Pavlichenko attained a final kill tally of 309, making her one of the top five deadliest snipers, period.
March is Women’s History Month, and accordingly, The National Interest shall honor the occasion by commencing a multi-part series honoring some of history’s most badass female warriors. (Granted, we actually got nearly a full month’s head start with our February 7, 2025, story of retired U.S. Air Force Col. Allison Black, aka “The Angel of Death,” but eh, why nitpick.)
With all due respect to Vanessa Williams and her song “Save the Best for Last,” we’re actually going to save the best for first. In this case, “best” means “deadliest,” as in the deadliest female sniper in history, Leytenánt (lieutenant) Lyudmila Pavlichenko.
Lyudmila Pavlichenko’s Early Bio
“Miss Pavlichenko, well-known to fame/Russia’s your country, fighting’s your game/The world will always love you for all time to come/300 Nazis felled by your gun.”—“Miss Pavlichenko” by Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie (1912-1967).
Well, with all due respect to the late great Guthrie’s songwriting and singing abilities, though Americans may have used “Russia” as a generic label for the entire Soviet Union during the twentieth century, Lyudmila Mikhailovna Pavlichenko was actually born on July 12, 1916, in Belaya Tserkov, which at the time was in the Kyiv Governorate of the Russian Empire, and in turn became the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1919.
Her parents were Mikhail Belov—a locksmith from Petrograd as well as a loyal Communist party member and former regimental commissar in the Red Army who had been awarded the Order of the Red Banner—and Elena Trofimovna Belova.
As noted by Larry Slawson ofOwlcation:
“Although Pavlichenko originally worked as a grinder at the Kiev Arsenal Factory, she later developed a keen interest in guns, and even joined a local shooting club in her city to practice sharpshooting … After later marrying, having a baby, and finishing her Master’s Degree during the 1930s, Pavlichenko’s career in teaching was abruptly halted with the onset of Operation Barbarossa in 1941.”
Pavlichenko’s Deadly Wartime Deeds
Lyudmila was twenty-five years old at the time of the Nazi German invasion. Eschewing the chance to be a Red Army nurse, she instead opted to be a lifetaker rather than a lifesaver, volunteering for sniper duty in order to indulge her marksmanship skills and love for guns. This decision would prove to be quite a boon for the Red Army as well as her own individual career.
After completing sniper school, Lyudmila immediately saw action on the Eastern Front, nabbing her first two confirmed kills within days of her arrival at Belyayevka. Only a few weeks later, during the Battle for Odessa, she racked up an astounding 187 kills over a three-month span.
When all was said and done, this deadly doyenne attained a final kill tally of 309, which makes her not only the deadliest female sniper in history but one of the top five deadliest snipers, period. Within a mere two months of her initial enlistment, she was promoted to Stárshiy serzhánt (senior sergeant) and ultimately attained her final rank of lieutenant in May 1942. One month after her commissioning, she was wounded in action by mortar shrapnel, which got her pulled from frontline duty.
Pavlichenko’s Death-Dealing Device
The weapon that Pavlichenko used was the famous Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifle chambered in a 7.62x54mmR cartridge (the longest-serving military cartridge in history), a firearm that gained further notoriety for its use by the Red Army’s most famous sniper of the so-called “Great Patriotic War”: Kapitán (captain) Vasily Grigoryevich Zaitsev, who killed 225 enemy soldiers during the Battle of Stalingrad and was immortalized for Hollywood audiences in the 2001film Enemy at the Gates (wherein Capt. Zaitsev is portrayed by actor Jude Law).
Meanwhile, how’s this for irony: the Mosin-Nagant—a Finnish-made variant of it anyway—was also used to kill many of Pavlichenko’s and Zaitsev’s Red Army tovarishiy (“comrades”) during the Winter War of 1939-1940. Indeed, it was the weapon of choice of Vänrikki (second lieutenant) Simo Häyhä, aka “The White Death,” the deadliest sniper in the history of warfare, who ended up killing 542 Soviet soldiers in that brief but intense conflict. (Somewhat akin to Ukrainian and Russian troops killing one another with Soviet-designed AK rifles and Makarov pistols in the present day.)
The Mosin-Nagant has a 5-round magazine, and those 7.62x54mmR rounds come barreling out of the rifle’s muzzle (bad pun intended) at a velocity of 2,840 feet per second (865 meters per second) and generating 3,593 Joules (2,650 foot-pounds) of energy. (Speaking as a former Mosin-Nagant owner, I can personally vouch for the gun’s excellent accuracy and power.)
Pavlichenko’s Legacy
After the war, Pavlichenko resumed her education at Kyiv University and began a new career as a historian. From 1945 to 1953, she was a research assistant at Soviet Navy headquarters. On October 10, 1974, Lyudmila Pavlichenko passed away from a stroke at the age of fifty-eight and was laid to rest at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
Just how revered was Pavlichenko in the USSR? So revered that her government issued a postage stamp in honor of her sixtieth birthday. She was quite well-liked in the United States as well; even before Guthrie immortalized her in the above-quoted folk song, she was hosted by FDR in late 1942, thus becoming the first Soviet citizen to be welcomed at the White House. From there, she was sponsored by then-First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt on a publicity tour of the United States (a tour intended by the Soviet High Command to drum up American support for a “second front” in Europe).
By all accounts, Pavlichenko was a loyal Soviet citizen from start to finish, who gave off absolutely no indications of sympathy for the cause of Ukrainian nationalism. Indeed, in response to a sexist American reporter who asked her about her underwear (of all things!) during that aforementioned U.S. publicity tour, she responded:
“I am proud to wear the uniform of the legendary Red Army. It has been sanctified by the blood of my comrades who’ve fallen in combat with the fascists.”
About the Author: Christian D. Orr
Christian D. Orr was previously a Senior Defense Editor forNational Security Journal (NSJ) and19FortyFive. He is a former Air Force Security Forces officer, Federal law enforcement officer, and private military contractor (with assignments worked in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, Japan, Germany, and the Pentagon). Chris holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California (USC) and an M.A. in Intelligence Studies (concentration in Terrorism Studies) from American Military University (AMU). He has also been published inThe Daily Torch,The Journal of Intelligence and Cyber Security, andSimple Flying. Last but not least, he is a Companion of the Order of theNaval Order of the United States (NOUS). If you’d like to pick his brain further, you can ofttimes find him at theOld Virginia Tobacco Company (OVTC) lounge in Manassas, Virginia, partaking of fine stogies and good quality human camaraderie.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.