Secret lover inspired Nureyev to flee Russia for world stage

Ben Hoyle, Arts Reporter

A secret love affair with a handsome young German dance student inspired Rudolf Nureyev’s dramatic defection to the West in 1961, a new BBC film claims.
Teja Kremke was an 18-year-old East Berliner living in Leningrad when he met Nureyev, then aged 21, who was a rising star of the city’s Kirov ballet and destined to become one of the greatest dancers of all time.
They became lovers, blood brothers and collaborators. Kremke’s shaky handheld film footage of Nureyev dancing, which he used to analyse his performances, will be screened for the first time in Nureyev: From Russia with Love, on BBC2 on September 22.
But according to interviews with friends and family members, Kremke played another, decisive role in Nureyev’s development: he convinced him that the Soviet authorities would prevent his talent from flourishing, where it belonged, on the world stage.
John Bridcut, the film’s writer and producer, said: “Kremke fed Nureyev’s belief that he should be a world star but he also told him that his travelling would be restricted because he was too rebellious.”
Nureyev was barely known outside Russia when he arrived in Paris in May 1961. He was a late addition to the Kirov’s touring party, on the insistence of the French organisers.
Three weeks later, on June 16, he burst on to the world’s consciousness when he broke away from his KGB escorts at Le Bourget airport and flung himself into the arms of French police, screaming “I want to be free.”
Still reeling from Yuri Gagarin becoming the first man in space two months earlier, the West seized on Nureyev’s defection as a propaganda coup at the height of the Cold War.
For the Soviet Union it was a cultural and political disaster. For Nureyev’s friends and family it was also a personal tragedy. Careers were stalled, phones were tapped and his father, a loyal communist who had only recently accepted that his son was a ballet dancer, disowned him. Only Teja Kremke was pleased. He told a friend: “He did well.”
“The defection was spontaneous and planned, if that’s not too much of a contradiction,” Mr Bridcut said.
Nureyev’s performances had captivated Parisian audiences but his off-stage carousing displeased the Soviet authorities, which had recalled him to Moscow instead of allowing him to carry on to London with the rest of the company.
He was given conflicting explanations: that Kruschev wanted him to dance for him again, that his mother was ill. Nureyev told a French colleague: “I’m a dead man.” Mr Bridcut said: “When the crisis came he knew what he had to do because of his conversations with Kremke.”
Kremke’s role was discovered by Julie Kavanagh, whose official biography, Rudolf Nureyev: The Life, is published on September 27.
Soon after the defection Nureyev telephoned Kremke in East Berlin, asking him to join him in Paris. Kremke dithered and within days the Berlin Wall went up, trapping him behind the Iron Curtain. For the rest of his life he was hounded by the Stasi secret police. He married twice, turned to drink and died in suspicious circumstances at 37.
Nureyev found fame and glory dancing with the much older Margot Fonteyn in London during the 1960s and 1970s and became one of the most celebrated artists in the world. He died in 1993 from an Aids-related illness.