A Thousand Sisters Read online

  While Marina was starting her adult life as a worker, wife, and mother, Stalin and the Communist Party launched the first of a series of fierce and brutal “Five-Year Plans” to modernize the nation, plans that would ultimately involve sacrificing the lives of the Soviet Union’s own citizens.

  Before the Russian Revolution, about 80 percent of the population were peasants who worked in the fields like their medieval ancestors. After the revolution, they’d claimed land and formed small shared farms. The first Five-Year Plan seized this land for the state under a program called “collectivization.” The peasants still had to work on the same land, but instead of growing their own crops, they got paid in wages—they weren’t allowed to sell or eat their own produce. Millions of other agricultural workers were told to move to cities to work in factories. Multitudes of people had to leave their homes, and the shock to traditional lifestyles was enormous.

  The number of small farms merged into collectives was a number about equal to the current population of Texas. Imagine if every single man, woman, and child in Texas owned a farm—and then imagine that every single one of those farms was suddenly taken away by the government.

  Not surprisingly, the collectives were spectacularly hated.

  There was resistance to them everywhere, which the Communist Party crushed ruthlessly. In 1932 and 1933 it took away the food crop harvest and next season’s seed in the Soviet states that produced most of the nation’s grain—Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Kazakhstan. A police blockade was set up around the entire state of Ukraine so that no one could get out and no food could be brought in. The result was that an estimated four million people died of famine in 1933 in Ukraine alone—an area about the size of all the New England and mid-Atlantic states put together.

  In addition to the collectivization of farms, the Five-Year Plans also aimed to industrialize the USSR. While agricultural workers starved in Ukraine, record numbers of laborers produced factory goods. Transportation routes expanded; workers dug the foundations and laid tracks for the new Moscow Metro subway system.

  One of the major goals of the second Five-Year Plan was to multiply the number of civil air routes across the USSR, covering extreme distances and connecting the far-flung corners of the huge country. In 1933, at the age of twenty-one, Marina went along with her supervisor, Aleksandr Belyakov, as his navigator on a flight expedition sponsored by the Zhukovsky Academy. It was a national project to select landing sites for future passenger airports in the Crimea, Caucasus, and Sea of Azov areas. And it was a wonderful chance for Marina to use her new navigation skills over the enormous distances of the Soviet Union.

  Marina Raskova and Aleksandr Belyakov, as navigators in the enticing and glamorous field of aviation, were helping the USSR become a leader in the aviation race.

  In 1934 Marina graduated from the air navigation department of the Leningrad Institute of Civil Aviation Engineers. She was the first woman in the USSR to become a professional air navigator. She also became the first female lecturer for the Zhukhovsky Air Force Engineering Academy.

  Being the trailblazer for women in this field wasn’t easy. Marina’s first students were a group of older male officers. They refused to stand at attention when Marina entered the classroom, as they were supposed to do for a senior instructor, and had to be scolded by Marina’s superiors. Only after she’d been teaching them for some time did they grudgingly admit that women aviators clearly could stand shoulder to shoulder with men.

  As well as teaching, Marina also took her first flying lessons in 1934. Her employer, the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy, paid for her training at the Central Flying Club in Tushino, outside Moscow.

  * * *

  “WOMEN DON’T BELONG IN AIRPLANES”

  Marina’s work as a lecturer at the Zhukovsky Academy made international news. A story in the Arizona Republic, the state’s largest newspaper (and one with traditionally conservative leanings), stated provocatively on June 11, 1936:

  “Unlike American officials, who hold that women fliers aren’t suited to arduous air duty, the Soviet gives women equality in aviation. Marina Mikhailovna Raskova, a young mother, has won a place in the Russian military aviation school as instructor of blind flying,3 in which she is regarded one of the world’s foremost experts.”

  Despite the popularity of celebrity female aviators such as Amelia Earhart, the general public in the United States felt that women should not be flying. The 1929 women’s National Air Race was nicknamed the Powder Puff Derby, as if women couldn’t take the controls of an aircraft without worrying about messing up their makeup.

