The Rockets' Red Glare

In 1992, a famous American dancer visited the formerly closed seaport of Vladivostok. Then everything blew up.

As a contemporary dancer, Christine Dakin often performs “Deep Song,” a Martha Graham ballet dedicated to the victims of the Spanish Civil War. And every time she hears the piano music for the piece, she recalls the first time she danced the work in public, in Vladivostok in May 1992, while Russia’s Pacific Fleet arsenal was exploding not far away.

There was never an official explanation from the Russian government of what happened. Various internet sources report that a million torpedoes, antisubmarine bombs and heavy artillery ammunition exploded May 14-16, 1992. The total power of the explosions amounted to 50 megatons, the Vladivostok newspaper reported.

The blasts shattered the windows of homes and factories nearby, and the ground shook as if from an earthquake. More than 50,000 of the city’s 700,000 residents were evacuated. Police caught looters, criminals and reckless teenagers who tried to sneak into the closed territory to steal explosives. The names of the dead and wounded have never been released. Decades later, people still find unexploded shells in the ground.

At the time I was a dancer with a small contemporary ballet company in Vladivostok. A graduate of an English language department, I was also useful to the Olga Bavdilovich Chamber Dance Theater as a translator. Our award-winning troupe of 12 dancers was well-known in Russia for its unique style. In her ballets, Bavdilovich used Indian raga music, jazz by modern composers such as Herbie Hancock, chanting by Buddhist monks, or no music at all. She had attended a dance festival in the United States in 1991 and was impressed with Martha Graham’s dance style. On Olga’s behalf, I wrote a letter to the Martha Graham Dance Company requesting a mentor. Surprisingly, the world’s most famous modern dance troupe responded and sent us its prima-ballerina via a USAID grant.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian Far East had opened to the outside world. The US government had reestablished a consulate in the strategic military port of Vladivostok for the first time since 1922 (the year that failed interventionist troops from the US, Japan and other countries evacuated). Consul General Randall LeCoq helped organize the visit by Dakin, who had danced with stars such as Rudolf Nureyev.

Dakin and I became friends, and recently, in an hour-long phone conversation, we recalled the bizarre situation of how she went on teaching us dance techniques while the city was rocked by explosions that had the ferocity of wartime. It was surely the most memorable moment of the cultural cooperation between our companies.

Dakin said she was surprised that the partnership request had come from Vladivostok, rather than one of the big cities of western Russia with a long dance tradition and a major ballet company.

“I was very impressed by that,” she said, “because this is an art form that really could have never found a place in Russia. This is all about individuality, about breaking conventions… The thought that somebody in Russia would be able to be interested in that and be allowed to seek that kind of support seemed very dramatic, very revolutionary to me.”

Later, while discussing the trip with her husband, she thought it was risky, “off-the-chart strange.” But by then Dakin had toured the world with the Graham Company for 15 years and difficulties on the road did not scare her.

Dakin’s trip to the Russian Far East was long – from New York to Seattle, then to Magadan and Khabarovsk via Alaska. When the plane landed in Khabarovsk, Dakin had been on the road for 25 hours.

In Khabarovsk, Dakin was met by Cultural Attaché Karen Danz, from the US Embassy in Moscow. But apparently someone in the embassy had misunderstood the Trans-Siberian railway schedule and bought tickets for a train that had already departed Khabarovsk for Vladivostok.

Luckily, Konstantin Shulga, our troupe’s manager and the choreographer’s husband, learned this in advance. And he had driven a Niva from Vladivostok to Khabarovsk (472 miles) with one of the dancers to meet the American guest. Who was quickly loaded in the Niva for the long drive back to Vladivostok.

“That’s when I said to myself: ‘Wow! That is a great country. These people are great people,’” Dakin said.

“Now I am driving through this empty, beautiful, stunning expanse of tundra.”

There was no snow, but the weather was crisp and cold. During a pit stop, she went a few yards off the road and couldn’t see a thing.

“It was totally and utterly black,” she said. “All you could see was stars, and that’s all.”

The story became legend among Dakin’s family and friends.

Along the way, the car pulled into a block of Soviet-style buildings. Shulga, who by now had been driving for 20 hours, went in, spoke to someone, and received permission for them stay in a room overnight.

Since there was nowhere to buy food on the remote roads they were traveling, Dakin, who was used to being stuck on the road, shared her nuts, raisins and crackers with her fellow travelers.

They went to a room on the third floor of the apartment block and lay down on the floor to sleep. But soon thereafter the police showed up, demanded their passports, and asked what they were up to. Dakin started to worry.

“If you think about this, in the middle of no place, anything could happen,” she said. “But Kostya was so Russian, so brave, confident, and strong, so I thought, ‘Let’s pretend that everything is OK.’”

Apparently, it was. The cops returned their passports, and no one was arrested. The next day, they drove another 12 hours.

“You don’t get used to this discomfort and strangeness, but you understand it,” Dakin said.

There were plenty more surprises ahead. In the Molodyozhnaya Hotel in Vladivostok, Dakin was amused by the Soviet Realism on the interior dome of the hotel lobby. Japanese men wandered the halls in their underwear, and rats clambered around inside the walls of the hotel, which was either half-built or half-broken down.

The beautiful part of the trip started when Dakin finally met the dancers and the choreographer. “Olga was wonderful,” she said. “And of course, all our conversations and the work of collaborating and teaching and dancing and communicating... so rich and wonderful.”

