Brouhaha at the Bolshoi

Two more visiting dancers make a grand jete to freedom

Among problems caused for the Bolshoi Ballet by the defection of Alexander Godunov in New York City last month was finding a replacement for the company's most charismatic performer.

Obviously, political reliability was as important as artistic talent. As the Bolshoi doggedly continued its tour to Chicago and Los Angeles, Artistic Director Yuri Grigorovich settled on a little-known principal to substitute for Godunov Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake. For Grigorovich, the choice proved a disastrous mistake. Leonid Kozlov was intent on playing Godunov's role to the hilt. Following the troupe's last American curtain call in Los Angeles last week, Kozlov repeated Godunov's final grand jete to freedom.

The next day he and his wife Valentina, another Bolshoi principal, requested and were granted political asylum in the U.S. Like Godunov, and the famous earlier defectors from Leningrad's Kirov company --Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov--the Kozlovs were seeking greater artistic freedom in the West.

Back in Moscow, the latest defections threw the volatile Bolshoi troupe into an uproar. "Nobody liked Kozlov anyway," said one of his former colleagues. Others privately conceded that the defections had shattered the Bolshoi's carefully nurtured image as the showcase of Soviet artistic superiority. Perhaps most galling was the expected curtailment of travel privileges; the Bolshoi was unlikely to tour the U.S., or perhaps even Western Europe, for a long time to come. A purge was expected of secret police officials in charge of keeping the Bolshoi dancers in line, just as happened in 1961, after Nureyev's defection. Grigorovich was already vulnerable because of fierce opposition within the company to his authoritarian rule; the defection could only make his position worse. It was said that he had insisted on taking Godunov to the U.S., and that he had compounded his error by thrusting Kozlov forward. In Moscow, he had previously been attacked in Pravda by one of his dancers for tampering with classics like Romeo and Juliet and Swan Lake. Such great Bolshoi stars as Maya Plisetskaya and Vladimir Vasiliev so dislike his choreography that they have refused to dance in his ballets.

In New York, ballet insiders speculate that Godunov will make his first post-defection appearance when the American Ballet Theater opens its December season in Washington, D.C. Because the Kozlovs are not in a class with the spectacular Godunov, they will probably find a base in a less prestigious American or European company that will be glad to have a pair of superbly trained Bolshoi dancers.

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