But you know what? It was worth it, even though nobody was nice to me for a couple of days. As I was only a child and too young to be told of the history between my grandfather and my grandmother, it was just a cool trip with my parents to visit this new grandad whom I hadn’t even known existed. He had a big house with lots of animals – dogs, cats, birds, chickens and roosters running around. And he also had a bunch of beehives and would let me taste this really fresh honey, which was wonderful. I didn’t know at the time what it meant for my mum to go and visit her dad. She didn’t tell my grandmother where we all went because she knew she would be upset, but I remember she found out a couple of years later and then I understood the truth about what had happened when my mother was young.
I was ten years old and I heard my mother and grandmother talking in raised voices about it. My grandmother had somehow found out that my mother had visited her real dad and she was very, very upset. She couldn’t understand why my mother would want to see him and she reminded Mum about all the times he would hit her and how they had gone to stay at the school to escape him. Also, she didn’t understand how my mother could forgive him, although in her defence, I think it is human nature to try to understand where you come from. My grandfather had stopped drinking by then and my mum explained to my grandmother how he was a different man now and that he had changed his lifestyle and was taking better care of himself. He had told my mother that my grandmother was the love of his life and he would never be able to forgive himself for treating her the way he had.
Grandad had never remarried; he just lived on his own with his animals and never formed any other relationships. A strong man, he was also very clever and matter-of-fact and had been in the army, too. I certainly think my mother got her personality from him rather than my grandmother, who was a very soft woman. My mother was very definite in her decisions, something I think she got from him.
And there wasn’t really anything soft about my mother either. As well as the constant fighting with my dad, I felt that she would never just talk to me either – she always seemed to shout! I understand now, although I didn’t then, how frustrated she must have been with my dad and the state of their marriage. She would shout at me constantly, almost taking her anger out on me. Very full-on, she was also very strict with me. I might have tried to say something back to her once or twice but then I would get a smack and so I would never do it again.
As I have said, you would never disrespect your elders, ever, and so we did grow up with a lot of appreciation for older people. When I was ten or eleven years old there was a school programme that involved us going to visit war veterans and helping them in any way you could. I used to visit a lady, a war veteran who lived alone – she was so sweet. I would wash the floors for her, clean her kitchen and go to the shop and fetch her some vegetables and other things. Her family couldn’t visit her every day as they lived outside Vladivostok, but the government knew where the elderly veterans lived and those who were living alone and at their most vulnerable. They would then be reported to the local schools so the students could help. It was a really considerate scheme and we felt we were doing a good thing. It did teach us to be compassionate and to show respect for our elders, especially those who had been through so much. And so it became second nature to help them whenever we could – even if that meant just helping someone to cross the street or giving them a seat on public transport.
CHAPTER 5
Wanting to be a Masha
After the third grade, you moved classrooms and had different teachers for each subject. It meant you could sit where you wanted – which was wonderful for me as I had been made to sit next to Maxim all that time. Now I was able to sit with my friend, Vera, whom I knew from outside school as we lived in the same apartment block.
We would quite often play together, but she was also a very studious girl. She would always get straight As in all of the subjects and I wanted to be just like her. I did study quite well and really loved subjects like History, Literature and Russian Language, but I hated Maths, Algebra and Physics – not my thing at all. From the fourth grade upwards school became even more strict and intense. There was lots of homework and everyone had the same subjects to study until they left school. Nowadays you can specialise in certain subjects if they are going to be subjects you want to study in more depth and graduate in from college, but when I was at school there was a big emphasis on everyone studying exactly the same thing, which was very demanding.
I remember we all loved English lessons – although I used to think it was a little pointless and I couldn’t understand why I would ever need to learn English. So I wasn’t that keen on it to begin with, and when our class was split into two groups to study it, I was pleased to have a teacher who spent most of the time doing her nails and didn’t make us learn a lot, whereas the other group had a very strict teacher. Ours would give us a paragraph to translate and that would be it for the whole lesson. We thought we were very lucky until one week she was sick and they merged the two groups. It was only then that we realised we knew absolutely nothing compared to the other group. The teacher only spoke in English, and we realised we hadn’t learned anything.
I wasn’t a lonely child at school but I could probably only count Vera as my friend. It didn’t help that I felt like an outsider because of my name, which I hated. I was the only girl in school with the name Kristina, and I was so cross with my mum.
‘Why did you give me that name? Everyone makes fun of me with that stupid name! I want a different name!’ I would shout at her. And she would say, ‘OK, what name would you want? Something like Masha? Do you want to be like everyone else?’
