Soviet Women Soldiers in World War II: Three Biographical Sketches

Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military, Fall-Winter, 2000 by Kazimiera J. Cottam

My Women in War and Resistance: Selected Biographies of Soviet Women Soldiers (1998) is an original collection of one hundred mini-biographies, of which three are presented here. This original book is part of a series also including three collections which I compiled, edited, and translated from Russian. The series consists of personal memoirs and biographies of Soviet women who served in both military and paramilitary units as pilots, navigators, air gunners, snipers, machine gunners, tank crew members, communications specialists, political officers, marines, medics, partisans, resistance leaders, and spies. Four biographies pertain to Civil War heroines while the rest are limited to participants in World War II.

On the Road to Stalingrad: Memoirs of a Woman Machine Gunner (1997) describes the desperate fighting for Odessa and Sevastopol (1941-1942) as witnessed by a woman non-commissioned officer who eventually commanded a machine-gun company. Women in Air War: The Eastern Front of World War II tells the story of three women's combat air regiments formed by Marina Raskova. Defending Leningrad: Women Behind Enemy Lines describes the contributions made by two women partisans and one secret agent, and includes a teenager's diary. Excerpts from my translation of the diary will be reproduced in an forthcoming book entitled Why Do They Hate Me (about children in the Holocaust and World War II), to be published by Simon & Schuster of New York.

The transliteration system employed here, known as "the geographic names' method," was adopted by Canadian and U.S. military translators.

RASKOVA (nee MALININA), MARINA MIKHAYLOVNA (28 March 1912 - 4 January 1943). Major. Commanding officer of the 587th Dive Bomber Regiment, subsequently renamed the 125th "M.M. Raskova" Borisov Guards Dive Bomber Regiment (Orders of Suvorov and Kutuzov III Class). Was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union on 2 November 1938.

Unlike the majority of Soviet airwomen, Raskova had no early interest in aviation. She became pilot-navigator purely by accident. Her parents wanted her to become a musician; and she aspired to a career as an opera singer. Due to his poor health, Raskova's father taught singing at home; her mother was a schoolteacher. At six years of age, Raskova began to attend the Pushkin School of music twice a week. In October 1919, at the age of sixty-seven, Raskova's father died from injuries sustained when he was struck by a motorcycle. Afterwards Raskova's mother became the director of a boys' home in Marfino near Moscow. A year later, she transferred back to Moscow to enable her children to attend appropriate schools. Here, late in 1920, she was assigned a room for her family in a communal apartment.

Little Marina went to a regular school and after school hours attended a child centre in which her mother, Anna Spiridonovna, was employed. Here she passed her time drawing, and taking drama and singing lessons. At ten years of age she passed the entrance examinations for admission to a conservatory and subsequently transferred to a technical school of music, where she also studied French and Italian. In her basic school, her favourite subject was biology. Subsequently, she enrolled in grade eight of School No. 32 with emphasis on chemistry, with a view to securing immediate employment upon graduation, to assist her family. At the age of about fifteen, she came down with a middle-ear infection and paratyphoid, and was bedridden for over two months. As a result, her doctor delivered an ultimatum to Marina's mother, insisting that a choice must be made between chemistry and music in this case. Marina herself chose chemistry. She graduated in the spring of 1929 and was immediately sent by her school to the Butyrskiy Aniline Dye Plant as an apprentice. Six months later she became a full-fledged laboratory technician. Meanwhile, she married Sergey Raskov, an engineer whom she met through an amateur drama club at the Plant. (She was to divorce him in October 1935.)

She left the Plant to look after her baby daughter Tanya, born in 1930. Bored at home, she began taking singing; lessons from an aunt who was an opera singer. This was not challenging enough and she longed to go back to work. Coincidentally, in October 1931, Raskova was offered a position as a draughtswoman in the Navigation Laboratory of the "N.Ye. Zhukovskiy" Air Force Engineering Academy, which determined her future career.

By the end of the year Raskova was promoted and became a teaching and laboratory assistant. In that capacity she observed and soon understood the purpose of various instruments. Two months after her arrival at the Laboratory, A.V. Belyakov was appointed its director. In that capacity, he began to systematically equip the Laboratory with various instruments and training aids. Having absorbed, in the course of her duties, an elementary knowledge of the theory of air navigation, Raskova gained a better understanding of the purpose of her work. Her duties in the Laboratory were expanded. She was charged with testing the instruments and together with a technician installed them aboard aircraft. In addition, as an extramural student at the Aviation Institute in Leningrad, for two years she studied mathematics, physics, geometry, and mechanical engineering.