Then I realized that something had happened.” He immediately got on a flight to Moscow, where he played an important role defending the city against the attempted takeover. “I turned on the TV and saw the swans dancing,” Filatov told the Moscow Times.
Sergei Filatov, a member of the Russian legislature, was on vacation at the time. In August 1991, Ross writes, when a group of communist hard-liners attempted to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev’s government, television programs again were interrupted for days, the only thing on state TV was a continuous loop of Swan Lake.
Swan Lake was so often the backdrop for Soviet political upheaval that seeing it on television became a tip-off that all was not well in Moscow. The same happened following the deaths of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. The broadcasts were a stalling tactic, meant to block access to the news while the Soviet leadership settled on a succession plan. When Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982, after nearly two decades in power, state-controlled television stations cut into programming not with news of his death or an announcement of who would next lead the country, but with broadcasts of Swan Lake “in its full-length, four-act, three hour expanse,” writes Stanford dance historian Janice Ross in her new book, Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia. For many Russians, the opening strains of Tchaikovsky’s score are as likely to remind them of political upheaval as they are the beauty of classical ballet. Why Swan Lake? It may seem like a random artistic choice, but to anyone who lived in the former USSR, it made perfect sense. In the background, the site played a looped video from the ballet Swan Lake. On the site, big, bold numbers counted, in real time, the days, hours, minutes, and seconds since Putin had last been seen. Andrii Kapranov, who works in web marketing in Kiev, lost no time in creating a website to track the Russian leader’s disappearance. Ukrainians, at war with Russian-backed separatists in the east of their country, were particularly excited by the latter possibility. Speculation spun out of control: was his mistress giving birth to a secret child? Had he had a stroke? Or plastic surgery? Was it a coup? His meetings were cancelled, he disappeared from the public eye, and the Kremlin refused to explain what was going on. For nearly eleven days in mid-March, Vladimir Putin was missing.
0 kommentar(er)
