A graduate of the Moscow State Academy of Choreography in 1933,[1] she was the principal dancer of the Bolshoi Ballet till 1959.
There she danced the leads in the major classical works including Swan Lake, Raymonda, The Sleeping Beauty and Don Quixote.
She also created roles as the Tsar-Maiden in Alexander Gorsky's The Little Humpbacked Horse and Zarema in Rostislav Zakharov's The Fountain of Bakhchisaray.
In 1943, she danced Nikiya in Gorsky's La Bayadère and in 1947 she performed in Vasili Vainonen's Flames of Paris as Mireille de Poitiers in a work intended to show that the Russian Revolution had a more international context.
[3][5] After retiring from the stage in 1959, she became director of the ballet school from 1960 where she obtained considerable success with her students, especially Natalia Bessmertnova.