Girl With A Sniper Rifle: An Eastern Front Memoir

by Yulia Zhukova, Martin Pegler (Foreword)

In this vivid first-hand account we gain unique access to the inner workings of Stalin's Central Women’s Sniper School, near Podolsk in Western Russia.

Luliia was a dedicated member of the Komsomol (the Soviet communist youth organization) and her parents worked for the NKVD. She started at the sniper school and eventually became a valued member of her battalion during operations against Prussia.

She persevered through eight months of training before leaving for the Front on 24th November 1944 just days after qualifying. Joining the third Belorussian Front her battalion endured rounds of German mortar as well as loudspeaker announcements beckoning them to come over to the German side.

Luliia recounts how they would be in the field for days, regularly facing the enemy in terrifying one-on-one encounters. She sets down the euphoria of her first hit and starting her “battle count” but her reflection on how it was also the ending of a life.

These feelings fade as she recounts the barbarous actions of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. She recall how the women were once nearly overrun by Germans at their house when other Red Army formations had moved off and failed to tell them. She also details a nine-day stand-off they endured encircled by Germans in Landsberg.

Regularly suffering ill-health she took a shrapnel injury to her knee and had to be operated on without an anesthetic. She would eventually see the end of the war in Köngsberg.

Like her famous counterpart Pavlichenko she gained recognition but struggled to come to terms with war service. Haunted by flashbacks she burned the letters she sent home from the Front. She later discovered that of the 1885 graduates of her sniper school only 250 had died in war.

In this powerful, firsthand account we come up close to the machinations of the NKVD (the secret police) as well as the grueling toll of war and the breathtaking bravery of this female sniper.

Additional material includes notes by John Walter and an introduction by Martin Pegler.

Genres: History, World War II, War, Nonfiction, Russia, Memoir, Biography

256 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 30, 2019

Reviews

[Jean Blankenship · Rating 5 out of 5]

Girl with a Sniper Rifle was a surprise. It was about World war 2. The surprise was that it was about how the Russian women were so Important to the war. Yulia Zhukova of Russia, whose hometown was Uralic, joined the Young Communist League as a young girl. She wanted to help defend her country and people. She was brought up with a love for her country. She became a sniper for the Red Army. Training was very hard. There wasn’t any rest and not much food. She was a woman who shared with men all the horrors of war. She has written in such details about her life at the front and she became very close to her frontline friends, both men and women. She was awarded many medals. She did Cadet training at the Central Women’s Sniping School. Went to the front end in 1944. War ended and she arrived home on August 6, 1945. I think the reason that she wrote her story is so that the young people of Russia would remember the war of 1941 to 1945 and respect the veterans. I especially enjoyed all the photos at the end.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC.

[Cav · Rating 4 out of 5]

"‘Everything for the front! Everything for victory!’ - these words became the country’s main slogan during the four long years of the war..."

Girl with a Sniper Rifle was an interesting historical account.

Author Yulia Zhukova spent her early years in Uralsk, but her parents moved from city to city through their work for the secret police, the NKVD. Despite suffering from ill-health in her youth she eventually enlisted and trained to be a sniper. After the war she finished her studies at Moscow University Pedagogical Institute and worked as a Komsomol secretary in Moscow. She then became a school director of a school and worked for the Communist Party.


The author Martin Pegler writes this in the book's foreword:

"In late 1944 she went to the Central Women’s Sniper School in Moscow, from which she graduated and was promptly sent to the East Prussian front. There, her official tally as a sniper for the war was eight, although as she correctly points out, reality and official figures often varied widely. This could make the reader ask how her experiences were worthy of an entire book. But that would be to miss the essence of what is a truly fascinating account of the experiences of a very young girl caught up in what was arguably the was most savage and bestial fighting on any front since the middle ages..."
"...Despite her extensive sniper training, she was later transferred to a howitzer regiment in an infantry role, where she was the only woman. She had no privacy and was constantly molested, not by her own comrades who were fiercely protective of her, but by senior officers, who regarded the availability of women soldiers almost as a perk of rank.
Of equal interest is the continuation of her story in the hard post-war years, when she suffered from posttraumatic stress for 30 years in the form of terrible nightmares, and a total mental block about her past. Her first regimental reunion in 1975 was not only to open the floodgates of repressed memory but also effect a form of therapy, and she was finally able to acknowledge with pride the part she played in the defence of her homeland."

