• Texan teen to become first American to graduate from premier Russian ballet school

    When Joy Womack arrived at Moscow's elite Bolshoi Ballet Academy at 15, she spoke limited Russian and was one of a number of foreigners allowed to train at the school. Now 17, she is poised to become the first American to graduate from the Russian academy.

    By Irina Tkachenko
    NBC News

    MOSCOW -- Like many of her high school peers in the U.S., Joy Womack keeps an Internet blog and chats with her family on Skype. The 17-year-old devours books on Kindle, listens to music and stresses about end-of-year exams. But this is where the similarities end.

    By the end of May she will become the first American to graduate from the Bolshoi Ballet Academy, arguably the most enviable and demanding choreography school in the world.

    Clad in jeans and a puffer jacket -- too skinny for this blustery Russian spring -- she looks impossibly delicate and long-limbed, even for a dancer, and speaks with sincerity, focus and poise that would be impressive in an adult. And if she is a tad nervous, small wonder. Having lived by herself for three years in Moscow, Russia, some 6,000 miles away from her home in Austin, Texas, Joy is preparing to take her final exams.  

    “Nothing can compare to the rigor and the mental strength it takes to train at the top of our school,” Joy told NBC News.

    Ballet dancers are never late bloomers. By age 15 Joy had already put away years of preparation in prestigious American ballet schools like the Austin School of Classical Ballet and Kirov Academy of Ballet, when she was hand-picked by the Bolshoi Ballet Academy teachers to train in the Russian dancers department for tuition of $18,000 a year. That in itself was a special and unusual honor since the academy has a separate course for foreign students.

    Barely believing her luck -- after all, her love of ballet began with YouTube videos of Russian ballerinas -- Joy left her parents and siblings and boarded a plane for Moscow, in awe of the opportunity of a lifetime.  Little could have prepared her for the change she was about to make.

    “When I first arrived here, nobody had heard of me. Everybody thought, ‘Here is this new American coming into the Russian class,’” she said. “I was put with the graduation class in repertoire ahead of the other girls in my class … that had created a lot of jealousy and a lot of questions.”

    Joy, who did not speak Russian at the time, said she needed the instructors to repeat themselves again and again.

    “It was hard the first six months, because the girls did not want to talk to me, did not want to be my friends,” she said.

    A far cry from America

    The Bolshoi Ballet Academy, also known in Russia as the Moscow State Academy of Choreography, launched in the late 18th century on the order of Russian empress Catherine the Great. Originally conceived as an orphanage, the school has long since established itself as an institution and feeder school for the Bolshoi Ballet troupe, a premier training ground for classical Russian ballet dancers that emphasizes technique and artistic expression. It is rooted in structure and tradition that have outlasted political regimes and many a revolution.

    For Joy, life at the academy quickly proved a far cry from her American routine.  Instruction exclusively in Russian all but assured a language and culture gap too big to tackle quickly. The school's focus on discipline meant dancing up to 10 hours a day, six days a week. It did not matter if you were hurting or sick: you showed up and you danced through the pain.

    A measure of the school's ethos is its strict caps on the students' weight: 96 pounds for those who are 5'6", for instance. Ballerinas tipping the scale at 110 pounds are not allowed to participate in a duet class, but are required to observe it.  In a country that spends most of the year waiting for winter to pass, this schedule meant rarely seeing the light of day. In the middle of December in Moscow, the "day" lasts barely six hours.

    Asked when she saw her family last, Joy paused before replying, “Ten months ago.” That was the only time her dad had been able to come.

    Driven to dance

    Then, of course, there were injuries. Joy had surgery on her foot. She broke her wrist. A torqued back once confined her to bed for two weeks, only to make her write in her WordPress blog.

    "I feel miserable," she wrote, adding that she could not wait to get back to the studio.

    When asked what keeps her going, Joy didn’t wait to consider the answer.

    “In order to cope with my rigorous training schedule, my long days I mostly depend on good food and … really the knowledge that after I get through this, I’ll be able to take on anything,” she said. “Of course, there are always those hard moments, especially here in Russia, where in winter it’s really hard … It seems so difficult to keep going. In those moments I rely on God, I rely on Jesus.”

