Fifty years later, it’s difficult to convey the cataclysmic impact of Mikhail Baryshnikov’s defection to the West. In 1974, ballet was hot. The “dance boom”—the art form’s interval of unmatched popularity in America—was on. The Cold War with the Soviet Union was of nearly three decades’ duration, and the U.S. government had learned—well after the Soviets—how to incorporate classical dance into its image flexing. And then came an unforeseen windfall: the consummate classical technician, whose appearance onstage suggested an Icarus whose wings never melted, touched down on our side.
A star of the U.S.S.R.’s Leningrad-based Kirov Ballet, Baryshnikov had already proved a sensation on the Kirov’s foreign tours. It was just another night on the road—June 29, 1974—when the 26-year-old dancer, in Toronto as part of a small Russian touring group, left the theater after a performance and sprinted from his colleagues toward a waiting car.
