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

Rights, rules, and regulations can matter little in Russia, and personal connections, or animosities, can make all the difference. Dmitrichenko harbored a grudge against Filin less because he coveted Filin’s position (as Tsiskaridze did) than because he resented the obvious conflicts of interest within the profsoyuzï, the artists’ unions. These were supposed to represent the artists and their concerns to the Bolshoi administration. Yet the unions were headed not by performers but by members of the administration. Thus those running the theater conscripted the artists’ unions to their own cause, a problematic state of affairs harkening back to the Soviet era, when Communist minders and KGB operatives headed the unions to keep the artists in check. Dmitrichenko protested Filin’s position as head of the dancers’ union. Moreover, as journalist Ismene Brown has revealed, Dmitrichenko challenged the system that offered lucrative bonuses to Filin’s favored dancers. The “quarterly ‘grants’ committee,” which Filin chaired, “traditionally deferred to his wishes,” Brown explains. “It awarded bonuses to dancers for performance, according to a time-honored ranking of what a solo was worth. But dancers not chosen to perform did not qualify. Dmitrichenko, petitioned by the timorous corps de ballet to represent their interests, unceremoniously commanded that all dancers, whether chosen to perform or not, were doing their work as required, and therefore should be entitled to some of the quarterly bonus pot.” But Filin “was dissatisfied with the slack attitude of many dancers, who would drift off to do other things or claim sick leave without any notice,” Brown reports, and so rejected Dmitrichenko’s demands for a proportional distribution of bonuses.8

In July 2013, Svetlana Zakharova, the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina assoluta and a former cultural representative in the Russian parliament, objected when she learned that she had been assigned to the second cast of John Cranko’s Onegin. She quit the production, turned off her mobile phone, and left town. The government had had enough of the chaos. Iksanov was asked to step down, with Vladimir Urin, the respected general director of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theaters, becoming his replacement. The Stanislavsky had come to the creative and administrative rescue of the Bolshoi in the past: a case in point being Filin’s appointment in 2011. Urin expressed little patience for intrigue and even less for Tsiskaridze and his witches’ brew of reactionary invective. According to the journalist, socialite, and former dancer Kseniya Sobchak, Urin replied to the suggestion that Tsiskaridze might return to the Bolshoi with the Russian equivalent of “over my dead body.”9

As the new general director of the Bolshoi, Urin initiated reforms. Early in 2014, he unveiled a new collective agreement that erased some of the inequities and set out in legal prose what had once been merely understood. The superstar Zakharova, who boasts an international career, heads a charity in her name, and enjoys a driver taking her to and from the studio, exempted herself from the agreement. The haggling over quarterly bonuses was the business of the corps de ballet, no concern of hers. While calm was restored at the Bolshoi Ballet, class conflict remained: between stars and soloists, soloists and members of the corps, those in favor and those who had fallen out. Dancers are defined by their roles—not only in terms of rank, but also by the characters they represent. Before anyone was arrested for the assault on Filin, Bolshoi Theater administrators hazarded that it must have been committed by one of the dancers who took the role of a villain. Filin had performed dashing heroes; the ethnically Georgian, impressively coiffed Tsiskaridze gravitated toward sorcerers. Dmitrichenko appeared in tragic ballets, but also took the role of a gangster in Yuriy Grigorovich’s satiric The Golden Age. Onstage and off, as it turned out, Dmitrichenko played the part of Tybalt to Filin’s Romeo.

Within a year of the crime, Judge Elena Maksimova of the Meshansky District Court in Moscow sentenced Zarutsky to a decade in prison, Dmitrichenko to six years, and the driver Lipatov to four. The three together were also ordered to pay Filin 3.5 million rubles, or $105,000, in damages. (Later, their sentences were trimmed by a year, six months, and two years respectively; and in June of 2016, Dmitrichenko was paroled.) The sight of a popular Bolshoi soloist and two common criminals caged in court, as Russian defendants usually are, recalled earlier, seedier periods in the history of ballet—the lowly state it sometimes fell into in France, Italy, and Russia during the nineteenth century. Then, as suddenly now, the exquisite art seemed compromised by the desperation, exploitation, pain, and toxic rivalries suffered by its artists. Dmitrichenko seemed to embody a pernicious stereotype of the hotheaded, out-of-control artist rebel: He was forced as a child into ballet, he claimed, and had acted “the hooligan,” in school, “throwing firecrackers at the teachers.”10 He had riled his peers and railed against the Bolshoi administration. But he did not commit the crime in service of some cliché. Instead, behind the distorted reporting, personal agendas, institutional priorities, and tabloid scandals, lies a basic truth about how business is conducted at the Bolshoi—as in Russia.

