Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  There remained the question of closing the long-neglected, underfunded ballet school, or at least ending the subsidies for room and board. The school had survived the revolution, and was shuttered, as Anastasia Abramova remarked, for just a few days during the shooting. The ballet committee demanded that it remain open to prevent the stars of the future leaving the country and ending up in the service of foreigners. The director of the (Imperial) Theater College, of which the ballet school remained a part, insisted on preserving the pre-1917 academic curriculum, which included lessons in “the Holy Gospel in Old Slavonic, God’s laws, and moralistic spiritual readings”—all anathema to Marxism.30 The financial problems, the director’s recalcitrance, and freezing temperatures in the classrooms forced the school to close through the winter of 1918–19. A committee was appointed to overhaul the curriculum according to the new political realities. It proposed abolishing the Table of Ranks for dancers, the aristocratic system that placed the corps de ballet, akin to working-class dancers, at the bottom. The coryphées, the bourgeoisie, rested in the middle, and the soloists sat at the top as the noble elite. Character dancing would be emphasized, likewise athleticism, “physical culture.” The school would also, in time, privilege the teaching of regional dances. Some of these dances purported to be authentic, imported from the campfires of the provinces, but most of them were abstracted and estranged from their sources, made more folk-like than the folk. Fantasy was better than the real thing, and so under Stalin, dancers and singers from Moscow would be sent to the provinces to teach the locals their own eccentric traditions. Thus in terms of how they sang and danced, the peoples of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Uzbekistan, and the other Soviet republics would be made into caricatures of themselves.

  The council governing the Bolshoi Theater proved inept. Basic administrative questions about benefits, leaves, and performances in other venues were left unanswered. It was dissolved, only to be replaced by another, equally ineffective council. Eventually Lunacharsky recognized the need to bring order to the Bolshoi—both for his own sake, as Lenin’s overworked culture and education minister, and for the Bolshevik cause. In 1919, he named a new director of the Bolshoi, the loyal Bolshevik functionary Elena Konstantinovna Malinovskaya (1875–1942). Stern, stout, and flush-faced from nicotine, she knew nothing of culture besides tutoring the basics and helping her husband, an architect, in building a “People’s House” to offer free lectures and public concerts in her hometown of Nizhniy Novgorod. To her credit, she never pretended to know, and so she tried, in her duties at the Bolshoi, “to let the dancers dance as they like,” even when doing so resulted in the coarsening and cheapening of time-honored solos.31

  Her political climb began in 1905, when she joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (of which Lenin’s Bolsheviks were a faction) and began involving herself in agitprop activities. Moving to Moscow landed her a position in the cultural-enlightenment division of Mossovet. She lived in the building where she worked, spending long hours at a desk concealed by telephones, never raised her voice (even when shouted at), and demonstrated unsmiling trustworthiness in her duties. A caricature captures her grimace along with the fashion for silk and felt hats in the early 1920s; the caption reads, “Today she’s gloomy.”32 The Bolshoi’s older artists resisted her efforts to lift the rock of imperialist repression from their backs and forced her, more than once, to resign. She was accountable to the artists in word, but to Lunacharsky (and above him, Lenin) in deed.

  Thus the theater’s artists discovered that their professional unions, or profsoyuzï, which supposedly represented their interests to the directorate, were actually powerless. Any decision required Lunacharsky’s approval. Minutes from the meetings of the dancers in June 1918, October 1919, and December 1919 reveal the depths of their discontent. Some soloists quit; others floated the idea of separating the Bolshoi Ballet from its theater. But despite deep resentment of Malinovskaya they elected a representative to the directorate: Vladimir Kuznetsov, an 1898 graduate of the ballet school, who both danced with the Bolshoi and acted in silent films—four in all. Other side activities included adjudicating a contest for best female legs for a satirical magazine (the contestants submitted photographs of their exposed calves for his sophisticated assessment). An affair with Sophie Fedorova, Gorsky’s preferred ballerina and a future member of the Ballets Russes, aided his modest career. He appeared in Gorsky’s version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and danced the gopak (Cossack dance) in The Little Humpbacked Horse; a photograph also shows him costumed for the mazurka in, presumably, Swan Lake. His signature role was the Chinese doll in Coppélia, who dances in the second act until his clockwork runs down. Then he sits on a bench upstage, facing the audience. Kuznetsov once wagered that he could get through the entire act without blinking; he won the bet by painting fake eyes on his eyelids and keeping his real eyes shut tight. Besides makeup, magic tricks, and comic roles, Kuznetsov loved practical jokes, causing a stir in 1914 by masquerading as Gorsky during a performance of The Little Humpbacked Horse to commemorate the ballet master’s quarter century in the theater. Kuznetsov was a congenial bon vivant and was praised by his peers for his “sense of justice.”33 But he does not seem to have been politically savvy, given that he taunted Malinovskaya as a Bolshevik factotum ignorant of the arts. Being right did not help him, and neither did redoubling his insults.

