The three of them come to the theater hours before their scheduled plays, the time when they own all this empty space. The backstage is almost as vast as the eight-hundred-seat theater itself: several dozen dressing rooms, along the maze of wide hallways winding around a resting area for actors, with couches and a scattering of armchairs, like a living room in an enormous apartment, if Russian apartments had living rooms. On the second and third floors, Ira and Tamara, the theater seamstresses, preside over a workshop filled with racks of costumes and bales of fabric; Uncle Tolya and Uncle Moishe hammer nails into newly cobbled shoes; and their makeup artist, Lida, upholstered in a blue lab coat and layers of cheerful plumpness, takes care of trays of greasepaint, arrays of brushes, and at least a hundred wigs. On the top floor, in a suite of four high-ceilinged rooms wallpapered with the posters of its century-long history, are copies of plays that have been performed here over the years, along with other exhibits of their theater’s museum. The Bolshoi Theatre is like a medieval fortress, and if they decided to reside here and never return home, every requirement of their life, from food to clothes to books, would be easily sustained within these walls.

They gossip about the latest liaisons and scandals and try to figure out the identity of the current KGB informer, because there is always an informer in the theater, listening in on their conversations, pretending to be one of them. “There is an informer in every workplace in our vast motherland,” Sveta warned them back in drama school, “but Theater is always in the avant-garde of Soviet spying,” she insisted, “because plays have the power to influence so many people all at once. ‘Theater is a very dangerous weapon,’” she quoted the legendary director Meyerhold. Sasha wasn’t sure she believed Sveta back then, but in the few months working here, she has learned this much: trust is an exotic fruit that doesn’t grow in this semiarctic zone of freezing winters and rainy, mosquito-infested summers. Aside from their small kompaniya of three friends, they can trust no one in their Bolshoi Theatre.

“Do you remember the exercise we did in drama school called Contact?” says Slava when Sasha asks about the informers in their theater. She remembers. You had to stand back-to-back with a partner and feel his pressure as you both squatted simultaneously and then slowly lifted yourself up again. It only worked if both did the equal amount of work, if you could give your partner a feeling of support and trust and, as a result, receive the same trust in return. It worked back then, when The Magnificent Seven from America was playing in Moscow theaters, when life was all in the future tense, when she could be—despite what her acting teachers thought—a Dostoyevsky heroine.