Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  Through it all, the Bolshoi Theater, an opulent symbol of the tsarist empire and host in 1896 of the murdered emperor’s coronation gala, stood in place across from the Metropole Hotel and close to the Kremlin. The composer Sergey Rachmaninoff, who left Russia for good in 1917, departing Petrograd for Helsinki on an open sled, recalled the theater’s imperial twilight. He had conducted at the Bolshoi for a couple of seasons and gilded his memory of the experience, noting the beauty of the annual concerts for veterans, the “fantastic” staging of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (the clinking of the spurs worn by the Polish dancers drowned out the orchestra, he quipped), and the cat that wandered onto the stage to take in an aria sung by Feodor Chaliapin before a packed house.4

  The cat stayed, but Rachmaninoff left, slamming the door “noisily” behind him as he departed, in the midst of conflicts with the musicians and the administration of the Bolshoi.5 He mentioned none of that in his golden recollections—an acknowledgment of sorts that his challenges were trivial compared to what his successors confronted after the revolution.

  The Bolshoi itself suffered only modest damage in 1917: a few windows were smashed, some cash stolen from a desk. One of the younger dancers, Anastasia Abramova, made it seem as though the coup had merely disrupted her schedule, telling the New York Times that “Oh, yes, the revolution was terrible—it interrupted the work of the ballet school three whole weeks.” Abramova had to miss class a few days. So much for “one of the greatest national convulsions history ever recorded.”6

  The Bolsheviks made the Bolshoi an essential part of their government, both in an effort to cleanse it of imperial associations and because they needed the space for political meetings. Lenin took the stage to explain, in his 1918 constitution, how the “Rights of the Working and Exploited People” were to be defined and defended.7 The theater hosted the biannual gatherings of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, the chief governmental organ of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), whose members were elected by regional councils (soviets) of people’s deputies. The executive committee of the congress, headed by Lenin, directed the affairs of government and defined the responsibilities of the people’s commissars, who ran the ministries. Lenin tamed the congress, purging his opponents from the membership.

  The most serious and fearless among his foes was Mariya Spiridonova, who had cut her teeth as a defender of the working people by pumping five bullets into the body of a peasant-abusing provincial councilor in 1905. Her punishment included beatings, rape, and a long jail term. (“Swearing terribly,” she recalled of her Cossack interrogators, “they would beat my naked body with their whips and say, ‘Come now, my fine young lady, give us a stirring speech!’”)8 Spiridonova’s political organization, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, had fallen out with the Bolsheviks after Lenin capitulated to the Germans. In an effort to scuttle the peace treaty, Spiridonova arranged the murder of a high-ranking German official in Moscow. On July 5, 1918, a grenade exploded in the upper tiers of the Bolshoi during the fifth meeting of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. According to the British agent Lockhart, who had been attending the congress with dozens of other prying foreigners, the grenade exploded by accident, having been “dropped” by a “careless sentry.” Knowing that the theater was ringed by troops and the doors barred, another British agent, along with a French one, tore up and swallowed the secret papers in their possession. Other potentially incriminating items were “shoved down the lining of the seat cushions.” “The situation was too tense for us to appreciate its comic side,” Lockhart added.9

  The Left Socialist Revolutionaries were subsequently outlawed by Lenin as a political organization. Later Stalin would have Spiridonova, the onetime heroine of the socialist cause, arrested and executed.

  THE ABDICATION OF the tsar and the formation of the provisional government prompted an immediate reorganization of the Bolshoi as a state enterprise, ending its existence as an imperial theater but preserving the imperial repertoire. The nineteenth-century opera Eugene Onegin was to be staged in March of 1917, but on March 1, the schedule for the theater announced “no rehearsal on account of revolution.” The next day, another notice: “bloodless revolution, performance cancelled.”10 The Bolshoi sputtered back to life, concluding the season with the comic ballet La fille mal gardée (The wayward daughter) before a largely empty hall.11 Don Quixote was staged during this period, likewise Le corsaire and, for the opening of the 1917–18 season, The Sleeping Beauty. During the Bolshevik conquest of Petrograd on October 25–26, the Bolshoi performed Alexander Gorsky’s version of La bayadère, a decadent imperialist ballet with a “slow-beating pulse” that defied the times—though, politics aside, the colors were glorious and the ensembles liberated, breaking through the temporal and spatial frames Petipa had once imposed on them.12 Rimsky-Korsakov’s fairy-tale opera Kashchey the Deathless joined Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta on a double bill.

