Dancers were nonetheless intensely loyal. They were civil servants, bound to the Great Father (as to the tsars before him) by ties of gratitude and self-interest. Many came from poor backgrounds, and the state saw to their every need: as dancers they were fed, sheltered, and educated, and enjoyed privileges and prestige beyond the wildest dreams of ordinary Soviet citizens. Star dancers had dachas, cars, access to food and medicine, and (after the war, with strict restrictions) foreign travel. They belonged to the Soviet elite, even when they were also its puppets, and lived in a glittering parallel universe. Reared with military-style discipline, moreover, dancers were ill-equipped and disinclined to question authority; in any case, to question the system was to risk one’s place in it. Thus when the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin attended an official function in Moscow just after the Second World War, he met with a group of carefully vetted writers but also with actors and ballet dancers because, he was told, they were the “most simple minded and least intellectual among artists” and could generally be relied upon to be harmless.3
Indeed, dance produced no political dissidents. Those few who did eventually find the system too confining did not stay to fight: they defected. There was very little middle ground in dance. More than that: most dancers were proud of and deeply involved in the achievements of the state. Under Soviet rule, classical ballet grew from a narrowly circumscribed urban and court art into a vast continental network of schools, companies, and amateur performing groups, all controlled from Moscow. The choreographic academies (ballet schools) attached to the Kirov (formerly Maryinsky) and Bolshoi Theaters grounded the system: talent scouts recruited children from the far corners of the country and brought them to the center, and trained artists were in turn sent back out to the Soviet republics to spread and elevate the quality of the art.
Ballet companies were established in the capitals of each of the national republics and in major satellite cities; where they already existed, they were brought under the centralized state apparatus. Dance classes were available across the country through local organizations such as the Young Pioneers (youth movement) and Komsomol (the Communist youth organization) and in palaces of culture, factories, and union halls: this is how Rudolf Nureyev and many others got their start. Amateur dance groups also performed locally, thus further spreading knowledge and enforcing the prestige of dance. By the mid-1960s, according to one historian, the Soviet Union had successfully established nineteen ballet schools across the country, offering serious nine-year training courses fully sponsored by the state. No one could claim that the Soviets did not take ballet seriously.
We are left with a seeming paradox: dance and dancers thrived in a repressive, ideologically driven police state. Worse, as we shall see, they produced their best and most lasting art in its cruelest years. It is easy to assume that art demands freedom, that creativity and the human spirit flourish only when individuals can openly express themselves, unfettered by outside authority and an oppressive state. But the Soviet example suggests otherwise: dance succeeded there because of the state, not in spite of it. And if Soviet ballet did finally lapse into an artistic coma, paralyzed by years of political pressure and sloganeering, we must nonetheless recognize that even then, at its lowest point, the Soviet system continued to produce some of the world’s greatest dancers and most impressive ballets. Where did they come from? What was it that nourished their art?
Soviet ballet, it could be said, began in 1934. In that year Stalin contrived the murder of Sergei Kirov, first secretary of the Communist Party in Leningrad (and a personal friend), and then used his death to justify launching the Great Terror. In the course of the next four years, an estimated two million people—artists, intellectuals, and high Party officials prominent among them—were arrested and sentenced to death or sent to labor camps. Leningrad, the country’s cultural capital and Kirov’s personal fief, was crippled, and power was henceforth increasingly concentrated in Moscow. In a cynical and highly symbolic coup de grâce, however, Leningrad’s State Academic Theater for Opera and Ballet (formerly the Maryinsky) was given the dubious honor of memorializing Kirov’s name. The Kirov Ballet was born.4
The Kirov, however, was not the country’s only ballet company, nor even its most prominent. The Bolsheviks had always been suspicious of Leningrad (as St. Petersburg, former seat of the tsar, had been renamed) and under the press of the war they had moved the capital to Moscow in 1918, deliberately relocating the center of power to old Muscovite Russia. In the years after Kirov’s death, ballet followed suit, and the Bolshoi, which was situated close to the Kremlin at the geographic heart of Soviet political life, overtook its Leningrad cousin as the preeminent dance company of the USSR. This did not mean that the Kirov slipped into oblivion. As we have seen, the Kirov had always been the undisputed leader of the art, and it still boasted a better school, finer training, and a more elegant and refined style. And now, precisely because it had been politically demoted, it had a degree of artistic give that the Bolshoi would never have—the noose of ideology was not pulled quite as tightly there. The result was a tense but curiously productive relationship: through most of the Soviet period, the Kirov produced the country’s greatest dances and dancers, but it was the Bolshoi that showcased them to the world. The flow of artists from Leningrad to Moscow was constant: it was the Kirov that provided the talent and ideas that made the Bolshoi Ballet the USSR’s premier cultural institution.
