Alla Osipenko

Alla Yevgenyevna Osipenko (Russian: Алла Евгеньевна Осипенко; born 16 June 1932 in Leningrad) is a retired Soviet ballerina.

Her repertoire included: Lilac Fairy in The Sleeping Beauty, Odette-Odile in Swan Lake, Gamzatti in La Bayadère, Waltz and Mazurka in Chopiniana, Masha in The Nutcracker, Frigia in Spartak, the Mistress of the Copper Mountain in The Stone Flower (1957), and Mekhmene-Banu in Legend of Love (1961).

In 1961, while Osipenko was on tour with the Kirov Ballet in Paris, one of her main dance partners, Rudolf Nureyev defected to the west on her 29th birthday.

Osipenko, who was not a Communist Party member, was under considerable suspicion by the KGB upon her return to the Soviet Union who believed she might have known about the defection ahead of time (she didn't).

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Osipenko moved to the US in the 1990s and worked with the Hartford Ballet Company in Connecticut.