The ballet consists of montages of toil and rest plus depictions of soldiers packing up and trudging off. The most important event occurs offstage, out of sight, at the end. After a cluster of stylized folk dances to abstracted folk themes, the ballet suggests the presence of foes who, if not checked, will devastate the grape gatherers of the Ararat Valley, Armenia’s Garden of Eden. The symbolic national hero, Armen, must decide if he will forgo his own pleasures—in this instance, dating the heroine, Karine—to join his Red Army comrades at the frontier.
As a Soviet man, Armen is not one to cower, so he enters into unseen battle and returns home in bandages. On the way, he crosses paths with Karine, giving her a chance to dance out her dread that he might have been killed, but the two of them are destined to be together. Their wedding party expands into a broader celebration of the friendship of the peoples and their leader. The point is made explicit in the final lines of the scenario: “The act concludes in an apotheosis, a hymn to the leader of the peoples, to the great Stalin. The border guards join the collective farmworkers in a song about Stalin.”
Khachaturian emphasized that his entire score bears the intonations of Armenian folk material, which he learned not firsthand, as Soviet writers asserted on his behalf, but from listening to recordings and performances of the Armenian Philharmonic and its chorus. Nine folk tunes are used in Happiness, although one of them—the music for a gopak dance—was actually Ukrainian, and another was lifted from a Russian limerick. Fittingly, it serves as the basis of a comical crane dance, or zhuravl’. The Armenian material includes “Duy-Duy,” a staple of Azeri musicians often performed as flamenco; “Ashtarak,” a tune named after a town that expresses romantic longing; and the popular wedding tune “Shalakho,” which involves two men courting the favor of the same woman in adagio gestures.
The ending of the score was, as everyone involved pointed out, a paean to Stalin: “Our happiness,” Khachaturian explained in his remarks on the ballet, “is inextricable from the name of the person who gave us this life, from the name of great Stalin.” The choreographer Arbatov repeated the points about love for the land and its leader, offering no specifics about his dances other than his avoidance of the angular, agitprop poster style that had been popular in the Lunacharsky era. He shunned abstract gestures in favor of “national folk elements,” these being integrated into classical balletic syntax. Arbatov repeated the wooden refrain about the happiness of the characters in this, the first Soviet-Armenian ballet, again emphasized the broader friendship of the peoples, and described the ending as a “cantata in honor of the great Stalin. Hence the name of our ballet: Happiness.”72
THAT HAPPINESS WAS so well received meant that a sequel would be commissioned for professional dancers. Scenarist Konstantin Derzhavin in Leningrad was charged with preserving the best of Happiness while replacing the worst. The obvious problem in the original was its lack of drama: life in the utopian domain of Khachaturian’s first ballet is plot-free, except offstage. In the follow-up version, Armen is given a sister, Gayané, after whom the ballet is named. The setting remains an Armenian kolkhoz, this one devoted to cotton picking and carpet weaving, but life is now much less paradisiacal. Gayané’s husband, Giko, is an abusive alcoholic who colludes with unnamed criminals to torch the crops, setting the surrounding hills demonically aglow. Things end back in contentment, though: Gayané escapes her husband and finds new love with a dashing young Russian officer, Kazakov, and Armen meets his Kurdish sweetheart toward the end. The infectious “Saber Dance” is performed as part of a grandiose trans-Caucasian divertissement. Khachaturian completed the ballet in 1942, and it was premiered at the end of that year.
Details were added and subtracted from the plot during the initial run as well as the 1952 and 1957 revivals, for purely political reasons. The immediate context for both Happiness and Gayané was the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact between the Soviet Union and Germany on August 23, 1939. The Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, and his German counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop, devised a secret protocol that aimed to define the Soviet and German spheres of influence for a decade. They split Poland, the three Baltic states, and the enclave of Bessarabia between them. For the two years that the pact remained in force, the Committee on Arts Affairs curtailed the creation of anti-Nazi plays, films, operas, and ballets. Hence the reason the border infiltrators in Happiness go unidentified; hence the emphasis on threats within the Soviet sphere, as opposed to foreign enemies, in the draft scenario of Gayané. And hence, when the pact ended, further revisions to the scenario adding explicit references to the Nazi invasion, including air-raid alerts.
