Yashka

Yashka

By Maria Bochkareva.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Introduction
4. Frontispiece
5. Yashka
   1. Part I: Youth
      1. I: My Childhood of Toil
      2. II: Marriage at Fifteen
      3. III: A Little Happiness
      4. IV: The Road to Exile
      5. V: Escape from Exile
   2. Part II: War
      1. VI: I Enlist by the Grace of the Tsar
      2. VII: My First Experience of No Man’s Land
      3. VIII: Wounded and Paralysed
      4. IX: Eight Hours in German Hands
   3. Part III: Revolution
      1. X: The Revolution at the Front
      2. XI: I Organize the Battalion of Death
      3. XII: My Fight Against Committee Rule
      4. XIII: The Battalion at the Front
      5. XIV: An Errand from Kerensky to Kornilov
      6. XV: The Army Becomes a Savage Mob
   4. Part IV: Terror
      1. XVI: The Triumph of Bolshevism
      2. XVII: Facing Lenin and Trotsky
      3. XVIII: Caught in a Bolshevik Deathtrap
      4. XIX: Saved by a Miracle
      5. XX: I Set Out on a Mission
6. Endnotes
7. List of Illustrations
8. Colophon
9. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Introduction

In the early summer of 1917 the world was thrilled by a news item from Petrograd announcing the formation by one Maria Bochkareva of a women’s fighting unit under the name of “The Battalion of Death.” With this announcement an obscure Russian peasant girl made her début in the international hall of fame. From the depths of dark Russia Maria Bochkareva suddenly emerged into the limelight of modern publicity. Foreign correspondents sought her, photographers followed her, distinguished visitors paid their respects to her. All tried to interpret this arresting personality. The result was a riot of misinformation and misunderstanding.

Of the numerous published tales about and interviews with Bochkareva that have come under my observation, there is hardly one which does not contain some false or misleading statement. This is partly due to the deplorable fact that the foreign journalists who interpreted Russian men and affairs to the world during the momentous year of 1917 were, with very few exceptions, ignorant of the Russian language; and partly to Bochkareva’s reluctance to take every adventurous stranger into her confidence. It was her cherished dream to have a complete record of her life incorporated in a book some day. This work is the realization of that dream.

To a very considerable extent, therefore, the narrative here unfolded is of the nature of a confession. When in the United States in the summer of 1918, Bochkareva determined to prepare her autobiography. Had she been educated enough to be able to write a letter fluently, she would probably have written her own life-story in Russian and then had it translated into English. Being semi-illiterate, she found it necessary to secure the services of a writer commanding a knowledge of her native language, which is the only tongue she speaks. The procedure followed in the writing of this book was this: Bochkareva recited to me in Russian the story of her life, and I recorded it in English in longhand, making every effort to set down her narrative verbatim. Not infrequently I would interrupt her with a question intended to draw out some forgotten experiences. However, one of Bochkareva’s natural gifts is an extraordinary memory. It took nearly a hundred hours, distributed over a period of three weeks, for her to tell me every detail of her romantic life.

At our first session Bochkareva made it clear that what she was going to tell me would be very different from the stories about her related in the press. She would reveal her innermost self and break open for the first time the sealed book of her past. This she did, and in doing so completely discredited several widely circulated tales about her. Perhaps the chief of these is the statement that Bochkareva had enlisted as a soldier and gone to war to avenge her fallen husband. Whether this invention was the product of her own mind or was attributed to her originally by some prolific correspondent, I do not know. In any event it was a convenient answer to the eternal question of importunate journalists how she came to be a soldier. Unable to explain to the conventional world that profound impulse which really drove her to her remarkable destiny, she adopted this excuse until she had an opportunity to record the full story of her courageous life.

This book will also remove that distrustful attitude based on misunderstanding that has been manifested toward Bochkareva in radical circles. When she arrived in the United States, she was immediately hailed as a “counterrevolutionary,” royalist and sinister intriguer by the extremists. That was a grave injustice to her. She is ignorant of politics, contemptuous of intrigue, and spiritually far and above party strife. Her