Caught in the Revolution
Page 22
Of all the women Emmeline Pankhurst and Jessie Kenney hoped to meet in Petrograd, at the head of their list was Maria Bochkareva – commander of the newly formed Women’s Death Battalion and probably the most talked-about woman in all Russia. A semi-literate peasant girl from the Volga, Bochkareva had, within the space of barely a year, risen from obscurity to the status of national heroine. Her drunken father had deserted the family when she was young and she was sent out to work as a nursemaid at the age of eight, to help her mother make ends meet. Married at fifteen, she quickly abandoned her brutish husband and followed her lover to Yakutsk in eastern Siberia when he was condemned to exile for robbery. But on the outbreak of war in 1914, and fired with patriotic zeal, she had travelled the three thousand miles to Tomsk, where the commander of the 25th Reserve Battalion was based, and had volunteered for the Russian army. He told her she could only go as a nurse; but Maria Bochkareva wanted to fight. Undeterred, she appealed directly to Nicholas II by telegraph, upon which he agreed to her request, which was ratified by General Brusilov, Commander-in-Chief of the army.23
As a fighting soldier, Bochkareva certainly had the right attributes, for she was naturally muscular, stocky and strong. She had had no compunction about cutting off her long brunette plaits on enlisting, and cropped her hair close to her head like any male recruit. Donning her soldier’s breeches and high black boots, and after training in marksmanship, she entered service at the front in the 28th Polotsk Infantry. She called herself ‘Yashka’ and her mannish persona fooled many: ‘The strength and breadth, and the deep, full-toned voice of a man, were hers. Passing her on the street, you had to look three times to make sure she was not a man,’ recalled Bessie Beatty when she met her in June. ‘After the first few days of grumbling protest, her comrades seldom remembered she was a woman.’24
During her service at the front in 1915–16 Bochkareva demonstrated great fortitude and courage in battle and was wounded four times, the last time being laid up in hospital for months, and was awarded two grades of the Cross of St George. A devout patriot, she had been an ardent supporter of the revolution when it broke in February, but by the spring of 1917 she was dismayed at how ill-prepared her people had been for freedom. What most alarmed her, however, was the consequent breakdown in discipline and order in the Russian army. By May it had been severely weakened by the war, with more than 5.5 million casualties. Morale was at an all-time low and the rate of desertion alarmingly high. The conscripts at the front didn’t want to fight the Germans any more; they just wanted to go home. But Bochkareva wanted to carry on fighting to the bitter end.
To counter this loss of morale, special combat formations – known as ‘shock battalions’ – had been formed, their objective being to underline the nation’s savage determination to die, if necessary, in defence of Russia. It seemed to Bochkareva that the honour and even the very existence of her country were at stake, and she wanted Russia’s women to set an example. ‘They give men guns to fight death with,’ she complained, ‘but women simply sit and wait for death.’25 She insisted that she – and they – would rather die fighting. With this in mind, when Duma president Mikhail Rodzianko visited the front in May, Bochkareva asked him to support her request to Kerensky, as Minister of War, that she be allowed to form a women’s ‘death battalion’ – the first of its kind in the world. ‘We will go wherever men refuse to go,’ she declared. ‘We will fight when they run. The women will lead the men back to the trenches.’ Returning to Petrograd, Bochkareva held a mass rally in the plush surroundings of the Mariinsky Palace on 21 May, at which she exhorted:
Men and women-citizens! . . . Our mother is perishing. Our mother is Russia. I want to help save her. I want women whose hearts are pure crystal, whose souls are pure, whose impulses are lofty. With such women setting an example of self-sacrifice, you men will realize your duty in this grave hour.26
Fifteen hundred women answered Bochkareva’s call to arms that evening, their numbers bolstered by another five hundred who volunteered after seeing accounts in the newspapers the next day. They were accommodated in four large dormitories at the Kolomensky Women’s Institute on Torgovaya, which had been made available especially to Bochkareva as a base.27 Many were quickly rejected, their numbers being reduced to five hundred mainly eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds by Bochkareva’s strict moral discipline (she abhorred ‘loose behaviour’, such as flirting with their male instructors); others were let go for failing to take her orders ‘in true military spirit’.28 Some of the more politicised women changed their minds when Bochkareva adamantly refused to allow them to set up Soviet-style soldiers’ committees. She was in sole charge, and that was that.
