Isadora Duncan's Bolshevik Days

During the 2021–22 academic year, the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) at Stanford University sponsored a directed reading course based at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. It was taught by Hoover research fellow Bertrand Patenaude, who also guest curated the exhibition Bread + Medicine: Saving Lives in a Time of Famine. The students researched the American Relief Administration Russian operations and chose unique topics for their final research papers. These papers are now presented as digital stories and are part of the Bread + Medicine online exhibition.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917, many among the country’s intelligentsia—the artists, professors, and professionals who had shaped the cultural and artistic life in late Imperial Russia—followed developments with considerable trepidation. While the revolution brought with it artistic and creative fervor, it also brought state violence and repression. The new regime was not uniformly hostile to art and artists, but it created an unfriendly environment for free thinkers who strayed beyond the new class view of things or those it considered political undesirables. In general, the Communists in power had little sympathy for the men and women who had reaped material wealth from artistic success under the old regime.
The famine that plagued Soviet Russia’s cities in 1919 and 1920 intensified the hardships of non-Communist artists and intellectuals. Many survived by fleeing the country and then found themselves unable or unwilling to return. Among those who stayed behind, most had their property confiscated and their jobs taken away and were forced to do manual labor in order to receive a government food ration. Many of these “former people,” as the dispossessed came to be called, came under suspicion as active enemies of the state. Those who managed to find employment were overworked and underpaid, and often very hungry.
Paradoxically, the Great Famine of 1921, which would claim at least six million lives, also brought hope to these intelligentsia, in the form of Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration (ARA). In addition to the kitchens feeding a daily meal to Soviet children, the ARA also ran a “supplementary” food remittance program.

большевик [Bolshevik] by Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev, 1920. Poster Collection RU/SU 781. Digital Record.
большевик [Bolshevik] by Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev, 1920. Poster Collection RU/SU 781. Digital Record.

Воскресникъ 14-го марта во дворцѣ труда [Sunday March 14 at the Palace of Labor], from the Boris Sokoloff album, circa 1920. Caption in album: "All the pipes are destroyed. All the refuses are thrown in the yard, thus making the atmosphere in the houses terrible. Then the occupants of the houses start cleaning up themselves according the law of compulsory work. There is shown a group of actors of the Little Theater cleaning the cess-pools. No. 23a." Boris Sokoloff photographs. Digital Record.
Воскресникъ 14-го марта во дворцѣ труда [Sunday March 14 at the Palace of Labor], from the Boris Sokoloff album, circa 1920. Caption in album: "All the pipes are destroyed. All the refuses are thrown in the yard, thus making the atmosphere in the houses terrible. Then the occupants of the houses start cleaning up themselves according the law of compulsory work. There is shown a group of actors of the Little Theater cleaning the cess-pools. No. 23a." Boris Sokoloff photographs. Digital Record.









Russian actors, circa 1922. ARA Russia, box 400, folder 1.
Russian actors, circa 1922. ARA Russia, box 400, folder 1.

Maria Kubalerova, pianist, Kazan, circa 1922. ARA Russia, box 402, folder 4.
Maria Kubalerova, pianist, Kazan, circa 1922. ARA Russia, box 402, folder 4.

Intelligentsia Relief, Members of Russian ballet take delivery of Food Remittances, circa 1922. ARA Russia, box 400, folder 1.
Intelligentsia Relief, Members of Russian ballet take delivery of Food Remittances, circa 1922. ARA Russia, box 400, folder 1.

Russian women measuring out sugar for some of the [ARA] food remittances, Moscow, circa 1922. Digital record.
Russian women measuring out sugar for some of the [ARA] food remittances, Moscow, circa 1922. Digital record.

Contents of a $10 food remittance package, circa 1921. Digital record.
Contents of a $10 food remittance package, circa 1921. Digital record.

Contents of a $10 Kosher food remittance package, circa 1921. Digital record.
Contents of a $10 Kosher food remittance package, circa 1921. Digital record.

Contents of a $10 food remittance package, circa 1921. Digital record. Variant 1. Variant 2.
Contents of a $10 food remittance package, circa 1921. Digital record. Variant 1. Variant 2.

Contents of a $10 food remittance package, circa 1921. Digital record. Variant 1.
Contents of a $10 food remittance package, circa 1921. Digital record. Variant 1.
It was mainly the remittance program that eventually brought aid and comfort to the country’s beleaguered artists and intellectuals by enabling donors overseas to purchase bulk quantities of staple foods—117 pounds constituting a $10 package—that the ARA would deliver to individuals or groups in Soviet Russia. Some of the ARA's beneficiaries happened to be faithful Communists. One of the true believers among them was not a Russian at all, but rather the American dancer Isadora Duncan (1877–1927), who had such an affinity for Soviet Communism that she was drawn to Soviet Russia to open a school in Moscow.

