Olga Lepeshinskaya (dancer)

Olga Vasilyevna Lepeshinskaya (Ольга Васильевна Лепешинская; 28 September 1916 – 20 December 2008 ) was a Soviet ballerina.

From the early years Lepeshinskaya showed her talents in dancing and in the 1925 she was admitted to the Bolshoi Choreographic School.

She appeared for the first time on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre at the age of ten as one of the little birds in the ballet The Daughter of the Snows.

In 1932, she played the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker ballet.

Lepeshinskaya graduated from Bolshoi Choreographic School and started working the Bolshoi Theatre.

She started as Rosina in a ballet of The Barber of Seville (Тщетная предосторожность) performed by the second stage of the theater.

In 1935, she performed the main role in the Three Fat Men ballet by Yury Olesha.

The ballet became very popular and the 18-year-old ballerina became famous.

Lepeshinskaya performed in private concerts at the Moscow Kremlin from the age of 17.

She was very close to Polina Zhemchuzhina, wife of Vyacheslav Molotov.

It was a great shock for her when Zhemchuzhina was imprisoned in a Gulag.

Lepeshinskaya was known as the favourite ballerina of Joseph Stalin and even rumoured to be his mistress.

In February 1940, the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad first performed their Don Quixote ballet with Lepeshinskaya as Kitry.

The ballet was a great success.

In 1941, when the Stalin Prize was established, Lepeshinskaya was among the first laureates of the prize for her performance in Don Quixote.

Altogether Lepesinskaya received four Stalin Prizes.

With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War Lepeshinskaya became a member of the Front brigade of the Bolshoi Theater.

The brigade performed near the front lines, in hospitals, in Moscow and in Saratov where the Bolshoi was evacuated.

Lepeshinskaya was a member of the brigade until the end of World War II.

Her performances near the battlefields were filmed in the 1941 Soviet Documentary Kontsert – Frontu (Concerto to the Front).

In 1942, the Soviet Youth Anti-Fascist Committee was organized.

Lepeshinskaya was its Deputy chairperson.

In 1943, she became a member of the Communist Party.

Lepeshinskaya married a Soviet intelligence MGB general Leonid Raykhman (known as the handler of Nikolai Kuznetsov).

In 1943, she starred as Assol in the Bolshoi premiere of Scarlet Sails.

On 9 May, she was with her Bolshoi brigade with Soviet troops in Warsaw.

The next day she received her invitation to perform in the Bolshoi's production of Cinderella.

The ballet, first performed on 21 November 1945, was the first post-war show at the Bolshoi.

Lepeshinskaya won her second Stalin prize for her performance.

She received her third Stalin prize for her performance in the Flames of Paris and the fourth prize for the Tao-Hoa role in The Red Poppy.

She was named a People's Artist of the USSR in 1951.

Lepeshinskaya was born to an old Polish noble family in Kyiv, Russian Empire (now the capital of Ukraine).

Her grandfather, Vasily Pavlovich Lepeshinsky, was arrested as a member of the revolutionary organization Narodnaya Volya.

Her father, Vasily Vasilyevich Lepeshinsky, was a railway engineer, one of the builders of the Chinese Eastern Railway.

He was arrested on 19 October 1951 as an alleged participant in the fabricated Zionist Plot in MGB.

Lepeshinskaya claimed that her appeals to Stalin saved the life of her husband.

In March 1953, after Stalin's death, Raykhman was freed, rehabilitated and appointed the head of MVD Control Commission.

In August 1953, he was arrested again that time for his own fabrications of criminal cases, tortures of prison inmates and other violations of the "Socialist Law".

He was sentenced to five years in prison in August 1956 but amnestied in November 1956.

After that, he did research work in astronomy.