[2] They moved her to Sretensk where Maria began a relationship with a local Jewish man named Yakov (or Yankel) Buk.

When she insisted that she wanted to fight with the men, the commander helped her compose a telegram to Tsar Nicholas II requesting his personal permission.

[3] When she obtained his approval, she underwent three months' training[4] and was sent to front-line duty with the 5th Corps, 28th Regiment of the Second Army, stationed at Polotsk.

[1] After she was wounded in the arm and leg, Bochkareva worked as a medical sister until she returned to the front as a corporal in charge of eleven men.

[1] After the abdication of the Tsar in early 1917 due to the February Revolution, she proposed to Mikhail Rodzianko the creation of an all-female combat unit that she claimed would fix the Army's morale problem.

[4] Once she agreed to lead the unit, her proposal was approved by Army Commander-in-Chief Brusilov, and she approached Minister of War Alexander Kerensky.

[7][3] The rushed training of the battalion was led by twenty-five male instructors from the Volunskii Regiment of the Petrograd Military District.

The women of the unit performed well in combat, but the vast majority of male soldiers, already demoralised, had little inclination to fight.

[12][13] While in New York, Bochkareva dictated her memoirs, Yashka: My Life As Peasant, Exile, and Soldier, to a Russian emigre journalist named Isaac Don Levine.

[14][3] After leaving the United States, she traveled to Great Britain where she was granted an audience with King George V. The British War Office gave her 500 rubles of funding to return to Russia.

In April 1919, she returned to Tomsk and attempted to form a women's medical detachment under White Army Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, but before she could complete this task she was recaptured by the Bolsheviks.

[3] Maria Bochkareva is one of the heroines of the Russian film Battalion directed by Dmitriy Meskhiev and released to cinemas in February 2015.