Rudolf’s dance with danger
QUESTION Did defectors to the West, such as ballet star Rudolf Nureyev, revisit their homeland?
Following Mikhail gorbachev’s late 1980s policies of glasnost (being more ‘open’) and perestroika (to ‘rebuild’), and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it became increasingly easy for defectors to return to the Motherland.
Rudolf nureyev returned only once. The opulence of his life in exile contrasted starkly with the poverty of his birth on a Trans-Siberian train in 1938 into a poor Bashkir-Tatar family.
nureyev’s extrovert personality and homosexuality had long caused problems with the Soviet leadership.
During a tour of the west with the Kirov Ballet in 1961, he slipped away from his KgB minders at le Bourget airport in Paris and claimed asylum.
in 1987, nureyev, who was then director of the Paris opera ballet, was granted a 48-hour visa to visit his sick mother.
‘My mother is very old and suffering. i am very moved,’ was all he had to say on the matter.
natalia Makarova defected from the Soviet Union while on tour with the Kirov Ballet in london in 1970. She returned to Russia in 1994 to film a segment of the BBC’s great Railway Journeys. Starting at her home town of St Petersburg (then leningrad), she and her teenage son took a luxury steam train south to Tashkent. During the trip, she paid emotional visits to Moscow, Volgograd (Stalingrad) and Astrakhan.
Two other famous ballet dancer defectors, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Alex godunov, refused to return home.
in contrast, conductor and pianist Maxim Shostakovich — son of Dmitri Shostakovich, the most famous Russian composer — fled the Soviet Union in 1981 due to ‘ cultural stagnation’ under Brezhnev. After spells conducting the new orleans Symphony orchestra and the Hong Kong Philharmonic orchestra, he decided to return to live in St Petersburg in 1994.
‘i want my children to grow up in Russia, to feel like real Russians,’ he said. Andrew Simons, King’s Lynn, Norfolk. QUESTION Is it true Cliff Richard only started recording his early hits when his mother had arrived at the studio? CliFF’S mother, Dorothy webb, was so proud of her teenage son’s achievements that fans who turned up at the family home, a council house in Cheshunt, Herts, were invited in for tea and cakes.
But there is no truth in the tall tale that Cliff would not record at london’s Abbey Road unless his mother was present.
Far from being shy and nervous, the former Harry webb was a confident young performer. like so many of that 1950s era who had been inspired by Elvis Presley, he was an experienced performer at the age of 17.
with his school vocal group the Quintones, he had performed gospel/folk/ Christian songs at local churches and youth clubs.
on July 24, 1958, Cliff recorded his debut single Move it at Abbey Road Studios.
Before its release in August, Cliff and The Drifters did a short season at the Butlin’s holiday camp in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex. Move it stormed up the charts, peaking at no 2, and was the first hit of Cliff’s 60 year-plus pop career. Rob Bradford, Thatcham, Berks.