Khiuaz Dospanova, a famous Kazakh navigator-gunner, inscribed her name into the history of Kazakhstan and the Soviet Union for generations. She was born in the village of Ganyushkino, now in the Atyrau region of Kazakhstan, on May 15, 1922. Her story is a testament to the fact that what is expected of you and what you are actually capable of are often not the same, and she proved that.
She was among the “Night Witches” during World War II. Photo credit: From open internet sources. A “Night Witch” is not a metaphor you borrow lightly. It was a name given by the Nazi enemy during World War II, reluctantly, almost grudgingly, to women who flew fragile, slow biplanes into the dark, cutting their engines before the final approach so that all you could hear was a whisper.
Then—bombs. To climb into that cockpit required more than training. It required a particular kind of nerve: to mobilize yourself against fear, against physics, against the quiet suggestion that you did not belong there at all. For a young woman, especially one coming from the Kazakh steppe, far removed from everyday contact with machines, let alone aircraft, that leap was not just physical.
It was civilizational. And yet, the idea that she would have been unprepared is misleading. Women of the steppe were never porcelain figures. They worked, managed households, endured scarcity, and, when necessary, made decisions that shaped the survival of families and communities.
So in a way, the war did not invent Khiuaz’s resilience. It simply redirected it. Her trajectory, at first glance, looks almost like a textbook Soviet: a pioneer leader, secretary of the Komsomol organization. She graduated in 1940 with a gold medal. However, there was an early deviation—aviation.
She trained at a local aeroclub while still in school, earning a reserve pilot certificate. Immediately after graduation, she went to Moscow intending to enroll in the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy. However, even then, the system drew a line: she was denied entry due to the absence of women among cadets.
It is worth pausing here. Talent was not the barrier. So she pivoted to a safer option and enrolled in a medical institute in Moscow, where she was admitted without an entrance exam. But life presented her with a different test, one that would challenge her desire to fly not for herself, but to defeat an enemy, fully aware it could cost her life.
In October 1941, she joined the women’s aviation units organized by the legendary pilot Marina Raskova, a navigator and one of the first women awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Within weeks, she was in Engels on the Volga river, undergoing accelerated military flight training for combat operations in night bomber aviation.
The pace was brutal. The margin for error: nonexistent. Dospanova became a navigator-gunner in the 46th Guards Regiment, the group that would earn the nickname “Night Witches.” They flew the Po-2, a plywood-and-canvas aircraft that had no business surviving in contested airspace because, by every conventional metric, it was fatally disadvantaged: too slow to escape, too fragile to absorb damage, and too lightly equipped to fight back.
Even though the laws of physics set the constraints, they learned how to use them. Something women, more often than not, have had to do throughout their lives. Navigator-gunner Dospanova carried out combat missions in the most difficult sectors of the front: the Southern Front, Transcaucasia, the North Caucasus, Ukraine, and Belarus.