    She does not mention passion. But then, you can see it in her dance.

    To connect to the outside world and to hold herself "accountable" Joy answers dozens of queries from American fans on her blog. “What do you do not to lose trust in yourself when you think you're no good...?” asked one in an obvious moment of self-doubt.

    And from across the Atlantic came the answer from Joy, meant, it seemed, as much for herself as for the person asking:

    "Instead of getting upset or depressed if something does not go as you thought it would, God always opens another door. Even if it takes you awhile to find a light switch.”

    Blood, sweat, tears, fatigue: 'it is worth it!'

    Last December the Bolshoi Ballet Academy showed "La Fille Mal Gardee," one of its signature productions, on the venerable stage of the Bolshoi. It was pronounced best student show in the theatre and landed the school an award from the Russian government (Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was on hand to honor the occasion). And Joy? She danced the lead. A month before she had won the "Youth America Grand Prix" in Paris. 

    Today Joy speaks fluent and lively, if a bit accented, Russian. She treasures the bond she formed with her Russian ballet teachers and adores them for their "tough love" and dedication to her.  She has found her friends, though she once wrote the best one of them may still be the Internet.

    Time is a precious commodity, and free time almost nonexistent. 

    After she completes her state exams in all subjects: acting, classical ballet, character dance, and duet, Joy will dance in one final performance with the Bolshoi Ballet Academy, the lead in "Paquita." Then, after graduation in May, the nerve-wracking wait: will the Bolshoi come calling to invite her to its regular troupe? Joy will find out the answer having barely turned 18. 

    "A dancer is honest with themselves and faces their flaws and imperfections in the mirror and chips away at them,” she wrote online. “Behind the love is blood, sweat, tears, stress, fatigue! But it is worth it!" 

     

     

  • NBC's Jim Maceda in Moscow answers questions about the Russian elections

    Russians head to the polls on Sunday to vote in presidential elections most expect Vladimir Putin to win handily. If Putin wins, he was previously president from 2000-2008, he will return to the Kremlin after a four-year stint as prime minister. But, support for Putin’s return is not universal – a vocal opposition has been protesting the election for months.

    NBC’s Jim Maceda, who has covered Russia since the days of the Soviet Union, is in Moscow following the elections. He answered reader questions about the elections, Putin’s hold on power, the opposition, etc.

    Please replay the chat below.

     

     

    Related links: Could Vladimir Putin be in power until 2024? 10 key questions about Russia's elections
    Anti-Putin activists pay high price, but refuse to back down
    U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul, a laid-back Yankee in trouble in Putin's court
    Anti-Putin protesters: Coping with bitter cold and big questions

     

  • Anti-Putin protesters: Coping with bitter cold and big questions

    Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP - Getty Images

    Two of the organisers of the upcoming opposition rally "For Fair Elections," anti-Kremlin blogger Alexei Navalny (R) and former chess champion Garry Kasparov (L), speak as they attend a meeting of the rally organisers in Moscow, on Jan. 31, 2012.

    Jim Maceda writes

    MOSCOW – By any standard, it was an impressive array of individuals. Seated under a large poster of a young Andrei Sakharov – the Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident, 1975 Nobel Peace Prize recipient and spiritual father of their movement – the brain trust of Moscow's anti-Putin opposition sat at card tables debating their next move.  

    The group was putting the finishing touches on the plan for this Saturday's protest – an hour march through central Moscow and a short rally across the Moskva River from the Kremlin. It will be the third mass opposition demonstration in Moscow since the December 4 parliamentary polls that were widely criticized for voter fraud in favor of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s party.  

    Six weeks ago, more than 100,000 protesters took to the streets to vent their anger with the corruption and stagnation of the Putin regime. But since then, the end-of-year Russian holidays, followed by a Siberian cold snap with record-breaking temperatures, has undeniably sapped the protest movement's energy. The organizers collective fatigue was palpable.

    Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, led the meeting. Not because he's so smart he almost beat a super computer at chess, but because his countless arrests and beatings at the hands of Russian riot police had earned him the mantle. Seated beside him were the two young stars of the new generation of Russian dissidents, the right-of-center blogger Alexei Navalny and socialist activist Sergei Udaltsov. 

