A Thousand Sisters

by Elizabeth Wein

  A new long-distance flight record in a Soviet plane would make a fine political statement to the Germans: our long-range bombers won’t have any trouble reaching Greater Germany if war breaks out.

  Valentina, Polina, and Marina spent the summer training for the flight and familiarizing themselves with the Rodina. Their converted bomber was the only flyable plane of its type ever built, and that summer Polina made over a hundred practice takeoffs and landings in other types of bombers to get herself ready to fly it. In addition to their flight preparations, all three young women had to learn to fire pistols and hunting weapons in case they were forced to land in the Siberian wilderness.

  But the flight of the Rodina had to be delayed because Marina was hospitalized with appendicitis. By the time she was back on her feet, it was late September. Now the planned flight would have to cross parts of Siberia where it might already be snowing. On September 23, a state commission canceled the flight of the Rodina.

  Stalin, not a man to pay much attention to the wind, overruled the decision. The flight would go ahead as planned.

  COPILOT POLINA OSIPENKO, PILOT VALENTINA GRIZODUBOVA, AND NAVIGATOR MARINA RASKOVA POSING WITH THE RODINA

  Early in the morning on September 24, 1938, Valentina, Polina, and Marina, wearing leather jackets and fur-lined boots, took off from Moscow into a clear sky. Their nonstop flight would last more than twenty-four hours.

  * * *

  BLIND FLYING

  Radar, which has so many uses in modern navigation, didn’t exist in a practical form in the 1930s. It hadn’t even been given that name yet. The early radio system used by aviators to find their way when they couldn’t see the ground was called “radio direction finding.”

  Here’s how it worked. An aircraft could send out a radio signal to a station on the ground. The controllers on the ground literally shifted their own radio around until they found the position where it was receiving the strongest possible signal from the air, and then they were able to tell which direction the signal was coming from. If two or more ground stations did this at the same time, they were able to compare their results. Then they could draw lines on a map and figure out a “position fix” showing exactly where the airborne plane was over the ground at the moment it had sent the radio signals.

  Once they’d figured out these details, the ground-based controllers could send a radio message back to the plane and tell its pilot exactly where she was—even if she couldn’t see the ground she was flying over.

  Navigating using instruments without being able to see the ground was known in the early days of aviation as “blind flying.” We call it “instrument flying” now, and it’s much more complex and reliable than it was in the 1930s.

  At that time, if any of the radios failed on the ground or in the air, or there was any kind of interference with the radio transmission, the system didn’t work. There usually wasn’t a backup. The pilot was on her own. She’d either have to get out of the clouds, or land and wait for the weather to clear or for daylight to break. Otherwise she’d be flying blindly into the unknown.

  * * *

  Half an hour after takeoff, the fair weather disappeared. The trip had hardly started when the Rodina became surrounded by thick cloud.

  The crew was flying blind. In the navigator’s cabin up front in the nose of the plane, Marina could barely catch a glimpse of the ground to figure out where they were. By nightfall they were depending almost entirely on radio navigation, counting on people far away to relay their location to them in radio messages. After they’d been flying for sixteen hours and just before it got dark, Marina caught a brief glimpse of the river near Omsk, which was enough to tell her they were still on course. She sent a radio message back home to Moscow to let them know that all was well.

  It wasn’t just cloudy, though. It was cold—well-below-zero cold. Soon the aircraft became crusted with ice both inside and out. All three women knew that if too much heavy ice formed on the wings, the plane would become impossible to control. So Valentina climbed higher to try to avoid the damp cloud that was creating the ice.

  But the higher she flew, the lower the temperature fell. Now they had another problem: the extreme cold froze the communication instruments. At about −35 degrees Celsius (−31 degrees Fahrenheit), both the radio and its emergency backup failed. So did the intercom. Marina and Valentina had to write notes to each other to communicate.

