Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  Among those arrested was Fyodor Fyodorovsky, the brilliant designer for Gorsky’s children’s ballet Ever-Fresh Flowers and The Red Poppy, plus several ballets and operas in a grand Soviet style. He also designed the hammer-and-sickle-embroidered curtain of the Bolshoi—first imagined in 1919, then realized in no-expensespared gold and crimson silk in the first half of the 1950s. His fate reveals the extent to which the Bolshoi and the police state had become inextricably entangled, although the theater always inhabited its own strange world. Art cannot be reduced to politics, but that does not mean it escapes it.

  In 1928, Fyodorovsky found himself embroiled in scandal. He was imprisoned on allegations, made from within the Bolshoi, first for plagiarism (supposedly violating Article 141 of the penal code) and then for his suspected involvement in the suicides of two women, Natalie Aksenova and Agnessa Koreleva, at the Bolshoi.97 “I cannot be likened to a criminal and answer for the gossip, psychopathic hysteria, and suicides happening in the theater,” he pleaded, after explaining that the twenty-year-old “girls” in question were untalented artists who had insinuated themselves into his atelier, pestering Geltser, Tikhomirov, and his own staff. “I want to create, to work, not to sit in prisons,” he added to his self-defense.98 The case was described in a pair of articles in the New York Times, which provided the shocking details of the double suicide during, not by chance, a performance of The Red Poppy. The girls were identified as dancers as well as “students of theatrical decoration,” and the subject of their compact was not Fyodorovsky but the refined, roguish Kurilko. “Devoted to each other and yet both desperately in love with the painter, it was thought that the dancers preferred a common death as the best way out of the situation.” They “plunged to death from the uppermost flies of the stage in full view of the public and just as the curtain was about to fall.” The reports added that they had bound themselves together with a silk scarf and timed their fatal seventy-foot jump to coincide with the fictional death of the ballet’s heroine (danced by Geltser) and the performance of “La Marseillaise.” Some in the audience considered it a garish special effect. “To the corps de ballet, however, who at that moment came from the wings advancing to midstage in a dance of revolutionary triumph, the tragedy was only too apparent in all its gruesome aspects. Before their eyes lay the two girlfriends, the one dead and the other just breathing.” Geltser breathlessly shared the details of the “awful crunching sound,” “gasps of horror,” and “suppressed scream.” “I felt that something tragic had occurred, but I knew that I must play out my role. Then the curtain fell and I rushed to the corner where the two bodies lay bleeding and broken. One was motionless; the other was writhing in agony.”99

  Kurilko pointed the finger of blame at Fyodorovsky, whom he resented for being promoted above him in 1927, and Fyodorovsky was interrogated and imprisoned. He pled his case from his cell to Avel Enukidze, the secretary of the government’s executive committee. Enukidze had a soft spot for the ballet and had defended the Bolshoi against its antagonists in the government. But he had an unpleasant reputation for pouncing upon ballerinas, some underage, after wooing them with boxes of sweets and other gifts. For this reason he took the deaths of two of the Bolshoi’s beautiful young dancers personally. Once the details of the suicides became clearer, however, Fyodorovsky was released. Kurilko took his place in the dock before also being freed. His future lay in Siberia and the design of the opera and ballet house in Novosibirsk. Meantime, the newspapers reported the arrests of “two unnamed young men” in the matter of the double suicide.100 Enukidze continued his unhealthy patronage of the ballet until 1935, the year he was removed from his posts after a political power struggle with his old friend from Georgia, Stalin. The times were obviously hedonistic, even lethal.

  AFTER THE DRAMA, and trauma, of the initial run of The Red Poppy, Ekaterina Geltser retired from the Bolshoi to dance in galas and concerts throughout the Soviet Union, displaying her oft-mended ballet slippers “before the workers of Magnitogorsk and Stalingrad, before the miners of the Donbas and Kuznets,” and “in the taiga.”101 She achieved fame, she said, during a period of endless possibilities in Russian culture; she ended it, she did not say, during a period of impossibilities—of censorship, repression, the perpetual anxiety of not knowing the rules that were always changing anyway. Life and art coalesced in her old age; confused memories washed up at Táo-Huā’s port and onto the streets of Moscow, where Geltser could be seen strolling in chinoiserie and other fashions from days long gone. The delights of hashish and of the opium den were one and the same in her mind. The prima ballerina assoluta, as the press in the West had dubbed her back in 1910, fought physical decline and overindulged in lipstick, powder, and eau de cologne. Her vision began to fail, and she died blind, having spent her final two years “sitting too close” to a television that she pretended to hate.102