    Str / AFP - Getty Images

    Opposition activists hang their banner reading: "Putin, go!" atop a bulding's roof, just over the Moskva River river from the Kremlin (foreground) in Moscow, on Feb. 1.

    Both men, in their 30's, had recently spent weeks in jail on charges of organizing illegal protests. Now they were subdued, speaking occasionally, but more often just listening, scrolling through their iPhone messages or tweeting.

    Opposite Kasparov, sat Vladimir Ryzhkov.  He too had paid his dues. Once the youngest MP elected to Boris Yeltsin's parliament at age 27, Ryzhkov, broad-minded and articulate, was seen rather differently by Putin's Kremlin. The “dangerous” reformer has effectively been ostracized from mainstream politics. 

    “No doubt the Russian Winter is not as inviting as the Arab Spring,” Kasparov quipped. “But I would say that 30, 40 or 50,000 in this weather will send a message across the river to the Kremlin.''

    But what message will that be? Putin's propaganda machine will likely jump on any smaller turn-out, proving, they will no doubt say, that the protest is petering out.

    By the end of their two hour meeting the protest organizers were clearly divided over what to do next to regain some momentum.

    Navalny argued that the mass protests of December needed to grow bigger and more frequent to pressure the Kremlin. But author Boris Akunin argued that the days of the big protests were over. They were too costly, too time-consuming, and had already peaked. It was time, he said, to focus on smaller, flash mob-generated actions.

    Misha Japaridze / AP

    Russian opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov shows a V sign after he was released from a detention center in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2012. Udaltsov, whose jailing became a rallying point for the Russian opposition, has been freed after a month in custody.

    Indeed, across Moscow, such “attacks” are growing in number. On any given day, small groups of protesters walk out of the city's many subway stations, their mouths covered with strips of masking tape, on which is written “We Have No Voice.” They're arrested almost as soon as they walk into the street. They also have tried cyber-attacks on the Kremlin's Internet. Within hours of the launch of Putin's own website, it was jammed by thousands of emails calling on him to resign.

    And in arguably the most startling “protest,” several activists managed to hang a giant banner on the top of a building directly opposite the Kremlin for all to see. Painted on the banner, both Putin’s likeness covered by a huge “X,” and beneath it, the words, “Go Away!” in Russian. Amazingly it took an hour for the police to spot it and tear it down. But, while often hilarious, none of these flash mob tactics are likely to keep Putin from winning a six-year term in the March 4 presidential elections.

    Kremlin's photo-doctoring backfires big time

    Putin himself seems to have come to that conclusion. Creating massive traffic jams in central Moscow today as his convoy skidded over the icy snow from one campaign stop to another, he's got his swagger back. His camp believes the protest movement is too divided to coalesce around one opposition candidate. And, besides, the other official candidates – Communist Gennady Zyuganov, Nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Social Democrat Sergei Mironov and billionaire owner of the New Jersey Nets Mikhail Prokhorov – are all Kremlin-approved because they pose no real threat.

    Andrey Smirnov / AFP - Getty Images

    A police officer braves the cold as he detains a demonstrator wearing a carnival costume of death who tried to take part in an unauthorized stage protest just outside the Interior Ministry headquarters in Moscow on Friday. The sign on the protester's chest says "Corruption."

    So what happens to the movement if Putin wins? Ryzhkov painted a dark picture: “There will be mass protests starting March 5th,” he said in his Moscow home and office following the meeting. “And then we stay in the streets until reforms start and Putin promises new legislative and presidential elections.”
     
    “You mean Tent Cities,” I asked?

    “Yes,” he replied. “Like the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.”

    And what if Putin doesn't reform, but instead cracks down?

    “Unfortunately Putin is a dangerous man. He can start some violence like [Syria’s] Bashar al-Assad or [Libya’s] Moammar Ghadafi. But I hope that if he sees a half million people in the streets, he will start reforms instead of violence.”

    Many middle-class, well-educated Russians are calling the protests a turning point. But is it the beginning of the end of Putin's political career? Or rather the beginning of an unprecedented second 12-year run of power for the only real leader Russians have known this century?

    The answer is blowing in a bone-chilling, Siberian wind.

