Odds are, you’ve never heard of Lyudmila Pavlichenko. A few years ago, I hadn’t, either—it wasn’t until my research into The Huntress’s Night Witch pilots that I ran smack into the astounding story of another Soviet war heroine: this celebrated library-researcher-turned-sniper who was responsible for 309 kills during World War II, took America by storm during a publicity tour in 1942, hobnobbed with Hollywood stars, and became White House besties with Eleanor Roosevelt. I knew at once that I had to write her incredible story.
The Soviet Union’s record before, during, and after the war isn’t pretty, so it’s easy to forget that in the early days of World War II, they were the underdog. The Third Reich regarded Russians as racial undesirables fit only to be exterminated; Soviet soldiers were routinely slaughtered or starved if they were taken prisoner, unlike the more by-the-book treatment of French and English POWs. The Russians responded with equal savagery once the tide turned in their favor, but at the beginning of Germany’s terrifying and overwhelming invasion, all the under-equipped Red Army could do was mount a fighting retreat, letting the harsh terrain and Russian winter do to Hitler what it had done to Napoleon. That strategy came at a horrifying cost: millions of Soviets died wearing down the German advance.
And many of those front-line lives at stake were women.
The USSR was the only Allied nation to employ women on the front line in their actively fighting military branches. Approximately 800,000 women served in the Soviet Armed Forces during the war, or about 5 percent of the total military personnel. They were more likely to be shunted into communications and medical personnel, but many managed to play a more active part: bomber pilots, like the Night Witches; tank drivers, like Mila’s friend Vika—and snipers.
Hollywood has colored our view of sharpshooters. We imagine them as militarized serial killers; at best they’re the odd man out on a squad of regular guys, the one described as having ice water in his veins—see Barry Pepper’s Scripture-quoting sniper in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. And the idea persists that killing from a distance, from hidden nests, is somehow dishonorable or unfair . . . but skilled marksmen have been used by every army since the invention of firearms (and before that the bow and arrow: think of the English archers bringing down French knights at Agincourt, or Robin Hood’s Merry Men downing royal soldiers from hidden forest hideouts!). The use of snipers isn’t a violation of the Geneva Convention, but the stereotype persists: snipers are cold-blooded, remote, pitiless. As Eleanor Roosevelt said when meeting Lyudmila Pavlichenko: If you have a good view of the faces of your enemies through your sights and still fire to kill, how can ordinary people approve of you?
But the woman known as Lady Death defies such stereotypes. She comes across in her memoirs and the anecdotes of her peers as warm, funny, charming, a bookworm, a loving mother, an introvert who savored her alone time but could nevertheless be the life of the party. She did not even have the requisite ice-blue or cold gray eyes most snipers are described as having!
She was no naïf who learned to shoot at the front; she arrived in uniform already an accomplished markswoman. Neither did she come from the kind of rural family where a daughter might be expected to wield a rifle right out of the cradle. She was Ukrainian (though she described herself firmly as Russian when asked), a city girl and a booklover whose ambition was to be a historian, but she enjoyed the occasional outing at the gun range with her friends—enjoyed it enough that she decided to apply for an advanced marksmanship course. Though she acquired her skills as a hobby, she lost no time volunteering them in her country’s defense: a young woman went to the beach with her friends in the morning, heard the declaration of war at noon over lunch at a nearby café, and by nightfall was leaving La Traviata early to go enlist. It didn’t take long for the girl from Odessa—the graduate student who had been finishing the world’s nerdiest dissertation on Bogdan Khmelnitsky, the Ukraine’s accession to Russia in 1654, and the activities of the Pereyaslav Council—to begin racking up a serous tally.
