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
