There is a fascination in the idea of the Amazons, the women who once terrorised the ancient Scythian plain. They were courageous, dedicated; skilful archers, merciless. But female fighters since their day have tended to miss out. Men get the glory and the blame, especially for violence. In the very land of the Amazons, the steppes of southern Russia and Ukraine, the ideal woman stays at home to bake the bread and mind the babies. The Communist regime itself left that idea intact. In Soviet times, people assumed, good soldiers were all men. As for the terrorist police, they had to be tough males. The girls might do as part-time spies, but killing was men’s work.

A similar kind of stereotyping applies to revolutionary politics. In the wake of the First World War, with a whole continent in shock, far-left and Communist parties gathered very wide support in East and Central Europe and the airy steppes beyond. The main leaders were male (of course), but some romantic women feature in the history books, including Lenin’s lover, the elegant Inessa Armand, and Rosa Luxemburg, the co-leader of Germany’s Spartacist League. Both died in tragic circumstances well before old age. In myth, the female revolutionary remains forever beautiful.

This sexism is curious. It acts like the good housewife’s bleach and gets rid of the blood. But when I searched the Cheka files for female officers, I found at least one woman with a real taste for slaughter. Her tally was so monstrous that Rosalia Zemlyachka was to become the first woman ever awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Male comrades might make fun of Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, for she was not just a poor cook but unattractive, too. By contrast, at least in her first youth, Rosalia was more their type. Like Luxemburg, her given name was Rosa. Like Luxemburg, she sat, haloed in pretty curls, for teenage studio portraits. The camera plays many tricks. The likeness ended there. Even in an age of butchery, Rosalia Zemlyachka was exceptional, accounting personally for tens of thousands of deaths. The tale goes, she enjoyed it, too.

Rosalia was born in Kiev in 1876. At the time, the city was a pleasant place if you ignored the politics. But that was always difficult; not only were Jews vulnerable but tensions were building between the majority Great Russians and local, ‘Little Russian’ nationalists. What Jewish merchant Samuel Zalkind wanted for his first child was a quiet, decent life, and in his sage imagination that meant educating her. So this girl trained in medicine, attending classes in Kiev before enrolling in the medical faculty in faraway Lyon. The Zalkinds must have been so proud as her train pulled away. Get dear Rosalia to France; Kiev was dangerous.

Unfortunately for that hope, fin de siècle France had long been home to vocal groups of exiled Russian malcontents. Rosalia spent her study-time exploring Russia’s several brands of revolutionary socialism, including the peasant-facing radical Populism and a newer, urban-based Marxism. She might have met both back at home, but France gave her more time.

A first clue to her future was the prophet whom she chose. Among her piles of reading was a broadside entitled ‘What the “Friends of the People” Are’. The work was tediously petulant but that was not the point. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin clearly wrote it in a rage, but Nadezhda Krupskaya would later insist that it ‘undoubtedly’ had ‘a strong influence on Marxist youth at the time’. It certainly turned Rosa’s head. Having ploughed her way through a hundred pages of invective, the young woman joined the Russian Socialist Democratic Workers Party, the RSDRP. The Marxists, not the Populists. By temperament radical, she had been drawn to Lenin’s group. They made good use of her.

Her main job in these early years was smuggling documents. It was a classic woman’s job; Krupskaya did the same. But that was just in St Petersburg. As a bona-fide student, Rosalia could travel unquestioned into Europe. The story goes that she concealed explosive messages inside her lady’s travel-mirror. Feminine or not, this was a tough apprenticeship. When she returned to Kiev in 1896, Rosalia was a committed revolutionary. Young people of all classes were becoming radicals. It’s hard not to be sympathetic; successive Russian governments were foolish and tyrannical. Easter 1903 was blackened by pogroms against the Jewish population; the authorities showed little pity – and they may indeed have prompted them. In short, protests were rational and anger justified.

But Rosalia was a professional. She read her Lenin eagerly, she even met the man. Like him, she welcomed any disaster, including violence, if it made people so enraged they would not compromise. By 1905, she had relocated to Moscow, the empire’s second city, where she headed the local Committee of the RSDRP. Her special interest, she said, was military affairs. On 3 December that year, a crowd of striking workers was attacked by tsarist shells. In the melee that followed, Rosa shot her first gendarme.

