Word: svetlana
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...Olga is the center of my existence," Svetlana often said. She lavished much warmth on the child, but all too 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...
...Svetlana remembered her papochka, Stalin was tender with her in her early childhood, bestowing "loud moist kisses" and calling her "little sparrow." But as she reached adolescence, he became incensed by her independent spirit. He berated her for the "insolence" on her face. He made a scene when he found her wearing a tight sweater. He hated the sight of her in short skirts and made her wear hers much longer than other schoolgirls did. When he learned that she had a lover, he slapped her twice across the face...
...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...
...Svetlana complained constantly about what she considered the lack of discipline in U.S. schools; indeed, her 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...
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...