Marina Lavrentyevna Popovich, a test pilot who broke more than 100 flying records and who was the first Soviet woman to break the sound barrier, died in the Krasnodar region of southern Russia on November 30th.
Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, announced her death on Facebook and YouTube. The Tass news agency said she died in a hospital.
Her age was unclear; Tass listed her as 86, but it also said she had added six years to her age as a young woman in order to enroll in a military flight school.
Popovich followed in the footsteps of female aviators who had gained prominence in the Soviet military during the second World War, some of whom were called the Night Witches by German forces.
Overcoming hurdles presented by both her gender and her diminutive height, she attained the rank of colonel in the Soviet air force as a test pilot, setting dozens of flying records for distance and speed, some of which still stand.
"The first flights on a high-speed fighter jet were breathtaking," she told the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in 2012. "Before I even pull up the chassis on takeoff, the sky turns dark violet, and there are small unblinking stars in the zenith."
She broke the sound barrier in 1964 flying a MiG-21 fighter jet for the State Red-Banner Scientific Research Institute, run by the air force.
“A pilot is overcome with a special kind of inner excitement after breaking the sound barrier,” she said.
She was the third woman to achieve that feat. US pilot Jacqueline Cochran was the first, in 1953. Jacqueline Auriol of France broke the sound barrier later that year.
Flee
Vasilyeva was born in what is now the Smolensk region of Russia, west of Moscow. Her father was a musician, and she was expected to become one, too, until German troops advanced on her town in the second World War, forcing the family to flee.
They settled in Novosibirsk, more than 3,200km to the east, where she decided to become a pilot “to take revenge on the fascists,” she told a magazine for military officers’ wives in 2011. She said she had also been inspired by her uncle, who was a fighter pilot.
She made her first attempt to learn to fly at age 14. But at 4ft 9in tall, she was so small – “practically a Lilliputian,” she said – that her feet could not reach the pedals. Determined nevertheless, she hung herself upside down using alpine ropes in the hope that it would make her grow. Whether by those means or naturally, at 16 she ultimately cleared 5ft and was able to join an air club.
But her advancement was stalled by bureaucratic barriers; once the war was over, women were no longer permitted to fly.
She managed to gain an audience with Kliment Voroshilov, a prominent Soviet military officer, and she was accepted into an aviation academy. She also graduated from a civil aviation academy in Leningrad.
Despite their initial skepticism, most male instructors and pilots came to be in awe of her.
“She learned strikingly fast,” Nikolai A Bondarenko, a test pilot, wrote in his memoirs, adding that she had piloted an L-29 fighter jet “as confidently as she walked the ground”.
Forced out
In The First Soviet Cosmonaut Team: Their Lives and Legacies (2009), space historians Colin Burgess and Rex Hall wrote that most of Popovich's success "would lead to later speculation that she was about to become the first Soviet woman to travel into space".
At one point the Soviet space programme did train female cosmonauts, and Popovich was admitted for testing. But ultimately only one, Valentina Tereshkova, was sent into space. Popovich said that she was advised to focus on her family, and that she was forced out of the programme.
“I and a group of women were rejected,” she told the news site Pravda.ru in 2011. “Officially I was told: ‘You have a small daughter, so we’re not going to take the risk, we’re only taking unmarried women.’ Well then, why did they subject me to testing for two months, torment me?”
Her disappointment was heightened by the fact that she lived among some of the first cosmonauts. Her first husband, Pavel R Popovich, trained with Yuri A Gagarin, who in 1961 became the first human to orbit Earth. Gagarin was their neighbour in Star City, the space training center near Moscow.
Popovich told Seagull, a Russian-American magazine, in an interview published in 2008 that she even declared a hunger strike in protest, only to be told by generals overseeing the cosmonauts that she "should let your husband fly first, and then you can".
Her marriage to Pavel Popovich, with whom she had two daughters, ended in divorce in the 1980s. She is survived by her second husband, Boris A Zhikhorev, also a pilot; her daughters, Natalia and Oksana; and three grandchildren.