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Hollywood and Stalin: Love without reciprocity (part 25)

Continuation of the cycle, start read here .

In the previous part of the cycle, it was about the film "Red Danube" directed by George Sidney based on Bruce Marshall's novel "Vienna Vespers." I found a used copy of the 1947 publication through Amazon.com - they sent him from Australia. The heroine of the novel and the film, the former Soviet ballerina Olga Alexandrova, is saved under a stranger in Austria from forced repatriation in the USSR.

Marshall wrote his novel based on personal experience. I wondered: is there a real story behind this plot?

I did not find a specific prototype of Olga, but I now know a few similar destinies.

In 2003, Berlin Das Dokumbartheater staged the play "Ballerina for barbed wire." The annotation says that the plot of the play is based on the real story of the dancer of Alla Rakityanskaya, who was aimed at Nazis for forced labor in Germany. There she was forced to dance in front of the German public, and after the war was repatriated to the Soviet Union and sentenced to 25 years of camps. In May 2010, when the theater came with this performance to Kiev, Alla Rakityanskaya, according to Ukrainian news agencies, was alive and lived in Dnepropetrovsk.

Valentina Pereyaslavets was born in 1907 in Yalta and at the age of nine was admitted to the ballet department of the Moscow Imperial Theater School. At the end of her studies in 1926, she entered the troupe of the Kharkov Opera and Ballet Theater, became his prima ballerina. According to then practice, she also performed on ballet scenes of Kyiv, Odessa and Sverdlovsk, spent three years in Leningrad, improving her professional skill under the leadership of Agrippina Vaganova. In 1939, she received an invitation to the Lviv Opera and Ballet Theater as a prima ballerina.

In July 1941, Lviv was occupied by the Nazis, and Valentina Pereyaslavets was sent to the Ostarbeter to the factory in Leipzig. After the war, Valentina Pereyaslavets ended up in a camp for displaced persons in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt, in the American occupation zone. There she organized a children's ballet circle, which gave a number of performances under the auspices of the Administration of Assistance and Restoration of the UN.

As already mentioned in the previous parts of the cycle, the Western allies did not consider the inhabitants of Western Ukraine by Soviet citizens, so Valentina Pereyaslavets avoided forced repatriation to the Soviet Union. In 1949, she received a visa to enter the United States. She arrived in America with 11 dollars in her pocket. She worked in Philadelphia: soap fruit, packaged cigarettes. Then she got a job in the specialty: first in the studio of Tatyana Semenova, the former soloist of the famous troupe Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and the Paris Opera, who organized her school in New York, then in 1951 moved to the American Ballet Theater, which had just opened school.

In this school, Pereyaslava taught more than 30 years, raising several generations of American dancers. She died in 1998, at the 91st year of her life.

In this miraculously preserved video, Rudolf Nureyev takes in London a class of Valentina Pereyaslavets. Closer to the end of the recording, she herself is visible.

Another name, well known to American ballet professionals, is Elena Dudina, or Helen Dudin, as they called her in America. I do not know how she was behind the ocean - most likely, about the same as Valentina Pereyaslavets. Before the war, she danced in Kyiv. In 1954, she became a teacher of the American ballet school George Balanchin. Her Kyiv friend Antonina Tumkovskaya brought her to school. Here is my main story about her.

Antonina Tumkovskaya, New York, 1948. Photo by Fred Melton.

Antonina Dmitrievna Tumkovskaya was born in 1905 in the family estate of her father in the Chernigov province. She studied at the famous Kyiv Funukleevsky female gymnasium. Like a noblewoman, Antonin did not want to take a ballet school, and only exceptional physical data helped her overcome this barrier. She graduated from the Kiev ballet school in 1923 and at the same time, 18 years old, debuted on the stage of the Kyiv Opera and Ballet Theater and quickly grown to the soloist. She danced in Bolshoi and Kirovsky. But in the history of the Soviet ballet it is impossible to find her name - it is deleted from there.