  Her heart remained with Mannerheim, but her career belonged to Tikhomirov, who doted on her until he died, six years before her. She wrote to him in 1939 from a booking in Krasnodar. She had pushed her tired limbs through the mazurka from A Life for the Tsar (renamed Ivan Susanin) and, on special request, something from Swan Lake. It was the worst of times in terms of arrests, confiscations, disappearances, and ideological thought control. She retreated, describing the evening as would a little girl. The bouquets were lovely, the stage nice and clean, her room was warm, and the linens fresh.

  From Krasnodar, she went to Stalingrad, formerly Tsaritsïn, to perform in another concert in another House of the Red Army. Her apartment was searched when she returned, and the letters from Mannerheim confiscated, likewise two portraits of him by Silver Age painters. The Soviet-Finnish war had begun, and Geltser had been caught staring at pictures of a Soviet people’s enemy. Fame saved her from arrest. Fifty-seven years later, in 1997, a nephew of hers living abroad sent a letter to the Bolshoi Theater Museum in which he brought to light both the search and Geltser’s subsequent efforts to liquidate her personal archive. He added, perhaps in the form of a complaint, that the location of the “fifteen hundred letters” Geltser received over the course of her life is unknown.103

  She had no students to define her career for her, and so had to define it herself. In 1949, she reminded Tikhomirov of their mutual joys and sorrows, and how they both had “suffered” in defense of “pure” art.104 That word—“pure”—finds Geltser rejecting Gorsky’s violation of the Petipa tradition. It also has her rejecting that which is least pure, namely politics. She ended the letter with a reference to one of the biblical paintings in her collection, Vasiliy Polenov’s Christ Child, which she had wanted to give to him but could not. It belonged to the state.

  At the time of Tikhomirov’s death, in June of 1956, Geltser wrote to him one last time, standing beside his coffin, in his apartment: “Thank you, my beloved, dearest friend, for everything—for the enormous work we did, for your classes, for your tolerance and patience with me, for your love of others and good wishes for the best for them. I bow to the ground to you. Farewell, I’ll be there soon.”105

  A copy of the note was read at the Bolshoi Theater memorial service for Tikhomirov. The original went into his grave.

  . 6 .

  CENSORSHIP

  BY THE TIME STALIN had beaten back his rivals to consolidate power, there was as much real political drama at the Bolshoi as anything imagined in ballet or opera. Stalin delivered speeches onstage extolling the achievements of the Soviet people past, present, and future. The applause and hurrahs would crescendo, ebb, then begin anew. On one occasion the uniformed, pockmarked ruler poured himself a glass of cognac at the podium as a toast to the working class. More clapping. Another orgy of adulation ended with Stalin wiping the side of his face, slicing the top of his throat with the fingers and palm of his right hand, waving off the crowd in feigned humility, and finally saying, irritably, in his nasal, Georgian-accented voice, “Enough.”1

  The Bolshoi hosted several All-Russian Congresses of Soviets and several more
All-Soviet Union Congresses. The very establishment of the USSR was celebrated on its stage with banners and speeches; the first Soviet constitutions were ratified there. Lenin had spoken dozens of times at the Bolshoi, as had members of the executive committee charged with determining the path to socialism and beyond to communism. The Communist International met in the theater, likewise the heads of the NKVD (Narodnïy komissariat vnutrennikh del), the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, which was established in 1934 as the replacement to the Cheka. Under the control of the Politburo, the inner circle of Stalin’s inner circle, the NKVD targeted communist officials, members of the armed services, rank-and-file bureaucrats, perceived saboteurs, traitors, anyone among the intelligentsia suspected of resistance or subversion, and artists without the stature to make them indispensable to the regime. Those citizens of the police state whose names landed on arrest orders were taken into custody (often at night), tried publicly or secretly, and imprisoned in the labor camps that supported the Soviet economy. Or they were simply executed.

