Lyudmila Pavlichenko: the sniper of Odessa and Sevastopol

In early September 1942 a young junior lieutenant of the Red Army dined with Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington. A few months earlier she had been lying in rifle pits outside Sevastopol. Lyudmila Pavlichenko became the best known woman sniper of the Second World War. Her story is well recorded at its public moments and much harder to check at the front. This page follows her from a Kyiv lecture hall to the Crimea and on to Washington, and keeps what the documents show apart from what was repeated afterwards.¹

A student from Kyiv

She was born in 1916 in Bila Tserkva, a town south of Kyiv. When she was 14 her family moved to Kyiv, where she worked at the Arsenal factory and joined a shooting club, earning the Voroshilov Sharpshooter badge. In 1937 she enrolled at Kyiv University to study history, and while still a student she also took a course at a sniper school. Her targets at that time were paper ones: she was training as a historian, not as a soldier.²

Volunteering in 1941

Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Pavlichenko went to a recruiting office in the first weeks of the war, and the officials there tried to steer her toward nursing. She insisted on a rifle, proved she could use it, and was enrolled as a sniper in the 25th Rifle Division, in its 54th Rifle Regiment. According to the National WWII Museum, whose figures the National Park Service repeats, she was one of about 2,000 women who served as snipers in the Red Army; only about 500 of them survived the war.³

Odessa, 1941

Her division fought in the defense of Odessa, the Black Sea port besieged from August to October 1941. In about two and a half months there she was credited with 187 kills. When Odessa was given up in October 1941, she went on to the next and longer siege, in the Crimea.⁴ › Siege of Odessa, 1941

The siege of Sevastopol

Sevastopol held out from October 1941 until July 1942. Pavlichenko fought there for some eight months. By May 1942 her credited tally stood at 257 and she had been commissioned as an officer. Accounts of her service describe counter-sniper duels, one of them lasting three days; these stories come from Soviet wartime reporting and from her own later account, and no independent record of them survives in the sources we checked. In June 1942 she was wounded in the face by fragments of a mortar shell and withdrawn from the front. A few weeks later the city fell.⁵

How many kills did Lyudmila Pavlichenko have?

The official figure is 309 enemy soldiers and officers, including 36 snipers. The State Russian Museum's note to a drawing of her made in July 1942 gives that total for Lieutenant Pavlichenko of the 2nd company, 54th Rifle Regiment. The number grew in steps during her service: 187 at Odessa, 257 by May 1942, 309 by the time she left the front.⁶

The figure should be read for what it is: the tally credited to her by the Soviet army and repeated in Soviet publicity. From 1942 her story also served the Soviet state abroad, when she was sent to North America to argue for a second front. The details also vary between accounts. Most give 36 enemy snipers among the 309, but the publisher's description of the English edition of her memoir gives 29. According to one account of her service, a kill counted only when a witness confirmed it; even so, such a count records what observers believed they saw, not bodies examined after the fighting. No list of the individual kills has been published, and a figure like this cannot be checked against enemy records. It is fair to count her among the most successful snipers of the war, as long as the record is understood as an official Soviet one.⁷

Washington and the White House

In the summer of 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Stalin to send delegates to an International Student Assembly in Washington, preferably young people who had seen combat. Moscow sent Pavlichenko with another sniper, Vladimir Pchelintsev, and a leader of the Communist youth organization. She is described as the first Soviet citizen to be received at the White House.⁸

In her newspaper column of 3 September 1942, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that she had dined with the Dutch and Soviet delegates the evening before, that she found Junior Lieutenant Pavlichenko very charming, and that the young woman had clearly suffered. The next day she reported on the President's own speech to the assembly.⁹

The American press treated Pavlichenko as a curiosity. Reporters asked about makeup, clothes and hot baths, and she answered sharply; in an interview with Time she asked whether they knew there was a war on. The First Lady then invited her to tour the country. In Chicago she told a large crowd that she was 25 years old and had already killed 309 fascists. She also visited Canada and Britain to press the case for a second front in Europe. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about her, Miss Pavlichenko.¹⁰

After the war

Pavlichenko did not return to combat. She trained Soviet snipers for the rest of the war. On 25 October 1943 she was made a Hero of the Soviet Union, and she received the Order of Lenin twice. She finished her history degree at Kyiv University, and she worked as a researcher for the Soviet Navy, at its Main Staff from 1945 to 1953 according to the State Russian Museum. The museum adds that she was later active in the Soviet Committee of War Veterans.¹¹

In 1957 Eleanor Roosevelt, visiting the Soviet Union, came to see her in Moscow. Pavlichenko died in October 1974. Sources give different days of the month for her death, so we give only the month.¹²

Legend and record

Two things about Pavlichenko are firmly documented: her service at Odessa and Sevastopol, attested by her decorations, and her 1942 tour, recorded by American photographers, reporters and Eleanor Roosevelt herself. The hardest part to check is the one most often repeated, the exact count and the duels behind it.

The photographs on this page belong to the documented part. They were taken for the US Office of War Information during the student assembly and are kept in the Library of Congress. They show a young officer at ease among American public figures, with badges on her tunic. They are evidence of the tour and of how Washington chose to present its new ally. They tell us nothing about Sevastopol.

Her memoir was published in English in 2018 by Greenhill Books as Lady Death, with a foreword by Martin Pegler, a former firearms curator at the Royal Armouries. It is a valuable primary source, but a careful reader should remember its origin. Pavlichenko died in 1974, so everything in it was written in the Soviet Union, by a decorated officer whose story had been part of state publicity since 1942. It tells us how she wanted her war remembered. It cannot confirm the numbers on its own.¹³

How she is remembered

Pavlichenko is the best known of the Soviet women who fought in the Second World War, and she belongs in any account of women warriors in history. Her war was fought in the long sieges on the Black Sea coast in 1941 and 1942; the wider war she belonged to is told in our guide to the greatest battles of the Eastern Front. For Americans in 1942 she was a first look at the Soviet ally. For historians she is also a case study in how a soldier's record and a state's publicity can become hard to separate.