Word: friends
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Svetlana often walked away from places with a malediction on her lips. Thus had she left the Soviet Union and thus would she eventually depart the West. Men and women who got to know her felt the lash of her leave-takings. Said one former friend: "If you didn't stop your life and devote yourself completely to hers, she would cast you out into utter darkness...
...everyday dealings Svetlana behaved more reasonably, frequently disarming new acquaintances with a charm that was undeniably genuine. She touched people by the evident sincerity of her religious belief. "She could be warm, lovely and simple," says Margedant Hayakawa, Wes Peters' sister, who remained a supportive friend...
...often Svetlana's ungovernable temper got in the way of her loving intentions. Wherever mother and daughter lived in the U.S., people remember, Svetlana frequently struck Olga. When the child was five, an acquaintance in Carlsbad, Calif., recalls, "Olga had been playing next door with a friend, and Mrs. Peters was not particularly happy about it for some reason. When she called her home, Olga came running, fell, skinned her knee and cried. I picked her up to comfort her. But her mother started smacking her on the bottom for falling down." Olga's upbringing was almost a case study...
...American friend who knew Olga for nearly a decade says that when Svetlana got angry, she too hit her child in the face over and over again: "Svetlana did not break her bones, but she ruled her with an iron hand." The violence started, the acquaintance recalls, "when Olga began to have a mind of her own, which was pretty early, at about five." Svetlana apparently could not grasp that the child's displays of independence were perfectly normal. Says the friend: "Olga is a very spirited, independent girl, and her mother could never tolerate that, ever...
...letter to a friend in Cambridge, Svetlana complained, "With this precious, long-legged and dumb-headed daughter of mine I'm tied hand and foot. She goes back to school on Sunday, THANK GOD! When she's with me, I miss more than ever my Katya and Osia (her children in the Soviet Union). They are so nice, and she (Olga) is a fool, spoiled rotten...