  Stalin dreamed, as had the Russian tsars before him, of leading the huge swath of the planet under his control to dominate the rest and so demanded superhuman agricultural and industrial production. The Soviet Union would grow wheat and forge steel for the world while also exporting its values through the Communist International as well as more discreet espionage organizations, including one dedicated to the cause of cultural exchange. Among the consequences of Stalin’s aims were a famine in Ukraine that killed millions, the construction of a vast labor-camp system known as the Gulag, and a literal decimation (it was reduced to a tenth of its size) of the Red Army officer corps that left the nation far more vulnerable to Nazi invasion. The trauma of Stalin’s reign has not been much reckoned with in Russia, and the might and power he symbolized retains its noxious nationalist pull.

  Long before these terrible events, long before the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg and Moscow came to be managed by a single administration charged with “bringing theatrical performances to perfection,” the Bolshoi fell under the control of the military governor general of Moscow.2 Under Stalin, the Bolshoi was militarized again—both the building itself and the performances within. The Soviet government exerted direct and indirect control over every aspect of artistic life. Art was to be popular, people-minded, and based on class struggle; it needed to celebrate love of the land, love of the Communist Party, love of Stalin, and love of the surrendering of the self, in every sense, to the great collective being. These were the ideals of socialist realism, the official artistic doctrine of the RSFSR and its satellites. By definition, the ideal cannot be realized, but the Soviet experiment, as it developed under Stalin, ignored practicalities in pursuit of purist ideological principles, no compromises, no second-guessing, no vacillation. This is the essential difference between Stalin and Soviet rulers before and after him. The artists of the Bolshoi, and to a lesser extent those at its neighboring “experimental” affiliate (the onetime home of the Zimin Opera, a private enterprise abolished after the revolution), were tasked with representing a freedom that was fundamentally not free. Mature artists were turned back into submissive children, awaiting their next instructions, radical external threats vanquished by overcoming doubts from within. Censors dictated efforts to create the textbook socialist-realist artistic product, but eventually it became easier, safer, to prohibit anything from reaching the stage.

  Before and after the Soviet phase of the Second World War, few ballets and operas on Soviet themes were produced; instead, Swan Lake and Boris Godunov thrived, to the despair and relief of those who performed them. Yet there were original efforts by three of the most prominent Russian composers of the twentieth century, each of whom suffered the consequences of the capriciously cruel regime. Their endless and unhappy encounters with government censors left them at a loss—at least in terms of composing music for the theater. Sergey Prokofiev suffered creative paralysis at the end of his life, as did Dmitri Shostakovich in the middle, before he turned away from the ballet altogether. Aram Khachaturian struggled in his early years. All worked in a genre known as drambalet, which privileged ideological storytelling, in simple terms, and which followed (or at least tried to follow) the aesthetic precepts of the Soviet regime. Socialist realism and drambalet preserved something of the classical tradition and strived to capture the new Soviet spirit of the age, but merriment was enforced, spontaneity scripted.

  In the nineteenth century, dance evolved from a form of perfumed etiquette into a true art. It came to serve a dual purpose in the Russian imperial court, as an emblem of cultured enlightenment and of hierarchical, top-down government. Such would also be its use in the Soviet state theaters: the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and the Mariyinsky Theater in Leningrad, which became known as the Kirov, in honor of the slain Leningrad Communist Party chief Sergey Kirov. Gorsky’s antagonists accused him of wrecking the ballet classics through his embrace of realism, but he also helped prevent the Bolshoi from reverting to vaudeville, the fugitive vision of rabble-rousing proletarian factions after the revolution. Even as the Soviets drove the Russian Orthodox Church underground, as least until the Second World War, ballet endured—becoming just as sacred to devotees of the art. The Commissariat of Enlightenment under Lenin, the Committee on Arts Affairs under Stalin, and the Ministries of Culture under Khrushchev and Brezhnev pressed the Bolshoi into the service of their own particular dogma.

