Touring often during these three decades, the Bolshoi's brilliant galaxy of soloists--including Galina Ulanova, Maya Plisetskaya, Vladimir Vasiliev, and Ekaterina Maximova--became world famous.

So let us take it from there, and work out the bloodlines of, say, Margot Fonteyn and Galina Ulanova.

And it was quite a night--October 3, 1956, at London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, with the Leonid Lavrovsky/Sergei Radlov/Serge Prokofiev production of Romeo and Juliet featuring Galina Ulanova, Yuri Zhdanov, and Sergei Koren in the ballet's original 1946 Bolshoi staging, itself only slightly revised from the first 1940 Soviet production by Leningrad's Kirov Ballet.