ONCE THE RUSSIAN news cycle turned, shuffling the crime off the front pages in favor of the conflict in eastern Ukraine, this terrible episode seemed soon to be forgotten as but a momentary crisis corrected by installing the unexcitable Urin at the helm. Yet the recent violence surrounding the Bolshoi echoes events dating back to the very founding of the theater in the late eighteenth century. Gripping tales—some lurid, others inspiring—are told in thousands of documents stored in Russian archives, museums, and libraries kept under bureaucratic lock and key; in the recollections of active and retired dancers; and in the distinguished scholarship of Russian ballet experts. The records make for strange reading. However fantastic the imaginings of ballets on the Bolshoi stage, fiction cannot measure up to the truth.

Truth did not exist backstage, declared one of the greatest dancers of the Soviet period, Maya Plisetskaya. An eccentric, explosive performer who moved in and out of official favor, Plisetskaya believed in the Bolshoi, where she danced Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake countless times, rhapsodically for some, too showily for others, while also committing to the dark night of the soul known as the agitprop repertoire. Critics were baffled by her iconoclasm. She could be reckless on stage but also mesmerizing, possessing a physical vocabulary that ranged from toreador moving in for a kill to fashion model on the catwalk. In her twenties and thirties Plisetskaya gravitated toward the bad girls of the repertoire, the troublemakers, but also the free spirits. The arrest and disappearance of her parents during the Stalinist purges had left her bereft, defiant, and rude to the KGB officers who trailed her to and from the theater, owing to her romance with a British embassy staffer. Cynicism fueled sedition, but she never defected and largely confined her protests to unorthodox performances. The Soviet regime, desperate for celebrities, needed her both at home and abroad. Still, she was treated coarsely, and remembered recoiling as Leonid Brezhnev drunkenly pawed her in his limousine after a performance. “The one time I did go to the Kremlin,” she fumed, “I had to walk home across Moscow all alone.”11 In semiretirement, she looked back on her life in the theater with fondness, describing the Bolshoi stage as her guardian. “It was a familiar creature, a relative, an animate partner. I spoke to it, thanked it. Every board, every crack I had mastered and danced on. The stage of the Bolshoi made me feel protected; it was a domestic hearth.”12 She recorded those words in her memoirs, an international bestseller by ballet standards, and one that resonates with the recent drama in the Bolshoi. The dispossessed dancers of 2013, of today, speak from a script that Plisetskaya provided.

The Soviet period still haunts the theater, but the oligarchs of the twenty-first century have taken a vested interest in the Bolshoi, now that the grime has become glitz. In his efforts to restore prestige to the new Russia, President Dmitri Medvedev approved a complete overhaul of the Bolshoi, opening up the coffers of the state-controlled oil-and-petroleum giant Gazprom. The theater closed on July 1, 2005, after the final performance of two Russian classics: Swan Lake and the tragic historical opera Boris Godunov. Six years later, the gala celebration of the $680-million-plus restoration was a political event of a different order. On October 28, 2011, a nervous-looking Medvedev extolled the Bolshoi as one of few “unifying symbols, national treasures, of so-called national brands” of Russia.13

Yet the Russianness of the Bolshoi remains a matter of debate. The very concept is fraught and paradoxical, never quite borne out by the ethnographic facts, and has inspired spurious claims of exclusiveness, otherness, and exceptionalism. Dance critic Mark Monahan swoons over Olga Smirnova’s “swan-like neck” and the “unmistakably Russian” undulation in her arms, but her syntax and affect are neoclassical and neoromantic, much indebted to traditions outside of Russia.14 And what the ballet master Marius Petipa contributed to nineteenth-century Russian ballet has its continuation not in Soviet circles but in the creations of George Balanchine in America and Frederick Ashton in Britain. The annals of the Bolshoi do not bear out claims of Russian exceptionalism. Moscow exceptionalism, perhaps, but even that assertion is debatable, since most of the great Russian dancers, past and present, moved back and forth between the academies and stages of the old imperial capital of St. Petersburg and the new one of Moscow.