  “Women don’t belong in airplanes. That’s a man’s job,” Edna Gardner White was told in 1928 when, even though she’d received the highest possible grade on her written aviation exam, she had to twist the examiner’s arm to let her take her actual flight test for her license.

  When an American female pilot was killed in an air race in 1933, women were banned from competition until 1935.

  In 1927, when Charles Lindbergh made his groundbreaking first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic, less than 1 percent of American pilots were women. By 1935, out of 13,949 licensed pilots in America, around 800 were women—about 6 percent of the total. (Believe it or not—and discouragingly—that statistic wasn’t much higher in 2015, when women numbered only 7 percent of America’s pilots.)

  It’s a sharp contrast that, by the end of the 1930s, somewhere between a quarter and a third of all pilots in the Soviet Union were women.

  * * *

  3

  Marina Navigates

  In the 1930s, the pressure on you to belong as a young Soviet was probably the most overwhelming pressure of your life. It wasn’t just a question of being accepted by your peers, of wearing the right clothes or wearing them the right way or fixing your hair like everyone else’s. Those are ordinary pressures we can relate to, the insistence of fashion or the approval of friends. Sure, you want to do well in school and you worry about your future in your community. But in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the pressure to belong was literally a matter of life and death.

  The reasons for this pressure are complicated, but they begin with the leader of the USSR, Josef Stalin.

  Stalin was a complex, confusing man who was both powerful and paranoid. In the early 1930s, not only was he dealing with the industrialization of the Five-Year Plans and the forced starvation of millions of people on collective farms, but he was coping with the recent suicide of his wife (the official state announcement was that she had died of appendicitis). Stalin got his emotional support from his colleague and best friend, Sergey Kirov, the swashbuckling head of the Communist Party in Leningrad.

  Things changed in December of 1934, when Sergey Kirov was suddenly shot and killed by a gunman waiting for him outside his office.

  It’s possible Stalin ordered the murder himself, but that’s never been proved.

  What’s known is that Stalin set out to punish his friend’s killer, and anyone else who might have been involved in the plot against Sergey Kirov—or against the Communist Party—or specifically against Stalin himself. Stalin called on the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs or NKVD,4 a military police force of spies and assassins, to root out treachery . . . whether it was real or possible or even fantastically impossible.

  In the weeks following the murder, several thousand people were arrested in Moscow and Leningrad. There were so many of them that, to deal with them quickly, two hundred suspects were executed every day at the NKVD headquarters in Leningrad.

  But Stalin didn’t stop there.

  He decided he needed to make absolutely sure that the people of the Soviet Union were loyal to him—or at least, that they behaved in all ways like loyal people.

  In 1936 he began a series of random arrests and executions that touched every aspect of Soviet society. This horrific nationwide cleanup, which went on for two years, is now known as the “Great Terror” or the “Great Purge.”5 Hundreds of thous
ands of people—no one will ever be sure how many—were arrested, tortured, and forced to make confessions. Then they were thrown into jail, executed, or sent to prison camps in the frozen wastes of Siberia. People vanished all the time as they were arrested and killed or sent away.

  No one was safe.

  People tried to hide their identities, disguised their family histories, and even changed their names to protect themselves and their children. You could easily be accused of guilt just by knowing the wrong people. Teens weren’t any safer than their parents.

  A chilling example is what happened to Anna Popova, who was born in 1923 and was in high school during the Great Terror. Anna, like Marina, was destined for a career in aviation—she later became a flight radio operator on transport aircraft during World War II. Anna was arrested by the NKVD secret police, along with eight of her schoolmates, when they were only fifteen years old.

  The reason for the arrests? Apparently some of the boys in the group had been signing their names in code when they wrote notes to their friends.

  The teens were all put in prison in Minsk, the capital of the region of Belorussia (now Belarus) where they lived. Anna was kept in solitary confinement for six months before she completed ninth grade.

