Isadora Duncan's Bolshevik Days

Between performances, Duncan found time to have an active social life in Moscow, hosting various Russian bohemians and foreign journalists in her home in gatherings that often featured her performances. It was in this vibrant setting that Isadora fell in love with the imagist poet Sergei Yesenin. Yesenin was twenty-six years old—seventeen years younger than Duncan—and was as much a provocateur as she. He spoke only Russian, a language of which Duncan knew very little, but this apparently posed little barrier to romance. Yesenin was also a heavy drinker, and drink made him violent; their relationship, while passionate, was turbulent.

In May 1922, Duncan and Yesenin married and flew to Berlin, leaving in charge Irma Duncan, one of the six dancers from the original Berlin school whom Isadora had “adopted.” In an interview she gave to a reporter from the New York Herald at the Hotel Adlon, the city’s finest hotel, Duncan sounded relieved to be back among the bourgeois comforts she had denigrated in leaving the West for Soviet Russia. “The Russian people are very lovable and I intend to go back there next year, but it is great to return to a place where one can have warm water, napkins and comforts again.”⁸ And she made no secret of the financial strain she was under: “The Soviet Government promised me a thousand pupils, but I received only forty, and found it necessary to contribute toward their food out of my own money.” A month later, the Herald reported that Isadora’s school in Moscow was “broke.” Adding to her woes, the paper also reported, her marriage to Yesenin, in making her a citizen of Russia, complicated her travel plans, as she and her husband, still in Berlin, awaited passports to Great Britain, France, and the United States.⁹

The tour that followed was as tempestuous as the rest of their relationship. They reached US shores at the beginning of October 1922. There they were held up by the immigration authorities, which seems to have been due in part both to her provocative politics and to her provocative performances. She and Yesenin released a statement to the press, which, as the Herald reporter noted, “seemed to be inspired in spots by the expectation of questions from American official sources.” The statement read:

We come to America with only one idea, to tell of the Russian conscience and to work for the rapprochement of the two great countries. No politics, no propaganda. After eight years of wars and revolutions, a Chinese wall is surrounding Russia. Europe itself, torn by war, hasn't enough strength to tear down that wall. Russia is in the shadows, but it is misfortune that has helped us. It was during the Russian famine that America made a generous gesture. Hoover has destroyed the Chinese wall.

The work of the American Relief Administration is unforgettable. Above everything else we wish to emphasize the fact that today there are only two countries in the world, Russia and America. In Russia there is an avid thirst to study America and her great people. May it not be that art will be the medium for a new Russian-American friendship? May the American woman with her keen intelligence help us in our task.¹⁰

While Isadora was in the States, in October 1922 Irma Duncan informed the ARA office in Moscow that government rations for the school—which at the time had forty-seven students enrolled, far short of the envisaged one thousand—would be discontinued. The ARA was not particularly keen on Isadora herself or her politics. Col. William Haskell, the ARA's director in Moscow, noted disapprovingly that “one of the mottoes on the school seal is a call for the proletarians of the world to unite.”¹⁷ He seemed to think the money of American donors could be put to better use than supporting Duncan’s Communist dance school. Nevertheless, the ARA came to the rescue, and the school was added to the list of institutions for which the ARA would take responsibility for supplying a daily supplementary meal, in addition to the remittance packages sent to the school by sympathetic donors in America. And the Duncan school was only one of many artistic institutions saved by the beneficence of the ARA—others included the great ballet schools and conservatories in Moscow and Petrograd (the former St. Petersburg) that had taught such luminaries as Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Pavlova, and Vaganova. Through the hardships of repression, famine, poverty, and disease, the ARA helped keep Russia’s artistic heart beating.

By the time of her return to Moscow in 1923, Duncan found it difficult to make ends meet. In fact, the situation must have seemed dire. She tried to purchase food packages for her school at the ARA's Moscow office using checks drawn in London from an empty bank account. This drew the ire of George Barr Baker, the ARA’s publicity chief based in New York. He expressed his displeasure in a letter to activist Helen Todd: “She talks about lack of freedom in the U.S.A!! If she played any such tricks against the Soviets she would quickly find herself locked up. If I had my way, I would have tried to have her arrested in England for issuing fraudulent checks.”¹⁸ As it happened, Baker asked Todd to suggest to any of Duncan’s friends “willing to do something for Russian children” that if they would refund the money, the ARA food packages would immediately be provided to the students at Duncan's school. When the ARA departed Soviet Russia in the summer of 1923, Duncan lost a lifeline for her school. She returned to Paris, for good, in the summer of 1924, leaving Irma Duncan to direct the school, which lived on till the end of the decade. For all Isadora's relentless denunciations of the hypocrisies and perversions of American society, ultimately it was American philanthropy that came to the rescue of Comrade Duncan in her hour of greatest need.