At the age of 14 she fought as a volunteer in World War I and later in the Russian Civil War on the side of the anti-communist White movement.
In 1915 she got wounded during a mission blowing up a bridge near Yerevan, Armenia. She was treated at the Red Cross hospital in Baku and then returned to the Eastern Front, where she became a military driver. In 1917, she was wounded, and spent nearly the entire year 1918 in a hospital in Moscow, suffering from concussion and shell shock