So, I have a fairly self-indulgent headcanon about how Ilya and Svetlana first met.
They met at a rink in Moscow when they were eight. Ilya was practicing shots after his hockey practice had ended. A girl his own age with Afro puffs, a leotard and figure skates came up to him and started giving him a detailed breakdown of everything he was doing wrong. It was impressive how much she knew!
Then some older boys heard a girl lecturing Little!Ilya about hockey and skated over to bully him for it. This girl knew a hell of a lot more about hockey than these big boys did, so Ilya stuck up for her. Being Ilya, even at eight, he said something smart mouthed to the big kids.
They took offence and decided to pound the little shrimp. But before they could beat him up, Svetlana grabbed Ilya’s hockey stick and hit the biggest bully in the face with it. She broke his nose.
Then she gave Ilya her hand and told him she’d help him run away from the bullies. They hid in the girls change room until their respective moms tracked them down there. The hiding place was Sveta’s idea. After their next practice at the same time, Ilya convinced Irina to let him to go to the nearest playground with Svetlana. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between two little hellions.
Grigori was at first annoyed that Irina had let Ilya become friends with a girl, and a mixed race girl at that. Then he found out she was Sergei Vetrov’s daughter. Instantly starstruck! Grigori used his son’s friendship with Svetlana to become friends with Sergei. So Ilya and Svetlana got to spend more time together. At some point they swore a blood oath to be friends forever.
After Irina killed herself when they were twelve, Svetlana convinced her parents to let Ilya sleep over at their apartment. Since the Rozanov apartment still had the mortuary coming to pick up the body. Ilya was still in shock, and neither Grigori nor Alexei was in any shape to look after him.
So she didn’t have to convince her parents too badly. They felt bad for the poor kid, so they let him sleep over in her room. Svetlana was the only person Ilya ever told until he was 26 what had really happened to his mom. She hugged him the whole night while he cried. She promised she would always be his best friend, and she kept that promise.
Another headcanon of mine is that Little!Svetlana desperately wanted to play girls hockey. But her dad made her do figure skating instead. We know nothing against Sergei Vetrov EXCEPT that he’s a close friend of Grigori Rozanov’s. Given how sexist and homophobic Grigori is, maybe Sergei has similar views.
There have always been lots of lesbians in girls and women’s hockey. Maybe Sergei was worried his little girl would be corrupted by them. Or maybe he let her play for a few years. And then she broke her nose or something else potentially disfiguring, and he made her switch to figure skating. Can’t have her ruining that pretty face, or she’ll never get a husband when she grows up.
Svetlana critiques Ilya’s play when they’re 8 because she’d love to play herself, but she’s not allowed. Maybe their friendship deepens when she tells Ilya that. This little brother with no sisters realizes it’s not just his mom who gets treated unfairly, it’s other girls too. Ilya lends her his own hockey gear and sneaks her onto the ice in it as often as he can.
Irina looks the other way, as long as the kids give her some plausible deniability. I.e. So Grigori doesn’t blame HER for undemining Sergei as a father. She likes Svetlana, and encourages the friendship. Although post-suicide, I suspect Svetlana’s memories of Irina are more complicated than Ilya’s. Irina wasn’t her mom, after all, so she doesn’t need to idealize her memory. And Svetlana can see how Irina’s suicide left her bestie with gaping emotional wounds.
Another possible point in favour of Sergei Vetrov being a shitty dad is that Svetlana moved seven time zones away from her family as soon as she was a legal adult. Yes, she goes back to Moscow for visits, but she doesn’t live there. She moved to Boston solely because her bestie had been drafted by Boston and she had an American passport.
And then she made a whole new life for herself there, stayed in Boston even after Ilya left. It’s safe to say she’s probably not TOO close to her parents. So my guess is Sergei might have blighted her childhood dream of playing hockey, and Mrs Vetrova didn’t fight him on it as much as her daughter wanted her to. Yeah, Svetlana could play in a rec league after moving to Boston, but if she only started playing at 18 or 19, she’d never be able to play competitively.
I’m also assuming Svetlana was born during her dad’s NHL career, hence the American passport. She was presumably born 1991, same year as Ilya. Prior to Gorbachev in 1985, it was virtually impossible for Soviet citizens to go to the West unless they defected. But perestroika changed that.
Sergei was a famous goalie for the Soviet Union. Maybe in the late 1980s he seized the opportunity to make big western money in America before his career ended. The Soviet Union was a disaster at the time, economically. Major shortages of food and consumer goods, political instability, etc.
As an elite athlete, Sergei would’ve been far more privileged than the average person, but by the mid to late eighties, the whole system was breaking down. Even privileged people like Olympians and cosmonauts were feeling the pinch. Sergei moved to the USA with his family, and his wife had a baby girl in 1991. When his career ended, they moved back to Russia, but Svetlana still had two passports.
I’m also assuming Svetlana’s mother was probably Cuban or African originally. Back in the Soviet days, it was common for the children of Communist Party elites in developing countries to study at Soviet universities. It was one of the cheaper ways the USSR rewarded Communists in developing countries, by giving their kids opportunities they wouldn’t have at home. A pretty Cuban or African student met a handsome goalie. Svetlana might have older siblings, we just don’t meet them in canon.
It’s also possible that Sergei moved to the USA to play and married a black American woman there. But it’s clear Svetlana and Ilya spent most of their childhoods together in Moscow. And Russia in the 1990s was a fucking disaster. It’s hard to believe that the Vetrov family would’ve gone back to Moscow and stayed there if Mrs Vetrova had US citizenship. She could have sponsored her husband and they could’ve raised their kids somewhere less turbulent than post-Soviet Russia.
Now, clearly Sergei, like Grigori Rozanov, was a survivor who adapted to the fall of Communism in 1991 and ended up thriving in its wreckage. He’s prosperous, and is apparently as of 2014 the Minister for Sport in Putin’s cabinet. Possibly he got axed from that job after the Sochi Olympics. After the embarrassment of the men’s hockey team crashing out to a former colony.
But I suspect Sergei could have thrived in the USA as well, if he’d had a clear path to citizenship through an American wife. The USA is a chaotic place, but Russia in the nineties would’ve been even more so.
So those are my headcanons about Svetlana and Ilya’s childhood together.