Soviet ‘girl sniper’ had 309 kills — and a best friend in the White House

One man with a gun can control a hundred without one, Vladimir Lenin said. Lyudmila Pavlichenko proved one woman with a gun can entrance millions.

Pavlichenko, Russia’s celebrated “girl sniper” of World War II, became an instant celebrity when she toured the US in 1942 on Josef Stalin’s orders. She dined at the White House with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, visited Charlie Chaplin’s Hollywood home and became the heroine of a Woody Guthrie folk song. Her snarky retorts to reporters made headlines.

Can women wear lipstick at the front?

“Yes,” she replied. “But they don’t always have time. You have to be able to reach for a machine gun or a rifle.”

Your uniform makes you look fat; don’t you mind?

“I wish you could experience a bombing raid,” was her response, “you would immediately forget about the cut of your outfit.”

The 26-year-old Red Army lieutenant was already the deadliest female sharpshooter in history. Her audacious attacks killed 309 Nazis.

In “Lady Death” (Greenhill Books), out this week, her memoir available for the first time in English, Pavlichenko traced her journey from college student to propaganda superstar.
Her romance with guns began as a teenager, when she visited a Kiev shooting club on a whim. “Firearms are beautiful,” she said. “The most perfect creation of human mind and hand.”

The new passion helped fill an emotional void. At 16, she had married and given birth to a son, but her husband soon abandoned her. Her parents cared for the boy as Pavlichenko studied history at Kiev University — and later when she left for the front.

A committed Young Communist, she took a sniper-training course with the state civil-defense service in 1937. Her instructor believed that women, “given an enhanced intuition by nature itself,” make ideal sharpshooters.

Hitler’s forces invaded the USSR in June 1941. Pavlichenko enlisted in the infantry the next day, ignoring recruiters’ demands that she become a medic instead. Soon she notched the first of her many kills: a pair of enemy officers, from a quarter-mile away.

The first lady accompanied Pavlichenko on a speaking tour… and even invited her for a week’s vacation at the family estate

“I did not remember the appearance of those I shot,” she wrote. “They did not exist for me; they were just targets.”

As a sergeant commanding her own platoon, new arrivals were “completely bewildered” at the sight of her — after all, female soldiers made up only 2 percent of the Soviet Union’s forces. “I took them in hand,” she wrote. “I shot better than all of them, I knew a lot about the war, and they had to submit to me unquestioningly.”

After vanquishing a Nazi sniper who had preyed on the Soviets from a blown-up railway bridge, she triumphantly looted a 50-foot roll of bandages from his mangled corpse. “Let’s be frank — a woman can never have too many bandages or too much cotton wool,” she wrote in a coy nod to managing your period on the front lines.

She maintained a policy of “No flirting with anyone, ever!” before falling into a blissful unofficial marriage with a fellow officer in early 1942. “The honeymoon had a profoundly positive effect on my shooting,” she wrote. Two months later, he died in her arms when a mortar strike blew him to pieces.

Stalin, recognizing Pavlichenko as a poster girl for the war effort, built a morale-boosting propaganda campaign around her, then sent her to Washington, DC. Her mission: talking the Americans into invading Europe’s western coast, dividing Hitler’s forces.

Eleanor Roosevelt became an intimate friend. The first lady accompanied Pavlichenko on a speaking tour with stops in Chicago, Detroit and farther west, and even invited her for a week’s vacation at the family estate in Hyde Park, NY.

In a comic — and startlingly intimate — scene, Pavlichenko describes how the wheelchair-bound FDR rolled into his wife’s bedroom to find the Russian visitor, clad only in a pink satin pajama top with a bath towel wrapped around her waist, perched on Eleanor’s bed as the first lady hemmed the matching pants.

Despite her brushes with celebrity, Pavlichenko yearned to return to the fight, even pleading with Stalin himself, but the dictator refused. As an icon of Soviet womanhood, she was far too valuable to the state. She made public appearances and trained young snipers for the duration of the war.

Afterward, she battled alcoholism and what we would now call PTSD until her death in 1974 at age 58. As the Cold War simmered, the Kremlin forbade her requests for a return visit to the US.

But the authorities could hardly refuse Eleanor Roosevelt, who made two trips to Moscow in the late 1950s to visit her “dear Lyudmila.”