Yuri Grigorovich’s ballets made the Bolshoi’s name. Now the theater may have to pay his assistant for the privilege of dancing them.

Shortly before he died, the renowned choreographer Yuri Grigorovich gave his assistant, Ruslan Pronin, the copyright to 11 of his productions free of charge, the magazine Post- reported, citing unnamed sources. Meduza has independently confirmed the report.

Grigorovich died on May 19, 2025. Several weeks later, on July 3, 2025, Pronin founded a nonprofit called the Yuri Grigorovich Foundation and transferred all rights to the foundation’s name. He then demanded that all theaters in Russia and abroad staging Grigorovich’s ballets pay royalties to the foundation — in the Bolshoi Theater’s case, about 1 million rubles per performance.

The 11 productions include Grigorovich’s revised versions of classical ballets, among them Swan Lake and Giselle, as well as original ballets of his own, such as Spartacus and Ivan the Terrible. These productions did much to build the Bolshoi Theater’s modern global brand.

According to Post-, Grigorovich’s nephew and sole heir, Nikolai Karatygin, a psychophysiologist, filed a fraud complaint back in December 2025. He insists that the 98-year-old choreographer could not have understood what he was doing when he signed the rights over to Pronin. A source close to the investigation told the magazine that an expert assessment confirmed Karatygin’s claim. For now, though, Pronin is a witness in the case, and no one has been charged yet. The Bolshoi Theater’s management filed its own complaint, prompting investigators to open a second criminal case, which was later merged with the first.

A Post- source said the Bolshoi had expected the rights to pass to Karatygin, who was then supposed to hand them over to the theater. Grigorovich had reportedly said as much before he died.

Post- suggested that Pronin’s actions could leave the Bolshoi without The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, but Meduza has learned that this is unlikely to happen: the theater will probably work with whoever holds the rights.

Pronin danced with the Bolshoi Ballet from 1988 until he left the stage in the late 2000s. In 2011, he became the Bolshoi’s ballet company manager. According to media reports, he could have become acting artistic director in 2013, after an assailant threw acid in the face of Sergei Filin, the ballet company’s artistic director, but Pronin turned down the job. His contract with the theater expired that same year, and Grigorovich offered him a position as his assistant. Since then, Pronin has restaged a great many of Grigorovich’s ballets around the world, mounting Spartacus alone six times — in Beijing, Astana, Seoul, Yerevan, Munich, and Antwerp. In 2023, he became chief choreographer of the Azerbaijan State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater.