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History’s Deadliest Woman and Other Lesser Known Killers

Khalid Elhassan September 6, 2019 54 min

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A 1918 propaganda poster in St. Petersburg, declaring ‘Death to the Bourgeois and its Lapdogs – Long Live the Red Terror’. Pinterest

38. The Russian Civil War’s Femme Fatale

Rozalia Zemlyachka returned to Moscow in 1914, seemingly a spent force, only to spring back to life during the 1917 Russian Revolution. As a founding member of the Executive Committee of the Moscow Soviet, she was on the ground floor of the Bolshevik hijacking of that revolution. Indeed, Zemlyachka played a key role in securing Moscow for the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution. In the ensuing Russian Civil War, she split her time between Moscow and various Bolshevik field armies, where she bucked up the troops as an electrifying speaker and political agitator. Lenin made her chief political commissar for the 8^th Army in Ukraine, then for that the 13^th Army. Her most famous – or infamous mark – however was made during the Red Terror.

A Cheka execution squad during the Red Terror. Pinterest

The Red Terror was a period of extreme repression and mass killings carried out by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War, that began in 1918, after a failed attempt at assassinating Lenin. Zemlyachka was involved in the repression campaign from the start, advocating for the annihilation of class enemies, and taking part in the first batches of executions in Moscow. However, her zeal and methods alarmed even Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka (forerunner of the NKVD and KGB). Considering that Dzerzhinsky was known as “Iron Felix“, alarming him must have taken some doing, yet that is just what Zemlyachka did. So in 1920, she was bundled out of Moscow and sent to Crimea, as Secretary of the Crimean Regional Committee of the Russian Communist Party.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.