During World War II, the Red Army counted some of its most valuable fighters among its snipers. These sharpshooters could conceal themselves from the enemy and strike targets with deadly force from considerable distances. Many German soldiers met their end at their hands.
Perhaps surprisingly, more than 2,000 of the Soviet Union's snipers during the Second World War were women. Combined, they achieved over 11,000 kills. They have gone down in history as some of the most efficient fighters of the war.
A few of these women stood out in particular for their prowess with a rifle. Lyudmila Pavlichenko and Roza Shanina were among the most accomplished in their field, and they earned a fearsome reputation as a result.
So why did the Soviets fill their ranks with female snipers, when many armies of the time were composed almost entirely of men? Much of the answer lies in a series of beliefs held by the Soviets during the war.
It was thought that the role of sniper would fit a woman well, since a sharpshooter needed to exhibit great patience, deliberation, and accuracy. All of these characteristics were synonymous with femininity in Soviet Russia.
As such, the Red Army employed a total of 2,484 female snipers. Tragically, only 500 of them would survive the conflict.
Soviet propaganda of the time also promoted equality of both sexes. While that equality was sadly not realized in many parts of society, the military did take on a large number of women and provided them with a range of opportunities.
Those opportunities were often hard to come by and were mainly voluntary. Many women who applied to fight had their applications blocked before they could even be considered, or they ran into convenient red tape that stalled their admission.
It was hard for Soviet women to fight for their country, despite the heavy losses the Soviet military had sustained at the start of the Second World War. Manpower had been reduced across the board as a result of intense fighting, and the Russians were experiencing a shortage of soldiers.
While many young women developed a burning passion to fight the Nazis, they were a drop in the ocean compared with the vast numbers of male soldiers ready to fight for the Red Army. The Soviet military employed over 800,000 women over the course of the Second World War.
Many of them found their calling in non-combat roles, such as medics and signalers. Thousands still took on roles on the front lines. Among those fighting the Germans were female Soviet machine gunners, tank crews, and combat pilots.
Today, the image of the Soviet female sniper has been popularized in films, books, and even video games. A select few women are well and truly at the top of their game.
Aliya Moldagulova was born in 1925 in what is today Kazakhstan. She was one of the female snipers who would go down in history for her achievements.
Raised amid the Soviet famine of the 1930s, she came from a poor family who had to scrape out a living in the countryside. Her short life was marked by violence.
Moldagulova's mother was killed by a watchman for stealing potatoes in 1933. Her father was persecuted by the government for being a descendant of a nobleman from the pre-Soviet era.
For over a year, she wandered the streets of her village without a home until finding help from her uncle. She moved in with relatives in the city of Almaty.
During her time in Almaty, Moldagulova managed to piece together scraps of an education, but she was always described as a very firm individual. She moved to Moscow in 1935 and then to Leningrad when her uncle joined the Military Transport Academy, where she was able to continue her education for a short while.
With the outbreak of World War II in 1941, Moldagulova was the only member of her family to remain in Leningrad. She applied to join the military in 1942 and swore to defend the motherland to the end.
Moldagulova trained to become a sniper at the young age of 17 at the Central Women's Sniper Training School near Moscow. She reportedly had a strong desire to head to the front lines and steadily honed her sharpshooting skills over time.
In July 1943, she was assigned to the 15th Rifle Brigade of the 22nd Army. By October, she had put down 32 Nazis as they attempted to invade the USSR.
In a memoir written by one of her fellow snipers, she was described as having shown exceptional fearlessness. She not only beat the fascists but also carried wounded comrades from the battlefield and performed first aid on them.
Tragically, at the age of just 18, Moldagulova was killed in action after racking up a total of 91 confirmed kills as a sniper. As she attempted to repel a German counterattack near the village of Kazachikha, she was wounded in the arm by a fragment from a mine.
The attack forced her into close quarters combat. Although she managed to kill an oncoming German officer, she ultimately lost her life from the injuries sustained by the mine.
In June 1944, Moldagulova was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union and decorated with the Order of Lenin.
Roza Shanina, one of the most famous female Soviet snipers of the war, was born in the Russian village of Edma in 1924. She was one of seven children, along with three adopted orphans, and she began her education in the town of Bereznik.
Against her parents' wishes, she attempted to pursue a secondary education, leaving home at 14 to study at the Arkhangelsk College. She took a job at a kindergarten to finance her studies and graduated in 1942, when the USSR was already in the throes of war.
