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In July 1917 Bochkareva's Women's Battalion of Death, about 300 volunteers, went over the top near Smorgon. The battalion took German trenches, but the gains collapsed when male soldiers failed to press forward, some drinking captured liquor instead, and the women took heavy casualties holding ground no one reinforced.
Bochkareva argues that after the February Revolution the soldiers' committees ended discipline in the Russian army. They let men vote on orders, debate whether to attack, and fraternize with the enemy. Once obeying an order became a matter of debate, a unit could not be made to take risks, so she refused to allow any committee in her battalion.
Bochkareva proposed the women's battalion mainly as a moral lever, not for its fighting numbers. Women visibly volunteering to die at the front was meant to embarrass war-weary male soldiers back into fighting. The tactic depends on the audience still accepting a norm that fighting is men's duty, and it failed where that norm had already given way to revolutionary politics.