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ON THE NIGHT of January 17, 2013, Sergey Filin, artistic director of the Bolshoi Theater Ballet, returned to his apartment near the central ring road in Moscow. He parked his black Mercedes outside the building and trudged through the wet falling snow toward the main entrance. His two boys were asleep inside, but he expected that his wife Mariya, herself a dancer, would be waiting up for him. Before he could tap in the security code to open the metal gate, however, a thickset man strode up behind him and shouted a baleful hello. When Filin turned around, the hooded assailant flung a jar of distilled battery acid into his face, then sped off in a waiting car. Filin dropped to the ground and cried for help, rubbing snow into his face and eyes to stop the burning.

The crime threw into chaos one of Russia’s most illustrious institutions: the Bolshoi Theater, crown jewel during the imperial era, emblem of Soviet power throughout the twentieth century, and showcase for a reborn nation in the twenty-first. Even those performers, greater and lesser, whose careers ended in personal and professional sorrow could justly believe that their lives had been blessed thanks to the stage they had graced. The Bolshoi’s dancers transcended the cracked joints, pulled muscles, and bruised feet that are among the hazards of ballet to exhibit near-perfect poses and unparalleled equipoise. Orphans became angels within the schools that served the theater in the first years of its existence; the Bolshoi then nurtured the great ballet classics of the nineteenth century, and more recently the sheer skill of its dancers has redeemed, at least in part, the ideological dreck of Soviet ballet. The attack on Filin dismantled romantic notions of the art and its artists as ethereal, replacing stories about the breathtaking poetic athleticism on the Bolshoi stage with tales of sex and violence behind the curtain—pulp nonfiction. Crime reporters, political and cultural critics, reviewers, and ballet bloggers alike reminded their readers, however, that the theater has often been in turmoil. Rather than an awful aberration, the attack had precedents of sorts in the Bolshoi’s rich and complicated past. That past is one of remarkable achievements interrupted, and even fueled, by periodic bouts of madness.

The history of the Bolshoi travels hand in hand with the history of the nation. As goes Russia, so goes the Bolshoi—at least since the Russian Revolution, when the seat of power moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Under the tsars in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg, the Mariyinsky Theater (also known as the Kirov Theater) possessed the most prestige; the city of Moscow and its precariously financed ballet and opera house were considered provincial. But depending on who is looking and from where, one theater, one city, one lineage or another might appear in the foreground of a long tradition. In the twentieth century, the Bolshoi assumed pride of place within Russia and on the international stage as the emissary not only of the Russian ballet tradition but also the Soviet state. Bodies speak in Realpolitik. Russian ballet does not privilege abstraction, and those choreographers who, on limited occasion, sought to create non-narrative, non-subjective works erred in imagining that abstraction could be assigned whatever concepts they desired. Looking at the video records of today and sifting through the archival remains of yesteryear affirm that neither the dance nor the music attached to it is, or ever was, considered pure. Boldness and the projection of power are essential to politics and culture, especially within the context of President Vladimir Putin’s aggressive nationalist posturing. Today the Bolshoi seeks to regain the preeminence it forfeited after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Within Russia, from the vaguely defined time of the nation’s founding, the rulers of Russia—tsars, Bolshevik revolutionaries, Stalin and his henchmen, the siloviki (members of the military-security establishment) of the current petro-ruble regime—have looked to the Bolshoi as a symbol, whether imperial, ideological, or commercial. The theater is about as old as the United States, but has had numerous lives. With Catherine the Great’s blessing, a Russian prince and an English showman first raised it up from the marshes of Moscow in 1780 on a plot of land close to the Kremlin; the start-up theater and the seat of goverment have been neighbors through several catastrophes. And fittingly so, given that in Russia politics can be theater and theater, politics.

After a fire in 1853, architect Alberto Cavos turned the Bolshoi into a stone neoclassical paradise of fluted columns, fitted mirrors, and alabaster vases; a sculpture of the Greek muses was installed above the portico. Following the Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks considered blowing up the Bolshoi as a decadent icon of the Russian imperial past but pillaged it instead, pulling up the marble floor and painting over the frescoes. The theater became a cultural symbol of the new state, which soon enough had imperial ambitions of its own; indeed, the Soviet Union itself was born at the Bolshoi. On December 30, 1922, it hosted the political congress that voted the Soviet Union into existence.