A sniper’s official tally consisted only of confirmed kills, so Lyudmila’s true list of enemy dead probably did not stand at the official 309: fighting in two desperate sieges, she would not have had time or opportunity to verify all of her kills, and the enemies she downed fighting as a soldier rather than a sniper wouldn’t have been counted at all. Her true tally might have been less than the 309 eventually finalized for official purposes; it could also easily have been much more. What seems certain is that in less than eighteen months of fighting, Lyudmila Pavlichenko buried hundreds of enemies, was wounded at least four times, and earned the nickname Lady Death. Many of the feats described in this novel—her training of a platoon, the assaults on Gildendorf and No-Name Height, her recruitment of the ranger Vartanov whose family had been murdered, the Kabachenko homestead and the bond she formed with a young girl who had been raped by German soldiers (“Kill them all”)—are drawn directly from the memoir Lyudmila wrote later in life.
Soviet memoirs are long on fact and short on emotion; it isn’t the Soviet way to gush about feelings. Yet Lyudmila’s response to becoming such an efficient taker of lives come through as far from ghoulish. Making her first two kills under the eye of Captain Sergienko, she didn’t hesitate to down the two officers, yet admitted that firing on a target and firing on a human being were very different things. She disliked her own growing fame, viewing herself simply as a soldier with a job to do: the enemy were invaders who had been ordered to attack; she was a defender who had been ordered to push them back, and that was that. Her anger at the Germans flowered into hatred as she saw the damage Hitler’s forces inflicted on her homeland, but Lyudmila still prided herself on clean kills and utter professionalism. The only time she gave the order to shoot to wound rather than to kill was in the final defense of Sevastopol, where it was the only way to slow down an overwhelming enemy.
The Russian front was pure hell: the casualty rates were appalling, the weather brutal, the troops ill trained and under-equipped, almost as likely to be shot by their own officers (if they showed a single sign of faltering) as by the Germans. Women soldiers had an especially tough time of it. Red Air Force women like the Night Witches served together in all-female regiments or were at least grouped with their sister pilots in mixed regiments, but Red Army women were vastly outnumbered by male soldiers and commonly regarded as sexual perks for the officers. Turning down a superior’s advances could result in anything from physical assault to being left off lists for commendations and promotions. Lyudmila was intensely admired by the men in her company, whom she apparently handled with friendly but steely authority, but at least one source states that she incurred resentment for turning down men who outranked her. This could explain her lack of military decorations early in her fight . . . until a three-day duel with a German sniper catapulted her to fame.
Detractors disputed both that fame and her achievements. Even now, some insist that Lyudmila Pavlichenko was a fake, a pretty propaganda-department brunette with a memorized story designed to inspire the masses. Such claims nitpick at the inaccuracies in her memoir’s timeline, insist that the kind of platoon she described leading wasn’t yet formed, and cite her refusal to demonstrate her sharpshooting skills in America as proof she didn’t actually have any.
To me, Lyudmila Pavlichenko comes across as the real deal. Her memoir bears the stamp of Soviet propaganda, but her technical recall of a sniper’s skills, weapons, and routine is exactly where her voice is the most precise and vividly individual. There are inaccuracies in her timeline, but a woman piecing her memories together through the fog of war and the PTSD of multiple battlefield concussions is bound to get a few details wrong. The kind of sniper platoon she described leading didn’t exist yet in the Red Army, but Lyudmila was fighting in the early days of the war when everything was slapdash, and she was probably making up procedure as she went along. As for her on-tour nyet whenever she was asked to shoot on command (except for one gun-club demonstration in Chicago), her reasons come through loud and clear in her memoir: Lady Death scorned the idea of being trotted out like some show-pony circus shooter, and she absolutely refused to reduce her deadly skills to a parlor trick.
Her war wasn’t all mud, blood, and pain. Lyudmila had a sense of humor, which shines through when she recounts butting heads with oblivious superior officers or relaxing with her platoon in an evening of song, vodka, and scavenged treats after a successful raid. And despite her mandate of no fraternizing with male colleagues, she broke her own rules for a spectacularly romantic front-line love affair.
