Hello and welcome to the History Extra podcast from BBC History Magazine.

I'm Ellie Corthorne.

Nina Anisimova was a premier dancer with the Kirov Ballet, and by the 1930s, one of the most famous ballerinas in the Soviet Union.

But in 1938, at the height of the

Great Terror, as Stalin brutally purged dissenting members of the Communist Party, Nina was

accused of counter-revolutionary crimes and transported to a forced labour camp in what is now

Kazakhstan. Christina Ezrahi, a historian of Soviet-era politics and dance,

has explored Nina's story in her new book, Dancing for Stalin.

Our digital editor, Eleanor Evans, spoke to her to find out more.

Your book tells the story of Nina and Nisimova, a well-known ballerina in the Soviet Union,

who was arrested in 1938 for supposed counter-revolutionary activity.

Before we hear more about Nina, can we hear a little from you on your work and how you came to Nina's story?

So in some ways it's a story of be careful what you wish for and because i always wanted to use

russian ballet as a lens on russian history especially a history of the soviet period and one day

i was sitting in an archive in st petersburg and working on the private files of a very well-known dancer of the Stalin period,

when I suddenly saw in the catalog a file with the name, contact between artists and foreign diplomats,

and it was stated Leningrad 1938. And as a historian, I knew this is the year of the Great Terror when contact between

Soviet citizens and foreigners could mean a death sentence very easily.

So I ordered up this file from the depository.

And when it appeared on my desk, it actually had a big heading, which said not to be given out to anyone in the reading room.

But it had been done. I was lucky. I looked at it and basically stumbled upon Nina's story.

She was, as you mentioned, a very famous dancer of the Stalin period, and according to my

...