February 21, 2013
Eleanor Roosevelt and the Soviet Sniper
Lyudmila Pavlichenko arrived in Washington, D.C., in late 1942 as little more than a curiosity to the press, standing awkwardly beside her translator in her Soviet Army uniform. She spoke no English, but her mission was obvious. As a battle-tested and highly decorated lieutenant in the Red Army’s 25th Rifle Division, Pavlichenko had come on behalf of the Soviet High Command to drum up American support for a “second front” in Europe. Joseph Stalin desperately wanted the Western Allies to invade the continent, forcing the Germans to divide their forces and relieve some of the pressure on Soviet troops.
She visited with President Franklin Roosevelt, becoming the first Soviet citizen to be welcomed at the White House. Afterward, Eleanor Roosevelt asked the Ukranian-born officer to accompany her on a tour of the country and tell Americans of her experiences as a woman in combat. Pavlichenko was only 25, but she had been wounded four times in battle. She also happened to be the most successful and feared female sniper in history, with 309 confirmed kills to her credit—the majority German soldiers. She readily accepted the first lady’s offer.
Justice Robert Jackson, Lyudmila Pavlichenko and Eleanor Roosevelt in 1942. Photo: Library of Congress
She graciously fielded questions from reporters. One wanted to know if Russian women could wear makeup at the front. Pavlichenko paused; just months before, she’d survived fighting on the front line during the Siege of Sevastopol, where Soviet forces suffered considerable casualties and were forced to surrender after eight months of fighting. “There is no rule against it,” Pavlichenko said, “but who has time to think of her shiny nose when a battle is going on?”
The New York Times dubbed her the “Girl Sniper,” and other newspapers observed that she “wore no lip rouge, or makeup of any kind,” and that “there isn’t much style to her olive-green uniform.”
In New York, she was greeted by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and a representative of the International Fur and Leather Workers Union, C.I.O., who presented her with, as one paper reported, a “full-length raccoon coat of beautifully blended skins, which would be resplendent in an opera setting.” The paper lamented that such a garment would likely “go to the wars on Russia’s bloody steppes when Lyudmila Pavlichenko returns to her homeland.”
But as the tour progressed, Pavlichenko began to bristle at the questions, and her clear, dark eyes found focus. One reporter seemed to criticize the long length of her uniform skirt, implying that it made her look fat. In Boston, another reporter observed that Pavlichenko “attacked her five-course New England breakfast yesterday. American food, she thinks, is O.K.”
Soon, the Soviet sniper had had enough of the press’s sniping. “I wear my uniform with honor,” she told Time magazine. “It has the Order of Lenin on it. It has been covered with blood in battle. It is plain to see that with American women what is important is whether they wear silk underwear under their uniforms. What the uniform stands for, they have yet to learn.”
Still, Malvina Lindsey, “The Gentler Sex” columnist for the Washington Post, wondered why Pavlichenko couldn’t make more of an effort with regard to her style. “Isn’t it a part of military philosophy that an efficient warrior takes pride in his appearance?” Lindsey wrote. “Isn’t Joan of Arc always pictured in beautiful and shining armor?”
Slowly, Pavlichenko began to find her voice, holding people spellbound with stories of her youth, the devastating effect of the German invasion on her homeland, and her career in combat. In speeches across America and often before thousands, the woman sniper made the case for a U.S. commitment to fighting the Nazis in Europe. And in doing so, she drove home the point that women were not only capable, but essential to the fight.
Lyudmila Mykhailvna Pavlichenko was born in 1916 in Balaya Tserkov, a Ukranian town just outside of Kiev. Her father was a St. Petersburg factory worker father, and her mother was a teacher. Pavlichenko described herself as a tomboy who was “unruly in the class room” but athletically competitive, and who would not allow herself to be outdone by boys “in anything.”
“When a neighbor’s boy boasted of his exploits at a shooting range,” she told the crowds, “I set out to show that a girl could do as well. So I practiced a lot.” After taking a job in an arms plant, she continued to practice her marksmanship, then enrolled at Kiev University in 1937, intent on becoming a scholar and teacher. There, she competed on the track team as a sprinter and pole vaulter, and, she said, “to perfect myself in shooting, I took courses at a sniper’s school.”