Stalin ratified the Soviet constitution on the stage of the Bolshoi and delivered speeches before cowed Communist Party officials; no one wanted to be the first to stop applauding. Thereafter it became the site of much Communist Party business, and even served as a polling station until a suitable palace was built inside the walls of the Kremlin. The Bolshoi was the single place where the rulers of Russia and their subjects came into contact. As one Kremlinologist explains, “To put in an appearance in the Bolshoi Theater meant that you belonged to the very highest echelons of power; but to disappear from there was synonymous with a fall from favor and death.”¹ At the Bolshoi, ballets began after speeches delivered by officials who had overseen mass murders—the execution, on a staggering scale, of perceived saboteurs, traitors, anti-Soviet “fifth columnists,” and other undesirables. “Those who sat on the stage,” historian Karl Schlögel reports, “had appended their signatures to the thousands of death sentences approved by the extraordinary commissions and had even become directly involved themselves—in interrogations and the use of physical force.”²

The repertoire of the State Academic Bolshoi Theater, as it became known, fell under Communist Party control. Its general directors were ordered to produce ballets and operas on approved Soviet subjects. Bulldozers rumbled across the stage to represent the construction of the Communist utopia before audiences of peasants and workers who had to be told when to clap. In 1939, the character of Lenin even appeared onstage in an agitprop opera called V buryu, or Into the Storm. A photograph from that era shows laborers listening to a performance of Tchaikovsky by way of celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Lenin’s secret police. For those directors who could not countenance ballets and operas about collective farms and hydroelectric stations, hewing close to the classics became the one safe, government-sanctioned alternative.

During World War II, part of the foyer of the theater was destroyed by a German bomb. Repairs were done on the postwar cheap, but the acoustics had earlier been compromised by Stalin, who had ordered the tsar’s loge at the center of the first tier encased in protective cement. (A document ordering the special reinforcement was reportedly buried in the wall.) In the 1980s, the Bolshoi fell apart along with the Soviet Union, but the power and majesty of Russian ballet remained, broadcast to the masses as the last vestige of national pride in the bankrupt munitions plant known as the USSR.

WHEN HE SIGNED a five-year contract as artistic director of the Bolshoi in 2011, Filin was the forty-year-old prince of Russian ballet. A Moscow native, he had built a high-profile career as a principal dancer at the Bolshoi and been decorated as a People’s Artist of the Russian Federation, the nation’s highest artistic honor. His parents were not especially interested in ballet but, seeking to channel the boy’s restlessness, arranged for him to learn folk dance. His energy immediately found focus, and at ten years old Filin entered the Bolshoi Ballet Academy, graduating eight years later to claim a position in the professional company. Filin performed his first major role as the impish knave Benedick in Love for Love, a balletic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. The dance, set to music by Tikhon Khrennikov, is perhaps deservedly forgotten, but the experience sparked Filin’s enduring fascination with Shakespeare. The image that he had of himself as a dancer destined for greatness was tempered by Marina Semyonova, his professional coach. She died in 2010 at age 102, the Bolshoi tradition incarnate. During her final decades, she pushed her pupils to overcome the strictures of the Bolshoi style as preached and practiced during the late Soviet period. Filin has singled her out as his most important mentor and confidante. Semyonova told him “things that she didn’t share with anyone,” and even guided his personal life, cheekily advising him not to marry “this one” or “that one” owing to supposedly “misshapen” limbs or low breeding.³

What made Filin a star was chiefly his range: the spectrum he could span between technical displays (as in Don Quixote, one of the buttresses of the Bolshoi repertoire), poetic expressiveness, and subtle characterizations. His good looks in his twenties made him perfect for the part of a gadabout, a pleasure seeker; experimental roles came later. Injury forced him from the stage in 2004, but he battled back into the spotlight while also completing a degree at Moscow University in the performing arts. In 2008, at age thirty-seven, he became the artistic director of the Stanislavsky Theater in Moscow; three years later, he was appointed to the same position at the Bolshoi. His job, basically second in command to then general director Anatoliy Iksanov, gave him control over repertoire, casting, appointments, and dismissals. It was a sensible choice. Filin knew the theater and its traditions intimately. Plus he was easygoing, not a firebrand.

