Valery Panov, a star of the renowned Kirov Ballet, who was fired when he sought to leave the Soviet Union in 1972 and whose two-year harassment by Soviet officials made him an international cause célèbre before he and his wife, a ballerina, finally won exit visas to Israel, died on June 3. He was 87.
His death was confirmed by the Israel Ballet, with whom he sometimes worked. It did not say where he died.
The struggle of Mr. Panov, who was half Jewish, to leave the Soviet Union was taken up by Western political leaders and arts celebrities, and it served to dramatize the plight of Soviet Jews and dissidents who sought free emigration in a period of Cold War tensions.
Mr. Panov’s high profile as an internationally known dancer made him a prime target of the Communist authorities. Using world tours of Russia’s famous ballet companies for propaganda purposes, they diligently policed the troupes against defectors whose preference for the West or Israel might humiliate the Soviet Union.
Denounced by fellow Kirov dancers for seeking to emigrate, Mr. Panov was trailed by the K.G.B. and at one point jailed for 10 days on a charge of hooliganism, for supposedly spitting on a man who had accosted him. He also engaged in a hunger strike.
Mr. Panov’s desire for artistic and personal freedom — and perhaps a more lucrative career in the West — was championed by Prime Minister Harold Wilson of Britain, Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington and a raft of American celebrities, including Carol Channing, Harold Prince and Tony Perkins, who held a rally for him in Manhattan in March 1974.
By then, after a three-week hunger strike, Mr. Panov had been told that he could leave but that his wife, Galina Ragozina, who was not Jewish, could not.
Mr. Panov was emotive and given to high drama in his dancing and choreography, as well as in interviews and in his occasional writings. He refused to emigrate without his wife.
“I have a little more strength left to fight,” he told the columnist Anthony Lewis of The New York Times, who in 1973 visited the couple’s cramped apartment in Leningrad, where the Kirov was based. “Then I must get out or my life is over — there is no more me,” he added.
Speaking of Ms. Ragozina, who was 11 years his junior, he said, “They tell people I am an evil magician who has cast a spell on her.”
When Mr. Panov first applied to emigrate, in March 1972, Ms. Ragozina, a principal dancer with the Kirov, was pressured to denounce her husband at a meeting of the dance company. She refused.
“Out of the theater, you traitors, Fascists, Zionists!” one ballerina, a Communist Party member, shouted at the couple, according to a timeline written by Mr. Panov that The Times published in 1974.
Ms. Ragozina was demoted to the corps de ballet and soon left the company.
Both dancers were finally granted exit visas to Israel in June 1974, after leading artists in Britain threatened to boycott a London visit by the Bolshoi Ballet.
The Panovs, as the couple became known professionally in the West, danced soon afterward in Israel before an audience of 3,000, including Prime Minister Golda Meir. They received a thunderous 11-minute ovation.
They made their first American appearance together in 1975, in Philadelphia, in a program of pas de deux at a 15,000-seat sports arena.
Mr. Panov went on to have a prominent dance career, mainly in Europe, although he was never as celebrated as his fellow Russian ballet defectors Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Clive Barnes, a dance critic for The Times, described Mr. Panov “as nimble as quicksilver” in the Philadelphia performance.
Years earlier, in 1968, in reviewing a Panov performance in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Mr. Barnes called him “one of the few great male dancers of the world.”
Regarded as one of ballet’s leading performers in dramatic roles as well as a bravura technician, Mr. Panov had performed in the United States in 1959, but the Soviet authorities, fearing he was too fond of Western freedoms, refused to let him tour abroad again.
After they were allowed to emigrate, the Panovs danced as guest artists in Europe and in the United States with various companies, including the San Francisco Ballet, and at a gala with Margot Fonteyn in Chicago. But they were frustrated that no major company had asked them to join it as principal dancers.
Reviews of their dancing were sometimes mixed, and the word in the dance world was that the couple’s celebrity had outstripped their artistry.
Anna Kisselgoff of The Times pushed back, writing, “Anyone familiar with Soviet ballet would understand that no dancer could become a principal and dance leading parts in the Kirov Ballet, as the Panovs did, without such outstanding talent.”
In 1977, the couple achieved a breakthrough when they were invited to join the Berlin Opera Ballet; Mr. Panov was also hired to choreograph.
The next year, Ms. Kisselgoff described Mr. Panov’s dancing in his own version of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” in New York as “stupendous,” with “goatlike leaps and snake slithers.”
For the Berlin troupe, Mr. Panov created a ballet based on Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Idiot” and performed in a production of it in 1980 with Mr. Nureyev, also a former Kirov dancer. It was their first onstage reunion in 20 years.
In 1984, Mr. Panov became director of the Royal Ballet of Flanders, the Belgian state dance company, for which he created a ballet based on Chekhov’s play “The Three Sisters.”
But the company fired him in 1987, accusing him of shirking the administrative duties that went along with his creative role. His ouster prompted a sit-in by dancers, who protested that he had lifted the quality of dancing at the company.
Mr. Panov went on to become dance director for the Bonn municipal opera in Germany. His marriage to Ms. Ragozina ended in divorce.
He was born Valery Shulman on March 12, 1938, in Vitebsk, Belarus, the town made famous by another native son, Marc Chagall. He was raised in Moscow and Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. His father, Matvei Shulman, was an administrator of state institutions overseeing leather goods production. His mother was Elizaveta Petrovna Charitonova.
Valery began ballet training in Vilnius and studied further in Moscow and Leningrad before joining the Kirov Ballet (now the Mariinsky Ballet), once the home of Pavlova and Nijinsky, in 1964.
From his father, who was Jewish, he absorbed a disdain for his ethnicity, internalizing the intense antisemitism of the Soviet state. Early on, he was told that the name Shulman would limit his future as a dancer. He adopted the surname of his first wife, Liya Panova.
“I took the opportunity of marriage to join my father’s cowardice” about being a Jew, he wrote in a 1978 autobiography, “To Dance,” written with George Feifer.
Israel’s Six-Day War in June 1967 awakened in Mr. Panov a sense of his Jewishness, at the same time that it fanned institutional discrimination against Jews in the Soviet Union, which backed Israel’s Arab foes. Many Soviet Jews sought to emigrate.
In Israel, Mr. Panov and his third wife, Ilana Yellin-Panov, a former ballerina, founded the Panov Ballet Theater in Ashdod in 1998. In 2009, at 42, she jumped to her death from the couple’s apartment building. According to Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, she was suffering from depression.
Mr. Panov, then 71, told the paper that he had fathered four children: a young son with Ms. Yellin-Panov; a son, who was living in Russia, from his marriage to Ms. Ragozina; a son from his first marriage, who had died; and a daughter from a liaison in Europe. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
Despite Mr. Panov’s long public association with Ms. Ragozina and her steadfast support during his ordeal in the Soviet Union, he indirectly slighted her in speaking to Haaretz, in an interview characteristic of his penchant for dramatic flourishes.
“Everyone always said that Valery Panov is a Don Juan, a lady-killer,” he said. “But the truth is far from that: Women loved me in order to get a job or to win fame or get protection or money.”
“The most beautiful women in the world wanted me, but they always wanted something from me,” he continued, before reflecting on his third wife. “All of them, except Ilana. She was the only one who loved me truly, who did not need anything from me.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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