Khachaturian decried the ravages to his nation—and to his ballet, which the censors left in a mess of “confused notation, confused libretti, everywhere the same arrogance and distortion.”73 But as the shredded pages of the conductor’s scores to his third ballet, Spartacus, attest, his complaints went unheeded. Little had changed for ballet composers since the time of Pugni and Minkus; their music still belonged to choreographers, even if it had become more sophisticated, the scores integrated, representational, the melodic details of individual numbers resonating across the wholes. Politics accounts for some but not all of the distortion, as Khachaturian’s experience in 1967 with the dictatorial Bolshoi Theater ballet master Yuriy Grigorovich would attest. Experience, fame, and state prizes, including the Lenin Prize for Spartacus in 1959, perversely gave him less rather than more control over his music.
THE SOVIET-GERMAN PACT was shattered on June 22, 1941, when Hitler double-crossed Stalin by invading the Soviet Union in a three-pronged assault known as Operation Barbarossa. That December, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States, now allied with the Soviet Union, into the night and fog of Hitler’s madness. Humiliated, Stalin disappeared from public view for a week and a half as the Wehrmacht, unopposed, scorched the fields and cities of his empire. He had received reports of Germans taking down the barbed wire along the immense Soviet border, but he had hesitated to respond, seeking to prevent all-out invasion, even after the Germans swarmed into Soviet terrain from points north, south, and west, “from the muddy lagoons of the Danube Delta to the tidy sand dunes of the Baltics.” “Some waded,” Constantine Pleshakov reports, “some rowed, some ran, some walked, some rode in tanks and trucks.”74 It fell to Molotov to broadcast the news of the invasion to the terrified masses, and to signal to Stalin that lack of readiness had caused the loss of hundreds of aircraft, thousands of tanks, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers arrayed at the front. The Soviet Information Bureau invoked the Otechestvennaya voyna, the Patriotic War of 1812 against Napoleon, to mobilize the populace in the Velikaya Otechestvennaya voyna, the Great Patriotic War against Hitler.
In October 1941, government ministries, the Communist Party, diplomatic missions, and cultural agencies evacuated Moscow for Kuybïshev (present-day Samara), an industrial center on the Volga River. Those who refused the order to leave Moscow, or did not receive one, recalled a lawless and hedonistic atmosphere as the last trains left. Stalin reemerged as a mega-mind war strategist to direct the generals of the Soviet armed forces (those senior officers who had survived the purges) into ill-equipped battle against the mechanized Nazis. Hitler studied the Napoleonic campaigns before plotting his invasion of the Soviet Union and dreamed of Moscow in flames again, its 4 million citizens subjugated. His war would take a much ghastlier toll on the former Russian capital than the new one. Hitler blockaded Leningrad for 872 days, starving the populace into acts of cannibalism before food and fuel could be conveyed into the city across the ice of the Gulf of Finland.
The Luftwaffe dropped five-hundred-pound explosives on Moscow’s factories, and clusters of cruder, smaller firebombs on the buildings, adjacent to the factories, where people lived. The planes whined across the skies in half-hour waves, five or more hours a night. The Red Army and the trud (labor) front—including men who had connived deferments, critical officials
, prisoners, the aged—manned the cannons and the spotlights, hacked at the mud with pickaxes to make trenches and tank traps, erected barricades, planted mines, and chased sparks on the rooftops, dousing them with buckets of water tugged up the sides of the buildings. During the raids, mothers took shelter with their children in the cavernous metro stations, bedding down on the platforms or in the tunnels.
