A dress rehearsal at the Bolshoi, a month after the acid attack on the company’s artistic director, Sergei Filin. Since the nineteenth century, the Bolshoi has uncannily embodied the society to which it belongs: imperial Russia, Soviet Russia, and, now, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Photograph by Misha Friedman

Sergei Yurevich Filin, a man of early middle age and improbable beauty, sat behind the wheel of his car on a winter night driving toward home. It was 10 degrees Fahrenheit in the center of Moscow, a light snow in the air, snow on the rooftops, snow piled up in the lanes. Traffic was thick but brisk. Nearby, spotlights illuminated the Kremlin towers. Laughing skaters sliced along a vast rink set up for the season on Red Square. An immense white inflatable dome encased Lenin’s Tomb, sealing it off for structural repairs. Muscovites joked that the eternal resting place of their discredited forefather now looked like Chernobyl’s Reactor No. 4.

When Filin was in his twenties and thirties, he had been a principal dancer for the Bolshoi Ballet. He performed the glamour roles: Count Albrecht, in “Giselle”; the princes in “The Nutcracker,” “Cinderella,” “Swan Lake,” and “The Sleeping Beauty.” He was not the strongest dancer—by the time he was thirty, his jumps were low, his turnout was vague—but, with his pointed chin and light eyes, he retained a dashing presence. He was an effective mime. When Giselle would go into her mad scene, Filin had a way of putting his hands lightly to his temples as if to signal to the audience that he required three aspirin and a glass of water. He was forty-two years old now, but his face was still unlined, his hair shaggy in a teen-idol sort of way. His gaze was, it always seemed, confiding and unworried—despite the great change in his life. Nearly two years earlier, he had become the Bolshoi’s khudruk, its artistic director. He did not pretend to dictate policy in the Bolshevik style of Yuri Grigorovich, an imperious second-rater who ruled the company by decree for three decades, from 1964 to 1995. But Filin did control the crucial matters of scheduling, casting, promotion, and repertoire. The fortunes of more than two hundred dancers—many of them in a permanent state of anxiety about their mayfly careers—rested with him, with his judgments and his caprices.

Filin drove a black Mercedes S.U.V. In what was once the land of the Lada, Bentleys and Maybachs had become a cliché. Moscow was now an oil-and-gas capital, with more billionaires than any other city in the world. Soviet-era shops with their sackcloth names—Clothes and Shoes, Milk and Vegetables—had given way long ago to Dior and Chanel, Nobu and the Vogue Café. Filin savored his ride home. It gave him time alone to think.

It had been an unusual evening. Ordinarily, Filin would have attended that night’s performance at the Bolshoi—it was “Swan Lake”—and then gone backstage to distribute to the company his congratulations and, perhaps, some gentle corrections. But on this night, January 17th, he went instead to a performance a short walk away, at the Moscow Art Theatre, which was celebrating the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Constantin Stanislavsky, the theatre’s founder.

After the event, Filin walked back to the parking lot at the Bolshoi and got in his car. He pulled out of the lot onto Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, turned onto the Boulevard Ring, and then onto the Garden Ring. Filin, his wife—a Bolshoi dancer named Maria (Masha) Prorvich—and their three young sons lived just north of the Ring Road, at 9 Troitskaya Street. Their building was populated largely by performers and administrators at the Bolshoi.

At around eleven, Filin, feeling tired and eager to see his wife, steered the Mercedes into a parking lot outside his building and headed for his door. The snow was icy and thick. Filin was reaching for the security buzzer when he heard someone behind him call out his name. Then the voice said, “Tebye privet!”—literally, “Hello to you!,” but more abrupt and menacing, as though someone were relaying an ominous greeting from a third party.

Filin turned and saw a man in front of him. He was neither tall nor short. He wore a woolly hat and a scarf wrapped around his face. His right arm was crooked behind him, as if he were concealing something.

A gun, Filin thought, in that flash of confrontation: He’s holding a gun and I am dead. Bolt! But, before he could move, his attacker swung his arm out in front of him. In his hand was a glass jar filled with liquid, and he hurled its contents at Filin’s face. A security camera in the parking lot fixed the time at 23:07.

The liquid was sulfuric acid—the “oil of vitriol,” as medieval alchemists called it. Depending on the concentration, it can lay waste to human skin as quickly as in a horror movie. Scientists working with sulfuric acid wear protective goggles; even a small amount in the eyes can destroy the cornea and cause permanent blindness.

Filin was in agony. The burning was immediate and severe. His vision turned to black. He could feel the scalding of his face and scalp, the pain intensifying all the time.

“In those first seconds, all I could think was, How can I relieve the pain?” Filin told me later. “The burning was so awful. I tried to move. I fell face first into the snow. I started grabbing handfuls of snow and rubbing it into my face and eyes. I felt some small relief from the snow. I thought of how to get home. I was pretty close to my door. There’s an electronic code and a metal door, but I couldn’t punch in the numbers of the code. I couldn’t see them. When I understood that I couldn’t get into the building, I started shouting, ‘Help! Help! I need help!’ But no one was around. I tried to make my way to another entrance, in the hope that someone would see me and help me. But that was not such a good idea, because I was falling down and getting up and bumping into cars and into walls and falling down because I couldn’t see any steps. There was so much snow. Snow was coming down. I kept rubbing it into my face.

“When I understood that there was no use shouting for help, I decided to reach into my pocket and put my mobile phone in my hand. I hoped someone would call me. I couldn’t see the screen, so I couldn’t dial. Usually, I get one call after another, but there were no calls for some reason. I tried to knock on the door of each entrance. I’m quite strong and I banged very loudly, but no one was coming out to help. Then the phone slipped out of my hand and I lost it in the snow. The pain in my eyes and face was so terrible that I had a wave of thought: I was dying. But I only wanted to die if it was in the arms of my wife. The pain was unbearable. I really thought this might be the end of me.”

Filin stopped talking for a while, gathering his memory. Then he said, “I remembered that at the parking lot there’s a booth with security guards, and I hoped there would be someone there. So I ran in what I thought might be the direction of the parking lot. My eyes couldn’t see, but somehow my bodily navigation was alert and it moved me in the right direction. I kept falling down and bouncing off the cars, as if I were the ball in a pinball machine. Eventually, I made my way to this booth and I started banging on the window. And here I finally lucked out. There was a guard there. He said he was absolutely shocked when he saw me. He immediately scooped up more snow and rubbed it into my face. By now I was trembling. I’d developed some sort of fever, it must have been shock, and I kept saying, ‘Please call Masha, please call Masha.’ I really thought I was dying. So he called an emergency number—for an ambulance—and then he called upstairs to Masha, who came out of the apartment and to the parking lot. I don’t want to discuss the nightmare that came next: my wife’s reaction, the reaction of my relatives who saw me in this condition. I could hear them crying and I understood that what they saw in my face was something . . . horrendous.”