Her own mother tried to kill her when she was only 4 years old by stabbing her in the back of the neck with a kitchen knife. She was born in southern Russia to an alcoholic mother and a father she never knew. Masha, on the other hand, was happy being a ward of the state and having Dasha by her side to do her bidding.At 13 years old, Masha has already survived the unthinkable. Like me, she was accommodating but had always wanted a fulfilling job, a husband and children. I continued to see them almost every week, taking them out for picnics in the woods or back to my flat for home-cooked food and a hot bath. As one of their childhood doctors who knew them for many years said: “It was as if one had been brought up by a family of peasants and the other by professors.” Moreover, a Soviet scientific paper on them stated that they displayed different personality traits from birth, so they hadn’t developed opposite personalities in a deliberate effort to differentiate themselves from each other. They clearly loved each other fiercely, but I was both distraught to see Dasha being sometimes physically and emotionally abused and baffled that it could be happening.Īfter all, they had identical genes and identical upbringings. Dasha was submissive, quiet, kind and thoughtful. Masha was dominant, charming, manipulative and egocentric.
And I was part of it.Īs I got to know them over the following 12 years it became obvious how different they were. But, having been sent to this dental hospital for treatment, they were now planning their great escape. I’d been standing doing the ironing with my newborn baby in her cot, when they appeared on my screen recounting how they’d been locked away for the past 20 years in what was then an institution for the insane. I had first seen them a week earlier on a TV chat show aired to 100 million people across the USSR. I didn’t realise then that this was to be the start of a close, lifetime friendship. So six years later, here I was, now a freelance journalist, standing outside a door marked “Strictly no entry”, notebook in hand, preparing to interview the twins about their public appeal for better living conditions. He was indefinitely refused permission to leave the USSR as he had served as an officer in the army during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and was considered to hold State secrets. It was 1988 and I was living in Russia at the time, having gone out to work as a nanny for the British Embassy and inconveniently fallen in love with, and then married, a Muscovite. It’s not every day you get to meet conjoined twins, so as I made my way up to the room where 38‑year‑old Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova were waiting for me in Moscow’s Dental Hospital, I was just a little bit jittery.
Juliet Butler explains how she came to write a novel based on the lives of the conjoined twins
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