Twenty Letters to a Friend by Svetlana Alliluyeva

Author:Svetlana Alliluyeva
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062442611
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

That was the end of governesses for me. My father had now made up his mind that everything else could go by the board but I simply had to learn English. So from time to time various English teachers would appear. One of them was a nice, cheerful, fat little lady with a large braid around her head by the name of Tatyana Vasilchikova. She and I became friends, and on vacations she went to Sochi with me. I enjoyed her lessons and got a good deal out of them.

Once his tutor Alexander Muravyov had gone, Vasily’s school work got worse and worse. His teachers and the head of his school bombarded my father with complaints about his behavior and his lack of progress. My father ranted and raved. He scolded Vasily and blamed Vlasik, my aunts and the entire household for his bad grades, but things didn’t get any better. In the end my brother switched to artillery school and then to the aviation institute at Kacha, in the Crimea. He went there in 1939, and my nurse and I were the only ones left at home.

I’ll tell you a little about some of the other bizarre characters who watched over me during those years. Starting in 1937, someone—I don’t know whether it was my father, Vlasik or some committee of the secret police—decided that a plainclothes man was to follow at my heels everywhere I went: to the country, the theater, to and from school every day. He was supposed to protect me, though from whom and what I never had the faintest idea.

The first was an emaciated, jaundiced-looking man, Ivan Krivenko by name. When I saw him rummaging in my schoolbag and reading my diary, which I was taking to show to my friends, I conceived a hatred for him. He was quickly replaced by a fat, self-important-looking man named Alexander Volkov, who bit by bit terrorized the whole school.* He inaugurated a system of his own there. Instead of using the same cloakroom as everybody else, I had to use a special little room next to the school office, to which I would go blushing with embarrassment and rage. During the midday break, instead of eating in the dining room with my friends, I had to have a lunch brought specially from home, in a little corner screened off from everybody else. I stood it awhile and then rebelled.

Next I had a quiet, goodhearted man by the name of Mikhail Klimov. He and I were even friends, in a way, despite the unsavory nature of his duties. He trudged faithfully behind me from 1940 to 1943, when the job was abolished altogether. I was in my first year at the university by then. I told my father I was ashamed to go there with this “tail” and begged him to take it off. Apparently my father realized how absurd the whole thing was. He was just back from the Teheran Conference of December, 1943, and was in a particularly good frame of mind.

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