Soviet Ballet Tours America: The Bolshoi Is Back

It has been nearly a decade since the Bolshoi Ballet last visited these shores. On that occasion in the summer of 1979, three of the leading dancers of the USSR's most celebrated ballet company defected to the West (Alexander Godunov in New York near the beginning of the tour, and Leonid and Valentina Kozlov in Los Angeles at the end). At the time, most people predicted that the USSR was going to punish the famous troupe in the same way as it had dealt with the Kirov Ballet a few years earlier.