A Thousand Sisters

by Elizabeth Wein

  Less than a year later, on March 28, 1912, another Russian aviator came into the world. She was born into a family of musicians in Moscow, the second-largest city of the Russian Empire after Saint Petersburg. Her name was Marina Mikhailovna Malinina, and she was the girl who would grow up to be Marina Raskova.

  When Marina was two years old, in 1914, Europe plunged into World War I. For the next four years, most of Europe’s young men fought, and millions died, on the battlefields of France and Belgium.

  The Russian Empire entered the war right away. But its army was badly equipped and Russia lost nearly two million lives, fighting mainly against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Russians at home grew angry and unhappy, resentful of having to pour their lives and resources into this war. The capital of Russia, Saint Petersburg, was renamed Petrograd in 1914 because “burg” sounded too German. When the Russian Revolution started in 1917, a year before the end of World War I, it was partly in response to the awful wartime leadership of the imperial ruler, Czar Nicholas II.

  For some years before the war started, women all over the world had been campaigning vocally and often violently for their own rights. Now, throughout Russia, young women felt that they ought to be allowed to fight in World War I alongside the nation’s young men. Thousands of them enlisted—many in men’s regiments, sometimes disguised as boys to reduce the possibility of being turned away or sexually assaulted. The Soviet Union didn’t exist yet, but the actions of Russia’s women in the world’s first “Great War” led the way for the women who would fight for the Soviet Union in the “Great Patriotic War,” the name for their part in World War II.

  Maria Bochkareva, who’d married a soldier when she was sixteen, was desperate to play a part in the fighting. She joined a men’s battalion and went into combat with them. A fierce and focused soldier, she was awarded a medal for rescuing fifty of her wounded comrades in one battle, and was even made a commander.

  But Maria grew frustrated because the soldiers who fought alongside her were miserable about the way the war was going for the Russian army. She decided that a group of fighting women might embarrass these unhappy men and make them leap into action.

  So Maria got permission from Czar Nicholas II to form her own regiment composed entirely of women. Terrifyingly, they were known as a “Death Battalion.” Before World War I was over, four other Russian women’s regiments formed based on Maria Bochkareva’s battalion, along with many smaller units.

  With so many Russian women joining the army as foot soldiers so they could fight in World War I, it’s no surprise that several of Russia’s first female aviators also went to war. A dozen nations were using the new technology of aircraft for bombing, for taking photographs of enemy troops, for shooting at soldiers on the ground, and for aerial combat against enemy pilots. Between 1915 and 1917, at least four Russian women—two of them princesses!—served as reconnaissance pilots (scouts who gathered information).

  Nadezhda Degtereva, who disguised herself as a man so she could go to war, became the first woman to be wounded in air combat—though the medics who treated her wounds discovered her secret. One of the princesses, Yevgeniya Shakhovskaya, had been a flight instructor in Germany before the war. Like Maria Bochkareva, she went to Czar Nicholas II himself to get permission to fight. She persuaded the czar to let her fly for Russia as a military reconnaissance pilot, scouting out the best direction for soldiers on the ground to fire their guns. Though we don’t know if she flew combat missions, she was without a doubt working as a pilot on the battle lines in a war zone.

  Women of other countries served in World War I as nurses, ambulance drivers, and communications personnel. Their work was always dangerous and often dirty, and required endurance and bravery. But it wasn’t combat work. Only Russian women went directly into battle to fight and kill other human beings. There weren’t many of these women, but they paved the way for Marina Raskova and for the next generation—the generation that would fight in World War II twenty-five years later.

  In 1917, Marina Raskova was five years old. She was probably too young to understand grown-up politics, even though she might have heard her parents talking about the terrible war news. But the war in Europe was only one part of Russia’s troubles. Beyond the fragile security of the familiar walls of Marina’s home, her Motherland was exploding.

  Workers and intellectuals in Petrograd were hungry for political reform and for Russia to get out of World War I. They finally took matters into their own hands and took over the government, finishing off the three-hundred-year reign of the Romanov czars. The last czar, Nicholas II, resigned his power in March 1917.

  That was the end of the Russian Empire.

  The problem was that nobody agreed on who should run the country now, or on how to run it. A Provisional Government took the place of imperial rule in Petrograd and granted equality in law to Russian women, giving women the right to vote and to hold office. This made Russia the first country to give women the same legal rights as men.

  But the Provisional Government didn’t last long. In October 1917 the radical Bolshevik Party took advantage of people’s anger over World War I and overthrew the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks were led by Vladimir Lenin, a man of bold and energetic ideals who had been urging revolution for more than twenty years. Lenin’s vision of a better future for the working poor was so ambitious that he hoped World War I would inspire everyone in Europe to get rid of their old-fashioned governments. That clearly wasn’t going to happen, so Lenin did what he felt to be the next best thing for his own people: early in 1918, he negotiated a treaty with Germany to get Russia out of the war.

  World War I didn’t end for the rest of Europe until November 1918. Marina was six years old. In the same year that the Bolshevik Party carried out the murderous execution of the former czar, Nicholas II, and his wife and four children, Marina started going to elementary school and took lessons at the Pushkin School of Music in Moscow twice a week.

