Unsurprisingly for a work controlled by a committee of bureaucrats, the ballet was mired in conflict throughout its development. Virtually everyone involved fought over every element possible (aside from composer Reinhold Glière – a master of the art of playing it safe who kept his compositions light and uncontroversial, stayed out of ideological battles between artists, and coasted through the revolution unscathed). The original scenarist’s treatment was rejected and his duties were passed to Kurilko, who is credited as its official author. A third person involved in the script fell out with ballet master Vasiliy Tikhomirov over the second act, and his name was removed from the project. One of the ballet’s most crowd-pleasing dances, the folksy Yablochko (or “Little Apple”), is derived from a Russian sailor song, and as Glière later recalled, the Bolshoi orchestra’s musicians considered it demeaning to play. “Pressure, endless pressure,” reads an internal memo from the period, quoted by Elizabeth Souritz in her book Soviet Choreographers in the 1920s. “More than once the whole thing fell apart and we lost hope.”

Flower power

The Stalinist era was difficult for new productions: higher-ups wanted them, but it was hard for them to survive the ever-shifting demands of the state bureaucracy and censorship. Usually, it was safer to simply rework old classics with the right ideological spin. The Red Poppy too was nearly killed. In the spring of 1927, the culture commissar ordered the Bolshoi to bump it in favour of an opera by Prokofiev, as part of an effort to woo the acclaimed composer back from abroad. But then, the ballet found its moment. On 6 April, Chinese police raided the Soviet embassy in Beijing. Meanwhile, crisis was building in Shanghai. Nationalists had allied with communists to take control of the city, but had turned on them. Soviet papers filled with headlines about the slaughter of Chinese communists. The Red Poppy suddenly “resonated with the current political situation and thus received approval for performance,” writes Simon Morrison, a music professor at Princeton University, in his book Bolshoi Confidential.