At twenty-four, Lyudmila had already endured a minefield of a love life. She says extremely little (and nothing good) of her first husband Alexei Pavlichenko, the older man who seduced and impregnated her after a dance when she was barely fifteen. Lyudmila’s only comment about Alexei, after he abandoned her and their son Rostislav, is: “Fortunately, my son is nothing like his father.” As a single mother she remained focused on her work, her education, and her son—so romance hit like a thunderbolt when she met a tall, funny, good-looking Red Army lieutenant in Sevastopol. Enter Lyonya Kitsenko, the man who wooed and won the most dangerous woman on the Russian front.
Kitsenko is frequently described as her junior sergeant and fellow sniper, her partner with whom she hunted night after night as part of a lethal, inseparable team—but Lyudmila described him as the lieutenant who commanded her company. My conjecture is that two men may have been confused, and that Lyudmila was romantically involved with both her company commander and her sniper partner at different points. Thus I separated the two and described Kitsenko as Lyudmila did: Lieutenant Alexei Arkadyevich Kitsenko, nicknamed Lyonya, her superior officer and eventually second husband. Whether they were legally married or not (he is not listed on her grave as her spouse), Lyudmila regarded Lyonya as her husband in every way that counted: they had a whirlwind courtship culminating in the attack where Lyonya carried the wounded Lyudmila off the front line, gave blood for her surgery, visited throughout her recovery, and invited her to dinner in his dugout (complete with flowers in a shell-casing vase!) the day she was released. He proposed that night; he and Lady Death were inseparable from then on.
It was the best time of Lyudmila’s war. She wrote that love was good for her shooting; while she was coming home to Lyonya she seemed to hit every target she aimed at, including the tense three-day duel where she and her sniper partner (to whom I gave the name of Konstantin Shevelyov, a name later crucial in her life) outwitted a German sharpshooter. But after barely three months together, Lyonya was hit by mortar fire right before Lyudmila’s eyes. He died in her arms hours later, and she nearly went mad from grief. She wasn’t able to return to shooting until she and her sniper partner grieved together at Lyonya’s grave. Then she returned to the front lines with a new fury: as she later told Eleanor Roosevelt, every German in her sights after that might as well have been the man who killed Lyonya.
Sevastopol fell months later, and Lyudmila likely would have been killed there (women snipers in the Red Army had about a 75 percent chance of dying in combat) had she not been wounded and evacuated a few weeks before. Despite her wish to return to the front, the propaganda department had other ideas. A missive had recently landed on Stalin’s desk from Washington, D.C., inviting a deputation of Soviet students to join Eleanor Roosevelt’s international student conference, and the Boss saw an opportunity: Lady Death was headed to America.
She certainly felt like a fish out of water, and the White House welcome breakfast did not go well: Lyudmila’s terse response to the First Lady’s comment about how a woman sniper could be relatable to Americans is drawn directly from her memoir, as are her responses to the astonishingly asinine questions she was asked at her first press conference. But one woman turned things around for Lyudmila: the First Lady, who offered her Soviet guest a ride in her convertible to that evening’s dinner party. Though her driving apparently alarmed Lady Death more than an entire panzer division, it signaled the beginning of an unlikely friendship.
It was Eleanor who introduced Lyudmila and her fellow delegates to FDR for a private meeting where they could discuss the hoped-for second front in Europe, and who escorted her on part of her subsequent goodwill tour around America. The idea of a First Lady and a Russian sniper becoming friends may seem wildly improbable, but many of their scenes in The Diamond Eye are taken directly from Lyudmila’s memoir: their discussions on American segregation (which appalled Lyudmila, as did British colonialism in India); Lyudmila falling asleep in the presidential limousine with her head on Eleanor’s shoulder; Lyudmila tumbling out of a canoe at the Hudson estate and ending up in the First Lady’s bedroom as Eleanor hemmed a pair of pink pajamas for her and they chatted for so long that FDR had to retrieve the unlikely BFFs for dinner!