  Around her, the Red Army of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party was fighting to crush opposition groups that sprang up after the fall of the Russian Empire. Now, fierce disagreements within Russia itself over how to run the country began a bitter and bloody civil war.

  The winds of change blew harshly around young Marina. When she was seven years old, her musician father was hit by a motorcycle and killed.

  There is a Russian saying that people use with resignation at times like this: Life is life. Marina’s widowed mother worked as the director of a boys’ home near Moscow and then got another job in the city working at a childcare center, which made it easier for Marina and her older brother, Roman, to go to school. In 1920 Marina’s mother managed to get a government-assigned room for her family in a shared apartment in Moscow.

  So Marina must have known, from very early in life, that it is possible for a woman to be in control of her own destiny.

  Marina was ten in 1922 when the last armed clashes of the Russian Civil War took place.

  Her country’s new leaders were now attempting to improve life with an untried system of government called communism, in which property, goods, and services are owned by the community and shared according to need. Their efforts weren’t always made with the clearest of intentions or the best of success. An estimated one million soldiers, both men and women, fought and died to make these changes possible. Another eight million civilians perished because they were caught in the cross fire, or struck down by the starvation and disease that war brings with it.

  Those numbers are so enormous they’re almost meaningless, even to an adult. And Marina was only ten years old. She was just beginning further education in music at the Moscow State Conservatory, one of the most respected music schools in the entire world.

  Marina’s home city of Moscow now became the capital of a nation so new that it hadn’t even given itself an official name yet. The scouring winds of the civil war, which had lasted five years and spread across two continents, left the population of her
country struggling to feed itself and to rebuild its industries. From the ruins, the Bolshevik Party would become the Communist Party, and Lenin would emerge as the head of a new nation with a new form of government.

  What was left of the old Russian Empire would become known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—the USSR, or Soviet Union.1

  Either way, it was still Marina’s Motherland.

  2

  Learning to Fly in a Nation That’s Learning to Fly

  Marina Raskova’s school years were bent and shaped by the harsh winds of change that swept her nation.

  There were droughts in 1920 and 1921. The new government was unable to cope with its country’s needs, and failed crops resulted in a horrific famine that lasted into 1922 and killed millions. Disease was everywhere. The streets of Russian cities were filled with homeless children Marina’s age who hadn’t been as lucky as her. They lived rough, their families torn apart by the events of the past ten years.

  Also, Lenin now struggled with poor health. He died in 1924 at the age of fifty-three. Josef Stalin, who’d been the general secretary of the Communist Party since 1922, became the dominant party leader, though his official job title didn’t change.

  Lenin made a lasting impression on the people of the USSR. Even today he remains a cult figure. His body was preserved so that a continuous stream of mourners could view him lying in state in a special tomb on Red Square in Moscow. Five days after Lenin’s death, Petrograd, the former capital of Russia, was renamed Leningrad in his honor. Marina, twelve years old in 1924, was no doubt aware of Lenin’s passing; living in Moscow, she may even have been one of the tens of thousands of mourners who visited Lenin’s tomb to get a glimpse of his eerily waxlike body in the weeks following his death.

  Many of Lenin’s modern ideals stayed in place as Josef Stalin first took over leadership of the USSR. Now Stalin and the Communist Party nailed together a haphazard structure for a country that, in principle at least, treated men and women with equal rights. One of the ways the Soviet government successfully put this into practice was through a school system that integrated boys’ and girls’ education. Although the design for this wasn’t complete until the 1930s, the basic system was established during Marina’s high school years.

  In this respect, the United States was way behind the Soviet Union. In the 1920s in the United States, high school girls were given special classes in sewing, cooking, and hygiene, while boys learned woodworking and how to use tools. But in the years between the two world wars, children in Soviet schools were treated with complete gender equality, with girls and boys studying the same subjects. They were also encouraged not to settle for old-fashioned and “bourgeois” gender roles—“bourgeois” being a catchall term for the upper middle classes of Imperial Russia who’d aspired to wealth and luxury.

  As a high school student, Marina decided her favorite subjects were biology and chemistry. But what she really wanted to be was a professional opera singer, like her father. She loved music and had talent, and she played the piano, sang, and performed, in school and at home.

  When Marina reached the age of fifteen, the wind changed again for her.

  This time, the wind that howled in her ears and that changed the course of her life affected her own young body: she came down with an inner-ear infection combined with a disease called paratyphoid. Marina had to stay in bed for two months. She was so sick that it affected her musical ability.

  Even when your plane is flying in a windless sky, a mechanical failure can make it difficult or impossible to fly. It’s always a good idea to keep a plan B in the back of your mind so you can get safely down to earth no matter what happens to you in the air.

  Marina had dreamed of a musical career since she was six years old. When she had to give up on that dream, she fell back on chemistry. She was interested in it, and she knew it would be a good way to support herself and her family. And she wasn’t wrong. When Marina graduated from high school in 1929, her focus on chemistry helped her find a job as an apprentice in a dye factory, and six months later she became a full technician.

