For almost 250 years, the Bolshoi Ballet has remained synonymous with the art of dance. As one of the most celebrated companies, the Bolshoi Ballet has roots in eighteenth-century imperial Russia. Beloved by Romanov tsars and Soviet leaders, the Bolshoi Ballet has a reputation for skilled technique and dramatic style. The Bolshoi has evolved to survive wars, revolutions, defectors, and even acid attacks. Read on to discover the Bolshoi Ballet’s history and enduring popularity as a jewel of art, a cultural export, and a symbol of Russian power.
One of the Top 5 Ballet Companies in the World
Today, the Bolshoi Ballet ranks among the top ballet companies worldwide, along with the Royal Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, and the American Ballet Theatre.
However, the Bolshoi Ballet did not always hold this spotlight.
Until the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg overshadowed the Bolshoi Ballet. When the Soviets rose to power, they moved the capital to Moscow, where the Bolshoi Ballet developed under the Kremlin’s watch. During the Cold War, the Bolshoi Theater took center stage as the premier Russian ballet school.
Bolshoi dancers are known for their athletic prowess, high lifts, and bold productions that range from classical pieces to historical spectacles. With its prestigious standing, the Bolshoi Ballet has performed all over the world. Its reputation demonstrates how recognized ballet has become on an international scale.
Bolshoi Ballet: Survival Through Fires & Wars
Located in the heart of Moscow near the Kremlin, the Bolshoi Theater has represented a political tool and a central sphere of cultural life. Bolshoi simply means “big” in Russian. The name fits this theater, which has served as a backdrop to significant moments in Russian history. Thanks to its dramatic architecture and proximity to the Kremlin, the Bolshoi has served as a stage for speeches, rallies, and announcements such as Vladimir Lenin’s death.
It is one of the iconic landmarks in Moscow.
In 1775, Prince Pyotr Urusov, a provincial prosecutor and patron of the arts, created the first Bolshoi Ballet, known as the Petrovsky Ballet. The Petrovsky Ballet gained success under Empress Catherine the Great. With imperial privilege came hard work. The company’s first dancers mostly came from the Moscow Orphanage. An Italian ballet master was given three years to whip the new company into shape. Prince Urasov had five years to build a stone theater to grace Moscow.
Urasov joined forces with English tightrope-walker and engineer Michael Maddox. In 1777, they purchased a spot on Petrovka Street. The first theater building appeared in just five months. Its grand auditorium held twenty rows of stall benches, a gallery, and three tiers of theater boxes. Standing room could accommodate up to 1,000 people.
On January 10, 1781, the Petrovsky Theater opened to the public for the first time. By the nineteenth century, the theater had a distinctive style, blending ballet with Russian folk dancing, drama, and comedy. In 1805, the Petrovsky Theater burned to the ground. In the wake of this disaster, the ballet came under the Directorate of Imperial Theaters. After three nomadic years, the ballet troupe settled in a classical Greek-style theater. Unfortunately, this new building was completely made of wood.
Four years later, tragedy struck again.
In 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Russia with over 600,000 French soldiers. A gigantic fire erupted in Moscow as Russian troops withdrew from the city. The fire forced Napoleon to evacuate the Kremlin. The flames also consumed the wooden Bolshoi Theater just two days after the company’s last performance. Both sides blamed each other for the disaster.
The new theater erected on the site became known as the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater due to its larger size. On opening day in 1825, crowds swarmed the Bolshoi Theater, and even the huge building could not accommodate all the eager theatergoers.
Then, on March 11, 1853, a fire broke out again at the Bolshoi. For three days, the blaze devoured everything in its path, including costumes, scenery, instruments, sheet music, and theater machines. The building became a charred shell, with only the walls and portico columns left standing. Within two years, the rubble disappeared, and restoration work began.
This time, architect Albert Calvos designed the Bolshoi auditorium with the acoustic capacity of a gigantic instrument.
It boasted a chandelier lit by 300 oil lamps, a lavish crimson and gold interior, and a circular ceiling painting of Apollo and the Muses. The stalls and boxes could accommodate almost 2,300 people. Above the entrance, a bronze Apollo and his chariot took flight from the Bolshoi’s roof. The tsar’s box took center stage. Artisans worked to complete the theater with extraordinary speed in time to celebrate Tsar Alexander II’s coronation in 1856.