  Lunacharsky resisted the election of Kuznetsov to the directorate—claiming, in typical kompromat fashion, that Kuznetsov had been detained in the commissariat for “drunkenness” and had even, according to the sadistic charges, hosted “orgies” in his “tavern.”34 Lunacharsky’s accusations repeated those leveled, in another context, against the bohemian Stray Dog Café in Petrograd, which the imperial government had closed in 1915 for the unauthorized selling of spirits. But the “tavern” was in fact an atelier, a basement dining room of sorts near the Bolshoi, where skits, humorous tales (by Chekhov, among others), dances, and songs of different genres were performed. Kuznetsov put together the programs and enlisted the entertainers, who worked for food, one free meal per show; they were denied booze, sex, and the delights of hashish—just kasha and cutlets for them. Kuznetsov defended himself from the slander to the satisfaction of his colleagues at the Bolshoi. No one believed he could have been “arrested in a drunken state.”35 But to keep the peace he eventually withdrew from the election. The third and final vote of the Bolshoi dancers, in December 1919, went to Gorsky’s disciple, Vladimir Ryabtsev.

  Kuznetsov continued to attack Malinovskaya on behalf of the union, underestimating the director’s ties to Lunacharsky. In the first of her several acts of revenge against the artists under her control, especially the more charismatic ones, she accused Kuznetsov of sabotage. He had, she told Lunacharsky, incited the troupe to go on strike before the start of the 1920–21 season. Lunacharsky, in response, turned to the head of the Cheka, Lenin’s political police. Kuznetsov was arrested but spent just three days in prison. His colleagues signed a petition asserting his innocence. After his release, the feud continued. Lunacharsky, no longer the congenial Bolshevik the artists had believed to him to be, filled Kuznetsov’s Cheka file with fictions about his basement bordello, alcoholism, and “morally dubious past.”36 Lunacharsky informed the chief of the secret police that “disloyal and demagogic agitation persists” in the Bolshoi, with roots in “the ambition of a group of dubious types who seek election to the directorate.” He pointed to Kuznetsov as the perpetrator of “a series of clear criminal acts,” including agitating the collective to demand better rations and encouraging the dancers and singers to “disrupt spectacles and close the theater.” “From my personal meetings with Kuznetsov,” Lunacharsky continued, “it became obvious that this individual seeks to lay the path for himself to the highest positions in the theater and he will not desist in his damaging campaign unless he is eliminated in the severest fashion possible. In light of Kuznetsov’s criminal actions I ask the M. Ch. K. [Moscow Cheka
] to immediately place him under arrest. This will in and of itself sedate the troubled personnel, bringing the matter, once investigated, to a proper conclusion.”37 Kuznetsov blamed the prudish Malinovskaya for his downfall, never suspecting Lunacharsky’s involvement. But the commissar harbored an intense, almost intimate, hatred for him.

  Kuznetsov was forced to quit the Bolshoi after the 1920–21 season. His Cheka file labeled him a “sulky element” with no right to work in a state theater.38 At forty-two years old, he was past retirement age for a dancer, but since he had been voted head of not just the ballet union but also the combined union for all of the artists in the theater, he technically had the right to work until old age. Lunacharsky expelled him nevertheless, and then instructed everyone to breathe a sigh of relief that the subversive demagogue was gone. Kuznetsov recovered from the blow. After the Bolshoi, he found employment in Soviet cultural groups and cabarets, giving dance lessons and, in the mid-1920s, staging a frolicsome entertainment about mythological satyrs titled The Goat-legged (Kozlonogiye). He also remarried, divorcing his first wife for a nineteen-year-old Bolshoi ballerina.

