Mariya Oktyabrskaya ⚔️ A Soviet War Hero 💃 #Women'sHistoryMonth
To close off the Women's History Month there's one woman that should get on the list of Disney princesses and that is if you asked me Mariya Vasilyevna Oktyabrskaya (16 August 1905 – 15 March 1944), who got dubbed the Tank-Driving Widow.
Mariya was one of ten children born from poor Ukrainian parents on the Crimean Peninsula as a serf, which was a social status of a peasant under feudalism. This meant that everything that she did or wanted to do, she needed permission from her feudal lord. So, when the social revolution came around when she was twelve (12), communism was her way out of the antiquated system by getting an education and being employed.
And then, Germany broke the nonaggression (Nazi-Soviet) pact in 1941 with the biggest military invasion towards the Soviets, which resulted in the death of Mariya's husband Ilya in August 1941, who was send off to the front. Because Mariya was send away to safety to Tomsk in Siberia, it took two years before the news of the death of her late husband had reached her.
When the sad news reached Mariya she sold off all of her belongings to order the construction of a tank and named it the Fighting Girlfriend and wrote a letter to Stalin to demand her being send to the frontline as the tank driver of the commissioned machine.
Stalin and his government gave Mariya permission to serve in the army and really prepared her in tank driving, by letting her go through the real five months course, because they believed it would benefit the public's opinion of the war's efforts. Even though some fellow male officers made fun of her because she was a woman, she put all of that rage into destroying and killing and even sometimes putting her own life in danger, which also resulted in her rising to the rank of sergeant.
Her reckless but brave behavior became the dead of her in 1944, when she got out of her tank, made some field repairs and got into a coma after being struck in the head by fragments of an anti tank shell. Mariya gave her last breath after two months after the incident and posthumously gotten awarded with Hero of the Soviet Union; the Soviet Union's highest honor for bravery during combat.
After doing my research about this brave woman and writing about her, I must say that I really look up to her and that I'm really fascinated by her story and her bravery, despite her recklessness. Even though she was also driven by anger, at least she knew what she wanted and gave everything and did what she could to further that cause.
Was my pleasure and looked like the community where I needed to end this month with 😊.