Yashka My Life as Peasant, Officer and Exile - Maria Botchkareva

The modern ‘Joan of Arc’ of the Great War and Russian Revolution

This the story of an astonishing life told in her own words. Maria Botchkareva (whose nickname was Yashka) was not only a soldier in the Russian Army who fought in combat during the First World War, she was also the first woman to command a military unit in the Russian Army. Born a peasant, Yashka left home at 16 years old, coerced into prostitution and tramped into exile on foot following her abusive criminal lover. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Yashka then age twenty-five and motivated by national pride, attempted to join the army. Although she was initially rejected she was eventually accepted following the intercession of the Tsar. Sent to the front Yashka was decorated for rescuing fifty wounded soldiers from the battlefield and was wounded herself several times. In 1917 she proposed the creation of an all-female combat unit which would not only fight, but provide inspiration for the flagging morale of male Russian troops at that point in the war. This eventually gave rise to the creation of the incredibly titled 1st Russian Women’s Battalion of Death. The unit served on the Russian Western Front where once again Yashka was wounded in action. Botchkareva’s inspirational initiative attracted international attention and she was visited by Emiline Pankhurst, the political activist and suffragette who proclaimed her ‘the greatest woman of the century’. By this time Yashka was associating herself with the White Russians and had been placed on a Bolshevik ‘death list’, the fatal consequences of which she narrowly escaped, making her way to the USA where she pleaded with President Woodrow Wilson to aid Russia in its time of need. She was also granted an audience in Britain with King George V. Yashka returned to Russia, was eventually captured by the Bolsheviks and against Lenin’s orders shot by the Cheka as an ‘enemy of the state’ in 1920.

Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket.