Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  She told this tale in her own words, having decided against collaborating with a professional biographer. Her 1994 memoir is a brash, score-settling performance, toughest on artists who kowtowed to the regime, bleakest about the fate of her father; she remembers him sinking into depression at the start of the purges while still indulging the hope that he might be welcomed back into Stalin’s good graces after months of fear and trembling. He had sat in the Bolshoi on December 5, 1936, for the formal proclamation of the new Soviet constitution, with Stalin himself presiding, but subsequently, unexpectedly, lost favor with the ruler. His sin? He had insisted on keeping in touch with a Trotskyite older brother who had emigrated to the United States. In the spring of 1937, a pardon seemed to come in the form of a prestigious invitation to the May Day celebrations on Red Square. Eleven-year-old Maya planned to put on a new dress and walk hand in hand with her daddy to the parade. But just before dawn that day, “the stairs creaked beneath the leaden weight of sudden steps.” The apartment was searched while her pregnant mother sobbed, her little brother wailed, and Maya watched. “The last thing I heard my father say before the door shut behind him forever was ‘Thank God, they’ll settle this at last.’”14 His family was told that while in prison, he had been deprived of the right to write letters for a decade. That meant he had been shot.

  Plisetskaya’s mother was herself jailed, with her newborn, the following March, though she would be spared execution. She sang lullabies to her baby in a prison cell in Moscow before being shipped by cattle car to Kazakhstan and condemned to a labor camp with the other wives of supposed traitors. In 1939, she earned a sort of reprieve by being exiled to the south, where she taught dances in clubs. Plisetskaya was taken in by her aunt, the dancer Sulamith Messerer. Custody was at first temporary, since the Stalinist system deemed the children of “enemies of the people” to be wards of the state. Thus the Soviets had their own version of the Imperial Foundling Home, which, back in Michael Maddox’s time, had tutored the unwanted children of philandering noblemen in dance, drama, and Enlightenment values. Rather than receiving a basic education, however, now the orphans of the purges were subject to psychological rehabilitation according to Soviet dogma.

  The night Maya’s mother disappeared, Sulamith was performing Sleeping Beauty at the Bolshoi. Somehow (neither she nor her aunt were clear about the details) Maya made her way to the theater with her little brother Alik. The bad-tempered director of the production made the children wait in Sulamith’s dressing room until the entr’acte. “Mayechka, where’s your mama?” her aunt asked, bursting backstage. “She said she’s been urgently summoned to our father in Spitsbergen,” the girl answered. “She told us to come see you in the theater.”15 Sulamith took the children home to her communal apartment. Plisetskaya promised to be good; her brother cried inconsolably, not knowing why his mother had taken his baby brother away but left him behind. Their uncle, Asaf Messerer, gave him shelter while Plisetskaya remained in the communal apartment with Sulamith, who received legal guardianship of her against the wishes of the menacing matriarchs of the orphanage system. Her aunt (known to family and friends as Mita) housed Plisetskaya until 1941, when her mother was released and moved into the same communal flat, sleeping on a cot beside her now adolescent child. “I was saved by Mita,” Maya recalled. “I did not end up in [the labor and death camps of] Vorkuta, Auschwitz, or Magadan. They tormented me, but they didn’t kill me. Didn’t burn me in Dachau.” Instead, “my knowledge of the ballet grew.”16

  Plisetskaya enrolled in the Communist Movement of Youth, as required, and its newspaper announced the professional debut of the “komsomolka-solistka” on April 6, 1944. She was eighteen, center stage in The Nutcracker. “Plisetskaya joined the Bolshoi Ballet during the war,” the newspaper reported, noting her instant promotion to the rank of soloist in a trio in Swan Lake, a “leaping variation” in Don Quixote, and the Chopiniana mazurka. She “seems to live in the elements of dance and speaks through its poetic language: she embodies themes of sadness, rumination, love, pleasure, and merriment to great effect.”17 The accompanying photograph shows her flinging herself through the air with more style than technique. Ovations followed in the pages of Sovetskoye iskusstvo, the mouthpiece of the Committee on Arts Affairs, and, after Plisetskaya began to tour the Soviet Union with her longtime partner Nikolay Fadeyechev, similar accolades appeared in the regional newspapers of Kazakhstan, Ukraine, the Baltic States, and the Russian interior.

  Stalin made Plisetskaya an Honored Artist of the RSFSR in 1951 and kept her confined in the Soviet Union, apart from allowing her to perform in youth festivals in eastern Europe. Her first trip abroad as a professional came in response to a November 28, 1953, directive from the Central Committee to “prepare a group of Soviet artists, 30 people, for a concert tour to India.”18 The concerts mixed ballet and opera excerpts, and Plisetskaya was slated to dance The Dying Swan and a pas de deux from Don Quixote. She was required to gather character references and sit for interviews meant to gauge her trustworthiness. Although the most notable (and, for the regime, embarrassing) defections came about only in the 1960s and 1970s, traveling out of the Soviet Union had always been a special perk reserved for a chosen few. Permission was granted for Plisetskaya to go on tour in 1954.

  During the trip, she had to put up with Yuriy Shcherbakov, the deputy director of the Department of External Relations of the Ministry of Culture or, as Plisetskaya described him, a “sweaty” NKVD/KGB agent with “bad breath.”19 The Russian delegation also received an invitation to perform in Rome, since the artists were traveling through that city to and from Karachi and Delhi. The request was rejected, owing to the risk of the performers getting “tired”—never mind the six days of travel, by train and plane, to get to India from the USSR.20 The same excuse, tiredness, served to keep the artists out of Egypt and Pakistan.

  Under Khrushchev, Plisetskaya was named a People’s Artist. Her talent continued to stun audiences, critics, and bureaucrats alike. In June 1956, she danced the lead role in the Bolshoi’s production of Laurencia, a ballet choreographed by Vakhtang Chabukiani to music by Alexander Kreyn, first performed in Leningrad in 1939.21 The plot concerns the revenge of Spanish villagers on a Lothario-like prince who ravishes a maiden at her wedding. Khrushchev brought the Yugoslav president, Marshal Tito, to the show, a “high-voltage” display of technical bravura. Plisetskaya, as Laurencia, was “lithe and slender and as much at home in the air as on the ground,” in the opinion of critic John Martin, who left the Bolshoi Theater stunned. She tore up the stage, concluding sequences of springing leaps by brushing the back of her head with her foot. It was a statement, a riposte to the recoiling pitter-patter, the heels-on-the-ground blinchiki of the other dancers. “Not until my eyes have returned to their sockets and my jaw has resumed its natural position can analytical judgment be attempted,” Martin concluded.22

  The Soviet regime would continue to exploit her talents, marketing her on tour to the West as one of the wonders of the socialist-communist system—once, that is, she was cleared to travel, and once the Kremlin allowed the Bolshoi to compete on the stages of supposedly hostile imperialist capitalist nations. The Russian repertoire of the Bolshoi ballet might not appeal to audiences elsewhere, but the dancers themselves were the real draw, out-hustling and -muscling their counterparts in modernist ballet companies as part of the larger battle for cultural and ideological dominance. Ballet would join chess and rocket science in the effort to prove, on the world stage, that Russian political and nationalist might was right. Such were the conceits of the Cold War, which continue to haunt ballet’s global present.

  Plisetskaya was prime flesh for the Kremlin to flaunt, but she was a problem. Ever since India and since she had begun fraternizing with foreigners, the government had declared her unexportable. She had her enemies, including the perspiring KGB operative Shcherbakov, a French-horn player charged with enforcing communist discipline at the Bolshoi, and the hardline communist ballerina Olga Le
peshinskaya, who battled rumors that she had slept with Stalin.23 Mocking her government minders had done her no favors; nor, despite Khrushchev’s denunciation of the crimes of Stalin, had the arrest of her father during the purges; nor her being Jewish. Yet when the government sanctioned a cultural exchange between the Bolshoi Ballet and the Royal Ballet, “Covent Garden,” in the fall of 1956, Plisetskaya was slated to go to London. Of course, she and her fellow artists would be closely minded by “KGB workers” who served as their tour guides.24

