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 Plisetskaya died of a heart attack in Munich, Russian media
reported on Saturday evening, citing the director of the Bolshoi
theater Vladimir Urin. Her death was "a huge loss not only for
Russian culture, but also for the whole world of ballet", he
told RIA news agency.
Plisetskaya had lived since 1991 in Munich, where she moved with
her husband, composer Rodion Shedrin, following the collapse of
the Soviet Union.
In a career spanning six decades, she gained international fame
for a fiery, emotional style that contrasted with the more
demure performances traditionally expected of ballerinas.
Under Joseph Stalin her family were branded "enemies of the
people", her father falling victim in 1938 to one of the
regime's bloody purges while her mother was sentenced to several
years in a labor camp.
Plisetskaya was also disadvantaged by growing up Jewish at a
time in the late 1940s and early 1950s when the Soviet leader
was gripped with paranoia about imaginary 'Zionist' plots.
"Endless suffering and humiliation fill my memory," she wrote in
her 2001 autobiography.
"What drove her past all obstacles and hazards were her
unbending determination and her refusal to do things any way but
her own," dance critic Robert Gottlieb wrote in the Los Angeles
Times in 2001.
Plisetskaya was born in Moscow in 1925, spending part of her
childhood in a Russian mining colony run by her engineer father
on the barren Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen.
She appears to have inherited her artistic talents from her
mother's side. Her mother Rachel Messerer-Plisetskaya was a
silent movie star while an aunt and uncle both danced for the
Bolshoi.
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Studying at the famous Moscow ballet school from the age of nine,
she first danced for the Bolshoi at 11, joining it permanently in
1943 and becoming its lead ballerina in 1960.
Fearing that she might defect to the West, Soviet authorities banned
Plisetskaya from traveling abroad until 1959, when Nikita Khrushchev
lifted the travel ban in response to her growing popularity.
Khrushchev, who had rehabilitated Plisetskaya's parents along with
thousands of other victims of Stalin, described her as "not only as
the best ballerina in the Soviet Union, but the best in the world".
She joined a celebrated 1959 Bolshoi tour of the United States and
Canada, performing as Odette-Odile in Tchaikovsky's masterpiece
"Swan Lake", her signature role and which she later said she
prepared for by studying the movements of actual swans in the park.
Plisetskaya stayed with the Bolshoi until her retirement in 1990,
directing and teaching as well as dancing.
President Vladimir Putin expressed "deep, sincere condolences" at
her death, the Kremlin said, while Boris Akimov, a star of the 1960s
and 1970s who danced with Plisetskaya, told news agency Tass: "She
was a ballerina from God."
(Reporting By Jason Bush; editing by John Stonestreet)
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