Genrietta’s childhood memories were dominated by the Great Patriotic War, which had a devastating effect on her family. With the advance of German troops, the plant where her father worked was evacuated to the Ural Mountains, but he remained behind to defend Moscow. By this time German planes were dropping bombs on the city—Genrietta could distinguish the enemy planes by the sound of their engines—and the Moscow suburbs were a front-line town. She was expecting at any moment to see tanks painted with swastikas rumbling down Moscow streets.
Genrietta vividly recalls the day her father left the house for the last time. Authorities were evacuating all women and children from the city, but her father’s parting words were that no matter what happened, they should stay in Moscow. If they left, he said, they would be sent to Siberia, and when the war was over they would not be allowed to return. With that he said goodbye, and like millions of other Russian soldiers, he never returned.
Education had always been important to Zoya, who found work in the postwar period as a librarian, and she successfully passed on the love of learning to her daughter, who at an early age decided to become a teacher. Teachers earned relatively good pay and enjoyed social prestige; and education was recognized as a major force in building the new Russia.
As a student Genrietta was serious and erudite, interested in science as well as the arts. But student activities also provided social occasions, and it was at a university event that she met Sein, who would become her first husband. Looking back now, she found it hard to understand how she could think of him as marriage material. He was the son of a railway worker from an ordinary Russian family, and their temperaments were very different. She was spiritual and progressive in her thinking; he was materialistic, and destined to be the manager of a classified military-defense plant and a district party leader. But he was handsome, clever, and well mannered, and one thing led to another and the next was marriage.
Within a relatively short time, Genrietta realized she’d made a mistake, and their relationship was breaking up when she found she was carrying his child. This was an unplanned, unwanted turn of events, and she gave serious consideration to having an abortion, a common form of birth control in the Soviet Union. She was still in school, she had ambitions, and she knew by now if she had a baby she would be facing single parenthood. But her mother was living with her, so that would be a help, and she just couldn’t bring herself to terminate the life that was growing inside her.
Once she had made that decision, she knew it was the right one, and she found joy in the preparations, embroidering baby diapers by hand. Her daughter was born on October 27, 1960, and she named her Violetta because she thought it was a beautiful name and it rhymed with her own. At the time she was unaware that Violetta was also the name of the expensive courtesan in the opera La Traviata, with whom a young man fell in love to tragic results.
In many ways Genrietta was a woman ahead of her time. She had feminist notions—she didn’t believe men should decide important issues without taking into consideration the woman’s point of view—and she was determined not to let motherhood deter her plans for a career in academia. With the help of Zoya, who babysat Violetta when she was an infant and walked her to and from school when she was older, and Violetta’s father, from whom she was divorced but who would occasionally visit his daughter in the evenings and help her with her studies, the parenting chores were shared in a way that allowed Genrietta to pursue her professional aspirations.
And when she did arrive home, she would do her best to make up for her absence by taking evening walks with Violetta and reading to her until bedtime. Genrietta believed that Violetta’s interest in foreign languages originated with the myths and legends from countries around the world that she read to her daughter at a young age. Hearing stories about magicians and giants, beautiful damsels in distress and rescuing heroes was a lot more interesting to a young girl than what was taught in Soviet schools, where lessons infused with Communist ideology were drilled into the students repetitiously from the day their formal education began. And Violetta exhibited an amazing memory. When she played with her dolls, she would pretend she was reading to them and could repeat the stories her mother had read to her almost word for word.
When Genrietta, who believed that the educational process should take into consideration the God-given nature of the individual, noticed that Violetta was responding with great curiosity to learn more about foreign countries, she encouraged her. At a shop in Moscow that sold international educational materials she purchased a game made up of disks on which different images were painted, and the players were supposed to spin an arrow and name in English the figure or animal it pointed to. Then she bought a record player and a variety of children’s musical records on which the Russian name for something was followed by the English name, all sung to a catchy melody.
Genrietta liked the idea that she and her daughter were on a parallel learning track. She had visions of raising a “Renaissance woman,” and that impulse led her to introduce Violetta to a variety of activities. She took her daughter to classical-music concerts, arranged for her to receive piano lessons, and interested her in collecting stamps of painting masterpieces. Winter skiing forays into the forests were complemented with skating ventures at a public rink, where Violetta showed such instinctive coordination that Genrietta enrolled her in classes with a professional. During Genrietta’s summer vacations the two of them would travel to vacation spots around the U.S.S.R., where they would swim and hike and climb mountains. Wherever they went, people were struck by Violetta—she had ash-brown hair and radiant blue eyes that turned green as she grew older before settling on hazel—and that attention would sometimes lead to invitations and opportunities that turned their trips into adventures.
As Violetta began to develop a personality of her own, her mother noticed several distinct features over which she felt she had no influence, however. Violetta had a mind of her own and could be headstrong. Even as a toddler she wanted to make her own choices. Once Genrietta took her to Children’s World to pick out a party dress, and when she selected a dark-cherry one with white polka dots that her daughter didn’t like, Violetta started to scream so loudly the store manager ran over as if to rescue her from abuse.
Violetta was also a very private child, withdrawn almost, and wary of making new friends. Rather than running around in the courtyard and playing with the neighborhood kids, she would sit by herself in their flat and wait for her mother to come home and take her to the theater, or to put flowers on the tomb of the unknown soldier near the Kremlin in memory of her grandfather.
If there was one particular area of concern Genrietta had about her daughter as she grew up, it was her attitude toward men. It wasn’t that Violetta exhibited anything abnormal as an adolescent, other than that it always seemed to work out that the boys who were smitten with her she found annoying. When she was a first-year schoolgirl, the runt of her class became ridiculously infatuated with her and told his mother if he could not sit at the same desk with Violetta, he would refuse to attend school. When the teacher sat them beside each other, Violetta did everything she could to drive him away. She deliberately spilled ink on his notebook. Once she pushed him so hard he fell to the floor. When nothing else worked, she complained to her mother and said she would not go back to school until he stopped pestering her.