Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today

COPYRIGHT

4th Estate

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London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This 4th Estate paperback edition published in 2017

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by 4th Estate

First published in the United States by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. in 2016

Copyright © 2016 by Simon Morrison

Cover image by Jo Walker

Anna Sobeshchanskaya as Odette; Gorsky’s ‘choreographic photo etudes,’ 1907–09; Simon Virsaladze, Alexander Lavrenyuk, and Plisetskaya, Legend of Love, 1972 courtesy of Bakhrushin Museum. The Bolshoi Theater, May 15, 2015, courtesy of author.

All other images courtesy of Russian State Archive of Literature and Art.

Simon Morrison asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780007576630

Ebook Edition © October 2016 ISBN: 9780007576623

Version: 2017-05-31

DEDICATION

For Nika, who retired from ballet

before she was five.

• • •

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND DATES

INTRODUCTION

1. THE SWINDLING MAGICIAN

2. NAPOLEON AND AFTER

3. FLEET AS LIGHTNING: The Career of Ekaterina Sankovskaya

4. IMPERIALISM

5. AFTER THE BOLSHEVIKS

6. CENSORSHIP

7. I, MAYA PLISETSKAYA

EPILOGUE

PICTURE SECTION

NOTES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

A Note on Transliteration and Dates

• • •

THE TRANSLITERATION SYSTEM used in this book is the one devised, phonetically, by Gerald Abraham for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), with the modifications introduced by Richard Taruskin in Mussorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (1993). It renders the Russian letter ы as ï and the аи combination in the name Михаил as Mikhaíl. Exceptions to the system concern some commonly accepted spellings of Russian and non-Russian names and places (for example, Alexei rather than Aleksey, Dmitri rather than Dmitriy, Maddox rather than Medoks, St. Petersburg rather than Sankt-Peterburg) and surname suffixes (Verstovsky rather than Verstovskiy). For ease on the eye, I favored Ekaterina over Yekaterina and Elena over Yelena. In the bibliographic citations, however, the transliteration system is heeded without exception (Dmitriy rather than Dmitri, and so on). Surname suffixes are presented intact, and soft signs preserved as diacritical apostrophes.

RUSSIA RETAINED USE of the Julian calendar from antiquity until January 1, 1918, when the Bolsheviks under Lenin mandated the conversion to the Gregorian calendar of western Europe. Before the reign of Peter the Great (1682–1725), Russians marked the start of the year on September 1 rather than January 1, and numbered years from the date of the creation of the Earth rather than the birth of Christ. Peter the Great reformed the counting of the years but upheld the use of the Julian calendar in deference to the Russian Orthodox Church. So in effect, before the Bolshevik overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II, the Russian calendar was twelve days behind that of the western European calendar. In this book, dates are specified according to the calendar in use in Russia: Julian before 1918 (abbreviated O.S.), Gregorian afterward.

INTRODUCTION

ON THE NIGHT of January 17, 2013, Sergey Filin, artistic director of the Bolshoi Theater Ballet, returned to his apartment near the central ring road in Moscow. He parked his black Mercedes outside the building and trudged through the wet falling snow toward the main entrance. His two boys were asleep inside, but he expected that his wife Mariya, herself a dancer, would be waiting up for him. Before he could tap in the security code to open the metal gate, however, a thickset man strode up behind him and shouted a baleful hello. When Filin turned around, the hooded assailant flung a jar of distilled battery acid into his face, then sped off in a waiting car. Filin dropped to the ground and cried for help, rubbing snow into his face and eyes to stop the burning.

The crime threw into chaos one of Russia’s most illustrious institutions: the Bolshoi Theater, crown jewel during the imperial era, emblem of Soviet power throughout the twentieth century, and showcase for a reborn nation in the twenty-first. Even those performers, greater and lesser, whose careers ended in personal and professional sorrow could justly believe that their lives had been blessed thanks to the stage they had graced. The Bolshoi’s dancers transcended the cracked joints, pulled muscles, and bruised feet that are among the hazards of ballet to exhibit near-perfect poses and unparalleled equipoise. Orphans became angels within the schools that served the theater in the first years of its existence; the Bolshoi then nurtured the great ballet classics of the nineteenth century, and more recently the sheer skill of its dancers has redeemed, at least in part, the ideological dreck of Soviet ballet. The attack on Filin dismantled romantic notions of the art and its artists as ethereal, replacing stories about the breathtaking poetic athleticism on the Bolshoi stage with tales of sex and violence behind the curtain—pulp nonfiction. Crime reporters, political and cultural critics, reviewers, and ballet bloggers alike reminded their readers, however, that the theater has often been in turmoil. Rather than an awful aberration, the attack had precedents of sorts in the Bolshoi’s rich and complicated past. That past is one of remarkable achievements interrupted, and even fueled, by periodic bouts of madness.