She describes the sniper school that she would be sent to:

"The Central Women’s Sniping School for which we were heading was born out of stern necessity - the war. Its midwife was the Central Committee of the Young Communist League. It was at its initiative that a course was established in 1942 to train top-line shooters and in July 1943, by edict of the USSR People’s Commissariat for Defence, the Central Women’s Sniping School was established on the basis of the existing women’s course.
The school was subsequently awarded the Banner of the Young Communist League Central Committee and the best cadets were given presentation sniper rifles. In accordance with an edict of the USSR Supreme Soviet, the school was awarded the Order of the Red Banner in January 1944. This was how the school’s contribution to sniper training was recognised.
The school was headed by an amazing woman - Captain Nora Pavlovna Chegodaieva, daughter of Pavel Chegodaiev, a revolutionary and lawyer who held several important political offices after the October Revolution. She had graduated in the 1920s from the Frunze Military Academy, which did not normally accept women: it took extraordinary persistence and obstinacy to become a student there. Nora possessed those qualities..."

Zhukova spends quite a bit of time with the backstory here. She doesn't cover her time at the front until past the halfway mark; Chapter 6. She spends a bit more time than it was worth in the early chapters covering her family life, her parents, upbringing, training at the sniper school, and other details.
There is also an afterword that is fairly long, where she discusses the aftermath of the war, Russia's role in it, and how it was recorded in the public record.

"We have just received our sniper’s rifles. On my right is Lyuba Ruzhitskaya, June 1944":


The book mentions this interesting historical tidbit, about the chambering of Russian guns:

"The Russians, astutely, ensured that all their front-line weapons were of 7.62 mm calibre (0.3 in., Drelineinaya, 'three lines’) to ensure that barrel-making machinery could be used for everything from the TT to the Maxim machine gun."

She drops this quote, about fear in warfare:

"I have often been asked the question: was it frightening during the war? It seems to me that this is not the right question to ask. Every normal person loves life and values it. As for the war, I am in agreement with the poet Yulia Drunina:
'Anyone who claims that war’s not scary, Knows not the actuality of war...'"

Interestingly enough, despite her father being carted away and imprisoned by the NKVD as "an enemy of the people," she somehow still ended up a Communist...
She also seems to bear no ill will to the man directly responsible for that, and for the Red Purges, the mass famines, and the wholesale death and misery created with the expansion of the Russian Gulag labour camp system. She writes this of Comrade Stalin:

"But the entire world has acknowledged our victory; the entire world admired the feats of the Soviet people, who saved humanity from Fascism; the entire world paid due tribute to Stalin as an outstanding figure of his time..."

*************************

The story told here by Zhukova was an interesting one. I enjoyed hearing this historical account. Zhukova writes with a straightforward easy style, making this one a very readable book that shouldn't have a problem holding the reader's attention.
I would recommend it to anyone interested.
4 stars.

[Medusa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a lot here regarding the sniper's craft, and there is some cringy Soviet apologia and some other regrettable stuff at the end, but this is still a candid, open and forthright memoir of a woman who saw combat in WW2. I'm glad I read it and got to hear her story.

[Jessica Rich · Rating 3 out of 5]

It isn't a bad read - you will need to keep in mind the author and the time period when reading. I had a hard time connecting with the elements of what was being told but I am happy that this person's experience was recorded and can be remembered and experienced by others.

