BOLSHOI INSIDERS SUSPECTED that the attack on Filin was motivated by professional and personal resentments. So did the police. Yet the Russian media—the government-monitored television channels, plus the less-regulated newspapers and online news portals—teased the public with baroque theories of the crime. The clippings were compiled in a Russian-language book called Black Swans, and the American network HBO released a documentary about the attack called Bolshoi Babylon.4 (The behind-the-scenes footage shows Filin, after his martyrdom, being shamed into silence by the new general director in front of the dancers: “I asked you not to speak,” Vladimir Urin tells Filin in front of the assembled company. “I’m not going to argue with you … Please sit down.”) Gossips and alienated former employees blamed dark elements connected to meddling Kremlin officials—a theory of the crime that did not seem absurd, given that the Bolshoi is a political as well as an artistic institution. Filin denied allegations of extortion, that fees had been demanded for auditions and choice parts. True, he had promoted his own people, as artistic directors are wont to do; he also decided who headlined the programs, who went on tour, and who appeared in the galas—decisions with significant financial consequences for the dancers. There were those who thus coveted his position and thought that he benefited too much from it.
Speculation about the crime centered first on the flamboyant senior dancer Nikolay Tsiskaridze, an indefatigable critic of his employer. For years he had been complaining about everything at the Bolshoi: the five-year, top-to-bottom renovation of the building, the managers, the artistic directors, the stars in the making. But he seemed strangely cheerful in his defense, much too glad to give interviews and declare that he had declined a lie-detector test. When asked about his grievances, Tsiskaridze reminisced about his career and likened himself to other besieged greats of the stage, namely the opera singer Maria Callas, although she was more demure and, onstage, used less maquillage than he did. He recalled his fun-filled, innocent, and lucrative New Year’s Eve performances of The Nutcracker: “$1,500 a ticket at the official rate,” he boasted on the phone, “and Iksanov says I can’t dance.” In May 2013, his lawyer threatened to sue the Bolshoi in response to the reprimands he had received for his gossipmongering. That June, the nationalist newspaper Zavtra broke the news that his two contracts with the Bolshoi, as performer and teacher, had been canceled. He parried with characteristic bravado: “What did you expect? It’s a gang there.” Fans mounted a protest in front of the theater, inspired by his declaration in the French newspaper Le Figaro that “Le Bolchoï, c’est moi.”
Tsiskaridze exposed an age-old conflict at the Bolshoi between progressives and conservatives, pitting those dancers who benefited from an archaic patronage system against those who did not. Earlier in the twentieth century, during the era of the Bolsheviks and the Cultural Revolution, Elena Malinovskaya served as director of the theater. An unprepossessing nondescript who rose to fame through Marxist-Leninist political circles, she governed the Bolshoi with a scowl from 1919 to 1935. Occasionally she threatened resignation, claiming that the pressures of the job and the threats she received from disgruntled artists had compromised her health, but her Kremlin protectors kept her at her desk. Although Malinovskaya’s survival ensured the Bolshoi’s continuing operation, she was reviled for purging the ranks of suspected dissidents. She was further castigated for spoiling the repertoire, accused of making even the classical art of ballet a tool of ideology and so giving it a guilty conscience.
Thus began the struggle between the defenders of the aristocratic tradition and its critics, as well as between those who conformed to official dictates and others who fell silent, knowing it was pointless to resist. The official artistic doctrine of socialist realism obliged ballet scenarists and opera librettists to freight even works about the distant past with Marxist-Leninist content, to taint them with ideological anachronisms. The emphasis on making ballet for the people yielded Cossack, gypsy, and peasant dances not seen on the Moscow stage since the Napoleonic era. The scenarios enforced the simplest binaries: pro-Bolshevik pluckiness versus anti-Bolshevik cowardliness; Soviets versus Fascists; collective farmworkers versus the hot sun and parched earth. Pantomime and peasant exotica were the essence of the repertoire throughout the 1930s and the Second World War.
Tsiskaridze stood with the old guard, those dancers attached to traditional stagings of the Russian repertoire rather than the innovative productions privileged by Iksanov and Filin. His dismissal came as a relief even to his backers at the theater, since it dimmed the spotlight on the scandal. But after a short vacation, he resumed his performance of a persecuted balletic Old Believer. Tsiskaridze had little to fear, it seems, because he enjoyed the protection of powerful interests. Much as Rasputin had bewitched the Empress Alexandra before the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1918, so too the magnetic Tsiskaridze is understood to have impressed the spouse of the president of Rostec, a government-controlled firm that develops advanced weapons systems. He was not out of work for long. In October 2013, Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky appointed Tsiskaridze rector of the Vaganova Ballet Academy in St. Petersburg, one of the world’s most prestigious schools for dance.
Filin’s predecessor as artistic director, Alexei Ratmansky, offered no specific insight into the attack but commented on Facebook that “many of the illnesses of the Bolshoi are one snowball—that disgusting claque which is friendly with artists, ticket speculators and scalpers, half-crazy fans who are ready to slit the throats of their idol’s competitors, cynical hackers, lies in the press and scandalous interviews of people working there.”5 Claqueurs are professional audience members, tasked with offering overly demonstrative applause for their favorite Bolshoi dancers in exchange for tickets some resell. The mysterious balletomane Roman Abramov currently leads this “elegant theatrical protection racket.”6 He appears in the HBO documentary, and boasts of attending hundreds of performances a year.
Ratmansky left the Bolshoi in 2008, after reviving suppressed Soviet ballets and redoing the shopworn classics. He found the pressure from inside and outside of the theater intolerable, especially when brought to bear on creative decisions. To perform the 1930 Soviet ballet The Bolt, for example, Ratmansky excised a potentially offensive scene that once would have been comical, even canonically so. It involves a drunken Russian Orthodox priest and a dancing cathedral. The lampoon was politically correct for the godless Bolsheviks of 1930, but heresy to the lords of the new church of 2005. So it was cut. In relocating to New York, Ratmansky hoped to escape the machinations to create what he liked. The Bolshoi lamented his departure, but even the press officer at the theater, Katerina Novikova, empathized with his decision. Tsiskaridze had made his life miserable, she acknowledged. Ratmansky had also put up with bad behavior from other dancers, including the one who would finally be convicted in the attack against Filin.
In March 2013, the police arrested Pavel Dmitrichenko, a lead dancer, and charged him with organizing the attack. He had supposedly paid 50,000 rubles ($1,430) to a thug with a record. Speaking to reporters from his hospital room, Filin confirmed that he had long suspected Dmitrichenko, an irascible, tattooed soloist who harbored a grudge against Filin for passing over his ballerina girlfriend for choice roles. Filin’s haute-goth lawyer, Tatyana Stukalova, informed a deferential interviewer on television that Dmitrichenko could not have been acting alone. Soon it emerged that he had two accomplices: Yuriy Zarutsky, an unemployed ex-convict who tossed the acid, and Andrey Lipatov, the driver. Dmitrichenko confessed to organizing the attack but argued that he had merely wanted to frighten Filin, put the fear of God into him. The acid was Zarutsky’s idea. Dmitrichenko admitted his “moral responsibility,” while carping, wild-eyed, about how he had been wronged.7