  The revolution would neither be danced nor sung in the theater for many years. Yet there was one balletic nod to the ongoing events, which came at the order of the commissar of the state theaters. A tableau vivant titled Liberated Russia (Osvobozhdennaya Rossiya) was stitched together by Gorsky, who remained ballet master at the Bolshoi until the year of Lenin’s death, 1924. Russian cultural heroes were celebrated—especially those who had run afoul of the imperial censors or, even better, had done time in tsarist prison. Gogol, Lermontov, and Pushkin were depicted onstage, likewise Dostoyevsky, whose semiautobiographical novel The House of the Dead recalls his four-year stint in a Siberian labor camp, the sick minds of the guards and his fellow convicts, and the brutalities everyone suffered. Actors portrayed the Russian nationalist composers Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, even performing a group sing-along with laborers, peasants, sailors, students, soldiers, and revolutionaries. A plainly attired figure of the motherland held up her broken shackles to the strains of the French insurrectionist anthem “La Marseillaise.”

  The March 13, 1917, performance also included Alexander Gretchaninoff’s setting of “Long Live Free Russia!” (Da zdravstvuet Rossiya, svobodnaya strana!), a poem by Russian symbolist Konstantin Balmont. The magazine Iskrï (Sparks) noted “the tears in the eyes” of the audience.13 Gretchaninoffpenned his hymn in half an hour and donated the proceeds from the printed edition to “liberated political prisoners.”14 In 1925, hardship forced him to immigrate to Paris. Balmont had already left five years earlier. Gorsky, stuck in Moscow, would find himself between two stools, castigated as too eclectically “left” by the defenders of the imperial tradition and as too stagnantly “right” by those who sought the reconstruction of ballet along new, proletarian lines.15 The Bolshoi was, Gorsky complained, “a stone box with chaos inside.”16 In the spring of 1918, “severe neurasthenia, accompanied by insomnia, frequent headaches, and weakening of the heart” forced him to take a leave of absence from the Bolshoi.17 Still, his contract as ballet master continued to be renewed. Gorsky had to straddle past and present, performing his versions of the imperial repertoire while also sanctioning productions of modernist ballets by choreographer Michel Fokine and composer Igor Stravinsky that had been performed in Paris by an émigré company, the Ballets Russes. Gorsky deemed the cultural trends of the early 1920s—including Nikolay Foregger’s machine dances, the ballet-gymnastic hybrids at the Sokol sports clubs, and the erotic night bazaars—too radical. Although he loosened tradition, he did not want to do away with it. Instead he sought, through ethnographic realism, to revitalize the Russian ballet heritage. Cultural revolutionaries ridiculed him in the immediate aftermath of the coup, but his approach ultimately helped rescue the Bolshoi Ballet. It survived as a Soviet institution thanks first to the ideological redecoration of the classics, then to the commissioning of grand new ballets on Soviet themes. The Bolshoi would not have lasted as a proletarian cabaret, which is how the radicals reimagined it—and, ironically perhaps, as it had been at the time of its founding.

  In 1917, the noblemen who ran th
e kontora of the Moscow Imperial Theaters disappeared. One of the last, Sergey Obukhov, took a well-timed vacation that summer, never to return. The kontora was searched by the Bolsheviks, and peccadillos were revealed. A hidden passageway was discovered in the loge reserved for “balletomanes of rank.” It led through a corridor to a peephole, disguised as a vent, through which men of means could watch the ballerinas putting on their makeup (the dressing room was elsewhere). Investigators felt compelled to confirm that the peephole offered such pleasures, so they gazed through it during an actual performance.18 There was nothing more to see, however, once performances began to be canceled and replaced by political speeches accompanied by renditions of “La Marseillaise.”