[Olga Miret · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thank Rosie Croft, from Pen & Sword, for providing me an early hardback copy of this non-fiction title that I freely chose to review.
I reviewed The Sniper Encyclopedia a while back and I became fascinated by the data about female snipers, so I was happy to have this opportunity to review a personal account by one of them.
As the description explains, Luliia (or Yulia, depending on the spelling) Zhukova was one of many girls who fought during WWII as part of the USSR forces. She wrote this book in her 90s (she was 92 when the original version was published), and it is clear from her introduction that she was somewhat reluctant to write a memoir, as she, like many others, thought that only people who’d led extraordinary lives should write such accounts. But she changed her mind as she realised that all lives reflect their historical era, and she also felt that the young generations should have access to different, personal, and alternative accounts to the official narrative of the war in her country (that is not particularly enamoured by). This reflects a major turning point for her, because as we learn when we progress through the book, for many years she wished to bury all memories of that period, suffered terrible nightmares, and made a concerted effort to get rid of any reminders (including burning correspondence, documents, pictures, etc.). Despite all that, there are a handful of photographs, some from her time as a soldier, some from the seventies, when she started attending reunions of veterans of the war, and some more recent, of her with her daughter and granddaughter, which help put a face to the story, and also to some of the other people she mentions. There is also an insert talking about the weapons, and an appendix at the end listing the graduates of the Central Women’s Sniping School who were awarded the Order of Glory 2nd and 3rd class.
Although she does not consider herself extraordinary in any way, she was a determined young woman, and a brave and eager one, as she has always suffered from ill health but that did not prevent her from enrolling into a course to become a sniper, even before she was 18, and then going to war, despite that going against the wishes of her mother and her step-father. Luliia does not describe her life before the war in a lot of detail, but there is enough to give a good understanding of what kind of family she grew up in (she was an only child, so her parents would have been even more reluctant), and it provides us with some understanding of the dynamics of the era (her step-father had been imprisoned once even though he held an official position).
Once Luliia gets to sniper school, her life changes drastically. The narration comes to life with stories of comradery, of life in a group of women, of living away from home for the first time, having to wear strange uniforms, having to follow a harsh discipline, missing her mother but becoming much more independent and proud of her achievements. By the time she goes to war, Luliia has grown up, although nothing has quite prepared all of them for what is to come.
The author acknowledges that she might misremember things (and recounts her memory of her first kill and compares it to the account of another woman in her regiment, and there are significant differences), and she does not always recall all dates and locations, but she is excellent at recreating the atmosphere, the smells, the bodily sensations, the fear, the anxiety, and the brief moments of joy (having a bath after days in the trenches, sleeping in a proper bed, receiving any kind of good news…). This is not a list of battles and skirmishes, but a personal account of what it felt to be there, especially as a woman, and the instances of what nowadays would be classed as harassment (almost a way of life) but also of kindness and support. She got separated from the rest of her regiment and ended up joining a male unit, with the difficulties you can imagine. So, although she is not well-known, her experiences deserve to be told, read, and remembered.
There are many moments that give one pause when reading the book, and not because the author goes out of her way to overdramatise things. If anything, her style is matter-of-fact and understated. Often, what is not said is as poignant as what she does say. There are no complaints and the only bitterness she expresses is towards accounts of the war that she feels have robbed those who took part in it of their pride, making them feel ashamed, and some being abused and harassed because of it (to the point where she mentions some veterans who took their own lives because of it). Her opinions will not be to everybody’s taste, but when she mentions an incident when a veteran attended a school and a youth asked him why they had fought so hard in the war and told him that if they hadn’t, Germany would have conquered them and now they would have as good a life as the Germans did, her upset is understandable. We might agree or not with the politics that brought the conflict into being, but the people who got caught in it and put their lives at risk deserve respect.
She shares a poem from Nikolai Berezovsky’s “The Last Front Line Veteran” that I found quite moving and thought I’d share with you:
When out last front-line veteran
Shuts his eyes and lies in peace,
Doubtless, at that moment
We’ll all feel a great unease.
The heart of every Russian
Will be struck by a strange malaise.
If the sun’s out brightly shining,
It will yield to a darkening haze.
We’ll feel an untimely shudder,
We’ll sense a feverish glow,
And the maple in mother’s garden
Will suddenly bow down low.
I think this is an important book that I recommend to those interested in WWII, especially in personal accounts, and more particularly those looking for Eastern Front memoirs. Also, to historians or readers eager to learn more about women’s involvement in WWII, and, in general, to anybody keen to read a memoir from an era we should never forget.

[Randal White · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book to be fascinating! The author, now in her 90's, details her experiences in World War 2 as a sniper for the Russian army. Never bragging, yet obviously very proud of her contributions, she bares her soul to the reader of her history. From being a teenager who wanted to defend her country, all the way through to today, she makes you feel like she is sitting at a table with you, telling her story. And what a story! The sacrifices she suffered, the horrors she witnessed, the PTSD she experienced; it's amazing she is still alive. As she relates the extremely difficult training she went through, the sexism she endured, and her escape from the Nazi's, you will feel your heart being ripped out of your chest. Never dwelling on the blood and gore, simply telling her story and what she did to save her country, this should be a book that everyone interested in World War 2, and in Russia today, should read!