The State Academic Bolshoi Theater had been closed two months before the invasion for repairs to the ventilation and an expansion of the backstage area. It was not in use on the day of the attack. The leading artists received the order to evacuate with the government to Kuybïshev; others boarded trains loaded with tsarist treasures bound for Sverdlovsk; still others joined the fight. The Bolshoi Ballet soloist Alexei Varlamov received his “war christening” driving a T-34 tank through the brick dust and oil smoke of the Battle of Stalingrad; he was discharged a hero after a shell tore through his left leg, and yet managed to return to the stage.75 Vasiliy Tikhomirov, choreographer of The Red Poppy, had taken ill and could not leave. The ballerina Olga Lepeshinskaya, star of the post-Geltser version of that ballet, showed her mettle during the war. She was a committed communist from her teen years and a member, from the first year of the war, of Mossovet, the Moscow city government. Her patriotism, obvious talent, and the example she set as a hardworking, self-sacrificing Soviet artist granted her access to political power from age twenty-five. Her colleagues feared her connections, but she too had her moments of panic. Lepeshinskaya’s first husband served as senior interrogator for the NKVD. He was twice imprisoned, which forced her to twice divorce him, the second time for a general. In the tumult, the head of the secret police called into question Lepeshinskaya’s loyalty, inviting her for a chat in his book-lined study. “I’ve heard rumors that you don’t trust Soviet authority,” he said. She replied, robustly, “Let’s talk like communists. If he’s guilty, punish him. If not, let him go.” Earlier, Stalin—a “bad man, vindictive and malicious”—had laid his piercing eyes on her, and she wore revealing clothing when dancing at Kremlin receptions in his presence.76 Lepeshinskaya was no less proud of her marksmanship and service to Soviet anti-fascist causes than her ecstatic physical exertions on the stage; she resented being evacuated in 1941 and did not particularly enjoy entertaining the populations of the provinces in social clubs and other make-do spaces. She took a pass, at least at first, on the ballet Crimson Sails (Alïye parusa), which tells the tale of a motherless girl, her seafaring father, the toy boat he gives her, and her dream-come-true of escaping across the waves with a prince. A pastel-colored ballet of pleasant dances and innocent comic roles, it was created, in difficult conditions, by three young choreographers to music by a young composer, Vladimir Yurovsky, with a young dancer, Nina Chornokhova, making it special. Crimson Sails premiered in the Kuybïshev House of Culture (Dom kul’turï) on December 30, 1942, and had fifteen performances. Lepeshinskaya danced in the revival at the Bolshoi.
“This was in truth the first and last time in my life when I threw my ballet shoes into the cupboard,” she recalled of her march to the Sverdlovsk regional Komsomol command “to demand, not request,” that she and two other patriot-dancers be sent to the front.77 That did not happen, for the sake of her safety. Instead, Lepeshinskaya returned to Moscow to guard the rooftop of her building. Anecdote has her practicing her ballet poses in one of the turrets. After the Germans were repulsed from Moscow, Lepeshinskaya joined a crack ballet brigade that did, in fact, make it to the front to boost morale; she also performed in concerts in hospitals and munitions factories. The ballet historian Elizabeth Souritz distinctly remembers Lepeshinskaya performing in concert with Pyotr Gusev in Kuybïshev on August 31, 1942, and the ballerina playing games of bridge with her parents, who had also been evacuated to Kuybïshev during the war (Souritz’s father was an ambassador for the Soviet Union.)78
The experience of the war became part of Lepeshinskaya’s dancing afterward. She shed the flirtatious, happy-go-lucky comic roles of her youth to become a serious Soviet heroine: formidable, indomitable, unhesitating. In 1953, Lepeshinskaya broke her leg in the first act of a performance of The Red Poppy but continued performing until the entr’acte, fracturing it in two more places and losing consciousness when the curtain came down.79 She eventually retired with an unprecedented four Stalin Prizes.
THE ART ENDURED. During the war, the evacuated students of the Theater College toured hospitals, schools, work settlements, and orphanages around the Volga with a ballet about the Slavic Santa Claus, Grandfather Frost. A wartime photograph captures an outdoor ballet class in a ruined Russian town. Girls stand in third position on planks thrown across the mud, with a thin log serving as handrail. Tots in kerchiefs, their torsos folded around another log, gaze openly at them, as does a worker in soft cap and peasant blouse.80 Those dance pupils who remained in Moscow, and who had not effectively replaced their parents as medics and machinists, fell into the care of the dancer Mikhaíl Gabovich, one of the acclaimed Romeos to Galina Ulanova’s Juliet.