What happened to the Kyiv Theater during the war years? And on his own website , and on Wikipedia it is written that the theater was evacuated to Ufa, then to Irkutsk. But this is not entirely true. On the eve of the outbreak of war, on June 21, 1941, the troupe received a vacation, a large group of artists went on tickets to the Crimea. They had no opportunity to get to Kyiv from there. Many did not see this special need, because Soviet propaganda inspired citizens that the war would be short and victorious, the fighting would be mainly waged in the enemy. So did, in particular, the outstanding opera bass Boris Gmyry. To the concern of his colleagues, according to eyewitnesses, he answered with a careless grin: “Why are you, a week in a week will end! And here is warm, good ...” As a result, he had to engage in “cultural services” of German troops.

On November 27, 1941, he opened the new theater season Grosse Oper Kiew - this was now called the Kiev Opera and Ballet Theater. Artists who did not manage to evacuate worked in it. The director and artistic director was appointed conductor Wolfgang Trutkerner. In the repertoire were LoEngrin and Tangeyer Wagner in the language of the original, “Queen of Spades”, “Carmen”, “Travate”, “Aida” ... In the spring of 1942, about the premiere of Faust, the Reviewer “wrote” the new Ukrainian word “wrote:

Orientation to new Europe for the Kyiv opera, as for each theater, is needed as air. Only this will enable the theater to finally get rid of the cargo of "methods of Soviet realism", dull limited in art.

The ballet troupe also worked. On June 20, 1942, on the occasion of the visit to Kyiv, the Reich Minister for Eastern Territories of Alfred Rosenberg and in the presence of the Reich Commissioner of Ukraine Erich Kokha Grosse Oper Kiew gave Coppelia Deliba.

It is likely that Antonina Tumkovskaya also participated in this performance. In 1943, she, along with her younger sister, also ballerina, and her niece left for Germany. She danced in concert programs on the territory of the Reich and the occupied countries of Europe, as many other European artists, mobilized for the "cultural service" of the highest race.

Antonina Tumkovskaya with a student. New York, 1959. Photo Martha Swope.

In the period between the two world wars, as evidenced by the Russian dancer Lilian Karina in his book "Dancing under the Swastika" , the Berlin ballet scene was flooded with artists from Russia. She writes:

The ballet was "Russified", and even non-Russian dancers took the scenic names sounding in Russian in order to certify their high class.

The Nazis' coming to power became a disaster for German ballet: Jews and homosexuals were subjected to repression. In particular, the famous Berlin artist of ballet, Sasha Leontyev, who was born in Riga, whose real name was Mikhail Katz, died in August 1942 at the Mauthausen concentration camp.

Apparently, in 1944 there was a meeting of Tumkovskaya with General Malyshkin. They got married.

In August 1938, Vasily Malyshkin, then the brigade commander, was arrested in Moscow on charges of participating in a "military-fascist conspiracy". Due to the grave tortures, he signed recognition, but at a meeting of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, he refused to testify. The case was sent for the investigation, but it was no longer possible to carry out repeated confrontations, since the "accomplices" of Malyshkin was already shot. He was saved by Berievskaya "liberalization" of the methods of work of the NKVD. In the fall of 1939, he was released, completely rehabilitated and restored in rank. At the beginning of the war, Major General of the Red Army Malyshkin was the chief of staff of the 19th Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Lukin. In October 1941, the army was surrounded by Vyazma (then four armies were then in the infamous Vyazemsky Cauline). Lukin and Malyshkin were captured. Subsequently, Malyshkin became one of General Vlasov’s closest employees.

