(b. 1889)
Commander of the Russian Women’s Battalion of Death. Maria (Yasha) Bochkareva was born in Nikolsko, Siberia. She was physically abused by her alcoholic peasant father. At age fifteen, she married Afansi Bochkareva, who also abused her. She left him and her job as a construction worker and worked on a river steamer. Her second husband, Yakov Buk, was also violent. In 1914, Maria left him and was allowed to join the Russian 25 th Reserve Battalion as a woman soldier. She was wounded twice and awarded three times for her bravery.
In May 1917, she was able to persuade Alexander Kerensky, then minister of defense of the provisional Russian government, to allow her to form a women’s battalion. She reputedly said, "If the men refuse to fight for their country, we will show them what the women can do!" (Farmborough 1975, 299). She was able to recruit 2,000 women. There were young women from prominent families and university students swept away by patriotic emotion, and perhaps sometimes "drawn to battle through personal sorrow or failure in love" (Stites 1978, 297). Some of these became officers, but after
Bochkareva culled the ranks and drove away most of her recruits with her draconian discipline, only 300, predominantly peasant women, remained. Those who remained were instructed by men from the Volhynia Regiment. Before shipping to the front, the battalion was praised by the British suffragette turned patriot Emme-line Pankhurst.
The battalion, bolstered by officers and rank-and-file male volunteers, fought credibly in the July offensive, driving through three German trench lines. Bochkareva thought, "Surely, the men would be shamed at the sight of their sisters going into battle. Surely, the front would awake and rush forward like one man" (Bochkareva 1919, 207). To her dismay, the battalion was left in the lurch by all-male units, who refused orders to support its attack. Some of her own unit and their reinforcements faltered. During the fighting, Bochkareva discovered one of her women making love with a Russian male soldier. She ran the woman through with a bayonet, but the man escaped before she could kill him (Bochkareva 1919, 217). The women were forced to fall back to avoid encirclement and suffered staggering casualties, between 109 and 210 of its 300 soldiers (Stites 1978, 297), including Bochkareva, who was wounded. After recovering, she was attacked and almost lynched by disgruntled male onlookers when she attempted to impose discipline on a women’s unit in Moscow. She returned to the front and her unit, but defeatism was rampant. Her effort to shame men into fighting led to insults and threats. Finally, twenty of her soldiers were lynched by defeatist men (Bochkareva 1919, 256). At that point, Bochkareva dissolved her unit.
Asked by an old officer acquaintance to confer with General Lavr Kornilov, she went to an area in the south where Kornilov and the Bolsheviks were fighting. Captured by the Bolsheviks, she narrowly escaped execution. Through luck, being recognized as a soldier who had saved wounded soldiers on the battlefield at great personal danger, and the help of acquaintances, she was released. She was able to make her way to Vladivostok, and on April 18, 1918, she was transported to the United States on a U.S. ship.She left the United States in July and returned via England to Archangel, Russia. There she disappeared in 1919.
The 135 women soldiers stationed in the Winter Palace in Petrograd at the time of the October Revolution are frequently identified as members of the Women’s Battalion of Death. They were not part of Bochkareva’s unit, but a company from a women’s battalion formed in Petrograd after Bochkareva disbanded her unit and left the front. They were almost the sole defenders of Kerensky’s Provisional Government against the Bolsheviks. Kerensky left the women soldiers and young male cadets to fight while he escaped in an automobile commandeered from the U.S. embassy. His effort to rouse reinforcements failed, and the company of women left their barricades and surrendered. The women were taken to various barracks for the night. They were insulted and beaten; three were raped, and one committed suicide. Despite wild rumors, there was no massacre and no mass rape. The next day, the women were marched to the Finland station and sent to their barracks, after which they disbanded.