She was in Odessa when the war broke out and Romanians and Germans invaded. “They wouldn’t take girls in the army, so I had to resort to all kinds of tricks to get in,” Pavlichenko recalled, noting that officials tried to steer her toward becoming a nurse. To prove that she was as skilled with a rifle as she claimed, a Red Army unit held an impromptu audition at a hill they were defending, handing her a rifle and pointing her toward a pair of Romanians who were working with the Germans. “When I picked off the two, I was accepted,” Pavlichenko said, noting that she did not count the Romanians in her tally of kills “because they were test shots.”
The young private was immediately enlisted in the Red Army’s 25th Chapayev Rifle Division, named for Vasily Chapayev, the celebrated Russian soldier and Red Army Commander during the Russian Civil War. Pavlichenko wanted to proceed immediately to the front. “I knew that my task was to shoot human beings,” she said. “In theory that was fine, but I knew that the real thing would be completely different.”
Russian delegates accompany Pavlichenko (right) on her visit to Washington, D.C. in 1942. Photo: Library of Congress
On her first day on the battlefield, she found herself close to the enemy—and paralyzed by fear, unable to raise her weapon, a Mosin-Nagant 7.62 mm rifle with a PE 4x telescope. A young Russian soldier set up his position beside her. But before they had a chance to settle in, a shot rang out and a German bullet took out her comrade. Pavlichenko was shocked into action. “He was such a nice, happy boy,” she recalled. “And he was killed just next to me. After that, nothing could stop me.”
She got the first of her 309 official kills later that day when she picked off two German scouts trying to reconnoiter the area. Pavlichenko fought in both Odessa and Moldavia and racked up the majority of her kills, which included 100 officers, until German advances forced her unit to withdraw, landing them in Sevastopol in the Crimean Peninsula. As her kill count rose, she was given more and more dangerous assignments, including the riskiest of all—countersniping, where she engaged in duels with enemy snipers. Pavlichenko never lost a single duel, notching 36 enemy sniper kills in hunts that could last all day and night (and, in one case, three days). “That was one of the tensest experiences of my life,” she said, noting the endurance and willpower it took to maintain positions for 15 or 20 hours at a stretch. “Finally,” she said of her Nazi stalker, “he made one move too many.”
In Sevastopol, German forces badly outnumbered the Russians, and Pavlichenko spent eight months in heavy fighting. “We mowed down Hitlerites like ripe grain,” she said. In May 1942, she was cited in Sevastopol by the War Council of the Southern Red Army for killing 257 of the enemy. Upon receipt of the citation, Pavlichenko, now a sergeant, promised, “I’ll get more.”
She was wounded on four separate occasions, suffered from shell shock, but remained in action until her position was bombed and she took shrapnel in her face. From that point on, the Soviets decided they’d use Pavlichenko to train new snipers. “By that time even the Germans knew of me,” she said. They attempted to bribe her, blaring messages over their radio loudspeakers.“Lyudmila Pavlichenko, come over to us. We will give you plenty of chocolate and make you a German officer.”
When the bribes did not work the Germans resorted to threats, vowing to tear her into 309 pieces—a phrase that delighted the young sniper. “They even knew my score!”
Promoted to lieutenant, Pavlichenko was pulled from combat. Just two months after leaving Sevastopol, the young officer found herself in the United States for the first time in 1942, reading press accounts of her sturdy black boots that “have known the grime and blood of battle,” and giving blunt descriptions of her day-to-day life as a sniper. Killing Nazis, she said, aroused no “complicated emotions” in her. “The only feeling I have is the great satisfaction a hunter feels who has killed a beast of prey.”
To another reporter she reiterated what she had seen in battle, and how it affected her on the front line. “Every German who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks,” she said.“Dead Germans are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a German, I am saving lives.”
Her time with Eleanor Roosevelt clearly emboldened her, and by the time they reached Chicago on their way to the West Coast, Pavlichenko had been able to brush aside the “silly questions” from the women press correspondents about “nail polish and do I curl my hair.” By Chicago, she stood before large crowds, chiding the men to support the second front. “Gentlemen,” she said, “I am 25 years old and I have killed 309 fascist occupants by now. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?” Her words settled on the crowd, then caused a surging roar of support.
