Secret Ballet History: Agrippina Vaganova’s Narrow Escape From Arrest
Agrippina Vaganova in La Esmeralda, St. Petersburg, ca. 1910
If you are a serious ballet student, the name Agrippina Vaganova will definitely evoke something in you: your favourite exam classes from St. Petersburg’s Vaganova Academy available on YouTube, your favourite Vaganova-trained ballerina – or memories of that insanely exhausting but inspiring class you once took with a teacher teaching the Vaganova method. Vaganova was one of the most important ballet teachers in the history of dance, who systematised and further developed the teaching methods of the Russian imperial ballet. Her crucial role is symbolised by the fact that, unlike London’s Royal Ballet School or Paris’s Paris Opera Ballet School, St. Petersburg’s famous ballet school - the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet - is not named after the company it is attached to, but after its most famous teacher. The Vaganova method has become one of the most widely respected methods for teaching serious ballet students and is used all of the world.
But Vaganova didn’t work under easy circumstances. Born in the St. Petersburg in 1879, she laboured her way up the hierarchy of the Mariinsky Ballet. For a long time, she was known as the “Queen of the Variations” – she was a technically very strong first soloist but only made the cut to the highest rank of ballerina one year before she retired from the stage in 1916. The strict teacher of the Soviet period was a ballet dancer of imperial times, who could also act frivolously, even though she lacked the charm and beauty of some of her more successful contemporaries. Once, she was fined for wearing jewellery on stage, maybe to dazzle an admirer. She became the long-term lover of Andrey Pomerantsev, a retired railway colonel, and had a son with him in 1904. The couple lived like a family, even though they never married because Pomerantsev remained married to his first wife.
In 1917, the October Revolution destroyed the comfortable life that Vaganova had built for herself. Her husband saw his world crumbling apart and feared how the Communist Bolsheviks would deal with members of the bourgeoisie like himself. Unable to envision his future, he shot himself by the Christmas tree. The retired ballerina had to find a way to feed herself, her son, and her sister’s two children in cold and hungry civil war Petrograd. She returned to the stage, performing in variety shows and revues, but also began teaching at the school in 1917, teaching the female graduation class from 1921 until the year of her death,1951.
But where there is a powerful teacher, there are disgruntled students. To make things worse, Vaganova became the artistic director of the Kirov Ballet in 1931, a position that inevitably creates enemies. And in Soviet Russia, enemies could always exploit the perception that ballet was an art form alien to socialist ideals. Ballet had largely managed to survive the revolution because it was so popular with the audience. Lenin, the first leader of the Soviet Union, even contemplated closing down the Bolshoi and Mariinsky Theaters.
Vaganova was working under a Communist dictatorship, and the state kept a tight watch over its artists and the art they created. Ever since the first days of the revolution, the regime had arrested and even executed those who were against it, or who were simply “alien” to it because they belonged to the elites of imperial Russia. Political repression was a constant in Soviet life, but it intensified during several waves.
Between July 1937 and November 1938, the Soviet regime started a special campaign against potential and imagined enemies. Over 750,000 people would be executed across the Soviet Union, while more than 800,000 were sentenced to up to ten years of forced labour in the camps of the Gulag. During the Great Terror, nobody could be safe from sudden arrest and hysterical, vicious denunciations – not even a celebrated ballet teacher.
On 7 December 1937, the Kirov Ballet convened a company meeting that turned into a political trial of their director and former teacher, Vaganova. So many dancers were queuing up to attack Vaganova that the meeting had to be continued on 9 December. Of the leading ballerinas, only one dared to defend her former teacher: Natalia Dudinskaya. Dancers were complaining that Vaganova was only casting her favourites, that there were not enough new productions – and, worst of all, that Vaganova had been in cahoots with the former director of the Kirov, who had already been arrested and executed as “enemy of the people,” as well as other formerly high-ranking officials in Leningrad’s cultural administration that had by now been arrested. The meeting ended with the declaration by the theatre’s new director that the theatre needed a “surgical operation.”
What happened next is shrouded in mystery. All we know is that Vaganova rushed to Moscow after the company meeting. Ten days later, she was honourably dismissed from her position as director of the Kirov Ballet – and escaped arrest. Did she manage to appeal to somebody powerful? Did somebody intercede for her? We will never know, but ballet history would have taken a different course if she had been arrested.
If you are interested in other, even more dramatic stories about Kirov Ballet dancers during the time of Stalin’s Great Terror, we recommend you read Christina Ezrahi’s Dancing for Stalin: A true story of extraordinary courage and survival in the Soviet gulag.