  The dire housing shortage forced Kuznetsov, his new wife, his ex-wife, and his ex-wife’s new lover into a communal apartment. Nerves frayed; tensions within the ménage à quatre increased. Kuznetsov foolishly brought home émigré newspapers and even read aloud favorite passages within earshot of his ex-wife. She and her paramour denounced him to the Cheka, and he was locked up for possessing subversive material. Apparently his jailors had gentle hearts, and after two months of interrogations they allowed him to plead ignorance. His punishment was relatively mild. Kuznetsov was banished from Moscow and denied the right to live in any of Russia’s five largest cities. For a dozen years he lived in Malinovskaya’s hometown, Nizhniy Novgorod, after which he was arrested for a third and final time. He had opened his mouth in the presence of the director of the Soviet Palace of Culture in Novosibirsk, declaring Soviet culture inferior to that of his golden, tsarist youth. It was 1938, the height of the Stalinist purges, the Great Terror. Kuznetsov was convicted of treason under Article 58 of the Soviet penal code and assigned to a labor camp in Tomsk. He died in 1940.

  CONDITIONS DETERIORATED IN the theater, as in Moscow, during the frigid winter of 1919. The civil war prevented food and fuel from reaching the city. Sewage entered the water system; typhoid, flu, and cholera spread. There were shortages of pine for coffins and plots for burial. Despite being illegal, bartering for peat moss, flour, and potatoes flourished, as did thefts from factories. Some were slyly retrofitted to produce items that employees could sell for food, including “stoves, lamps, candlesticks, locks, hatchets, and crowbars.”39 Dancers rehearsed in the cold, their breath visible as the temperature fell close to freezing on the stage and well below that in the ballet school. Audiences sat in coats and gloves. Curtain times were moved up an hour to save heating costs. Power failures curtailed performances. Instead of hiring part-time workers to clear snow, the theater had the artists themselves do the shoveling. Performers and technical staff scattered, leaving altogether or, between rehearsals and performances, taking on hackwork for bread (“black bread” from rye, Malinovskaya notes, since white bread from wheat could not be found in Moscow at the time).40 Verdi’s Aida and Wagner’s Die Walküre had to be pulled from the repertoire due to lack of resources. Bolshoi orchestra musicians entertained soldiers for rations, sometimes playing on rare, historical instruments that had been confiscated from the homes of noblemen by the music office of the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment. Nationalizing the instruments, the thieves argued, kept them from being sold for hard currency or smuggled abroad.

  Salaries were cut, save for the highest-ranking employees. (One of them was the machinist Karl Valts, whom Lunacharsky thought “an exceptional talent.” His pay increased from 4,800 to 8,000 rubles in the spring of 1919.)41 The belt-tightening meant wages were paid through the winters of the revolution and civil war, but not the summers. Malinovskaya and her bookkeeper came up with an unusual scheme to make payroll, taking advantage of the limited free-market reforms of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), including permission to earn a profit and the encouragement of entrepreneurship. A new elite appeared on the streets of Moscow: speculators, or “gold diggers,” who bought and sold the essentials of life, plumping themselves up with their profits at cake shops. “Speculators’ wives are usually fat, red-cheeked, with heavy hanging hair, and much fur and diamonds,” the New York Times reported in an exposé of the women of “Red Russia”—from the no-nonsense spouses of Lenin’s inner circle to the ragtag tram-car ticket takers. “She wears what she has and in the winter everything she has,” the reporter observed of one of the non-uniformed tram-car conductors.42 NEP ended after seven years, and Malinovskaya expressed loathing for its capitalist components in her memoirs. At the time, however, she took advantage of the system by asking the government for permission to organize a Bolshoi Theater lottery. Her bookkeeper calculated that selling 5-ruble tickets for a chance at the 10,000-ruble jackpot would increase the salary pool by 200,000 rubles. For that to happen, however, the artists would need to hawk tickets to the theater’s patrons. Malinovskaya hectored them into doing so, all the while recounting her difficulties getting the Moscow trade union council to allow the event at all.