After confiscating all their personal property except their brassieres, Bochkareva marched her chosen recruits off en masse to four barbers’ shops to have their heads shaved; a crowd consisting mainly of soldiers waited outside, deriding the women as they emerged bald-headed. The volunteers were then thrown into a rigorous induction course, rising at 5.00 a.m. and spending ten hours a day on rifle practice and training, like any male recruits. Bochkareva oversaw it all closely, barking out orders like any sergeant major and slapping any insubordinate women on the cheek. Soon the battalion was pruned to 250–300, with many leaving voluntarily, unable to tolerate Bochkareva’s harsh regime.29 The only concession was the issue of the cavalry carbine, which was five pounds lighter than the standard-issue infantry rifle.
Those who survived the harsh selection process seemed, to one American reporter who observed them at drill, ‘as likely soldiers as any others I had seen . . . they took themselves and their work with the utmost seriousness and with the same lack of self-consciousness’.30 Once they had passed through training, the women donned their standard army-issue uniforms, the only distinguishing marks being special white epaulettes with a red-and-black stripe, and a red-and-black cloth arrowhead sewn to the sleeve – this insignia, also worn by similar male battalions, denoting that they had vowed to fight to the death for Holy Russia and for the Allies.31
The Petrograd Women’s Death Battalion contained an extraordinary cross-section of women. Some were former Red Cross nurses; the oldest among them was a forty-eight-year-old medical doctor. The rest were a mix of ‘stenographers and dressmakers . . . office girls, servants and factory hands, university students and peasants, and a few who in the days before the war had been merely parasites’, as Bessie Beatty noted.32 As a seasoned reporter currently writing a regular ‘Around the World in Wartime’ column for her paper, Beatty had arrived in Petrograd not long after Rheta Childe Dorr and, like her, made a beeline for Bochkareva, for the Women’s Death Battalion was a great news story and soon featured in the world’s press. Both reporters quickly discovered that the women who joined had different, and often dramatic, reasons for doing so.
One such was Bochkareva’s twenty-year-old ADC, Mariya Skrydlova. Tall and aristocratic, she was the daughter of an admiral who had distinguished himself in the Russo-Japanese War and was one of six Red Cross nurses who enlisted with the battalion. Convent-educated in Belgium, a talented musician and linguist, Skrydlova was later awarded the Cross of St George for her bravery, but subsequently suffered shell shock and walked with a limp. During the February Revolution, prior to joining the battalion, she had encountered the full force of grass-roots fury against the former aristocracy, when the mob had broken into the naval hospital where she had been nursing and murdered wounded officers in their beds. Other wounded men whom she had sat up nursing through the night, she told Florence Harper, had ‘turned on her now that Russia [was] free and cursed her as she never heard a person cursed before in all her life’.33 After seeing other nurses in the apartment block where she lived murdered, and young girls attacked and raped, she had ‘taken off her Red Cross uniform and vowed that she would not lift a hand while such people were in power’; instead, when she heard of the formation of Bochkareva’s battalion, she had gone straight off ‘without even putting her hat and coat on, running
most of the way’ to volunteer. Like her commander, all she wanted to do was to serve Russia.
