Rudolf Nureyev — ballet with roots in the USSR
Rudolf Khametovich Nureyev was born on 17 March 1938 on a Trans-Siberian train near Irkutsk, as his mother travelled to join his father, a Red Army political officer. The family was Tatar, and he grew up in poverty in Ufa, the capital of Bashkiria, where he first danced in folk ensembles and took lessons from former members of the imperial ballet who had been exiled there.
In 1955, at seventeen, unusually old for a ballet student, he was admitted to the Leningrad Choreographic School, now the Vaganova Academy, where he studied with Alexander Pushkin. In 1958 he joined the Kirov Ballet as a soloist and quickly became one of its stars, known as much for his temperament and independence as for his dancing.
On 16 June 1961, at Le Bourget airport in Paris, as the Kirov prepared to fly on from its Paris season to London, he was told he would be sent back to Moscow. He asked the French police for asylum and remained in the West. He did not see his family again for more than twenty-five years.
In 1962 he began his partnership with Margot Fonteyn at the Royal Ballet in London, in Giselle, one of the most celebrated partnerships in ballet history, which lasted until the 1970s. He danced with most of the major companies in the world, staged the Russian classics — The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, Don Quixote, La Bayadère — from memory for Western companies, and helped make the male dancer a star in his own right in the West. He became an Austrian citizen in 1982.
From 1983 to 1989 he was director of the Paris Opera Ballet, where he promoted a generation of young French dancers. In 1987 he was allowed to return to the Soviet Union to visit his dying mother in Ufa, and in 1989 he danced again on the Kirov stage in Leningrad.
His last production was La Bayadère for the Paris Opera in 1992. He died in Paris on 6 January 1993, aged fifty-four, after a long illness, and was buried in the Russian cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.
"Nureyev defected at Paris Le Bourget Airport on June 17, 1961, during a Kirov tour."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Irkutsk / Ufa
Born in 1938 on a Trans-Siberian train near Irkutsk to a Tatar family, he trained in Ufa and at the Leningrad Choreographic School and danced with the Kirov Ballet until 1961, when he remained in France during the company's tour.
Irkutsk / Ufa. At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.
A career defined by ambition
"I did not want to be caged. The West was the only place where I could become what I needed to become."