She had an affair with the head of Komsomol, Aleksandr Kosarev who was executed during the Great Terror in 1937.

In 1938, she married her first husband, Anatoly Serov, a Soviet Air Force general, a test and fighter pilot.

[4] In 1939 Anatoli Serov died in an air crash together with Polina Osipenko preparing his type rating on the I-16UTI-4.

She subsequently inspired a series of love poems, collected as "With You and Without You" ("С тобой и без тебя").

[6] While it's true that Serova, working as a hospital volunteer, met Rokossovski several times while he was recovering from a wound from a shell fragment in early 1942, it was not acknowledged.