  After a series of pleas and trials, most of the teens who’d been arrested with Anna Popova were released, but one unlucky boy was sent to prison for five years—for some uncomplimentary thing he’d said at school about the collectives.

  So working hard at Osoaviakhim and Komsomol clubs wasn’t just something you did to be like all your friends, or even because you were patriotic. Joining these groups was a practical way to protect yourself from suspicion. Komsomol-sponsored activities and paramilitary training through the Osoaviakhim helped young people to prove their Communist Party loyalty.

  Anna, looking back on this terrifying time in her school years, commented bitterly that “the vigilant hawks of the Stalin regime . . . converted the whole great country into a big concentration camp of life-term inmates.”

  Somehow, Marina Raskova seems to have steered her way with brave and steady purpose through the Great Terror, avoiding any kind of suspicion.

  Marina completed her pilot’s license in 1935, just before the purges began. In the same year, she and her husband, Sergey, divorced. Their daughter, Tanya, was five years old, and Marina was only twenty-three when she became a single parent. Her own mother, Anna Spiridonovna, continued to care for Tanya.

  Right after she got her pilot’s license, Marina took part in a women’s publicity expedition organized by the Experimental Aviation Institute. It was the first time she’d ever flown anything other than training aircraft, and it was her first time flying as a qualified pilot. For the stunt, Marina was one of six women, each flying her own plane, and each carrying another woman as a passenger. They were supposed to fly from Leningrad to Moscow, a distance of about 590 kilometers (370 miles). The six planes were supposed to travel together as a group.

  They didn’t make it to Moscow in one leg. Bad weather slowed them down, and as it began to get dark, Marina’s group had to make the decision to come down to earth on a soggy airfield in the middle of nowhere.

  No doubt Marina risked getting in trouble with her sponsor and the state, but she made the right decision. She was an inexperienced pilot in an unfamiliar aircraft, and she knew her limits. She landed short of her destination rather than continuing blindly into the storm.

  You might think that being involved in the Soviet Union’s great aviation achievements would help protect you from being accused of treachery, but you’d be wrong.

  In June 1937, Stalin’s minions tortured confessions of treachery out of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the Red Army chief of staff who’d written The Future War. He was tried, found guilty, and executed within hours of his trial. Not long after, most of the men who’d served as his judges were also shot. Now the Soviet Air Force became an unlucky target for Stalin’s purges, because it had been a source of pride for Mikhail Tukhachevsky.

  Less than a week later, Marina’s mentor, Aleksandr Belyakov, made the first-ever air transit over the North Pole. He and two other pilots traveled from Moscow to Vancouver, Washington, in the United States, flying in a special long-distance plane designed by Andrey Tupolev. It was the first time anyone had successfully crossed the North Pole in flight—a triumph of international importance for Soviet aircraft designers and pilots.

  But in October 1937, Andrey Tupolev and another leading aircraft designer, Vladimir Petlyakov, were arrested by the NKVD on typically flimsy charges of treason and sabotage. All the directors of the Central Aero and Hydrodynamics Institute, in Moscow, were swept up in the arrest along with them.

  It might have been a strategic move by Stalin to keep a close eye on all the Soviet Union’s top aviation specialists.

  Andrey Tupolev would spend the next four years in prison, to be released on probation only after the USSR entered World War II. His work, like that of his colleague Vladimir Petlyakov, would be essential to Soviet wartime defense.

  So what protected Marina from being arrested during the Great Terror, if hard work, success, and national glory weren’t enough to keep you from suspicion? She was no doubt taking the political wind into account, navigating Soviet affairs of state as carefully as she navigated the skies. The fine line between safety and danger was probably all about lucky connections.

