11. A Peaceful End for a Vicious Murderess
Upon her return to Moscow from the Crimea, Rosalia Zemlyachka was awarded the Order of the Red Banner – then the highest Soviet military award. She spent the rest of her life climbing the Communist Party’s rungs, joining the Central Control Commission – the organization that kept a watchful eye on the party. She worked closely with the NKVD during the Great Terror, and so impressed Stalin with her ruthlessness that he made her head of the Control Commission in 1939.
That made Zemlyachka the only woman in the USSR’s highest administrative body, the Council of People’s Commissars. She died of natural causes at age 71 in 1947, and was honored with a burial in the Kremlin. However, deadly as she was, the claims that Zemlyachka was “history’s deadliest woman” are overstated. As seen below, another woman exceeded her death toll, many times over.