The young revolutionary was arrested and sentenced to penal exile. Like many other women, too, she conceived, carried and then lost a baby in the process. But her first love was revolution, not the human beings in her life. Perhaps inspired by poetry, she called herself Daemon. Her (few) defenders all refer to Lermontov’s epic of the same name, but if that was her inspiration there is little comfort there. In Lermontov, the Daemon was no shadowy furred pet. ‘He sowed great evil’, wrote the poet. ‘But without all delight…’

With power came her opportunity. ‘A revolution’, declared Mao Zedong, ‘is not like a dinner party… or doing embroidery. It is an act of violence.’ Rosalia may have celebrated Lenin’s daring coup d’état, but when his enemies rebelled she found her real joy. First, she was sent south to the Don, where the Eighth Army was encountering determined resistance. What this lot needed, she decreed, was better discipline. Her focus was total. Working 20 hours a day, she baulked at no extreme of cruelty on the principle that History (the destiny of humankind, the freedom of all peoples, to say nothing of Lenin and Marx) was on her side. Deserters were tortured, cowards shot, informers had their tongues cut out. The would-be doctor’s treatment worked. Having reshaped the Eighth, Rosalia was assigned to the 13th Army, which had been struggling to take the Crimean peninsula. She arrived in September 1920, just as the 13th broke through south. Her task now was to make sure White Crimea would turn Red.

One problem was the stragglers from Wrangel’s defeated Whites. Though many slipped away by sea, tens of thousands remained trapped on the peninsula and many of those were armed. The Soviet Commander on the Southern Front, Mikhail Frunze, proposed the offer of a safe conduct for any who would surrender. General Brusilov, the respected former military chief, added his name to the call, appealing to all White officers to join the Reds in the name of Russian unity. A message, printed in his name, was dropped across the steppe by aircraft and thousands of people responded by registering with unfamiliar local authorities. For Red Rosalia and her new lover, the Hungarian Bela Kun, the names were merely shooting lists.

The first winter was the bloodiest. Some estimates suggest that Zemlyachka’s crew shot as many as 96,000 people in the space of four months (more then a tenth of the total population). Though Bela Kun’s attempt at revolution in Hungary had collapsed, he remained true to Lenin’s cause; in Soviet Sevastopol, he was credited with shooting 8,000 people in one week. A stink rose over Simferopol, the peninsula’s handsome capital, as corpses left to rot grew bloated in the late November chill. The poet, Max Voloshin, who knew both Rosalia and Kun, wrote later that the pair drank wine and yawned as they signed mass death-warrants. Kun had tormented Voloshin by forcing him to take a list and cross out just one name in ten for sparing the next day.

Gender, it seems, was no bar to common sadism, but Rosalia was housewife enough to be concerned about the wanton use of bullets. Her solution disgusted even some Bolsheviks. Instead of shooting unarmed Whites, she tied them up on makeshift barges (or even just a few thin planks) and drowned them wholesale in the Black Sea. Lenin was delighted – hence her coveted Order of the Red Banner – and her return to civilian life was smoothed by national acclaim.

Peacetime suited her less than war. Rosalia had lovers (and at least three husbands), but she never had a family. Meanwhile, not least because the Bolsheviks were mostly sexist males, she also found the path to highest office to be closed. Her middle years were spent in middle-ranking Party roles. It was only after another blood-letting – the Great Purge – that a few vacancies appeared at last. From 1939 to 1943, Rosalia served Stalin on the Central Committee of the Communist Party and as Deputy Chair of the Council of People’s Commissars. Her main forte, now Moscow was again at war, was her instinct for the hidden enemy and her willingness to strike. But after Stalingrad and Kursk, and as the Soviets pushed west, these special skills lost their appeal. She spent her final years (she died in 1947) living next door to the Khrushchevs in the House on the Embankment, the prestigious apartment block that faced the Kremlin walls. Her job was fielding residents’ complaints about their flats.

In any humane peacetime world, Rosalia Zemlyachka would be infamous for her sadism, her methods and the sheer scale of her butchery. If she had been a Nazi, maybe, her name might live on still, at least in the annals of international infamy. But, as Stalin himself remarked, the victors don’t stand trial. Moreover, in most people’s minds, there are still certain kinds of crime that women don’t commit. Newspapers love a poisoner, a jilted lover or the brokenhearted story of a mother who kills, but female revolutionaries aren’t meant to handle power, let alone to use it with any murderous effect. And they have to be beautiful; no glasses and no scars. Zemlyachka’s face said far too much about the life she led.

The Soviet poet, Damian Bednyi, penned a scurrilous little piece on just this theme. ‘Hang Zemlyachka’s picture in your office, my friend,’ he wrote. ‘Then offer prayers of grateful thanks that you know her only through a portrait; the original is a hundred times more terrifying.’ That may have been the case, but there was nothing lovely in the ubiquitous Lenins and Stalins of the time, either, let alone the puffy Berias or preposterous strutting Voroshilovs that graced so many Soviet walls. They have survived in history, Zemlyachka disappeared.