Several months before Kirov’s murder, Andrei Zhdanov, one of Stalin’s favorites recently promoted to the Central Committee, had addressed the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers. There he proclaimed the doctrine of socialist realism in art: “Socialist Realism … demands of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality must be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism.” If the language was stilted and obtuse, it nonetheless contained a simple and disarmingly contradictory imperative: make art that depicts gritty, “real” socialist themes (such as workers or collective farms) but give them an idealistic glow. Or, in the words of a popular song, “turn a fairy tale into reality”—and reality into a fairy tale. And do it without “formalism,” a highly charged code word for anything complex, ironic, or sophisticated—any art that hid (or was thought to hide) a subversive message within its forms. Art, Zhdanov made clear, should be ideologically explicit and literal: it should demonstrate that life in the USSR really is ideal. Nor was this merely an aesthetic proposition. Artists carried a burden: they must transform the “consciousness” of workers and the people. They were, as Stalin himself famously put it, “engineers of the human soul.”5
Zhdanov’s speech had been directed at writers, but artists across the spectrum knew it applied to them too and its precepts quickly infected all the arts, with well-known and devastating consequences. In dance, socialist realism meant dram-balet, a new genre that came to the fore in the 1930s and would dominate the Soviet ballet stage for at least two decades to come. The idea, elaborated by Zhdanov but already circulating in ballet circles in the 1920s, was simple: a ballet had to tell a straightforward, uplifting story about heroic workers, innocent women, and courageous men. Abstract dances or complicated allegorical or symbolic ballets open to misinterpretation were strictly banned. Every step or gesture had to have a clear dramatic meaning. The old Petipa pantomime, moreover, was not an acceptable solution: it was deemed too artificial and pretty, a hated vestige of the Imperial, aristocratic court.
Socialist realism inspired a stream of “tractor ballets” featuring Soviet workers and Party enthusiasts clutching shiny tools and building factories, laboring on collective farms, and performing rousing folk dances. But that was not the whole story. The dram-balet was not always as empty and ideologically bald as “tractor ballets” suggest; at its best it also drew on strong beliefs and utopian
ideals, however compromised and mangled these became as Stalin’s rule progressed. And although official accounts liked to portray the dram-balet as a sharp break with the past—a new dawn of Soviet art—in fact (like socialist realism itself) its finer examples had deep roots in pre-revolutionary Russian modernism. The origins of the dram-balet lay at least in part at the turn of the century in the experimental dances of the choreographer Alexander Gorsky (1871–1924) and his work with the theatrical director Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938).
Gorsky was a product of Imperial St. Petersburg. He had danced at the Maryinsky in the 1890s and was steeped in Petipa’s classicism. At the turn of the century, however, he had moved to Moscow and set about restaging the old master’s ballets at the Bolshoi—but with a provocatively modernist twist. Rather like Fokine, Gorsky wanted to remove the fairy-tale gloss from the classics and render them in sharp, naturalistic colors. Fokine, as we have seen, did this stylistically; Gorsky’s approach was psychological, which is where Stanislavsky came in: he was the key to Gorsky and the link forward to the dram-balet. Stanislavsky too belonged to the world of Imperial Russia and had a strong taste for ballet. The son of a wealthy Moscow businessman who manufactured gold and silver thread, he had a classical education, including dance lessons with the ballerina Anna Sobeshchanskaya (who had performed in the first, ill-fated production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in 1877).
