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As 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.
An 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. 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.
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."
In a 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."