Swans of the Kremlin: Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia

Christina Ezrahi's book is a welcome addition to the growing literature about cultural production/consumption, cultural politics, and ideology in the Soviet Union, especially during post-Stalin socialism. Her book, based on extensive archival research and oral history, focuses on two major (and the most popular in the West) ballet troupes in the USSR, one from the Mariinskii (later Kirov) Theater in Leningrad and the other from the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. Although the book begins with the era of the October Revolution, it concentrates mostly on the post-Stalin period of Soviet ballet's international fame in the 1950s and 1960s. Ezrahi explores “the remarkable resilience of artistic creativity under the Soviet regime” and tells a story of “the struggle for artistic autonomy” (p. 5). Using the theories of James C. Scott casting everyday resistance as a “weapon of the weak,” which became popular in Soviet studies in the West in the 1990s,...