Marina Raskova - Early Life

Early Life

Marina Raskova (née Malinina) was born to middle-class parents. Her father was a singing instructor and her mother a teacher. Unlike the majority of Soviet airwomen, Marina did not show any early interest in aviation. She became pilot-navigator purely by accident. Her parents wanted her to become a musician, and her goal was to become an opera singer.

In October 1919, when she was seven, her father died from the injuries sustained when he was struck by a motorcycle. Nevertheless, she continued her drama and singing studies but, being very strict on herself, she started to suffer from stress. She decided to quit music and to devote herself to study chemistry in high school and after graduation in 1929, started to work in in a dye factory as a chemist, to help her family. She married an engineer, Sergey Raskov, so changing her name to Raskova. She had a child, Tanya, in 1930. The following year she started to work in the Aero Navigation Laboratory of the Air Force Academy as a draftswoman. Raskova became a famous aviator as both a pilot and a navigator for Russia in the 1930s. She was the first woman to become a navigator in the Soviet Air Force in 1933. A year later, she started teaching at the Zhukovskii Air Academy, also a first for a woman. In 1935, she divorced. As significantly in the eyes of the Soviet Union, which gave its aviators celebrity status, she set a number of long distance records. Most of these record flights occurred in 1937 and 1938, while she was still teaching at the air academy.

The most famous of these records was the flight of the Rodina (Russian for "Motherland"), Ant-37 - a converted DB-2 long range bomber, on September 24–25, 1938. She was the navigator of the crew that also included Polina Osipenko and Valentina Grizodubova. From the start, the goal was to set an international women's record for a straight-line distance flight. The plan was to fly from Moscow to Komsomolsk (in the Far East). When finally completed, the flight took 26 hours and 29 minutes, over a straight line distance of 5,947 km (total distance of 6,450 km).

However, the ordeal took 10 days when the plane was unable to find an airfield due to poor visibility. Because the navigator's cockpit had no entrance to the rest of the plane and was vulnerable in a crash landing, Raskova parachuted out before they touched down. She had forgotten her emergency kit and was unable to find the plane for 10 days, with no water and almost no food. The rescue crew had found the aircraft 8 days after the landing, and was waiting when she found her way to it, after which all three women were taken to safety. On November 2, 1938, all three women were decorated with "The Hero of the Soviet Union" award, the first females ever to receive it and the only ones before World War II.