I was also so caught up with my dancing that I just never really wanted to play with anyone after school because I always wanted to go to dance classes. Dance school was where I made friends and had lots of friends, boys and girls, as we all shared a common interest. For me it was a happy place, and fun to be among my friends. Even though I loved living with my grandparents and my aunt, my parents were still fighting all the time. And Dad was constantly leaving home and coming back and I just kept blaming my mum. Dance school was my escape and I especially loved going away on trips to take part in competitions. I was never homesick. No one at dance school knew what my home life was like so in a way I felt free – I could be myself and I was praised and appreciated because I was good at dancing.
Don’t get me wrong, it was never praise that wasn’t earned; we definitely had to prove ourselves to be good dancers and hard workers to warrant any admiration, so it felt good to be doing something well. It was a happy place for me and I definitely loved performing on the stage because it was a place where I too felt loved and appreciated. I was somebody worthy of attention on stage whereas at home, probably from the age of nine or ten, I wasn’t getting a lot of attention from my parents – my dad especially. Maybe that sounds harsh. I guess to a certain extent I did have my parents’ attention as they always supported me in dance competitions and made an effort on my birthday but to me, I think I felt a lack of attention from them as parents. My mum tried her best to make up for my dad’s absences when she would take me to see the ballet, theatre shows and the circus. She really broadened my horizons, taking me to see some amazing shows that captured my imagination. I was a huge animal lover when I was young and cats were my favourite – I loved them! So when the cats’ circus came to the city she would take me as a treat, as well as a way to compensate for my father being away.
When he was at home it was a lot worse as they were so caught up in their own problems I felt rejected a lot of the time, or that I was in the way. I certainly don’t think they cared much about me as they would always fight in front of me, and they would be so aggressive with each other. Can you imagine how awful it is to see your parents so angry towards each other? And they wouldn’t hold anything back; they wouldn’t try to hide their arguments. I was a constant witness to the shouting and screaming and it upset me a lot. I did cry quite often, but
that was worse as they would then take their anger out on me and start shouting at me, too. My grandmother tried to calm them down and stop them from yelling, but there wasn’t much chance of escape in our three-room flat.
The only bonus of living with six people in a smaller flat was that you didn’t need to worry about the heating quite so much in winter. There was a lot of body heat generated so sometimes the central heating didn’t have to be on full blast, which in Russia, during winter time, is the only way to survive. Our winters are extremely cold and temperatures can sometimes drop to -20°C. It was also very windy, for we were right on the coast so the wind chill from the sea can sometimes make it feel like -40. And I hate the cold!
I really didn’t like the winters at all but the one good thing was that there was always plenty of snow, really deep, thick snow, which meant that snowball fights were part of daily life and my aunt and I would have great fun travelling to and from school on our sleighs. It does make me laugh how in the UK things come to a halt at the first sign of a snowflake. I can’t imagine how people here would cope with the snow we used to get in Russia. We had so much, but it was never a problem because people were used to it. Schools would always be open and people had snow chains on the wheels of their cars so there were no transport difficulties either. Always we had to be prepared for snow, and we were.
In the summer the temperatures could get very high. It would reach 30°C in August, which was fine but it was also 98 per cent humidity too: humid and hot. We would spend lots of time outdoors, often by the sea in summer camp. My mum would get free vouchers for summer camp from work and I loved it. In Russia, in Soviet Union times, the schools would always break up in early June and then you would have June, July and August to enjoy summer before going back to school on 1 September. My dance school often held a few competitions in June (there was usually a big one at the beginning of July) and then after that we were released on holiday. I loved summer camp – there were always so many activities to do and always some kind of dancing which, of course, I loved. It was fun meeting new people and I enjoyed the company and being away from home. I always went with my aunt, who being older had already started dating boys so she loved it because it gave her the freedom to see them, and I loved it because I was able to dance and perform. And just being away from home was fun.
Summer camp, as well as being fun and a great place to learn and take part in new activities, was also fairly health-orientated, too. I suppose in a way the Soviet Union wanted to reinforce the notion of us being a strong, healthy generation and so every morning at camp we would have to stand in front of a quartz lamp to get our daily dose of vitamin D. It was something that was done across the whole of Russia – I didn’t think much about it, I just lived it. I took my place in the Soviet system, although it was a system of contradictions, too. On the one hand there was a lot of pressure on Russia in the big sporting events, like the Olympics, to be the best and to win every event. But at the same time you had to conform and be equal with everyone else as well. My aunt was very sporty, and would often represent the school at athletic events; the whole family was very proud of her. I loved it when I was old enough to move out of my parents’ room and in with her. There was a little desk where we could study but mostly we would just spend time together, chatting and gossiping. Before 6pm I was allowed in the living room and I could watch a couple of hours of children’s TV on our big old chunky black-and-white television set.