  The Kremlin made politics and nationalist ambitions seem the prime motivation for the London tour and those that followed in the 1950s and 1960s. But the actual motivation was financial: touring was intended to turn a profit. Stalin had left the Soviet budget in a catastrophic state, the industrial and military complex so dilapidated as to allow US spy planes to fly unimpeded over Soviet terrain. USSR cultural exchange and international friendship organizations (VOKS, SSOD) made the crucial point that other ballets in other places, like the Sadler’s Wells Ballet in England, had made up for lean times with lucrative tours; the Bolshoi Ballet could compete with these companies across the globe. It became a product to be sold—like the silver deposits of Transbaikalia or pearls fished from the rivers of the Kola Peninsula. Fearing defections, the KGB did not want to sanction the trip, but the financial argument won out. Exploiting the commercial potential of the Bolshoi meant dispensing with the amateurish ideologues of the friendship organizations in favor of professional entrepreneurs like Sol Hurok in the United States. The ministers of culture under Khrushchev talked a good game about disseminating Soviet values abroad, but for the Central Committee the point was to bring in much-needed foreign funds. Thus the Cold War was allowed to thaw for the sake of the bottom line—at least until, under Brezhnev, oil profits rose, leading to a political refreezing, the arms race, and a reprise of hyperconservatism.

  Plisetskaya would certainly be a box-office draw in London, but likely an unreliable representative of the Soviet Union. Two months before the tour, she was struck from the roster, angering the English. The threat of Soviet tanks rolling into Budapest encumbered negotiations, as did an absurd London shoplifting scandal involving the Soviet discus thrower Nina Ponomarena and five hats. For British balletomanes, however, Plisetskaya’s absence was the focus. “I must protest the withdrawal of one of your leading dancers without explanation and ask you to re-consider this decision,” the Royal Opera House beseeched an assistant to the minister of culture, on behalf of a public expecting to see the ballerina of the future.25

  The ballerina of the past, Lepeshinskaya, was ruled out as a substitute. Never popular with her colleagues, she had fallen out of favor with the Central Committee as well, despite continuing to make a case for herself as an artist and ideologue. Her association with Stalin and promotion of the Stalinist cult of personality ended her career under Khrushchev. Others were removed from the list owing to problems at home (recent divorces, no children or relatives to compel them to return after the tour), a record of conduct unbecoming of a Soviet citizen, even insufficiently Slavic looks. Julia May Scott (Zhilko), a dancer with a Russian mother and an African American father, learned that she would not be traveling owing to her heritage: she was a “half-breed,” according to the commission on foreign travel.26 Thus the spotlight turned on Galina Ulanova. She had to dance on tour, even though she was long past her peak.

  Four ballets were to be performed: The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, Giselle (or the altogether unrelated Gayané), Romeo and Juliet (or Don Quixote), and Swan Lake. A contract was also worked out with the British Broadcasting Corporation to televise the second act of Swan Lake, starring Ulanova, for a fee of 1,250 pounds sterling, with 1,000 pounds sterling more for a rebroadcast. The rehearsal plan for London, dated May 24, 1956, had Plisetskaya scheduled for eleven appearances and Ulanova twelve. The cancellation of Plisetskaya’s performances added to the burden on the forty-five-year-old Ulanova, whose health was already in question before the tour. (Plisetskaya, in contrast, was in top form at just thirty-one.)

  Ulanova strained a calf muscle midway through the tour and collapsed in exhaustion at its end, but her performances that fall radiated reclaimed youth. The critic for The Observer geared up to malign Romeo and Juliet for its baleful Stalinist monumentalism, which he dismissed as “a lumbering three-decker-pageant, moving at opera pace against pillars and brocade,” and acting that should have been left in the era of silent film.27 The atmosphere in the theater was tense. “You could hear a fly fly” as the curtain rose, Ulanova commented, long after the fact, in 1986.28 She took the stage and won over the audience. “Peaky and wan,” she enchanted the critic with her “pale hair and pale eyes … as transparent as a drop of water.” Her performance showcased “the art of interpretative movement carried to the nth degree.”29 Her naturalness won the day, and “stunned” the English prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn, who recalled being transformed by Ulanova’s performances in 1956. “Her dancing had exactly the smooth perfection of thick cream poured from a jug, with never a harsh movement anywhere. Her beautiful legs were steely and lithe.”30

  A recent graduate of the ballet school, Nina Timofeyeva, substituted for Plisetskaya in a version of Swan Lake that combined the first and second acts into one. She overcame the pressure to deliver “an astoundingly complete rendering,” according to The Spectator, “slighted only here and there by placing faults due only—observably—to her nervousness.”31 The Bolshoi Ballet received standing ovations, and its principals “saw rose petals strewn by admirers on the path from the theater to the hotel,” despite the disgraceful absence of Plisetskaya.32

  No one forgot that insult; she made sure of it.