In 1898 Stanislavsky cofounded the Moscow Art Theater. His approach to acting was self-consciously radical: he was “against theatricality, against bathos, against declamation, against overacting … against habitual scenery, against the star system which spoiled the ensemble, against the light and farcical repertoire.” Stanislavsky pushed his actors to plumb their deepest emotional memories and to find ways to reproduce real feelings and sensations onstage. His actors devoted hours to research and internal preparation and immersed themselves in the history and psychology of the character they hoped to become. The theater was especially highly regarded, and controversial, for its early productions of Chekhov.6
Gorsky brought Stanislavsky’s ideas to bear on ballet—Petipa’s ballet. Eschewing the old master’s outwardly ornamented steps and decorative patterns, he emphasized instead mime and gesture—he liked to call his ballets “mimodramas”—and paid particular attention to plot development and story line. In 1919 the Moscow Art Theater merged briefly with the Bolshoi Ballet, and the collaboration between the two led to several groundbreaking productions. In a new version of Giselle, for example, Gorsky transformed the hitherto sweet villagers into earthy folk and assigned each a distinct individual profile. His wilis, moreover, were not idealized spirits but dead brides in tattered gowns with ashen faces and black circles gouged under their eyes; they did not dance in straight regal lines, but instead splayed themselves indecorously on the floor and ran chaotically about the stage. Gorsky even brought the ballerina down from her lofty Romantic heights: he scribbled a note instructing his Giselle to “be a temperamental wench—don’t dance on pointe (too sugary). Jump like a young goat and really do go mad. Die with your legs apart, not placing one on the other.”7
Gorsky’s experiments met with derision from a group of influential artists and bureaucrats within the theater who resented his success and despised his irreverence for the classical tradition. They mobilized the growing state apparatus against him. Hounded and demoralized by official committees who picked apart and obstructed his ballets, Gorsky sank into depression and decline. He stopped choreographing and could be seen listlessly wandering the halls of the theater; in 1923 he was admitted to a mental hospital and died there the following year. The baton passed to one of his most aggressive critics and rivals, the dancer Vasily Tikhomirov.
Tikhomirov’s talents were more political than choreographic. In 1927 he created The Red Poppy, a watery agitprop ballet that pitted “good” Chinese Communists against “bad” (Charlestoning and foxtrotting) Chinese and Western imperialists; it included an opium dream with giant goldfish and Buddhas who showed the way to a better world, accompanied by butterflies and birds. Workers flocked to performances (the music, by Reinhold Glière, incorporated strains of “The Internationale”) and it also appealed to NEP-men (businessmen and others who became wealthy from the New Economic Policy instituted by Lenin in 1921) and apparatchiks. There was Red Poppy perfume, soap, and candy, and a Red Poppy café. Leftist critics, however, were irritated at the “decadence” of the whole thing: “You don’t make a statue of a Red Army officer out of whipped cream.” The poet and writer Vladimir Mayakovsky was especially scathing: in his play The Bathhouse, one of the characters sarcastically comments, “You were at the Red Poppy? Oh, I was at the Red Poppy! Amazingly interesting! The flowers flitting about everywhere, the singing, the dancing of all sorts of elves and … sylphides.” The ballet’s old-world kitsch, however, turned out to be its greatest asset: it was a big hit, and under pressure from trade unions, the press, the Party, and Komsomol, The Red Poppy was mounted (in a revised version) at the Kirov in 1929. It remained in the repertory at the Bolshoi until 1960 (it was eventually renamed The Red Flower) and was standard fare for regional companies across the Soviet Union.8
Meanwhile, Gorsky’s most radical dances were lost or forgotten. His ideas, however, were later picked up by the men and women who created the dram-balet, and Stanislavsky, who lived until 1938, continued to influence ballet. Thus, in September 1934, not long after Zhdanov’s speech, The Fountain of Bakhchisarai premiered in Leningrad. It was a defining socialist realist production and one of the most successful and enduring dram-balets ever created: it is still performed by the Kirov (Maryinsky) Ballet today. The libretto for the ballet, drawn from Pushkin’s poem, was by Nikolai Volkov, and the score was an overwrought affair by the rising Soviet composer Boris Asafiev.9 The production was directed by Sergei Radlov, working closely with his student and protégé, the choreographer Rostislav Zakharov.
