Speaking of anti-communists, I hope readers had a chance to watch PBS' broadcast of the BBC documentary Nureyev: The Russian Years last night on Great Performances. The documentary was fascinating, and explained why the Soviet ballet star defected to the West--he faced 5 years in a Siberian prison camp for homosexual behavior, which just might have been his death sentence. Having just read David Caute's The Dancer Defects, with a chapter on Nureyev, the film seemed particularly vivid and compelling. The face-off between KGB and French police at Le Bourget airport at the moment of Nureyev's leap to freedom was dramatized beautifully in a first-person eyewitness account. Nice clips of Nureyev dancing both in Russia and the West, too.
You can read my review of The Dancer Defects at Amazon.com.
