Marina Mikhailovna Raskova

Born Mar. 15 (28), 1912, in Moscow; died Jan. 4, 1943, near Saratov. Soviet pilot-navigator; major (1942). Hero of the Soviet Union (Nov. 2, 1938). Member of the CPSU from 1940. Daughter of teachers.

Raskova worked at the air navigation laboratory of the N. E. Zhukovskii Air Force Academy from 1932. She graduated as a navigator from the Central Training Center of the Civil Air Fleet in 1934 and from the pilots’ school of the Central Air Club in 1935. She joined the Red Army in 1938. The same year Raskova was a navigator on long-distance nonstop flights. On July 2, together with P. D. Osipenko and V. Lomako, she flew from Sevastopol’ to Arkhangel’sk on a seaplane, and on September 24–25, together with V. S. Grizodubova and Osipenko, from Moscow to the Far East on the ANT-37 airplane. In the Great Patriotic War (1941—45), Raskova commanded an air detachment for the formation of women’s air regiments and was from January 1942 commander of a women’s bombardment aviation regiment.

Raskova died in the line of duty and was buried in Red Square at the Kremlin Wall. She was awarded two Orders of Lenin and the Order of the Patriotic War First Class (posthumously). Raskova is the author of Notes of a Navigator (1939).