Hero of the Soviet Union Lyudmila Mikhailovna Pavlichenko is the most successful woman sniper, having achieved a personal tally of 309 dead enemy troops and officers. She is among the best-known rank-and-file participants of the Second World War, both in our own country and in the world at large. Between 1942 and 1945 over 100,000 leaflets bearing her portrait (and she was a good-looking woman) and the call ‘Shoot the enemy and don’t miss!’ were distributed on the Soviet–German front. After her death in 1974 the name Lyudmila Pavlichenko was given to a ship belonging to the USSR Ministry of Fisheries, to the No. 3 School in the city of Belaya Tserkov [TN: Bila Tserkva in Ukrainian], Kiev Region, which she attended from classes one to seven, and to a street in the centre of Sevastopol.
The complete and authentic autobiography of this heroine reads like an enthralling novel. It contains tragic pages, for, having joined the ranks of the Red Army on 26 June 1941, with the 54th Rifle Regiment, she made the arduous retreat from the western borders as far as Odessa. It contains heroic pages; while defending the city, she wiped out 187 Nazis in two months. The siege of Sevastopol endowed the best sniper of the 25th Chapayev Rifle Division with further glory, as her tally rose to 309 dead enemies. But it also contains lyrical passages. It was in the war that Lyudmila met the love of her life. The courageous junior lieutenant of her own regiment, Alexei Arkadyevich Kitsenko, became her husband.
On Stalin’s orders, in August 1942 a Young Communist League youth delegation comprising Nikolai Krasavchenko, Vladimir Pchelintsev and Lyudmila Pavlichenko flew out to the USA to take part in an international student assembly. They were meant to campaign for the speedy opening of a second front in Western Europe.
In defiance of the ban on such activity, Pavlichenko had kept a war diary. She made very brief notes in it from time to time. A sniper could not just pick up a pencil or pen every day. The combat at Sevastopol was particularly fierce and unrelenting. Upon retiring in 1953 with the rank of major in the Soviet coast guard, Lyudmila remembered about her notes from the front. A historian by education, she took a serious approach towards her memoirs and felt that research in libraries and archives was needed before they could be published. She made the first step towards this in 1958, when she was commissioned by the state political publishing house to write a seventy-two-page factual pamphlet entitled Geroicheskaya byl. Oborona Sevastopolya (The Heroic Past: The Defence of Sevastopol). She also contributed a number of articles to various anthologies and journals. These were not recollections of her service as a sniper but, rather, general narratives of the main events which unfolded both on the front line and in the rear of the Sevastopol defence district between October 1941 and July 1942.
Following these publications Pavlichenko was accepted in 1964 as a member of the USSR Union of Journalists, becoming secretary of the military history section of the Moscow division. Close contact with her pen-wielding colleagues and active participation in the task of educating the next generation in their spirit of patriotic military duty brought her to the conclusion that a book written by a senior sergeant commanding a platoon of ‘super-sharpshooters’ and giving an authentic account of many details of infantry service could be of interest to the modern reader.
By the end of the 1960s it was not only recollections by major military commanders of the Soviet army’s successful operations in 1944 and 1945 that were beginning to come to light; there were also authentic accounts by Red Army officers and political staff about the difficult, even tragic, beginnings of the Great War for the Fatherland. Among such books one might mention the memoirs of Ilya Azarov, Osazhdennaya Odessa (Odessa Under Siege (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1966)); the collection U chernomorskikh tverdyn (By the Black Sea Fortresses (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1967)), which includes articles by the former commander of the 25th Chapayev Division, Trofim Kolomiyets, his fellow service-woman Lyudmila Pavlichenko and the former Young Communist League organizer of the 54th Regiment, Yakov Vaskovsky; and the memoirs of a rank-and-file participant in the defence of Odessa, Nikolai Aleshchenko, Oni zashchishchali Odessu (They Defended Odessa (Moscow: DOSAAF Publishing, 1970)). Upon reading them, Lyudmila set to work herself.
She now wanted to focus on the role of the sniper at the front and to describe in detail everything connected with this military profession: training methods, battlefield tactics and, in particular, the weaponry, of which she had a superb knowledge and was very fond. During the 1940s and 1950s it was not permitted to divulge such information, but the story of the snipers’ battle with the enemy would be incomplete without it.
Recalling previous instructions, Pavlichenko diligently gathered material and sought the best literary form for her manuscript. It became clear to her that the gap of twenty years that had elapsed since the end of the Great War for the Fatherland was not conducive to the speedy fulfilment of her plan. Many things were difficult to recall and many records turned out to be lost. Besides that, she had handed over many of her own precious documents and photographs, as well as personal effects, to museums: to the Central Museum of the USSR Armed Forces in Moscow and the State Museum of the Heroic Defence and Liberation of Sevastopol.
Unfortunately, serious chronic illness prevented the war heroine from completing the work and seeing her memoirs of her life as a sniper published. Fragments of this manuscript have been preserved thanks to the efforts of Lubov Davydovna Krashennikova-Pavlichenko, widow of Lyudmila’s son, Rostislav Alexeyevich Pavlichenko.
A.I. Begunova
Editor