Dasha was eight

with Dasha Belova
in Saint Petersburg
images: Vika Ilyushkina
2008
black and white
English

"Once we went out with my mother, I crossed the street and she showed me across the street, there was a kind of factory with big gates. It looked a bit strange, the whole factory. And she said that they made salt there out of children who were running away, and she said they would catch me, because under the gate, there was a big space, a kind of hole, and she said that if children pass by, then they just take the children and take them to the gate.

My parents had a friend from America, Randy, he was from America and he was fascinated by Russia
And once, we went with those friends to a shop called Berjozka, there were several of those Berjozkas across all Russia, especially in Moskow and Saint Petersburg. It was like a paradise, there were alcohols and things you could not buy in the city. Then the guard of the shop came to me: “Hey girl, you are Russian aren’t you?” And that was the first time when I realised there are some borders even inside the city, that there are some places you are not allowed to enter, just because you are Russian you are not good enough, and if you were American you would be quite good to enter it!

With Perestroïka, new schools or schools with strange orientations appeared: gymnasiums with English language or French, also in the suburbs appeared a girls’ gymnasium. It was some sort of cosmic event, because you have to imagine the suburbs: children are fighting everywhere! My parents wanted me to become a bit more girlish and they sent me to this school. We were studying English and there started to be some exchanges, we were writing letters to girls in America and they were writing letters back to us. I remember we sent presents to them and they sent us about ten boxes of Barbies and that was really amazing because there were no Barbies before and at that moment we did not even know about it.

My parents wanted to send me to an English college when I was about 15. We even went there with… I can’t remember his name, a very rich guy; an oligarch, small one - Saint Petersburg-type - and his son had been studying there for two years. And we came there and there were lots of Russian children of families who somehow had gotten rich and could send their children to English colleges. And it was very strange, because the children were missing Russia very much. I noticed that they knew quite a lot of English but they did not know the Russian translation of it. It was like: “What? You forgot the Russian words because you have studied there, and you have only studied in English, you loose your traditions and your own culture and own language! “ That is why I decided not to go there and to make English college and English way of life."