BOLSHOI INSIDERS SUSPECTED that the attack on Filin was motivated by professional and personal resentments. So did the police. Yet the Russian media—the government-monitored television channels, plus the less-regulated newspapers and online news portals—teased the public with baroque theories of the crime. The clippings were compiled in a Russian-language book called Black Swans, and the American network HBO released a documentary about the attack called Bolshoi Babylon.⁴ (The behind-the-scenes footage shows Filin, after his martyrdom, being shamed into silence by the new general director in front of the dancers: “I asked you not to speak,” Vladimir Urin tells Filin in front of the assembled company. “I’m not going to argue with you … Please sit down.”) Gossips and alienated former employees blamed dark elements connected to meddling Kremlin officials—a theory of the crime that did not seem absurd, given that the Bolshoi is a political as well as an artistic institution. Filin denied allegations of extortion, that fees had been demanded for auditions and choice parts. True, he had promoted his own people, as artistic directors are wont to do; he also decided who headlined the programs, who went on tour, and who appeared in the galas—decisions with significant financial consequences for the dancers. There were those who thus coveted his position and thought that he benefited too much from it.

Speculation about the crime centered first on the flamboyant senior dancer Nikolay Tsiskaridze, an indefatigable critic of his employer. For years he had been complaining about everything at the Bolshoi: the five-year, top-to-bottom renovation of the building, the managers, the artistic directors, the stars in the making. But he seemed strangely cheerful in his defense, much too glad to give interviews and declare that he had declined a lie-detector test. When asked about his grievances, Tsiskaridze reminisced about his career and likened himself to other besieged greats of the stage, namely the opera singer Maria Callas, although she was more demure and, onstage, used less maquillage than he did. He recalled his fun-filled, innocent, and lucrative New Year’s Eve performances of The Nutcracker: “$1,500 a ticket at the official rate,” he boasted on the phone, “and Iksanov says I can’t dance.” In May 2013, his lawyer threatened to sue the Bolshoi in response to the reprimands he had received for his gossipmongering. That June, the nationalist newspaper Zavtra broke the news that his two contracts with the Bolshoi, as performer and teacher, had been canceled. He parried with characteristic bravado: “What did you expect? It’s a gang there.” Fans mounted a protest in front of the theater, inspired by his declaration in the French newspaper Le Figaro that “Le Bolchoï, c’est moi.”

Tsiskaridze exposed an age-old conflict at the Bolshoi between progressives and conservatives, pitting those dancers who benefited from an archaic patronage system against those who did not. Earlier in the twentieth century, during the era of the Bolsheviks and the Cultural Revolution, Elena Malinovskaya served as director of the theater. An unprepossessing nondescript who rose to fame through Marxist-Leninist political circles, she governed the Bolshoi with a scowl from 1919 to 1935. Occasionally she threatened resignation, claiming that the pressures of the job and the threats she received from disgruntled artists had compromised her health, but her Kremlin protectors kept her at her desk. Although Malinovskaya’s survival ensured the Bolshoi’s continuing operation, she was reviled for purging the ranks of suspected dissidents. She was further castigated for spoiling the repertoire, accused of making even the classical art of ballet a tool of ideology and so giving it a guilty conscience.

Thus began the struggle between the defenders of the aristocratic tradition and its critics, as well as between those who conformed to official dictates and others who fell silent, knowing it was pointless to resist. The official artistic doctrine of socialist realism obliged ballet scenarists and opera librettists to freight even works about the distant past with Marxist-Leninist content, to taint them with ideological anachronisms. The emphasis on making ballet for the people yielded Cossack, gypsy, and peasant dances not seen on the Moscow stage since the Napoleonic era. The scenarios enforced the simplest binaries: pro-Bolshevik pluckiness versus anti-Bolshevik cowardliness; Soviets versus Fascists; collective farmworkers versus the hot sun and parched earth. Pantomime and peasant exotica were the essence of the repertoire throughout the 1930s and the Second World War.

Tsiskaridze stood with the old guard, those dancers attached to traditional stagings of the Russian repertoire rather than the innovative productions privileged by Iksanov and Filin. His dismissal came as a relief even to his backers at the theater, since it dimmed the spotlight on the scandal. But after a short vacation, he resumed his performance of a persecuted balletic Old Believer. Tsiskaridze had little to fear, it seems, because he enjoyed the protection of powerful interests. Much as Rasputin had bewitched the Empress Alexandra before the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1918, so too the magnetic Tsiskaridze is understood to have impressed the spouse of the president of Rostec, a government-controlled firm that develops advanced weapons systems. He was not out of work for long. In October 2013, Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky appointed Tsiskaridze rector of the Vaganova Ballet Academy in St. Petersburg, one of the world’s most prestigious schools for dance.

