“Joshua Waletzky's splendid documentary is a story of survival — of how one of the world's great cultural centers, with its home a giant Baroque czarist jewel box in St. Petersburg, endured two wars and two revolutions in the 20th century alone. The imperial city with its great palaces and museums survived because Lenin's cultural czar was a balletomane who saw that the treasures of the elite could become those of the people. The Mariinsky survives in the post-Soviet era largely because of its venturesome artistic director and principal conductor, Valery Gergiev, a man of whom Vladimir Putin has said, ‘I will serve my term and disappear, but Gergiev will last forever.’

Waletzky deftly locates the Mariinsky in Russia's cultural and political history, and had the inspired idea of providing revealing glimpses of the Kirov's sumptuous "Sleeping Beauty" and its boldly innovative staging of "Boris Godunov" as a way of showing how these signature works are metaphors for Russia's turbulent history and by extension how the Mariinsky has sustained the Russian people while setting world standards in the arts.”— Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times

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