Word: svetlana
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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...
Leaving the U.S. was a wrenching experience for Olga, who invariably introduced herself by saying, "I'm an American." As it happened, her new school was exceptionally liberal--and Olga loved it. Svetlana was horrified to discover that students were 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...
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...
Last year Svetlana's upstairs neighbors, Lynne and Peter Mansfield, heard her hectoring Olga nearly every day when the girl was home for summer vacation and - on weekends. "We could hear her even when we turned the television up and closed the windows," Mrs. Mansfield says. "Once she carried on for hours because Olga had put red polish on her toenails...
...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...