Within the field of sniping literature this memoir is completely unique, for it is the first ever written by a female front-line sniper. Lyudmila Mykhailovna Pavlichenko was not just any sniper, however, for she was to become the highest-scoring female sniper, with 309 official kills. Official kills, it should be noted, were those observed by a second party. In common with most snipers, many of Pavlichenko’s kills were made during attacks where stopping to take notes of how many enemy soldiers had been dispatched was neither wise nor practical. Her exact total therefore remains unknown, but around 500 would not be improbable.
On another level, this remarkable memoir also sets the record straight about much of the ill-founded criticism and inaccurate writing that has been subsequently aimed at her, particularly suggestions that she was not a sniper at all, but the product of the Red Army propaganda machine. Once geared up to laud the exploits of an individual, the Soviets were indeed formidable creators of myths, but Pavlichenko as well as fellow sniper Vasily Grigoryevich Zaitsev were the genuine article. Indeed, it is ironic that had their unwanted fame not caused them to be plucked from their front-line duties when they were, there is little doubt that both would merely have become names on a war memorial. The lifespan of a Soviet sniper was normally short; at Stalingrad, neophyte snipers had an expected combat life of two weeks. The longer you survived, the better you became and the stronger the chances were that you would live – up to a point. But in warfare, there is a law of diminishing returns where front-line combat is concerned, and eventually battle fatigue, sheer physical exhaustion and the willpower to continue will take their toll and mistakes happen. The life of a sniper was not unlike that of a pilot, for it could be ended by one mistake and there was seldom a second chance.
Not that Pavlichenko had the slightest inkling that she was destined for a future that would earn her the nickname ‘Lady Death’, win her the highest awards that the Soviet Union could bestow, meet with Stalin and travel to America, Canada and Europe. Like tens of thousands of other young Russians, before the war she appeared destined to work within the Communist Party system; being an intelligent woman she would probably have become a minor official and progressed upwards through the ranks of the Party faithful. Yet her chance introduction to a TOZ-8 .22-calibre target rifle would change the course of her life. Mostly unknown outside Russia, these little single-shot rifles were manufactured in their tens of thousands and used in rifle clubs and for hunting small game. They were cheap, solidly constructed, accurate and the first rifle that most people learned to shoot. That she had a natural aptitude is one of those quirks of nature, when someone has exactly the right combination of hand–eye coordination, muscle steadiness, good eyesight and patience. But there was another, more nebulous quality, which not every good shot possessed and which differentiates the sniper from an ordinary rifleman. Exactly what it is is often argued about; some define it as an inherent hunting instinct, not always present in men and even rarer in women. Others define it as strength of purpose, the possession of willpower far beyond that of the accepted norm. Certainly, Lyudmila’s faith in her country, its politics and the justice of the Soviet cause never wavered, and this provided her with extraordinary determination, often in the face of overwhelming odds. In common with the rest of the Soviet army, dying for the motherland was considered a worthwhile sacrifice and perhaps this provided her with a reason to continue after being wounded so often, when others would have fallen by the wayside. Latterly, the need to avenge her husband must also have driven her on. Yet in many respects, Pavlichenko was not the heroic material the propagandists were looking for. True, she was not unattractive, but she had typical sniper’s characteristics. She was reticent, bordering on introverted, shy of publicity and wanted solely to do her job, or ‘kill fascists’, as she bluntly put it. Gregarious snipers must certainly have existed, but they were rare and probably did not survive in their chosen field for long. As interest grew around her role, Pavlichenko stated, ‘a sniper should not draw attention to him or herself. The main prerequisite for operating successfully was remaining hidden.’ This applied not solely to the battlefield but also to her wariness of publicity. Snipers needed the patience of a cat, innate cunning and an attitude to their profession that might reasonably be described as obsessive. As an example, consider the effort she put into finding and killing the German sniper concealed on the bridge. Hours of careful observation, putting herself in the mental shoes of the German sniper, returning time and again and being prepared to continue to do so with no guaranteed end result in sight. This was not something that the average soldier would have had the perseverance for.
Perhaps this seems at odds with the woman who undertook a world tour and met presidents and politicians, but she had to make the best of the situation into which she had been placed. Nor should it be forgotten that she had been wounded four times, each of which would have had some deleterious effect on her mental and physical state and, worst of all, she had buried her husband of a few weeks, Lieutenant Alexei Arkadyevich Kitsenko, in Sevastopol only a few months before being taken out of the front lines. Whilst there is now a considerable body of material available to medical science on the long-term effects of combat on male soldiers, almost nothing has been researched about women, because so few have ever served as combat troops. It is therefore impossible to determine what condition she was in when she left Russia. On the one hand she was expected to show the Soviet army in the best possible light to their allies, with no real experience of mass public speaking, facing the press and radio reporters, or even of being out of Russia. As she stated, simply being in Moscow was like a foreign country to her, so the challenges she faced and the pressure she was under in being sent to Europe and the United States must have been immense. She also had to be careful, as she was accompanied by Party officials who noted every word she said. In addition, she despised much of the media she was exposed to. In particular she could not comprehend the lack of understanding of the realities of war when in America, where journalists asked what make-up she wore in the front lines, and discussed in detail the hemlines on her army uniform. She did on occasion snap, once telling the assembled crowds that they had been hiding behind the backs of fighting men for too long. Nor was she happy about being asked to demonstrate her shooting prowess – she disliked doing it in Russia and even more so on her world tour. She would always refuse, and this gave rise to theories that she could not actually shoot a rifle. She was, of course, a gifted shot but not a circus act and did not believe it was her role to do trick shooting, particularly with rifles and scopes she was totally unfamiliar with.