    Jim Maceda is an NBC News foreign correspondent based in London who has covered Russia and the former Soviet Union since the 1980's.

  • Prehistoric bones: A cottage industry in Siberia

    By Jim Maceda
    NBC News

    Dmitry Solovyov/NBC News

    Siberian sunset.

    It’s hard to imagine, looking out at the frozen expanses of Yakutia, in North Eastern Siberia, that 30,000 or so years ago, so many animal species, now extinct, roamed the Pleistocene grasslands. From 12-foot tall, five-ton wooly mammoth bulls to tiny rodents, an Ice Age hunter would have found as many as 100 animals in each square mile he tracked, at least according to Sergei Zimov, our Ice Age expert, geo-physicist and guide during our recent visit.

    Today, Siberia’s thick icy crust, or permafrost, which has held the remains of predators and herbivores alike in an epochal deep freeze, is beginning to melt. And the bones of prehistoric rhinos, bison, reindeer, horses – and yes, mammoths – are rising to Yakutia’s surface at an amazing rate. One literally trips over bones on a short stroll along the banks of the Kolyma River. The downside, of course, is the attendant release of so much CO2 – a greenhouse gas - as this melting permafrost exposes a 150-foot thick layer of plant and animal remains. But there is an upside: a burgeoning cottage industry in the finding and selling of prehistoric bones.

    Zimov says that 30 years ago, only a handful of Russian "bone" men – serious businessmen - were attracted to the adventurous lifestyle, spending their summers combing Pleistocene beaches and valleys. Today, at least 1,000 bone hunters work throughout Russia, with several dozen focusing on Siberia’s permafrost zone, where the best prizes are to be found.

    Dmitry Solovyov/NBC News

    One of Zimov's prized mammoth tusks.

    Professional hunters like Feodor Shidlovsky and Alexander Votagin are at the top of the bone chain. Shidlovsky has arguably the biggest mammoth bone collection in Russia, displaying them in his own natural history museum in Moscow. The money he makes from the sale of mammoth bones goes into his exhibitions, the funding of artists who fashion jewelry from the ancient bone, and scientific expeditions.

    Every summer, Votagin leads his team to Dvarii Yar – or Windy Cliffs – a remote stretch of Kolyma riverbank that has given up the richest finds of prehistoric bones over the past decade. Located about 400 miles north of Zimov’s isolated science station in Cherskiy - Yakutia’s main airport and hub - the so-called New Siberian Islands (all underwater in Pleistocene times) are now a treasure trove of bones. Local hunters collect more than 20 tons of mammoth, rhino and bison bones a year, selling most of them to local dealers in Cherskiy – presumably to sell them to tourists like us, though the Russian government bans the export abroad.

    And here’s why: prehistoric bones can be a very lucrative catch. While fishermen and hunters now augment their meager incomes with up to $10 per mammoth tooth or ivory shard, the more professional - and lucky – hunters can fetch more than $80,000 for a pair of mammoth tusks in good condition. Zimov keeps such a pair in the living room of his science station cum abode – but isn’t tempted to sell them.

    Dmitry Solovyov/NBC News

    Prehistoric bones along the beach.

    "These are like my family," he told us. "Would you sell your brothers for $80,000?" In fact, Zimov has never sold any bones he’s collected over his decades of combing Yakutia for clues to global warming. On one such outing, he and his son Nikita collected some 1,200  bones – which he thinks is a world record - all which remained of a pack of mammoths and all within a few hundred yards of beach. For amusement, they arranged their bone hoard into the shapes of mammoths, horses and bison.

    Until the mass, mysterious extinction of so many Ice Age animals took place - triggered, probably, by extreme change of climate and habitat - the so-called "Mammoth Steppe Eco-system" chugged along like a glacier, both efficient and self-sustaining. Mammoths knocked over heat-absorbing trees, grasses grew, and dozens of herbivore species not only grazed on those grasses, but fertilized them too.

    Though that eco-system died some 15,000 years ago, mammoths and other Pleistocene throwbacks are helping to maintain today’s human population, with a $5 prehistoric bison jaw here, a $10 wooly rhino knee bone there or $1,000 piece of wooly mammoth tusk, buried right under your feet.

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