To me, Lyudmila Pavlichenko comes across as the real deal. Her memoir bears the stamp of Soviet propaganda, but her technical recall of a sniper’s skills, weapons, and routine is exactly where her voice is the most precise and vividly individual. There are inaccuracies in her timeline, but a woman piecing her memories together through the fog of war and the PTSD of multiple battlefield concussions is bound to get a few details wrong. The kind of sniper platoon she described leading didn’t exist yet in the Red Army, but Lyudmila was fighting in the early days of the war when everything was slapdash, and she was probably making up procedure as she went along. As for her on-tour nyet whenever she was asked to shoot on command （except for one gun-club demonstration in Chicago）， her reasons come through loud and clear in her memoir: Lady Death scorned the idea of being trotted out like some show-pony circus shooter, and she absolutely refused to reduce her deadly skills to a parlor trick.
Her war wasn’t all mud, blood, and pain. Lyudmila had a sense of humor, which shines through when she recounts butting heads with oblivious superior officers or relaxing with her platoon in an evening of song, vodka, and scavenged treats after a successful raid. And despite her mandate of no fraternizing with male colleagues, she broke her own rules for a spectacularly romantic front-line love affair.
At twenty-four, Lyudmila had already endured a minefield of a love life. She says extremely little （and nothing good） of her first husband Alexei Pavlichenko, the older man who seduced and impregnated her after a dance when she was barely fifteen. Lyudmila’s only comment about Alexei, after he abandoned her and their son Rostislav, is: “Fortunately, my son is nothing like his father.” As a single mother she remained focused on her work, her education, and her son—so romance hit like a thunderbolt when she met a tall, funny, good-looking Red Army lieutenant in Sevastopol. Enter Lyonya Kitsenko, the man who wooed and won the most dangerous woman on the Russian front.
Kitsenko is frequently described as her junior sergeant and fellow sniper, her partner with whom she hunted night after night as part of a lethal, inseparable team—but Lyudmila described him as the lieutenant who commanded her company. My conjecture is that two men may have been confused, and that Lyudmila was romantically involved with both her company commander and her sniper partner at different points. Thus I separated the two and described Kitsenko as Lyudmila did: Lieutenant Alexei Arkadyevich Kitsenko, nicknamed Lyonya, her superior officer and eventually second husband. Whether they were legally married or not （he is not listed on her grave as her spouse）， Lyudmila regarded Lyonya as her husband in every way that counted: they had a whirlwind courtship culminating in the attack where Lyonya carried the wounded Lyudmila off the front line, gave blood for her surgery, visited throughout her recovery, and invited her to dinner in his dugout （complete with flowers in a shell-casing vase!） the day she was released. He proposed that night; he and Lady Death were inseparable from then on.
It was the best time of Lyudmila’s war. She wrote that love was good for her shooting; while she was coming home to Lyonya she seemed to hit every target she aimed at, including the tense three-day duel where she and her sniper partner （to whom I gave the name of Konstantin Shevelyov, a name later crucial in her life） outwitted a German sharpshooter. But after barely three months together, Lyonya was hit by mortar fire right before Lyudmila’s eyes. He died in her arms hours later, and she nearly went mad from grief. She wasn’t able to return to shooting until she and her sniper partner grieved together at Lyonya’s grave. Then she returned to the front lines with a new fury: as she later told Eleanor Roosevelt, every German in her sights after that might as well have been the man who killed Lyonya.
Sevastopol fell months later, and Lyudmila likely would have been killed there （women snipers in the Red Army had about a 75 percent chance of dying in combat） had she not been wounded and evacuated a few weeks before. Despite her wish to return to the front, the propaganda department had other ideas. A missive had recently landed on Stalin’s desk from Washington, D.C., inviting a deputation of Soviet students to join Eleanor Roosevelt’s international student conference, and the Boss saw an opportunity: Lady Death was headed to America.
She certainly felt like a fish out of water, and the White House welcome breakfast did not go well: Lyudmila’s terse response to the First Lady’s comment about how a woman sniper could be relatable to Americans is drawn directly from her memoir, as are her responses to the astonishingly asinine questions she was asked at her first press conference. But one woman turned things around for Lyudmila: the First Lady, who offered her Soviet guest a ride in her convertible to that evening’s dinner party. Though her driving apparently alarmed Lady Death more than an entire panzer division, it signaled the beginning of an unlikely friendship.