Filin’s predecessor as artistic director, Alexei Ratmansky, offered no specific insight into the attack but commented on Facebook that “many of the illnesses of the Bolshoi are one snowball—that disgusting claque which is friendly with artists, ticket speculators and scalpers, half-crazy fans who are ready to slit the throats of their idol’s competitors, cynical hackers, lies in the press and scandalous interviews of people working there.”⁵ Claqueurs are professional audience members, tasked with offering overly demonstrative applause for their favorite Bolshoi dancers in exchange for tickets some resell. The mysterious balletomane Roman Abramov currently leads this “elegant theatrical protection racket.”⁶ He appears in the HBO documentary, and boasts of attending hundreds of performances a year.

Ratmansky left the Bolshoi in 2008, after reviving suppressed Soviet ballets and redoing the shopworn classics. He found the pressure from inside and outside of the theater intolerable, especially when brought to bear on creative decisions. To perform the 1930 Soviet ballet The Bolt, for example, Ratmansky excised a potentially offensive scene that once would have been comical, even canonically so. It involves a drunken Russian Orthodox priest and a dancing cathedral. The lampoon was politically correct for the godless Bolsheviks of 1930, but heresy to the lords of the new church of 2005. So it was cut. In relocating to New York, Ratmansky hoped to escape the machinations to create what he liked. The Bolshoi lamented his departure, but even the press officer at the theater, Katerina Novikova, empathized with his decision. Tsiskaridze had made his life miserable, she acknowledged. Ratmansky had also put up with bad behavior from other dancers, including the one who would finally be convicted in the attack against Filin.

In March 2013, the police arrested Pavel Dmitrichenko, a lead dancer, and charged him with organizing the attack. He had supposedly paid 50,000 rubles ($1,430) to a thug with a record. Speaking to reporters from his hospital room, Filin confirmed that he had long suspected Dmitrichenko, an irascible, tattooed soloist who harbored a grudge against Filin for passing over his ballerina girlfriend for choice roles. Filin’s haute-goth lawyer, Tatyana Stukalova, informed a deferential interviewer on television that Dmitrichenko could not have been acting alone. Soon it emerged that he had two accomplices: Yuriy Zarutsky, an unemployed ex-convict who tossed the acid, and Andrey Lipatov, the driver. Dmitrichenko confessed to organizing the attack but argued that he had merely wanted to frighten Filin, put the fear of God into him. The acid was Zarutsky’s idea. Dmitrichenko admitted his “moral responsibility,” while carping, wild-eyed, about how he had been wronged.⁷ The artistic director had not bestowed the promotions he deserved; his girlfriend, the aspiring ballerina Anzhelina Vorontsova, had been denied the star-making dual role of Odette/Odile in Swan Lake as payback for some past slight, notwithstanding the genuine kindness shown to her by Filin and his wife over the years. Dmitrichenko’s supporters organized a petition insinuating financial corruption at the Bolshoi—as if that, or anything else, justified maiming someone for life. Filin, blind in his right eye and with 50 percent vision in his left, wept as he testified.

Rights, rules, and regulations can matter little in Russia, and personal connections, or animosities, can make all the difference. Dmitrichenko harbored a grudge against Filin less because he coveted Filin’s position (as Tsiskaridze did) than because he resented the obvious conflicts of interest within the profsoyuzï, the artists’ unions. These were supposed to represent the artists and their concerns to the Bolshoi administration. Yet the unions were headed not by performers but by members of the administration. Thus those running the theater conscripted the artists’ unions to their own cause, a problematic state of affairs harkening back to the Soviet era, when Communist minders and KGB operatives headed the unions to keep the artists in check. Dmitrichenko protested Filin’s position as head of the dancers’ union. Moreover, as journalist Ismene Brown has revealed, Dmitrichenko challenged the system that offered lucrative bonuses to Filin’s favored dancers. The “quarterly ‘grants’ committee,” which Filin chaired, “traditionally deferred to his wishes,” Brown explains. “It awarded bonuses to dancers for performance, according to a time-honored ranking of what a solo was worth. But dancers not chosen to perform did not qualify. Dmitrichenko, petitioned by the timorous corps de ballet to represent their interests, unceremoniously commanded that all dancers, whether chosen to perform or not, were doing their work as required, and therefore should be entitled to some of the quarterly bonus pot.” But Filin “was dissatisfied with the slack attitude of many dancers, who would drift off to do other things or claim sick leave without any notice,” Brown reports, and so rejected Dmitrichenko’s demands for a proportional distribution of bonuses.⁸

