She has two versions of how this happened, but the basic facts are the same: she joined other Russian artists in signing a public letter supporting the conviction, for tax evasion, of the oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky-a charge most of the world saw as politically motivated. Then, two years later, according to Volochkova, they set her up. Volochkova joined United Russia in 2003, shortly before her problems with the Bolshoi began, but the party did not come to her rescue. (The lesson learned? “I will fuck the shit out of the entire world. “Over the course of seven years, wherever I went, people would say, ‘Well you know, Anastasia, we thought you were so big and fat,’” she said in a recent interview. The resulting public squabble-which included a New York Times reporter showing up at a Moscow restaurant to weigh and measure her, as well as a lawsuit, which she won-still brings her to tears. The Bolshoi’s version is that Volochkova had simply gotten fat. Volochkova’s version is that it was because of the influence of a former boyfriend of hers, a powerful billionaire. She excelled at her Swan Lake roles, but then, in 2003, the theatre fired her. Volochkova, the daughter of a Leningrad table-tennis champion, became a prima ballerina at the Bolshoi Theatre at the age of twenty-two, in 1998. Because if this is the first step of this vengeance, then I don’t know what form the future steps will take.” “But at the end I started weeping, because I was extremely upset with what had occurred.” She went on, now angrily, “I don’t know what will become of me later. “I performed this song in one breath, trying not to show my audience that something was not right,” she recounted. The last number of her performance in Togliatti was a song, “Applause,” written for her by one of her show-business friends. Her bedazzled gold phone kept interrupting her with the chorus from Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.” Swans adorned her bejeweled velvet backpack, as they do nearly every accessory she has. Heavily made up, with tattooed eyebrows, she was sipping a cup of rum-spiked tea. “Of course, I was extremely upset,” Volochkova recalled on a recent wintry afternoon, in her office up the street from the Kremlin. She found out backstage that the special had only aired in the Russian Far East and Kazakhstan before the switch was made. Volochkova had been looking forward to watching the program-she had asked friends to tape it because she would be on stage in Togliatti when it aired. Unofficially, he is United Russia’s chief ideologist, its Karl Rove, its Grey Cardinal. Officially, Surkov is the Russian President’s first deputy chief of staff. The channel on which the television program was scheduled to run, Channel 1, is the country’s main station, and is majority-owned by the Kremlin, and overseen by Vladislav Surkov. She wrote on her blog: “At the very end of the show, right before I entered the stage for the final number, my director told me that the show ‘Let Them Talk,’ dedicated to my birthday, had been taken off the air.” Volochkova blamed a man named Vladislav Surkov. In this sense, Anastasia Volochkova is a real woman.” Then, on February 11th, when Volochkova was on tour with her new show, “Applause,” in the southern city of Togliatti-Russia’s Detroit-a television segment celebrating her thirty-fifth birthday was scheduled to air during a popular talk show. She announced her decision in a radio interview-seemingly on a whim-and referred to the party of Vladimir Putin as “that fucking party” and “that shit into which I was careless enough to step.” United Russia posted a short statement on its Web site: “Women, like children, are inclined to changes in mood. Earlier this month, Volochkova cut her ties with the country’s ruling party, United Russia, which had enlisted her as a celebrity spokesperson.
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