Rudolf Nureyev: The Great Escape

Video: Excerpt from the documentary: "NUREYEV: THE RUSSIAN YEARS"


Nureyev was born on the Trans-Siberian train near Pysinky Irkutsk, Siberia, Soviet Union, while his mother Farida was travelling to Vladivostok, where his father Hamat, a Red Army political commissar, was stationed . He was raised as the only son in a Tatar family in a village near Ufa in Soviet republic of Bashkiria. When his mother smuggled him and his sisters into a performance of the ballet "Song of the Cranes", he fell in love with dance. As a child he was encouraged to dance in Bashkir folk performances and his precocity was soon noticed by teachers who encouraged him to train in Leningrad. On a tour stop in Moscow with a local ballet company, Nureyev auditioned for the Bolshoi ballet company and was accepted. However, he felt that the Kirov Ballet school was the best, so he left the local touring company and bought a ticket to Leningrad.

Owing to the disruption of Soviet cultural life caused by World War II, Nureyev was unable to enroll in a major ballet school until 1955, aged 17, when he was accepted by the Leningrad Choreographic School, the associate school of the Kirov Ballet.

Alexander Ivanovich Pushkin took an interest in him professionally and allowed Nureyev to live with him and his wife. Upon graduation, Nureyev continued with the Kirov and went on to become a soloist.

In his three years with the Kirov, he danced fifteen roles, usually opposite his partner, Ninel Kurgapkina, with whom he was very well paired, although she was almost a decade older than he . He became one of the Soviet Union's best-known dancers and was allowed to travel outside the Soviet Union, when he danced in Vienna at the International Youth Festival. Not long after, for disciplinary reasons, he was told he would not be allowed to go abroad again. He was confined to tours of the Soviet republics.

According to wikipedia, In 1961, the Kirov's leading male dancer, Konstantin Sergeyev, was injured, and Nureyev was chosen to replace him on the Kirov's European tour. In Paris, his performances electrified audiences and critics,[citation needed] but he broke the rules about mingling with foreigners, which alarmed the Kirov's management. The KGB wanted to send him back to the Soviet Union immediately. As a subterfuge, they told him that he would not travel with the company to London to continue the tour because he was needed to dance at a special performance in the Kremlin. He believed that if he returned to the U.S.S.R., he would likely be imprisoned, because KGB agents had been investigating him. According to KGB archives studied by Peter Watson, Nikita Khrushchev personally signed an order to kill Nureyev.

On June 16, 1961 at the Le Bourget Airport in Paris, Rudolf Nureyev defected. Within a week, he was signed up by the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas and was performing The Sleeping Beauty with Nina Vyroubova. On a tour of Denmark he met Erik Bruhn, a dancer who became his lover, his closest friend and his protector for many years.

Although he petitioned the Soviet government for many years to be allowed to visit his mother, he was not allowed to do so until 1989, when his mother was dying and Mikhail Gorbachev consented to the visit. During this visit, he was invited to dance with the Kirov Ballet at the Maryinsky theatre in Leningrad. The visit gave him the opportunity to see many of the teachers and colleagues he had not seen since he defected, including his first ballet teacher in Ufa.