  Throughout the crisis, she represented herself as a heroic warrior doing battle with unnamed foes of the Bolshoi. “The B. T. is surrounded by enemies; fighting those seeking to get their hands on it takes great effort,” she wrote.43 The most serious threat to the theater came from the hardline Bolsheviks who, for financial, political, and aesthetic reasons, saw no reason to finance the arts—especially during a time of cold, hunger, and civil war. Her job was to enact Lunacharsky’s harshest decisions and accept blame for them, while he pivoted between the artists and the authorities, trying to placate both sides.

  Everyone found a cause to rally around in the first successful revolution-themed ballet, a work by and for children. The Soviets made children, both guttersnipes and those from proper homes, the sole privileged class in the Soviet Union; in terms of staging a new art to suit the changed times, agitprop for kids was a safe bet. The children’s ballet-pantomime Ever-Fresh Flowers (Vechno zhivïye tsvetï, 1922) earned sincere praise from Lunacharsky. The commissar was so impressed that he even urged Lenin and his wife to attend the second performance, the first having been reserved for children, some of them orphans of the revolution, the civil war, and the Cheka. Ever-Fresh Flowers was both rustic and constructivist, representing meadows and mountains, ribbons and garlands, bees and butterflies, fresh-baked buns and cakes, harvesting and blacksmithing, sickles and hammers, marching and singing, and the spelling out of political slogans with letters held up on sticks for all to see. It opened with the children in a ship at sea, threatened by a thunderstorm, and ended in an orchard under the sun. The score offered up a miscellany of accessible classics, boys’ and girls’ songs, and marches. The elders in the cast explained to the children onstage, and everyone in the production then to the audience, that the flowers in the title represented the new start of the revolution, now five years old. The sets and costumes were done by Fyodor Fyodorovsky, an inspired designer, in a “bright [agitprop] poster style.”44 The apotheosis of Ever-Fresh Flowers involved more slogans, more marching, and a hymn to toil—a hit with the fresh-faced audience and, for Gorsky, an uncontroversial success.

  And yet the question remained: “Should the Bolshoi Exist?” In some sense, the direst moment of crisis had passed. Its finances had begun to improve, and Russia had begun to rise back up on her feet, leaving time to consider the survival of the theater from an ideological perspective. The theater remained suspect as an imperial institution. It staged operas and ballets, the most elite entertainment. Also it seemed it could not be controlled at a time when lack of control was most threatening. From the perspective of the government, there was too much freethinking in the theater. Lunacharsky tried to fulfill
his promise that the Bolshoi would be made to serve the regime. Thus those artists who were the most true to themselves, the most artistic, the most spontaneously and individually inspired and motivated, needed to be suppressed. The bind that the Bolshoi, its artists, and its management found itself in would inform the plots of its greatest “Soviet” productions: sacrifice of the individual for the collective.

  Lunacharsky and Malinovskaya defended their actions like woodcutters letting chips fall where they may, arguing that risk-taking belonged outside of the government, in the looser domain of the proletarian cultural groups, and that the path taken by government-funded organizations needed to be narrower, straighter. The Cubists, the Futurists, the Cubo-Futurists, the likes of Kuznetsov, and the riskier experiments of Gorsky’s disciples, if not Gorsky himself, belonged elsewhere. To be inspired by the revolution was one thing, but to support Bolshevism quite another. One existed in the realm of ideals, the other as a regime. To let the iconoclasts run free even within the world of the theater would be to risk the ire of the Old Guard within the ranks as well as the rulers within the Kremlin. The theater remained open, but only in the shadow of another threatened rebuilding—this time as a political convention center.

  IN MAY OF 1922, Lenin suffered the first of the three strokes that, two years later, would end his life. His wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, a former schoolteacher, did her part at the typewriter to make it seem as if he were still in command. Lenin had already anointed Stalin as general secretary of the Communist Party, a position that allowed Stalin to establish an enormous political support structure for himself and eliminate his real and imagined foes. Meanwhile the architect of the revolution would be confined to his residence in the woods outside of Moscow, unable to speak, enfeebled, and only dimly aware of his protégé’s machinations. After Lenin’s death, on January 21, 1924, Stalin would become the ruler of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union.