Maya Plisetskaya and Rodion Shchedrin: ‘The KGB put a microphone in our marriage bed’

‘People in the West don’t understand nothing. Even the new Russian generation don’t understand anything at all. You don’t know, and it’s better you don’t.’ Maya Plisetskaya scrutinises me with her beautiful, kohl-rimmed, 88-year-old eyes, a gaze made wary in childhood, when her father was shot as an enemy of the Soviet people, her mother jailed, and her Jewish family broken by persecution.

‘Can anyone understand how if you took a single carrot from the collective farm, just one carrot, you could get ten years’ prison? Who could understand that?’ The Soviet Union’s most iconic, deathless ballerina shrugs, and slips back into the kitchen to renew the tea, the discreet wife to her husband, composer Rodion Shchedrin, who’s having his moment in the sun now that her career is finally, finally over.

Mind you, you never know with Plisetskaya. She last performed three years ago. There’s YouTube to prove it. She was still dancing the Dying Swan on pointe and in tutu until her seventies.