  Girls and boys growing up in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s, like Marina Raskova, felt that preparing for war was their duty, just like going to school. The “future war” would be their “test,” as the civil war had been for their parents. In 1928, the Red Army’s chief of staff, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, had published a report called The Future War. He recommended that the USSR build a strong military equipped with new aircraft and tank fleets, which he believed would be the key to a knockout victory in modern warfare.

  And so, beginning in 1932, military training was built into the secondary education curriculum in the USSR. From the age of eight, both boys and girls studied the history of the Red Army, met and talked with veterans, learned to use a gas mask, and practiced shooting with a bow and arrow—an introduction to the rifle training they’d pick up at age thirteen.

  In their free time, all boys and girls had to join a fitness or defense program outside school. These were run by the Communist League of Youth, or Komsomol, which sponsored clubs called Osoaviakhim2 that gave military training to the Soviet Union’s young people. You joined with your friends. It was fun, or at least it was challenging. You could earn badges and participate in competitions—just like in the Scouts.

  You could learn to fly.

  Even in powerful nations like the United States and the United Kingdom, only the very elite—or the incredibly determined—could learn to fly. In Germany, restrictions had been placed on their air force after World War I that meant they now had to train their military pilots in secret. State-sponsored flight training in Germany wasn’t available until 1937, and of course even then it was only available to men. But in the USSR, by 1935 there were about 150 flying clubs that provided aviation tuition to any teenage girl or boy who was a Komsomol member. The training was free. You didn’t have to pay for tuition or for fuel. Anyone could learn to fly if he or she really wanted to.

  It wasn’t a perfect system. The out-of-school activities didn’t do as good a job of including girls as the schools did. It didn’t seem as important for girls to learn to use rifles and fly planes as it was for boys, because only men were required by law to be on the military reserve list; women weren’t registered in the reserves. A young woman could join the army, but she didn’t have to.

  Nevertheless, according to the Soviet Constitution of 1936, also called “Stalin’s Constitution,” Soviet women had voting rights and gender equality with men. In theory, they were even given equal pay to men—an issue that wasn’t dealt with in law until 1963 in the United States and 1970 in the United Kingdom. And in a country where men and women had equal constitutional rights by law, letting girls into after-school flying clubs fulfilled Komsomol requirements, so they couldn’t be turned away.

  Marina Raskova wasn’t quite young enough to benefit from this program. But she was already on a career path that would soon turn her into one of her Motherland’s most important and adored aviators of all time.

  Marina was about eighteen when she married Sergey Raskov, another engineer she’d met at her first job in the Butyrsky Aniline Dye Plant; she took his name to become Marina Raskova.

  Their daughter, Tatyana, nicknamed Tanya, was born in 1930. Marina stopped working while Tanya was a baby, but when her daughter was a year old, Marina found a new job. She became an assistant at the Aero Navigation Laboratory of the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy in Moscow, working with the academy instructor and director, Aleksandr Belyakov. She drafted drawings of new flight instruments and prepared them for testing. Air navigation became the focus of Marina’s life, as music once had been. Dedicated, absorbed, and conscientious, she was soon promoted and began part-time studies at the Aviation Institute in Leningrad.

  In our modern society, when a man works and succeeds at a skilled job, we expect it. When a woman does the same, we like to call her a “career woman,” and if she happens to be someone’s part
ner in a relationship and also a mother, we say she “has it all.”

  In the early years of the USSR, a woman was expected to have a job and also be a mother. Marina Raskova probably didn’t think of herself as “having it all”; she was a hard worker, but in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, so was everybody else. Motherhood and jobs were both encouraged by the state.

  MARINA RASKOVA AND HER DAUGHTER, TANYA

  But it wasn’t any easier then to be a working mother than it is now. Marina was able to manage because, in 1932, her own mother retired so she could look after Tanya.

  The 1920s and 1930s are often called “the golden age of flight.” Pilots flying new planes could provide swift transport over otherwise impossible distances and heights, perform glamorous stunts and dramatic rescues, explore new territory . . . and, of course, embark on dangerous acts of war.

  That was the dark side of the world’s obsession with aviation. Between 1929 and 1939, the world’s great powers were in a race for air supremacy. In 1933 the Nazi government seized power in Germany under Adolf Hitler, and by the mid-1930s the Germans were building an impressive modern air force of their own. They tested their new bombers in the Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936, using aircraft for brutal and ruthless attacks on civilians as well as soldiers.

  The United States and the United Kingdom, though also powerful, were anxious not to repeat the horrors of World War I. They openly took pride in civil aviation achievements while keeping quieter about their military developments. But they were worried about what was going on in Germany. And the Soviet Union, Germany’s geographic neighbor, was very worried about it. In the mid-1930s, even though the Soviet Union wasn’t yet fighting the “future war” it dreaded and expected, it was already using its own air power to support countries who were at war, such as China and Spain.

  No country, and certainly not one as vast and as aggressive as the new Soviet Union—nor one so close to Germany—was going to be without an air force. Stalin and the Communist Party encouraged ambitious designers, daring pilots, and mechanical experts to create an industry that was exemplary throughout the world.