The history of the Bolshoi travels hand in hand with the history of the nation. As goes Russia, so goes the Bolshoi—at least since the Russian Revolution, when the seat of power moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Under the tsars in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg, the Mariyinsky Theater (also known as the Kirov Theater) possessed the most prestige; the city of Moscow and its precariously financed ballet and opera house were considered provincial. But depending on who is looking and from where, one theater, one city, one lineage or another might appear in the foreground of a long tradition. In the twentieth century, the Bolshoi assumed pride of place within Russia and on the international stage as the emissary not only of the Russian ballet tradition but also the Soviet state. Bodies speak in Realpolitik. Russian ballet does not privilege abstraction, and those choreographers who, on limited occasion, sought to create non-narrative, non-subjective works erred in imagining that abstraction could be assigned whatever concepts they desired. Looking at the video records of today and sifting through the archival remains of yesteryear affirm that neither the dance nor the music attached to it is, or ever was, considered pure. Boldness and the projection of power are essential to politics and culture, especially within the context of President Vladimir Putin’s aggressive nationalist posturing. Today the Bolshoi seeks to regain the preeminence it forfeited after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Within Russia, from the vaguely defined time of the nation’s founding, the rulers of Russia—tsars, Bolshevik revolutionaries, Stalin and his henchmen, the siloviki (members of the military-security establishment) of the current petro-ruble regime—have looked to the Bolshoi as a symbol, whether imperial, ideological, or commercial. The theater is about as old as the United States, but has had numerous lives. With Catherine the Great’s blessing, a Russian prince and an English showman first raised it up from the marshes of Moscow in 1780 on a plot of land close to the Kremlin; the start-up theater and the seat of goverment have been neighbors through several catastrophes. And fittingly so, given that in Russia politics can be theater and theater, politics.

After a fire in 1853, architect Alberto Cavos turned the Bolshoi into a stone neoclassical paradise of fluted columns, fitted mirrors, and alabaster vases; a sculpture of the Greek muses was installed above the portico. Following the Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks considered blowing up the Bolshoi as a decadent icon of the Russian imperial past but pillaged it instead, pulling up the marble floor and painting over the frescoes. The theater became a cultural symbol of the new state, which soon enough had imperial ambitions of its own; indeed, the Soviet Union itself was born at the Bolshoi. On December 30, 1922, it hosted the political congress that voted the Soviet Union into existence.

Stalin ratified the Soviet constitution on the stage of the Bolshoi and delivered speeches before cowed Communist Party officials; no one wanted to be the first to stop applauding. Thereafter it became the site of much Communist Party business, and even served as a polling station until a suitable palace was built inside the walls of the Kremlin. The Bolshoi was the single place where the rulers of Russia and their subjects came into contact. As one Kremlinologist explains, “To put in an appearance in the Bolshoi Theater meant that you belonged to the very highest echelons of power; but to disappear from there was synonymous with a fall from favor and death.”1 At the Bolshoi, ballets began after speeches delivered by officials who had overseen mass murders—the execution, on a staggering scale, of perceived saboteurs, traitors, anti-Soviet “fifth columnists,” and other undesirables. “Those who sat on the stage,” historian Karl Schlögel reports, “had appended their signatures to the thousands of death sentences approved by the extraordinary commissions and had even become directly involved themselves—in interrogations and the use of physical force.”2

The repertoire of the State Academic Bolshoi Theater, as it became known, fell under Communist Party control. Its general directors were ordered to produce ballets and operas on approved Soviet subjects. Bulldozers rumbled across the stage to represent the construction of the Communist utopia before audiences of peasants and workers who had to be told when to clap. In 1939, the character of Lenin even appeared onstage in an agitprop opera called V buryu, or Into the Storm. A photograph from that era shows laborers listening to a performance of Tchaikovsky by way of celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Lenin’s secret police. For those directors who could not countenance ballets and operas about collective farms and hydroelectric stations, hewing close to the classics became the one safe, government-sanctioned alternative.

During World War II, part of the foyer of the theater was destroyed by a German bomb. Repairs were done on the postwar cheap, but the acoustics had earlier been compromised by Stalin, who had ordered the tsar’s loge at the center of the first tier encased in protective cement. (A document ordering the special reinforcement was reportedly buried in the wall.) In the 1980s, the Bolshoi fell apart along with the Soviet Union, but the power and majesty of Russian ballet remained, broadcast to the masses as the last vestige of national pride in the bankrupt munitions plant known as the USSR.

