Lyudmila Pavlichenko
Lyudmila Mikhailovna Pavlichenko (; 12 July 191610 October 1974) was a Soviet sniper in the Red Army during World War II, credited with 309 kills. She is regarded as one of the top military snipers of all time and the most successful female sniper in history.
Nina Lobkovskaya
She was born the eldest of five children in Siberia. Her family moved to Stalinabad in the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic following the ill health of her father Alexei who had enlisted in the Red Army in 1942 before being killed in the battle for Voronezh in October of the same year. While the Second World War was not fought in Tajikistan itself, after the arrival of numerous refugees from the war to the Tajik SSR Lobkovskaya took the impact of the war to heart and volunteered for the military after graduating from school under the advice of the Komsomol.
Lobkovskaya was one of 300 women sent to Veshnyaki in Eastern Russia to train as snipers at the Central Women’s Sniper Training School. From February 1945 until the end of the war, Lobkovskaya commanded a company of female snipers who eventually saw action in the Battle of Berlin. On one night while defending a section of road the unit assisted in the capture of 27 enemy combatants. During the war she reached 89 confirmed kills of enemy combatants, having fought on the Baltic and Belorussian Fronts.