Christina Ezrahi - Swans of the Kremlin

ON 26 FEBRUARY 1917, Mathilda Kschessinskaya received an urgent call from General Halle, the chief of police of the fashionable Petrograd district where she lived. Kschessinskaya was not only prima ballerina assoluta of the Mariinsky Ballet, but she was also the former mistress of Nicholas II and the current mistress of Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich, and Halle was anxious about her security. He warned Kschessinskaya that the situation in town was very serious and advised her to save whatever she could from her house before it was too late. The revolution had begun. The ballerina looked at the possessions decorating her elegant style moderne house and felt that her situation was desperate: her most important diamond pieces were kept at Faberg, but what was she to do with the incredible quantity of smaller items scattered around her house? When she sat down for dinner with her son, his tutor, and two dancers from the Mariinsky the following evening, shots could be heard next to her house. Kschessinskaya decided that it was time to leave. She put on her most modest fur coat, a black velvet coat trimmed with chinchilla, and threw a shawl over her head. Someone quickly lifted up her favorite fox terrier Dzhibi, whom she had almost forgotten, someone else carefully carried the traveling bag with her valuables, and they left. Kschessinskaya remained in Petrograd until July 1917, but she was not to live again in her house after that evening, finding shelter with friends and family instead. Driving past her former home, she once saw the most prominent female Bolshevik, the revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai, stroll around her garden in the ermine coat she had left behind:

The absurd image of Alexandra Kollontai taking a stroll in Kschessinskaya's ermine coat is emblematic of the paradoxical situation Russia's imperial ballet found itself in after the October Revolution. Ermine is the fur of kings, and Kschessinskaya's ermine coat symbolized the symbiotic relationship between Russia's imperial ballet and its patron, the tsarist regime. More than any other art form, ballet was a child of aristocratic court culture, yet it not only survived the upheaval of the early revolutionary period but soon claimed its place in the official pantheon of Soviet cultural achievements. Just as Kollontai had put Kschessinskaya's ermine coat around her shoulders, the Soviet regime adorned itself with ballet.

But could the Soviet regime ever claim full ownership, or control, over ballet? Could the artistry of the imperial ballet survive and develop after a revolution that destroyed the social and political order of which ballet had formed an intrinsic part, a revolution that held the utopian promise of a new world and demanded before long that art should become an engineer of human souls, a propaganda tool serving the ideological needs of the state?

Under the tsars, several theaters had received the title imperial, signifying their status as theaters operating under court supervision and on generous state funding. Russia's imperial ballet consisted of the ballet companies of two imperial theaters, the Mariinsky Theater of Opera and Balletin St. Petersburg and the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. Before the October Revolution, these two ensembles were the only public, state-supported ballet companies in Russia, even though from the late eighteenth century ballets were also performed by serf theaters maintained by aristocrats as part of Russia's flourishing private, aristocratic theatrical culture. In the last third of the nineteenth century, troupes of foreign ballet dancers began to perform in nongovernment-supported theaters springing up in the Russian provinces. After the ban on private companies in Moscow and St. Petersburg was lifted in the 1880s, touring companies also visited these two cities, especially in the summer. During the twilight years of imperial Russia, cabarets and theaters of miniatures emerged as centers for ballet experimentation. Strictly speaking, the Mariinsky and Bolshoi were thus not the only troupes performing in Russia, but as the only ballet companies with imperial status, they benefitted from the tsar's largesse and protection, enabling them to create those ballets at the heart of the classical canon that define our understanding of classical ballet to the present day. As this book is about the fate of Russia's imperial ballet after the revolution, it is therefore logical to focus on the former Mariinsky Ballet (known as Kirov Ballet for most of the Soviet period) and the Bolshoi Ballet and not on the numerous, but by comparison less significant, ballet ensembles created throughout the Soviet period.