Gabovich had joined the fight, operating a spotlight during the worst of the Luftwaffe attacks. In the fall of 1941, however, the Committee on Arts Affairs made him the artistic director of what remained of the Bolshoi Theater ballet and opera. Gabovich was ordered to stage classic ballets and operas in a classic style—nothing Marxist, nothing done from the perspective of dialectical materialism. He had nowhere near the number of professional dancers required, however, and so placed a frantic telephone call to the Theater College: “Natalya Sergeyevna, come immediately to the Bolshoi!” “Why, what’s happened?” “Performances are being revived, and we need children for the ballet, those that weren’t evacuated to Vasilsursk.” “What’s with you, Misha! What ballets, we’re at war, the Germans are close to Moscow …” “The Germans won’t last. The people of Moscow need us at the theater—for a rest, to distract themselves, to forget about war for a few hours. We have to support them. Our fighters will come. They will gather their strength, feel better, become stronger in beating the enemy.”81
And so, according to this breathless anecdote, a fifteen-year-old ballerina named Maya Plisetskaya was given two of the adult roles in Swan Lake, with one of her rehearsals conducted under sirens and bombs. For performances of Boris Godunov, the ushers, stagehands, and tutors of the Bolshoi were dressed up as sixteenth-century peasants in the crowd scenes before a packed hall of conscripts holding weapons. Unlike the factory workers and peasants who had been trucked to Moscow to assess Shostakovich’s last ballet, The Bright Stream, the soldiers were agreeably uncritical.
These and other performances occurred in the affiliate of the Bolshoi, not the historic building. In the first months of the siege, firebombs and the casings of antiaircraft shells routinely fell onto and through the roof. The Bolshoi was under constant threat and so was placed under the protection of Moscow civil defense commander Alexei Rïbin. To him, protection meant stamping out cinders; it also meant preventing the theater from being occupied by fascists. Rïbin ordered his subordinates to mine the first floor with “several tons of explosives of tremendous destructive power.”82 The Metropole and National Hotels were also defended from invasion in this fashion. From the air, meantime, the Luftwaffe targeted the building of the Central Committee, which was located in the neighborhood between the theater, the river, and the Kremlin. At four in the afternoon of October 22, 1941, eighteen minutes after sirens began chasing the public toward the shelter of Okhotnïy ryad metro station, a huge bomb landed in front of the Bolshoi. The blast slammed Rïbin into a wall as the theater rocked back and forth on its ancient pilings “like a suspended cradle.”83 The bomb killed the soldier standing on guard at the front, bloodied and fractured the faces and limbs of those who had not made it to the metro on time, and collapsed the floors and walls of the foyer, crushing a janitor. The sculpted columns buckled along with the thick oak doors, the underground water pipes burst, and the asphalt all around sank. Had Rïbin’s mines gone off, he would
have died, and the entire building and the surrounding streets would have been razed. But they did not, and he ordered them removed.
Resolve met defiance. Repairs to the theater began in the winter, and the gala agitprop concert celebrating the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution went ahead as scheduled, on the platform of Mayakovskaya metro station.
THOSE ARTISTS WHO declined to use the spotlight to spread nationalist propaganda during the war watched their commissions disappear. Defeating Hitler was the focus, on all fronts. Even after the Soviet triumph, the sacrifice and suffering of the people remained a sacred touchstone of the Soviet experience. Efforts by artists to turn the page in the spirit of rebirth, to create new ballets, operas, films, and plays about current events often came to ruin, subject to ridicule by the cultural police of Glavrepertkom. Of a doomed postwar ballet called Love Poem (Poema lyubvi), one of the censors wrote, “The pursuits of the characters are amorous,” such that “one might think that this is the sole pursuit of our youth.” The plot seemed to lack the requisite heroic deeds and moral lessons. “Meanwhile one of the heroes is writing a dissertation,” the censor lamented, although “he might as well not be writing it for all it affects the plot.” The ballroom scene, set under a disco ball, also did not impress. Even in “the glow of life’s sunrise,” Soviet youth were supposed to have more on their minds than sex.84 Razed towns and cities needed rebuilding, farms re-collectivizing, and repurposed factories restarting, and meanwhile all that had to be shown onstage.
Bolshoi Confidential Page 33