[Tom Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

200 pages of text - not badly translated - being a bit of a Russophile (and how can one not admire a people of such strength, tenacity, resourcefulness, and patriotism? The sheer amount of punishment they have absorbed is amazing).

To be as earnest as Yulia Zhukova is, all through her life; she is now 94 (worthy article on her life here https://www.pressreader.com/uk/histor... ) could of course lead to exploitation but Yulia was a survivor and there is a story in that simple fact.

[Andrea Di Bernardo · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Russian front was, from the point of view of the ferocity of the fighting, the hardest and most difficult front during the Second World War. This war of ideologies before armies involved a total mobilization of the Soviet population, to such an extent that the Red Army enlisted women in large numbers (other armies did too), but above all used them in combat roles such as tankers and sharpshooters. In this case, thanks to the work of recovering many memories of the German and Soviet side carried out by Greenhill Books, we are faced with a very interesting memoir: Yulia Zhukova, in fact, tells us about her past as a sniper.
Yulia passed away recently, sadly, but her war story survives. The book tells of her youth and her ideological commitment, despite the first years of her life being marred by the arrest of her father, in the context of Stalin's paranoia for sabotage. All this did not affect her faith in the Soviet state, to tell the truth also present in the old Yulia, which leaves us some reflections on the fragmentation of the post-1991 Soviet Union. Both these and the stories of war and training, actually very human stories and reflecting the camaraderie between very young girls at the sniper school are some of the most interesting parts of the book.
The same human trajectory, typical of the Soviet state, which led Yulia from being a worker in an arms factory to a volunteer enlisted in a battalion of elite marksmen, is interesting. Her commitment is even more important if, as we read in the memoirs, it turns out that Yulia was certainly not in good health and was close to dying.
Her enlistment then saw her deployed in the last stages of the war, certainly not bloodless for the Red Army, which was still fighting a highly motivated enemy in East Prussia. There the descriptions of the war actions make us think of a strong emotional impact on the young girl.
And it is precisely the desire to forget that nightmare that was the war, to distance Yulia from every comrade she met, from her memories until she burned the letters and "put in a drawer" every legacy of that conflict that had made her grow too fast. In this Yulia is very human in the description of that sense of oblivion, but also of the will, spent some time to heal the wounds of memory, to rediscover the pride of having been part of something great and unique. That recovery of the testimonies, which conflict with hers, in the encounter with the old dormitories. And finally, the slow transformation of Soviet society, which at a certain point forgets the enormous effort made by that generation, a society that perhaps just wants to restart, or perhaps as it happens too often simply loses its historical memory. I think this is the most interesting part of the book because it compares those who fought and, unfortunately, for age reasons, are disappearing, and those who do not understand the great and terrible clash that was the Second World War.
Another memoir published by Greenhill Books that combines attention to the selection of primary sources, and which is going to be included in that "Sniper Library" that has released so many interesting titles in recent years.

[Lonny Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author is obviously not a professional writer, though the book is well written. About 2/3 of the book is dedicated to her life before she joined the Red Army and her training after she joined. I wish she had included more about her actual frontline experiences. She enlisted at the age of 17, late in the war, and arrived in the frontlines in the winter of 1944. She was an ordinary soldier, not a hero. Women in the Red Army received little in the way of special treatment. They wore the same clothing, ate the same food, used the same weapons, used the same facilities as the men. This of course, lead to embarrassing situations for the women and inappropriate behavior by some of the men. Zhukova writes that she was lucky to have protectors, men who treated her with respect and shielded her from those who wouldn't. Her descriptions of being in battle are matter of fact. I got the feeling that she is a very down to earth, practical woman. She describes stalking a German sniper with the help of a partner. She fired twice and is not sure if she got him, but after her shots, he didn't reappear. She quite honestly points out the difference between how she remembers her first kill and how she described it in a letter written at the time.

There is a level of patriotism/nationalism here that was hard for me to grasp. I love the US and would defend her if necessary, but Zhukova seems to feel that Stalin and the Communist Party can do no wrong. The last chapter is a bit of a rant about the evils of Perestroika, the failures of post Stalin leaders, and her disappointment at the breakup of the USSR. It also details how the service of veterans has been devalued to the point that some were attacked and their medals stolen to be sold to collectors.

She briefly mentions suffering from what is obviously PTSD. How she refused to talk about the war and had nightmares about her experiences. She finally found relief when she attended the 30TH reunion of her unit and spoke with her comrades in arms about the war.

