Rudolf Nureyev – Part 1

These are some excerpts and comment from the biography I was reading over Easter. I shall include it in the next Diary for April. This is the first half in advance and concerns the lives of Rudolf’s parents as a young couple. They belong to the first generation who were building a life under the Russian Revolution.

Rudolf Nureyev was the-boy-who-was-born-on-a-train, 17^th Mar.’38. His mother, Farida was travelling with her 3 daughters and other wives to meet their husbands serving in the Red Army’s Eastern Division.

The couple met in the 1920’s in the Tatar capital, Kazan. Rudolf’s father, Hamet was studying at the Tatar Academy, Farida worked in her brother’s bakery – restaurant and became an excellent cook.

Times were optimistic during this period of the NEP- the New Economic Policy.

(Not all, only some, became party members. Orwell in “1984” makes it clear that rulers are ruthless in brainwashing the Party members, they did not fear the masses. Party members should not be too intellectual or too kind: Hamet was discharged from the army, a humiliating blow – he was a major- because he became too close to his men and he had socialized with Polish soldiers).

Hamet’s request for transfer from the far east to Moscow was granted.

The family was told to leave Moscow taking only essentials. Soon after Harriet arranged for Farida and the children to stay in the town of Ufa.

Rudolf remembers “those endless six-month-long winters in Ufa without light and almost no food”. They had sold everything “my father’s civilian clothes, his belts, his braces, his boots.” Farida made regular excursions on foot to Hamet’s family in Asanova, a distance of 60 kilometres.

(job) – in an ice-cream factory.