Shanina's brother, Mikhail, had passed away in 1941 during the infamous siege of Leningrad. Heartbroken by this loss, Shanina opted to join the military herself and was eventually admitted into the Sevobuch program for military training in June 1942.
She attended a local shooting range to hone her skills before undertaking advanced training. Soon she found herself at the Central Women's Sniper Training School in Moscow.
Shanina did well in her training and graduated with honors. She then found herself among the ranks of the 184th Rifle Division, in a platoon of fellow female snipers.
Shanina immediately proved her skill, but after killing her first German soldier, she recoiled in horror at the idea of taking a man's life. Her comrades reminded her of the reasons for waging war against the fascist invaders, and she soon wrote that she was killing the enemy in cold blood and saw the meaning of life in her actions.
Shanina soon became the commander of her platoon and received the Order of Glory third class for her efforts in April 1944. Her skills strengthened as the war progressed.
Across her career, she was known to have made over 50 confirmed kills, using counter sniper tactics to bring down enemy sharpshooters. She even outwitted German soldiers by entering their territory stealthily and picking them off one by one.
She remained determined to provide as much fire as she could to the front line, but was eventually overwhelmed by the Germans' attempts to strengthen their advance during the East Prussian Offensive of early 1945. Her final diary reports acknowledged that she was drawing closer and closer to a terrible death as German fire intensified.
Shanina ultimately lost her life on the 27th of January. A shell had exploded nearby, tearing open her chest, and despite attempts to save her, she died from her injuries.
Shanina was honored posthumously in the Soviet press throughout the 1960s. Streets across Arkhangelsk Oblast were named after her, and sporting organizations from the area hold ski races to compete for the Roza Shanina prize.
By far the most famous and accomplished female Soviet sniper was Lyudmila Pavlichenko. She was born in 1916 in what is now Kiev Oblast, Ukraine.
Having moved to the city of Kiev at age 14, she joined a shooting club and soon trained as an amateur sharpshooter. She studied history at Kiev University starting in 1937 and initially intended to become a school teacher upon graduation.
While completing her studies, she enrolled in a sniping school hosted by the Red Army and developed an interest in pursuing a career in the military. Pavlichenko requested to join the military in 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
At the age of 25, she had a strong desire to join the infantry, but the registrar pushed her to become a nurse. Pavlichenko refused and was eventually accepted as a sniper, given her extensive training.
She joined the 25th Rifle Division and was initially assigned to digging out trenches and routes for communication, armed only with a single grenade due to shortages in weapons. In August 1941, Pavlichenko made her first kills with a sniper rifle, bringing down two German officers in Biliaivka.
During the siege of Odessa, Pavlichenko spent around two and a half months furiously raining down sniper fire on the German invaders. She made 187 confirmed kills.
An additional 100 Nazis would die by her hand over the subsequent months, which saw her promoted to senior sergeant. When the Nazis overran Odessa in October 1941, Pavlichenko withdrew to Sevastopol and began training fresh snipers for the Red Army.
While defending the city during the siege of Sevastopol, Pavlichenko killed over 100 more German soldiers. By the end of the war, she is believed to have claimed the lives of 309 Nazi invaders, and 36 of her targets were enemy marksmen.
Such was Pavlichenko's skill that she departed on a publicity tour, visiting the United States and Canada. She was the first Soviet citizen to be received by an American president, meeting with Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942.
Despite sustaining wounds from mortar fire, she survived the war and became a propagandist for the Red Army. She was given the nickname Lady Death on account of her sniping prowess and continued to train new recruits until the end of the war.
When the war came to a close, Pavlichenko finished her university education and became a historian, researching Soviet military history. In 1974, at the age of 58, she passed away after suffering a stroke.
Among her many honors and awards are two Orders of Lenin, a Hero of the Soviet Union commendation, and medals for the defense of Odessa and Sevastopol. In the modern age, Pavlichenko has been immortalized on the big screen in 2015's Battle for Sevastopol, and her memoir, Lady Death, was made available in the West in 2018.
While the female snipers of the Soviet Union killed thousands of German troops during the invasion of the USSR, only a small fraction of them survived the conflict as a whole. Many were young women with their whole lives ahead of them who were brutally killed before their time.
Their efforts in assisting the Allies to win the Second World War have gone down in international history. But the three women profiled here were far from alone.
There are thousands of stories now tragically lost to the archives that played out alongside those of Pavlichenko, Shanina, and Moldagulova. What is known about those who fought, died, and survived the war is nothing short of fascinating and full of admiration.