She was no na?f who learned to shoot at the front; she arrived in uniform already an accomplished markswoman. Neither did she come from the kind of rural family where a daughter might be expected to wield a rifle right out of the cradle. She was Ukrainian （though she described herself firmly as Russian when asked）， a city girl and a booklover whose ambition was to be a historian, but she enjoyed the occasional outing at the gun range with her friends—enjoyed it enough that she decided to apply for an advanced marksmanship course. Though she acquired her skills as a hobby, she lost no time volunteering them in her country’s defense: a young woman went to the beach with her friends in the morning, heard the declaration of war at noon over lunch at a nearby café, and by nightfall was leaving La Traviata early to go enlist. It didn’t take long for the girl from Odessa—the graduate student who had been finishing the world’s nerdiest dissertation on Bogdan Khmelnitsky, the Ukraine’s accession to Russia in 1654, and the activities of the Pereyaslav Council—to begin racking up a serous tally.
A sniper’s official tally consisted only of confirmed kills, so Lyudmila’s true list of enemy dead probably did not stand at the official 309: fighting in two desperate sieges, she would not have had time or opportunity to verify all of her kills, and the enemies she downed fighting as a soldier rather than a sniper wouldn’t have been counted at all. Her true tally might have been less than the 309 eventually finalized for official purposes; it could also easily have been much more. What seems certain is that in less than eighteen months of fighting, Lyudmila Pavlichenko buried hundreds of enemies, was wounded at least four times, and earned the nickname Lady Death. Many of the feats described in this novel—her training of a platoon, the assaults on Gildendorf and No-Name Height, her recruitment of the ranger Vartanov whose family had been murdered, the Kabachenko homestead and the bond she formed with a young girl who had been raped by German soldiers （“Kill them all”）—are drawn directly from the memoir Lyudmila wrote later in life.
Soviet memoirs are long on fact and short on emotion; it isn’t the Soviet way to gush about feelings. Yet Lyudmila’s response to becoming such an efficient taker of lives come through as far from ghoulish. Making her first two kills under the eye of Captain Sergienko, she didn’t hesitate to down the two officers, yet admitted that firing on a target and firing on a human being were very different things. She disliked her own growing fame, viewing herself simply as a soldier with a job to do: the enemy were invaders who had been ordered to attack; she was a defender who had been ordered to push them back, and that was that. Her anger at the Germans flowered into hatred as she saw the damage Hitler’s forces inflicted on her homeland, but Lyudmila still prided herself on clean kills and utter professionalism. The only time she gave the order to shoot to wound rather than to kill was in the final defense of Sevastopol, where it was the only way to slow down an overwhelming enemy.
The Russian front was pure hell: the casualty rates were appalling, the weather brutal, the troops ill trained and under-equipped, almost as likely to be shot by their own officers （if they showed a single sign of faltering） as by the Germans. Women soldiers had an especially tough time of it. Red Air Force women like the Night Witches served together in all-female regiments or were at least grouped with their sister pilots in mixed regiments, but Red Army women were vastly outnumbered by male soldiers and commonly regarded as sexual perks for the officers. Turning down a superior’s advances could result in anything from physical assault to being left off lists for commendations and promotions. Lyudmila was intensely admired by the men in her company, whom she apparently handled with friendly but steely authority, but at least one source states that she incurred resentment for turning down men who outranked her. This could explain her lack of military decorations early in her fight . . . until a three-day duel with a German sniper catapulted her to fame.
Detractors disputed both that fame and her achievements. Even now, some insist that Lyudmila Pavlichenko was a fake, a pretty propaganda-department brunette with a memorized story designed to inspire the masses. Such claims nitpick at the inaccuracies in her memoir’s timeline, insist that the kind of platoon she described leading wasn’t yet formed, and cite her refusal to demonstrate her sharpshooting skills in America as proof she didn’t actually have any.