It was Eleanor who introduced Lyudmila and her fellow delegates to FDR for a private meeting where they could discuss the hoped-for second front in Europe, and who escorted her on part of her subsequent goodwill tour around America. The idea of a First Lady and a Russian sniper becoming friends may seem wildly improbable, but many of their scenes in The Diamond Eye are taken directly from Lyudmila’s memoir: their discussions on American segregation （which appalled Lyudmila, as did British colonialism in India）; Lyudmila falling asleep in the presidential limousine with her head on Eleanor’s shoulder; Lyudmila tumbling out of a canoe at the Hudson estate and ending up in the First Lady’s bedroom as Eleanor hemmed a pair of pink pajamas for her and they chatted for so long that FDR had to retrieve the unlikely BFFs for dinner!
Under Eleanor’s wing, Lyudmila found her feet in the spotlight. She met everyone from Charlie Chaplin to Woody Guthrie （who wrote a song for her, “Miss Pavlichenko”—find it on YouTube!） and became a passionate public speaker, never forgetting her mission of asking for American aid on behalf of her fellow soldiers. In Chicago she brought an audience roaring to their feet with the speech that cemented her fame: “Gentlemen, I have killed 309 fascist invaders by now. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?”
Eleanor and Lyudmila bid goodbye at a farewell dinner at the White House in October 1942. They continued to correspond for the next fifteen years, as FDR carried through on his promise to send American soldiers to Europe and Mila finished her war as a sniper instructor. In 1957, the widowed Eleanor came to the USSR on a goodwill tour of her own, and the former First Lady and the former sniper embraced with cries of welcome.
My author notes usually take time to explain where my fictional characters weave in with the historical ones. The Diamond Eye is different, because nearly every person named comes straight from the historical record. Lyudmila’s fellow delegates Pchelintsev and Krasavchenko; her officers General Petrov, Lieutenant Dromin, and Captain Sergienko; her platoon mates Fyodor Sedykh and old Vartanov; her Odessa friend Sofya and medical orderly friend Lena Paliy . . . all real. My only substantial fictional additions to the record are Vika, the ballerina turned tank driver （a heroine I have in mind for a future novel!）， and Kostia Shevelyov, who is a fictionalized composite of two real men.
I have taken some liberties with the historical record to serve the novel. A few of Lyudmila’s front-line adventures were condensed and reordered: the Romanian attack with priests was slightly moved up, and her subsequent recovery moved to the hospital battalion rather than back in Odessa. The first sortie she fights with Kostia was fought with another recruit, and Lyonya is introduced earlier in The Diamond Eye than he appeared in real life—his time with Lyudmila was so limited, I couldn’t resist bringing him onstage sooner! Some events on the goodwill tour are also reordered: Lyudmila’s meeting with Laurence Olivier likely didn’t happen until she went to England, and FDR’s private tour of U.S. defense plants ended somewhat earlier and wasn’t intended to coincide with any of Lyudmila’s California press engagements.
Wherever I have conflicting information, such as the exact name of Lyudmila’s regiment or the precise evening of the Soviet delegation’s White House farewell, I have used Lyudmila’s version—likewise, I generally use her spellings of location names and Russian names, which may appear differently in modern maps and transliterations. Some of the facts and figures she quotes may not be accurate, but they are the facts and figures she would have believed were accurate at the time, so I have used them. There are also incidents in Lyudmila’s memoir which I have chosen to leave out, like a meeting with Stalin that probably didn’t happen. It has been something of a delicate dance to treat Lyudmila Pavlichenko’s memoir as the concrete original source of its heroine’s memories, yet also a document with which the propaganda office took some liberties.
Her memoir contains tantalizing gaps and silences which I’ve filled in with artistic license. Lyudmila states that she last saw her husband Alexei Pavlichenko three years before war broke out, and she makes no further mention of him. Likely he was one of the millions of Russian men who disappeared into the Red Army and died on the front—there is some evidence suggesting he was a doctor, so I brought him into the novel as a combat surgeon. His ultimate fate was unknown, so I crafted what I felt was a suitably satisfying end for the man who seduced a fifteen-year-old and abandoned her and their child.