In July 2013, Svetlana Zakharova, the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina assoluta and a former cultural representative in the Russian parliament, objected when she learned that she had been assigned to the second cast of John Cranko’s Onegin. She quit the production, turned off her mobile phone, and left town. The government had had enough of the chaos. Iksanov was asked to step down, with Vladimir Urin, the respected general director of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theaters, becoming his replacement. The Stanislavsky had come to the creative and administrative rescue of the Bolshoi in the past: a case in point being Filin’s appointment in 2011. Urin expressed little patience for intrigue and even less for Tsiskaridze and his witches’ brew of reactionary invective. According to the journalist, socialite, and former dancer Kseniya Sobchak, Urin replied to the suggestion that Tsiskaridze might return to the Bolshoi with the Russian equivalent of “over my dead body.”⁹

As the new general director of the Bolshoi, Urin initiated reforms. Early in 2014, he unveiled a new collective agreement that erased some of the inequities and set out in legal prose what had once been merely understood. The superstar Zakharova, who boasts an international career, heads a charity in her name, and enjoys a driver taking her to and from the studio, exempted herself from the agreement. The haggling over quarterly bonuses was the business of the corps de ballet, no concern of hers. While calm was restored at the Bolshoi Ballet, class conflict remained: between stars and soloists, soloists and members of the corps, those in favor and those who had fallen out. Dancers are defined by their roles—not only in terms of rank, but also by the characters they represent. Before anyone was arrested for the assault on Filin, Bolshoi Theater administrators hazarded that it must have been committed by one of the dancers who took the role of a villain. Filin had performed dashing heroes; the ethnically Georgian, impressively coiffed Tsiskaridze gravitated toward sorcerers. Dmitrichenko appeared in tragic ballets, but also took the role of a gangster in Yuriy Grigorovich’s satiric The Golden Age. Onstage and off, as it turned out, Dmitrichenko played the part of Tybalt to Filin’s Romeo.

Within a year of the crime, Judge Elena Maksimova of the Meshansky District Court in Moscow sentenced Zarutsky to a decade in prison, Dmitrichenko to six years, and the driver Lipatov to four. The three together were also ordered to pay Filin 3.5 million rubles, or $105,000, in damages. (Later, their sentences were trimmed by a year, six months, and two years respectively; and in June of 2016, Dmitrichenko was paroled.) The sight of a popular Bolshoi soloist and two common criminals caged in court, as Russian defendants usually are, recalled earlier, seedier periods in the history of ballet—the lowly state it sometimes fell into in France, Italy, and Russia during the nineteenth century. Then, as suddenly now, the exquisite art seemed compromised by the desperation, exploitation, pain, and toxic rivalries suffered by its artists. Dmitrichenko seemed to embody a pernicious stereotype of the hotheaded, out-of-control artist rebel: He was forced as a child into ballet, he claimed, and had acted “the hooligan,” in school, “throwing firecrackers at the teachers.”¹⁰ He had riled his peers and railed against the Bolshoi administration. But he did not commit the crime in service of some cliché. Instead, behind the distorted reporting, personal agendas, institutional priorities, and tabloid scandals, lies a basic truth about how business is conducted at the Bolshoi—as in Russia.

ONCE THE RUSSIAN news cycle turned, shuffling the crime off the front pages in favor of the conflict in eastern Ukraine, this terrible episode seemed soon to be forgotten as but a momentary crisis corrected by installing the unexcitable Urin at the helm. Yet the recent violence surrounding the Bolshoi echoes events dating back to the very founding of the theater in the late eighteenth century. Gripping tales—some lurid, others inspiring—are told in thousands of documents stored in Russian archives, museums, and libraries kept under bureaucratic lock and key; in the recollections of active and retired dancers; and in the distinguished scholarship of Russian ballet experts. The records make for strange reading. However fantastic the imaginings of ballets on the Bolshoi stage, fiction cannot measure up to the truth.

