Romeo and Juliet stands on its own merits, but its history also gives it special poignancy. In its folds lay a mix of old Imperial and modernist impulses harnessed to socialist realism and overshadowed by the Terror. The postscript is sad: Adrian Piotrovsky disappeared into the gulag and was never heard from again. Radlov fell into German hands during the Second World War and had the misfortune to be repatriated when the hostilities ceased: like thousands of others, he was accused of collaboration and treason and shipped off to a labor camp. He remained in captivity until Stalin’s death and died shortly thereafter in Latvia. Prokofiev, as we shall see, continued to work but was increasingly tormented by the authorities; he died in 1953 a broken man. The contrast with the dancers could not have been sharper: Lavrovsky was promoted and in 1944 became chief choreographer for the Bolshoi Ballet, alongside Zakharov. Ulanova went with him.
When the Germans invaded the USSR in June 1941 it seemed quite possible that the country would fall. The devastation was staggering: during the first six months of the war the Red Army lost four million men and seventeen thousand tanks. As Nazi troops closed in on Leningrad and Moscow, Stalin ordered a massive evacuation of cultural, political, and industrial organizations: government offices, airplane factories, and manufacturing plants, but also entire theaters, orchestras, and film studios were packed up and moved to safer locations in the Urals, Central Asia, and Siberia.
Under the circumstances, it is hard to imagine that ballet would have been deemed a vital national asset right alongside guns, machinery, and the apparatus of government, but it was. From the very beginning, the seriousness of the Nazi threat made it clear that it was not only territorial Russia that was at stake: the country’s vast cultural heritage was in peril and the need to preserve its traditions urgently felt. The Bolshoi Ballet was moved to Kuibyshev (although a rump troupe remained in Moscow) and its school relocated to Vasilsursk, a small town on the Volga. The Kirov Ballet and school were removed to Tashkent in the east, and finally sent to Molotov (Perm)—which still to this day has an excellent ballet company, developed in part by dancers who spent the war there. Dancers trained and rehearsed with newfound purpose, and they performed for the troops and in hospitals and factories. Some joined the Red Army Song and Dance Ensemble (known for its pantomimes ridiculing fascists) for front-line concerts where they performed excerpts from Swan Lake and other favorite ballets—Russian ballets. Ulanova, clearly moved, later recalled the soldiers who wrote to thank her and to say that they took strength from the memory of her white swan.
For many dancers, the war, difficult as it was, also brought a degree of relief. Material conditions were harrowing, but artists were freer than they had been for some time. The brutal ideological program of the 1930s softened and gave way: this was a genuine struggle for survival, a “Great Patriotic War,” and it brought Russians together and diminished the suspicion and paranoia that had governed public life for so long. Stalin did not stop his murderous campaigns (in 1941 and 1942 nearly 157,000 servicemen were shot for desertion and other lesser crimes) but he did relent on the ideological front and long-suppressed thoughts, feelings, and even religious ideas spontaneously returned, however tenuously, to Soviet life. As Boris Pasternak later recalled: “The tragic and difficult period of the War was a living period and in this context there was a free and joyful return of a sense of common interest with everyone else.” After the war, Ulanova reflected: “I had seen how selflessly Soviet people had lived, how much they had given to win the war. Those war years helped me to look at my postwar Juliet with new eyes, to give her the courage and resolution which had been less apparent in the previous production.”18
As we shall see, the war did something else too: it shaped a generation of young performers who would never forget the sense of duty and dedication and the urgent exhilaration of dancing in those years. They were children at the time, but they would later fill the ranks of the Bolshoi and Kirov ballets; many would become its stars. Yuri Grigorovich (b. 1927), who would later direct the Bolshoi Ballet, quit his ballet school as a young teenager to go to the front but was eventually sent to Perm, where he completed his studies and joined the Kirov in 1946. Or Maya Plisetskaya: born in 1925, she too was trained during the war and her gritty, heroic style and fierce loyalty to the Bolshoi Theater and to the Soviet state owed much to her wartime experiences. Irina Kolpakova, born in 1935, began dancing in Perm as a child and would later warmly recall the dedication and camaraderie of that time; the dancer Nikolai Fadeyechev (b. 1933) felt a lifelong debt to the Bolshoi, which took him in, fed him, and gave him a profession. The list goes on. “What other state,” as the dancer Ninel (Lenin backward) Kurgapkina once put it, “would do that for an artist?”19
When the war ended, Stalin celebrated with (among other festivities) Cinderella performed at the Bolshoi Theater in 1945. The music was Prokofiev’s, composed in Perm in 1943, and the ballet had a scenario by Volkov and choreography by Zakharov. The production glossed over the usual rags-to-riches story: this Cinderella was a thinly veiled parable depicting the victory of a virtuous but downtrodden Cinderella (the USSR) over her evil stepmother. The ballet was impressive, a quasi-military display of strength and glamour produced on a lavish scale, and emotionally moving for those who saw it then (and in years to come). The point was clear: like the Red Army, ballet—Russian ballet—had emerged from the war triumphant. Its position at the heart of official Soviet culture was firmer than ever. Cinderella, with its lush grandeur and poignant score, earned Prokofiev the Stalin Prize, First Class.