It is an interesting memoir of a part of WW2 we seldom hear about. I recommend it.

[Melisende · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yulia's story is slightly different in that she was no sharp-shooter prior to enlisting, which she saw as her patriotic duty. A sickly child who worked in the local factory to support the war effort, she was determined to contribute more. She was dedicated member of the Komsomol (the Soviet communist youth organization) and her parents worked for the NKVD. Completing her training at the central Women's Sniper School, by the time Yulia saw active service in East Prussia and Poland in 1944, female snipers were not unusual. Wounded, she returned to combat until the war ended. Unlike Lyudmilia, she was not a poster-girl for the Russians, but returned to her village and life, struggling to deal with and accept her part in the war; acceptance did not come until much later in life.

Both memoirs (reviewed in conjunction with Lady Death: The Memoirs of Stalin's Sniper ) are highly readable offering a different yet similar view of their experiences - we often comment that fact is sometimes more enthralling than fiction. Pavlichenko, the historian, would take a more academic approach, supplementing her diary with historical research; whilst Zhukova relied on memory, letters (that escaped being destroyed as she tried to forget her past) and remembrances of her fellow cadets. Both women were dedicated in their commitment to both Russia and the Russian war effort - "... dying for the motherland was considered a worthwhile sacrifice ...". It is hoped that readers will discover, through both works, the camaraderie, strength of spirit, unflinching loyalty that these two women - and the many others like them - displayed in the face of the terror of war. How many readers are left wondering whether or not they could do the same.

See full review @ Melisende's Library

[C. G. Telcontar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well.... this started with great promise and bogged down into boot camp glory days reminiscing with a bit of front line action to season the mix, followed by trivial material and ending up with a protracted grinding of the axes manifesto. She's got reactionary "it was better in my day" stamped all over every paragraph from boot camp on, making excuses for the Red Army's behavior in Germany at war end by stating lamely... "I didn't see this where I was at, therefore it didn't happen. And by the way, we were nice to the German civilians." There's a curious and confusing section on why she doesn't trust updated casualty figures given for the Soviet Union and absolute rage that Russian society has forgotten the war and doesn't honor its veterans as it used to, a familiar gripe in many, many counties around the world of wars past and veterans' sacrifices tossed into the heap of indifference that is a nation's fragmentary attention span.

If this were a metal album review I'd go with the standard line, "All filler, no killer," to sum it up. If you're a hardcore WW2 completionist, go for it. Otherwise, only if it really catches your fancy.

[Sharyn Price · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't know what to expect from this book. What I found was not only an engaging story but an unexpected insight into the beliefs and motivations of an ordinary Russian woman who could readily volunteer to work long hours in a factory or risk her life to shoot the enemy. 'Patriotism' wasn't discussed as a major theme or held up as a shining national value, as it is in the USA, but rather her love of her homeland and fellow citizens simply suffused Yulia's descriptions and decisions.
Turning her back on her history and destroying mementoes of wartime service was an instinctive way to put the war behind her, yet ultimately Yulia realised that there were so many women with something in common and she needed to remake those connections.
It doesn't matter what our present day political beliefs are, I think many women will be surprised to see how much they have in common with a woman who could find it in herself to kill the enemy in her youth and dote on her grandchildren decades later. Indeed, the two are anything but contradictory!

[Paul Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written account of a very young female Russian sniper in WW2, but the real strength of this long term diary is how the author feels about the post war years, about how veterans were treated and thought of.
There is no heroic telling of adventures here, nor any detectable exaggeration of experience. It's a straightforward well written passionate book, and greatly appreciated for that.
Due to post war changes in political opinion I think that here in the west (I'm in the UK), we don't give enough credit nor thanks to the Russian war generation, perhaps we should.

[Cristie Underwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author's painstaking research and attention to detail is obvious in the writing of this book. There were many facts that I only discovered after reading this!

[Ben GS · Rating 4 out of 5]

Audiobook

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel giving a memoir a star rating to be inappropriate.

An insightful look at pre war training, war experiences and post war attitudes in Russia. Yulia draws attention to the role her gender played in her military life, her love for her country, her fellow soldiers and the people of her homeland she protected with vigour.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is truly is a mix of vivid and fascinating characters, Historical saga, dastardly well written and intricate story-line. !