Similarly in mid-April, famour Russian pianist Alexei Lubimov began to play Ukrainian compositions at a large public theater concert in Moscow. Within minutes, armed security personnel appeared on stage. Despite the pianist’s effort to quickly shift to a Shubert composition more acceptable to the Putinists, the security police declared the concert over due to a non-existent “bomb threat.”
As recounted in The Dancer and The Devil, Stalin and now Putin thirst for cultural hegemony, for rule maintained through ideological or cultural means. And this extends to ballet. Like Putin’s war crimes, Stalin’s purges fed a diaspora of Russian ballet talent, feeding the entire world, including Njinsky, Lifar, Diaghilev and Balanchine. The greatest of all Russian ballerinas, often picked as history’s greatest dancer, was Anna Pavlova – called the Swan for her signature short piece, Death of a Swan, which describes the line between life and death.
In the 1920s, Stalin repeatedly invited and then summoned the Swan home, but she defied the invitations, instead dancing the old Imperial ballets like Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, so hated by Stalin, all over the world. Finally in 1931, she boarded a train from Paris to the same Netherlands to which Olga Smirnova has fled. On the train, Pavlova became deathly ill, telling doctors she had been poisoned by the food she ate in Paris. Within a short time, she died, swearing her company to go forward with the scheduled performance. They danced in front of a weeping crowd. Her death was an unsolved mystery. Only recently, with the discovery a Stalinist, Paris-based poisoning assassin ring called “Yasha’s Group,” was the mystery of who would poison a much-loved ballerina solved. Putin admires Yasha’s Group as being among Russia’s greatest agents. Putin’s own group of assassins, “Unit 29155,” has poisoned many in our present age. The Yasha Group began its poisonings in Paris in the 1920s.
Putin has declared Stalin a great, inspiring hero who made a few mistakes due to bad advisors. In reality, Stalin was a butcher, responsible for many millions of deaths, including six to eight million in Ukraine – Putin’s current killing fields. He began the slaughter in 1931 by summoning to Kyiv the famous Ukrainian bard musicians known as the Kobzars for their mandolin-like instruments. They were much like American country-western singers, whose ballads of love and war were the cultural history of Ukraine. When they arrived in Kyiv, they were taken out of town, and 368 were executed and buried in an anonymous mass grave with their instruments. It was then made a crime to have such an instrument or sing such songs in Ukraine.
Putin and his closest advisors call themselves the Siloviki – the Strong Men, much as Stalin self-anointed himself with the title “Stalin,” Man of Steel, as opposed to his former modest nicknames of Koba, or Pockface. They are largely KGB careerists with little actual combat experience. The Strong Men appear to have run into true strong men in Ukraine, and true strong women in their own ballerinas. Putin would do well to take a lesson from Stalin’s Ukrainian massacre and his poisoning of the Swan Pavlova. After his own poisoning death by his underling Beria (likely with warfarin, now a rat poison), Stalin was denounced in Russia and his crimes exposed in 1956. His pictures and statues disappeared. Fittingly, on Halloween night, October 31, 1961, Stalin’s body itself was moved in disgrace from its grand tomb into the earth where he had consigned so many innocents. Meanwhile, Pavlova and her dance, Death of a Swan, were recently commemorated by 32 ballerinas dancing in 13 countries around the world, including performances in Paris, the United States, Beijing, Australia, and the Philippines.
Some say that songs, dance and culture are in the end more important than political pronouncements and laws. Tyrants like Stalin and Putin are rightfully afraid of the power of symbols like the Kobzars, or even a brave ballerina. As Gandhi in his own desperate time counseled, “When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it – always.”
John O’Neill, a New York Times #1 bestselling author, and Sarah Wynne, are the co-authors of The Dancer and The Devil (Regnery, April 26, 2022), a recently published account of murders and biowar by Stalin, Putin and Xi. O’Neill is a Naval Academy Graduate and decorated combat Vietnam veteran.
