Lyudmila Pavlichenko Died - Oct. 10, 1974

Assassin Lyudmila Pavlichenko died on this day in 1974. There's more about her in the May 15, 2017 episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class, "Six Impossible Episodes: Soldiers, Snipers and Spies"

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to This Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff you
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and it's October t.

(00:21):
Ludmilla Pevlchenko died on the Stay in nineteen four She
was one of the most famous snipers in the Soviet
Red Army. Ludmilla Pavlichenko was born not far from Kiev
in nineteen sixteen, and in her youth she joined the
Volunteer Society for the Assistance of Army Aircraft and Fleet.
This is a paramilitary youth organization. It also involved a

(00:43):
lot of patriotism and athletics. It wasn't so much a
really volunteer organization though, even though the word volunteers in
the name. Attendance was expected, and that's where she first
learned to shoot. She got a certificate in marksmanship with
the Volunteer Society for the Assistance of Army Aircraft and Fleet.
She went on to sniper's school while studying at Kiev

(01:04):
University When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June one,
Pavlichenko decided to put her training to use and she
tried to join the army. She was turned down, though
because she was a woman. She kept trying. They kept
encouraging her to be a nurse, but she didn't want
to be a nurse. She wanted to be a soldier.
Not only did she want to be a soldier, she

(01:25):
had the skills required of being a soldier. Finally, after
all this persistence on her part, someone decided to give
her a test. She was with a unit that was
defending a hill and someone pointed out two Romanians who
were working with the Germans and told her to shoot them,
which she did. She was then accepted into the Red
Army's twenty five Chipaya of Rifle Division. In her first

(01:48):
seventy five days of service, she had a hundred and
eighty seven confirmed kills, and by the end of that
service that number had risen to three hundred nine thirty
six of these were German snipers, some of which were
effectively in duels with the enemy. From her point of view,
especially when it came to the snipers, the work that
she was doing was ultimately saving many other lives. She

(02:10):
was also wounded four times in the line of duty
while working as a sniper. Her reputation as a sniper
really spread, and the Red Army started using her in
recruitment materials and in propaganda. In two she went to
the United States to try to get some support from
the United States for Russia's military efforts on the European continent.

(02:32):
While she was in the US, she became very close
friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. Although the press coverage in this tour,
which there was a lot of, was really focused on
questions about her appearance and what she was wearing, rather
than her military service or the Russian efforts that she
had come to the United States to try to get
support for. After she returned home, she was promoted to major,

(02:55):
she was named Hero of the Soviet Union, and eventually
she was depicted on a postage stamp. After the end
of World War Two, she went back to school and
she became historian, and then in nineteen fifty seven, while
Eleanor Roosevelt was on a tour of Moscow, the two
women were reunited. This was something that Roosevelt had asked
for again and again while she was planning this trip.

(03:16):
When she got to Moscow, she kept asking her hosts
please could she see Udmilla Pavlochenko. After asking over and over,
they finally agreed to let her, although at first they
would not allow the two women to be alone together.
It was, according to all accounts, a very joyful reunion
among the two of them once they actually got to

(03:37):
talk to each other. Leadmila Pavlicchenko died have a stroke
at the age of fifty eight. We talked about her,
along with five other women on the front lines in
the May seventeen episode of Stuff You Miss in History
Class called Six Impossible Episodes Soldiers, Snipers, and Spies. Thanks
very much to Tari Harrison for all of her audio

(03:58):
work on this podcast, and can subscribe to the Stay
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else you get your podcasts. Tomorrow we will have the
opening of a massive change to a major church