The Bolshoi Theater also managed to survive the Second World War. Despite Soviet attempts to camouflage important and historic buildings in Moscow, the German Luftwaffe still managed to target Moscow during Operation Barbarossa. On October 22, 1941, the Nazis dropped a high-explosive bomb on the Bolshoi. The blast slammed between the theater’s columns, smashed the façade, and damaged the vestibule. Despite wartime hardships, restoration work began in the winter of 1942. By the war’s end, the Bolshoi regained its former glory.
After surviving repeated fires during the nineteenth century, the Bolshoi Ballet School grew during the 1850s. Operas and ballets replaced drama, comedy, and folk productions. In 1877, Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake ballet appeared in its world premiere at the Bolshoi. This event marked a long history of critically acclaimed productions recognized worldwide.
Bolshoi Ballet: Favored by the Tsars and Stalin
Since 1776, when a Russian prince enlisted an English entrepreneur to jumpstart his provincial theater, the Bolshoi Theater has captured audiences from Romanov tsars to Soviet leaders. The Bolshoi Ballet also has a complex history as a space for politicized art.
With the new building completed to celebrate Tsar Alexander II’s coronation, the Bolshoi became the epicenter for imperial performances when the tsars came to Moscow. One of the most significant events occurred on May 17, 1896, when the Bolshoi Theater threw a glittering gala to celebrate the coronation of the last crowned tsar, Nicholas II.
The performance opened with Mikhail Glinka’s patriotic historical opera A Life for the Tsar, which had first premiered in 1836. The story revolves around Ivan Susanin, a peasant who saves the life of Mikhail, the first Romanov tsar, during the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century. A one-act ballet called The Pearl followed. The best ballerinas and dancers from the Moscow and St. Petersburg ballets kicked off the premiere.
After the October Revolution in 1917, the Bolshoi faced a new threat. At first, the Bolshevik government toyed with the idea of shutting down the Bolshoi Theater. Then, in 1919, the government awarded the Bolshoi academic status. Days later, the Soviets debated shutting down the theater again. By 1922, the Soviets agreed that closing the Bolshoi would result in financial loss.
With Moscow restored to the nation’s capital, the Bolshoi Ballet regained its status. From its dramatic stage, the Bolsheviks proclaimed the founding of a new country: the USSR. At first, the Bolshoi’s troupe and directors protested the state nationalization of the theater and the controls imposed on art. Many artists fled abroad.
By the 1920s, the Bolshoi had demonstrated its right to exist as an art center. Like all Soviet culture, ballet became a state tool. Ballet at the Bolshoi became a way to mass audiences and promote Soviet realism.
While a few critics debated the quality of party-approved works (often at the risk of the gulag), the Bolshoi made ballet relatable to the masses. To attract the average theatergoer, Soviet composers created ballets with timely topics such as women’s liberation and colonization. While Vladimir Mutnikh, the head of the Bolshoi, was executed during the 1930s purges, most ballet dancers actively supported the Soviet cultural plan.
In 1936, just months before Josef Stalin’s Great Purge began, Dmitry Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk played at the Bolshoi. With dissonant music and themes that dealt with blood and guilt, Lady Macbeth did not please Stalin, who condemned it in a scathing Pravda review. The review ended with a terrifying verdict that the avant-garde composer’s “fidgety, screaming, and neurotic music” trifled with “difficult matters” and warned that “such games can only finish badly.”
Instead of repenting, Shostakovich wrote his volatile Fourth Symphony, which did not see the light until the post-Stalinist years.
In 1950, the Bolshoi accidentally caused a diplomatic incident with The Red Poppy ballet. Despite Soviet efforts to rewrite the ballet as a leftwing criticism of British imperialism in China, it fell short of understanding the complexities of Chinese history, culture, and the Communist Revolution. Dancers wore a queue, or braid, which the Chinese considered a symbol of Manchu oppression, while the ballet’s title referred to the complicated history of China’s forced role in the opium trade.
