Maria Bochkareva, Who Led Women Into Battle in WWI

Overlooked? There was actually a pretty good Russian movie about her released in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1AvU3YPvxY And a mini-series in 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMc8-TK962Y You can watch them on Youtube (in Russian)

Terrific piece of an overlooked person. Yes, she was on the losing side but on the “wrong side of history “? What does that even mean. The Bolsheviks were hardly on the right side of history. She was simply a victim of a maelstrom of historical forces.

Maybe nobody remembers her because the Russian army has fielded million of female soldiers.

About 200 members of the Women's Battalion of Death defended the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg when the Bolsheviks seized power. When the Bolsheviks stormed the Palace the women dropped their rifles and fled. Fortunately for the women, the attackers were focused on finding the Czar's wine cellar - the best in the world - and allowed the women to escape. By morning the halls of the Winter Palace were littered with drunken Bolsheviks and the smell of urine.

Interested in more? See my novel RIVKA'S WAR, which features Yashka as a central character.

Of all the ways to demonstrate that the NYT is on the wrong side of history -- and the toxic dead end of identity politics. By the same internal logic, a woman slavemaster in the American Civil War would be celebrated, with the fixation on identity excusing all else. The Women's Battalion of Death was a ferociously right-wing grouping, defending the Tsar, then the corrupt Kerensky regime. When it was on its death throes, the only two forces which mounted opposition to the taking of power by the Bolsheviks were a ragtag assemblage of teenage officer students, and the Women's Battalion of Death. In an insurrection which was even published in the papers in advance, only these were reactionary enough to come to the aid of the putrefied and repressive regime, whose leader Kerensky had adopted the Tsar's own royal apartments as his own. Assemble the facts in this article rationally: she travelled abroad offering her services as traitor and Quisling to the twenty-odd nations that invaded Russia, fearing the working-class government. They used her and manufactured an image to suit their interests. And then she returned to fight the national liberators. Who was she a martyr to? Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George, not the Russian people.

Truly sad that you are glorifying the worst form of government created by the human race, guilty of killing tens of millions of men and women, just to point out that this atrocity of humanity also made women officers in their military.

It's nice that you choose to cover a Russian war hero from WWI. How about some coverage of Ahmed Abu Hussein, the second journalist targeted and killed by the Israeli army in Gaza over the past few days.

An absolutely outstanding historical vignette! Reading and understanding History is absolutely essential to knowing how we got where we are and understanding where we are headed. Keep up the great work!

I would like to suggest someone who should be included in your list of overlooked women: Mary Somerville, after whom Somerville College at Oxford was named. She was a self-taught Scottish polymath and science writer who, upon her death, was dubbed the Queen of Science. She was reputedly the person for whom the word "scientist" was originally coined and was Ada Lovelace's advisor and mentor.

Krupskaya liked her though, and tried to rehabilitate her.

Amazing initiative by the New York Times. This reminds me of what historians of women have been doing for years: excavating women's lives from the ruins of dismissive patriarchy.

To try and connect to the world she lived in , and was executed in, while being assaulted daily now with constant live displays of would be kings who romp over the world and plunder for their own enrichment, a Fellini movie script comes to mind.

I remember reading about her. Brave and tough as she was, she was also a difficult person to get along with. The women who served in her battalion absolutely feared her and often described her as a bully and borderline sadist, more Nurse Ratchett than Joan of Arc.

Nice article! There is a segment of society that seems to yell "historically inaccurate!" every time pop culture portrays women as combatants in historical wars. Clearly those people were/are just not looking hard enough.

An interesting piece. Can I make a plea to NYT? I nominated someone (Rosalind Franklin, as it happens) for inclusion. But I have no way of knowing if in fact she was given an obituary at the time; or if not, whether my recommendation has been reviewed and if the omission will be rectified. Can we have some easy way of finding out? Perhaps a database of names so we can look up when they were obit-ized (and maybe a link to the original? - shouldn't be too hard) and if not whether I am alone in recommending her or whether there are many of us who would like to see a nomination acted on.

"Deemed an enemy of the people." Sounds like a phrase the our current fearless leader will no doubt use.

She was a remarkable woman in a falling world. WWI was a never-ending slaughter, and Russia's disastrous engagement killed around 2 million and wounded about double that number. Even before the Russian Empire entered the war, there were credible warnings of defeat and revolution because of social and economic weakness. Often badly equipped and led, conscripted peasants fought for reasons they did not understand and were mowed down, still putting up a stubborn resistance against the odds. But Russia drained Germany's manpower and reserves, and even carried through military innovations such as the use of shock troops which Germany later copied. Prit Buttar's history in four volumes covers the war(s) on the Eastern Front in detail from 1914-21: (1) Collision of Empires; (2) Germany Ascendant; (3) Russia's Last Gasp; and (4)The Splintered Empires. Russia's role in defeating Hitler's Germany in WWII is much better appreciated. But Russia's tremendous struggle in WWI, even at the cost of its own collapse, allowed the Western Allies to hold on until America intervened. The modern world would otherwise have been very different.

There were many women Soviet Army snipers and combat pilots during WW2 that had remarkable martial achievements, some of whom may not have had Times obits. One example would be the female sniper team of Natalya Kovshova and Mariya Polivanova that has an estimated 300 kills before their deaths which came from a grenade that Kovshova pulled the pin on as German troops entered their trench during a battle in village of Sutoki-Byakovo in August 1942. Russia and later Vietnam showed that women could excel in combat in conjunction with men.

"My haert yearned to be there, in the boiling caldron of war, to be baptized in its fire and scorched in its lava." Wow. Spoken like a true survivor of abuse!! This is one of my favorite stories in history! I wish they had included some more details about the Women's Battalion of Death. There is this beautiful story where both male troops and the Women's Battalion are called into an offensive against the Germans. It seemed hopeless, and the men all hesitated. The women decided they were going in anyway, and they made it into German territory. I believe reinforcements never arrived, so they had to retreat, but they still killed it!!!

Absolutely stirring piece. I can see where Timmy Williams from WKUK got his inspiration.

This is cool. Thanks for doing this, but come to think of it, there will always be people who deserve recognition throughout history all around the world who will always be overlooked. Mothers, for example.

Much is to be admired in digging up the past that has unfortunately been overlooked. Generations today, the millennial and those following it will have less regard for the past because so much is available at their fingertips of the present and future. But to overlook the past is to tear at the very core of what it means to be human, to be free, to live one's own life to the fullest. The NYT knows the importance of the past, because if they didn't they would never have bothered to unearth obituaries that were not printed or overlooked. And what they have done is remind us that obituaries themselves are "not dead things but contain - in an unusual way - a 'potency' of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are."

“All night long my nerves were taut and my fists busy,” she wrote. “I continued to rain blows til the bell rang at five o’clock.” Perhaps some of the women who report that they can't locate the door when they find themselves on a bad date could take some inspiration from Bochkareva.