But if the Great Patriotic War remained at the forefront of the Soviet imagination for decades to come, the freedoms and cultural relaxation that the war itself had created were less enduring. In a speech before the Central Committee in February 1946, Stalin laid down a hard ideological line, ominously invoking enemy and capitalist threats and calling for renewed vigilance in defense of the socialist cause. Later that year Zhdanov, who was by then Stalin’s de facto deputy, delivered the first of several decrees viciously attacking prominent artists for “formalism,” “mysticism,” and a depressingly familiar range of artistic crimes. “If our youth had read [the officially condemned poet Anna] Akhmatova,” Stalin wrote to Zhdanov justifying the crackdown “.…what would have happened in the Great Patriotic War? Our youth [has been] educated in the cheerful spirit able to win victory over Germany and Japan.” And so Shostakovich, Khachaturian, and even Prokofiev were publicly vilified and modern music excoriated for its “naturalistic sounds,” which (Zhdanov asserted in 1948) reminded audiences “of a musical gas chamber.” Performances of music, theater, and ballet were canceled, works banned, jobs placed in jeopardy.20
The consequences for ballet were predictable: more—and more conservative—dram-balets. Indeed, the war itself became a prominent theme: the victory over Hitler was played and replayed on the ballet stage, enshrined, as it was in other cultural spheres, as a justification for the Soviet system. In 1947, for example, the Kirov Ballet premiered Tatiana, or Daughter of the People, a three-act ballet about a Soviet couple who penetrate and explode a Nazi camp. They are captured and tortured—one observer noted that “the Nazis twisted, broke, threw onto the ground, and lifted the dancer in a symbolic crucifixion.” Although the woman, Tatiana, is eventually saved by the Red Army, her lover is killed. After the war, however, he miraculously returns to life and to his Tatiana. The lovers revisit the site of their exploits: from the ashes of the Nazi base a Soviet naval academy has arisen, and the couple is saluted by the cadets amid celebrations. If this unlikely mix of torture, resurrection, and patriotic self-sacrifice seems far-fetched today, it was perfectly in keeping with the time. Not coincidentally, one observer noted that the heroines featured in this kind of war ballet brought to mind the figure of Zoia, a young partisan purportedly captured by the Germans, tortured, and hanged (it later transpired that her story had been embellished if not fabricated). Zoia was the subject of a hugely popular film in 1944, made by the same director
who would later make Romeo and Juliet.21
In the same vein, Lavrovsky created Life at the Bolshoi Theater in 1948, to music by the Georgian composer Andrei Balanchivadze (brother of George Balanchine). The ballet portrayed a strong, self-sacrificing wife—danced by Ulanova—who takes up her husband’s duties on the collective farm after he goes to war, and bravely perseveres when she receives news of his death in battle. (In a bitter twist, Lavrovsky’s own wife, who was of German origin, had been arrested during the war and sent to a camp.) In 1959 the Bolshoi performed We Stalingraders, a ballet reenacting that great battle, and in 1960 the Kirov presented Stronger than Death, set in a Nazi torture chamber. Three Soviet prisoners are set to be executed, but when the shots are fired, the men do not die. Instead, each leans on the others, and together they are stronger than enemy fire.
Perhaps most striking of all, in 1961 the choreographer Igor Belsky (1925–1999) choreographed Leningrad Symphony at the Kirov to Shostakovich’s music. It was a ballet freighted with symbolism: the score had been composed during the war, and Stalin had had it airlifted into Leningrad at the height of the siege; the music was performed by a ragtag orchestra and broadcast on loudspeakers through the streets of the starving and beleaguered city. Work on the ballet was intense and deeply personal: at least one (and perhaps more) of the dancers who performed the ballet in 1961 had been there as a child and survived the siege.