Pavlichenko received gifts from dignitaries and admirers wherever she went—mostly rifles and pistols. The American folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote a song, “Miss Pavlichenko,” about her in 1942. She continued to speak out about the lack of a color line or segregation in the Red Army, and of gender equality, which she aimed at the American women in the crowds. “Now I am looked upon a little as a curiosity,” she said, “a subject for newspaper headlines, for anecdotes. In the Soviet Union I am looked upon as a citizen, as a fighter, as a soldier for my country.”
While women did not regularly serve in the Soviet military, Pavlichenko reminded Americans that “our women were on a basis of complete equality long before the war. From the first day of the Revolution full rights were granted the women of Soviet Russia. One of the most important things is that every woman has her own specialty. That is what actually makes them as independent as men. Soviet women have complete self-respect, because their dignity as human beings is fully recognized. Whatever we do, we are honored not just as women, but as individual personalities, as human beings. That is a very big word. Because we can be fully that, we feel no limitations because of our sex. That is why women have so naturally taken their places beside men in this war.”
USSR Lyudmila Pavlichenko postage stamp from 1943. Photo: Wikipedia
On her way back to Russia, Pavlichenko stopped for a brief tour in Great Britain, where she continued to press for a second front. Back home, she was promoted to major, awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union, her country’s highest distinction, and commemorated on a Soviet postage stamp. Despite her calls for a second European front, she and Stalin would have to wait nearly two years. By then, the Soviets had finally gained the upper hand against the Germans, and Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy in June 1944.
Eventually, Pavlichenko finished her education at Kiev University and became a historian. In 1957, 15 years after Eleanor Roosevelt accompanied the young Russian sniper around America, the former first lady was touring Moscow. Because of the Cold War, a Soviet minder restricted Roosevelt’s agenda and watched her every move. Roosevelt persisted until she was granted her wish—a visit with her old friend Lyudmila Pavlichenko. Roosevelt found her living in a two-room apartment in the city, and the two chatted amiably and “with cool formality” for a moment before Pavlichenko made an excuse to pull her guest into the bedroom and shut the door. Out of the minder’s sight, Pavlichenko threw her arms around her visitor, “half-laughing, half-crying, telling her how happy she was to see her.” In whispers, the two old friends recounted their travels together, and the many friends they had met in that unlikeliest of summer tours across America 15 years before.
Sources
Articles: “Girl Sniper Calm Over Killing Nazis,” New York Times, August 29., 1942. “Girl Sniper Gets 3 Gifts in Britain,” New York Times, November 23, 1942. “Russian Students Roosevelt Guests,” New York Times, August 28, 1942. “Soviet Girl Sniper Cited For Killing 257 of Foe,” New York Times, June 1, 1942. “Guerilla Heroes Arrive for Rally,” Washington Post, August 28, 1942. Untitled Story by Scott Hart, Washington Post, August 29, 1942. “’We Must Not Cry But Fight,’ Soviet Woman Sniper Says,” Christian Science Monitor, October 21, 1942. “Step-Ins for Amazons,” The Gentler Sex by Malvina Lindsay, Washington Post, September 19, 1942. “No Color Bar in Red Army—Girl Sniper,” Chicago Defender, December 5, 1942. “Only Dead Germans Harmless, Soviet Woman Sniper Declares,” Atlanta Constitution, August 29, 1942. “Russian Heroine Gets a Fur Coat,” New York Times, September 17, 1942. “Mrs. Roosevelt, The Russian Sniper, And Me,” by E.M. Tenney, American Heritage, April 1992, Volume 43, Issue 2. “During WWII, Lyudmila Pavlichenko Sniped a Confirmed 309 Axis Soldiers, Including 36 German Snipers,” By Daven Hiskey, Today I Found Out, June 2, 2012, http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/06/during-wwii-lyudmila-pavlichenko-sniped-a-confirmed-309-axis-soldiers-including-36-german-snipers/ “Lieutenant Liudmila Pavlichenko to the American People,” Soviet Russia Today; volume 11, number 6, October 1942. Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/pavlichenko/1942/10/x01.htm
Books: Henry Sakaida, Heroines of the Soviet Union, 1941-45, Osprey Publishing, Ltd., 2003. Andy Gougan, Through the Crosshairs: A History of Snipers, Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004.