Dakin said she admired the bravery and persistence of Bavdilovich and her dancers: Before perestroika, the authorities often cancelled the troupe’s concerts and put its members under surveillance. Bavdilovich had worked in Vladivostok since 1974, but only starting in 1990 did she start to get the respect she deserved, after receiving the grand prix at the First Contest of Choreographers of Siberia and the Far East, held in Novosibirsk.

Dakin gave lessons on our newly renovated stage in the Dom Molodyozhy building in the Vtoraya Rechka neighborhood. We would arrive by 11 am and Dakin would have already been at it for two hours – warming up on her own and working on a new piece she was rehearsing.

She was a wonderful teacher. Despite having danced with some of the world’s greatest ballet stars, she displayed no arrogance. She was kind and curious and grateful.

We followed her instructions and did the “contraction and release” exercises with pleasure. I translated for her, but she quickly learned how to count in Russian. In her youth, she had studied Russian and French at the University of Michigan. But after attending a Martha Graham Dance Company performance, she knew that was her path: she dropped out of college and followed the company back to New York. It took Dakin six years to be accepted, but soon Graham noticed her and made her a soloist.

After classes, we took Dakin sightseeing around our hilly seaport or shopping in GUM, which hardly had any merchandise. We watched her dance on video recordings of Graham’s ballets.

On May 14 we were visiting the studios of local artists when the disaster began. As Dakin was looking at Victor Fyodorov’s new gouaches spread out on the floor, I went out onto the balcony. I saw smoke rising from the hills behind my neighborhood; I heard explosions.

I had left my five-year-old son at home with one of our dancers. Back then, my apartment block didn’t have a phone line, so I couldn’t call to check if they were all okay. I told Kostya and Olga that I had to go home.

It took us about an hour to drive five miles – as close as we could get to the area, which was already blocked off by police. We left the car in an alley, and Kostya took Dakin to her hotel to get her suitcase, then drove her back to his home, farther from the explosions.

Meanwhile, I ran to my home on ulitsa Davydova, horrified by what I was seeing. Parents were leading children on foot toward the railway and bus stations by the sea, carrying suitcases and backpacks. They looked like refugees fleeing a war zone. Explosions were continuing nonstop behind the hill. I could see the trajectories of shells rocketing through the air.

Night was falling. People gathered on hilltops to watch the “fireworks.” There were no lights on in any windows in the neighborhood. The roads were empty of vehicles.

Fortunately, I found my apartment block still standing. Neighbors told me that the Pacific Fleet’s arsenal had caught fire two miles away, but that we were protected by the hills in between. My apartment was locked and there was a message that my parents had come and taken my son to their place on the other side of the city. I didn’t have a key. The government ordered a total evacuation. Everyone had to go.

I spent the night in my cousin’s place a few hills closer to the sea. She still had electricity. But we didn’t sleep all night. The windows rattled from the explosions, and we could see the flames glowing behind the hills. An unexpected problem was that we were attacked by swarms of mosquitoes, as if all the birds and frogs had been killed by the bombing.

The next day the ballet dancers came to the class exhausted and mosquito-bitten.   

Dakin hadn’t slept all night – a mosquito had bitten her on the eyelid. She said that someone from the American Consulate had called and offered to evacuate her by plane, but she declined. The craziness of explosions continued, but we continued with our class. To all of us, this seemed the right thing to do.

After the class, Dakin showed us her work. She danced “Deep Song,” created in 1937, for the first time in public – with the staccato sound of rapid-fire explosions in the background. I cried at the emotion of the profound sorrow the piece expressed. It was about war and death.

Today, Dakin said she still feels it.

“Every time I perform it,” she said, “my body feels this experience of what it must be like to be surrounded by the fear and the sounds of bombs, completely at the mercy of what was happening.”

She admits being frightened, but she carried on. She said she didn’t want to make things more difficult for any of her hosts. She also realized that there was absolutely nothing anyone could do.

The explosions stopped late at night on May 16. And the next day Dakin left for Khabarovsk to return to New York. This time, by train.

She had a lot to tell at home. But the story was so unbelievable that most family and friends had a hard time envisioning the reality of it, she said.

Recently, the Russian Ministry of Defense ignored my request for a report on the Primorye Military Prosecutor’s Office’s investigation of the incident. The web offers a few nuggets of information. On May 15, 1992, Valentin Novikov, an Interior Ministry official in Vladivostok, told The Moscow Times that the entire military garrison was fighting the blaze and that four soldiers had been wounded.

One reason for the disaster was the military’s practice of overloading the arsenal with ordinance. Twenty years after the accident, the Vladivostok reported that most likely thieves who had stolen explosives set the arsenal on fire in order to cover up their crime.

According to the Vladivostok, the first respondents were marines in tanks, sent to the epicenter to figure out what was exploding and to protect the fire engines that followed. The tanks squashed the unexploded shells scattered around, to prevent them from catching fire.

Oleg Koval, a Marine captain at the time, told Vladivostok that they had to use their uniforms to extinguish small grassfires. One blaze came very close to a stack of rockets for the BM-21 Grad multiple rocket launcher truck, Koval said. Had they gone off, they would have caused major destruction in the city.

None of the first responders received any awards for their bravery.

Christine Dakin visited Vladivostok again in 1996 via an ArtsLink grant and had a joint concert with Olga’s theater. She still travels the world, teaching modern dance.

In 2013, I dropped in on her in her New York home. On her shelf were Russian-style wooden dishes she had bought in GUM. Her wall was decorated with pictures painted by Russian artists. RL