Ludmila Mikhailovna Pavluchenko, a young Soviet sniper has written a story from the World War II epics at the age of only 25 after she succeeded in sniping a large number of Hitler's soldiers.
Ludmila was born in 1916 in the Ukrainian town of Bela Tserkov to a military father and a mother who took advantage of her English proficiency to teach the young. Ludmila herself was a superior student. She received a diploma in historical sciences at Kiev National University after she moved to the Ukrainian capital to pursue her studies, A master's thesis was offered, but it did not give her time. World War II broke out, and Hitler's Nazi armies began to invade the western borders of the Soviet Union.
With the outbreak of the war, the Soviet military forces were looking for competent soldiers and commissioned a group of experienced snipers to search for a number of snipers whom the Soviet army could use in its war against Nazism. Ludmila drew the attention of researchers to her ability to snip during one of the competitions held by the University during She studied, surpassed all male colleagues in one of the shooting fields.
A new beginning
Ludmila began a new chapter of her life when she joined an intensive training course for professional shooters of 6 months to improve her skill at sniping at a military institute. On June 22, 1941, Ludmila joined the front.
Ludmila says in her book published in 1958 that she did not accept the front at first. Her colleagues did not accept the presence of girls in one of the most dangerous units of the Soviet army, the 25th emergency brigade, but she drew attention again to her proficiency during her first days as a Soviet soldier. For its existence, which yielded great benefits to the Soviet army.The young sniper waited until dawn, and then emerged from her military unit carrying her rifle and binoculars and headed to the front without any attention to the weather, waiting for the Nazi soldiers to fall into the range of fire, and then unleash its deadly skill.
Ludmila spent 255 days on the front, where 309 Nazi soldiers, including 36 snipers, were taken from June 1941 to July 1942, one year after joining the army.
Ludmila's tournaments would not have stopped if she had not been hit by the war zone during the battle of Sevastopol.
Ludmila is out of the field
After her injury, the military leadership withdrew from the front and was sent along with the official Soviet delegation, which traveled to the United States and Canada to persuade the Allies to accelerate intervention in the war and open a new front against the Nazis. During that visit, Ludmila met US President Franklin Roosevelt, The first Soviet citizens the US president received at the White House.
During a press conference in the state of Chicago, she was bombarded with a barrage of questions. She had a hand in the hand of a Soviet delegate in which she had to say about the USSR and Joseph's tournaments Stalin, but she ignored all this and said in perfectly sound English: "Gentlemen, I am 25 years old, and I have spent 309 Nazi invaders, do not you seem to have long been hiding behind my back."
Ludmila was promoted to the rank of "pioneer". She did not practice sniping again, but she worked in the training of snipers until the end of the war. In 1943 she was awarded the Golden Medal of the Hero of the Soviet Union and printed her photo on a postage stamp as a kind of honor.
After the end of the war Ludmila did not forget her desire to complete the study. She studied at the University of Kiev and worked in the history profession. From 1945 to 1953, she held an important position in the Russian Navy, the assistant commander.Ludmila died on Oct. 10, 1974 at the age of 58 and was buried in the Russian capital Moscow. Her story inspired many filmmakers. Russian director Sergei Murkitsky used her own book to produce a 120-minute film, "The battle in which a large number of victims were killed and wounded. The film was awarded the Golden Eagle Award by the Russian Academy of Film and Arts in 2015.