  Valentina flew the Rodina higher still to get above the cloud, so that Marina could navigate by the stars. Now Marina had to hold her sextant out of the hatch of her cabin into the icy wind so she could calculate which direction they should fly. She had to take off her fur gloves to hold the sextant; the vapor from her breath made a thin crust of frost on her goggles. But she got the reading she needed.

  Polina took over the flight controls for six hours so that Valentina could rest as they flew on through the subzero Siberian night.

  As it grew light, the weather got better, and once again Marina was able to pinpoint where they were. They managed to warm up the radio enough to try to make one last transmission of their location to Moscow. But they didn’t hear back—the freezing and reheating was more than the radio could take, and they weren’t able to use it again.

  They’d been flying without stopping for more than a day when the low-fuel light came on unexpectedly. It warned them they had only half an hour before they ran out of fuel.

  This was the worst shock yet. They still had over an hour before they’d reach their destination, and they were supposed to have enough fuel for at least another 500 kilometers (300 miles). After all that preparation, how could they possibly have taken off without enough fuel? The fuel tanks had even been sealed shut back in Moscow so that they couldn’t cheat and land somewhere along the way to fill up again. Valentina guessed that the mechanics back home must have failed to top up the fuel tanks after testing the engines.

  In those tense minutes after the low-fuel warning light came on, Valentina and Marina discussed all the possible alternative destinations they could think of—but they didn’t have enough fuel to get to any of them. All three women knew, with sinking hearts, that they were going to run out of fuel in the middle of the Siberian wilderness.

  They were still flying over subarctic taiga, a seemingly endless landscape of conifer forest—in English this is sometimes called “snow forest.” If any of the flight crew were going to survive, Valentina would have to land there. They were nowhere near an airfield, or even a village.

  The navigator’s cabin was by itself right up in front of the aircraft. If the plane crash-landed nose first, which could easily happen in an emergency, Marina would be crushed. According to the Rodina’s emergency procedure, Marina would have to escape from her cabin before Valentina tried to land the plane. Valentina told her to use her parachute to jump out.

  Marina really didn’t want to—she tried to convince Valentina that she’d be okay if she stayed as far back in her cabin as she could get. But Valentina was worried that if the hatch to Marina’s cabin was crushed, Marina would be stuck in the forward cabin even if she survived the landing.

  So Marina made her first-ever parachute jump, alone, into the middle of the Siberian forest.

  The Rodina had lost its navigator.

  With just enough fuel left to get them to the ground, Valentina and Polina managed to crash-land the Rodina in one piece. They didn’t know if Marina had landed safely, but they hoped so, and after they’d climbed out of the aircraft, they fired shots into the air with their pistols to try to signal Marina to let her know where they were.

  Marina had, in fact, survived her own landing.

  Although her parachute had tangled in a fir tree as it came down, she had managed to cut herself free and made it to the ground. Alone by herself in the taiga, she heard the echoes of her companions’ gunshots. But from where she stood, the echoes were louder than the shots themselves, and following the sound, Marina set off in the wrong direction.

 
It was days before she realized her mistake.

  Marina was lucky it wasn’t later in the year or she wouldn’t have been able to survive the taiga’s severe winter weather. As it was, the temperature dropped below freezing at night. After the frantic last-minute decision to jump out of the Rodina, Marina had accidentally left her emergency kit behind, so the only food she had on her was one and a half chocolate bars and some mints in her pockets.

  For ten days, she survived on wild cranberries, mushrooms, and birch leaves. As she wandered in hungry frustration trying to find the shelter and supplies of the Rodina, she fell into the icy water of a swamp and became soaked. She had to wait for her clothes to dry before she could move on.

  As the days dragged by, Marina began to hear and see planes passing overhead. So she knew that people were looking for her and for the Rodina. But she could also hear bears and lynx growling in the wilderness around her. To her horror, one evening, she got to meet the source of one of these eerie noises.