Sign up for our free email newsletter and receive the best stories from Smithsonian.com each week.
What is a source for the 1957 meeting? I’ve read Roosevelt’s memoirs and diary entries for that trip but I don’t recall anything about this episode. (Although maybe I’ve either forgotten or it just wasn’t recorded in those sources.)
Christian, that source was the 1992 American Heritage article by E.M. Tenney, listed above.
I think it is important to remember that the definition of “equality” for Ms. Pavlichenko would be very different from our definition of equality. It is true that our society is only today recognizing that women are just as capable of serving in combat as men, something that existed over 70 years ago in Russia. However, we must remember that both Russian men and Russian were “equal” in their “inequality” back in 1940, and that Ms. Pavlichanko served a regime that was responsible for the mass murder of over 3 million of its own citizens through starvation and murder (over 700,000 were shot) between 1939 and 1941. Furthermore the Russian regime was an ally of the Nazi regime in the destruction of Poland and the murder of over 200,000 Polish citizens between 1939 and 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia.
It is also important to remember that we can be as blind to the reality of others in the world today as our parents and grandparents were to the reality of Ms. Pavlichenko. For all of our problems in this country, we are truly blessed when compared to what others must deal with. We need to be careful and not apply our standards to them – or adopt their standards to us – without understanding the context in which those standards have developed.
Pathetic there is no mention that “equality” in the Soviet Union meant all men and women were owned by the state.
When the US allied itself with the lesser of the two evils,that did make make the lesser evil a good guy. If Eleanor Roosevelt did not see thatand act accordingly, that is pathetic.
Great respect to those brave and heroic Russian snipers!!! Another beautiful Russian woman sniper, the legendary Rosa was her name I think, she gave her life fighting the nazis!!!!
One thing I gleaned from this article is that American journalists were imbeciles even seventy years ago.
As a former combat infantryman (Korean War) I can deeply appreciate what Ms. Pavlichanko went through and how difficult it must have been for any soldier, much less a female soldier in (probably) all male outfits. Combat is nasty, and is usually very cold, very hot or very muddy. And killing people is a dirty business and getting wounded multiple times is extraordinarily nasty.
Is there any record (outside of the meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt) of where her work took her after the war and if she has survived until now?
It seems some replies miss the point.
At the time she was a soldier for Russia they became our allies (for better or worse). Her trip to the US and England was only political in Russia wanted us in the war sooner.
She is not to blame for Stalin any more than Elenore is for a few of our Presidents that committed atrocities on Native Americans.
Need to understand both politics and history a lot better people.
The problem with accepting any historical account of what actually happened verses propaganda during the Great Patrotic War makes fools of us all. There is absolutely no way to verify this lady!s exploits. If one could I suspect embellishment would be the operative word.
I’m happy she didn’t get packed off to the gulag by the regime, like so many other brave soviet soldiers.
My grandfather and grandmother were both Polish. My grandfather hated Roosevelt. Told me hat he sold Poland down he river to the Soviets. Just finished reading a book on the Katyn massacres of Polish officers by Stalin. Roosevelt and the Briitish covered it up so as not to rock the boat against the Russians. Roosevelt also denied entry to Jewish refugees from Germany. The man was a criminal in my estimation, but a hero to the so called progressives.
Interesting that this historical source confirms their time together and the intimacy of their relationship, even that they were together alone in a bedroom and embracing. Eleanor is widely (albeit to my knowledge only apocryphally) believed to have been lesbian or bisexual. I wonder how FDR felt about this relationship.
Lyudmila Pavlichenko is truly a hero in the true sense of the word! I don’t believe that the average pampered American woman could even come close to what she did.
Excellent article, and especially timely in light of the debate over American women serving in combat. More than 100,000 Soviet women served as snipers in WWII, others serving as effective combat pilots. But it’s worth noting that few served in “integrated” infantry units alongside males, so the relevance to our debate is somewhat diffused. Also, let’s get real about the “equality” of Soviet women, which was basically a propaganda sham. For instance, a prevalent role of Soviet female soldiers, especially the pretty ones, was to serve as “campaign wives” for Soviet officers, often against their will. In any event, the incredible bravery and effectiveness of Soviet women in an indescribably ugly war is a compelling story.
