Bolshoi Confidential is a compelling biography of Russian ballet company life and of an imperial theatre; an album of Russian ballet’s myriad players, and a catalogue of the love–hate relationship the Soviet regime had with choreographers and their artistic associates. It is also a story of rival clans and claques, a dead cat thrown at the feet of one ballerina, a flock of chickens released on stage at another’s. The density and scope of Morrison’s research is indicative of his intellectual energy and perspicacity. Furthermore, he had paved his way into Bolshoi culture while researching Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement (2002), The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet years (2010), and the reputedly harrowing Lina and Serge: Lina Prokofiev’s loves and wars (2013).

The story begins with the circuitous history of the Petrovsky Theatre, precursor of the Bolshoi Theatre – mismanaged, bombed by Napoleon, and burned to the ground. The man who built the theatre’s audience, Morrison’s ‘Swindling Magician’, was Michael Maddox, an English actor, acrobat, and clockmaker. A brief encounter as tutor to Empress Catherine’s son, Pavel, proved helpful when Maddox joined forces with Prince Pyotr Urusov, whom Catherine had licensed to present public entertainments. While nobles and merchants who ran serf theatres on their estates looked on with concern, Maddox indulged his grandiose plans. Today his enterprise would be regarded as a salad of vaudeville, opera, folk, and fairy ballets danced by Italian, French, and German artists, and a corps de ballet of serfs and children from the Imperial Foundling Home. He created so many disasters that Urusov pulled out broke, leaving Maddox to his own devices until the Imperial Theatre directors in St Petersburg chose to corral the Bolshoi under its administration.

The Bolshoi ensemble that developed was barely Russian in content or aesthetic, but after Napoleon’s destructive raid on the theatre, it, along with ballet, became something of a national fetish. After the 1917 Revolution, Lenin wanted to destroy the theatre as he returned the seat of government to Moscow, the ‘real’, ancient Russia, or, as Morrison puts it, ‘Russia before Russia’. Fortunately, People’s Commissar for Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky persuaded Lenin otherwise. By the end of World War II, the Bolshoi had become a place of ‘Russian exceptionalism’ (code for supremacy), an unconvincing concept that would flourish in the process of Cold War cultural diplomacy.

Performance in the Bolshoi Theatre, Mihály Zichy (1827–1906), 1856 (Alexander II. Coronation Book of 1856, Wikimedia Commons)

Behind the glittering theatre lights, other, sorrier scenarios ran unfettered by propriety. While Imperial favourites, such as prima ballerina Mathilde Kchessinska, mistress of Tsarevich Nikolai (soon to be tsar) and two of his cousins, lived in luxury and was regularly given fabulous diamonds, lesser dancers were exposed to chronic sexual exploitation. Many were orphans, some teenagers, many living in poverty, as did Avdotya Arshinina, an emerging talent. Arshinina’s poverty-stricken father sold her for ten thousand rubles to Prince Boris Cherkassky, who drugged and raped her, then abandoned her to others who abused her too. She was severely beaten, her genitals described as ‘blackened’ by the hospital staff that nursed her to her death, while the culprits escaped censure through connections, mendacity, and victim blaming. Arshinina’s father, however, was briefly imprisoned.

Of a completely different tenor is Morrison’s account of routine censorship of new works in the making, or days after a première, imposed by pedantic, often ignorant bureaucrats on creative minds of the day. Shostakovich’s serious but playful experimental ballets, for instance – The Golden Age, The Bolt, The Bright Stream – were criticised in Pravda and at Communist Party meetings, and led to excoriating denunciations commanded by Josef Stalin. These were artist who tried to put a human face on Soviet ideologies, while Prokofiev, trying to create a new, muscular music for Romeo and Juliet, watched the deracination of his intentions, line by line, instrument by instrument, page by page.

Sergei Prokofiev, 1918 (Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons)It is fortunate that Morrison is resilient and ironic in the face of such harrowing events. At times he makes some crisp, colloquial remarks that do not sit well in the text, although one may well share his pleasure at taking pot shots at belligerent theatre bureaucrats, who could make life miserable, even dangerous, for artists who stood up for themselves. The final chapter examines the battle between Maya Plisetskaya, the Bolshoi’s most gifted and glamorous international star from 1945 to 1990, and her nemesis, Yuri Grigoriev, artistic director and chief choreographer for thirty years. He was a pathological controller of independent spirits, and one of the least inspired choreographers in Russian history. His ballets, fraught with posturing and declamatory gestures, were ridiculed in the West. Ultimately, Plisetskaya undid his iron grip by seeking and receiving permission to create her own ballets with her husband, composer Rodion Shchedrin. But did her freedom, her victory, appease her lifelong hatred of a country that assassinated her father, enslaved her mother in a labour camp, then exiled her to Kazakhstan? Morrison thinks not – only her death, before her ninetieth birthday in 2015, could do that.

Finally, a word of gratitude to Simon Morrison for revealing, after two hundred and forty years, the author of the original scenario for Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake – Vladimir Begichev, a repertoire inspector and scenarist at Moscow Imperial Theatres.