  About fifteen meters (sixteen yards) ahead of her, a shape suddenly appeared out of the forest.

  It was a black bear.

  As it shuffled toward Marina, that extra training with firearms came to her rescue. She aimed her pistol and shot at the bear.

  She didn’t hit it, but she frightened it enough that it lumbered away and she survived the encounter undamaged.

  Marina spent that night on the top of a hill, where she could keep a good lookout.

  Meanwhile, fifty aircraft and thousands of people in motorboats, on foot, on horseback, and even riding reindeer were all searching for the missing plane and flight crew.

  Eight days after the crash, a pilot named Mikhail Sakharov in a civilian aviation service seaplane finally spotted the downed Rodina. Two small figures stood nearby, Valentina and Polina, waving a white cloth at the small plane that buzzed over their heads in the wilderness. They still didn’t know what had happened to Marina.

  The Rodina had been found, but there wasn’t any place for a rescue aircraft to land. Now that people knew where the plane was located, they had to figure out how to get to it on the ground. In the meantime, they dropped supplies to the crew by parachute.

  During the rescue effort that followed, two of the search aircraft collided with each other. Horrified and unable to help from the ground where they waited, the pilots of the Rodina had to watch the terrible accident happen. Sixteen people were killed in the crash—including an air force commander and his chief navigator. It was years before this tragedy was made public. Nothing was going to stop the USSR from announcing that the flight of the Rodina was anything other than a phenomenal success.

  For, in just over a day, Valentina Grizodubova, Polina Osipenko, and Marina Raskova had flown some 6,000 kilometers (about 3,700 miles).7 The women’s long-distance flight record, previously held by British pilot Elizabeth Lyon, had been smashed to smithereens. The Rodina had beaten the world record by approximately 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles), in an aircraft that was an entirely new Soviet design.

  The day after the crash site was located by the rescue team, Marina managed to make her way to the Rodina. She and her crewmates hugged each other, laughed, and cried, and Polina asked her what had taken her so long. Right away a doctor was summoned to treat her legs for bruises and frostbite, but Marina was especially grateful for hot tea!

  Now the tragedy could turn to triumph. And not only had Marina Raskova played a key role in the phenomenal achievement, but she had an amazing story of ten days of wilderness survival to tell along with it.

  What a woman! And a mother, too! When Marina was able to speak to her daughter, Tanya, on the telephone from the Far East, the call was broadcast by radio throughout the Soviet Union.

  While the Soviet government was scrambling to launch the enormous rescue effort for their heroic women pilots, an event of global significance was going on without them in western Europe.

  On September 30, 1938, while Marina was still lost in the taiga, government officials from Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom met for a conference in Munich, Germany—the USSR wasn’t invited. There, these “great powers” signed an agreement that gave parts of Czechoslovakia to Germany. This unfair treaty, called the Munich Agreement, shows just how desperate the European powers were to avoid the outbreak of a war against Hitler’s Germany.

  The timing of the Munich Agreement, which was made behind the Soviet Union’s back and was certainly a blow to its pride, may partly explain why the Soviet government and media gave so much attention to the flight of the Rodina.

  When the triumphant fliers got back to Moscow, they were swept up in a parade through streets filled with flowers and cheering crowds. Apparently Stalin himself greeted them with kisses when they reached the Kremlin, the palatial seat of Soviet government, and Marina and Valentina had a joyful reunion with their children. Valentina held her two-year-old son, Sokolik, while she gave a speech; at a reception at the Kremlin, Marina’s daughter, Tanya, sat with Stalin and the premier, Vyacheslav Molotov, who’d hosted the Rodina’s crew at his summer house in July.

  The flight of the Rodina was reported all around the world. Marina and Polina were each presented with a second Order of Lenin award, and they and Valentina were all given the Gold Star of Hero of the Soviet Union—the nation’s highest honor. They were the first women ever to receive it. Marina, mother and aviator, was a worldwide star.

