Dancing for Stalin: A True Story of Extraordinary Courage and Survival in the Soviet Gulag (Paperback)
Christina Ezrahi (author)Published: 16/03/2023
A heartwrenching story of how far people are prepared to go for love, Ezrahi’s engrossing biography charts a ballerina's fall from grace in Stalin’s Soviet Union, and how her husband stopped at nothing to rescue her from the Gulags.
Nina Anisimova was one of Russia's most intriguing ballerinas and one of the first Soviet female choreographers. Yet few knew that her exemplary career concealed a dark secret.
In 1938, at the height of Stalin's Great Terror, Nina was arrested by the secret police, accused of being a Nazi spy and sentenced to forced labour in a camp in Kazakhstan. Trapped without hope - and without winter clothes in temperatures of minus 40 degrees - her art was her salvation, giving her a reason to fight for her life.
As Nina struggled to survive in the Gulag, her husband fought for her release in Leningrad. Against all odds, she was ultimately freed and astonishingly managed to return to her former life, just as war broke out. Despite wartime deprivation and the suffocating grip of Stalin's totalitarian state, Nina's irrepressible determination set her on the path to become an icon of the Kirov Ballet.
A remarkable true story of suffering and injustice, of courage, resilience and triumph.
Publisher: Elliott & Thompson Limited
ISBN: 9781783966981
Number of pages: 320
Dimensions: 198 x 129 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'Christina Ezrahi vividly charts this brutal and uplifting story, bringing alive an extraordinary resourcefulness and determination to survive.' - Helen Rappaport, author of The Race to Save the Romanovs
'Nina Anisimova's story is extraordinary - heroic and harrowing in equal measure, a snapshot of the best and worst of Stalin's Russia - and Christina Ezrahi does it vivid, gripping justice.' - Judith Mackrell, author of Going with the Boys
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“Rich Research and an Inspiring Story!”
As a History graduate, with a similar research field, I was looking forward to read this book so so much - and it did not disappoint. I really wish I would have read this book when I was going to university - it is... More
“Beauty and horror”
A terrific history book, capturing the grace of the ballet and the fire of Nina’s character, juxtaposed with the paranoid brutality of Stalin’s secret police and the terror of the Gulags.
Gripping and easy to...
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“Meticulously researched, Fantastic story”
I was sent this book for free in return for an honest review.
‘Dancing for Stalin,’ starts in the archives of St Petersburg and takes us on a journey through the years of ‘The Terror,’ under Joseph Stalin the leader...
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