Not that I really had much time to watch TV, what with dancing and Mum making sure I was doing my homework and studies. When she wasn’t arguing with my dad, she always made sure I was working as hard as I could. As well as being a very clever woman herself, Mum was also extremely good-looking. She was so beautiful – we would walk out of our apartment building and she would have men turning their heads to watch her. It was embarrassing as a kid and I remember saying to her, ‘Mum, every man is looking at you!’
Because she was also very outgoing, she had lots of friends. Whenever she took me out with her, she always made sure we were both dressed up and looking our best. She would make me wear a big bow on my head too, made from her red polka-dot scarf. She’d tie it into a bow and put it on my hair and sometimes it was bigger than my head! But she wanted me to look beautiful and she would sew some wonderful outfits for me. She always got a lot of attention from men and yes, that was probably hard for my dad to see as well, but she really couldn’t help it. Sociable and intelligent, she was able to strike up a conversation with anyone and had no shortage of admirers. It probably led to quite a few arguments with Dad. As well as his regular disappearances, the fights were getting worse and worse.
Little did I realise, though, that living with my grandmother, Boris and my aunt would actually turn out to be one of the happiest times of my childhood – at least other people were around for me to talk to. But those living arrangements were not to last. In 1988, my dad was given a flat with his work. I would have been eleven years old around then and in 1989, my parents and I moved out of the big flat that we had shared with my grandparents and aunt and into our own little flat.
That was when my life started to get really tough.
CHAPTER 6
There may be trouble ahead. But while there’s moonlight and music…
The year my parents and I moved into the new flat given to my dad by the government was also the year when my country, as I had known it so far, changed beyond all recognition. Not only did this change affect the whole country, it brought about a change in my own life too, marking it as the time when my life and my country simultaneously began to fall apart.
In a way Dad was quite lucky that he got the flat from his work before everything started closing down. He actually lost his job a short while after we moved into our new home, for it was a time when companies closed and people stopped getting paid by the government. My mum was still going to work at the shipbuilding company but she hadn’t been paid for a long, long time and eventually she had to leave her job, too. The whole country turned wild, in a sense. Mum said it was like we were at war, just without the bombs. That was how it felt: we were living in a war zone, everything was uncertain, no one knew what would happen. It was the start of Perestroika, and to give you some idea of what was happening, I will let the history books explain:
In 1989, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev decided to implement the policies of Perestroika, an economic ‘restructuring’. It is often considered that this movement was the cause of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Over the course of 1990–1, 15 countries declared their independence from the Soviet Union (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan) and the adoption of varying forms of market-economy in those post-Communist States, together with the rise of business oligarchs, led to a general decline in living standards. Rich Russian business entrepreneurs emerged under Gorbachev and by the end of the Soviet era and during Perestroika, many Russian businessmen imported or smuggled goods into the country and sold them, often on the black market, for a hefty profit. They became well-connected entrepreneurs to the corrupt, elected Russian government and they became extremely unpopular with the Russian public. Gang crime increased as the rich and poor divide became apparent. The businessmen and the gangs that were enforcing their rule are commonly thought to be the cause of much of the turmoil that plagued Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Our new flat was in a new development area in Vladivostok so nothing had been established yet – there weren’t even any trees around. We had a couple of bad winters when we had no heating at all – during Perestroika everything just seemed to stop working. The new flat was quite a way from where we used to live – in reality only about half an hour on public transport but it felt far enough away for me. The move also meant I had to change schools and make new friends, which was pretty tough, but the worst thing of all was that there was no dance school in the ar
ea so I didn’t dance for about a year.
For a twelve-year-old who loved to dance this was a very hard time indeed and now, of course, I was living in a flat with just my parents. There were no grandparents around to try and calm them down and the fighting became unbearable. They would argue non-stop, day and night, and it was absolutely horrific because there were just no boundaries. Sometimes it was physical, and a book or something else would be thrown, accompanied all the while by yelling and screaming. They would just fight and fight and fight. Dad had no money as he had lost his job and the money he would earn from his music gigs he wouldn’t bring back home. He wanted to record his songs with his mates and so he put his money in that, which of course upset my mum because she wanted him to take some responsibility and look after us. She was still supporting the whole family. As I have already mentioned, I was in a new school and I wasn’t in dance school so I had lost my happy place, too. In our first year of moving to that flat it was such a dark time on so many levels and I missed everything about my old life.
I think the other thing is, as a Russian, whenever there is trouble, alcohol is never far away either. They both would drink. For my mum, however, it became a problem. It might have been an inherited thing from my grandfather perhaps, the alcohol, but in the end there was no hiding from the truth: Mum had turned into an alcoholic.
Dancing Out of Darkness Page 4