Isadora Duncan. A Russian print of her photograph inscribed "With Best regards, Isadora Duncan." Pasternak family papers (96063), box 38, folder H, Hoover Institution Archives.
Duncan was about as far from the traditional image of the Russian ballerina as it was possible to get. She was a pioneer in the field of modern dance: unconventional, intuitive, and naturalistic. She performed in loose clothing and in bare feet, and her movements emphasized expression and feeling over any particular style of technique, favoring the natural movements of the body. Duncan had achieved great success, although a mixed critical record, as a performer touring in Europe and America. She opened a school in Berlin, where she took on six protégées who would follow her around the world and eventually carry on her legacy. She later opened a school in Paris as well, though it lasted only briefly before the outbreak of World War 1 in 1914, after which she and a small number of her students returned to the United States. Before once again returning to Europe, she scandalized the audience during a 1917 performance in New York City, where, it was reported, she “told fashionable New York society from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House that they did not recognize real art.”1
Duncan’s outspoken politics were on the Left, so it was no surprise that she would be sympathetic to the Soviet experiment and that she would accept an invitation to direct a dance school in Moscow. She was living in Paris at the time and having difficulty finding the funds to support her efforts there. Duncan’s move to Moscow was negotiated by Soviet diplomat Leonid Krassin; the arrangement, as described in the New York Times, was for her to open a “dancing academy for a thousand children.”

Soviet politician and diplomat Leonid Borisovich Krasin (1870-1926), circa 1920-25. Bain News Service photograph collection, Library of Congress (LC-DIG-ggbain-34969).
Soviet politician and diplomat Leonid Borisovich Krasin (1870-1926), circa 1920-25. Bain News Service photograph collection, Library of Congress (LC-DIG-ggbain-34969).
In making the announcement, she told reporters: “The Soviet is the only Government that cared about art nowadays and about children. I can no longer go on with my work in Paris. The intellectuals have no more money and the expense of production is too great when I perform.” Clearly, she hoped the Soviets would be more able and willing to fund her artistic endeavors. She went so far as to state, “I expect to spend ten years in Russia. I will give my art to the Russians, whom I adore, and who will support me with splendid musicians and disinterested enthusiasm.” When asked whether she was concerned about a potential food shortage, Duncan replied:
“I fear spiritual hunger, but have no dread of hunger of the body. Privations don't count for me in advancing towards my ideal. It is the dream of my whole life that is being realized.”2

The New York Times, May 29, 1921. Copyright © The New York Times.

Isadora Duncan. A Russian print of her photograph inscribed "With Best regards, Isadora Duncan." Pasternak family papers (96063), box 38, folder H, Hoover Institution Archives.
Isadora Duncan. A Russian print of her photograph inscribed "With Best regards, Isadora Duncan." Pasternak family papers (96063), box 38, folder H, Hoover Institution Archives.

The New York Times, May 29, 1921. Copyright © The New York Times.
The New York Times, May 29, 1921. Copyright © The New York Times.
She arrived in Moscow in the late summer of 1921, and in October, despite the many obstacles in its path, the Isadora Duncan School of Dance opened in Moscow. From the outset it was a much smaller project than Duncan had hoped for, yet still it immediately ran into financial difficulties. Earlier that year Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin had introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP), a retreat to a partial market economy from the Communist program of recent years that had nationalized industry and banned trade. Duncan seems to have hoped to escape the commercial realities of art by coming to Moscow, but she soon discovered she would have to confront those realities among the Russians. There was no heat for the building and little food or clothing for the dancers, and the support of the government turned out to be much less than she had been counting on, amounting in the end only to free use of the building and government rations for her students.