Truth did not exist backstage, declared one of the greatest dancers of the Soviet period, Maya Plisetskaya. An eccentric, explosive performer who moved in and out of official favor, Plisetskaya believed in the Bolshoi, where she danced Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake countless times, rhapsodically for some, too showily for others, while also committing to the dark night of the soul known as the agitprop repertoire. Critics were baffled by her iconoclasm. She could be reckless on stage but also mesmerizing, possessing a physical vocabulary that ranged from toreador moving in for a kill to fashion model on the catwalk. In her twenties and thirties Plisetskaya gravitated toward the bad girls of the repertoire, the troublemakers, but also the free spirits. The arrest and disappearance of her parents during the Stalinist purges had left her bereft, defiant, and rude to the KGB officers who trailed her to and from the theater, owing to her romance with a British embassy staffer. Cynicism fueled sedition, but she never defected and largely confined her protests to unorthodox performances. The Soviet regime, desperate for celebrities, needed her both at home and abroad. Still, she was treated coarsely, and remembered recoiling as Leonid Brezhnev drunkenly pawed her in his limousine after a performance. “The one time I did go to the Kremlin,” she fumed, “I had to walk home across Moscow all alone.”¹¹ In semiretirement, she looked back on her life in the theater with fondness, describing the Bolshoi stage as her guardian. “It was a familiar creature, a relative, an animate partner. I spoke to it, thanked it. Every board, every crack I had mastered and danced on. The stage of the Bolshoi made me feel protected; it was a domestic hearth.”¹² She recorded those words in her memoirs, an international bestseller by ballet standards, and one that resonates with the recent drama in the Bolshoi. The dispossessed dancers of 2013, of today, speak from a script that Plisetskaya provided.

The Soviet period still haunts the theater, but the oligarchs of the twenty-first century have taken a vested interest in the Bolshoi, now that the grime has become glitz. In his efforts to restore prestige to the new Russia, President Dmitri Medvedev approved a complete overhaul of the Bolshoi, opening up the coffers of the state-controlled oil-and-petroleum giant Gazprom. The theater closed on July 1, 2005, after the final performance of two Russian classics: Swan Lake and the tragic historical opera Boris Godunov. Six years later, the gala celebration of the $680-million-plus restoration was a political event of a different order. On October 28, 2011, a nervous-looking Medvedev extolled the Bolshoi as one of few “unifying symbols, national treasures, of so-called national brands” of Russia.¹³

Yet the Russianness of the Bolshoi remains a matter of debate. The very concept is fraught and paradoxical, never quite borne out by the ethnographic facts, and has inspired spurious claims of exclusiveness, otherness, and exceptionalism. Dance critic Mark Monahan swoons over Olga Smirnova’s “swan-like neck” and the “unmistakably Russian” undulation in her arms, but her syntax and affect are neoclassical and neoromantic, much indebted to traditions outside of Russia.¹⁴ And what the ballet master Marius Petipa contributed to nineteenth-century Russian ballet has its continuation not in Soviet circles but in the creations of George Balanchine in America and Frederick Ashton in Britain. The annals of the Bolshoi do not bear out claims of Russian exceptionalism. Moscow exceptionalism, perhaps, but even that assertion is debatable, since most of the great Russian dancers, past and present, moved back and forth between the academies and stages of the old imperial capital of St. Petersburg and the new one of Moscow.

Regardless, the Bolshoi as a “brand” remains paramount. The theater and its dancers have always been marketed abroad. Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the ballet served the Kremlin as a cultural exchange operation and a conduit for low-level espionage by the agents who kept the dancers in check. Some performers defected, including, at the top of her career, the Kirov prima ballerina Natalya Makarova. So too did the soloist Mikhaíl Baryshnikov, who flourished in the West. In a July 2013 newspaper interview, the still-active Baryshnikov likened events at the Bolshoi, past and present, onstage and backstage, to a “non-stop ugly vaudeville.”¹⁵

In fact, the Bolshoi began its life as a vaudeville hall. Its co-founder and driving force had infamous (at least in the eighteenth century) problems with creditors and was forced, for financial and political reasons, to recruit amateur performers from an orphanage for his fledgling theater. Before catastrophe struck in the form of a fire, boys and girls of the Moscow Imperial Foundling Home took the stage as participants in light entertainments. But the Bolshoi only became the Bolshoi—a symbol of Russia itself—after the Napoleonic invasion of 1812. From the 1830s on, it produced a plethora of superb performers. Since that time, the dancers of the Bolshoi have been stereotyped for their athletic prowess, their physical culture. Yet they are also storytellers, gifted mimes. The first great ballerinas of the nineteenth century were trained by actors, and the admixture of dance-free miming and plot-free dance persisted at the Bolshoi long after it had been abandoned elsewhere.

