Introduction: “So Different in Their Personal Lives and So Similar in the Main Thing – [a] Desire to Fight…”

On October 9, 1941, Irina Rakobolskaia was on duty in the Komsomol room of the Moscow State University, where she studied physics. One of the phone calls she received that day was from the All-Union Komsomol headquarters. The caller read her the contents of a telegram that announced the mobilization of young women volunteers to the front. According to the notice, the Krasnopresnenskii city district, the administrative division to which the Moscow State University belonged, was to select twelve young women. The request was urgent. Right away, Rakobolskaia started the list of volunteers with her own name and began getting in touch with each department at the university, announcing the mobilization and registering more names. The following day, she and everyone who signed up gathered in the reception room of the Komsomol headquarters. A large crowd was already there – other young women responding to mobilization appeals. Only then, while waiting to be interviewed by the selection committee, did Rakobolskaia find out that the mobilization was for the Air Force, specifically for women's air regiments organized by Marina Raskova. As Rakobolskaia explained in a 1997 interview, Raskova, twenty-nine years old in 1941, “was a legendary figure, a famous woman pilot, a Hero of the Soviet Union. How was it possible to miss such an opportunity – to fly, to fight, and to do it all under the command of Raskova?