Duncan, who insisted on being called “Tovarishch” (Comrade) Duncan, openly denounced this recent turn to capitalistic ways on the part of the Soviet Communists. Having arrived in Moscow with high hopes and seeing in the Soviet government a kind of financial savior, she realized that government support would be nowhere near sufficient to support her ambition to enroll a thousand students in her school. Her patron was Anatoly Lunacharsky, the people’s commissar of enlightenment, responsible for the country’s art galleries, theaters, and museums. To mark the opening of her school, Lunacharsky interviewed Duncan for the Soviet government newspaper Izvestiia [News].
“As to the famine I have no fear,” she told Lunacharsky. “My mother, a poor piano teacher with many children, frequently did not have enough to eat, but she always managed to appease her hunger by playing Schubert or Beethoven while we danced instead of eating. It was thus I made my debut as a danseuse.”3
Lunacharsky was sympathetic to the struggles of artists and openly grateful for the work of the ARA, but he could not overrule the belt tightening and strict accounting practices introduced under NEP. “At present,” Lunacharsky noted sympathetically, “Duncan is going through a phase of rather militant communism that sometimes, involuntarily, makes us smile.” In a memoir, Lunacharsky expressed regret that “we could only platonically thank her, give her paltry aid, and in the end, sadly shrug out shoulders, to tell her than our time was too harsh for such problems.”4 Money would remain a constant source of worry for the Duncan School in the sink-or-swim Soviet economic environment.

Anatoly Lunacharsky, Vladimir Steklov, Karl Radek and unidentified, 1922. Russian Pictorial collection (XX764), Hoover Institution Archives.
Anatoly Lunacharsky, Vladimir Steklov, Karl Radek and unidentified, 1922. Russian Pictorial collection (XX764), Hoover Institution Archives.

Anatoly Lunacharsky expressing his gratitude to William Haskell, ARA director, May 26, 1922. ARA Russia, box 522, folder5.
Anatoly Lunacharsky expressing his gratitude to William Haskell, ARA director, May 26, 1922. ARA Russia, box 522, folder5.
Duncan had come to Russia not only to teach but to dance. She had performed in Russia on three occasions previously, and now she made her return to the stages of Moscow. She composed two new works to études of Scriabin, said to be “charged with pity and terror” and inspired by the famine. She performed her controversial Marche Slav, which in the words of a Western critic used “the allegory of the Russian workman struggling to free himself from his chains and the Tsar’s heel as accompaniment to Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony.”5 She thus made a hymn to the monarchy sound revolutionary, and the Bolshevik faithful watching her on the Bolshoi stage seemed to approve. By now in her mid-forties, Duncan was rather past her physical prime as a performer, but this did not inhibit her from appearing in her customary wardrobe, which was minimal to the point of indecency for the standards of the time.
At a performance at one of the ARA personnel residences in Moscow on Thanksgiving Day 1921, she and her pupils performed the “Dance of the Enraged Proletariat.” One of the Americans on the scene, Frank Golder, a Stanford University historian and curator for the Hoover Library, wrote back to a colleague at Stanford about an epic party that night.
“The prize guest is Isadora Duncan and the woman is either drunk or crazy, perhaps both. She is half dressed and calls the boys to pull down her chimies, I think that is the way they are called. The poor ballet dancers have eaten and drank everything in sight and they are still hungry. . . . What may happen before morning I do not know.”6
Maxim Gorky, who abandoned Soviet Russia in 1922 and settled in Berlin, watched Duncan perform there when she was passing through the city, in the apartment of writer Alexey Tolstoy after an evening of eating and drinking vodka. Whatever epic struggle her performance was intended to portray, Gorky commented that her movements seemed “to depict the struggle between the weight of Duncan’s age and the constraint of her body, spoilt by fame and love.”7
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

The Evening World, May 4, 1922.
The Evening World, May 4, 1922.

Isadora Duncan and Sergei Esenin, 1923. Wikimedia commons.
Isadora Duncan and Sergei Esenin, 1923. Wikimedia commons.


The Ellis Island authorities interrogated the couple before they were allowed to enter the country. The interview must have been an awkward affair. It sounds as though the interrogators' principal concern was not Duncan's politics but rather her state of dress, or undress, while performing on stage. Her account of the interview, as quoted in the New York Times, notes this perhaps unintentionally hilarious exchange: “I was asked if I was a classical dancer. I replied that I did not know, as my dancing was personal. Then they wanted to know what I looked like when I danced. I said I could not tell them because I had never seen myself dance.” Asked by a reporter if she was a Communist, Comrade Duncan dismissed the question as “Rot, rot, rot.”11
Her first stop was Carnegie Hall in New York City, with an audience capacity of three thousand, where she danced on October 7, the first of three performances there.12 She had in mind a national US tour, but things quickly deteriorated, both on stage and off. The mercurial Yesenin, not well known in the United States and often overshadowed by his wife, destroyed hotel rooms and fought the press, and allegedly gave Duncan a black eye. Duncan made speeches during her performances in support of the Soviet regime, and at a show in Boston, according to one newspaper, she pulled her dress down to reveal a breast, after which the mayor banned her from the city. Duncan reacted with her trademark defiance, declaring that
“Bostonians are afraid of the truth. . . . There is a Puritanical instinct for concealed lust. All Puritan vulgarity centres in Boston. The Back Bay conservatives are impoverished by custom and taboo. They are the lifeless and sterile of this country.”13

