- Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyopova were born in 1950 in Moscow.They were taken from their mothers and tested Cruel medical treatment. As adults, they came to communist television and told a French reporter their secrets.
Moscow, winter 1950. The light of day only lasted a few hours, and most Russians lived their lives between the little food they were given, the fear of Stalin, and the healing wounds of the end of World War II. On a cold January morning, conjoined twins Masha Krivoshlyopova and Dasha Krivoshlyopova were born. The child was born by caesarean section at the Central Hospital of the Soviet capital. This was completely surprising because there was no post-pregnancy imaging surveillance at the time.
Her mother had no idea she was giving birth to twin girls. The woman’s labor lasted 48 hours. The doctor first told the woman that she had given birth to two mutants and that they were going to take him away. However, the hospital’s night nurse took the woman to where the girls were. The next day, the woman refused to give up her identity as a mother. Doctors then told him the twins had died of pneumonia and took them to a pediatric hospital.
guinea pig
communist
Soviet doctors sent the conjoined twins to a medical institution in Moscow. There, they subjected her to cruel tests that were revealed many years later, when the sisters were already two adult women and still physically joined together.
Soviet doctors called them Dasha and Masha. Conjoined twins share a blood system but have separate nervous systems. This made them ideal subjects for study by Soviet physiologist Pyotr Onakhin.
The sisters were placed on a small bed in a glass box next to the laboratory. They spent the first years of their lives in fearful captivity. They are like inhabitants of a zoo. Many times doctors will bring their friends or other scientists to see them.
In this glass prison, girls were tortured for purported medical research purposes by Soviet doctors. They burned them, froze them, forced them to stay awake, starved them, injected them with radioactive and other harmful substances, and electrocuted them to test their conditioning.
For example, scientists would stick a needle into one of the conjoined twins and assess her sister’s reaction. Or they’ll pour ice water on one and check the temperature of the other. The torture continued until the girls were 12 years old.
Dasha and Masha’s spines are connected at a 180-degree angle, and each can control one of the two legs they share.
There are four arms and a separate small intestine between the two, but they share the same colon and rectum. They have four kidneys but only one bladder and a common reproductive system.
Each person has their own heart and lungs, but they share the blood supply. Dasha and Martha have separate nervous systems, which means one of them can get sick while her sister remains healthy. For example, during childhood, one twin contracted measles but the other did not.
The girls grew up far away from their mothers and were transferred to the Central Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedic Sciences in Moscow in 1956 when they were 6 years old. There they were taught to walk, read and write. Dasha and Masha studied alone with their teachers and had no contact with other children. They do addition and subtraction with their hands. When asked about the history of the 17th-century revolution and the founding of the Soviet Union, they often answered in unison.
unity but
different
As they grew up, they discovered that their personalities were completely different. The doctor who conducted the study noted the differences: “It was as if one was raised by a peasant family and the other by professors from Leningrad University.”
Journalist Juliet Butler met them in 1988 and became friends with them. The girls were 38 years old at the time and had spent much of their lives ostracized and tortured by the Soviet medical system.
“Martha was domineering, charming, controlling, and self-centered. Dasha was docile, calm, kind, and considerate. “They were obviously very much in love,” Butler said after interviewing the sisters several times.
Butler was shocked when he saw the conjoined twins. “Martha was self-centered, selfish, intimidating, greedy, but also charming, like a psychopath. In a way, he enjoyed his particular notoriety. Dasha was humble, kind, gentle, Generous and calm. Martha is better able to cope with her disability because she is aloof and cannot feel love or empathy so she doesn’t care what people think of her whereas Dasha cares very much. I hate going out. Martha is just right Those who looked at them yelled,” the journalist said in an interview after her book was published.
Juliet wrote a novel based on the lives of conjoined twins, and stated in the text that Dasha dreamed of being separated from her sister and living a normal life. Meanwhile, Masha is not interested in changing her life, she smokes cigarettes and reads magazines about the scarce Russian showbiz world.
“I remember one day in the late nineties, I came to see them with a letter from a British surgeon who specialized in separating conjoined twins, offering to perform an operation on them. Dasha looked on with hopeful eyes Martha, but Martha looked forward and immediately said ‘no’. As Dasha said, that’s it,” Butler revealed in an interview with English newspaper The Daily Telegraph.
sister fight
Only Dasha drinks straight vodka like most of her fellow Russians. For Martha, the white drink made her feel sick. Still, since they have the same blood system, they both get drunk.
In 1988, they appealed for their release on the national television program “Vzglyad”. Together they appeared before cameras, seen by millions of Soviet people and other satellite states of the remnants of communism. The girls smiled and didn’t go into detail with their stories. State censorship has exerted pressure to prevent this.
The appeal was successful and they moved to a Labor veterans’ home with better living conditions and bought themselves Soviet-era luxuries such as televisions, Ataris and stereos. As adults, they appear in society on that television and cannot avoid bullying. Perhaps, faced with ridicule, the sisters longed for the solitude and exclusion in the glass box in which they grew up. “People call us two heads. You hear all kinds of nonsense and it makes us cry,” Sasha said in an interview with reporters.
Girls share their reproductive systems. This is also a conflict for the conjoined twins. Dasha fell in love with Slava, one of the boys from the Moscow Invalids School. The boys spent the whole day together. The problems begin when young people retire. Martha didn’t want him around, and the sisters’ quarrels often ended in beatings.
Dasha never hid her desire to have sex with Slava, but Masha would not allow it. One night, Slava and Dasha got drunk, leaving Masha to suffer the consequences and unable to avoid the couple’s intimacy. The couple claimed in Butler’s book that they had sex, but there was no other evidence of the encounter. Meanwhile, his sister fell asleep after drinking too much vodka on her Siamese.
After the turmoil of adolescence, and many nights bruised by blows, came adulthood and peace. They reached the harmony of feeling each other’s pain with their own bodies. The line between the two becomes blurred or almost non-existent.
Martha suffered a heart attack at age 53 and lay in agony for 17 hours before passing away. I lived in a home for the disabled and they lived on a small bed in a small room. No one called an ambulance, and no one heard the conjoined girl’s screams. The toxins in the corpse decomposed his body. This happened directly to Dasha, who died another 17 hours after she thought her sister had just fallen asleep.
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Mariano Jasovich
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