Word: mother
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Increasingly during her last year in the West, Svetlana suffered from bouts of depression. She was haunted by her mother's suicide; as a child, she had evidently perceived it as a punishment. "My mother shot herself on the night of Nov. 8/9," she wrote to a friend in Britain, "and as the time comes close to that date, I begin to feel utterly bad and angry at the world." She spoke of conspiracies against her, much as Stalin had done in his time. "Something is around me, a 'bad aura,' fears, gossip, talk, two governments plotting...
...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...
...main reason for moving to Britain in 1982 was to put Olga into a strict boarding school. Arriving too late in the year, however, to enroll the girl in the kind of traditional institution she sought, Svetlana had to settle for a Quaker school in Saffron Walden. The mother moved into an apartment in Cambridge...
...allowed to wander around town by themselves after classes. She forbade Olga to wear tight jeans and bright tops like the other girls. During vacations, she kept Olga from playing with the children of Cambridge acquaintances. Says Fay Black, then a part-time teacher at Olga's school: "Her mother clung to her like a warden to a prisoner. The child's only hope was to go back to school...
There were further incidents of violence. One appalled English family remembers a visit to their home by Svetlana and Olga. Then twelve, the slender adolescent, who wore large square eyeglasses, was almost a head taller than her 5-ft. 4-in. mother. But the mother, at 190 lbs., pulled all the weight. "Stop whining!" she suddenly told her daughter, and struck her in the face with a clenched fist...