This one's kinda sexy, she'll do.

Yesterday, I shared a piece on badass, nazi-killer Mariya Vasilyevna Oktyabrskaya. I first wrote this piece, uh...a few years back at least, and it appears in Volume One of the books.

When I went to do the posts for the “not Facebook” platforms (as you probably remember, I post both here and on Patreon - same content, different user interfaces because we all have what we like best/are used to and I’m not trying to make anyone choose one over the other because I know how that shit makes ME feel), I went to find more pics of Oktyabrskaya, a thing I like to do for the people who subscribe and actually read my work on purpose because hey, you might be like me and like more visuals. Maybe not. That’s cool, too. I JUST LIKE TO PROVIDE OPTIONS, OK?

Anyway, I found myself annoyed that when you do a Google image search using Oktyabrskaya’s name as the criteria, you get a bunch of wrong shit. And yeah, sure, pics actually OF her do come up, but so many pics of “other random tank soldier-shaped ladies” do too. Like a lot of them. Some more than others.

One I see come up quite a bit is the sweet, smiling face of Aleksandra Samusenko, a WWII-era Soviet tank commander and liaison officer. So, yeah, some similarities there with their backgrounds, but it’s not fuckin Oktyabrskaya and I think that’s uh...sorta important, no?

Coincidentally, she succumbed to the wounds she sustained in combat, dying almost exactly one year after Oktyabrskaya - Samusenko passed in the first half of March 1945, mere weeks before the war was declared over.

There are several sites that use Samusenko’s pleasant likeness in place of Oktyabrskaya’s less bubbly mug; some even model their figurines on Samusenko - or someone similar, at least.

We’re prettier if we smile, you know.

And listen, it’s hard to know if what you’re looking at is the real deal when so many image searches return with MULTIPLE occurrences of the wrong fucking person. Samusenko’s sweet face is attached to SO many articles about Oktyabrskaya. So fucking many, along with other “not-Oktyabrskayas.”

I was having a conversation with a friend a while back about writing about women in history. They suggested a French Revolutionary, one who has been written about but not to any great extent, and they also commented that, bonus: She was attractive, too.

Why is that a bonus? Because “pretty” sells. Especially if she’s at least a little sexy.

And they weren’t wrong. At ALL. And that’s fully fucking evident when you do an image search for these women because, in general, while you might get a few real results, most of the WRONG results are more “conventionally aesthetically pleasing.”

When I was doing image searches for Agueda Kahabagan, a general in the Philippine Republican Army, or for Chinese Pirate Queen, Ching Shih - neither of whom were photographed - some of the results were...disturbing. Not all, but goddamn, folks, we don’t need to make everyone into a swimsuit model for fuckssake. They don’t need giant tits, a full face of makeup, and tiny, snatched waists; be serious right now.

Fortunately, there were a few artist depictions of these women that seemed “historically accurate enough” and not overtly sexualized to choose from.

And we don’t need to opt for the gentle, feminine aura, my dudes. These women were fucking warriors. I’m not saying warriors can’t be beautiful, but you get what I’m saying.

Sometimes, when doing an image search for Oktyabrskaya, you get the pleasant, if not QUITE as smiley, face of Soviet reconnaissance scout Yelena Fyodorovna Kolesova, an absolute fucking badass in that she was among those who would honeypot the fuck out of horny nazi, i.e. show up pretending to be looking for some naked playtime but instead lure them to an ambush where they’d be terminated on sight. Beautiful. I love this for them. Couldn’t happen to nicer guys.

But while this is AMAZING, it wasn’t even close to what Oktyabrskaya was doing at the time, which was writing letters to Stalin to request a tank to avenge her husband’s bloody fucking death, and then going out and doing it. A lot.

And who the fuck is this?