astonishingly different': Brit who was friends with Siamese twins tortured by Stalin offers insight into their complex lives
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In 1988 journalist Juliet Butler was living in Russia and heard about conjoined twins Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova and went to interview them not realising they would become firm friends.
The women had been viewed as freaks and appallingly treated by the Soviet authorities until eventually being allowed to have some kind of normal life.
Here Juliet explains what they were really like and why she chose to write a novel about their life in the voice of Dasha.
I decided to write this as a novel rather than as fact because what most touched me in the lives of Masha and Dasha was the fact that they were kept in such astonishing ignorance by everyone who surrounded them.
They were never told that they were conjoined - or that they had living parents who had been told they had died.
(Image: The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep, By Juliet Butler)
(Image: The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep, By Juliet Butler)
The book is narrated in the child like voice of Dasha, in the present tense the reader can’t help but feel unbearable sadness at her heart rending lack of awareness.
We as the reader understand it but she does not. To have told it with the benefit of hindsight as a biography would have removed all the poignancy of this crushing innocence.
When I first met them in 1988, I was astonished at how two people with such a terrible deformity could be so completely normal.
They offered me tea and chattered on about the staff in the dental hospital where they were staying for treatment as if I was an old friend.
They came to my attention after I watched their appeal on national television in front of 100 million Russians to be released from the mental asylum where they were being kept.
Being disabled in the Soviet Union was a nasty flaw in a ‘perfect’ system and so they had to be buried away in State institutions away from the public eye.
As a journalist I was interested in interviewing them but I immediately felt a close bond with the quiet spoken Dasha, and was amused by her witty, irrepressible sister and we soon became close friends.
As I got to know them better over the next twelve years, I was both amazed – and horrified – at how completely different they were. (I couldn’t imagine how I would cope if I was joined at the hip with my own twin.)
(Image: The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep, By Juliet Butler)
(Image: The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep, By Juliet Butler)
They were not just unalike, they were astonishingly different. Even though they had identical DNA and identical upbringings. Masha was tough, selfish and could be cruel. Dasha was gentle, thoughtful of others and kind.
I now believe this was because of the abuse they suffered as small children.
So called Childhood Abandonment Disorder causes deep insecurities which can lead to either psychopathy or empathy – two extremes on the behavioural spectrum.
Medical science is now discovering that identical twins can inherit the different personalities of their parents and Masha was more like her tear-away dad while Dasha was like her soft-spoken mum: so Masha became the psychopath and Dasha the ‘empath’.
They asked me to help write their autobiography and it was only then that I uncovered the details of their incredible life story – things they had never known themselves.
They were taken away from their parents at birth by Stalin’s scientists, who wanted to study the effect that the blood system and the nervous system had on the body’s ability to regulate temperature, sleep and hunger.
This meant that one was packed in ice to measure the other’s temperature level. They were also burnt, starved, deprived of sleep – and given electric shocks to test their reactions. Not surprisingly, their mother was told they had died when she insisted on visiting rights. No mother would have been able to stay silent on seeing what was being done to her babies.
At the age of six, with Khrushchev - who had renounced Stalin - now in power, they were sent to an orthopedics hospital to be taught to walk by a kindly physiotherapist who they called Aunty Nadya. She became their lifelong friend and surrogate mother.
(Image: The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep, By Juliet Butler)
(Image: The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep, By Juliet Butler)
But even here, some of the experiments continued and they were forced to appear naked on a stage for medical symposiums of male doctors into their teens.
They were given an elementary education in the hospital until the age of 11 but after that Masha was bored and always misbehaving, so they were allowed out to play in the courtyard but were seen by horrified passers by.
Rumours of a ‘two headed girl’ started spreading around Moscow and crowds surrounded the hospital waiting for a glimpse of them. The authorities decided to have them packed away to southern Russia to a school for the disabled - or ‘defectives’ as they were known in Soviet Russia – so that the ‘healthies’ would never see them.
The children and the teachers were kind, and Dasha recalls this as being the happiest time of her life. Masha was funny, naughty and at first popular with the other kids. But she had a temper and when she became annoyed with her sister she would beat her up.
Dasha was loved by everyone, but in particular by a boy in her class. Over the next four years they fell in love with each other. But tragically for Dasha, Masha couldn’t tolerate the idea of sharing her ‘slave’ with anyone else. By now the other children had turned against her, seeing her for what she was, a controlling bully. So when Masha realized her sister had fallen in love she decided to leave the school, without graduating and go back to Moscow.
Dasha was so distraught she tried to kill herself but Masha prevented her.
They were sent, at the age of 18, to an old people’s home where they were expected to live in a tiny room with nothing to do for the rest of their lives.
Leonid Brezhnev was now the new leader of the Soviet Union and a period of political stagnation set in.
Dasha was so traumatized at losing Slava, and also by the terrible discrimination they suffered from being conjoined, that she kept trying to take her own life. But was always prevented by a watchful Masha, who was determined to make the most of life and enjoy herself. She certainly did not want to die.
But after 15 years of never meeting anyone their age or being permitted out of the Home, even Masha became frustrated. She finally agreed to look for their mother, Katya, hoping she would take them into her home.
Katya was delighted to find that they were alive but was by now elderly and living in a one room flat with her adult son and so the question of taking them back never arose.
She visited them every week, bringing them home made food and cigarettes for Masha, but soon Masha grew bored of her and told her she didn’t want to see her again. Both Dasha and Katya were devastated at the abrupt decision.
(Image: The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep, By Juliet Butler)
(Image: The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep, By Juliet Butler)
Dasha was unable to stand up to her controlling and abusive sister, but she loved and respected her, believing her to be the strong one and that her decisions however much she hated them, were ultimately the right ones.
They had been living in the Home for twenty years when it was announced that it was to be turned into a mental asylum and that all the residents would be moved elsewhere.
Except Masha and Dasha.
Horrified at the idea of being labeled insane, Masha was determined to escape. Since Gorbachev was now in power, she took advantage of his ‘Openess’ campaign to appear on live TV chat show and appeal for help from the public.
(Image: Juliet Butler)
This incredibly brave act saved them.
I met them soon after and our fifteen year friendship began. I would take them out on picnics, to cafes, sightseeing in my car and took them home to play with my three children.
I was upset to see Masha being so controlling of Dasha and continuing to beat her, especially when they were drunk.
It was Masha who wanted to drink vodka but was unable to because she had a gag reflex to alcohol. So since they shared the same blood system she forced Dasha to do the drinking.
And happily blamed her when people labeled them alcoholics….
But finally, having known them for ten years, I saw their lives change miraculously.
Dasha stood up to Masha. She took back control and refused to drink, insisting instead that they get help for their alcoholism.
It was an incredible feat and I was delighted to witness how both of them found peace and enjoyment together.
(Image: The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep, By Juliet Butler)
(Image: The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep, By Juliet Butler)
After their death at the age of 53 (they were the oldest living conjoined twins at the time) I decided to write a novel to tell their incredible story but most importantly to tell Dasha’s version of their story: an opportunity she didn’t have in their autobiography which was Masha’s version and written in her typical impatient style in three months.
I spent many years crafting the novel to describe her life sensitively and with love, spanning the five decades from Stalin through to Putin.
Her one wish in life was to help able bodied people see beyond disability and deformity to the person within.
She wanted an end to the discrimination which was far more crippling than her condition. I hope I have helped her, posthumously, to fulfill this wish.
The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep by Juliet Butler is published by Fourth Estate.