Regardless, the Bolshoi as a “brand” remains paramount. The theater and its dancers have always been marketed abroad. Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the ballet served the Kremlin as a cultural exchange operation and a conduit for low-level espionage by the agents who kept the dancers in check. Some performers defected, including, at the top of her career, the Kirov prima ballerina Natalya Makarova. So too did the soloist Mikhaíl Baryshnikov, who flourished in the West. In a July 2013 newspaper interview, the still-active Baryshnikov likened events at the Bolshoi, past and present, onstage and backstage, to a “non-stop ugly vaudeville.”15

In fact, the Bolshoi began its life as a vaudeville hall. Its co-founder and driving force had infamous (at least in the eighteenth century) problems with creditors and was forced, for financial and political reasons, to recruit amateur performers from an orphanage for his fledgling theater. Before catastrophe struck in the form of a fire, boys and girls of the Moscow Imperial Foundling Home took the stage as participants in light entertainments. But the Bolshoi only became the Bolshoi—a symbol of Russia itself—after the Napoleonic invasion of 1812. From the 1830s on, it produced a plethora of superb performers. Since that time, the dancers of the Bolshoi have been stereotyped for their athletic prowess, their physical culture. Yet they are also storytellers, gifted mimes. The first great ballerinas of the nineteenth century were trained by actors, and the admixture of dance-free miming and plot-free dance persisted at the Bolshoi long after it had been abandoned elsewhere.

During these early years, the brightest star on the Bolshoi stage was Ekaterina Sankovskaya, a Moscow-born ballerina who inspired a generation of intellectuals through her freedom of expression and expression of freedom. She performed from the late 1830s into the 1850s, and was seen by her most ardent fans, including liberal students of Moscow University, to imitate, and rival, the illustrious European Romantic ballerinas Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elssler. Her appearances in La sylphide inspired a sycophantic cult following, a “claque” whose obsession with Sankovskaya, and ballet in general, worried the Moscow police.

The theater she inhabited came into being as an imperial institution with the opening in 1856 of Cavos’s new building, resurrected from the ashes of the devastating fire in 1853. The ballet struggled, however, and was almost liquidated; the dancers from the exploited poorer classes faced life as laundresses, mill workers, or prostitutes, even starvation on the streets. The Bolshoi and its machinist nonetheless, almost despite themselves, hosted a dazzling revival of the swashbuckling ballet Le corsaire, along with the premieres of Don Quixote and Swan Lake. The annual “incident reports” at the theater in the 1860s and 1870s detail the commercial gas wars in Moscow (of concern for the Bolshoi because it was gaslit) along with the eccentricities of the directorate of the Imperial Theaters, which oversaw the Bolshoi’s operations under the last tsars. The ballets survive as remote versions of their original selves, which have been lost to the stage and doubtless would have little appeal even if they could be reconstructed from the extant floor plans, lithographs, musical scores, and recollections. Who authored the original libretto for Swan Lake was until 2015 a mystery, and indeed Tchaikovsky’s music seems to be calibrated for a plot line that no longer exists. The gaps in knowledge are no fault of the official record-keepers, who turn out to have been exceedingly meticulous when it came to realizing the mad and beautiful dreams of choreographers and set designers. The search for a reliable donkey for the 1871 staging of Don Quixote was pretext for dozens of pages of conscientious bureaucratic handwriting; finding the props for the act 3 spider scene forced one scribe to overcome his arachnophobia.

Maya Plisetskaya, the vessel of Bolshoi bravura during the Soviet years, died just before her ninetieth birthday, which the Bolshoi marked on November 20 and 21, 2015, in a memorial gala called “Ave Maya.” She remains the source of some of the more reductively persistent assumptions about the Bolshoi ballet, including Jennifer Homans’s assessment of the Khrushchev-era Bolshoi as somehow “stranger” than other troupes, “more oriental and driven less by rules than by passions—and politics.”16 In honoring one of its greatest ballerinas, a deeply passionate artist both celebrated and constrained by politics, the theater revisited its own troubled history even while still struggling to emerge from the aftermath of the macabre attack on its artistic director.

FILIN COMPLETED HIS contract but remains at the theater in charge of an atelier for up-and-coming choreographers. After months of conjecture, Makhar Vaziev was appointed the new artistic director of the ballet. Vaziev comes from Milan by way of St. Petersburg, and his hiring, as Ismene Brown summarizes, “satisfies both the Bolshoi conservatives’ need for a director with a credibly conventional profile and suitable leadership CV to command the dancers’ compliance, and the pressure for an acceptable conductor of renovation and refreshment.”17

The healing of the present divide permits reflection on the ruptures and sutures of the past. The story of the Bolshoi Theater, its ballet, Russia, and Russian politics can only, however, be traced in gestures and revealed against mottled backgrounds in occasional close-ups. This book starts with select scenes from the beginning, but ends far from the end. The focus here falls only on the ballet, although the Bolshoi is, of course, a world-famous opera house as well; opera is excluded from the discussion, except insofar as it might illuminate the ballet, the national brand’s signature product. Ultimately, like ballet itself, this book proves paradoxical in documenting at times disenchanting truths—the complicated existences of the dancers, their art, and its venue—in hopes of at least suggesting what might be sublime, what might redeem, what could still elevate us above it all.

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