As discussed recently on 60 Minutes and in other media, the great prima ballerina of Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet, Olga Smirnova, has fled to Amsterdam. The ballerina publicly declared her shame at Putin’s war and war crimes upon Ukraine – an announcement which observers call a bomb detonated in the world of Russian ballet. Smirnova has led a vast crowd of dancers, conductors, choreographers, and other ballet figures fleeing to the West from Russia’s two great ballet companies – Moscow’s Bolshoi and St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky. As in Stalinist days, the choices today in Russia are to hide, to bend to Putin’s mad schemes, or to flee. Thus, at the Mariinsky, the remaining dancers who chose to bend were required to perform the dreary Stalinist-era ballet Spartacus – a notoriously awkward polemic.