  Marina was well placed. One fellow pilot believed she worked as a consultant for the NKVD, the organization that got rid of most of the Red Army’s officer corps, put the nation’s leading aircraft designers in jail, and arrested fifteen-year-old Anna Popova and her friends. Whether or not this was true, Marina no doubt took advantage of her association with her boss at the Zhukovsky Academy, Aleksandr Belyakov. Record-setting flights were a good way to rally national support for aviation. Marina, following in Aleksandr’s footsteps, now began pushing the limits of long-distance flight. In 1937, she placed sixth in a long-distance air race that called for sixteen hours of flying in a single day. Later that year, Marina teamed up with another daring and experienced female pilot, Valentina Grizodubova. In October they set a women’s long-distance world record together.

  Valentina herself was a deputy in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the highest branch of the government’s legislature. Valentina detested the ferocious disregard for humanity of the Great Terror. Somehow, astonishingly, she managed to use her position of political influence to quietly help out an estimated five thousand people who might otherwise have been victims of Stalin’s purges. If Marina really was working for the NKVD, it’s possible she was assigned to keep an eye on Valentina.

  In July 1938, Marina Raskova broke yet another distance record, this time navigating for pilot Polina Osipenko and her copilot, Vera Lomako. All three women were awarded the Soviet Union’s Order of Lenin honor for their achievement.

  Marina was perfectly placed to become a hero in the eyes of the people of the USSR, especially its youth. She had a flawless reputation for work and study; she was now a skilled and record-breaking air navigator; she had squeaky-clean connections. To the rising generation who would come of age in World War II, Marina Raskova was a young woman only a little older than they, someone they admired and aspired to be, a daring aviator and the loving mother of an eight-year-old daughter as well.

  Marina was now twenty-six years old. Two months after the flight that earned her the Order of Lenin, the fateful wind behind her would make her an international celebrity.

  4

  The Flight of the Rodina

  Valentina Grizodubova, the pilot and politician who’d flown with Marina Raskova on their record-breaking trip in 1937, was about Marina’s age. Her father was an aircraft designer who had taken her for her first flight when she was two years old in a plane he’d designed himself. Valentina had flown a glider alone by the time she was fourteen. After she finished her pilot’s certification in 1933, she became an instructor herself—mostly teaching young men. From 193
4 to 1938 she flew in a display squadron that performed thrilling aerobatic tricks. She was the first woman to be part of their team.

  There were plenty of other pilots in Valentina’s life, but not many of them were women. So when Valentina proposed to take off on another record-breaking journey, again she asked Marina to join her.

  This time, Valentina wanted to fly across the vast double continent of the USSR, from Moscow to Komsomolsk-on-Amur6 at the very eastern reaches of Siberia, covering over 6,500 kilometers (4,000 miles) in a straight line. She hoped to set a new women’s long-distance record for nonstop flight. Polina Osipenko, who’d flown with Marina earlier that summer, was going to be Valentina’s copilot; Marina would be their navigator. And the government would pay their expenses.

  The converted bomber aircraft they were going to fly in was another of Andrey Tupolev’s designs. Valentina nicknamed the plane Rodina, the Russian word for “Motherland.”

  The flight was supported not only by the government but by Josef Stalin himself. Valentina spent two hours in a meeting with the Soviet leader and other highly placed officials as she described the route, how the crew would have to train, and what they needed to prepare for the flight. In July 1938, Premier Vyacheslav Molotov, another important Soviet dignitary, hosted a special reception for Valentina and her crew at his own summer house. Stalin showed up at the party.

  And the Soviet press began a love affair with Valentina Grizodubova, Polina Osipenko, and Marina Raskova that would make the three women into household names and put their photographs into the inspired and admiring hands of every Soviet schoolgirl.

  Meanwhile, in Europe, Hitler was already on the prowl for more territory. Early in 1938, Germany merged with its neighbor, Austria, to form a bigger and stronger state called “Greater Germany.” Most Austrians were ethnically Germanic, and this wasn’t an invasion of their country. It was a union that was popular with both Germans and Austrians. It wasn’t so popular with the rest of the world, and European nations in particular watched uneasily as Germany suddenly got a lot bigger. Hitler’s Nazi government was growing increasingly bold, and boasted that its air force was now second to none in the entire world.