  PLISETSKAYA REMAINED BEHIND in Moscow during the London tour but participated in a spiteful, look-I-told-you-so experiment initiated by the dancer and choreographer Anatoliy Kuznetsov. He was happy to exploit the fact that the Bolshoi’s superstar had not been able to take her ebullient head-kicks to London and buck the Bolshoi tradition. The habit for the Bolshoi Ballet on tour is for those dancers left behind in Moscow to perform smaller, simpler ballets. That did not happen in 1956. Plisetskaya took the part of Odette/Odile in a revival of a four-act 1937 version of Swan Lake. Her uncle, Asaf Messerer, staged the climax of this version, a duel between Rothbart and Siegfried. Siegfried slashes Rothbart’s wings, the source of his power, thus freeing the maidens from his spell. Kuznetsov choreographed the “masculine” first and third acts of the revival, and Marina Semyonova, who danced the lead role in 1937, the “feminine” second and fourth acts. Conceived with Plisetskaya’s explosiveness in mind, the production became the talk of the town, with the stalls mobbed and foreign journalists scrambling to obtain passes. Plisetskaya remembered taking six curtain calls after the adagio and four after the variations. She exited the second act with her back to the audience to exhibit the plastique of her arms, and generations of ballerinas have followed her example. But her overseers disapproved. Plisetskaya was summoned to speak with Ekaterina Furtseva, future minister of culture, at her Central Committee office, and the police interrogated her claque. Kuznetsov, the mastermind of Plisetskaya’s triumph, expected an award from the Bolshoi for his initiative and got one. But it was for his contribution to the production as a dancer, not as director. Offended, he refused the award.

  Plisetskaya chafed against her Soviet confinement. Denied permission to go to Paris with a group of Bolshoi soloists in 1958, she flashed steel, writing to Khrushchev to remind him that she was the star. “The government performances,” those meant to showcase Soviet culture to foreign dignitaries, had been “entrusted” to her, she insisted.33 But arguing did not help: she had been kept from London, and now Paris, and was likely to be left behind when the company went on tour to New York in 1959. She was left begging Khrushchev to forgive her loose tongue, apologizing for not respecting the constant KGB surveillance of her activities and the mistakes that “remained an obstacle” in her “joining the Bolshoi Theater” a
broad.34 “In the last few years, I have behaved unspeakably badly, without realizing the responsibility that rests on me as an actress with the Bolshoi Theater,” she wrote to the leader of the USSR. “I allowed myself to be irresponsible; it is inadmissible to speak about our Soviet reality and the people leading our art without bearing in mind that my words have resonance.” Her openhearted plea to Khrushchev, a socialist-realist caricature of a politician, continued with the admission that she had “often been tactless and behaved provocatively at parties, mostly talking with foreigners. I am very sorry that I allowed myself to invite the British Embassy Secretary Morgan to my home, without consulting with anyone first. There was also the time I did not go to a reception at the Embassy of Israel, saying that I had not received an invitation that had in fact been extended to me by employees with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For all of my indiscretions, believe me, I am sincerely repentant today.” The self-debasement continued with mention of the fact that she had just gotten married, to the composer Rodion Shchedrin, and that “things will be different now,” “no one will be embarrassed by me.”35 With a husband to come home to, she advertised, there was no chance of her defecting. That helped her case; she received permission to travel to the United States.

  Plisetskaya wrote again to Khrushchev as she packed her bags on April 9, 1959, to express her gratitude for his “trusting” her. “I’m endlessly happy. Never have I felt so good and calm inside,” she gushed.36 She might have been baffled to learn that one of the people who recommended that the travel ban be lifted was Olga Lepeshinskaya. Plisetskaya had little positive to say about Lepeshinskaya in her memoir, for reasons both personal and professional, but in 1959 Lepeshinskaya did her a good turn by speaking to the Communist Party organization within the Bolshoi Theater “about the need to include Plisetskaya on the tour to the USA,” since American audiences demanded it.37 Plisetskaya’s husband, Shchedrin, also promised in the offices of the KGB director that she would not defect, which, despite the anguish she had suffered in childhood at the hands of the state, she did not think to do—both out of fear for herself and love for him.