WHEN HE SIGNED a five-year contract as artistic director of the Bolshoi in 2011, Filin was the forty-year-old prince of Russian ballet. A Moscow native, he had built a high-profile career as a principal dancer at the Bolshoi and been decorated as a People’s Artist of the Russian Federation, the nation’s highest artistic honor. His parents were not especially interested in ballet but, seeking to channel the boy’s restlessness, arranged for him to learn folk dance. His energy immediately found focus, and at ten years old Filin entered the Bolshoi Ballet Academy, graduating eight years later to claim a position in the professional company. Filin performed his first major role as the impish knave Benedick in Love for Love, a balletic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. The dance, set to music by Tikhon Khrennikov, is perhaps deservedly forgotten, but the experience sparked Filin’s enduring fascination with Shakespeare. The image that he had of himself as a dancer destined for greatness was tempered by Marina Semyonova, his professional coach. She died in 2010 at age 102, the Bolshoi tradition incarnate. During her final decades, she pushed her pupils to overcome the strictures of the Bolshoi style as preached and practiced during the late Soviet period. Filin has singled her out as his most important mentor and confidante. Semyonova told him “things that she didn’t share with anyone,” and even guided his personal life, cheekily advising him not to marry “this one” or “that one” owing to supposedly “misshapen” limbs or low breeding.3

What made Filin a star was chiefly his range: the spectrum he could span between technical displays (as in Don Quixote, one of the buttresses of the Bolshoi repertoire), poetic expressiveness, and subtle characterizations. His good looks in his twenties made him perfect for the part of a gadabout, a pleasure seeker; experimental roles came later. Injury forced him from the stage in 2004, but he battled back into the spotlight while also completing a degree at Moscow University in the performing arts. In 2008, at age thirty-seven, he became the artistic director of the Stanislavsky Theater in Moscow; three years later, he was appointed to the same position at the Bolshoi. His job, basically second in command to then general director Anatoliy Iksanov, gave him control over repertoire, casting, appointments, and dismissals. It was a sensible choice. Filin knew the theater and its traditions intimately. Plus he was easygoing, not a firebrand.

BOLSHOI INSIDERS SUSPECTED that the attack on Filin was motivated by professional and personal resentments. So did the police. Yet the Russian media—the government-monitored television channels, plus the less-regulated newspapers and online news portals—teased the public with baroque theories of the crime. The clippings were compiled in a Russian-language book called Black Swans, and the American network HBO released a documentary about the attack called Bolshoi Babylon.4 (The behind-the-scenes footage shows Filin, after his martyrdom, being shamed into silence by the new general director in front of the dancers: “I asked you not to speak,” Vladimir Urin tells Filin in front of the assembled company. “I’m not going to argue with you … Please sit down.”) Gossips and alienated former employees blamed dark elements connected to meddling Kremlin officials—a theory of the crime that did not seem absurd, given that the Bolshoi is a political as well as an artistic institution. Filin denied allegations of extortion, that fees had been demanded for auditions and choice parts. True, he had promoted his own people, as artistic directors are wont to do; he also decided who headlined the programs, who went on tour, and who appeared in the galas—decisions with significant financial consequences for the dancers. There were those who thus coveted his position and thought that he benefited too much from it.

Speculation about the crime centered first on the flamboyant senior dancer Nikolay Tsiskaridze, an indefatigable critic of his employer. For years he had been complaining about everything at the Bolshoi: the five-year, top-to-bottom renovation of the building, the managers, the artistic directors, the stars in the making. But he seemed strangely cheerful in his defense, much too glad to give interviews and declare that he had declined a lie-detector test. When asked about his grievances, Tsiskaridze reminisced about his career and likened himself to other besieged greats of the stage, namely the opera singer Maria Callas, although she was more demure and, onstage, used less maquillage than he did. He recalled his fun-filled, innocent, and lucrative New Year’s Eve performances of The Nutcracker: “$1,500 a ticket at the official rate,” he boasted on the phone, “and Iksanov says I can’t dance.” In May 2013, his lawyer threatened to sue the Bolshoi in response to the reprimands he had received for his gossipmongering. That June, the nationalist newspaper Zavtra broke the news that his two contracts with the Bolshoi, as performer and teacher, had been canceled. He parried with characteristic bravado: “What did you expect? It’s a gang there.” Fans mounted a protest in front of the theater, inspired by his declaration in the French newspaper Le Figaro that “Le Bolchoï, c’est moi.”

Tsiskaridze exposed an age-old conflict at the Bolshoi between progressives and conservatives, pitting those dancers who benefited from an archaic patronage system against those who did not. Earlier in the twentieth century, during the era of the Bolsheviks and the Cultural Revolution, Elena Malinovskaya served as director of the theater. An unprepossessing nondescript who rose to fame through Marxist-Leninist political circles, she governed the Bolshoi with a scowl from 1919 to 1935. Occasionally she threatened resignation, claiming that the pressures of the job and the threats she received from disgruntled artists had compromised her health, but her Kremlin protectors kept her at her desk. Although Malinovskaya’s survival ensured the Bolshoi’s continuing operation, she was reviled for purging the ranks of suspected dissidents. She was further castigated for spoiling the repertoire, accused of making even the classical art of ballet a tool of ideology and so giving it a guilty conscience.

