Unsurpassed Female Sniper

Unlike most other countries, the Soviet Union put women on the front lines, recruiting approximately 2,000 of them as snipers during WWII. The regime knew what it was doing because one of these women turned out to be one of the most successful snipers in history: Lyudmila Pavlichenko shot a confirmed 309 Axis soldiers, including 36 German snipers, during the war.
In June of 1941, the 24-year-old Ukrainian attended Kiev University, where she studied history, when Germany invaded her country. She went to the local recruiting office to sign up for the infantry but was told she’d be better suited as a nurse or clerk. She pulled out her Voroshilov Sharpshooter badge and a marksman certificate, both of which she’d earned while a teen as a member of a society that trained civilians in military tactics to be used to defend the homeland if needed. Owing to this early training, Soviet snipers dominated all others regarding confirmed total kill scores in WW II.
The recruiter signed her up for combat duty. She was assigned as a private to a subsection of the 25th Chapayev Rifle Division, the 54th “Stephan Razin” Rifles Regiment, in the Red Army. So skillful was she as a marksman, she was immediately assigned to the 2nd company sniper platoon with her regiment.
During the next year, she recorded 309 confirmed kills, including 187 in her first 75 days on the job while fighting at Odessa, before the Soviets were forced to withdraw.  Many suspect her total kills were even higher because an independent party had to witness any kill for it to be counted toward her total. 
Pavlichenko often camped 600 to 1,000 feet in front of her unit, often in the no-man’s land between the lines of friendly troops and the enemy. In June 1942, during the siege of Sevastopol, she was seriously injured for the fourth time, this time by a mortar shell that exploded near her hiding place. At this point she’d become well known publicly, and Red Army officials did not want her killed. So they put her on a submarine and assigned her as a sniping instructor and a public spokesman, with the rank of major. Within a month of her leaving Sevastopol, most of the members of her division were killed, including her husband.
While a public spokesperson, Pavlichenko traveled to the United States and Canada, the first citizen of the Soviet Union to be received at the White House by a U.S. President, in this case Franklin Roosevelt. She received an engraved Colt 1911 pistol while in the United States and an engraved Winchester model 70 rifle while in Canada. Unimpressed by the U.S. media, she remarked:
I am amazed at the kind of questions put to me by the women press correspondents in Washington. Don’t they know there is a war? They asked me silly questions such as do I use powder and rouge and nail polish and do I curl my hair? One reporter even criticized the length of the skirt of my uniform, saying that in America women wear shorter skirts and besides my uniform made me look fat…This made me angry. I wear my uniform with honor. It has the Order of Lenin on it. It has been covered with blood in battle. It is plain to see that with American women what is important is whether they wear silk underwear under their uniforms. What the uniform stands for, they have yet to learn.
Pavlichenko’s rifle of choice was the M1891/30 Mosin-Nagant 7.62 mm rifle with a PE 4x telescope. The rifle held 5 rounds and could shoot at about 2,800 feet per second with an average effective range of about 1,800 feet. She was often pictured holding another rifle, but this is the one she used as an instructor.

Of all the women in the Red Army working as snipers during the war, only 500 survived. Pavlichenko, of course, was one of them. Among other honors, Pavlichenko received the Gold Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union, Order of Lenin, and was featured on two commemorative postage stamps in the Soviet Union.

After the war, she finished her master’s degree in history at Kiev University and, among other things, worked as a research assistant at the Soviet Navy headquarters. American composer Woody Guthrie wrote a song honoring Pavlichenko, titled “Miss Pavlichenko.” Battle for Sevastopol, a movie released in 2015, portrayed her life. A book about her, titled Lady Death, was released the same year.