<p>A lot of countries out there are missing out on approximately 50% of their untapped badassery potential by not letting women into their military combat arms.&nbsp; I know a lot of folks out there are all like "OMG d00d WTF ROTFLOL chicks with guns YAH R1GHT ORLY SRSLY", but what those jerks don't get is that there are women out there like Lyudmilia Pavlichenko who are just as adept at jamming a high-caliber bullet into your eye as even the most badass dude is.&nbsp; In her service to Mother Russia during the Great Patriotic War (aka World War II), Lyudmila was a fucking kickass bitch from hell, notching more confirmed kills than any woman in modern military history and racking up kill counts that make Freddy Krueger look like that one Teletubbie everyone thinks is gay.</p>
<p>Pavlichenko was a regular average college chick at Kiev State University in the Ukraine when the goddamned Nazis decided they were going to be total fucking assholes and invade the Soviet Union for no reason at all other than to try and show the rest of the world how big their dicks were.&nbsp; This obviously pissed off a lot of Russians, because they weren't really down with having bombs dropped on them or being run over by tanks, so a couple million confirmed Communists decided they were going to enlist in the military and start kicking some Fascist asses like Indiana Jones.&nbsp; Pavlichenko wasn't any less patriotic than her fellow Russkies and was super pumped to partake in some of the Nazi face-punching action.</p>
<p>She marched down to her local recruiter and told him she wanted to "get in on the major asskickings".&nbsp; The jackass recruiting sergeant took one look at this 24 year-old college babe and was all like, "hey toots don't you think you'd rather be like a nurse or something?&nbsp; I've got this 'sexy nurse' costume I found at the adults-only Halloween costume shop... why don't you slip that on instead?"&nbsp; But like any good badass, Lyudmila wasn't going to waste her time stitching up bullet wounds when she could be out there creating them, so she judo flipped the recruiter through a plate glass window, stomped his balls with a high-heeled shoe and then whipped out her motherfucking MARKSMANSHIP CERTIFICATE because OH YEAH she joined a shooting club at age 14 and was such a crack shot with a bolt-action rifle that she could load her gun with rubber bullets and use it to program her number into your cell phone from three miles away.&nbsp; The sergeant took one look at the&nbsp;<em>Official Certificate of Ultimate Badassery +5</em>&nbsp;and attached her to the Red Army's 25th Infantry Division.</p>
<p>Using a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.surplusrifle.com/russianmosin189130/index.asp" target="blank">Mosin-Nagant 1891/30</a>&nbsp;7.62mm rifle with a 4x optical scope, Pavlichenko took to the wilderness around Odessa and started a rather prolific career in Nazi Hunting.&nbsp; In the first several months of the war, she notched 187 confirmed sniper kills and earned a reputation as someone not to be fucked with.&nbsp; It is a little known fact that this is the reason why even to this day "187" is gangsta code for "capping someone in the motherfuckin' head".&nbsp; After Pavlichenko had pretty much managed to kill every single sentient creature in the greater Odessa area she was transferred and fought in the Svastopol Campaign on the Crimean Peninsula, where she scored another 122 stone-cold headshots, giving her a combined total of 309 confirmed kills, including 36 confirmed German sniper kills (one of whom had himself notched over 500 kills).&nbsp; That's more people than fucking Charles Bronson killed in all the&nbsp;<em>Death Wish</em>&nbsp;movies combined, and if you check it against&nbsp;<a href="http://www.moviebodycounts.com/Top-Characters.htm">moviebodycounts.com</a>&nbsp;you'll see that not even fucking Rambo can touch this bitch in terms of sheer asskickery.&nbsp; I'm not exactly sure what the tabulation process looks like over there, but I'd imagine she'd also probably get some bonus points simply by virtue of the fact that she was killing Nazis.</p>
<p>Sadly, someone eventually dropped a mortar shell on her and blew her shit up.&nbsp; I don't think I need to tell you that she was so badass that she survived having some heavy artillery explode in her face, but obviously it slowed her down a little and she had to be taken off active duty.&nbsp; She spent the remainder of the war working as an instructor at Russian sniper school, where she educated a whole new generation of dead-eye balls-out snipers.&nbsp; After the war she completed her degree in History at Kiev State and got a job as a military historian working for the Soviet Defense Ministry.&nbsp; I'm going to go ahead and give her extra badass cred for finding a job in the fucking field as well, because God knows I'm not doing shit with my History degree these days.</p>
<p>For her service to her country and her ability to fuck up Fascists with the unholy realness, Lyudmila Pavlichenko was promoted to Major, awarded the Gold Star Medal (the USSR's highest honor) and given the title "Hero of the Soviet Union".&nbsp; She was a crack shot, a skilled sniper, and a fucking badass.</p>
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<p align="center"><img src="http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pavlichenko.jpg" alt="" vspace="8" /></p>
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<p><span style="color: #cc0000; font-size: xx-small;">Links:</span><br /><br /><a href="http://www.soviet-awards.com/digest/pavlichenko/pavlichenko1.htm" target="blank">Mankiller: Lyudmila Pavlichenko</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.snipersparadise.com/history/pavlichenk.htm" target="blank">Sniper's Paradise</a><br /><br /><a href="http://ww2db.com/person_bio.php?person_id=296&amp;list=Ground" target="blank">WWII Database</a></p>