"My Death for the Motherland Is Happiness"

liverpool annie · Oct 14, 2009

Amazing stories here ...... brave women !

"My Death for the Motherland Is Happiness": Women, Patriotism, and Soldiering in Russia's Great War, 1914–1917
Melissa K. Stockdale

On June 21, 1917, the citizens of revolutionary Petrograd witnessed a solemn public ceremony unique in modern history, the consecration of the standards of a battalion of women soldiers being sent as combatants to the front. Thousands flocked to watch the 300 women—their hair close-cropped, wearing regular army-issue trousers and boots, rifles gleaming—march from their barracks to the great St. Isaac's Cathedral. Among the military and civilian notables waiting to greet the women were generals Lavr Kornilov and P. A. Polovtsev, Duma president Mikhail Rodzianko, and leaders of various political parties. Two bishops and twelve priests officiated, as the battalion was presented with two icons—gifts of the soldiers of the First and Third Armies—and a banner sent by Minister of War Alexander Kerensky. Afterwards, enthusiastic soldiers and sailors lifted commander Maria Bochkareva onto their shoulders, crowds cheered, and orators mounted improvised tribunes to hail the battalion and its head. To the strains of the Marseillaise, the battalion then marched to Mars Field, to honor the graves of those who had fallen in the first days of the February Revolution.

The singularity of this event lay not so much in the appearance of women soldiers armed for combat, for individual women in Russia had been fighting as regular soldiers, with and without formal approval, since the very start of the war. Moreover, there had been instances of women in other times and places fighting alongside men in extraordinary circumstances, often as partisans or in civil wars.2 Rather, the event's significance lay in its public celebration of a female combat unit formally sanctioned by the authorities—not only civil authorities but, as this ceremony demonstrated, military and religious as well. In the opinion of one American observer, these women marked the true debut of the woman soldier: "Not the isolated individual woman who has buckled on a sword and shouldered a gun through the pages of history, but the woman soldier banded and fighting en masse—gun companies of her, battalions of her, whole regiments of her."
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