After the turmoil of the Revolution, and the defection of Fokine to the West, the Mariinksy Ballet was in a terrible state. In 1922, Feodor Lopukhov, the theater's first Soviet Choreographer of consequence, took the leadership of the ballet company. Although he later switched his allegiance to the Maly Theatre, he returned to the Kirov as artist director from 1944 to 1946 and again from 1951 to 1956. To him, Petipa style classicism was compatible with revolution. Both were utopian. He managed to rebuild the roster of dancers after many fled abroad, maintain the classic repertory and mount new productions of it, resist the sort of modernisation that dance was subject to by at the Bolshoi and introduce other momentous works by Stravinsky, including Firebird and Pulcinella. Lophukov had an enormous influence and created a style that merged the classical lexicon with the language of modern art, oriented towards the search for pure, abstract dance.

Feodor Lopukhov, first major Soviet choreographer. Courtesy The Russian Foundation for Ballet.


Agrippina Vaganova, Russia's premier dance teacher. Courtesy The Russian Foundation for Ballet. 		Although his influence on the Kirov Ballet was an undeniable and lasting one, Lophukov went probably too far and too fast for the times. In 1931, he was replaced by the more conservative Aggripina Vaganova, who headed the company for six years. Her value to the theatre was not as a dancer, nor a director but one of the most influential teachers of her time. Elizabeth Kendall sums it up: "Vaganova codified the various styles of dancing - the French, the Italian, and the newer Russian - that had already begun to fuse under Petipa. She also introduced a new bravura- bigger shapes, heroic gestures - nto ballet technique. What is important to ballet history is her emphasis on the human manners inherent in the steeps rather than on abstract properties. Her approach offered a rallying point for the whole ballet system after the Revolutionary culture began turning more conservative." She created a truly unique Russian way of dancing.
Many great dancers and Ballerinas emerged from the Kirov in this period, known as the Second golden age of the Kirov Ballet (after the first one at the beginning of the century), among which Marina Semenova, the first outstanding pupil produced during Vaganova's time as head of the GATOB ballet. She was described as a dancer who" extended the limits of virtuoso technique and even anihilated the very idea of such limits. At the same time, Semenova was very feminine in every involvement on stage, in every step, in every feature". Two great male dancers, Vakhtang Chabukiani, described as "the archetype of the male dancer on the soviet stage" and Konstantin Sergeiev, who established himself as virtually a Kirov legend, joined the company around 1930. Sergeiev was called the "poet of Dance" and was considered a prototype of the danseur noble, excelling in grand, passionate roles. After the war, he became chief choreographer of the Kirov, and artistic director from 1951 to 1955 and from 1961 to 1970. Dudinskaya joined GATOB a year after Sergeiev, her future husband. Together, they became one of the most acclaimed dance couples in Russia. A favourite pupil of Vaganova, she was still active in her late eighties as a teacher at the Vaganova Academy. From the 1940's through to the fifties, she was prima donna assoluta at the Kirov, and powerful enough to reserve a role like Giselle for her exclusive use.

During the 1950's, Sergeiev shared choreographic honours with Yuri Grigorovich and an iconoclastic figure at the Kirov, Leonid Yakobson. Yakobson created some 130 dance works during his career, most of them disliked by soviet officialdom, as they were outside the boundaries of the socialist realist style, and his eclectic choreography combined classical movement with turned-in positions, jazz, sculptured poses and popular dance. But his work was greatly admired by many leading Russian dancers because it stretched their dramatic range. Grigorovitch had joined the Kirov as a character dancer in 1946, and from 1961 to 1964, he shared the post of artistic director with Sergeiev before moving on to the same post with the Bolshoi ballet. His principal legacy to the theatre was his 1961 Legend of love, a very powerful and impressive work which used the classical dance tradition to its fullest expressive power. These years at the Kirov might easily be termed the Theatreœs third golden age of dancing. Nothing in the theatre's provincial opera wing remotely approached the splendour of dance at this time. Just a listing of some of the names from the halcyon 1950's makes the point: Ninel Kurgapkina, Vladilen Semionov, Inna Zubrovskaya, Alla Osipenko, Irina Kolpakova, Rudolf Nureyev, Valery Panov, Nikita Dolgushin, Gabriela Komleva, Alla Siziva, Yuri Soloviev. Any pair of them would have made the fortunes of another dance company, and two Kirov renegades, Nureyev and Baryshnikov, later did just that by themselves.
1961, the company was shaken by scandal. While on a spring tour in Europe, Nureyev defected to the French police in Paris. He had long been the black sheep of the Kirov flock, a dancer who was always Nureyev first and the role second. He was headstrong and broke most of the rules imposed on artists during his time. But so incandescent were his gifts that his idiosyncratic behaviour, while not forgiven, was largely overlooked. Like Nijiinsky before him, Nureyev spent only four years as a member of the Kirov before decamping and attaining the sort of idol status that had been Nijinsky's. Gennady Smakov said that "the paradoxical combination of his princely looks and his explosive, edgy style toppled all the classical criteria established by Russian academic training". His dancing was extreme, oversized, too tempestuous, too sensual, too emotional, but these characteristics could not be seen as deficiencies, and were wedded to one of the most prodigious appetites for dancing the world has ever known. Nureyev did not come back to Russia until 1989 when he danced for the last time on the Kirov stage. He was fifty-one and undertook five performances of James in La Sylphide.

Rudolf Nureyev as Albrecht in Adam's Giselle. photo: Vili Onikul

Nureyev's defection was a major shock for the company. The Kirov became a "mini police state": The dancers were watched vigilantly for signs of insubordination. If they looked like defection risks - indeed if they failed to attend company meetings or had the wrong friends - they were often banned from foreign tours. After Nureyev's brief time with the Kirov, its most prized male dancers were Soloviev and Baryshnikov. Had Soloviev, a troubled man who eventually took his own life at the age of thirty-seven, also defected to the West, there is little doubt that he too would have made a major international career. As it was, suicide was his sad means of defection. He possessed what has been described as "the greatest leap in the world" (because of it, he was nicknamed "Cosmic Yuri" after the Soviet Union's first space hero). Baryshnikov was at the theatre twice as long as Nureyev before defecting to the West in Canada during a 1974 tour. His art was cut from different cloth. He exuded none of Nureyev's sexuality, and although a highly individual dancer, he was a more disciplined one. Baryshnikov's appeal stemmed primarily from his incredible pure technique, which was artfully blended with what Smakov has termed his "impish charm".


Soloviev in Belsky's Icarus. Courtesy The Foundation for Russian Ballet.


Mikhail Baryshnikov as Basilio in Don Quixote. Courtesy The Foundation for Russian Ballet. 		Gergiev was a student in the Leningrad Conservatory when Baryshnikov defected, and he remembers that "it was a shock, but it was somehow expected - not particularly of him, but of someone. You see, the system was pressing, always pressing. When Baryshnikov, like Nureyev before him, felt too pressed, their solution was to defect. I don't think they wanted to leave, I think the system gave them no choice."