Valery Panov, ballet star who fought to leave the USSR, dies at 87

Boston Globe

26-06-2025

The struggle of Mr. Panov, who was half Jewish, to leave the Soviet Union was taken up by Western political leaders and arts celebrities, and it served to dramatize the plight of Soviet Jews and dissidents who sought free emigration in a period of Cold War tensions.
His high profile as an internationally known dancer made him a prime target of the Communist authorities. Using world tours of Russia's famous ballet companies for propaganda purposes, they diligently policed the troupes against defectors.
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Denounced by fellow Kirov dancers for seeking to emigrate, Mr. Panov was trailed by the KGB and at one point jailed for 10 days on a charge of hooliganism, for supposedly spitting on a man who had accosted him. He also engaged in a hunger strike.
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His desire for artistic and personal freedom -- and perhaps a more lucrative career in the West -- was championed by Prime Minister Harold Wilson of Britain, Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington, and a raft of American celebrities, including Carol Channing, Harold Prince, and Tony Perkins, who held a rally for him in New York City in March 1974.
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By then, after a three-week hunger strike, Mr. Panov had been told that he could leave but that his wife, Galina Ragozina, who was not Jewish, could not.
Mr. Panov was emotive and given to high drama in his dancing and choreography, as well as in interviews and in his occasional writings. He refused to emigrate without his wife.
'I have a little more strength left to fight,' he told columnist Anthony Lewis of The New York Times, who in 1973 visited the couple's cramped apartment in Leningrad, where the Kirov was based. 'Then I must get out or my life is over -- there is no more me,' he added.
When Mr. Panov first applied to emigrate, in March 1972, Ragozina, a principal dancer with the Kirov, was pressured to denounce her husband at a meeting of the dance company. She refused.
'Out of the theater, you traitors, Fascists, Zionists!' one ballerina, a Communist Party member, shouted at the couple, according to a timeline written by Mr. Panov that the Times published in 1974.
Ragozina was demoted to the corps de ballet and soon left the company.
Both dancers were finally granted exit visas to Israel in June 1974, after leading artists in Britain threatened to boycott a London visit by the Bolshoi Ballet.
The Panovs, as the couple became known professionally in the West, danced soon afterward in Israel before an audience of 3,000, including Prime Minister Golda Meir. They received a thunderous 11-minute ovation.
They made their first American appearance together in 1975, in Philadelphia, in a program of pas de deux at a 15,000-seat sports arena.
Mr. Panov went on to have a prominent dance career, mainly in Europe, although he was never as celebrated as his fellow Russian ballet defectors Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
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Clive Barnes, a dance critic for the Times, described Mr. Panov 'as nimble as quicksilver' in the Philadelphia performance.
Regarded as one of ballet's leading performers in dramatic roles as well as a bravura technician, Mr. Panov had performed in the United States in 1959, but the Soviet authorities, fearing he was too fond of Western freedoms, refused to let him tour abroad again.
After they were allowed to emigrate, the Panovs danced as guest artists in Europe and in the United States with various companies, including the San Francisco Ballet, and at a gala with Margot Fonteyn in Chicago. But they were frustrated that no major company had asked them to join it as principal dancers.
Reviews of their dancing were sometimes mixed, and the word in the dance world was that the couple's celebrity had outstripped their artistry.
Anna Kisselgoff of the Times pushed back, writing, 'Anyone familiar with Soviet ballet would understand that no dancer could become a principal and dance leading parts in the Kirov Ballet, as the Panovs did, without such outstanding talent.'
In 1977, the couple achieved a breakthrough when they were invited to join the Berlin Opera Ballet; Mr. Panov was also hired to choreograph.
The next year, Kisselgoff described Mr. Panov's dancing in his own version of Igor Stravinsky's 'The Rite of Spring' in New York as 'stupendous,' with 'goatlike leaps and snake slithers.'
For the Berlin troupe, Panov created a ballet based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel 'The Idiot' and performed in a production of it in 1980 with Nureyev, also a former Kirov dancer. It was their first onstage reunion in 20 years.
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In 1984, Mr. Panov became director of the Royal Ballet of Flanders, the Belgian state dance company, for which he created a ballet based on Anton Chekhov's play 'The Three Sisters.'
But the company fired him in 1987, accusing him of shirking the administrative duties that went along with his creative role. His ouster prompted a sit-in by dancers, who protested that he had lifted the quality of the company.
He went on to become dance director for the Bonn municipal opera in Germany. His marriage to Ragozina ended in divorce.
He was born Valery Shulman on March 12, 1938, in Vitebsk, Belarus. He was raised in Moscow and Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. His father, Matvei Shulman, was an administrator of state institutions overseeing leather goods production. His mother was Elizaveta Petrovna Charitonova.
Valery began ballet training in Vilnius and studied further in Moscow and Leningrad before joining the Kirov Ballet (now the Mariinsky Ballet) in 1964.
From his father, who was Jewish, he absorbed a disdain for his ethnicity, internalizing the intense antisemitism of the Soviet state. Early on, he was told that the name Shulman would limit his future as a dancer. He adopted the surname of his first wife, Liya Panova.
'I took the opportunity of marriage to join my father's cowardice' about being a Jew, he wrote in a 1978 autobiography, 'To Dance,' written with George Feifer.
Israel's Six-Day War in June 1967 awakened in Mr. Panov a sense of his Jewishness, at the same time that it fanned institutional discrimination against Jews in the Soviet Union, which backed Israel's Arab foes. Many Soviet Jews sought to emigrate.
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In Israel, Mr. Panov and his third wife, Ilana Yellin-Panov, a former ballerina, founded the Panov Ballet Theater in Ashdod in 1998. In 2009, at 42, she jumped to her death from the couple's apartment building. According to Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, she was suffering from depression.
Mr. Panov, then 71, told the paper that he had fathered four children: a young son with Yellin-Panov; a son, who was living in Russia, from his marriage to Ragozina; a son from his first marriage who had died; and a daughter from a liaison in Europe. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
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