Under Eleanor’s wing, Lyudmila found her feet in the spotlight. She met everyone from Charlie Chaplin to Woody Guthrie (who wrote a song for her, “Miss Pavlichenko”—find it on YouTube!) and became a passionate public speaker, never forgetting her mission of asking for American aid on behalf of her fellow soldiers. In Chicago she brought an audience roaring to their feet with the speech that cemented her fame: “Gentlemen, I have killed 309 fascist invaders by now. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?”
Eleanor and Lyudmila bid goodbye at a farewell dinner at the White House in October 1942. They continued to correspond for the next fifteen years, as FDR carried through on his promise to send American soldiers to Europe and Mila finished her war as a sniper instructor. In 1957, the widowed Eleanor came to the USSR on a goodwill tour of her own, and the former First Lady and the former sniper embraced with cries of welcome.
My author notes usually take time to explain where my fictional characters weave in with the historical ones. The Diamond Eye is different, because nearly every person named comes straight from the historical record. Lyudmila’s fellow delegates Pchelintsev and Krasavchenko; her officers General Petrov, Lieutenant Dromin, and Captain Sergienko; her platoon mates Fyodor Sedykh and old Vartanov; her Odessa friend Sofya and medical orderly friend Lena Paliy . . . all real. My only substantial fictional additions to the record are Vika, the ballerina turned tank driver (a heroine I have in mind for a future novel!), and Kostia Shevelyov, who is a fictionalized composite of two real men.
I have taken some liberties with the historical record to serve the novel. A few of Lyudmila’s front-line adventures were condensed and reordered: the Romanian attack with priests was slightly moved up, and her subsequent recovery moved to the hospital battalion rather than back in Odessa. The first sortie she fights with Kostia was fought with another recruit, and Lyonya is introduced earlier in The Diamond Eye than he appeared in real life—his time with Lyudmila was so limited, I couldn’t resist bringing him onstage sooner! Some events on the goodwill tour are also reordered: Lyudmila’s meeting with Laurence Olivier likely didn’t happen until she went to England, and FDR’s private tour of U.S. defense plants ended somewhat earlier and wasn’t intended to coincide with any of Lyudmila’s California press engagements.
Wherever I have conflicting information, such as the exact name of Lyudmila’s regiment or the precise evening of the Soviet delegation’s White House farewell, I have used Lyudmila’s version—likewise, I generally use her spellings of location names and Russian names, which may appear differently in modern maps and transliterations. Some of the facts and figures she quotes may not be accurate, but they are the facts and figures she would have believed were accurate at the time, so I have used them. There are also incidents in Lyudmila’s memoir which I have chosen to leave out, like a meeting with Stalin that probably didn’t happen. It has been something of a delicate dance to treat Lyudmila Pavlichenko’s memoir as the concrete original source of its heroine’s memories, yet also a document with which the propaganda office took some liberties.
Her memoir contains tantalizing gaps and silences which I’ve filled in with artistic license. Lyudmila states that she last saw her husband Alexei Pavlichenko three years before war broke out, and she makes no further mention of him. Likely he was one of the millions of Russian men who disappeared into the Red Army and died on the front—there is some evidence suggesting he was a doctor, so I brought him into the novel as a combat surgeon. His ultimate fate was unknown, so I crafted what I felt was a suitably satisfying end for the man who seduced a fifteen-year-old and abandoned her and their child.
The other place I filled in a historical gap is around Lyudmila’s sniper partner, and around her final husband Kostia Shevelyov. Lyudmila’s partner is named in her memoir as Fyodor Sedykh: such a relationship would have been as intimate as a working relationship could possibly be, yet she makes no mention of him after Sevastopol. Likewise, the man who became her husband after the war is a complete blank: we know nothing about Kostantin Shevelyov except his birth and death dates. Why does her memoir contain so little about two men who would have been so important to her?
