Male dancers were impressive—they communicated the muscle and the determination of the Soviet people, strong calves and arms a fleshly shorthand for artillery and armaments—but ballerinas even more so. The ballerina, with her sweetness and her secret strength, could convey all that had to be said to the West and the rest of the world. You could fall in love with her and not know you were falling in love with Russia; you could appreciate the graceful reach of her port de bras and not know that you were appreciating the distillation of a thousand years of history into a single sweep of the arms. You could admire the sculptured elegance of her body as a work of art, not considering what it really was—the work of an athlete who had trained for her entire life in Soviet gyms, supported by the Soviet state, fed on Soviet crops, and dressed in fabrics made by Soviet factories. A male dancer could impress, but a ballerina could dance out and disarm the world, could leave the audience asking what sort of philosophy had produced something so beautiful.
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