It could be presumed that Balanchine was already dreaming of being there as he worked on this nostalgic show about Berlin. In 1981, I asked him why he had emigrated to the West, and he replied,
It was impossible to live in Russia, it was terrible—there was nothing to eat, people here can’t understand what that means. We were hungry all the time. We dreamed of moving anywhere at all, just to get away. To go or not to go—I never had the slightest doubts about it. None! I never doubted, I always knew: if there were ever an opportunity—I’d leave!125
The opportunity arrived when an aspiring manager got permission from the authorities for a small group of performers to tour the West for “cultural propaganda.” The group included Balanchine and his wife, as well as three other stars of the Young Ballet: Danilova, Lydia Ivanova, and Nikolai Efimov. The same pretext was used the following year by two other émigrés—the pianist Vladimir Horowitz and his friend the violinist Nathan Milstein.
The unexpected and sudden departure, which was kept secret from the other members of the Young Ballet, was darkened by tragedy: during a boat ride on the Gulf of Finland Lydia (“Lida”) Ivanova drowned. A rumor spread through Petrograd that this was no accident; in the obituaries Ivanova was openly compared to Adrienne Lecouvreur, the celebrated French actress of the eighteenth century who was the victim of court intrigues. Ballet circles were convinced the secret police had had a hand in Lida’s death. Balanchine insisted to me: “I think it was a put-up job. I had heard that Lida knew some big secret and they did not want her to go to the West.”126
Akhmatova was a great admirer of Ivanova, whom she watched at the Maryinsky Theater in the twenties. Akhmatova kept Ivanova’s picture for many years and referred to her as “the biggest wonder of the Petrograd ballet.” This opinion was shared by many. Kuzmin wrote that Ivanova’s name was dear to all who were interested in the future of Russian art and described her gifts as “childlike purity, occasional humor, attentiveness, piercing seriousness, restrained emotion and strongly expressed feelings.”127
This characterizes the Petersburg type of performance. Ivanova loved Tchaikovsky, and not long before her death she wrote in her diary a touching comment that many later talked about in Petrograd: “I would like to be one of the tones created by Tchaikovsky, so that I could sound gently and sorrowfully and then dissolve in the evening mists.128
With her death, the Petrograd balletomanes recalled one of her most popular numbers, which now seemed prophetic, “Valse triste” to Balanchine’s choreography, in which the dancer was pursued and finally caught by Death. This story had a strange and unsettling parallel in 1956, when Balanchine’s new wife, his fourth, Tanaquil LeClerq, was stricken with polio. Many people recalled that a decade earlier the choreographer had composed a short ballet in which he danced the symbolic figure of Polio and touched LeClerq, who fell paralyzed.
Undoubtedly, the flight of Balanchine to the West caused him psychological trauma whose effect grew with the years rather than diminishing. Moving to the West from Soviet Russia had taken on threatening political overtones. The revolution had caused mass emigration. Exact figures are still lacking, but some one and a half to two million people must have fled. They were primarily well-educated, ideologically motivated foes of bolshevism, many of whom had taken up arms against Soviet power. A great number of them considered their emigration temporary, particularly in Germany, France, the Baltics, and the Balkan countries.
For the Soviet regime this “white” emigration, as it was then called, presented a definite threat. The Communists attacked the emigration politically, mocked it, infiltrated it, and tried to divide, tame, and disarm it. Relations with the emigres were an important aspect of Soviet foreign and domestic policy; each departure for the West was perceived as a hostile act and, later, as unpardonable treachery.
The problem of emigration was particularly acute for ballet dancers. Their regular trips abroad had begun before the revolution, with Diaghilev’s company, the first alternative to the state (then still imperial) Russian ballet. After the revolution, the cultural emigration increased. In 1922 the press revealed that thirty-four ballet artists from Petrograd had left for the West. It was “almost all the top dancers of the former Maryinsky Theater,” Lopukhov admitted. Some of the new émigrés wrote to Petrograd from the West, and their letters were widely read and discussed in ballet circles.
