Мария Бочкарёва: Солдат, батыр және контрреволюционер өмірі

Russian female soldier and counter revolutionary

María Leontievna Bochkareva (July 1889 – 16 May 1920; Мари́я Лео́нтьевна Бочкарёва, née Frolkova (Фролко́ва), nicknamed Yashka) was a Russian soldier who fought in World War I and formed the Women's Battalion. She was the first Russian woman to command a military unit.

Maria Frolkova was born to a peasant family in the village of Nikolskoye in July 1889. Her father was a sergeant in the imperial army who fought in the Russo Turkish War. She left home at sixteen to marry They moved her to Sretensk where Maria began a relationship with a local Jewish man named Yakov (or Yankel) Buk. When she obtained his approval, she underwent three months' training and was sent to front line duty with the 5th Corps, 28th Regiment of the Second Army, stationed at Polotsk. She was decorated for rescuing fifty wounded soldiers from the field. Eventually, she became exhausted from her physical injuries and lost interest in her military post. She was discharged in the spring of 1917. This was the first women's battalion to be organised in Russia. Bochkareva's 1st Russian Women's Battalion of Death initially attracted around 2,000 women volunteers, but the commander's strict discipline drove all but around 300 out of the unit.

Sponsored by socialite Florence Harriman, Bochkareva arrived in San Francisco and made her way to New York City and Washington, D. C. She was granted a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson on July 10, 1918, during which she begged the president to intervene in Russia. Wilson was apparently so moved by her emotional appeal that he responded with tears in his eyes and promised to do what he could. While in New York, Bochkareva dictated her memoirs, Yashka: My Life As Peasant, Exile, and Soldier, to a Russian emigre journalist named Isaac Don Levine. After leaving the United States, she traveled to Great Britain where she was granted an audience with King George V. The British War Office gave her 500 rubles of funding to return to Russia.

Bochkareva arrived in Arkhangelsk in August 1918 and attempted to organise another unit, but failed. In April 1919, she returned to Tomsk and attempted to form a women's medical detachment under White Army Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, but before she could complete this task she was recaptured by the Bolsheviks. She was sent to Krasnoyarsk where she was interrogated for four months. Ultimately, she was sentenced to death and executed as an "enemy of the working class". She was shot by the Cheka on May 16, 1920.

Maria Bochkareva is one of the heroines of the Russian film Battalion directed by Dmitriy Meshiev and released to cinemas in February 2015. In 2018 the New York Times published a belated obituary for her.