The Defectors

The First Leap

On June 16, 1961, Rudolf Nureyev ran past Soviet security guards at Le Bourget airport in Paris and threw himself into the arms of French police. "I want to stay," he said. It was the most consequential defection in the history of dance — and it was only the beginning.

Over the next three decades, a succession of Soviet-trained ballet artists would follow Nureyev's path: Natalia Makarova (1970), Mikhail Baryshnikov (1974), Alexander Godunov (1979), and dozens of lesser-known dancers, teachers, and choreographers. Together, they transformed Western ballet.

What the Soviets Built

To understand why Soviet dancers were worth defecting for, you must understand the system that produced them. The Soviet ballet training method — codified at the Vaganova Academy in Leningrad — was arguably the most rigorous performing arts education ever devised.

Students entered at age ten after passing brutally selective auditions that evaluated not just talent but skeletal structure: the proportions of the femur, the flexibility of the hip socket, the arch of the foot. Training lasted eight years, six days a week, with a curriculum that integrated classical technique, character dance, pas de deux, music theory, and theatrical performance.

The result was dancers of extraordinary technical accomplishment and physical beauty — dancers who could execute feats that Western-trained performers could not match. When Nureyev arrived in the West, his technique was so far beyond the local standard that audiences literally did not know what they were seeing.

Nureyev: The Revolution

Nureyev's impact on Western ballet was immediate and total. At the Royal Ballet, where he became Margot Fonteyn's permanent partner in 1962, he did four things:

1. Raised the technical standard. Male dancing in the West was polite and self-effacing. Nureyev was electric, aggressive, virtuosic. Within five years, every male dancer in London was training harder.

1. Restored the male dancer to equality. In Western ballet, the ballerina was supreme; the male was a porteur. Nureyev demanded equal choreographic weight — and got it.

1. Created a new audience. Nureyev was the first ballet dancer to become a genuine celebrity. He appeared on talk shows, dated movie stars, was photographed by Avedon. He made ballet exciting to people who had never considered attending.

1. Brought Soviet staging knowledge. His productions of La Bayadère (1963), Raymonda (1964), and Don Quixote (1966) introduced Western audiences to the full-length Russian classics in something approaching their original form.

Baryshnikov: The Perfectionist

If Nureyev was fire, Baryshnikov was light. His defection during a Bolshoi tour of Canada in 1974 brought to the West a dancer of almost inhuman technical perfection: the cleanest beats, the highest jump, the most musical phrasing anyone had ever seen.

But Baryshnikov was not content to be a Soviet dancer in the West. He wanted to learn Western choreography — specifically, the work of George Balanchine, whose neoclassical style was the antithesis of Soviet grandeur. In 1978, Baryshnikov left American Ballet Theatre to join New York City Ballet as a corps member, submitting himself to Balanchine's authority.

It was the most remarkable act of artistic humility in modern dance history. The world's most famous dancer, starting over.

The Legacy

The defectors did not merely improve Western ballet technically. They changed its self-understanding. Before Nureyev, Western ballet companies were local institutions with local audiences. After the defectors, ballet became a global art form with an international star system, cross-company guest engagements, and a shared technical vocabulary that transcended national schools.

The price was paid by the Soviet ballet system itself, which hemorrhaged its greatest talent and eventually collapsed with the Soviet Union. The Vaganova method survives, but the state apparatus that supported it — the guaranteed employment, the company housing, the pension system — does not.

The defectors' children and grandchildren, artistically speaking, now dance in every major company in the world. The leap Nureyev made at Le Bourget is still being completed.