  To run the Bolshoi, the provisional government chose an opera singer, the lyric tenor Leonid Sobinov. At first there was nothing for him to run. He railed against the political takeover of the theater. “As the elected manager of the theater,” Sobinov declared, “I protest its fate being seized by irresponsible hands.” The hands in question belonged to the revolutionaries in Petrograd, who struggled to manage the departments and institutions formerly run by the Ministry of the Imperial Court. “Let them deal with the equerries [the konyushennoye vedomstvo, or Office of the Master of the Horse], the wine-making estates, and the plant that makes playing cards,” he insisted, “but let them leave the theater alone.”19 The lesser entertainments of horse riding, drinking, and gambling were one thing, he seemed to be saying, ballet and opera quite another. Exasperated, Sobinov submitted his resignation, but since no one had the mandate to accept it, he remained on the job.

  He traveled to Petrograd and there received guidelines from the provisional government for restructuring. In June 1917, the Bolshoi became an autonomous institution, administered by a council that included the opera and ballet directors, their conductors, the choirmaster, four soloists (two from the opera, one each from the ballet and choir), and members of the technical and design crew—nineteen in all. The council sent a representative to the joint committee of Moscow’s public and social services unions. The joint committee supported the provisional government but dreaded and despised the Bolsheviks, interpreting the events of that October in apocalyptic terms.

  On October 27, the night after the coup d’état, the opera Lakmé was performed. Afterward the theater closed its doors. The November 10 meeting of the joint committee predicted, accurately, “searches, arrests, and violence,” the beginning of a “long civil war,” the “loss of free speech, a free press, and freedom to assemble,” and the hastening of Russia’s “economic and financial implosion.”20 The meeting concluded with the public services union resolving not to recognize the Bolshevik takeover. The Bolshoi’s staff and artists debated whether the best form of resistance to the “invaders” and the “orders and actions of the Bolsheviks” was “to go on strike” or, “on the contrary, to open the theater.”21

  On November 17, the artists and staff decided that their work needed to continue, so there were no acts of “sabotage,” no “arrests.”22 The theater reopened after a three-and-a-half-week hiatus with Aida, the grandest of grand operas. There was just one incident, a telling one, after it was announced that members of Mossovet (Moscow Soviet of People’s Deputies, the equivalent to city hall) would be using the former tsar’s loge. Hecklers began hurling homemade projectiles into the loge from the floor. Soldiers were summoned, the exits blocked, documents checked, and people searched. Revolvers and Finnish knives were found on the “battlefield” of the stalls.23 The performance in the seats overshadowed events onstage, as pro- and (chiefly) anti-Leninist factions clashed. The theater’s agitprop potential had been unleashed, albeit, in this instance, to the detriment of the Bolsheviks.

  The theater soon fell under the control of a jocular Swiss-educated Marxist named Anatoliy Lunacharsky. (“His features are not attractive,” one of his petitioners noted, “and he speaks with a slight burr, as children do.”)24 He was involved in the Comintern, nickname of the Communist International, reaching out to leftist organizations in France. As the People’s Commissar for Enlightenment, Lunacharsky toiled to keep the Bolshoi and other state theaters open; he signed orders ensuring the distribution of ration cards to artists and the procurement of footwear for ballet dancers. Between 1917 and 1919, the cost of silk and leather for ballet slippers grew from 6 rubles and 50 kopecks per pair to 250 rubles. The Bolshoi Ballet used about 500 pairs a season but, after 1917, had no choice but to economize, leaving the dancers’ shoes and feet in tatters. Shoe theft became a serious problem. The difficulties obtaining ballet shoes, as discussed by the fitters and stitchers and Lunacharsky’s minions, absorbed thirty-four single-spaced pages.

  Under the Bolsheviks, the volume of paperwork generated by the Bolshoi Theater, and the government in general, massively increased. The former kontora of the Moscow Imperial Theaters was filled with functionaries who much preferred to sit in meetings and debate protocols than shiver in their flats or, as the cause of freedom forced them to do, march in the streets. Hundreds of pages were required to name and re-rename Cavos’s architectural marvel from the State Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet in 1919, to the State Academic Bolshoi Theater in 1930. Deliberations continued even when conditions had deteriorated to the point that the operations of the theater had to be suspended, perhaps for good.