I gave her a reason: Konstantin Shevelyov had good cause to fly under the radar, and his famous wife was doing her level best to keep him out of her own limelight. In the carnivorous Stalinist regime, there could be any number of reasons a man might want to lie low. Thus I turned Kostia into Lyudmila’s sniper partner so I could introduce Lady Death’s final husband into the story and pay homage to the records that indicate a romantic link between her and her partner, but also gave him a background that explains why she might list another name as her partner.
Lastly, the marksman: there was no known plot against President Roosevelt in 1942, though he narrowly escaped assassination in 1933 when Giuseppe Zangara fired on him from a crowd in Miami, and he also managed to escape being deposed the following year by a shadowy cabal (allegedly including some of America’s most prominent heads of industry) who hoped to replace him with a military dictator. By 1942, Roosevelt still had plenty of enemies who would have celebrated his death: isolationists, American fascists, political rivals who believed him a traitor to his race and class, and anti-communists who saw even a wartime alliance with the USSR as treason. Creating the marksman also allowed me to make sense of one of the most bizarre episodes of Lyudmila’s goodwill tour: the American millionaire William Jonson who fell in love with her on her tour, followed her from city to city, proposed marriage, and sent her a spectacular set of diamond jewelry with a note stating: “We will meet again.” According to Lyudmila’s memoir, they did not. But this was too good a story to ignore, so in my version they do meet again: first at the White House (which had much less stringent security in the forties than it does today) and then in Rock Creek Park, a stretch of wilderness slicing through the nation’s capital that has swallowed its share of bodies over the years. Murdered Washington intern Chandra Levy disappeared there for a year, despite modern search capabilities. Another park mystery is the lost ring of Teddy Roosevelt, which fell off during a presidential hike in 1902. It remains missing to this day, and I enjoyed crafting a possible fate for it, too!
I owe heartfelt thanks to many people who helped in the writing, researching, and production of this novel. My mother and husband, this book’s first cheerleaders. My wonderful critique partners Stephanie Dray and Stephanie Thornton. My beta readers and marvelously knowledgeable subject matter experts: Erin Davies and Outlaw, Charles F. A. Dvorak, Annalori Ferrell, Elena Gorokhova, and Shelby Miksch. My agent Kevan Lyon and editor Tessa Woodward, and the marvelous team at William Morrow. I would be lost without you all!
I would also have been lost without Lyudmila herself. I recommend her engrossing autobiography Lady Death: The Memoirs of Stalin’s Sniper for those wishing to know more about this fascinating woman. The English translation by David Foreman (Greenhill Books) proved invaluable in the research and writing of this novel. Lyudmila Pavlichenko was far more than a killer of men, and she paid a price for her tremendous courage. Although she survived her war, finished her dissertation, and achieved her dream of becoming a historian, she saw many of her friends die, she struggled with PTSD, and she outlived Kostia . . . but she devoted her later years to war veterans, recorded her story for posterity, and died in the arms of her beloved son, surrounded by family and swearing at death until the very end.
It’s sometimes said that World War II was won with British intelligence, American steel, and Soviet blood. This sweeping generalization bears a kernel of truth. Since the USSR became America’s enemy in the Cold War so soon after WWII’s end, it’s easy to forget that without them, the war against the Axis powers might have been lost. Of all Hitler’s mistakes, his colossal Napoleonic error in taking on the USSR was perhaps the most pivotal: without the eastern front soaking up so much of Germany’s manpower, the Allies might never have prevailed. The cost of that victory was millions of Red Army dead as Soviet blood gave American steel and British intelligence time to turn the tide. In The Rose Code I wrote about the war through the lens of British intelligence. The Diamond Eye is seen through the lens of Soviet blood—one woman’s fight to stanch its flow, first with her rifle and then with her voice as she crossed an ocean to bring American steel home to help her countrymen.