Lyudmila Pavlichenko stands as one of the Red Army’s best snipers; she was the highest-scoring female sniper of WWII, and remains one of the top military snipers of all time. Her sharp eye, quick mind and steady hand also earned her a grim nickname.
.jpg)
Born in Bila Tservka in present-day Ukraine on July 12, 1916, Pavlichenko moved to Kiev when she was 14, taking up sharpshooting as a hobby at one of the thousands of amateur clubs across the Soviet Union. She married at age 16. Despite bearing a child, the marriage didn’t last. Pavlichenko remained in Kiev, enrolling as a student at Kiev University and continuing to hone her sharpshooting skills. It was a wise decision, one that proved deadly for the German troops who soon crossed her path.
When the Nazis invaded in July, 1941, Pavlichenko was among the first batch of volunteers in Odessa to enlist. Operation Barbarossa was intended by Hitler to crush Bolshevism and turn the Soviet Union into a vast graveyard. Pavlichenko was one of many who sought to combat the German offensive. She did so with terrifying effect.
Female recruits are standard in today's armies, but this wasn’t always so. While women served in the Red Army as snipers, fighter pilots, and tank crews, among other specialties, they still had to overcome the skepticism of commanding officers who doubted their abilities because of their gender. Initially offered a job as a nurse, Pavlichenko declined, later stating, “I joined the army when women were not yet accepted.”
She chose instead to join the 25th Rifle Division. It wasn’t long before her exemplary sharpshooting skills led to her becoming a member of the Soviet infantry’s elite sniper team. Pavlichenko was one of some 2,000 Soviet women to serve as a sniper. Only around 500 survived the war, a 75% casualty rate. Pavlichenko would be one of the lucky few. She preferred a semi-automatic SVT-40, and soon racked an astonishing number of kills in a very brief time period.