Exit Stage Left

Ballerina goes back to Moscow

The plot line was murky, the key-action took place offstage, and some motives were unclear, but one thing was certain about last week's high drama at Kennedy Airport: the Soviets got the girl.

Whether Ballerina Ludmila Vlasova of the Bolshoi Ballet really wanted to go home or to defect with her husband, Dancer Alexander Godunov, may never be known in full. When Godunov, one of the most brilliant of Soviet ballet stars, made his rush to freedom, he did not--or could not--take her with him. Upholding U.S. law prohibiting forced repatriation, the State Department insisted on interviewing Vlasova to see if she wanted to join her husband. Belatedly, the State Department moved to keep her in the country by preventing her Aeroflot jetliner from taking off until, in the words of Deputy Secretary Warren Christopher, she could be interviewed in "noncoercive surroundings."

Negotiations over the proper meeting place dragged on for three days, while the Soviet passengers camped out in the plane. There was an exchange between Presidents Carter and Brezhnev. Finally, an agreement was reached: a mobile lounge was rolled up to the plane, and Vlasova entered in the company of six representatives from each nation. She calmly assured the Americans that she wanted to go home.

If Vlasova had needed pressuring to return to the U.S.S.R., there was ample time to persuade her. When she arrived in Moscow, Vlasova was quoted as denouncing the U.S. for trying to compel her to stay, and was hailed hi the Soviet press as a heroine "who took a position of dignity and lofty civic duty" in the face of the "bourgeois brigands" of the U.S. If nothing else, the manner of her exit has probably saved her from what otherwise would have been her fate: the stigma of being the wife of a "traitor" with consequent loss of status, pay and dance roles.

John le Carre could scarcely have plotted it better. -

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