War themes, however, were not necessarily a guarantee of success. At the Bolshoi in 1950, for example, perhaps in an attempt to reproduce the success of Life, Lavrovsky created Ruby Stars, a story of love and war set in the Caucasus, once again with music by Balanchivadze. The ballet had two lovers, one Georgian, the other Russian, and according to the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya (who learned the lead role) Lavrovsky vacillated and fretted, trying to anticipate official reactions to his every move. Who should die first, the Russian or the Georgian? How to dance the war in an officially acceptable way? At the final dress rehearsal a group of dour representatives from the Central Committee, themselves nervous and on edge, categorically vetoed the ballet. Why, they wondered, was it set in Georgia? Didn’t Lavrovsky know that Russia, not Georgia, had been bombed first? Ruby Stars was never performed.22
Zhdanov’s decrees and the ideological crackdown that followed also led to a renewed emphasis on the classics. They at least were safe, and in the postwar years Swan Lake in particular would become a de facto second national anthem. At the Kirov, the dancer Konstantin Sergeyev, Ulanova’s former partner and a veteran of the 1930s dram-balet, began a long reign as director that would last, on and off, from 1946 until 1970. He made a career out of revising Petipa’s ballets in a socialist realist mold. This meant cutting the old mime sequences (an aristocratic remnant) and adding soaring lifts and bravura variations; he also added happy endings, thinly veiled allusions to a here-and-now socialist paradise. In 1950, for example, he created a new Swan Lake. Under pressure from the censors, who presumably objected to the ballet’s religious overtones, the traditional story of lovers sent to a tragic death by an evil sorcerer but united in the afterlife was revised. Sergeyev made the sorcerer die an agonizing death so the lovers could be blissfully joined not in heaven but here on earth.
When Stalin died on March 5, 1953, things began, slowly and haltingly, to change. As the news of his death sank in, artists he had attacked and marginalized—especially those associated with the modernist experiments of the 1920s—tentatively reemerged from the cultural crevices into which they had retreated. Fedor Lopukhov, who had already returned briefly to the Kirov during the war, became a powerful figure at the theater once again, not as a choreographer but as a mentor. His small apartment on Rossi Street became an informal meeting ground, and a younger generation in search of new ways of thinking about dance looked to him for advice and inspiration. But it was not only Lopukhov. Leonid Yakobson (1904–1975) also came to the fore. Yakobson had danced at the former Maryinsky Theater from 1926 to 1933; he had worked with Lopukhov and admired Mayakovsky and Blok. Like them, he belonged to the radical edge of the revolution in art and had sought to jolt ballet out of its complacent, classical, and bourgeois certainties through satire and wit.
Drawn to acrobatics and pantomime, and influenced by the ballets of Fokine, Yakobson created his first important dances in the ballet The Golden Age at the former Maryinsky Theater in 1930 to music by Shostakovich. But like Lopukhov, Yakobson had trouble fitting his work to Stalin’s socialist realist program, and he resented the dram-balet for its mulish adherence to old-world classical forms. His prime years were spent either in uneasy tension with the regime or in stoic retreat. In 1956, however, his situation improved. Several months after Khrushchev’s February address to the Central Committee denouncing Stalin and opening the way for the “thaw” in culture and art, the Kirov premiered Yakobson’s Spartacus, a daringly sexy evening-length ballet with an original score by Aram Khachaturian. It was a grandiose, Schéhérazade-like production with a cast of more than two hundred dancers performing openly erotic, Isadora Duncan–style free dances. This was a ballet that never would have seen the light of day under Stalin. Now it was not only performed but held up as an example: in 1962 Spartacus was transferred to the Bolshoi Theater.
Yakobson was not working in a vacuum. These were the years that saw the publication of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s Stalin’s Heirs (1961) and Alexander Solzhenitzyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), as well as the premiere of Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony (1962), which drew on Yevtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar” and openly satirized Soviet life. Even Meyerhold’s name and ideas reentered public discourse. The choreography of Mikhail Fokine, whose work with the Ballets Russes had been denigrated as traitorous émigré art, came to the Soviet stage, often for the first time: in 1961 Petrouchka, which had premiered in Paris in 1911, was finally given its Russian premiere at Leningrad’s Maly Theater. Khrushchev’s thaw, of course, had limits: Pasternak had to publish Doctor Zhivago in Italy, and although the book won a Nobel Prize, he was expelled from the Writers’ Union and officially ostracized. Shostakovich’s Thirteenth had just two performances and was then suppressed.
