Inside the Russian Revolution

by Rheta Childe Dorr

Mareea Botchkareva, Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst and Women of “The Battalion of Death.”

She fought in campaigns on several fronts, earned medals and finally the coveted cross of St. George for valor under fire. She was three times wounded, the last time in the autumn of 1916, so badly that she lay in hospital for four months. She got back to her regiment, where she was now popular, and I imagine something of a leader, just before the revolution of February, 1917.

Botchkareva was an ardent revolutionist, and her regiment was one of the first to go over to the people’s side. Her consternation and despair were great when, shortly after the emancipation from czardom, great masses of the people, and especially the soldiers at the front, began to demonstrate by riots and desertions how little they were ready for freedom. The men of her regiment deserted in numbers, and she went to members of the Duma who were going up and down the front trying to stay the tide, and said to them: “Give me leave to raise a regiment of women. We will go wherever men refuse to go. We will fight when they run. The women will lead the men back to the trenches.” This is the history of Botchkareva’s Battalion of Death, or rather of how it came to be organized. The Russian war ministry gave her leave to recruit the women, gave her a barrack in a former school building, and promised her equipment and a place at the front. Many women in Petrograd, women of wealth and social position, took fire with the idea, raised money for the regiment, helped in the recruiting, some of them joining.

In an odd copy of an American newspaper that reached me in Russia I read a paragraph stating that the schoolgirls of Petrograd were forming a regiment under a man named Butchkareff, a lieutenant in the army. I don’t know who sent out that piece of news, but it lacked most of the facts. The women soldiers are not schoolgirls, and Botchkareva’s battalion has no men officers. Three drill sergeants, St. George cross men all of them, did assist in the training of the battalion while it remained in Petrograd. Other men drilled it behind the lines, but Botchkareva, and another remarkable woman, Marie Skridlova, her adjutant, commanded and led it in battle.

Marie Skridlova is the daughter of Admiral Skridloff, one of the most distinguished men of the Russian navy. She is about twenty, very attractive if not actually beautiful, and is an accomplished musician. Her life up to the outbreak of the war was that of an ordinary girl of the Russian aristocracy. She was educated abroad, taught several languages, and expected to have a career no more exciting or adventurous than that of any other woman of her class. When the war broke out she went into the Red Cross, took the nurses’ training and served in hospitals both at the front and in Petrograd. Then came the revolution. She was working in a marine hospital in the capital. She saw many of the horrors of those February days. She saw her own father set upon by soldiers in the streets, and rescued from death only because some of his own marines who loved him insisted that this one officer was not to be killed.

Into the ward of the hospital where she was stationed there was borne an old general, desperately wounded by a street mob. He had to be operated on at once to save his life, and as he was carried from the operating room to a private ward the men in the beds sat up and yelled, “Kill him! Kill him!” It is unlikely that they knew who he was, but it was death to all officers in those days of madness and frenzy. Half unconscious from loss of blood, still under the spell of the ether, the old man clung to his nurse as a child to his mother. “You won’t let them kill me, will you?” he murmured. And Mlle. Skridlova assured him that she would take care of him, that he was safe.

The door opened and a white faced doctor rushed into the room. “Sister,” he gasped, “go for that medicine—go quickly.” Not comprehending she asked, “What medicine?” But he only pushed her towards the door. “Go, go!” he repeated.

She left the room, and then she saw and understood. Down the corridor a mob was streaming, a wild, unkempt, blood-thirsty mob, the sweepings of the streets and barracks. Quickly she threw herself across the door of the old general’s room. “Get back,” she commanded. “The man in that room is old and wounded and helpless. He is in my care, and if you harm him it must be over my body.”

Incredible as it seems this girl of twenty was able for forty minutes to hold the mob at bay. When guns were pointed at her she told the men to fire through the red cross that covered her heart. They did not shoot, but some of the most brutal struck her down, and then held her helpless while others rushed into the room and hacked and beat the old man to death. When the nurse fought her way to his side he was breathing his last. She had time to whisper a prayer, and to make the sign of the cross above his glazing eyes. Then she went home, took off her Red Cross uniform, and said to her father: “Women have something more to do for Russia than binding men’s wounds.”

When Botchkareva’s Battalion of Death was formed Marie Skridlova determined to join it. Admiral Skridloff, veteran of two wars, iron old patriot, went with her to the women’s barracks and with his own hand enrolled her in the Russian army service. In the regiment of which this girl was adjutant I found six Red Cross nurses who were through with nursing and had gone out to die for their unhappy country. There was a woman doctor who had seen service in base hospitals. There were clerks and office women, factory girls, servants, farm women. Ten women had fought in men’s regiments. Every woman had her own story. I did not hear them all, but I heard many, each one a simple chronicle of suffering or bereavement, or shame over Russia’s plight.