The girl and the plane: the fate of the heroine military pilot Marina Raskova

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Before the Great Patriotic War, the names of the legendary pilots Valentina Grizodubova, Polina Osipenko and Marina Raskova did not leave the front pages of Soviet newspapers. Unfortunately, only the first of the three folk heroines lived a full life. The last two paid with their lives for their passion for the sky. The fate of Marina Raskova is the most interesting, because she did not come from a common people, like Osipenko, or from a technical environment, like Grizodubova.

The future legendary pilot Marina Raskova was born into a family not just far from aviation. The world of machines for her parents Anna Spiridonovna and Mikhail Dmitrievich Malinin was a different universe. The father of the future legend of Soviet aviation served as a baritone at the opera house. Mother taught French. In 1919, when Marina was only seven years old, her dad died under the wheels of a motorcycle. The mother was left alone with two children: Marina and her older brother. She had to go to work in an orphanage, where they paid and fed better.

Opera diva

From childhood, Marina was distinguished by good health and liveliness: she ruled even among the children of orphanages. Physical strength and athletic build did not prevent the girl from showing extraordinary talent for music. In general, Raskova can be called a product of the era. Had she been born ten years earlier, perhaps the world would have remembered her as a professional opera singer. But the time in which the daughter of a singer and a teacher of a foreign language grew up had definitely different songs.

Under the influence of a strict mother, the girl sweetly wrote "Sleep, my child, sleep …", herself accompanying herself on the piano. But in the head of the docile and diligent Marina, completely different thoughts swarmed. She was one of those who perceived every editorial of the Pravda newspaper not only as a holy truth, but also as a guide to action.

Reluctantly talented Marina overcame a large competition for the children's department of the conservatory. Reluctantly she sang, unwillingly learned the scales and works of classical composers. She especially did not like the gloomy and religious, from her point of view, Bach. The era sounded for her rather light notes of Mozart.

But the fourteen-year-old girl still chose not music as her profession, but … chemistry. However, almost until the last days of her life, she loved to sing in the circle of family and friends, accompanying herself on the piano. But a man in military uniform, singing to his own accompaniment when free from state assignments, was more suited to the spirit of the times than a musician "in his pure form."

An excerpt from a diary that she kept while working as a chemist in the laboratory of the Butyr Aniline Paint Plant can serve as an illustration of what kind of person Marina was: “I loved the plant so much that its boilers fill my soul.” The boilers did not fill the chemist's soul for a long time, for she left married a colleague, engineer Sergei Raskov. In 1930, Marina's only daughter, Tatiana, was born, named after Pushkin's heroine. The couple divorced in 1935. But about this fact, as well as about the reasons for the gap, the Soviet press was silent. The heroine pilot could not be a divorcee, a single mother. When her daughter was one and a half years old, Marina began working as a draftswoman at the Air Force Academy. The grandmother began to raise the child. Now - and until her death in 1943 - Raskova was busy with her daughter in fits and starts.

Navigator of your destiny

Gradually, she became interested in the profession of a navigator and by 1933 had mastered it in practice.

The 30s of the last century became the heyday of a kind of feminism. Women not only in Soviet Russia, but also, for example, in America, began to fight for equality with men. And they did it, so to speak, in an extreme way - mastering the most difficult, traditionally male professions. The principle was this: if a representative of the fairer sex can be a pilot, then she can definitely work as an engineer or a driver …

The example of Pasha Angelina and her tractor brigade brought women to the wheel of agricultural machines. Example Raskova called to the sky.

Raskova was painfully awaiting an important government assignment, and soon received it. As a navigator, Marina laid the Odessa-Batumi air route. The pilot, as usual, admired everything: the work itself, and the storms in which her light plane fell, and the rocks into which she almost crashed.

Soviet female pilots waged an unofficial competition with American women - mainly with the legendary Amelia Earhart, who made the first female non-stop flight across the Atlantic. In terms of character, the Russian and overseas aviators were almost identical: enthusiasm, a reduced sense of danger and the desire to take risks where necessary and where not necessary. They were driven by an understandable desire to prove to the male world: a woman is capable of something more than housekeeping. And the male leaders of states sided with the spontaneous feminists, using the activity of women in the competition between the two powers.

Raskova was somehow even ashamed of everything feminine in herself. She loved to make bouquets of wildflowers. But this lesson was accompanied by the comment: "In such an environment, the navigational laws are blown out by the wind, they warm up with the sun and sink well into the head."

Soon Raskova was allowed to learn more to be a pilot. Allowed, because the country thirsted for feats and heroes. And on Marina, so to speak, they stopped their eyes. She was only glad.

Soon on the pilot's account were the first female flights Moscow-Leningrad and Moscow-Sevastopol (within the framework of the competition). During the second flight, the pilot was specially put on an outdated aircraft. Raskova did not take this as intrigues of intriguers - her flimsy car still came to its destination one of the first.

Unsuccessful flight

In 1938, the flight from Moscow to the Far East was made for the first time by the legendary crew: Valentina Grizodubova, Polina Osipenko, Marina Raskova. Before the flight, they reported to Stalin: “Soviet pilots more than once amazed the world with their exploits. We are confident that, inspired by you and inspired by your care, we will also bring our Motherland, the party of Lenin - Stalin, to you, our dear teacher and friend, Joseph Vissarionovich, a new victory."

Apparently, the "leader of the peoples" was haunted by the successful flights of Amelia Earhart across the Atlantic and across the American continent.

Despite the cheerful pre-flight mood, the trip did not go according to plan. Pilot Grizodubova incorrectly calculated the flight altitude - the fuel ran out about a hundred kilometers to the nearest airport. Valentina ordered the navigator Marina to be the first to jump into the taiga with a parachute: Grizodubova was afraid that when landing in the forest, the plane would fall with its nose into the ground, and Raskova would take the brunt. And Marina jumped. Jumped successfully. And soon Grizodubova successfully landed the car. They were quickly found with Osipenko. And Raskova spent ten days in the taiga! She ate mushrooms and berries. When she was finally found, the pilot found the strength to reach the rescuers on her own.

During the search for the legendary heroines, two search aircraft with crews were killed. But the cheerful Stalinist press concealed this unfortunate fact from the general public. The dead pilots were not even buried for a long time: their corpses lay for some time next to the wrecked cars.

But Stalin himself met the heroines in Moscow. The women timidly asked permission to kiss him. The leader, of course, allowed it.

The fact that the flight did not take place seemed to be forgotten.

Now the press was full of photographs: Raskova in military uniform, all tightened in belts, is examining an interesting book with her daughter. The pictures are clearly staged …

In 1939, during one of the training flights, Polina Osipenko died. But then the war began, and Raskova was instructed to form the first female flight regiments. At an anti-fascist rally in Moscow, Marina said: "A Soviet woman is hundreds of thousands of motorists, tractor drivers and pilots who are ready at any moment to get on combat vehicles and rush into battle with a bloodthirsty enemy …".

Marina Raskova was one of those who, apparently, had no shadow of doubts about the general line of the party. Or, at least, rumors of such seditious thoughts have not reached us. It is not known how the military pilot Raskova reacted to the repression of 1937, which decapitated the top of the Red Army.

In January 1943, the commander of the women's regiment, Marina Mikhailovna Raskova, died during the transfer of the plane to the Stalingrad front. She lived only thirty years.