Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people that never found their way into the newspaper.

By

April 25, 2018

Maria Bochkareva, a pugnacious, formidable and semiliterate peasant who, in World War I, became one of Russia’s first female army officers and led an all-women unit into battle on the Eastern Front, died on May 16, 1920. She was 30.

She was executed by a Bolshevik firing squad.

For a brief period in a life of outsize impact, Bochkareva was an international sensation: a hardened military veteran whose dedication to Russia’s continuing war efforts attracted the attention of Russian politicians, world leaders, journalists and prominent women’s rights activists. She met with President Woodrow Wilson, King George V of England and suffragists like Emmeline Pankhurst. Theodore Roosevelt gave her $1,000 of his Nobel Peace Prize money.

But Bochkareva was on the losing side of history, supporting an unpopular war that ultimately led to her downfall.

Her meteoric rise to fame was especially astounding considering her humble upbringing. She was born into a poor family in July 1889 and raised in the Siberian town of Tomsk. Her father was an alcoholic who beat her, her three sisters and her mother.