Dancers and dissidents: how ballet became a political football between east and west

Go west … Ballerina Natalia Makarova, who defected to London in 1970. Photograph: Jack Mitchell/Getty

When the independent Russian TV station Dozhd, or TV Rain, was forced off air by the government earlier this month, its final act was to cut to footage of the ballet Swan Lake. “That was epic trolling,” says cultural historian Simon Morrison, author of the book Bolshoi Confidential. It was the same footage that was played on every Russian TV channel as tanks rolled into Moscow during the attempted coup in August 1991.

“When the putsch happened in the Gorbachev era, the screens turned to Swan Lake because they didn’t want people to know what was happening,” explains Morrison. “So [Dozhd] was trolling them for mass censorship. ‘You don’t want people to know what’s happening in Ukraine – here’s your Swan Lake!’”