Women's Battalion of Death

On 21 June 1917 by the Julian calendar then in use in Russia, that is 4 July by the Gregorian calendar, an unusual ceremony took place on the square in front of St Isaac’s Cathedral in Petrograd. About 300 women in soldiers’ uniforms, with cropped hair, trousers and army boots, received a banner inscribed “First Women’s Military Command of Death of Maria Bochkareva”. The service was conducted by two bishops and twelve priests. The unit received two icons, gifts from the soldiers of the 1st and 3rd Armies, and a banner sent by the Minister of War, Alexander Kerensky. On the square stood Generals Lavr Kornilov and Pyotr Polovtsov, the President of the Duma Mikhail Rodzianko and leaders of the political parties, and thousands of onlookers watched the first women’s combat unit in the Russian army. After the ceremony the women marched to the Field of Mars to pay tribute to those who had fallen in the February Revolution.

Yashka

The battalion’s founder, Maria Bochkareva, was born in 1889 into a peasant family in Novgorod Governorate. In 1914, with the permission of the Tsar himself, she enlisted in the army as a private. Her comrades called her Yashka. She fought in the trenches, was wounded several times and was decorated for bravery. After the February Revolution she watched the army fall apart: soldiers fraternised with the Germans, refused to obey orders and deserted. In May 1917, on leave in Petrograd, she came up with the idea of a unit of women who would set an example to the men and lead them into battle. Rodzianko arranged for her to present the plan to General Aleksei Brusilov, who supported it, and Kerensky, Minister of War since May, gave his consent in spite of regulations forbidding the enlistment of women.

The Provisional Government was then preparing a great summer offensive and was looking for any means to raise the army’s spirits. The women’s units were above all of propaganda value. It was hoped that the sight of women going into the attack would shame soldiers who no longer wanted to fight. Bochkareva said that the number of women mattered less than the shame they would arouse among the men. More than 2,000 volunteers answered her appeal, among them factory workers, peasant women, students and young ladies from good families. The commander imposed iron discipline and refused to allow a soldiers’ committee, which every unit of the revolutionary army already had. After quarrels with Kerensky and her superiors she sent away hundreds of women who opposed her, leaving her with about 300. The name “battalion of death” was not reserved for women. It was the name then given to the shock units of volunteers ready to die for the motherland that were being formed throughout the army.

At the front

In those days the British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, who had come to Russia to urge the Russians to continue the war, watched the battalion on parade and praised it. According to some accounts she was also at the ceremony in front of the cathedral. A few days later, after only five weeks’ training, the unit left for the Russian Western Front, in the area of Smorgon and Molodechno. In Galicia the Kerensky offensive had already begun, and the Western Front was to support it with an attack near Krevo. The soldiers received the women with hostility, jeers and insults.

The battalion went into action during the attack near Krevo, around 21–23 July (8–10 July by the Julian calendar). According to accounts, the women, together with a shock battalion, broke through the first German line and carried some reluctant soldiers forward with them. Other units, however, refused to advance further and did not come to their relief, so the battalion had to withdraw. Figures for its losses differ: Bochkareva herself wrote of about 30 killed and 70 wounded out of 170 women who went into battle, while historians working from documents give much lower numbers. Bochkareva was wounded and promoted to second lieutenant. Soon the command concluded that the women’s units had not had the expected effect and no longer sent them into battle. Part of the 1st Petrograd Women’s Battalion, formed in the capital, defended the Winter Palace against the Bolsheviks in November, and the Bolsheviks disbanded the women’s formations at the end of 1917. Bochkareva later joined the Whites. In May 1920 she was shot by the Cheka in Krasnoyarsk.