Mao Zedong, who was in Moscow to sign the Sino-Soviet Treaty with Stalin, turned down an invitation to see the ballet. The Chinese ambassador’s wife saw a preview of the Soviet version and reported that it distorted the Chinese Revolution. Other Chinese representatives also found the ballet offensive. In 1957, the Soviets rewrote the ballet as The Red Flower to pacify Mao Zedong.
During the Cold War, the Bolshoi Ballet held center stage. Today, it continues to display national pride and promotes Russia’s cultural brand.
Known for Distinguished Dancers, Scandals, and Defectors
Over the years, the Bolshoi Ballet has had its fair share of stars and scandals. In the 1830s, dancing master Thomas Guerinot received a fine after he kicked a ballerina backstage. During an 1848 performance, someone threw a dead cat with an insulting note attached to its tail at a ballerina dancing the pas de trois. Other incidents involved ground glass found in rivals’ shoes, an alarm clock set to go off during a dance sequence, and a media firestorm that erupted in 2003 when the Bolshoi fired dancer Anna Volochkova for allegedly being too heavy.
After 1917, many dancers emigrated to dance with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Some ballerinas became Soviet icons, while other high-profile dancers defected to the West on tours outside the Iron Curtain.
The Stalin years brought no shortage of surveillance, denunciations, and executions. During the post-Stalin thaw, however, even stars like Maya Plisetskaya had to grovel before Nikita Khrushchev for disrespecting KGB surveillance and talking to foreigners without permission.
Despite a new era, dancers still faced political restrictions on art. In 1974, Mikhail Baryshnikov defected to the West while on tour with the Bolshoi. Five years later, Aleksandr Godunov also defected to the United States during the company’s tour in New York City.
The phenomenon of dissident dancers did not stop with the Cold War. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, dancers such as Olga Smirnova, the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina, defected to the West to protest the war.
Over the years, the company has experienced attacks on directors, sex scandals, and controversy. A Soviet ballerina, Lyudmila Semenyaka, once said that a dancer needed the “teeth of a tiger and the hide of a dinosaur” to survive at the Bolshoi.
According to Simon Morrison’s Bolshoi Confidential, the Bolshoi plunged into scandal again when two ballerinas decided to die by suicide mid-performance in 1928. They jumped together from the top of the stage at the height of a death scene. To the audience’s horror, one of the women did not die right away. A 1928 New York Times article identified the women as two dancers in love with the same man. According to reports, the Soviets promptly arrested and imprisoned the man over the failed affair.
In 2013, scandal rocked the Bolshoi again when Sergei Filin, the company’s ballet director, was attacked by a masked man who threw acid into his face. The attack left Filin with third-degree burns. In the aftermath, a dancer named Pavel V. Dmitrichenko was accused and sentenced to six years in prison for his role in the plot. As the case made national headlines, many believed that higher forces behind the attack represented the struggle for money and power in Russia.
The Bolshoi: A Symbol of International Influence and Power
Without the Ballets Russes, the influence of Russian ballets such as The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, innovative choreographers, and talented dancers, the American ballet tradition would look much different.
During the twentieth century, many artists, directors, and dancers fled the Soviet Union. Some of the biggest names included Mikhail Baryshnikov and George Balanchine. Russian ballet brought bold, precise, and athletic techniques to the international ballet sphere and had a substantial impact on the development of the American ballet scene.
During the tense days of the Cold War, the Bolshoi Ballet toured the West as part of a high-stakes cultural export program.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F. Kennedy headed to see the Bolshoi Ballet’s Swan Lake at the Soviet Embassy. After the performance, he clapped louder and longer than anyone else nearby. It was the president’s first social outing since the crisis. Impresario Sol Hurok, who worked to bring the Bolshoi to American soil, remarked, “As long as they keep dancing and the diplomats keep talking, we’ll have no war.”
At times held captive to ideology, subject to scandal, and transformed by art, the Bolshoi Ballet has survived centuries of wars, fires, and totalitarian regimes to become a cultural jewel. Since its birth, the Bolshoi Ballet has represented a performative space where dance and politics meet in a complex symbol of art and power.