During these early years, the brightest star on the Bolshoi stage was Ekaterina Sankovskaya, a Moscow-born ballerina who inspired a generation of intellectuals through her freedom of expression and expression of freedom. She performed from the late 1830s into the 1850s, and was seen by her most ardent fans, including liberal students of Moscow University, to imitate, and rival, the illustrious European Romantic ballerinas Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elssler. Her appearances in La sylphide inspired a sycophantic cult following, a “claque” whose obsession with Sankovskaya, and ballet in general, worried the Moscow police.

The theater she inhabited came into being as an imperial institution with the opening in 1856 of Cavos’s new building, resurrected from the ashes of the devastating fire in 1853. The ballet struggled, however, and was almost liquidated; the dancers from the exploited poorer classes faced life as laundresses, mill workers, or prostitutes, even starvation on the streets. The Bolshoi and its machinist nonetheless, almost despite themselves, hosted a dazzling revival of the swashbuckling ballet Le corsaire, along with the premieres of Don Quixote and Swan Lake. The annual “incident reports” at the theater in the 1860s and 1870s detail the commercial gas wars in Moscow (of concern for the Bolshoi because it was gaslit) along with the eccentricities of the directorate of the Imperial Theaters, which oversaw the Bolshoi’s operations under the last tsars. The ballets survive as remote versions of their original selves, which have been lost to the stage and doubtless would have little appeal even if they could be reconstructed from the extant floor plans, lithographs, musical scores, and recollections. Who authored the original libretto for Swan Lake was until 2015 a mystery, and indeed Tchaikovsky’s music seems to be calibrated for a plot line that no longer exists. The gaps in knowledge are no fault of the official record-keepers, who turn out to have been exceedingly meticulous when it came to realizing the mad and beautiful dreams of choreographers and set designers. The search for a reliable donkey for the 1871 staging of Don Quixote was pretext for dozens of pages of conscientious bureaucratic handwriting; finding the props for the act 3 spider scene forced one scribe to overcome his arachnophobia.

Maya Plisetskaya, the vessel of Bolshoi bravura during the Soviet years, died just before her ninetieth birthday, which the Bolshoi marked on November 20 and 21, 2015, in a memorial gala called “Ave Maya.” She remains the source of some of the more reductively persistent assumptions about the Bolshoi ballet, including Jennifer Homans’s assessment of the Khrushchev-era Bolshoi as somehow “stranger” than other troupes, “more oriental and driven less by rules than by passions—and politics.”¹⁶ In honoring one of its greatest ballerinas, a deeply passionate artist both celebrated and constrained by politics, the theater revisited its own troubled history even while still struggling to emerge from the aftermath of the macabre attack on its artistic director.

FILIN COMPLETED HIS contract but remains at the theater in charge of an atelier for up-and-coming choreographers. After months of conjecture, Makhar Vaziev was appointed the new artistic director of the ballet. Vaziev comes from Milan by way of St. Petersburg, and his hiring, as Ismene Brown summarizes, “satisfies both the Bolshoi conservatives’ need for a director with a credibly conventional profile and suitable leadership CV to command the dancers’ compliance, and the pressure for an acceptable conductor of renovation and refreshment.”¹⁷

The healing of the present divide permits reflection on the ruptures and sutures of the past. The story of the Bolshoi Theater, its ballet, Russia, and Russian politics can only, however, be traced in gestures and revealed against mottled backgrounds in occasional close-ups. This book starts with select scenes from the beginning, but ends far from the end. The focus here falls only on the ballet, although the Bolshoi is, of course, a world-famous opera house as well; opera is excluded from the discussion, except insofar as it might illuminate the ballet, the national brand’s signature product. Ultimately, like ballet itself, this book proves paradoxical in documenting at times disenchanting truths—the complicated existences of the dancers, their art, and its venue—in hopes of at least suggesting what might be sublime, what might redeem, what could still elevate us above it all.