Andrey Vlasov and Viliy Malyshkin. Photo from the book: Joachim Hoffmann. The history of the Vlasov army. YMCA-Press. Paris, 1990

In February 1945, Malyshkin and Tumkovskaya, together with other employees of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (CONR), were evacuated to Karlsbad, from there in April in Füssen (Bavaria). Malyshkin had a Vlasov order to come into contact with the Western allies. Malyshkin and Tumkovskaya lived in the house of the famous novelist Edwin Dvinger, who had a Russian mother. On May 1, the city was occupied by American troops. Malyshkin went to the headquarters of the 7th Army and entered into negotiations with its commander General Alexander Sandy Patch. However, on May 8, the war ended, and Malyshkin was taken according to the experience. It was transferred to the Soviet military authorities on March 25, 1946, sentenced to death and, together with other cases sentenced to the same case in the courtyard of Butyrsky prison on August 1 of the same year.

The Carlsbad-Fuussen period includes Malyshkin's diary records published by Kirill Alexandrov in the book "Russian soldiers of the Wehrmacht". They repeatedly mention Antonina Tumkovskaya, often under the reducing names of Tosha and Tonchik.

28.2. Our day! This was preceded by a three -day flu and my stories Tonchik about Paris. (DOPICAL DIRECTURE 4: as I do not have enough my native T.)

March. The period of idleness, endless conversations about the sending of the authorized ... Walks with lobes in the vicinity of Karlsbad ...

6.5. Exactly a week, as I broke up with a rack. Something she thinks now ...

10.5. Today is the day of the bright memory of Valyusha (the younger sister of Antonina Tumkovskaya. - V.A.). Exactly a year ago, she died at the raid of Ammer. bombers at Art. Craile (35 km north of Paris). Obviously, my Tosha is also a mourning day today.

26.5. Today I saw Tonchik for the first time in a dream. And therefore even more acutely I feel separation from my native.

They were no longer destined to see. The Soviet occupation authorities demanded her return to her homeland. Judging by the interview , which Tumkovskaya gave many years later in a rare moment of revelation (usually she categorically refused to talk about this period of her biography), representatives of the Soviet repatriation mission in Bavaria met her personally. But she did not succumb to their promises. “They wanted too much from me,” said Tumkovskaya then. “But I'm smart. No. No.” At that moment, the journalist writes, her pale green eyes lit up with emerald fire.

Antonina Tumkovskaya was absolutely right: as a member of the family of the commander who surrendered, she was subject to arrest according to the famous order of Stalin about deserters of August 16, 1941. In addition, she was the wife of not a simple traitor to the homeland, but an outstanding one, and she herself was an accomplice of the enemy from the point of view of Soviet justice.

Members of the leadership of the Vlasov movement, from left to right: Colonel Vladimir Boyarsky, Yuri Zherebkov (with a hat in his hands), Major General Malyshkin (Far right). Paris, 1943. Photo from the book: Joachim Hoffmann. The history of the Vlasov army. YMCA-Press. Paris, 1990

To the honor of the Americans, they refused the demands of the Soviet occupation administration to be forcibly transfer to her Tumkovskaya. In 1949, Antonina Dmitrievna from her niece received visas for entry into the United States. In the same year, she became a teacher at the Balanchin school and worked there for 54 years. She retired in 2003, when she was 94 years old. Antonina Tumkovskaya died in the 102nd year of her life in the House of the elderly Tolstoy farm in a suburbs of New York Valley-Kottes.

Among my friends was a man who knew all three heroines of this story well. Robert Majorano , in the past, the soloist of New York City Ballet, for four years was a student of Antonina Tumkovskaya, took lessons from Elena Dudina, and the class of Valentina Pereyaslavvets visited an adult dancer. He talks about them, especially about Tumkovskaya, with respect and warmth, and still does not allow himself familiarity: unlike later students who called Tumkov’s eyes simply “Tumi”, Robert calls her and Dudin “Madame Tumkov” and “Madame Dudin”.

Among other things, Robert recalls that Tumkovskaya always wore closed shoes. From one of her students, he heard that she was crippled by the joints of the toes, "because she refused to dance for the Nazis." But I can’t trust this testimony to the end - I had to read the same thing at ballet forums and about Valentina Pereyaslavets.

Continuation read here .