Photos: Maya Plisetskaya l 1925-2015

Maya Plisetskaya dances in a performance in her honor at the Kremlin Palace in Moscow in 2005.

Mikhail Baryshnikov wrote on Facebook on Saturday of “her amazing Dying Swan” from 1959 and 1986, noting that in the latter performance the ballerina was already 61. Plisetskaya, he added, was “one of the greatest dancers of our time … beautiful and graceful.”

In 1996, 70-year-old world ballet legend Maya Plisetskaya performs “Isadora Duncan” during her only Ukraine concert at the National Ballet Theater in Kiev.

Ballet became a refuge when the Stalinist purges of the 1930s tore Plisetskaya’s family apart. Her mother was sent to a labor camp and later exiled, while her father, a mining official and diplomat, was executed. Both were Jewish.

“She was the prima ballerina who could not tour with her company, the anti-Soviet who would not emigrate,” Russian dance historian Tim Scholl wrote in a foreword to her memoir.