Svetlana Vasilenko

[1] Svetlana Vasilenko was born in 1956 in Kapustin Yar, an airbase built next to a cosmodrome on the Volga River.

She grew up in an all-female household within this "male militarist environment" before studying at the Gorky Literary Institute, where she graduated in 1983.

Vasilenko co-founded a feminist literary group, The New Amazons, who published anthologies of women's prose in 1990 and 1991.

[1] Her 1998 novel Little Fool follows a 13-year-old girl growing up in Kapustin Yar at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

She is doubled by Ganna, a 13-year-old girl in an embedded story, who lives in 1930s Kapustin Yar, where the village inhabitants are Christians persecuted for their beliefs by the local communist regime.