Radlov was a theater director. An early disciple of Meyerhold, he had also worked with Mayakovsky and with Alexander Blok and had been a key player in staging official open-air events and festivals featuring thousands of people reenacting revolutionary events on the “world stage.” More recently, Radlov had embraced Stanislavsky’s acting techniques, and Zakharov had followed his lead. They were not alone: Stanislavsky, to his discomfort, was among Stalin’s personal favorites, and the old director’s “method” (he hated the word) was officially sanctioned as the foundation of a new realist art. Thus in preparation for The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, Zakharov worked with the dancers for months discussing Pushkin’s poem and analyzing the motives of each character in the ballet: background sketches were invented, and every movement—down to a walk or glance—was scrutinized and imbued with dramatic purpose.
The Fountain of Bakhchisarai told the story of Maria, the daughter of a Polish nobleman, held captive by a Crimean khan who has fallen in love with her virginal beauty. Zarema, the khan’s main harem lover, is consumed with jealousy, and she confronts and finally kills the innocent girl. The enraged khan orders Zarema’s death and erects a “fountain of tears” to the memory of his beloved Maria. It was hardly a prototypical socialist realist story: the virtuous workers and proud Party leaders featured in official literature, films, and other ballets were conspicuously absent. But Radlov did not need them because he had Pushkin, whose writings were universally revered in Party circles. The way out of the numbing political homilies that ruined so many ballets, it seemed, lay through literature, and the best dram-balets took their cues from Pushkin, Balzac, and Shakespeare, among other officially approved classics.
Films and later performances of The Fountain of Bakhchisarai show a heightened melodrama, with smoke and flashing lights, a blazing forest fire, and fierce battle scenes with dead bodies strewn across the stage. The khan’s warriors are caped and stomping heathens, and his harem is stocked with undulating women who stand in sharp contrast to Maria’s elegant, white simplicity. When the hot-blooded Zarema implores, th
reatens, and finally stabs Maria in a fit of passion, Maria leans on a pillar and sinks slowly to the ground until she expires, a martyr to her own innocence and purity.
All of this is conveyed with unsubtle gestures and movements, deliberately stripped of balletic artifice. Indeed, Zakharov had little interest in dancing as such and sought instead to invent a mute dramatic language, a naturalistic pantomime. (It is not by chance that Bakhchisarai brings to mind silent films and Cecil B. DeMille.) The outcome was a ballet that deliberately avoided ballet, a “mimodrama” in the tradition of Gorsky, but far less radical: in the early 1920s Gorsky had arranged his dancers in angular and expressionistic poses and shattered the symmetry of classical ballet with frenzied “undone” patterns of movement. Zakharov’s dancers, by contrast, performed conventional, bland steps and self-consciously eschewed “superfluous” divertissements (officially maligned as formalism). The point was not to dance but to act.
The success of The Fountain of Bakhchisarai thus owed little to its choreography; to the contrary, and in keeping with its Stanislavskian emphasis, the ballet depended almost entirely on the dramatic talent of its performers. Nor was this an isolated instance: with the dram-balet came a cult not of dance but of dancers—performers so revered by their public that many would become household names. And although Zakharov would noisily promote himself as the guardian of the dram-balet for decades to come, its most effective representative and advocate was the young dancer first cast in the role of Maria: Galina Ulanova.
Ulanova’s Maria was a perfect socialist heroine. Although ostensibly playing a Polish princess, she seemed in fact to exist out of time. Clad in a simple white chiffon dress, she appeared chaste and modest, emotionally direct and stylistically unadorned. She was a real-ideal woman, down-to-earth but also spiritual, even saintly. Ulanova’s legendary style, which can be glimpsed in films made later in her career, was a perfect blend of romantic pathos and pedestrian simplicity. Her line was plain and clear, and she performed steps effortlessly. She never showed off, and her movements seemed so natural that you could forget she was dancing.
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