Inside the Russian Revolution

by Rheta Childe Dorr

It could have been done, the people were ready for it. They felt the tragedy. At a memorial service for the dead women, held in Kazan Cathedral the Sunday after the battle, the presiding priest said: “This is a terrible and yet a glorious hour for Russia. Sad it is, and terrible beyond expression that men have allowed women to die in their places for our unhappy country. But glorious it will ever be that Russian women have been ready and willing to do it.”

After the service, a Bolshevik soldier, standing in front of the cathedral, tried to turn the sympathies of the crowd by making insulting remarks about the dead women. He did not have time to say much before a group of working women, with howls of rage, rushed him, and I believe would have killed him if his friends had not got him away.

Of the women left alive but wounded, thirty were brought to a hospital not far from the Nikolai station, Petrograd, and there I saw them. When I went into the first hospital ward a wounded girl sat up in bed and, smiling like the sun, held out to me a German officer’s helmet, her prize of battle. She had killed him—that was her duty—and had taken his helmet as a man would have done. But when she told me that Orlova, big, dull, kind, unselfish Orlova, loved by everybody, was among the killed, she broke down and wept as any woman would have done.

From this girl and the others I learned that Botchkareva had spoken the exact truth when she said that no woman had faltered or shown fear. “We all expected to die, I think,” one girl said. “I know that I did. I said over the prayers for the dying while I was dressing that morning. We all prayed and kissed our holy pictures, and thought sadly about the ones at home. But we were not afraid. We were stationed between two little woods. They were full of men, some who openly refused to go forward, some who hesitated and didn’t quite know what they ought to do. We shouted at them, the commander shouted at them, called them cowards, traitors, everything we could think of. Then the commander called out: ‘Come on, brothers, we’ll go first if you’ll only follow.’

“‘All right then,’ some of them called back, and we ran forward as fast as we could, following Botchkareva. She was wonderful, and Skridlova was wonderful too. We would have followed them anywhere.”

“Did you really capture a hundred Germans?” I asked.

“I don’t believe we did it all by ourselves,” was the modest reply. “After we got into the fighting the men and the women were side by side. We fought together and we won the battle together.”

Every one of those wounded women soldiers wanted to go back to the front line. If fighting and dying were the price of Russia’s freedom, they wanted to fight and fight again. If they could rally unwilling men to fight, they wanted nothing in the world except more chances to do it. Wounds were nothing, death was nothing in the scale of Russia’s honor or dishonor. Then too, and this is a strange commentary on women’s “protected” position in life, the women soldiers said that fighting was not the most difficult or the most disagreeable work they had ever done. They said it was less arduous if a little more dangerous than working in a harvest field or a factory.

This point of view I have heard expressed by other Russian women soldiers, those who have fought in men’s regiments. There are many such women; I have met and talked with some of them. One girl I saw in a hospital, a bullet in her side and a broken hand in a plaster cast, assured me that fighting was the most congenial work she had ever done. This girl had gone to Petrograd from Riga to join Botchkareva’s battalion, but for some reason she had not been accepted. She met a young marine who told her of a new Battalion of Death which was being formed out of the remnants of several old regiments and of a number of marines. “Why not join us?” he asked. “We already have four girl comrades.” So she joined.