Beckanne Sisk in Diana and Acteon.
Photo © Hideaki Tanioka.
“Why Swan Lake? It may seem like a random artistic choice, but to anyone who lived in the former USSR, it made perfect sense. For many Russians, the opening strains of Tchaikovsky’s score are as likely to remind them of political upheaval as they are the beauty of classical ballet. When Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982, after nearly two decades in power, state-controlled television stations cut into programming not with news of his death or an announcement of who would next lead the country, but with broadcasts of Swan Lake “in its full-length, four-act, three hour expanse,” writes Stanford dance historian Janice Ross in her new book , Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia. The broadcasts were a stalling tactic, meant to block access to the news while the Soviet leadership settled on a succession plan. The same happened following the deaths of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. Swan Lake was so often the backdrop for Soviet political upheaval that seeing it on television became a tip-off that all was not well in Moscow. In August 1991, Ross writes, when a group of communist hard-liners attempted to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev’s government, television programs again were interrupted; for days, the only thing on state TV was a continuous loop of Swan Lake. Sergei Filatov, a member of the Russian legislature, was on vacation at the time. “I turned on the TV and saw the swans dancing,” Filatov told the Moscow Times. “For five minutes, ten, for an hour. Then I realized that something had happened.” He immediately got on a flight to Moscow, where he played an important role defending the city against the attempted takeover. (One of the leaders of the coup, Vasily Starodubtsev, later admitted that the broadcast was a strategic error.)”
— “This Portentous Composition: Swan Lake’s Place in Soviet Politics” from Hazlitt
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