  The revolution found its way into the theater a year after the fact, on November 7, 1918, when the Bolshoi hosted a gala celebrating the first anniversary of the October Revolution. (The “October” Revolution occurred in November according to the new, Gregorian calendar, adopted on Lenin’s orders.) The theater threw open its doors to the sons and daughters of the working people, as well as commissars, deputies, delegates, and lesser functionaries. The Russian version of the French socialist anthem “L’Internationale” was performed, followed by Alexander Scriabin’s visionary 1910 score, Prometheus: The Poem of Fire. Hallucinogenic in conception, it calls for an enormous orchestra, solo piano, organ, a wordless chorus (representing the primordial cries of transformed man), and an electronic colored-light instrument. The music is orgiastic, ultra-dissonant, and, as reviewers in 1918 fancied, futuristic. There followed the popular assembly (veche) scene from Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Maid of Pskov, whose plot highlights the repressiveness of Tsar Ivan (Ivan the Terrible). He torches the rebellious city of Novgorod but leaves the rebellious city of Pskov in peace, because its most fetching maid, Olga, turns out to be his long-lost daughter. She is shot, tragically, and dies in her father’s arms. The long evening concluded with a ballet by Gorsky to music by Glazunov. Titled Stenka Razin, it concerns a Cossack insurrectionist who, in real life, killed, raped, looted, and stoked peasant unrest in the lawless southern borderlands of the Russian Empire in the 1660s. For his all-around nastiness, which Alexander Glazunov’s music tries very hard to ignore, the rebel was quartered on Red Square in Moscow. The Bolsheviks embraced him as one of their own. The ballet version of his exploits was inglorious, as weirdly benign as the music, with dancers dressed in costumes recycled from the opera. Notably, though, it marked a turn away from balletic classicism and offered a hint of something new: a ballet whose hero is reflected in, and defined by, the collective. The program was repeated on November 12, as part of the sixth meeting of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets.

  The anticipation of a fresh start after breaking from the court patronage system, and the fantasy of democratic elections, ceded to disillusionment. For the ballet and opera, the loss was very real. The records of the Moscow Imperial Theaters had been stashed for safekeeping in the Troitsk Tower of the Kremlin, which was damaged during the shooting in October of 1917. The papers that survived ended up being divided between the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts and the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art—without any logical organization. The records of Petipa’s time at the Bolshoi were likewise spoiled. Soldiers squatted in his Moscow apartment, and when his daughter Nadezhda returned, she faced a nightmare: “Everythin
g was turned out of the cupboards and chests. Papers, letters, documents, Marius Ivanovich’s entire archive was scattered on the floor, trod and laid upon, crushed and torn.”25 The official records, those that were not kept in the apartment, might have been culled by the Soviets owing to their tainted associations with the decadent imperial era.26

  The Bolshoi itself was stained as an emblem of imperial power, and thus the new government in 1917 debated its continued existence both in private and in public. An article asked the question “Should the Bolshoi Exist?”27 The answer provided in follow-up publications was no, not at all, but closing the theater, it was argued, might be more expensive than keeping it open. Pensions would need to be paid, and the building itself maintained to prevent vandalism. But the question kept coming up, both from financial and ideological perspectives, especially during the crisis of 1918–19. As Vladimir Galkin, the commissar overseeing Moscow’s grade schools, asked during a meeting, “Whose aesthetic interests have our theaters been serving up to now? … Carmen, Traviata, Eugene Onegin—these are all bourgeois operas. Nothing for the people, laborers, the Red Army.” He argued that “the scaffolds of the Bolshoi Theater would be better serving agitation and propaganda.” And given the shortages of fuel that winter, he wondered, pointedly, “Are we still of the mind to keep allowing precious fuel to be thrown into the voracious furnaces of the Moscow State Theaters, tickling the nerves of diamond-clad baronesses, while depriving heating stoves of the wood that could save hundreds of laborers from illness and death?”28

  The People’s Commissar for Enlightenment, Lunacharsky, missed the meeting, leaving no one to defend the Bolshoi from Galkin’s snarling attack. Lenin put the matter to a vote, but not before deadpanning, “To me, it seems that comrade Galkin has a somewhat naïve conception of the theater’s role and significance. We need it less for propaganda than to give rest to our workers at the end of the day. And it’s too early yet to put the bourgeois artistic heritage in an archive.”29 Lenin had spoken. The vote went against Galkin.