The New York Times, Oct. 24, 1922. Copyright © The New York Times.
She traveled to Chicago and Memphis, but the tour ran out of steam before she was able to make it to her native San Francisco. She departed the United States with her husband on February 3, 1923, blaming the American newspapers for ruining the tour, which she had hoped would be a moneymaker for her Moscow dance school. As the New York Times reported upon her departure, “Instead of taking money back to Moscow she had been compelled to ask her friends to advance sufficient funds to pay her fare.” In the paper, she blamed her husband’s riotous behavior on the vile bootleg liquor served him in Prohibition America. Claiming she would never return to the United States, Duncan offered her judgment of American society to reporters at the dock:
I would rather live in Russia on black bread and vodka than in the United States at the best hotels. America knows nothing of love, food, or art. We have freedom in Russia. Here people do not know what it is. The capitalistic newspapers have ruined my tour because I came here to teach the people what freedom is. . . . You people don't want art.14

The New York Times, Feb. 4, 1923. Copyright © The New York Times.
The couple landed safely in Paris and at the luxurious Hôtel de Crillon, whence they were evicted when Yesenin became destructive. Duncan sent him back to Moscow, saying, “He is better off in Russia, where he is loved even if he is foolish. He can smash things in Moscow and nobody cares, because he is a poet.”15 Their relationship ended in divorce in late 1923. “He is really too impossible,” she told the New York Times, citing flagrant infidelities and his weakness for the bottle and for “raising cain.” She sounded philosophical: “so that ends my first experience of matrimony, which I always thought a highly over-rated performance. Fortunately, it seems as easy to get divorces here as to get married. Just sign another paper and it's done with.”16 Yesenin would commit suicide in his hotel room in Leningrad in 1925. Duncan’s 1922 US tour was the last time she ever visited her native land. She survived her husband by only two years.

The New York Times, Nov. 29, 1923. Copyright © The New York Times.


The New York Times, Oct. 24, 1922. Copyright © The New York Times.
The New York Times, Oct. 24, 1922. Copyright © The New York Times.

The New York Times, Feb. 4, 1923. Copyright © The New York Times.
The New York Times, Feb. 4, 1923. Copyright © The New York Times.

The New York Times, Nov. 29, 1923. Copyright © The New York Times.
The New York Times, Nov. 29, 1923. Copyright © The New York Times.

Detail from photocollage. Historical caption “Moscow as seen from the elevation looking down upon Monastery Square on the Tverskaia Boul[evard],” circa 1922. Digital record.
Detail from photocollage. Historical caption “Moscow as seen from the elevation looking down upon Monastery Square on the Tverskaia Boul[evard],” circa 1922. Digital record.
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.

One of the youngest classes in the Moscow Ballet School, circa 1922. ARA Russia, box 400, folder 1.
One of the youngest classes in the Moscow Ballet School, circa 1922. ARA Russia, box 400, folder 1.
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.


The New York Times, Sept. 22, 1977. Copyright © The New York Times.
The New York Times, Sept. 22, 1977. Copyright © The New York Times.

Isadora Duncan School (Moscow) students, 1924. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library Digital Collections (b12173360). From left to right, the banners announce: "The Red Stadium of Trade Unions and the Young Communist League"; the school slogan, "A Free Spirit Can Exist Only in a Freed Body"; "Duncan School."
Isadora Duncan School (Moscow) students, 1924. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library Digital Collections (b12173360). From left to right, the banners announce: "The Red Stadium of Trade Unions and the Young Communist League"; the school slogan, "A Free Spirit Can Exist Only in a Freed Body"; "Duncan School."
About the Author
Sorcha Whitley, Stanford University Class of 2023, is an undergraduate majoring in international relations and executive director of the Cardinal Ballet Company at Stanford. Sorcha, who is from Los Angeles, is passionate about dance. An amateur baker, she enjoys spending quality time with her beloved cats, Darcy and Chutney.
This digital story is a component of the Bread + Medicine: Saving Lives in a Time of Famine online exhibition, launched in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition presented by the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, curated by Hoover research fellow Bertrand Patenaude and displayed at Hoover Tower at Stanford University September 19, 2022–April 28, 2023.
Unless otherwise noted, all material comes from the American Relief Administration Russian operational records archival collection at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives [herein abbreviated ARA Russia].
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