Galina Ulanova

Galina Sergeyevna Ulanova, a Bolshoi legend, died on March 21st 1998, aged 88

In his eulogy of Galina Ulanova, President Yeltsin said she had been a “symbol of conscience” for Russians. It is understandable that the head of state would wish to suggest that the Stalin period was redeemed a little by those with a conscience. And there were indeed a remarkable number of Russians who demonstrably stayed true to their beliefs despite the shadow of the gulag and judicial murder. Miss Ulanova does not appear to have been among this company. She was, though perhaps innocently, a redeemer of Stalinism.

Important foreign visitors to Moscow would be offered a special treat: a good seat at the Bolshoi, where Galina Ulanova, the prima ballerina, was performing, perhaps in Swan Lake. As Miss Ulanova floated on to the stage to Tchaikovsky’s syrupy music, any misgivings the visitor might have felt about the regime would perhaps be appeased, at least for a time. Whatever you might say about communism, you had to give it full marks for culture, did you not? Would the visitor care to come back-stage after the performance? Miss Ulanova has always admired your country.

The state was suitably grateful. Miss Ulanova was named a Hero of Socialist Labour (twice) and received the Order of Lenin, the Soviet Union’s highest honour. She gained the Stalin Prize on four occasions. Her tours abroad took on the appearances of state visits. Ecstatic reviews were expected, and when a New York writer made a minor criticism of one of her performances, Pravda accused him and his newspaper of seeking to continue the cold war. She had an impregnable escort of minders, but there was never any suggestion that she would run away. In 1956 the aircraft bringing the Bolshoi troupe to Britain was diverted from Heathrow to an RAF station because of fog. Despite assurances from her minders that the capitalists were not trying to kidnap her, Miss Ulanova refused to leave the aircraft until she had received permission from high up in Moscow.

For her devoted admirers it was enough that Galina Ulanova was among the greatest dancers of classical ballet this century. She had brilliantly sustained a tradition from the tsarist days, when Russian ballet became unequalled in the world. Her mother was a dancer, her father a choreographer, and as a child she was placed in a ballet school. Miss Ulanova was seven at the time of the Russian revolution. As she grew into adolescence, she, like many young people, was excited by what seemed the promise of a modern, vibrant Russia. The aristocracy was finished. “Our audiences,” she was to say later, “are ordinary people.” In 1928 she joined Leningrad’s Mariinsky Theatre, where her mother had danced, and which was later to be called the Kirov (after Sergei Kirov, a popular communist leader much mourned by Stalin, but always thought to have been murdered on his orders).

Miss Ulanova had rather a stocky figure, but such was her talent that on stage she seemed to be transformed. “As soon as she dances, a metamorphosis takes place,” said a critic. “With each part she has a different body, a new personality.” So in Giselle, her most famous role, she makes an idiotic

story about a peasant girl who turns into a ghost seem entirely true.

In 1944, on Stalin’s orders, she was brought to Moscow and to the Bolshoi. Although Leningrad was where the revolution started, Stalin never cared for it. He saw it as a rebellious city. In his great purges of the 1930s, members of the Leningrad party suffered most. Rebellion was in fact present in the Kirov, although it did not become evident until after Stalin’s death in 1953, with the gradual easing of repression in the Soviet Union.

Two of the Kirov’s greatest stars defected to the west, Rudolf Nureyev in 1961 and Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1974. Along with other discontents, they had become bored with the old ways. WhileSoviet ballet persisted, if brilliantly, with classical dance, in Europe and America dancers were finding new ways to tell stories, or even no stories at all, just abstractions, with new dance movements and modern music. In the Soviet Union experimental works by Shostakovich and Prokofiev were suppressed. Stalin seems to have liked only pretty music. Jazz, which plays a part in much modern ballet, was considered to be decadent. Tikhon Khrennikov, Stalin’s musical controller and one of his most abject acolytes, now aged 84, recalls that “nobody could say no to Stalin”. He draws a finger across his neck.

As for Miss Ulanova, she was getting rapturous applause into middle age. But at 50 she gave up public dancing and spent much of the rest of her life teaching. The Bolshoi she leaves is in a poor way. Ballet is costly. In the Soviet days, a former Bolshoi manager recalled, there was unlimited cheap labour to man the workings of the theatre. If money was requested it would be available immediately. Democratic Russia’s struggling market economy has destroyed such uncommercial extravagance. The fabric of the theatre itself is crumbling. Well, you can’t have everything.