Thus began the struggle between the defenders of the aristocratic tradition and its critics, as well as between those who conformed to official dictates and others who fell silent, knowing it was pointless to resist. The official artistic doctrine of socialist realism obliged ballet scenarists and opera librettists to freight even works about the distant past with Marxist-Leninist content, to taint them with ideological anachronisms. The emphasis on making ballet for the people yielded Cossack, gypsy, and peasant dances not seen on the Moscow stage since the Napoleonic era. The scenarios enforced the simplest binaries: pro-Bolshevik pluckiness versus anti-Bolshevik cowardliness; Soviets versus Fascists; collective farmworkers versus the hot sun and parched earth. Pantomime and peasant exotica were the essence of the repertoire throughout the 1930s and the Second World War.

Tsiskaridze stood with the old guard, those dancers attached to traditional stagings of the Russian repertoire rather than the innovative productions privileged by Iksanov and Filin. His dismissal came as a relief even to his backers at the theater, since it dimmed the spotlight on the scandal. But after a short vacation, he resumed his performance of a persecuted balletic Old Believer. Tsiskaridze had little to fear, it seems, because he enjoyed the protection of powerful interests. Much as Rasputin had bewitched the Empress Alexandra before the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1918, so too the magnetic Tsiskaridze is understood to have impressed the spouse of the president of Rostec, a government-controlled firm that develops advanced weapons systems. He was not out of work for long. In October 2013, Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky appointed Tsiskaridze rector of the Vaganova Ballet Academy in St. Petersburg, one of the world’s most prestigious schools for dance.

Filin’s predecessor as artistic director, Alexei Ratmansky, offered no specific insight into the attack but commented on Facebook that “many of the illnesses of the Bolshoi are one snowball—that disgusting claque which is friendly with artists, ticket speculators and scalpers, half-crazy fans who are ready to slit the throats of their idol’s competitors, cynical hackers, lies in the press and scandalous interviews of people working there.”5 Claqueurs are professional audience members, tasked with offering overly demonstrative applause for their favorite Bolshoi dancers in exchange for tickets some resell. The mysterious balletomane Roman Abramov currently leads this “elegant theatrical protection racket.”6 He appears in the HBO documentary, and boasts of attending hundreds of performances a year.

Ratmansky left the Bolshoi in 2008, after reviving suppressed Soviet ballets and redoing the shopworn classics. He found the pressure from inside and outside of the theater intolerable, especially when brought to bear on creative decisions. To perform the 1930 Soviet ballet The Bolt, for example, Ratmansky excised a potentially offensive scene that once would have been comical, even canonically so. It involves a drunken Russian Orthodox priest and a dancing cathedral. The lampoon was politically correct for the godless Bolsheviks of 1930, but heresy to the lords of the new church of 2005. So it was cut. In relocating to New York, Ratmansky hoped to escape the machinations to create what he liked. The Bolshoi lamented his departure, but even the press officer at the theater, Katerina Novikova, empathized with his decision. Tsiskaridze had made his life miserable, she acknowledged. Ratmansky had also put up with bad behavior from other dancers, including the one who would finally be convicted in the attack against Filin.

In March 2013, the police arrested Pavel Dmitrichenko, a lead dancer, and charged him with organizing the attack. He had supposedly paid 50,000 rubles ($1,430) to a thug with a record. Speaking to reporters from his hospital room, Filin confirmed that he had long suspected Dmitrichenko, an irascible, tattooed soloist who harbored a grudge against Filin for passing over his ballerina girlfriend for choice roles. Filin’s haute-goth lawyer, Tatyana Stukalova, informed a deferential interviewer on television that Dmitrichenko could not have been acting alone. Soon it emerged that he had two accomplices: Yuriy Zarutsky, an unemployed ex-convict who tossed the acid, and Andrey Lipatov, the driver. Dmitrichenko confessed to organizing the attack but argued that he had merely wanted to frighten Filin, put the fear of God into him. The acid was Zarutsky’s idea. Dmitrichenko admitted his “moral responsibility,” while carping, wild-eyed, about how he had been wronged.7 The artistic director had not bestowed the promotions he deserved; his girlfriend, the aspiring ballerina Anzhelina Vorontsova, had been denied the star-making dual role of Odette/Odile in Swan Lake as payback for some past slight, notwithstanding the genuine kindness shown to her by Filin and his wife over the years. Dmitrichenko’s supporters organized a petition insinuating financial corruption at the Bolshoi—as if that, or anything else, justified maiming someone for life. Filin, blind in his right eye and with 50 percent vision in his left, wept as he testified.