This could have been just Stalinist propaganda. There’s no telling. The USSR liked to brag that women had made great advances under socialism and so there were women pilots and women shock workers etc. etc. How much of it was true is debatable.
“This could have been just Stalinist propaganda.”
Most likely.
We should have gone through and purged all the communists out of Russia in 1945-46.
Would be a different and better world today.
I found a web site several years ago in which two guys did a massive amount of research to determine the accuracy of the various nations claims for air to air victories.
They finally concluded that the Germans were the most accurate followed by the U.S. then Japan and last of all Russia.
Despite the fact that many of the Japanese claims turned out to be false, they did not think they were purposely lying. A lot of things happen in the fog of war which can cause mistakes.
The Russians tho were just plain making it up. Of course they really did shoot down a lot of German planes but their claims were way overstated.
I suspect the same is true of their sniper claims.
For instance the famous Stalingrad sniper battle between Major Koenig and Zaitsev actually never happened. That is not to say that Zaitsev (however you spell his name) was not a deadly sniper. I suppose there were a lot of those Russian female sniper who did indeed kill Germans, just the totals were not even close to being accurate.
The Red Army did use female snipers. And I would not have dated any of them.
Pavlichenko was sent to Canada and the United States for a publicity visit and became the first Soviet citizen to be received by a US President when Franklin Roosevelt welcomed her to the White House. Pavlichenko was later invited by Eleanor Roosevelt to tour America relating her experiences. While meeting with reporters in Washington, D.C. she was dumbfounded about the kind of questions put to her. “One reporter even criticized the length of the skirt of my uniform, saying that in America women wear shorter skirts and besides my uniform made me look fat”.[3][8] Pavlichenko appeared before the International Student Assembly being held in Washington, D.C., and later attended CIO meetings and made appearances and speeches in New York City and Chicago. In Chicago, she stood before large crowds, chiding the men to support the second front. “Gentlemen,†she said, “I am 25 years old and I have killed 309 fascist occupants by now. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?†Her words settled on the crowd, then caused a surging roar of support.[9] The United States gave her a Colt semi-automatic pistol. In Canada she was presented with a sighted Winchester rifle now on display at the Central Armed Forces Museum in Moscow. While visiting in Canada along with Vladimir Pchelintsev (fellow sniper) and Nikolai Krasavchenko (Moscow fuel commissioner) they were greeted by thousands of people at Toronto’s Union Station.
On Friday November 21, 1942, Lieutenant Pavlichenko visited Coventry, UK, and accepted donations of £4,516 from Coventry workers to pay for three X-ray units for the Red Army. She also visited Coventry Cathedral ruins, then the Alfred Herbert works and Standard Car Factory from where most funds had been raised. She had earlier in the day inspected a Birmingham factory.[10]
Having attained the rank of major, Pavlichenko never returned to combat but became an instructor and trained Soviet snipers until the war’s end.[5] In 1943, she was awarded the Gold Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union,[11] and was commemorated on a Soviet postage stamp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyudmila_Pavlichenko