Lyudmila Pavlichenko was born on July 12, 1916, in Bila Tserkva, Ukraine. She was a student at the University of Kyiv majoring in history when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
The invasion caught the Red Army shocked and unprepared. Its best and brightest military leadership had been killed in Stalin's purges or sent to Siberian gulags.
One major Soviet city after another fell. Within the first five months, two million Soviet soldiers became prisoners of war, and a like number had been killed.
Pavlichenko decided to enlist. Because of her good looks and small stature, she was not taken seriously and was rebuffed, despite holding an expert marksmanship certificate earned through training.
During the German and Romanian attacks in Ukraine, she was taken to a location where the officer in charge pointed out enemies about 500 yards away. He wanted her to show she was as skilled with a rifle as she claimed.
A Red Army unit held an impromptu trial at a hill they were defending and handed her a rifle. She shot two Romanians with open sights within a minute of each other, impressing the officer, who assigned her to the 25th Rifle Division.
Within her first three months operating in Odessa, she had 200 confirmed kills. She had also mastered camouflage, concealment, and stalking, the trademarks of a good sniper.
Her skills were needed elsewhere, and she was relocated to Sevastopol as Field Marshal Erich von Manstein's 11th Army Group was closing the ring around the Crimea.
After she reached a score of 100 kills, she married her fellow sniper Alexei Kitsenko.
Because the Germans placed their own well-trained snipers to target Soviet officers, Pavlichenko began stalking the German snipers. Thirty-six of her kills were in sniper-versus-sniper duels.
Knowing the terrain and using various styles of homemade camouflage, which snipers called ghillie suits, she was never observed. Her fellow snipers included Vasily Zaitsev and Nikolai Ilyin, who served at Stalingrad.
German intelligence learned who she was. They even made radio broadcasts offering her money, rank, and favored treatment if she defected, as tens of thousands of Ukrainians already had.
Pavlichenko was wounded four times by shrapnel and once by a machine gun bullet, but she never wavered. After each wounding and recovery, she returned and continued doing her job.
Her last injury saw her wounded in the face, nearly losing an eye, following a German mortar attack called in on her position after she made her final kill of the war. Stalin personally had her evacuated by submarine to keep her out of German hands.
By the time of her wounding, she had recorded a total of 309 kills, though the unofficial count is as high as 400. Thirty-six of those were German snipers.
In her second month recovering from her last wounds in the hospital, she was visited by an NKVD officer with a personal note from Joseph Stalin. She was to go to the United States of America and meet President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the First Lady at the White House.
In 1942 she arrived to great fanfare. Following a paparazzi review, she joined First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt on a cross-country propaganda tour.
The United States government presented her with a Colt semi-automatic pistol, a Model 1911. Following her USA tour, she also toured Canada and the United Kingdom, describing her battles and explaining the roles of women in the Soviet army.
In Toronto, Ontario, while touring Canada with fellow sniper Vladimir Pchelintsev and Moscow fuel commissioner Nikolai Kravchenko, she was presented a Model 70 Winchester rifle equipped with a Weaver telescopic sight. This rifle is now in the Central Armed Forces Museum in Moscow.
While she was on tour, her husband was also fighting, and she learned that he had been killed in action.
After her UK tour, she returned home and was assigned by a senior sniper as an instructor, where she remained until the war was over. On Stalin's personal order, she then returned to school and earned her master's degree in military history.
She worked as an assistant researcher for the Soviet Navy until 1953. Pavlichenko was very active in veterans groups and was very supportive of helping female veterans of the war.
Her enemies also took note of her. World War II Austrian sniper Matthäus Hetzenauer, who had 345 confirmed and another 200 unconfirmed kills while serving the 3rd Mountain Division, mentioned her.
"We knew who she was. She was quite famous. Her field craft was excellent, and I know that she killed some of our best snipers," Hetzenauer said. Asked who was best, he or her, he said he would have to say that part of what gives a sniper the edge is fighting on home ground, and that was her advantage, besides her natural skill.
In 1957, Eleanor Roosevelt visited the Soviet Union and wanted to meet with Pavlichenko once again. The former First Lady called her the perfect example of a woman warrior and a great friend.
However, Pavlichenko's life fell into a dark place. She suffered from severe depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and had severe alcohol problems.
Her primary issue was that she never recovered from the loss of her husband, who had been killed, and she never remarried. In the Soviet system there was no psychiatric therapy or treatment for veterans, as such medical practice was considered unsoviet and voodoo science and rejected out of hand.
On October 10, 1974, Lyudmila Pavlichenko died of a stroke at age 58. She was buried in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow with full military honors.
Pavlichenko had been awarded the Order of Lenin twice and also named Hero of the Soviet Union. She was just one of many Soviet women who served with great distinction, breaking barriers and proving that a woman with a mission can be a very deadly opponent.