Soviet Union -- History -- Revolution, 1917-1921 -- Personal narratives; World War, 1914-1918 -- Soviet Union
A great many women who had seen service in men’s regiments were leaving
them and joining one or another of the women’s regiments which were
forming all over Russia about that time. The largest of these regiments
was being trained for action in Moscow. There were about two thousand
women in this battalion, which was formed and recruited by a women’s
committee, “The Society of Russian Women to Help the Country.” Among
the women was Madame Morosova, before the war prominent socially, but
since the war almost entirely occupied with relief work. She was a very
gay and laughter-loving person, but she had fed and clothed and helped
on their way thousands of refugees. She had turned her house into a
maternity hospital at times, and she had given large sums of money for
the relief of women and children. Finally the women soldiers appealed
to her as the most important work to be assisted and her whole energies
last summer were devoted to the battalion. Princess Kropotkin, a
relative of the celebrated Prince Pierre Kropotkin, was another member
of the society. She had a Red Cross hospital until the army desertions
began, and then she closed the hospital and turned to recruiting women.
Mme. Popova, vice-president of the society, is one more untiring
worker. In August she obtained Kerensky’s consent to go to Tomsk, her
old home, and organize a battalion there.
The Moscow regiment was being drilled by a colonel and half a dozen
younger officers, all of whom seemed immensely proud of their command.
Twenty picked women of the regiment were going daily to the officers’
school and when ready were to be given commissions in the regular army.
In Petrograd a regiment of 1,500 women was almost ready for the
trenches when I saw them last in August. They too were to be officered
by women, two score being a daily attendance at a military school. On
August 20 I saw these 1,500 women march out of their barrack in the old
Engineers’ Palace, to go into camp preparatory to going to the front.
This palace was once the home of the mad Emperor Paul, son of Catherine
the Great. He was assassinated there and his restless ghost is supposed
to haunt the gusty corridors. I asked Captain Luskoff, commander of
the regiment, if he had found out what the Emperor Paul thought of the
women soldiers, and he laughed and promised to report later on that
point.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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