  5

  “A Generation Not from This Universe”

  Two days after the flight of the Rodina was celebrated as a success, the commander-in-chief of the Soviet Air Force wrote a comment for Komsomolskaya Pravda8, the newspaper for the youth branch of the Communist Party. He said that the central air force headquarters had already received more than a hundred letters from young women begging to be admitted to military schools. Every single one of them mentioned the Rodina’s crew as her inspiration.

  But the women who’d made the record-breaking flight in the Rodina weren’t just dazzling celebrities: they were also safe role models. Of course, Marina was young and attractive, a skilled career woman in an exciting industry, an educated academic, and an adored mother; but most important of all to her success, she was admired and supported by Josef Stalin. So were Valentina Grizodubova and Polina Osipenko. When Polina died in a crash in May 1939, only seven months after the record-breaking flight, Stalin was a pallbearer at her funeral. Polina was buried in the wall of the Kremlin just behind Lenin’s tomb.

  Here’s what’s so hard for us to understand today: The ruthless, paranoid Josef Stalin, by then the uncontested leader of the USSR, commanded a bizarre and absolute power over his people. If you were a young person in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, you were unable to separate your fear of Stalin and his henchmen from your genuine patriotic fervor for your Motherland.

  It may be impossible for us to understand how the Great Terror could have prepared these youthful, idealistic minds for the incredible hard work and the enormous sacrifices that lay ahead of them in World War II.

  But though we can’t relate to it or understand it, this mix of fear and patriotism helps to explain why the youth of the Soviet Union fought so ferociously and relentlessly against Hitler’s Germany and Nazi fascism. Fascism, which we associate so strongly with the Nazi Party9, is a form of government rooted in nationalism, in which democracy gives way to a dictator. It’s used to describe political movements that whip up hate and fear against outsiders and try to disguise them as patriotism. During World War II, the people of the USSR referred to the Germans as “fascists” more than they used the term “Nazis.” Soviet citizens felt that they themselves were real patriots, fighting a war against the false patriotism of fascism.

  The Soviet name for the fight to drive the German army out of their nation during World War II is the “Great Patriotic War.” Today’s Russians still use that name.

  And the youth of the Soviet Union were ready for a patriotic war. In June 1935, eighteen-year-old Anna Mlynek gave a high scho
ol graduation speech that was reported in Komsomolskaya Pravda; addressing both the young women and young men of her generation, she concluded, “Each of us will become a hero when ordered by our country.” A whole generation of teens was anticipating having to become soldiers.

  We don’t know all their stories. We can only look at the ones that have been recorded, and consider what it must have been like for others in their generation. It is baffling for us to imagine how frightening life must have been for these teens, yet how much they seem to truly have felt they were working to improve their nation—their Motherland—and how desperately they struggled for safety and acceptance so they could live ordinary productive lives.

  Stalin often managed to shrug off the blame for his actions onto his subordinates or the Communist Party itself. People revered him as much as they feared him; they were just as anxious to prove themselves worthy party members as they were to avoid arrest.

  Another teen who suffered as a result of the Great Terror was Lidiya Vladimirovna Litvyak—or as she was known all her life, Lilya. She was born on August 18, 1921, and her birthday just happened to be Soviet Air Fleet Day or Aviation Day. For Lilya, this must have felt like destiny, because she wanted to be in the air more than anything else in the world.

  Lilya was one of millions of young people almost exactly the same age as the USSR itself, educated entirely in those Soviet schools that were now so free of gender bias. She made her first solo flight, in the sky on her own, when she was fifteen years old. She was seventeen and already training as a flying instructor when Marina, Valentina, and Polina made their record-smashing flight in 1938. Like the rest of the nation, Lilya was probably glued to the radio as reports told of the Rodina’s adventures in the Siberian wilderness. Lilya cut out newspaper articles and photographs of the brave and resourceful crew members and carried them around with her in a notebook.