Maria Bochkareva
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Maria Bochkareva (1889 – 1920) was a Russian woman who fought in World War I and formed the Women's Battalion of Death.
Maria Bochkareva was born in Siberia in 1889. She left home aged fifteen to marry Afansi Bochkarev and they moved to Tomsk where they worked as labourers. When her husband began to assault her, Bochkareva left him to work on a steamship. She later remarried to Yakov Buk but this marriage also ended after he began to abuse her.
At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Bochkareva joined the 25th Reserve Battalion of the Russian Army. Men of the regiment treated her with ridicule or sexually harassed her until she proved her mettle in battle.
In the following years, Bochkareva was twice wounded and decorated three times for bravery. After the abdication of Nicholas II of Russia in March 1917, she convinced interim prime minister Alexander Kerensky to let her form a women's battalion. The Women's Death Battalion fought at the Austrian front but after three months their numbers had dwindled from two thousand to around two-hundred and fifty.
During the October Revolution, Bochkareva and the remnants of her regiment tried unsuccessfully to defend the Winter Palace against Bolshevik troops. Many of the women were slain and some raped. Bolshevists detained Bochkareva and interrogated her but she later managed to escape to the United States. The subsequent Bolshevik government belittled the existence of her unit and later accounts regarded it as a legend.
According to some accounts, Bochkareva arrived at Archangelsk in August 1918 with British troops ready to support the White Army counter-revolutionaries in the Russian civil war, but the White Army officers there did not accept her.
Bochkareva published her memoirs, Yashka: My Life As Peasant, Exile, and Soldier in 1919. She again tried to form a women's battalion, this time under the White admiral Aleksandr Kolchak in Omsk, but again was captured by the Bolsheviks. The Omsk Cheka ordered her execution by firing squad on May 15, 1920.