Despite the obvious dedication of the Women’s Death Battalion, not all Russians admired them; out on the streets when they marched along, the women were often greeted by hisses and boos from men. But they gave as good as they got: ‘Go back, you dirty cowards. Aren’t you ashamed to let women leave their homes and go to the front for holy Russia?’ they retorted. Bessie Beatty admired the ‘grim confidence’ with which they faced the prospect of death under their ‘Gospodin Nachalnik’ Maria Bochkareva. ‘What else is there for us to do?’ they told her. ‘The soul of the army is sick, and we must heal it.’34
During June, Emmeline Pankhurst and Jessie Kenney had regularly visited Bochkareva and her soldiers at their barracks and had had their photographs taken with her. Pankhurst had proudly inspected the women recruits and watched them drilling; she made a point of speaking individually, through her interpreter, to as many of the women as she could. She swelled with pride at the sight of the fearless Maria Bochkareva – ‘that wonderful, splendid woman’ – at their head. It was, she later said, ‘the greatest thing in history since Joan of Arc’. She and Bochkareva, as the commander later related, became ‘very much attached to each other’ and Pankhurst invited her to dine at the Astoria.35 In considerable physical decline, after years of repeated hunger strikes and forced-feeding in jail, which had wrecked her digestive system, Pankhurst had a figure that was in stark contrast to the robust frame of her new-found Russian friend, and she seemed prematurely aged. Nevertheless, she stood as erect as she could during inspections of the battalion, immaculate in her white linen suit with black bonnet and matching gloves, raising her right hand in a salute of womanly solidarity – an image captured by Donald Thompson, who took numerous photographs of the battalion that summer after he returned from a visit to the front.36fn4
At a speech that she was allowed to give at a fund-raising concert for the Women’s Death Battalion held in Petrograd’s Army and Navy Hall on 14 June, Emmeline Pankhurst made the most of the opportunity to praise them: ‘I honour these women who are setting such an example to their country. When I looked at their tender bodies I thought how terrible it was they should have to fight, besides bringing children into the world.’ ‘Men of Russia,’ she exhorted, ‘must the women fight, and are there men who will stay at home and let them fight alone?’37
On 21 June, at a ceremony held in the great square in front of St Isaac’s Cathedral and attended by Kerensky, Milyukov and Rodzianko, and other members of the government, Maria Bochkareva proudly received her gold-and-white standard emblazoned in black lettering with the words ‘1st Women’s Death Battalion of Maria Bochkareva’. That same day she was promoted to ensign, and General Kornilov presented her with an officer’s belt, a gold-handled revolver and a sabre as a token of the nation’s appreciation.38 Rheta Childe Dorr noticed, however, that her women’s khaki uniforms were ‘rather shabby’ and ‘about half the girls wore, instead of army boots, the women’s shoes in which they had enlisted’. (She later discovered that such was the shortage of army-issue boots that the women got theirs only a day or so before going into action.) Kenney and Pankhurst had also attended and been moved by the sights and sounds of the occasion, in particular the chanting of the priests: ‘How Ethel Smyth would love this music!’ Pankhurst had exclaimed to Kenney, thinking with fondness of her friend, the suffragist composer.39
Two days later, prior to their departure for the front, an open-air Te Deum was said for the Women’s Death Battalion before an altar erected on the steps of the Kazan Cathedral. Bochkareva and her battalion of women had kept everyone waiting, finally arriving after 5.00 p.m. ‘If they are due to attack, and wait an hour and a half to powder their noses, what will the Germans do to them?’ soldiers in the crowd jeered derisively.40 For the most part, though, the crowd was silent, ‘women with tears in their eyes, men who shuffled uneasily in a shamed discomfort’ greatly outnumbering the few soldiers, who were ‘sullen, churlish, defiant!’ Jessie Kenney was there (on behalf of an indisposed Pankhurst), as were Lady Georgina Buchanan and other distinguished residents and visitors, as well as foreign reporters. Florence Harper thought the women of the battalion looked faintly ludicrous in their ill-fitting khaki uniforms and oversized peaked caps, and heard someone describe them as looking like the ‘chorus of a third-rate burlesque’.41 Nevertheless they inspired admiration – and some pity – in most of those gathered there that day, as they proudly stood holding banners proclaiming, ‘Death is better than shame’ and ‘Women, do not give your hands to traitors’.42
