Mariya Bochkareva and the Petrograd Women’s Death Battalion
“Since our men are hesitating to fight, the women must show them how to die for their country and for liberty.”
International Women’s Day, Petrograd, 1917
Training the Women’s Death Battalion
American Journalists cover the story
Russia’s Joan of Arc
In July 1917 Bochkareva’s women went into action at the front in Belorussia and fought with conspicuous courage, suffering 50 casualties. Among the wounded was Bochkareva herself. Brought back to Petrograd to recuperate, she was hailed as ‘Russia’s Joan of Arc’ by none other than Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, the British suffragette who arrived in the city in June on a morale-boosting visit to Britain’s Russian wartime ally. Footage and photographs survive of Pankhurst inspecting the women alongside Mariya Bochkareva, whom she greatly admired.
From the beginning the women have been the soul and chief inspiration of the revolutionary movement. In some ways it owes more to them than to the men; the women had usually the higher ideal, the greater readiness for sacrifice, the more dogged and dauntless persistence.
Sadly Mariya Bochkareva, the loyal patriot, who urged women to play their part in the war effort, eventually became a victim of the Bolsheviks. Arrested under a false charge of being an ‘enemy of the working class’, she was shot by the Soviet secret police, the Cheka, in May 1920.