Word: bolshoi
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This "glastnost"' Swan Lake paired principal dancers from the Boston Ballet with artists from the Kirov and Bolshoi Ballets in the lead roles of Odette/Odile and Prince Sigfried. The production attracted a record-breaking attendance of 43,000 fans over its two-week run, creating an overwhelming international stir...
...particularly terrible aspect of the problem, child prostitution. Our primary exhibit: a set of photographs taken in Moscow by freelance Russian photographer Alexey Ostrovskiy. Distributed first by Agence France-Presse, they purport to show a pimp named Sasha and two 11-year- old boys soliciting tricks near the Bolshoi Theater, an infamous pick-up spot. Some of the pictures, which showed the boys made up as girls, were too explicit to publish. The ones we did publish were awful enough, haunting and unforgettable...
Naturally, we had reported on the pictures' background before we published them: five independent sources had confirmed to our Moscow correspondents that Sasha is a pimp, that young boys are part of his "ring," that they work in the Bolshoi Theater area and other places. We could not then speak to the boys, who were said to be out of Moscow. But later the boy Marik (at left in both pictures) confirmed to our Moscow bureau that, yes, he did work with Sasha as a prostitute and, yes, some of his customers liked him to dress up as a girl...
Meanwhile, Ellis of Reuters and two colleagues had arranged to meet Sasha at the Bolshoi Theater garden to persuade him to say the story was false. Suspicious of Ellis' motives, Sasha brought a tape recorder in his pocket. On the tape, which Ostrovskiy obtained from Sasha and gave to TIME, Ellis and associates are plainly heard beseeching Sasha to say the pictures were staged, holding out the prospect that if he did so TIME would have to pay him "very good money. $20,000." They tell Sasha, "There is big money here. You and the kids can get real decent...
Sasha, a scruffy-looking long-haired resident of Moscow, has a lucrative profession. He sells the sexual services of small boys. His base of operations is a garden in front of Moscow's magnificent Bolshoi Theatre, where both local and foreign clients know to seek him out. Sasha pimps for a number of male teenagers who hang out with him near the Bolshoi, but his main "team" consists of three younger boys -- Marik, 8, and Volodya and Dima, both...