Still, the opening was real and intoxicating, and it seemed to offer the promise of setting dance on a new course. In 1962 Yakobson mounted The Bedbug, drawn from a Mayakovsky story. It was a raw and violent ballet depicting psychological disintegration and suicide, and it ended with the gory image of an oversized bed crawling with grotesque, blood-red bedbugs. Two years later he tackled Alexander Blok’s The Twelve (which, as he may have known, had gotten Balanchine into trouble forty years earlier), rendering it in a loud and satirical poster-art style. By then, however, the authorities were pulling back: in late 1962 and again in 1963 Khrushchev lashed out at abstract art (“art for donkeys”), jazz (“gas on the stomach”), and popular dances (“you wiggle a certain section of the anatomy … it’s indecent”) and issued formal and threatening condemnations of targeted artists and their work. Yakobson’s The Twelve did not go unnoticed. The dancer Natalia Makarova later recalled: “The Party higher-ups were fuming, most of all over the way the twelve Red Army men passed into the future—not with a sovereign stride befitting soldiers of the Revolution but as if they were Red bedbugs scrambling up a ramp from beyond which blinding scarlet light poured, the glow from the world conflagration. Standing with their backs to the audience, they looked meekly into this future.”23
Yakobson, she explained, tried to justify his ending by insisting that no one could know the future, to which the authorities responded, “Ah, so you still are unfamiliar with the future of our Revolution? We are familiar with it.” Finally Yakobson proposed a modified ending in which Jesus Christ would parade past the twelve soldiers streaming a red banner behind him, and disappear into the wings. The authorities balked: “What are you up to? Are you mocking us, Leonid Veniaminovich?” The ballet was shelved. In 1969, thanks to a highly placed friend, Yakobson was given space in a dank old building and allowed to form h
is own small company. He worked on what he called “miniature” ballets with a devoted group of dancers, including several disgruntled artists from the Kirov, but official harassment did not subside. “You have to bargain for every lift, sewing color strips on flesh colored leotards,” he complained, “they fear the naked body and sex like fire.” Bitter and depressed, Yakobson died of stomach cancer in 1975.24
Yakobson’s ballets were brave: even during the thaw the cost of being perceived to challenge the Party line could be high. After the orthodoxies of the dram-balet, his plastic, free-form style appeared shockingly unpredictable and uncontrolled, and his bold resistance to pressure from above made him a symbol of courage and artistic integrity. He was as close as ballet ever came to a dissident, and feelings about his dances run understandably high even today. Yet, judging from films and revivals of his ballets, Yakobson’s choreography was also stuck: his dance vocabulary was thin and clichéd, and it is hard not to read The Bedbug and The Twelve as a form of confrontation, as much revenge as art. Even Spartacus showed signs of a talent waylaid. Its choreography was watered-down Fokine, its only idea sex. It was an epic but depressingly one-dimensional anti-dram-balet. Yakobson exchanged toe shoes for bare feet, classicism for free dance, stuffy propriety for sensuality. Every step and pose seemed measured to test the Party line: admirable in its way, but also a sign of artistic despair and abdication.
The real breakthrough came not from the surviving older artists of the 1920s and ’30s but from the new “thaw” generation. Not because they were more radical; to the contrary, this was the first generation to have been born and raised under Stalin, and they were profoundly isolated both from their own past and from the outside world. The dram-balet and socialist realism were all they knew. At the same time, many had also lived through the spontaneous de-Stalinization of the war years: they craved the freedom and artistic intensity of that time and had internalized the national pride and love of homeland the war inspired. They were thus a generation apart, marked from generations before and after by the twin experiences of Stalin and the war. Conformist and utterly committed to the USSR, they were also extraordinarily ambitious and desirous of artistic innovation. Thus when the Great Father died and Khrushchev opened cultural life, they immediately followed his lead. But it was his lead: like the regime itself, these artists did not aspire to break completely with the past. They sought to reform Soviet ballet, to modernize and improve it from within. Theirs was not a headlong rush to freedom—or to Western standards and tastes in art—but instead a halting and hard-fought series of tactical battles waged at once within and against socialist realism.
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