Maria Bochkareva

Biography

Maria Bochkareva (1889–1920) was a Russian soldier and memoirist who became one of the most extraordinary women of World War I. Born Maria Leontyevna Frolkova in Nikolsk, Russia, into extreme poverty, she endured an abusive childhood and two brutal marriages before enlisting in the Imperial Russian Army in 1914—one of the few women to serve in combat with official permission, obtained by petitioning Tsar Nicholas II directly. She fought on the Eastern Front, was wounded multiple times, and earned numerous decorations for bravery. In 1917, with the Russian army collapsing after the Revolution, Bochkareva organized the 1st Russian Women’s Battalion of Death, an all-female combat unit intended to shame male deserters into fighting. The battalion’s dramatic assault at Smorgon became internationally famous. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Bochkareva traveled to the United States and Britain to seek Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks, meeting President Wilson and King George V. Her memoir, Yashka: My Life as Peasant, Exile, and Soldier, was dictated to journalist Isaac Don Levine and published in 1919. She returned to Russia and was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1920.