War is atrocity. But when you are attacked, there is a big difference between shooting invading soldiers in your own country and killing suspected (terrorist) with a drone missile in a foreign country. Even by today’s, global society standard, there is heated debate as to the right or wrong of it. Needless to say, conducting acts of military aggression against an unnamed enemy, at any time in history, could easily be viewed as a criminal act. Simply designating your target as a “suspected terrorist”, doesn’t make it right or lawful. Regardless of her country, score or equality, at least Lyudmila Mykhailvna Pavlichenko could name her enemy.
Lyudmila died in 1972.
One of the German sharpshooters she killed in the two day duel had killed on the Western Front over 500 French soldiers and officers.
Here is Guthrie song, btw..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHKjOl9ocR0&feature=player_embedded
I am Russian myself. When I would talk about my family dead of starvation in the Siege of Leningrad, or about civilians dying of hunger and diseases all over the Soviet Union during the War, many a time an American woman would reply, “But we suffered, too! We had no nylons and had to draw lines on our legs, pretending wearing stockings… ” So, I can understand the feelings of “Ms. Colt”. In her stories she told about a baby bashed head – it wouldn’t stop crying and German soldiers “pacified” it, but wouldn’t let its mother to bury the child or, at least, scrape the baby brains off the wall.. about raped and murdered girls and women, about the horrors of the German occupation. My father, a principal of high school, also volunteered to fight.. He never could talk about what he had seen in the liberated cities and villages..
I am very grateful to the author of the article. Ludmila Pavlichenko – a real hero. When in the country there are no such heroes, instead of them come men-spiders, batmen, and supermen.
After the war, she finished her education at Kiev University and began a career as an historian. From 1945 to 1953, she was a research assistant of the Chief HQ of the Soviet Navy. She later was active in the Soviet Committee of the Veterans of War.
In 1976, she was commemorated on a second Soviet postage stamp, and a Ukrainian cargo ship was named in her honor.
Well, I think it`s hard to understand for americans that she fought for her Motherland,family, history and proud! not for oil, equal rights for lesbians or so-called “democracy”… she knew she had to kill instead of being raped and teared to pieces by “civilized” and refined nazis… and that was obviouse for the whole nation… and please stop mention that crap about gulag! during 3 decades 3.5 mil.of people suffered from terrifying stalin`s regime (aver.116 k per year)…and what about 4 mil.of prisoners in America each year?
So many of the comments here are an embarrassment, and actually very good examples of the kind of orthodoxy that Stalin himself prized. Look, **I get it**, the USSR was harsh in many ways. But maybe, just maybe, you could turn the self-imposed ideological filters off for just a moment, and recognize the tenacity and creativity of that society, and its citizens. Their 20th Century was something that Americans simply cannot comprehend.
The inane carping in many of these comments — She was a communist dupe! Her accomplishments were Soviet lies! Maybe she was a lesbian! — are childish and petty. I wonder if the authors have ever been outside of America, or got history from any place other than American TeeVee.
I know in those days of war, good times were few and far between and people generally did not have the time to strap on their boogie shoes and party…but I bet Lyudmila was a lot of fun to hang out with during any such rare moments.
Furthermore, she seems to have her mind in exactly the right place insofar as what constitutes an enemy, what that means in terms of herself and her loved ones, and the nature of her response as a moral activity and what that means in terms of her responsibility. Exactly the kind of person I’d want on my side in treacherous situations.
I may be just a dumb ‘Merican, but I am capable of viewing the actions and character of an individual as separate from the actions and character of their country’s government, and my bad opinion of one need have no bearing on, nor be detrimental to, the other.
I believe she pretty much did what she claimed.
I also believe that American women have been raised in a society of victimology, where the concept of “equality” has little to do with the concept of “reality.”
American women are no more capable of combat than they are levitation. My guess is that when this warrior may have felt slighted somehow, or insulted somehow, or “victimized” somehow, her response wasn’t to file an EEOC complaint.
But that’s just me. And with my 9 years in Combat Arms and 5 years in Administration in the US Army, what would I know?