Perhaps it might be useful to make some comment here about the rifles she mentions so frequently, the Mosin Nagant Model 1891/30 with PE scope, (later supplemented by a modified PEM variant) and the SVT-40 semi-automatic. The Mosin was an old-school military rifle, designed in 1891. It had a barrel measuring 73cm, with a box magazine containing five rounds and it weighed 4kg. It chambered a rimmed 7.62 x 54mm cartridge, itself quite an old design – most countries having adopted rimless ammunition by the Second World War. The Mosin sniper variant had a 4x PE scope that was effectively a copy of the German Zeiss. It was accurate to beyond 1,000 metres, but only if weather conditions were perfect and the sniper was extremely competent. It was Pavlichenko’s favoured rifle, being very robust, easy to field repair and with good-quality optics. They continued in production until the very early 1940s, when a new model with PU sight was introduced which was a smaller, lighter scope of 3.5x.
In comparison, the SVT-40 semi-automatic was new technology, based on the earlier, flawed SVT-38 rifle. It too was chambered in 7.62 x 54 R mm but its gas-operated action provided rapid-fire capability that was extremely useful in close combat. It too had the new PU sight, which lacked the magnification power of the PE scope. However, because of its complex gas-operated mechanism the SVT did not have the range or accuracy of the Mosin, and 600 metres was regarded as a reasonable maximum for effective sniping. It also suffered from problems with reliability and accuracy. Pavlichenko’s rifle was, of course, a presentation weapon but she would probably not have chosen it herself, although she mentions several instances where its firepower proved extremely useful during large-scale attacks. In general, as a sniping weapon the SVT did not live up to expectations, and in 1942 production resumed of the Mosin sniping rifle.
Although her memoir relates some of her more memorable sniping episodes, it was a fact that most of Pavlichenko’s shooting during the sieges of Odessa and Sevastopol were at relatively close range. This was in part because the closer the enemy was, the more certain of a kill you could be, but she does comment on a new and gruesome tactic of shooting Germans in the stomach, as much for psychological purposes as anything. This is a measure of how brutal the fighting was on the Eastern Front, and there was no exaggeration on her part when she mentions saving the last round in her pistol for herself. A sniper caught alive was routinely tortured to death. It is also interesting to note, through her memoirs, how the Russian army slowly began to appreciate snipers fully as the war progressed. They changed from being glorified riflemen, expected to advance in an attack with the infantry, to being accepted as the most revered of front-line specialists. Indeed, they were regarded so favourably as to be given a day’s rest every week, an unheard-of concession and this in itself is a measure of the importance attached by the army to them. One reason for this is simply their effectiveness. It is not possible to make an accurate calculation of the numbers of Germans killed by Russian snipers during the course of the war. But some idea of the staggering numbers involved can be gleaned from the fact that the 2,000 female snipers who graduated from Russian sniper schools during the war had an officially accepted collective score of 12,000 German kills, and the top ten male Soviet snipers accounted for over 4,300. Multiplied out over the whole Soviet army, the numbers run into the hundreds of thousands. Compared to the figures we are used to seeing for the fighting across Western Europe after 1944, where the highest-scoring British sniper had an official tally of 119, such numbers are virtually impossible to comprehend. So it is unsurprising that the Russian propaganda machine began to look very closely at these new heroes, in particular the women. After all, it was the only country of the Second World War to employ them in front-line combat roles and the public needed a focus to take their thoughts away from the seemingly unstoppable advances of the Axis forces in 1941–3.
Pavlichenko became one of the most highly decorated women to serve in the Red Army, receiving the Order of Lenin twice and being designated a Hero of the Soviet Union. After the war, she stayed in the military, becoming a historian in the Research Institute of the Soviet Navy, leaving in 1953 with the rank of major. Neither has her status diminished as post-war interest in sniping has continued to grow. As her book clearly reveals, the many criticisms aimed at her are utterly without foundation. But, as with so many veterans, her survival came at a price; she was damaged, both physically and mentally. After the war she fought a lifelong battle with alcohol and suffered badly from the effects of her many head wounds, including deafness. She never remarried. She died aged fifty-eight in October 1974 and was buried with full military honours in Novodevichye Cemetery in Moscow, 1,500km and a lifetime away from her beloved Alexei.