  The earliest recognized example of drambalet was the 1934 Leningrad production of a harem tale titled The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (Bakhchisarayskiy fontan). It dazzled, but the politics behind it and its successors deadened. As the repatriated Prokofiev learned the hard way, and as Shostakovich and Khachaturian already knew, censorship was unpredictable, taking different forms and coming from different places, not just Glavrepertkom. The path from scenario to production was treacherous throughout the entire Soviet experience.

  Censorship had existed during the imperial era too, but it had focused then on the sources for scenarios—usually the stories behind the plots. During the Soviet era, government control went several steps further, making the challenge of getting a ballet onto the stage no less onerous than being admitted into the ballet schools of Moscow or Leningrad. The daunting auditions of Soviet legend—teachers scrutinizing pre-adolescents for the slightest physical imperfection—found an ideological parallel in the required inspections by censorship boards at the Bolshoi and the Mariyinsky–Kirov Theaters. First the subject of a prospective ballet was adjudicated in terms of its fulfillment of the demands for people-mindedness; the music and the dance would be likewise assessed. There would follow a provisional closed-door run-through to decide if the completed ballet could be presented to the public, after which it would either be scrapped or sent back to the creative workshop for repairs. Dress rehearsals were subsequently assessed by administrators, cognoscenti, politicians, representatives from agricultural and industrial unions, and relatives of the performers. Even then, after all of the technical kinks had been worked out, an ideological defect could lead to the sudden collapse of the entire project.

  Bodies as well as plots were changed by politics. The traditional emploi that defined danseurs noble and demi-caractère endured, but emphasis was placed on bigger builds and altogether less softness in the curves. In sculpture, “Soviet man” became like a Greek or Roman demigod, the muscles stronger than steel. So too he became in ballet.

  In 1927, Prokofiev and the choreographer Leonid Massine tried to make exactly this point about the heroic Soviet man to audiences in Paris. Their ballet Le pas d’acier, or The Dance of Steel, was brought to the Bolshoi Theater two years later for a show-and-tell session, igniting a bonfire of communist apparatchik vanities. Resentful mediocrities from the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) attacked the composer, who found himself in a terra incognita of unlettered sarcasm, baseless paranoia, and pointless rhetorical argument. The ballet had been seen in Paris, London, and Monte Carlo,
but it would never reach the Bolshoi stage.

  Beyond voicing covetous disdain for Prokofiev’s coddled lifestyle in the capitalist West, critics expressed resentment that the composer should dare to represent the Soviet experience without having firsthand knowledge of it. Indeed Prokofiev had watched the revolution from abroad, touring as a pianist and composer through Europe and the United States. He returned to the Soviet Union first in 1927, at Anatoliy Lunacharsky’s behest and with much fanfare, then again in 1929, to a less glorious reception. Had Prokofiev composed an allegorical drama, he might have succeeded, but since he had not himself sold cigarettes (as the worker-girl heroine of the ballet does) or worn an anchor around his neck (as the sailor hero does), he got it all wrong. Plus, it was said, the hammer heavers in the steel plant onstage looked less like the ecstatic fulfillment of one of Stalin’s five-year plans for industrial development than oiled-up slaves.

  Le pas d’acier was drafted to depict the aftermath of the revolution, but the first half of the scenario was rewritten by the émigré impresario Sergey Diaghilev, who turned the tale into a series of scenes from folklore for the entertainment of French audiences. Diaghilev added a witch and a crocodile into the middle of a drama unfolding on and around a rural railroad platform, rendering the events of the second half—the metamorphosis of the hero and heroine into model urban workers, and the sacrifice of their individual desires for the benefit of the collective—ambiguous at best. Prokofiev hoped that the Bolshoi staging would restore the original plot and clean up the ending: the steel mill was to be shut down by the bankrollers of the New Economic Plan for failing to turn a profit but subsequently reopened by the workers themselves, with the owner of the steel mill tossed into the clink. Thus the ballet was meant to depict the chaos under Lenin’s coup in the first half, with the swindlers on the streets having no time for political speeches, but in the second half, portray the order of the Stalin era. Grotesquerie morphs into something beautiful. But it was not altogether about factories, communist or capitalist. It was about the kinetics, the mechanical parts, of the body, which are more sublime in their communal operation than anything that could ever be forged, smelted, or tempered.