It was said that thousands of people rushed across the city to pay their respects as the Women’s Death Battalion marched away to Petrograd’s Warsaw Station after this farewell ceremony, each woman loaded with two hundred rounds of ammunition, the pots and pans on their kitbags making ‘quite a racket’ as they went, according to Donald Thompson.43 Many had flowers thrust into their rifle butts by the crowd as they passed. ‘Such a number of keen, serious young faces, it made one cry to see them go past . . . in full soldiers’ kit, undaunted by the hardships and weight they had to carry or by all the ridicule they will have to face, ridicule from their countrymen which will probably be harder to face than the German bullets,’ wrote a nurse from the Anglo-Russian Hospital. ‘There they were going to do a man’s job and show the way to the waverers. As we walked with the crowd that accompanied them along the Nevsky, an old general stepped out in front of them and called out, “God bless you! You will all get there, you are not like those others!”’44
But pockets of ill feeling towards the women still prevailed. When the battalion marched into Izmailovsky Prospekt the band accompanying them suddenly stopped playing, their way barred by a group of men from the nearby Izmailovsky barracks. Drawing the sabre recently presented to her, Bochkareva stepped forward, ordering the band to strike up again and – head high, with her sabre proudly raised – she led her women on to enthusiastic applause from the crowd, as the soldiers pulled back.45
At the station Lenin’s Bolshevik supporters did everything they could to foment animosity towards the women as they fought their way through to the train, in which they were given the honour of second-class carriages rather than the uncomfortable third-class ones usually given to troops. Large groups of Russian soldiers stood and hissed and jeered: ‘Those women ought not to be allowed to go to war,’ reporter William G. Shepherd was told. ‘It is a blankety-blank insult to Russia and its men . . . Everybody knows they are not going to fight. They are only going to the front to insult Russian soldiers and for bad purposes.’46 Those ‘bad purposes’ were more clearly articulated by another soldier in the crowd: ‘They only enlisted for the purpose of prostitution,’ he shouted within earshot of Florence Harper, who had also made her way to the station. She saw how the man’s remark provoked a quick response; enraged women in the crowd ‘rushed at him, like terriers around a wild animal, scratching his face, hitting him and pulling his hair’. She was afraid the mob was going to beat him to death, and tried to block their path. Militia men fortunately soon arrived and hauled the man off to the police station, the mob trailing after them.47
From Petrograd, the Women’s Death Battalion’s train headed off to the front near Molodechno, where they were assigned to the Tenth Army. On 7 July they went over the top against the Germans, during a five-day battle at Smorgon (in present-day Belarus).48 By the end of the day fifty of Bochkareva’s women were dead or wounded. Shortly afterwards Bochkareva herself was knocked unconscious when a shell exploded near her and she was taken to a field hospital in the rear suffering from shell shock; she landed up in hospital back in Petrograd, promoted to second lieutenant and fiercely proud that not one of her women who went into battle had faltered. Emmeline Pankhurst was pleased and proud to telegraph home to England:
First Women’s Battalion number two hundred and fifty. Took place of retreating troops. In counter attack made one hundred prisoners inclu
ding two officers. Only five weeks training. Their leader wounded. Have earned undying fame, moral effect great. More women soldiers training, also marines. Pankhurst.49
Before leaving for a visit to Moscow, Pankhurst and Kenney had continued to make the rounds of Petersburg society and the émigré community. Pankhurst had met up again with Lady Muriel Paget at the British Russian Luncheon Club – such fashionable watering holes still surviving the depredations of war and rationing. She also met the genial Prime Minister, Prince Lvov, and the now-notorious Felix Yusupov, whom she found altogether charming. Yusupov’s ‘exquisite courtesy and enunciation of the English language’ were greatly to Pankhurst’s taste, when he gave her and Kenney a conducted tour of his palace on the Moika, showing them the room where Rasputin was murdered and regaling them with the full grisly details of the story.50